Lift Up Your Hearts!

Ancestry.com is opening all its U.S. census records (1790-1940) for free from now through September 3.  The census is one of my favorite sources of genealogical information, and a lot of fun to check out.  Enjoy!

Definitely not my kind of music.  But check out the guitar solo between 2:63 and 3:12.

This afternoon we were part of a Messiah sing-along at Rollins College, sponsored by the Messiah Choral Society.  We sang through almost all of the choruses, including all of our favorites and some we had to sight-read.  What bliss!  For most of the choruses it has been nearly fifteen years since we had the pleasure.  And the Glory, And He Shall Purify, For unto Us, Glory to God, Behold the Lamb of God, Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs, And with His Stripes,  All We Like Sheep, He Trusted in God, Lift Up Your Heads, The Lord Gave the Word, Hallelujah, Since by Man Came Death, and Worthy Is the Lamb (with no cuts and including the whole Amen section).  Happy sigh.

It was good to be reminded of what an amazing experience (and unusual, for such a small church) we had back in the St. Paul's choir when St. Paul's was the church it once was.  It was also good to discover how much we have both grown, musically, in the intervening years, even though we've almost never sung such great music again.

All you Windows 7 users out there, can you help me with backup?  Here's the problem:  Windows 7 thinks it's smarter than I am, and I have my doubts.

I had a fine backup routine in place with Windows XP:

• Every night, I did an automatic incremental backup of my main drive to itself.  I know it's not good to backup to the same drive, but any other system requires having the backup drive plugged in and powered on all the time, which is (1) a waste of energy and (2) risky in itself.  Either that or I'd have to remember to plug it in at the right time.  I know myself better than that.  And this way at least the files were recoverable barring a hard drive crash.
• Once a week, I'd do a full backup of the main drive, this time to an external hard drive.  I keep many levels of backup, spread over multiple external drives.  (I know, I'm obsessive about it, but I've had two levels of backup fail at once before.)
• Also once a week, I'd do an incremental backup of the external drive that is plugged in most of the time and holds much of my data.  I only do a full backup of that one twice a year, as it takes some 15 hours.
• Occasionally I'd do an image backup of the whole primary drive.  (I added this after learning—the hard way—that even though the computer has the "factory settings" built in, you really don't want to go that far back if you can help it.)

The system seems to work well, and it doesn't take much of my time to give me some reassurance.  The computer's time, yes; my time, no.

So ... enter Windows 7 Backup.  As far as I can tell, I can't even specify where I want the backup to go, at any level lower than the entire external drive!  Worse, I can't specify "full" or "incremental"—Windows 7 does a full backup the first time, and then all subsequent backups are incremental, except that, "If you're saving your backups on a hard drive or network location, Windows Backup will create a new, full backup for you automatically when needed" (emphasis mine).

When needed?  How on earth does Windows 7 think it can tell when a full backup is needed?  I, and I alone, determine when a new full backup is needed!

Plus, if Windows is doing incrementals all the time, the backups are going to one drive only, and I really like distributing them over at least two drives.

I'm very new to Windows 7, and I like many of the features, but I do get ticked off when a feature I use all the time gets broken/removed.  I also know that I'm automatically resistent to change, which is often a fault, and that perhaps there's something better about Windows 7 backup that I'm just not seeing yet, which is why I'm writing this post.  Tell me what you like about it, what I'm missing, or how to do it better.

I'd really rather use the built-in system, and not have to resort to third-party software for something that Windows should provide—especially since it used to provide a backup that worked just fine for me.

Sporcle, my favorite technique for developing mental "hooks" on which to hang related information, now has a game for the Swiss cantons!  I still need to work on them, but I'm pretty happy to have gotten 20/26 on my first try—without looking at the Swiss map (thank you A&M!) on my wall.  All but one missed canton are in the eastern part of the country, with which I'm less familiar.  I am somewhat embarrassed at having missed Neuchâtel, but I still did better that I would do with Florida's counties....

