While I've made no headway on my online courses and only minor progress with my guitar practice, one thing that I've done well is exercise.  Every day this week except Tuesday (due to a planned power outage), I've been at the school soon after 10 am and run through a crossfit workout.  Two of the days, I had a workout buddy, but yesterday and today I was on my own.

Without an instructor, I've been using the website The Brand X Method to get my workouts (I've also gone to the City of Portland's crossfit site in the past).  I don't always use the workout listed for a particular day (especially if it's something that might need a spotter), but I usually try to.  If I don't understand what they mean by an exercise, I look it up on YouTube.

They've been some intense workouts, and I'm still not experienced enough to know if I am doing them correctly or what sort of stretches I should do at the end to keep from cramping up later.  The net result is while I'm feeling overall better for the exercise, I'm REALLY sore right now.  Sitting down and getting up from sitting are currently the most painful activities.  However, the first 100 meters that I ran as part of my warm-up today was certainly difficult too.

Still, it's a good kind of soreness that I'm experiencing.  It's the kind that makes me think that I am making progress, not that I'm simply hurting myself.  That said, I must look kind of funny when I rock myself up to get out of a chair.  Ultimately, the goal of this exercise is to be healthier, but right now it has me moving like an old man. 

Of my many faults, the one that embarrasses me the most is my temper.  While I'm very good about containing it in a professional setting and most public areas, I am not so successful in more private situations.  In particular, losing games tends to bring out the worst in me.  It doesn't really matter the game: board games, card games, solitaire ... all can bring out a degree of cursing and inarticulate rage that many people would be surprised to see from me.  

I am the worst with video games (well, and plumbing, but that's not really a game).  When my brother hosted LAN parties, I noticed that people liked being on the opposite team that I was on, not because I was a bad player (although that might have been a part of it), but because they thought that my cursing fits when taken out where hilarious.  In fact, I heard that one of the key indicators that they were in trouble is if I suddenly got quiet, as it meant that I was doing really well.

I don't like this side of me, especially when I turn my bile on people (usually my wife) who try to calm me down or hush me.  A few minutes out of the testosterone rage and I feel a deep shame and terrible self-loathing.  Sometimes the shame is in the background even when the rage is still being expressed.  Those are particularly awkward moments when I am mad at myself and yet redirecting it to those around me.

Thankfully, age and experience has reduced a lot of this.  I have become more accepting of the idea that winning is not everything or the only thing, and that fun can still be had in a game that ends in a loss.  Still, I have a ways to go.

... Especially when I lose to a player who cannon rushed on StarCraft ...

It's ironic; when the iPad first came out, I mocked it.  I didn't understand why people would want something that was bigger than an iPod yet wasn't just a laptop.  Now, after going for about nine months after having to turn mine back in to my previous school district (this was before I knew I was leaving said district), I find myself in severe withdrawal.

Without the iPad, I'm finding it harder to keep up with emails and looking up items online has been downright frustrating.  Lately, my frustration has grown since I've been playing Xenoblade Chronicles X--a game that not only encourages, but almost requires, looking up information on wikis or forums.  Doing so on my computer just isn't practical and looking it up on my phone means trying to navigate menus on a really small screen.

I know ... first world problems.  Would that the rest of the people of the world's main concern be that they were missing their iPads.  You know, rather than missing nutritional food, clean water, basic sanitation, violence-free neighborhoods, etc.  Sometimes I feel not just spoiled, but outright selfish.

That said, I won't say "no" if someone gives me an iPad.

Recent video games have spoiled me with their auto-save feature.  Almost all games that I play now automatically save my progress as I progress through the game.  In most cases, this is a good thing, as it takes one more cumbersome task (and menu) away.  There are a few cases where the auto-save is put in place to keep players from backtracking on their decisions, forcing players to play through the game multiple times to see the various outcomes of their choices or to even them hold them more responsible for character "deaths."  Even games that have manual saving options usually have generous save points that give you an easy place to jump back to.

