2013 Year in Review - Good Parts Version

I started writing up 'Year In Review' post, and you know what, it was a total drag.  Unemployment tried its best to ruin our year, and typing up a full year in review sucked - depressing to type, depressing to read.  So I'm packing it all into one sentence and moving on.  I lost my job, it sucked, it was stressful, it was depressing, our finances are in shambles and we moved away from many of our friends.

And now, I am happy to welcome you to the good parts version of the 2013 year in review.  Rather than some sort of chronological listing, we're going through the year topically, in the order that stuff comes spurting out of my brain.

Travels:
It was a light year for traveling.  In April we made the 5 hour trip to Kirtland, OH to see the church history sites there.  Being unself-employed, we went in the middle of a week so we could avoid people (not that April is peak tourist season), and so we could go see the Kirtland Temple on April 3rd.  Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll point you to Shannon's blog post for more details.

We also made the 1,685 mile trip (each way!) from Michigan to Utah for my little sister's wedding.  I'll try not to get too judge-y about Jessica getting married in the middle of a day that was like 102°.  I'll leave that for my sister who was like 8 months pregnant at the time.  Being the lame people that we are, we produced two blog posts on the traveling.  But only one on the month we spent in Utah.  So what did we do?  The wedding went well, and more importantly, Jessica picked a good guy.  (Jess: Have we fully explained how much better Tyler is than pretty much every other guy you ever hung out with? Not like the other guys were bad people or anything, but . . . well done.)  We did the standard Utah things: hike the Y, drink BYU chocolate milk, ride the train, see downtown and temple square, weenie roast in the canyon.  Some of our favorites were probably kayaking in Oquirrh Lake (Daybreak) with Shannon's parents and I really enjoyed my hike (with Stewart) from Lamb's canyon to Little Cottonwood Canyon (via Millcreek and Big Cottonwood).  It was about 17 miles, and we never got seriously lost, despite heading onto some trails that we were probably the first people that year to hike.  Even thinking about that hike makes me miss Utah.

Running:
This year was a banner year for running for me.  This was partly made possible by slacking off sufficiently in all other years that the bar was set reasonably low.  I ran only a single race, the Dow Run 10k, in which I got a medal for taking 2nd place in my age group.  I ran it in a personal best 43:08.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't checking the mail every day for weeks waiting for the silly thing to arrive. I'm going to end up with new records for number of runs in a year (96) and miles (452).  I struggle a lot with running consistency; every month this year I've either run more than 40 miles (6 times), or less than 20 (6 times).  I have hopes of run a lot more next year, provided it quits being so freaking cold.  (High of 6 °F on Monday)

Blog:
blogger doesn't let me look at yearly stats (day, week, month, and all time are the options), and I don't want to bother to add up page views or anything.  But, I can say that the two most popular blog posts of the year have been Enders Game, the Movie and I like big Books (and I can not lie).  Those had 99 and 76 page views, while nothing else I've written this year had more than 40.  Ender's Game also won with 6 comments. (2 of which were me.)

Reading:
At the start of the year, Shannon and I set out to record every book we read for the year.  We gave up on the children's books after a month or two.  It was just too much work.  By the time we quit we had amassed 97 unique books, which we had read 227 times.  We did keep up with our adult reading lists though.  Currently, I'm at 10,937 pages from 29 books and Shannon is at 9790 pages from 35 books.  (Don't worry, Shannon will get to 10,000 before the end of the year!)  My top five books for the year are:

1. "Moonwalking with Einstein" a book about memorization
2. "Born to Run" perhaps you've heard about people running in silly footwear?
3. "Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver explaining how predicting stuff is really hard.
4. "Mistborn" I'm currently reading the second book in this fantasy series.
5. Wheel of Time #14 was an excellent conclusion to a very long series.

Girls:
Julia reads all the time now.  We never really taught her how to read, but at the age of 5 1/2 she's pretty much an expert reader.  We went to the library the other day and got her two Junie B. Jones books.  Both done by the end of the day.  We're pretty sure she understands everything in the books - I mean, who would sit there hour after hour reading if they didn't grasp the story?  It's been amazing to see Julia learn manners and to pay attention to other people over this year.  She long ago learned that we demanded the use of words like 'please' and 'thank you', but now she's actually learned to mean them, and to go out of her way to use them.  On the other side of that, she's also developing an attitude sometimes.  If we ask her to share a toy with Ella her response is often something like, "Fine! I'll just never play with any toys again, and Ella can keep it forever!!!"