There's also a quiz for Facts about Switzerland, on which I got 37 out of 50 on the first try.  I would have gotten two more had I not been interrupted twice in the middle of the game.  When will Porter learn not to interrupt when I am doing important work?  I also wasted too much time trying variations on "Confederation Helvetica" for the official name....  And their answer for the "Southern Mountain Range" is nitpicking, I think.  I'll never be able to remember the name of the president (Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf), but that changes every year, anyway.

Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Random House, 2007)

Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?

Everyone who speaks wants his ideas to get across, be memorable, and have the desired impact on the listener.  But more often than not we thrash around like a baby in the throes of learning to crawl:  lots of action, no progress.

Before Switch, the Heath brothers wrote Made to Stick.  Like its successor, there is too much in this book to apprehend adequately in one reading.  At least for me:  I read as cows eat, and often need a second go-round to get full benefit from a book.  I found Switch more eye-opening and more immediately applicable, but Made to Stick is at least as important.  Even if you don't think you need any help communicating your ideas, you need to be aware of the techniques other people are using to get you to accept and remember theirs.  You can bet this book is must reading for anyone in the advertising business!  And even those with more laudable goals in mind than persuading you to buy their products have been known to use these techniques to promote ideas that are not necessarily correct or helpful.

You can read the first chapter on the authors' website.  Here's an excerpt that covers the basic premises, followed by a few passages that particularly struck me.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any." To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people's expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day's worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people's attention. But surprise doesn't last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don't enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas. When we're trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: "Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago."

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic "37 grams" doesn't elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it's difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it's easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

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Let me make two things clear up front:

1. I'd personally rather the government and other busybodies stay as much as possible out of ALL personal decisions, from health to education to the way we raise our children to the food we eat.  (Inform and educate, yes; regulate, no.)
2. Representative Akin's remarks about "legitimate rape" and pregnancy showed appalling ignorance, there's no doubt about that.

BUT it seems to me that we're always missing the main issue:  Rape doesn't change what abortion IS.  (Or is not.)  Either abortion following rape compounds one assault with another, so that there are two innocent victims of the crime instead of one, or it does not.  If it does not, then it makes not the slightest bit of difference whether the abortion is done on woman who has been raped or on a woman who simply does not want to be pregnant.  On the other hand, if abortion does double the number of victims, then even in the case of rape it is rightly an agonizing decision, and we need to help the woman through it, not somehow think to reassure her by insisting that because she was the victim of violence, the obvious right course of action is to inflict violence on another.

I may have missed it.  After all, I didn't watch much of the Olympics.  But what I did see was disturbing, and fits a disturbing pattern in the world today.

Who did the athletes often thank in their interviews?  Their mothers.  Who did one commercial sponsor feature frequently and prominently?  The moms.

Not that it's wrong to remember the encouragement and inspiration given the athletes by their mothers.  It's impossible to go over the top in honoring the maternal efforts and sacrifices made for the next generation.

But what about fathers?

We've gone from Father Knows Best to Father Knows Nothing.  And that's disturbing for two reasons.

• It's wrong.  It's untrue.  Was your dad the foolish, bumbling, absent, or abusive father portrayed in sitcoms and on the news?  Does your husband deserve to be the inexhaustible staple of comedic routines?   We're allowing a few bad examples to distract us from the overwhelming evidence that today's fathers are engaged, supportive, and wise leaders in their children's lives, on an almost unprecedented level.  If their involvement is not exactly the same as a mother's, that is as it should be:  children thrive best under the different kinds of wisdom and nurturing that come from the male and the female perspectives.
• It's foolish.  Even if there are some legitimate concerns about the state of fatherhood, repeatedly telling someone how bad he is will more likely have bad effects than good.  Fatherhood is difficult, sacrificial work; if a man's efforts are repeatedly met with denigration and derision, how long can a human be expected to persevere before giving himself up for lost?

Without taking anything away from the heroic efforts of mothers, let's not forget to give fathers their due.  They deserve much better than they are receiving at our hands.  Our children deserve better, also:  They need to be able to look up to their dads, and they need dads they can look up to.  Neither goal is served by belittling half of their parentage.

