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Usually stuff I’ve written personally, stuff I think is pretty good.

The Enthusiasm Experiment

As the holidays are nearly over, I’d thought I’d do a quick wrap-up of a couple little things I found interesting.

As for the enthusiasm experiment, well, I’ll get to that later. Bear with me for a moment.

Over these past holidays I’ve done a couple of things – from buying domain names, helping friends get up-and-running with my CMS of choice, WordPress, finishing games I’ve wanted to play for a while (more on that in another blog post later on), even the ocassional blog post, and pretty much everything in-between, and now, as a last-minute project, I’m currently in the process of doing an almost complete re-build of my PC (as well as a not-too-cheap upgrade to i7 – yes, pics soon). It’s been good fun, but the one thing I spent the majority of my time on (during January, at least) was work.

Ah, work. People tell me I’ll have plenty of time to work later in my life, but my counter to that is that I like being a consumer whore and buying new and shiny things. I’ve been known to make fairly bad decisions on gear before (which is one of the reasons of my curent upgrade, actually), but add the fact that I pay about $90 of bills every month, and being unemployed is not a situation I’d like to find myself in anytime soon.

Anyway, work. I’ve heard that I’ve been described as “not an extrovert”, and for the most part, that rings true. The thing is, my job isn’t just to be some sales-droid – what I sell can sometimes be pretty specialised, and sometimes that involves – shock, horror – actually talking to people – and not only that (but doing so face-to-face. Oh, the humanity!), but sometimes it involves being a cheerful sonofabitch. Normally, that’s okay – however, for reasons I still can’t fathom, mornings aren’t the best time for me, and it generally can take a while for me to “perk up” – and when you have to be ready from the get-go at 9am, sometimes this can be a little daunting, which can lead to general grumpiness, and so on.

The enthusiasm experiment came to me in one of my brighter moments one morning, just as I was about to board the bus. The thing that struck me was that I was just “making do”, and just taking on whatever came, reacting to things that happened. I wasn’t proactive enough. I wasn’t taking control of my own emotions as well as I should have been, and that lead to general sulkiness (yes, that is an industry-approved term). So, to kick start my new take on life I tweeted about it(twice, actually – once that day, and then once again the next), and from there, it was all sunny days, roses, and all those other happy-feeling emotives I can’t think of right now.

The result? I feel much happier now. I’d hate to turn this into one of those feel-good, happy-go-lucky posts, but that’s kinda what it’s like. Stuff like failing my re-test for my Ls doesn’t affect me as much as it did anymore – sure, I’ll still hate on things, just like everyone does (hey, maybe I’ll even tweet about stuff that gets me down), but for the most part, it’s smooth sailing from here, chaps!

Pot Luck Pies

The thing about luck is that it’s always unexpected. No one ever expects good luck to happen to them, and if you’re the kind of person who does, you’re certainly bucking the trend.

A food that is found perhaps a little more often than strictly necessary, but certainly welcome during the holiday period in my house is pies. Yes, pies. Mainly beef pies, but sometimes chicken/vegetable pies also make an appearance as well. That’s all well and good – there’s nothing wrong with pies, and they make an excellent lunch when combined with a couple slices of toast or similar – but sometimes my dad will cook a whole batch of pies at once, eat some, and then refridgerate the rest. Which is cool, fine, I can deal with that.

I should point out at this stage that the pies mentioned above are almost always store-bought – while homemade pies have ocassionally been spotted in the Ling household, they’re usually too much effort to bother with on a regular basis. But damn, they are tasty.

Anyway, the point I tried to make is that these pies all look the same. Combine that fact that my dad likes to cook a whole batch at a time for later consumption, throw in the fact that he mixes different varieties of pies (beef, other assorted meat, vegetable, chicken etc), and you get: pot luck pies. There’s no way to distinguish between them when they’re in the fridge, short of taking their tops off and inspecting them manually. There’s just no way to know what flavoured pie you’ll get before you eat it, hence, pot luck pies.

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