So I’m reading some stoicism, in particular “Right Thing Right Now” by Ryan Holiday, and it’s really very impressive. Often it seems to come down to.. “What is your vocation? To be a good person.”—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 11.5 …which seems to be almost flippantly simplistic, at least until we get around to defining ‘good’. But…

Start with Maslow’s needs: Then expand it a little: So maybe each day we work up the list and work on any deficiencies because if the layer below isn’t stable, the higher categories will be badly compromised. But within the hierarchy, we often take almost any of these evolutionarily attractive sub-categories and follow them way…

I’ve been thinking about pain more lately. I think it started with a therapeutic massage, when the practitioner outright told me ”this is going to really hurt for 10 seconds” and he didn’t lie. It’s rare to get such a warning of pain coming, and to think about how you will react. It made me…

The general background level of grumpiness has been gradually building all morning. It began with a mediocre night, resulting in very sore eyes (my achilles…heel??) with lots of pins and needles. Then the heat and humidity started settling in (gotta love Sydney weather), which reminded me to sort the failed AC in the youngest’s room.…

I am not normally a cryer. In my adult decades I have cried maybe a dozen times, and most would have been at films. I have often thought of this. I’ve had a partner who thought of me as emotionally stilted as part of some pure protestant preference (spoiler: I’m not).But things are changing, sometimes…

(stolen from here) This rule dictates the specific order in which adjectives should be arranged in a sentence, and native speakers follow it instinctively without being taught. The order is: Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose, Noun. For example: A lovely small old square brown French leather handbag. It sounds wrong if you…

To make nacho cheese, an emulsifier is used to stop the proteins and the fats from separating as the cheese cools down, which keeps the cheese creamy and dippable. The emulsifier used is Sodium Citrate, which has a chemical formula of… NaCHO

“Bishop James Ussher was the 17th-century cleric who put a date to Creation, calculating that it occurred at 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 B.C.E”. (noticed from here) So we just missed the creation’s 6,027th birthday. Why don’t we have the day off for this?

Well, this got complicated quickly. You would think it would be a relatively simple concept and that most people could quickly whip out examples of a ‘good day’. From that, we could then distill down what a Good Daytm really means. Apparently not! Start with The main secret of having a productive day (and the…

I hate naming because I never have a theme for any of my days lately. There are no overarching ‘things I’ve learnt that the world should know’ concepts—just stuff. Still, I’m a little more with it today, after several days of limited and erratic sleep. I’ve learnt to measure my mental state using several mechanisms.…