Mild Amusement

August 8, 2009. Over twelve years ago, I started blogging with this simple post . I didn't really have a great reason for starting the blog, other than I wanted to try it out. I wanted to try writing and putting it where others could read it. I don't know, it just seemed like a new adventure to try. Along the way, there have been all sorts of posts and all sorts of life events, but through it all, I kept writing. It just became a part of what I do at some point. It wasn't a matter of whether I was going to write a blog post, it was a matter of when. The Mild Wife has described it as a "writing practice," and it was one of the reasons why I kept writing. Honestly, it's good practice, and it gives me an opportunity to hone my craft. I'm no professional author, but we all have to write stuff in our everyday lives. Why not give yourself reps to get better at it? However, I think it's time for that practice to change. My weekly anecdotes sure kept me amused...

I like to write. It's more of a hobby than anything else, but I enjoy doing it. I get to create worlds and characters, so it's like a workout for my imagination. And if this blog is any indication, my writing isn't going away any time soon. Basically, it's something that gives me a little bit of joy. Now, I don't just write here, I also respond to Reddit writing prompts on occasion. I have to admit that I don't write there as much as I would like to, but it's more fun with an audience. Sure, I can still come up with interesting ideas or a clever turn of phrase when I write on my own, but that forum is nice because it has a built-in reader base. So I can see what works, what doesn't, or even if someone has constructive feedback. Basically, it's more fun when people read my stuff. However, not all feedback is created equal. I definitely appreciate the congratulatory "well done" and I find the constructive criticism helpful. After all, that...

Every now and then, the timing is more amusing than the actual thing. For example, I once let my sister and her husband use my bedroom when they stayed with us, only for me to have a hilariously hard time getting into a new routine during that time. I did eventually figure it out, but only on the very last day of their stay. Like I said, the timing is sometimes the funniest bit of the whole thing. In this case, it wasn't so much a slow crescendo that set up the joke. No, in this case, I had the PG&E public safety power shutoff to blame . If you're unfamiliar with what that was, the biggest utility company in California proactively shut off power to lots of people during some inclement weather. The craziest thing about it was that it wasn't even the kind of weather that you normally worry about. It wasn't high heat, extreme cold, pouring rains, or a hurricane. No, the root cause was high winds. Think about that; the wind blew so hard, that the utility company was ...

I almost didn't notice, but I have been blogging for a decade. Yes, ten whole years. In fact, I was bad enough at tracking the dates that I am now a month late in celebrating the ten-year anniversary of my first post  (the first one was apparently in August 2009). I never imagined that my random musings would lead to a full-blown writing practice, as the Mild Wife calls it. Still, here we are, all these years later. I figured the most fitting way to mark this occasion would be to revisit some of the more memorable/fun blogs posts during that time. As you can probably imagine, a lot has happened in ten years. So, I present you some of the highlights from the last decade: I got married a couple of years ago . There were several blog posts about it, but the term "Mild Wife" started making an appearance in posts shortly thereafter. The resulting Mild Honeymoon also led to plenty of laughs. I decided at about the two-year mark to  stick to a schedule of one blog post ...

One of the recent posts about movies (and the Mild Wife's reactions to watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies for the first time ) reminded me that I have a very particular quirk when it comes to watching movies. Basically, I always try to guess the plot. I'm not entirely sure why I think this is fun, but at the end of the day, I do. I think it may have something to do with my propensity for engineering brain , because plots seem like things that have to fit together in a particular way. So if I can understand what the author/screenwriter is trying to accomplish, I can try to piece together the way the movie might unfold. If you want a happy ending, make sure the knight rescues the princess. If you want a horror film, the princess was actually a demon in disguise and kills the knight at the end. The other thing that probably leads to this guessing game is the fact that I try my hand at writing every so often . I imagine it's sort of like a chef who goes out to eat...

A few weeks back, the Mild Wife and I decided to check out the Bay Area Book Festival . It was close enough to us that we figured it'd be fun to check out, and we both do some writing. In my case it's much more of a hobby (you are reading my personal, just-for-funsies blog, after all), but I do like to write nevertheless. Hell, I even write a small piece of fiction every now and then . Basically, we were excited enough about the concept of a bunch of workshops dedicated to books and to writing that we decided to partake in the festival. Now, the festival lasted the whole weekend, so there were quite a few moments that the Mild Wife and I enjoyed from the whole process. Better yet, the Mild Wife and I didn't go to the same sessions all weekend long, so we often had fun comparing notes and reporting amusing anecdotes from our respective experiences. There was one guy who spoke to the Japanese author in Japanese and knew just a tad too much about Japanese literature for it t...