Ella is goofy.  She has the most toned legs of any little kid I've ever seen.  I don't think toned is the right word.  They're muscular. She can't walk, she only skips, hops and twirls.  Just this morning she was laying in bed at 6-something in the morning singing jingle bells. Not just jingle bells though, the Barenaked Ladies version, which means that it starts out slowly, then she does the swirling interlude between verses where it picks up energy and roars into a raucous double-time chorus.  Julia, meanwhile, was sawing logs on the other side of the room.  Neither of my girls have ever been snugly, but we went and saw Frozen the other day, and Ella cuddled right up to me for much of the film.  It was heavenly.

Achievements:
There weren't any round numbers this year, but we did manage to turn 32, 31, 5 and 3.  Unemployment did manage to come to an end, finally, and in September I started working at a place called Rubicon Technology.  I do roughly what I've always done, and by this point, you either have an idea what it means to grow crystals or you don't.  With the new job, oh hey, we moved.  We've still got a house for sale back in Michigan, because selling empty homes is a hobby of ours.  Julia is doing great in Kindergarten, though it's eye-opening how little we really know about her life at school - and it's only half day kindergarten.  It's a mystical world full of kids and teachers that we don't really know.  We finally got to see Ben Folds Five in person, along with Guster and BNL.  For about 15 years I've been bummed that I missed BFF and Cake at the Big ___ Show in SLC.  It was the same night as the priesthood session of General Conference.  I don't regret my decision, but I was disappointed that I could see them.

Exponential Growth

Good news everybody!  My bank account is growing exponentially!  Of course, the bank is only paying me about 2 bucks in interest every year.  And today we're going to have a lesson on how those are not contradictory statements.

Exponential Growth is when the growth rate depends on how much you have.  Bank accounts are generally like this.  If you have a lot of money in the bank, you get a lot of interest.  Population growth is generally like this.  Texas has a of people, and so they have a lot of babies.  North Dakota has a lot few people, so they have a lot fewer babies.  Over time, we would expect the population of Texas to get bigger and bigger in comparison to North Dakota.  In some instances where time is in discrete and equal intervals, exponential growth can also be called geometric growth.  This would apply to some contrived board game sort of situation, where each turn you get, oh, let's say, 1 sheep for each 10 sheep you have in your flock.  (I'm inventing a sheep ranching game.)

Note that the term 'exponential growth' doesn't say anything specific about the growth rate (how fast something is currently growing).  In my original example, my bank pays me some tiny amount of interest.  My money will double if I leave it in there long enough.  Unfortunately for me, this time period is probably something like 400 years.  But it will continue to double every 400 years.  If I could become immortal, I could be rich!  Very often, I find that people use exponential growth to mean that something is growing very fast.  This is often the case.  India is adding millions of people a year.  A pile of cells in a petri dish probably add millions to their number in a few minutes or hours.  Sadly, my bank account doesn't add millions of anything per year.

What other types of growth are there?  Well, linear or arithmetic growth would be where your bank gives you $100 bucks every year, regardless of how much you have in there.  This would be a huge bonus for my bank account.  Not so much for Warren Buffet's.  Alternatively, you could have polynomial growth, which would follow a polynomial (something like x^2 where something would grow 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100 . . .).  Exponential growth will always win out over polynomial growth in the long run, though in some cases, like my savings account, you'd be better off to take polynomial growth, were it an option, than waiting 400 years.  I'm unlikely to live that long. :(

So, when you feel tempted to sound smart by saying that something is growing exponentially (which it very likely is), you can sound even smarter by simply saying that it is growing very quickly, which is probably what you really want to say.

Ice

This picture is from about a week ago, wherein I ran 12 miles on a cold day.  While it might look like water, I promise that everything on my face there is ice.  I guess that makes me feel cool.

You are also free to note that I am apparently not smart enough to turn my phone around to take a picture of myself, instead opting to use my rear view mirror.  What can I say, running makes me stupid.  On this particular run, at about 8 or 9 miles my feet were getting really cold, and I was really starting to regret my decision.

So this is Christmas

Me talking about Christmas music seems to be a periodic thing here on the blog.  I think it coincides with solar flares or something.  But this year, I'm not complaining!  (well, sort of.)  It's been noted before that most Christmas songs aren't exactly new.  According to xkcd, the 20 most played Christmas songs of all time were all written between 1930 and 1970, with 16 of those being between 1940 and 1959.

