Hooray!

I bought a used laptop off Craigslist today!  I'm typing on it right now and it's so lovely.  

Now I just need to procure the following fun things: mouse, laptop bag of some sort, webcam and microphone, possibly a TV tuner. :)  Also possibly some device to keep my cat from finding the keyboard irresistable.  If such a thing exists.

Gambler's fallacy

I'm putting off work, and I just realized I think during my last spurt of working I actually finished the main thing I was working on tonight...so I guess I am just putting off going home?? What is wrong with me? I guess I still have to log my time and answer a few emails or something, I must be putting that off.

Anyway, has anyone else ever been confused by the gambler's fallacy? This comic made me think of it. http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000298.html

I have never been able to get this one. OK, I get it that it makes sense that every time I flip a coin, the odds of it coming up heads are 50/50. But I also get that it is likely for 100 coin flips to come up roughly half heads and half tails, and so it is unlikely for 100 coin flips to come up all heads or all tails. So if you've had 80 flips that are heads so far, isn't it more likely that the next one will be tails?

It's not- people are always stressing that it's not, but I don't get it! I fail basic probability. I even read this website that seems to be made just for me, and I STILL don't get it at all! http://vegasclick.com/gambling/fallacy.html

Although T-Rex's description in the first two panels actually helped, with the difference between what happens in the long term vs. when you are predicting the correction to take place (in the short term). Anyway, here is a website that does a pretty good job of explaining it, if you are interested. I think it is starting to make sense now. Maybe.
http://wizardofodds.com/askthewizard/fallacy.html

I'm a little worried about Garrison Keillor

He loves Obama so much I am starting to think it's bordering on the obsessive. Obviously I don't mind much :) but it is starting to creep me out just a little!
http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/11/12/obama_victory/

Overall, I'm just happy for him. :) Because he is obviously VERY happy.

How Can I Get a Free Laptop?

It turns out it is a lot harder to post something to your blog every day when you no longer have the work laptop on the couch with you (because you are no longer sick with a lot of important work that still needs to get done).

I don't have a laptop, sad to say. I have a semi-working desktop computer that used to suit me fine when I lived in an apartment that had an office on the main floor that I could pop in and out of easily- but now my computer lives in my cold basement, because that is the only room in this house (other than our bedroom) big enough to accomodate my desk and Mike's desk, so we chose it as our office.  Unless somebody shows up at our door volunteering to move at least one of the very heavy and awkward desks up to a different room, it looks like it will stay the office for awhile.  (I could move the computer to the 2nd floor and just put it on a folding table or something, but I really want my internet to be on the main floor, and there just isn't any good place for a big honking desktop computer on that level of the house.)

Unfortunately I really don't come down here to the basement unless I *need* to use the internet for something.  And then I'm down in this dark and freezing basement for like 3 hours because I then do all my pent-up internet business at one exhausting stretch.  This is why I cannot keep up with Facebook right now, folks, these basement interludes are too long for me as it is.

Unfortunately I really cannot justify the purchase of a laptop right now, so tell me friends, how can I scheme to get one for free, or for around $100?  Seriously, if you see any used laptops for sale for cheap, and they seem like they would work for some wireless web surfing, please let me know.  There has to be a way.  

In other news, yesterday was a very nice day.  At the end of it, Mike and I watched an odd movie called Brand Upon the Brain! from Netflix.  As it started it seemed kind of familiar, and then Mike realized we had unwittingly gotten ourselves mixed up with another movie by Guy Maddin.  

At the last film festival we saw this pretty-awful-but-I'm-sure-supposed-to-be-brilliant movie called My Winnipeg that was done by Guy Maddin, and never did we think we'd voluntarily watch another one of his movies.  And this one was even really similar to the one we already saw- main character is named Guy, who has a very crazy domineering mother and a rebellious sister.  The movies resemble the style of silent films, all black and white, but with a lot of repetition and stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense, and a lot of weird gross stuff, and funny words flashed on the screen with lots of exclamation points.  Both movies are at times so wonderful and have made me laugh really hard, and at least they are something very very different- but they have also creeped the shit out of me, exhausted me and made me feel like I was going to insane from the tedium of watching them.  

