Daily 5 Minute Journal - May 1, 2016

Cold

It's a cold rainy day in Long Island. The weather seems cooler this year than usual. It's 49 degrees.

Allergies

Today is May 1st and this is usually the first day of my allergy season. I don't know why but I just sneezed 3 times as I wrote this sentence. I'm reminded of my dad's unusual sneeze where he would say eee-ha, eee-ha, eee-ha when he sneezed.

Last night my eyes were itching. I've never been officially diagnosed with an allergy but I call it "Rose fever."  I usually have itchy eyes, scratchy throat and sneezing.

Coincidences

I've been noticing some weird coincidences recently and trying to document them. I don't believe they mean anything as it's kind of like the birthday problem. This is where if you have 23 people in a room the odds are > 50% that two people will have the same birthday (month & day).

I'll post a spreadsheet that demonstrates this phenomenon.

Sardines

My wife was asking me about sardines which I recently had a bad batch of the fish. That instant I noticed a book on my shelf and I pulled it off the shelf and turned to a random page and the following heading from the book Diabetes without Drugs.

HOW TO GET MORE COQ10 AND UBIQUINONE IN YOUR DIET

Dietary sources in descending order include sardines, ...

Weird Shoes

I started noticing people wearing these weird shoes in New York City. They remind me of the shoes worn by Herman Munster.

Book I didn't buy

I went to Barnes and Noble last night and was looking for the book

Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg. I heard a great podcast from James Altucher  that I thought was very good and worth listening to. I didn't buy the book because it was $28.00 which isn't a good price point. I would have paid $15.00 but I could get this from the library or Amazon.com or wait until the book is released in soft cover.

Excel Diet

I've weighed myself everyday in the morning for about 4 years. The only time I haven't was when I was on vacation or forgot. Today I didn't feel like taking off my clothes to do this.

Books I bought

I did buy 4 books

1. How to Fail at Everything and still Win Big - Scott Adams
2. How Google Works
3. Do you Talk Funny
4. The Brilliant Memory Box

The Scott Adams book I bought because I liked him on a James Altucher podcast. I bought How Google Works because it was $7.98 and looked interesting. I bought Do you Talk Funny because it had 5 star rating on Amazon and the Brilliant Memory Box was cheap at $9.95 and had nice packaging.

Lawn

I spent a few hours thatching, seeding, watering, mowing and pulling weeds from my lawn. The sprinkler broke just as I was about to water it. I should take before and after pictures.

I like doing the lawn even pulling weeds one at a time.

While I was doing the lawn I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast on him reading his book The End of Faith. I placed my phone in a dangerous place on the lip of a recycling can. It kept falling off into the grass and nothing happened. But then it fell into the street and my beautiful phone has a cracked screen. The reason I put it there was I was wearing shorts without pockets.

This teaches me 2 new lessons:

1. Be careful with fragile items and don't put them were they could fall
2. Wear clothes that has pockets

Hitting Baseballs

My son and I went to the baseball field in our town to hit fungo baseballs out of the park. It's only a 200 foot fence and I couldn't get the ball out unless I moved 10 feet ahead of home plate. I think the bat was too heavy for me.

I hit 3 balls out and one ball must have gone 400 ft. as a women handed it back to me and said "wow you hit that all the way to the tennis courts, that was some shot."

Goals for May

It's May and my April goal didn't come to fruition. Why? My goal was to write a small book on Excel/VBA. I think the task didn't interest me enough. I did work a little on creating software to create a mailing list so when the book was finished I could ask the people on the list to buy the book. This technique I learned from James Altucher's podcast with Steve Scott.


I'm not sure what my May 2016 goal is but today's goal is to figure it out.

Annoyances

I'm annoyed with Blogger, I can't use a shortcut to change the heading. Maybe I'll write some code to do this. I have all the components.

At work a plastic container I keep my coffee in disappeared. The only thing I can think of is that the cleaning woman threw it out for some reason. This item is very cheap and I can bring one in from home, but I think the anger is from not knowing what happened.  I just have to let it go.

I've learned from Sam Harris' book Waking Up to think of how ridiculous to hold on to this anger when I can easily replace the item.