It’s funny how reliant we are on the Internet. There are entire parts of my job that I haven’t bothered to memorize, because I simply don’t need to. Rather than memorizing which C# class lets me parse file names correctly, I can search for that sort of thing. Sure, there are some that I’ve learned through sheer repetition, but for the most part, I don't bother with information that I can find via Google. I say that because I found myself in an interesting predicament earlier today. I had a couple of hours to myself at a coffee shop, with the full intent of writing some blog posts and a story or two. Normally, I would dig through my email and my text messages for inspiration, since that tends to be a good source of humor. Alas, it was not meant to be this time around. I was at a coffee shop I’d never been to before, so I didn’t know what the protocol was for the Internet. I paid with a credit card, but the person behind the counter made no effort to give me any kind of rece...

Several years ago, I started working out with some friends at work. Specifically, we started doing CrossFit work outs at work . A buddy of mine opened up a gym, and he wanted some company as he tried out this whole newfangled CrossFit thing. It was a lot of fun, so we decided to keep doing it. Ultimately, that led to a different blog where we kept track of the work outs . Funnily enough, that blog itself has led to some hilarity . Now, I didn't start that blog, but it more or less fell into my lap to keep it updated. I used to actually send out emails to people at work, since some people missed the work out. However, at one point, someone decided that they wanted to be able to search through them. Email isn't the best format to search, sort, and filter, so it magically turned into a blog. Either way, though, I happen to be the main contributor to that CrossFit blog. And since I've been writing those blog posts, I have a routine down. I usually reserve Sunday morning...

I've occasionally had people tell me that I have a very distinct way of communicating. I've got a "style," if you will. Now, I pretty much only know one way to talk: the way I talk. It's not like I have put countless of hours into crafting a new persona or figuring out how to piece words together. For better or for worse, it's an innate style. Most of the time, I don't really think about it. It's one of those curious little facts that people have thrown my way and I have retained (sort of like how I know that Japanese has a word for " someone who is so good they are legendary "). However, it's recently come up in enough ways that it's led to a few laughs, and several at my expense. First of all, it turns out that I write very much like I talk. I've never really thought about it, but that makes some sense. It's pretty natural to try to translate your actual speech into written speech, I think. Either way, this came up when ...

I've been writing this blog for a little over 5 years now ( though seemingly in secret ), and I'm amazed that I've managed to keep it up this long. Heck, at one point, I wasn't entirely sure if I was going to be able to keep to a schedule of a post per week . So far, so good, though. And if nothing else, it's sometimes fun to go back and look up old stories. I actually end up doing this quite a bit, as I sometimes have to refer to older posts. The first paragraph above is a perfect example of this. I knew I'd mentioned both the poor job of marketing and the schedule I keep in past posts, so I figured I'd point to them if anyone wanted the back story. So at least once per week, I will search through older posts to find relevant references. However, it turns out that I've written 300+ posts. That's definitely a large enough volume of posts that I don't remember all of them. Heck, I'm not sure I'd remember them all even if there were ...

Long-time readers of this blog (all two of you) know that I stick to a schedule . There are good reasons for this, all outlined in the linked post. However, the pertinent part of that post for today's purposes are near the bottom of that post: if I have to stick to a schedule, how do I ration out my funny stories so as to not run out? I don't want to end up in a situation where I post a bunch of funny stories, and then one day, I find myself staring at a laptop with nothing amusing to write. Well, as it turns out, the answer to this problem seems to be checking my email. Somehow, I have managed to gather a group of friends that consistently provide snarky and/or amusing stories. And they frequently email me about these post-worthy stories. On days when I find myself needing inspiration for the weekly blog post, I usually end up checking my email to see if there's anything worth writing about in there. In hindsight, this should come as no surprise. After all, my inbox wa...

I have been writing this blog for just under 5 years now (holy crap, I can't believe it's been that long), but it's never been wildly popular. That's mostly because it's only so interesting (it's called MILD amusement for a reason), but part of it is also due to how I market the thing. Or don't market it, as the case may be. The funny thing about me is that I will happily share details about myself , but I don't necessarily go out of my way to volunteer those details. In fact, as a result of this, some of my friends will intentionally tailor questions to me in a very specific manner to make sure that I respond with the details that they care about. It makes for some very amusing exchanges, but recently, it came up in relation to this blog. A friend of mine has been talking about starting a blog of her own, and she was telling a few of us all about how she came up with the name for it. It involved some guy quasi hitting on her as she was walking dow...

