Elephant Ears and Metal

One of my friends and fellow bloggers Todd Baker enjoying Olympia!! Check it out!

I lived my motto last Thursday. In case you didn’t notice, my motto is up at the top of the page: Be who you are, like what you like, and do cool stuff. I understand having a motto is a bit pretentious, but so is having a blog and writing books. I appreciate your complicity.

On Thursday, being who I am included being a runner. Running is part of my daily routine as I run every day during the workweek. Spending 30 to 45 minutes of my lunch hour running away from work makes it much easier to go back and face an afternoon filled with email and meetings. The difference on this Thursday was that I was running around Capitol Lake in downtown Olympia. The lake is nowhere near my office, so I had to drive to get there. I also had to change into my running clothes in…

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Grain for the Grinder

I like the old, it’s vintage, well read, historical and crap the under 30 group can google it!
But I look forward to your 2014 of “Grist for the Mill” – Maybe some “Junipers for the still” “Bud for the pipe” – come on – I live in Washington.

Todd Baker

I’ve finally hit rock bottom. It’s time to make a change. It won’t be easy, but I can’t avoid it any longer. I need to update my idioms.

My use of outdated expressions was first pointed out to me at work during a meeting with a supervisor and her staff. The supervisor is a friend of mine and she enjoys pointing out my flaws, especially if there is an audience. I was explaining the purpose of the meeting to her staff. I said I wanted to get their ideas about a particular topic and I told the group that I was looking for “grist for the mill.” My friend giggled. I looked at her confusedly, as I was sure I had not said anything funny. She turned to her staff, all of whom were younger than 30-years-old, and said, “Do any of you know what ‘grist for the mill’ means?”…

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The movies I watch over and over and over — Jason Bourne — and why

Really enjoying Caitlin Kelly’s Blog – “I suspect all of us are, in some measure, running fast and away from something: a fear, a hope, an unrealized goal, an unrequited love, or racing toward a future we can’t quite see, but which we hope lies on the other side of a border we haven’t yet reached — whether the Greek island where Bourne re-finds his love, Marie — or something closer to home.”

This really resonated with me, but more from the struggle to either lull into my current life and accept the job, the daily tasks and relax or to risk to create the life that I think I really want for myself.

Broadside

By Caitlin Kelly

A great post from Slate about why we love Jason Bourne:

Why do we love Jason Bourne? Why does this brooding nobody command our immediate allegiance? Because his mission is not to take down a cartel, destroy an undersea fear factory, or cripple a billion-dollar interstellar weapons system. It’s not even to save a beautiful woman. His mission is the essential human mission—to find out who the hell he is.
Plucked nameless from the Mediterranean, a floating corpse, by the crew of an Italian fishing boat (water: mother-element in the Bourne movies); rebirthed on the wet deck, his twitching hand eliciting gasps of atavistic wonder; tended to—healed—with gruff inexhaustible charity by the ship’s doctor (“I’m a friend!” insists this heroic man, as a panicked Bourne rears up and starts choking him. “I am your friend!”); recuperating on board, at sea, strengthening, doing chin-ups, tying fancy…

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