This is not the case for Xenoblade Chronicles X, a game for the Wii U that I received for Christmas (or perhaps my birthday).  I knew going in that it was a massive game and have held off playing it until I had more time (I was playing other games over winter break).  I know that the game doesn't have an auto-save, and am usually pretty good about saving before I quit.  Not so today.  After over two hours of play, I received an invite from my brother to play a game of StarCraft II.  Eager to do so, I powered down the Wii U and immediately realized my mistake.  Two hours of level grinding and exploration were suddenly erased.  It feels like those two hours of video game playing were wasted ...

... huh, I feel like some sort of realization just passed me by.  It's a good thing ... I don't want to learn too much from this experience ...

It amazes me that we are to this point already.  One week from today is Palm Sunday with Easter the Sunday following.  Our Lenten journey is nearing its glorious conclusion.

A surprising amount of today's homily focused on the following section from the first reading: "In the desert I make a way, / in the wasteland, rivers" (from Isaiah 43: 16-21).  Our presider stated that the Lord was making an easy path of return for the exiles to Israel after their long years of captivity.  This passage, he said, then shows the Lord's dominion over nature and thus our need to be better caretakers of our environment.  He made a comment that, should this passage have been written in modern times it probably would have said something about the Lord removing the pollutants from our air as well.  Although the sermon covered a wider breadth of topics, it returned to this idea several times throughout.

While I think the interpretation is a bit of a stretch and that there are better passages to use that do get this idea across, I certainly agree with the message.  We are meant to be caretakers, not pillagers, of our world (and any world we go to).  This is one area where I feel that native American, African, and many East Asian cultural traditions have a healthier relationship with nature than most European and Euro-American cultures.  Our lives seem to be so much more focused on exploitation than cultivation.  I certainly hope that this view changes in the near future.

I fulfilled the majority of my plans for today by sitting and playing computer games.  The good news is that my tailbone has been doing much better these past few months (with some occasional setbacks due to some sitting sessions in chairs without cushions).  While some of this improvement is doubtless due to my better health--especially the lower blood sugar as high blood sugar can impair healing, I give a lot of credit to the seat cushion that I purchased last summer.  

Unfortunately, my "computer" chair at home is still a camp chair (albeit with the cushion in it); thus, the bad news is that my posture (thus my lower back) is suffering for it.  The plan was to use the camp chair until we moved and had the space and opportunity to get better furniture.  This "temporary" arrangement has been in place since we arrived here in August.  

I need to get a better chair.  Through the years, we have gone through a variety of desk chairs.  I have only been happy with a few of them.  Interestingly my opinion of the chair is not always in correlation with its price.  While we have never bought a chair that was more than a hundred dollars ourselves, we did "inherit" one from friends of ours who were upgrading.  It had a lot of nifty moving parts, but was not at all comfortable.

So, what do I want in an office chair?  It should be large enough that I can fit in it easily, but not so large as to cause space issues in the room.  I want something with a back that is firm, but can lean back slightly.  I'd prefer a mesh-back chair to keep my back cool for long sessions in front of the computer.  The cushion should be comfortable, but I do have my portable cushion if necessary.  I need it to swivel.  I would need a wheeled base that doesn't easily tip and that can roll even on carpet without damaging the floor or the chair.  Moveable armrests would be nice.  I don't really need an adjustable height as long as it was at the right height to begin with.

Mostly, I want a comfortable place to sit as I contemplate the universe or save it.

I still can't fully wrap my head around the idea that we've already begun spring break.  This is, by far, the earliest spring break that I have experienced.  Even with one of the earliest Easter's that I can remember, this spring break still ends the week before Holy Week.  This also makes it so this is the only spring break that I've had that actually takes place before spring (although the final day is the vernal equinox).

As I'm home, Janelle opened up her work availability and has a pretty full schedule for the week.  This means that we aren't planning on going anywhere this break and that most of the evenings are going to be just me and the boys.  Thus aside from playing a lot of video games, my only other planned activities are to stop by the school at least four of the days to get in a workout, learn at least two new chords on the guitar, and to get some (if not all) of the coursework done for my online classes (required courses for my Alaskan teaching certificate).

It's not a glamorous set of plans, but sometimes those make for the best kinds of breaks.