A while ago, a friend of mine decided to do a 30 day "burpee challenge." I've mentioned burpees before, but they're a form of exercise that can be challenging after a few of them. In this case, the challenge was to do 30 of them every day for 30 days in a row. She then decided that she'd like company on this particular challenge, so she invited a few of us to play along with her. I'd been particularly bad about going to the gym at that point, so I was happy to participate. If nothing else, I'd get some form of exercise for 30 days. This plan worked out pretty well, since we all managed to hit the 30 day mark. In fact, it worked so well, that we agreed to keep going past the original 30 days. I wasn't very good about tracking the number of consecutive days, but I know for sure that we hit at least 100 days. At one point, though, I realized that I had gotten accustomed to the 30 burpees, so it wasn't very good exercise any more. Knowing that, I...

Starting a couple of years ago, I resolved to write a blog post at least once a week  (also, holy crap, I can't believe I've been on this schedule for two years now. It really doesn't feel like it's been that long). I remember being slightly concerned that I wouldn't have something to write about every week, so I would have to figure out how to pace my posts. After all, just how amusing could my life be? As it turns out, I've either got more amusing things going on around me or I'm really good at embellishing the mundane things that happen around me . However, I don't always write about these things in the moment. That means that if I don't write them down somehow, I'm liable to forget about them. This is particularly true if I hold off on writing about the amusing anecdote until the following week to make sure I don't fall behind on my schedule. So, I keep a whiteboard and write down things I can write about on it. When it comes time to w...

I've probably mentioned the CrossFit workouts I do on occasion over time; it's something I've enjoyed doing for a while and something that I like to talk about. It's not all that rare for me to describe the whole thing to someone with obvious enthusiasm in my voice. Like I said, it's something I like doing. In fact, it's something I like doing enough that I try to keep that linked blog up to date as much as possible. I'm hardly perfect, but I do try to post the work outs before the week is up, at the very least. I don't entirely remember when it became a part of my routine, but at some point, it just became one of those things that I had to get done. Sure, other people can update the blog, and they've done it before. Still, that responsibility has fallen to me often enough that I try to post the work outs when I know what they are. It's almost a matter of habit at this point. Regardless, I know that it's hard to figure out how movements ...

Remember how I recently wrote about my penchant for anonymizing (I know that's not a real word, but it should be) my stories? Well, it turns out that some of my earlier writing had not followed this rule. I clearly didn't remember some of these posts at the time when I wrote the linked post. Worse yet, I actually wrote that people had permission to smack me if I started doing so. Crap. Well, that wasn't good. The real question, though, was what to do about it. Overall, these posts were a tiny minority of the blog. I could just ignore the discrepancy, and hope that no one would notice. The odds that someone would actually do so were pretty small, so it's not like it'd be a huge risk. On the other hand, I could go back through all of my writing and make sure I edited out the names. This second plan would obviously take more of my time, and it would be far more tedious. Maybe a recent "This American Life" episode about a retraction influenced my thinkin...

Writing this blog is always an interesting act of duality. I hate the thought of attention whoring , but I still find it incredibly amusing to share anecdotes about this life of mine. So, I write in a way to avoid names , but I still have no qualms about making my life something of an open book (er, tri-fold ). I happily continue to churn out posts, but it's not like I'll plaster "look everybody, new post!" all over social media to promote myself. So, really, I end up compartmentalizing things. Writing about stuff exists in one bucket, and actual social interaction with people exists in a separate bucket. Every now and then, though, the two buckets mix. Usually this involves friends of mine, but the results are always interesting. The first time this happened, I was hanging out with some friends, and their friends. I happened to write about it a little while later, so the people I knew were amused to read about it. In fact, they were amused enough to pass along a l...

I don't quite remember when it happened, but sometime earlier this year, I resolved to write blog posts a little more regularly than last year. It's not like I was neglecting this blog, but I pretty much did it haphazardly last year. For example, I wrote a grand total of 2 posts in August of 2010, but I wrote 8 of them in February. At some point, I figured it couldn't hurt to even it out a little. Also, a fairly well-known programmer claims that it's going to make me awesome to stick to a schedule. Anyhow, I've resolved to write at least one blog post per week. I can't save them up or just decide that I don't want to write that week. Nope, I am holding myself accountable for at least one post per week. Incidentally, I am granting you all permission to hit me if I don't stick to this schedule, to put more skin in the game. Now, that's nice and all, but the point of my writing is to be amusing. I may not amuse everybody with every single post (the...