The only reason I'm writing now is to bleed off stray useless thoughts, and to empty my head enough of other superfluous things; to organize myself so I can concentrate on fixing up some lines of code in a program I'm trying to build. Sometimes the "Eureka!" or "Aha!" moments for finding a solution come when I distract myself with something else trivial and unrelated to what I'm supposed to be doing, but it isn't happening thus far. Maybe I need to find something else to do to put me in a proper 'trance' for it. I've exhausted my options and questions for general and specific searches on more than one engine; the concrete answers for dealing with this abstract stuff are still eluding me.
Perhaps it's because I overused my reserve of energy while doing my handy work yesterday that rendered me with nothing left for doing mental stuff like formula writing and number crunching for today. Yesterday, between catching up with personal errands, fix-ups, and processing stuff in the kitchen, I was on my feet for close to ten hours, with one break for coffee. I'm thankful and appreciative for all this abundance of produce that my friends and family gifted to me, but these masses of fruits and vegetables need to be cooked, portioned, and stored as single unit meal options for me. Dealing with all that raw material gets to be preparation intensive. I suppose I should have a measure of pride in knowing that I made six weeks worth of freezer-to-stove ready food for a cost of under 25 dollars. It was also an effort to not to be wasteful*, and to incorporate this stuff with my remaining white-flour/carbs in the pantry. Baked and steamed stuffed buns, other dumpling-like fare, stuffed peppers, a casserole, and big batches of three kinds of soup were the end products. My reasoning: if I eat this calorie-laden stuff while I'm more active in the fall, hopefully it will be all depleted by the time winter rolls around, so I'll be less likely to have more rolls stuck on me during my more lax time then . . . in theory.
This paragraph marks the end of my second crack at it with some break time afterward. I just came back from a light run. I thought that maybe my head would clear if I got more oxygen and some circulation flowing. No dice. I would have went further, but the old hips and knees said, "Oh no you don't!" When I approached the Vimy memorial, I realized that I totally forgot that today was the Terry Fox Run. I've either been busy, or forgetful about the TFR every previous year since I caught the running bug. It's a bit shameful that I've been this neglectful to participate in it each year, especially given the circumstances that prompted me to start running in the first place.
My third attack at it has now ended. I went back to reviewing some of my notebooks: hardcopies and digital; to see if I can re-assemble things on simpler level by doing some creative bypassing of a few variables, or re-structure the data arrays down to easier to manage chunks. It's a certainty that it's me being my own worst enemy by over-complicating things. I tried something different; I'm still no further ahead. My persistence isn't paying off. It's close to sundown now, and I don't want to let the whole damn day be wasted this way.
I'd be so angry if I go to sleep later, and the solution strikes me right then about of some ridiculously simple oversight, like missing punctuation or delimiters, being the reason for the failures before I started scrapping things to down ground zero, realizing how much time was wasted before such a simple correction entered the mind.
*- Globally, it is estimated that: one third of our food supply is wasted (China being the biggest culprit nation), while 870 million people on this planet are starving. Annually, the estimated mount of water wasted to grow food that isn't eaten amounts to the annual volume of water that flows through in the Volga river in Russia. Around 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases are produced by wasted rotting food and disposal of it. (source: Bing Financial) A lot of supermarket produce is discarded, not because of actual spoilage, but because of aesthetic imperfections. It's perfectly edible, yet some market and restaurant chains purposely taint and destroy it, and lock it away to prevent dumpster divers from salvaging and liberating this bounty from the trash. How can we dare call ourselves the dominant intelligent life forms, living on this planet this way?
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