For reasons still not understood by me, one of the main clocks that we use in our living room jumped into Daylight Savings Time yesterday.  I did not notice this change until after I shepherded my youngest two sons to bed (a mistake that I did not correct).  I had noticed how light the sky seemed after I put them in bed, but I discounted it due to the clearer sky.  I only realized that the clock was misaligned after I turned on my computer and saw the time there.

According to my mother, Daylight Savings Time messes with people's health; there is a rise in heart attacks and strokes around the time changes.  I don't know about the fall time change, but "springing forward" is certainly hard on my system.  This coming Sunday will be particularly rough, especially since our morning mass was moved up an hour at the beginning of February.  To combat this, it's suggested that people start going to bed a little bit earlier every night leading up to the change and to avoid caffeine or alcohol for the two days immediately preceding it.  ... That way you can really hate the time change.

I'm not a fan of Daylight Savings Time even if Benjamin Franklin was a supporter.  Instead of encouraging people and businesses to change their opening and closing times in response to the summer, we change the way we measure time itself.  Suddenly, noon is no longer noon, nor is midnight in the middle of the night.  

I've been particularly irritated since we shifted Daylight Savings Time to last even longer, starting before the vernal equinox and after the autumnal equinox rather than vice versa.  My irritation is that it was the most public aspect of an "energy bill" whose primary benefits went to oil companies while squashing investments into alternative energy (it still provided some government funding, but at a substantially smaller amount than the original bill had intended).  It also made it so our school children have to wait for their buses in the dark for a longer period of time.  Even though that bill was passed over eight years ago, I still rankle each time I think about it.

That said, I don't want Alaska to come off Daylight Savings Time unless the rest of the nation does.  It's bad enough having a four hour gap with Michigan, a five hour gap would be even more burdensome.  Nor would I want just to switch to Daylight Savings Time to being year-round.  Again, making middle of the night not occur at midnight, but at 1 am makes less sense to me than people and businesses adjusting their schedules to fit the time (which they technically do anyway, even if they are "tricked" into it).

Just remember to set your clocks forward an hour before this coming Sunday morning.

Tomorrow is the last day for students for the third quarter at my district.  This week has been a week of work days for those students who are still missing work, and essay grading days for me as I wade my way through the quarterly writing assessments that they turned in last week (and some this week).  In general, the grading has made me feel like a less-than-stellar teacher as many of their writings are missing elements that I know we practiced multiple times in class.  On the positive side, most of my students gave the paper a valid try, even some whom I would expect otherwise.

I'm not as far ahead with my grading as I was at the end of the previous quarter (where I got much of it done on the day I had to take off for Janelle's job training), but I'm still well on track to have everything in on Friday with plenty of time to attend the track coach meeting.  Overall, it's been a good quarter.  I have a few students who are still stubbornly refusing to learn, but most of them have been doing well even with the more complex tasks and skills that we introduced to them this term.

I think it's been a good quarter for the boys too.  I say this even though Janelle discovered today that Trevor failed to turn in a number of assignments for one of his classes and had a series of poor tests and quizzes in another (these grades were just posted or we would have been on his case sooner).  Currently, he's not that happy with us as we're not letting him use his computer or read his book tonight.  He needs to spend his time taking any last minute steps that he can to bring up his grade.  Still, I think he did better this quarter than the previous one.

This also means that spring break is next week.  As Janelle has a full work schedule, we don't really have any plans, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.  I just need to make it through tomorrow (and our short professional development on Friday).

Healthier:  I've commented before about the improvements that I've made to my overall health since coming to Alaska, but it was nice to have a doctor's appointment that confirmed it.  While the doctor's scale was not as nice to me as my home scale, I've officially lost more than 15 pounds by their count.  My blood pressure and blood sugar levels are both low enough to impress my doctor (although there is, of course, still room for improvement).  Not only did I get one of my medications reduced, but there was talk about taking me off them completely later this year as long as I don't revert to poor health choices.

I also had a coworker who rejoined our workout today (after about a month away) say, "You've gotten fast" in reference to the half mile that we ran.