It's really late now so I better stop.  But I have to do my something great for the day.  So, something that I'm grateful for in my life today is my future father-in-law's staple gun.  Clark was not being very grateful for the scratching post we so laboriously built for her, and seemed to prefer the couch to the sisal rope that we had wrapped around the post.  I thought maybe she wanted a weaved fabric to grip to, so we wrapped some burlap around the post (on top of the sisal rope) and used Dan's awesome staple gun that we borrowed for some other reason to secure it.  Staple guns are amazing; this thing works so smoothly.  In five minutes Clark was all done with the couch and all over the newly revamped scratching post.  Literally all over it; she now likes to leap up, sink her claws in and just hang from it, batting at the toys dangling from the top.  Success!  It's fun when an idea works.  Especially when it was easy too. :)

Kitty pictures

It's late and I already forgot my intention to write something every day! So my cop out post is all the kitten pictures I've been promising. And something that is great about my life today is, obviously, my kitten! And the fact that I have someone (Mike and Indy) helping me take care of the cat this time. :) Last time I had a cat I did not like the pressure of being the sole person responsible for another living thing.

Another thing that is great is the comments from thoughtful friends and new friends on this blog. I wish I had time to respond more thoroughly to each one because there is so much I want to say! But it's already a challenge to write once a day, so for now I am going to bed.

Today's Real Post: Work went ok today!

What I really was going to write today, now that I have a little more time, was that work wasn't so bad today. I've been feeling down about work a lot recently so it's nice to have some good days, especially after being sick for awhile and having to work from home while sick which just felt like adding insult to injury.

It seems like for awhile I have had this basic problem dealing with the reality that much of life isn't all that inherently pleasant. It's like on top of the unpleasant things I had to do, just the fact that life is tough and will probably only get tougher for the rest of my life...*offended* me or something, like it just was not RIGHT that anyone should ever have to work away from home, or work long hours, or not have enough time to do the things they like best, not to mention *real* problems like work in horrible conditions or have abusive relationships or be discriminated against, etc etc etc. I knew it was pointless but I just kept coming to the conclusion that the nature of life kind of sucked.

I don't know. But this weekend when I was sick and had time to think and talk to my mom and to Mike, something seemed to click.

I asked my mom about the secret to a good marriage, and she said you can't let your career be more important to you than your marriage. My first reaction was "well I don't have THAT problem"- because lately I have really *hated* work and certainly felt like I valued it less than my relationship with Mike. But then I wasn't so sure. I realized the dread and anxiety and sadness about work was totally eclipsing my home life. By letting myself get so upset about work I was letting it take away my whole evenings as I would talk endlessly about it to Mike, or just sit around looking in the worst mood. So even if you hate your job, you can still let your worrying about it get in the way of your relationship. Now, I already knew this, and previously it just added to my depression, but somehow the way I realized it was...different this time. I said to Mike, "You don't *love* your job and you've worked plenty of bad ones- how come you don't get so upset about it?" He said he didn't know, but that he though that in life you just had to do your best and enjoy all the good parts of life that you could get. Something about that stuck with me and I started to feel like I really had a choice.

Maybe something else that did it was when my mom said "when you get really old, you become reduced to your most dominant personality trait". She was referring mainly to my grandma who was always an anxious person, but as she got older and older seemed to be reduced only to anxiety and none of the other pleasant parts of her that made up the person we knew, so that by the time she died we all felt like she had been gone a long time already. I am a lot like my grandma and I suddenly had the awful thought of this anxiety I'm feeling more and more just taking over my life and eventually being the only thing left of me. I don't know if it's possible to change your personality, but I'm going to try to find another dominant characteristic. I think I depend on my anxiety to make me do what I need to do; I'm afraid that without the fear I won't remember to do things, or won't have the motivation, because sometimes when I've let myself relax I have failed to do things that really came back to bite me later. So the other night, I didn't let myself get upset that I needed to log in and do some work. But I also didn't go to bed and say "I'll do it tomorrow", which would not have actually worked. I just logged in and got it over with. Sounds easy but it felt great. And I did it again tonight. I guess I realized that getting so upset about the bad things in life was making everything twice as hard. This doesn't mean I have to give up trying to better organize my work so that I don't have to work from home at all- but when I don't see any good way around it, might as well just do it and not waste so much energy letting it upset me.

Wow, so long post. But work went pretty well today and I'm happy. Now I need to go to bed. Kitten pictures tomorrow! Hopefully.

Changes

This is going to be the most boring post ever, just to say that I changed my title because I wanted it to match my url. Because if you search foranonionaday.blogspot.com, you get a different blog, and it's actually IMO a better blog :) so I don't want any mixups, ha. It's actually the blog I wish I had, all about foods I love like onions and avocados and cheese sandwiches with caramelized onions on them. And the font is nicer. One day I will ask Laurie to school me in this blogging business so I can learn how to make my blog pretty too.

So it's Onion a Day now. That's all I wanted to say.