Pre-Internet, I wrote to letters to the Orlando Sentinel a lot.  That's "to," not "for"; no money came my way, though I was invited three times to a nice dinner at their Letter Writers' Forum.  Got a nice tea mug each time, too.  Then I found other outlets for my writing obsession.  Specifically, this blog, which is both more "local" in the sense of reaching family and close friends—though they read it from all over the world—and more global, with a potential audience much larger than that of a local paper.  My print output plummeted.

But yesterday, on a whim, I decided to write down my mental rebuttal to a recent article and send it in.  The process is much faster these days, and my letter appeared in today's paper.  The article, which I've linked to on another site since the Sentinel has started charging for online access to much of their content, concerned our increasing propensity for outsourcing our personal lives.  I, too, deplore the tendency, but what inspired me to write was a quotation from sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, who appears to blame the situation on the commercialization of life.

These services are only likely to proliferate in a world that undermines community, disparages government, marginalizes nonprofits and believes in the superiority of what's for sale.

To which I replied, "Huh?" before setting down something more articulate.  My letter is still (at the moment) available on the Sentinel site (it's the last one), but in case it disappears, I invoke author's privilege and publish it here, as well.  (The headline is the Sentinel's, not mine.)

Ultimate trust: Send a child to school

Turning over to professionals more and more of what we used to call "living" is indeed a disturbing sociological trend ("Outsourcing your life," Orlando Sentinel, Aug. 9).

Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild is wise in her recommendation that each of us must make his own, reasoned decisions and choose what is simply too personal and too important to trust to strangers.

But in attributing the outsourcing trend to "a world that ... disparages government" she is forgetting that it is the government, not commercial interests, to which we have long entrusted much that is highly personal and vitally important. Most of us now expect the police, not the rifle hanging over the door, to keep our families safe from marauders.

And every time families send new kindergartners to public school, they are expressing a faith in government unsurpassed by anything religion could hope for.

So sad.  Our washing machine gave great service for over 10 years, so I guess in terms of today's normal appliance lifespan it doesn't owe us anything.  But it is still in great shape, inside and out, according to the repairman who just left.  Unfortunately, the motor is giving out, and it's a problem that is not repairable -- only because that motor is no longer made, and replacing it (which our repairman used to do all the time with no trouble) now costs too much to be worthwhile.  How sad that a good machine must end up as scrap just because the company would rather sell new machines than old parts.

On a related note:  has anyone bought a machine in the last five years and been happy with it?  If so, what are your recommendations?  (I limit it to the last five years because apparently some brands have made major changes recently that have significantly affect lifespan.)  Thanks!

This is happening to a friend of a friend.  Really.  This is not an urban legend.  :)  f you don't believe me, you can watch the press conference video below.  But if it weren't for Facebook, I would probably not have discovered the connection.

Gavin and Carrie Jones, along with their eight-year-old son, Isaac, normally live in Papua New Guinea.  They came back to the U.S. so Gavin, a helicopter pilot, could upgrade his skills, and were given a gift that will extend their furlough a bit longer than planned:  Carrie just delivered (via a carefully planned and orchestrated c-section) five tiny babies, three boys and two girls.  Unlike others we've known in similarly difficult circumstances, they've chosen not to keep their story private.  As Gavin said, the more people who are praying for their babies, the better.

If you'd like, you can follow their story, and the progress of little Will, David, Marcie, Seth, and Grace on their blog.  I'm getting e-mail updates from my friend, and Facebook updates as well, but I still go to the blog for the full story.  I'm a sucker for babies....

The press conference is 35 minutes long, but neat to see.  I am so impressed by how poised and articulate the parents are, especially Carrie, who is dealing with five desperately needy babies and raging post-pregnancy hormones.  Even Isaac does well, though you can tell he's a bit shell-shocked.

Update 10/10/2019:  The embedded video no longer works, but you can see it by following this link.

When Porter came home from a two-week business trip, he commented, "Wow, the house looks great!"  I was momentarily taken aback, because—in contrast with many of his previous out-of-town stays—I had not done anything special to prepare for his arrival. On the contrary, the house had looked that good for more than a week.^*

(victory)

Lower case, no exclamation point, sotto voce—lest the shy bird be startled and take flight, as she has so many times before.  But I told my daughters that if I lasted a month with my new organizational system, I'd write about it.