​I just need to keep it up.

As I was reading An Echo in the Bone, I came across a word that I hadn't read before: lacuna (with a plural lacunae).  I did what I usually do (and what most people do) when I come across an unfamiliar word: I skipped over it and pretended it didn't exist.  However, unlike previous strange-word encounters, this one repeated again a couple of sentences later, and then a sentence after that.  In short, to understand the passage that I was reading, I needed to find out what the word meant.

Thank computer sciences for the Internet!  I was able to quickly discover that lacuna is an unfilled space, a missing portion, a gap, or a cavity.  As long as I was on the Internet, I decided to look up the word's etymology and I discovered that, rather than being a newer word, it's been in use in English since the 17th century.  It comes from Latin and is the diminutive form of the word from which we derive the word "lake."  Basically, a lacuna is less than a lake--a hole without water.  In the historical sense that the author was using it, it means that something should be there, but isn't.

 I wonder about the lacunae that reside in our knowledge of one another.  Even my own memories seem have a growing number of lacunae.  I'm amazed at our minds' abilities to fill these empty spaces, sometimes with exaggerated versions of what actually happened, sometimes severely downplaying poor decisions that we have made.  I suppose that it's in the filling of these missing portions of our knowledge that we truly see what sort of people we are.  Do we tend to fill them with doom and depression, with possibility and hope, or with some combination thereof?

Ah, the paths that a single word can take me ...

Today's Gospel is one of the most famous: the parable of the prodigal son.  Our homily today mentioned that while many people identify with the younger son who leaves home and later returns when he discovers that life away from his father is not what he wanted it to be [I'm deliberately avoid a direct comparison with any aspects of my life], the real focus at the time would have been on the father.  Some scholars even refer to this section as the parable of prodigal father.

The father is completely unlike most fathers from the time period.  Rather than being a strict upholder of discipline and the law, he forgives and embraces his wayward son, running out to meet him the as soon as he knows his son is on the road home.  This was a different way to present God than Jesus's audience was used to.  They expected powerful, harsh, and judgmental, not magnanimous and loving.  Our God doesn't wait for our apology, but rushes out to meet us, embracing us and forgiving us unconditionally.  He asks us to do the same.

This is the main message of this parable.  Jesus was talking to the devoted religious of His time.  He puts them in the place of the elder son who at first spurns the celebration out of anger for his father's generosity.  While many of us easily see ourselves in the place of the younger son, the truth is that we often find ourselves in the role of the elder one.  We need to learn it is not for us to sit in judgment of our fellow sinners.  As our presider stated today, we need to look to our own faults more than the faults of others; if don't think we have faults, then we really need to be concerned.

We've had a few more inches of snow these past few days than we had been expecting.  Our temperatures have been above average (let alone above freezing) for the past month and the forecasts have suggested much of the same, so it was a bit of a surprise to find our vehicles covered in snow this morning (especially since the forecast before we went to bed said nothing about any kind of precipitation).  Hopefully, Anchorage got a bit of that for the start of the Iditarod which kicked off today.  They had been trucking snow down, but it had been melting almost as fast as it arrived.  I heard that the bit of snow we got earlier was enough to cause a large number of traffic accidents; it doesn't take long for people to forget to be cautious while driving.

Still, we didn't get enough snow that a plow would be necessary, and since I felt that I should probably get some fresh air this week, I spent a little under an hour shoveling out what snow we did have.  I had to be careful as there is a solid inch or more of ice coating the drive, but otherwise the experience was enjoyable.  Because our landlord usually pays to have someone plow, this has been my first significant use of the shovels that we bought up here.  They have curved handles that I wondered at before, but definitely appreciated as I better learned how to use them for plowing purposes.

The boys all joined in for at least a little bit.  Rowen used the emergency shovel from my car since it's more his size, but it was Connor who ended up being the biggest help.  He had a harder time with the ice, falling three times, but he cleared a patch he designated as his own territory very well.  

I don't think I'll have many more (if any) opportunities to shovel in this half of the year.  That might mean that the next time I have to use a snow shovel could be for a driveway of my own.  I like the sound of that.