Life Lessons That Matter - Tire Changing

It is very often in life that you know the exact source of extremely useful information, but I do happen to know the origin of one such useful tid bit in my life.  The tale begins this morning, when I walked outside to my truck only to notice yet another flat tire.  I have changed a metric ton of flat tires in the past 5 years, and every time that I do I remember the little saying that most of us use to know how to tighten or untighten bolts and screws, and I remember when and where I learned it.

When we were in late high school and then for some years after Devin and I got in the habit of going out to our old farm house with friends on weekends to howl at the moon and have lots of fun.   These times were the best, we called them "wood stock weekends", I guess cause it was always a 3 day party in the country.

One Sunday after one such weekend I found myself with a flat tire on my good ole Nissan pick up.  I don't need to again mention how much this truck meant to me, but I will.  I had loved that truck ever since I watched it drive down the long driveway to the farm on the day dad drove it home from Beloit, KS (is that right dad? answer through mom in the comments since you never comment).  The truck looked just like the one that Marty Mcfly got in back to the future, and it served me well through more adventures than I can relate, though perhaps soon I should try.

Digression aside, my tire is flat at the end of woodstock weekend and I'm now tasked with my first solo tire change.  I'm sure Dad had gone over this task with me at some point, and I'm sure I had seen him do it multiple times, but I had never had to do it when dad wasn't around.  A drawback to having a really handy dad is that stuff get fixed and maintained almost by magic, and it's easy to learn to take stuff for granted.

So on my first ever tire change I find myself with sticky lug nuts, which made me question which way I needed to turn them to loosen them up.  My future cousin in law Natalie happened to be along that weekend and managed to be the first person in life who told me the rhyme, "lefty loosey, righty tighty".  Boom, lesson lived and learned.  I use that nugget still to this day when I have to change a damn tire.

Tracked Time Update

My Time Tracking experiment continues.  On Friday I switched from task timer to the light verision of Klok.  Even the light verision of Klok is a step up and it allows easily for the collection of stats over time, something I'm already putting to better use.  I have always enjoyed taking the first half hour after dishing out tech assignments to read local and some national news, along with whatever interesting articles I can find from a skim of stupid facebook.  I've justified this expenditure of time by calling it a job duty to be up on current events, however, my time tracking has revealed something undermining in this.  In just the last week and a half I was able to note that on days where this was my first activity, and that activity lasted longer than 15 minutes, I had noticeably less productive days.  So today I set out to put in a the first two hours of my day in solid work.  Then I allowed myself some time to see what happened in los angeles and the greater world.  Preliminary results show this to be a far more effective strategy at keeping me on track during my most productive hours of the day.

Get Klok here, don't but, just get the free version.

Tracking of the Times

I'm having a good week.  School has started again and with it my free time is limited.  On top of school and various musical projects I've made a vow to myself that I won't let LACC disrupt my fitness as thoroughly as it did last semester.
Lucky for me I have a new winter evening running route that is super challenging, beautiful and rewarding.  My biggest complaint with the time change is that forces me to only hit the canyons for serious runs on weekends, and weekend time is the first time to get gobbled up by life.  To that end I've started running up the steep streets of beachwood canyon.  From my door to the point where I turn around it's 3 miles of constant climb.  The view from just below the hollywood sign this time of year is a delight.  In the late evening it's foggy, and the lights create beautiful mist orbs to be seen across the horizon.
Here is the typical path I've been doing.

I've also this week started to do some time tracking.  On monday I started using this app Task Timer. I have to say that in just 3 days I can see a marked improvement in how I spend my time at work.  It's a commitment that I could see myself easily breaking from, because it can be very inconvenient to be reminded that you are wasting time when you really want to waste more time.  Yet there is something in me that loves records and statistics so much that I so far am motivated to continue in this new mode.
The concept is simple enough.  I have defined the ways in which I spend my time at work, between my actual job duties, the cooking and the cleaning, sanity breaks, lunch, things I hate doing, and homework.  I set pre-defined goals of time allotment for each of those tasks, and then I leave Task Timer open all day while I work and click start on a new task when I switch.  It's simple and it displays a pie chart at the bottom of the app, showing me in a glance where my time for the day is going.  
Task Timer is buggy though, and I don't like that it's not keeping stats for more than the day that I'm on.  So next week I will begin using a different app to the same ends, I just haven't figured out which one will work best for my needs.

Being back in school again made me curious to see my old college transcript.  It was pretty cool to see that I could request it, pay $9 and have the record of my lack of achievement displayed upon my screen in less than two hours.

Be well friends.