I'd like to be an original thinker, but what I'm actually proficient at is assembling, compiling, and melding other people's good ideas into something that fits my situation.  This was especially true in family life and education, where what at first glance may have appeared unique, or at least unusual, was merely my take on the best of what I found from a multitude of sources.

So, too, with my efforts at organization and homemaking.  At the heart of my new system is David Allen's Getting Things Done, but discerning readers will recognize the influence of Don Aslett, Steven Covey, FlyLady, Sandra Felton, Malcolm Gladwell, and a host of other inspirations, including family and friends.

I made my first effort to implementing GTD two years ago.  I knew then that I'd been handed an extremely powerful tool that would reform my life.   I made myself a Tickler file, I created Next Action folders, and I reaped significant benefit from them ... but the whole system never really got off the ground.  Mostly, I told myself, because "life interfered"—travel, visitors, and other disruptions shook up the system before it could become established as a habit.  Not that I would have traded any of the wonderful experiences I had, but they were, in my mind, the reason I didn't make progress.

Now I'm not so sure.  I'd be a fool to deny the detrimental effects of disruptions (especially unhappy ones) on a newborn self-improvement program, but in this case I now believe the crucial problem was that I had not had time (made time / had inspiration) to customize the program, to make it my own.

Porter's trip was the inspiration for tackling that project.  I'll spare you the nitty-gritty of the construction, except to say that most importantly it was a recursive process.  We perfectionists prefer that our projects have a long design phase.  "Measure twice, cut once" is our motto, and besides, planning is usually much more fun than implementation.  But what got this project off the ground and into a useful form was an ongoing design-implement-evaluate-revise-repeat plan.  Sometimes (often?) you just don't know what will work until you try it.

Enough talk.  So what am I actually doing?

I'm still using my Tickler file.  I love having a place to "file and forget until needed" concert tickets, driving directions for a future trip, birthday cards I've been inspired to write but which won't be mailed until later, information to bring to a doctor appointment, etc.

I'm also using Allen's Next Action, Projects, and Someday/Maybe folders, though this part still needs some revision.

Although these are anathema to GTD, my system relies on to-do lists.  I'm over trying to fit myself into what "should" work, and at leat at this point in my life, I need the inspiration of seeing the day's work laid out in front of me, with little check boxes that I can triumphantly, physically, mark off when the task is completed.  What's more, although i can do preliminary work on the lists in advance, I also need the inspiration of creating a customized list the night before, specifically for the next day, and printing it out.  I've tried putting my lists on the computer, and it just doesn't work for me.  At least not now.

The lists take two forms:

A Routine List, which sets out the basics of what I want to accomplish every day.  These are so standard that I print the list only once per week, and it has checkboxes for Monday through Saturday.  This list owes a lot to FlyLady's Morning and Evening Routines, but mine covers the whole day.  For example, the worms need their "air conditioning" refreshed once a day, and it makes no sense to give them their frozen water bottle in the morning or the evening:  they need it during the hottest part of the day.  Also, I want to work through my language exercises four times per day, spread out more or less evenly.  The lists are roughly divided into before and after mealtimes, but there's a good bit of overlap and flexibility as well. 

Daily Lists lay out, for each weekday and Saturday, what I hope to accomplish that day.  Some items are standard, such as "take out trash" on Mondays and Thursdays, and "yard work" on Tuesdays.  Others I fill in during my Weekly Review time, during which I evaluate the past week and look forward to the next.  Still others are added as I think of them during the week.  It all comes together the night before, when I check my Tickler and my Action folders, transferring items to the Daily List as appropriate, and printing the final result.  Did I say final?  Not really.  Often I'll add something by hand that comes up after the list has been printed.

It is easy to let the lists get out of hand.  I keep my Routine List to one page, with the table set up so that I can't put more than 38 items on the list.  In order to fit in what I want, I sometimes cheat by grouping items, e.g. "check & clear e-mail / blogs / Facebook / moderate comments" is one item.  That works because I don't group items until they have become such a habit that they get done together and I'm happy not checking them off until all are accomplished.  When I'm establishing new habits I need the satisfaction of checking of the baby steps; once established, I am okay with the groups and can take on the challenge of making room for something new on the list.