I get that major holidays in the US are extremely traditional, and we all want to pretend to be George Bailey for Christmas every year, but why are we stuck on Christmas songs that are, for the most part over 50 years old?  We record them over and over again, so we can get more electric guitar and pyrotechnics worked into the same songs, but a punk rock Holly Jolly Christmas is still at its heart, just a Holly Jolly Christmas.

So, I pose a question of what's the best Christmas songs written since I was born? (1982)  Heck, we can go further back and take song suggestions since 1970.  (Hint: "Feliz Navidad" is not a correct answer. Also, even "Grandma got run over by a reindeer" is 35 years old!)  Here is a reasonable list of Christmas songs if you want to look some over to get some creative juices flowing.  Surely in the last 40 or so years we have something that can exist on the same plane as "White Christmas" and "Silver Bells".  To be clear, I like most of those old traditional songs, and I generally like listening to Bing and friends singing them.  But society should be about progression, not sitting on our Blue Christmas laurels!

Of course, I have a few suggestions.

1. "Happy Xmas" (War is Over) by John Lennon (and I suppose also Yoko) is terrific, and was written in 1971.  It's perhaps more of a war protest song than a Christmas song, but since it's right there in the title (and written by John Lennon) it gets in easily.

2. Maybe to write a good Christmas song these days you need a cause, be it anti-war, or anti-famine.  I like "Do They Know it's Christmas?" which was written in 1984.

3. I like many of the original songs written by the Barenaked Ladies on their Christmas album, and my favorite (of the Christmas songs) is probably "Footprints".  Also on there are "Green Christmas" and "Christmastime".

And this is about where I run out of ideas.  I'm not all that big on Mariah Carey, giving my heart out for Christmas, or simply focusing on having a wonderful Christmas time.  But maybe someone else has some ideas?

More books

I've been reading a little bit more lately, so here's a book report, or two and a half.

Inferno by Dan Brown is a Dan Brown book.  That is both blindingly obvious, and probably the most insightful thing I can say.  Dan Brown books are the perfect airplane/airport books.  They're very engaging, so they make the time go quickly.  They have a gazillion chapters (103 chapters in a 400 page book), so there is always a handy stopping point. (Though about 90 of the chapters end with a phrase like "until he opened the door and saw who had just arrived." or "when he saw that they were too late.")  In this book, there is an evil badman who is going to ruin the world, and our only hope is follow clues left in art symbols to track down the diabolical device that he's hidden in the historic building.  So, yeah, it's just like all the other Dan Brown books.  This one uses Dante's inferno and associated artwork, and branches out from the Vatican to take us to entirely different places, like Florence and Venice.  I will say that the ending of this one took me by surprise.  Despite the little jabs I take at the book, it was just what I wanted it to be: entertaining.

If you're looking for something not entertaining, I can point you to Winston Churchill's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples".  Shannon first got me an abridged copy from the library, but I figured that if you're going to do something, you ought to do it right, so I sent the book back and got the unabridged one that is eight or nine hundred pages long.  I have since asked Shannon to go back and get the abridged one from the library.  I made it up to the Magna Carta or so before I started skimming.  I'm still stuck in the 1300s.  For some reason, I had assumed that Churchill would be a more entertaining writer.  (You know, "I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."?)  Apparently he did his writing sober.  Anyway, I may or may not finish this.  I plan to fast forward a few hundred years and see how it's going.

Because it was sitting around the house, I picked up "Michael Vey: the Prisoner of Cell 25" by Richard Paul Evans.  It's a YA superhero book, basically.  The writing is ok, but not great.  Michael Vey has some electrical super-powers, and there is a super evil, completely amoral, conscienceless, badman who wants to catch him and get him to do Bad Things.  The villain is kinda over the top, just so we can all be clear that he's completely, 100% bad.  So of course Michael, and friends he picks up along the way, have to get involved in saving the world.  I picked this up as a change of pace from Churchill rambling about King Edward the somethingth and his taxation fights with the church, so it has successfully entertained me.  I finished the first book and am about half way through the 2nd.  They are about 300 pages a piece, and I think there's only 3 of them, so I plan to read through them all.  Not good enough to really recommend to someone else, in my opinion, but now that I've started, I guess I need to see how it turns out . . .