The Daily Lists are also one page only, and I've made the table size bigger so there's only room for 18 entries.  Sometimes I fill them all, sometimes I don't.  The trick, I've found, is having enough to challenge me but not so many that I get discouraged.  Too few items and I procrastinate because I think I have lots of time; too many and I procrastinate because "I'm not going to get them all done, anyway."  Ideally I find myself stretching to get just a couple more things done so I can have the satisfaction of completing the list.  I'm still working on getting the right balance.  I don't prioritize the items, exactly, but the Daily Lists are roughly divided into "must do" and "would like to do" tasks.

Daily and weekly jobs go on the printed lists, but anything less frequent than weekly gets a card that goes into my Tickler file.  Originally I had cards for daily and weekly tasks in my Tickler (despite Allen's admonition not to), but I've found the lists work much better for me.  For biweekly, monthly, or other less frequent items, however, the Tickler is still the simpler solution.

That's the basic structure.  Simple, no?  But the devil—and the success—was in the details.  It was a grueling two weeks, mentally and physically, as I gradually put it all together.  Monday and Tuesday went swimmingly, but by Wednesday afternoon I found myself exhausted—mostly mentally, I'll admit, though the constant low-level pain of a flare-up of plantar fasciitis can't be ignored as a limiting factor.  I had been working pretty steadily from 6 a.m. till 10 p.m. for two and a half days, and had put too much on Wednesday's list, so that I moved out of the stretch zone and into the procrastinate zone.  Quadrant IV activities were looking pretty good.  It's hard to explain, but in many ways it was the structure that was the mental drain.  Although my plan included three sets per day of purposeful relaxation exercises, I hadn't left any time in the schedule for spontaneity, the lack of which my mind interpreted as a need for rest.  I scaled back for Thursday and managed to recover my energy and my momentum.

The next week I anticipated the Wednesday slump, made sure I structured the activities to be more rewarding and less taxing, and managed not to hit the wall until Friday.  By the third week, even though I was doing more, I had begun to ride the wave, and the structure became my friend rather than my enemy.  I had created a workable system, and along the way had made good progress in several far-behind areas of my life.

That, believe it or not, is the short version.  Below are some details and a few observations I've made along the way: (More)

It was my kind of outing:  a great concert, not far away, and only 50 minutes long.  Central Florida Community Arts presented an all-John Rutter choral concert at the Maitland Presbyterian Church.  I love Rutter's music, and I'm so happy to be in a church where we get to sing a lot of it.  In fact, just last Sunday we sang the concert opener, For the Beauty of the Earth, so all the notes were fresh in our memories.  The other works were A Dedication and Amen, A Gaelic Blessing, Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, and The Lord Bless You and Keep You, concluding with the marvellous Gloria.

For your listening pleasure, here's a version of For the Beauty of the Earth that's better than both what we sang and what we heard  :)

I didn't see Aly Raisman win her Olympic gold medal in floor exercise, as it was shown past even my Olympic-extended bedtime.  But I did watch the balance beam competition earlier, and that's where I saw her gold-medal performance.  Yes, I know she won bronze on balance beam.  But until her shockingly low score was re-evaluated and raised by the judges, she thought she had lost to Romanian Catalina Ponor.

What did Raisman do when she realized she had lost the bronze?  Did she cry, or swear, or sulk?  No, she walked over to Ponor and gave her a congratulatory hug.

Frankly, I find the Olympics mostly boring these days, now that the competitors and their performances are no longer amateur.  As a friend of ours, a National Football League referee, once said of football, "Don't kid yourself.  This is about business, not sport."  Raisman's display of good sportsmanship was the best thing I've seen from the London Olympics so far.

Skip this post if you are tired of reading about our fabulous grandchildren.  :)

I was talking with Janet the other day, and as I usually do, I asked what new cute things our grandkids were doing.

"Well," she replied, "Joseph counted nearly to 50."

This puzzled me, as numbers are his passion and a month ago he had happily counted past 150 for me.

Then she added, "in Japanese."