Casio fx-82A

Let's take a moment to marvel at my calculator, the venerable CASIO fx-82a. I picked this up in high school when my chemistry teacher was going to get rid of it. Because even 15 years ago it was considered old. My favorite feature is the physical on/off switch.

If you wanted, you could wax all philosophical about the enduring value of something that still fulfills it's purpose.  Or you could talk about a society that would throw something out because replacements are so cheap.  I'll let you do all that.  I'm busy making a little party hat for my calculators 30th birthday party.

Stream of Unconsiousness

It's been 5 or 6 years since I've pulled an all-nighter, but for the last 2 nights, I've been nocturnal. See, in my career, I've gone from making germanium crystals in about 3 days, to making silicon carbide crystals in a bit under a week, to making sapphire crystals that take 2 or 3 weeks.  And that means sometimes equipment needs someone to keep an eye on it over night.  I never had to do that at DC (mostly because you couldn't see anything while it was growing - you just put everything together, hit go, and then come back days later and see if it worked).  But now I'm in much more of an R&D role, and we've got a big (really big) new furnace, and it needs some baby sitting.  Luckily, tonight is my last night of hanging around here.  I've done reasonably well with this whole staying up late thing, which isn't to say that when 5:30am rolls around I'm not ready to pass out anyway.

So, from my sleep deprived brain, some stories about the girls.

Julia is growing up and has recently learned how to think about other people.  In a way, it's amazing to see little kids and realize that they really no notion of how much of an imposition they are nearly every moment of their lives.  Ella really just doesn't understand that I'm not waiting around all day to go wipe her bum at a moments notice.  But Julia is figuring things out more and more, and as the sensitive soul that she is, trying to make people feel better.  So, if she sees me or Shannon stressed out (usually because of Ella) she'll come over and gently stroke my hand, or give me a hug or something.  It's very sweet.

Ella, on the other hand, just gets goofier every day.  The girls usually take showers, not baths, these days.  I'm not entirely clear why, since they seem to want to stay out of the shower stream as possible, but that's what they pick.  Anyway, while in the shower the other day, Ella declared that she was having a "bum party" and starts doing her little booty shake dance.  Which brings us back to one of the rules we have to go over and over at our house: no dancing in the shower.

The Windy City

Since moving to St. Charles, I don’t play basketball twice a week like I did in Midland.  Insert frowny face here.  (My computer says that ‘frowny’ isn’t a word, but suggests I use ‘frowsy’.  I googled that (I was worried that google would say “did you mean frowny?”; also, why doesn’t my computer recognize ‘google’ as a word?) and frowzy means “scruffy and neglected in appearance”.  I suppose that’s a good sort of face to insert there, too.)  The cultural hall in our church is carpeted (yuck), and we have about half the LDS population density as in Midland, so basketball probably isn’t going to happen.  Basketball at a non-church place probably isn’t going to happen either.  So where does that leave me?  Running!

With two days suddenly freed up, I’ve been running a lot more since we’ve gotten settled in here.  Specifically, in the last 67 days, I’ve run 171 miles.  I set several personal records in November, most notably, getting out 18 times for a total of 95.2 miles.  I was a little bit bummed that I came that close to 100 miles without hitting such a nice, round base-10 number, particularly because I probably won’t be getting back to that level any time soon.  Why?  Because it’s cold here! (And running in the cold is less fun leading to less running (and less frostbite), in case you couldn't quite connect those dots.)

I don’t expect a whole lot of sympathy here, because I know that much of the US is having a very cold week this week, but I don’t know what I’m going to do all winter if I’m faced with days like next Tuesday, where my morning run is projected to be 3° with a windchill of -14°.  I’m just having a hard time wrapping my brain around going out running in conditions where one pair of gloves just isn’t enough.  My coldest run ever so far is 8°, which was pretty darn cold.  My long run this Saturday is scheduled for the afternoon when it might get all the way up to 20.  But my weekday runs pretty much have to be in the morning.  I have a rough running schedule for the month, wherein I might be able to get to around 85 miles, provided I don’t lose more than 6 days due to weather.

Theories abound as to the source of “The Windy City” as a reference to Chicago, but it’s certainly the windiest place that I’ve ever lived.  I suppose my options are to either sit at home and be lazy, or grow my beard out extra long, put on an extra 2 or 3 layers and keep running.