Skip to main content

Comparisons

Old West Collectibles - Gold Scale (by www.OldWestAntiques.biz ) We’ve been going to Let’s Dish to prepare our dinners for about a year now, and we really love it.  In case you’ve never been, and never heard Erin and I gush about it, Let’s Dish is a place where they get all of the ingredients together and we come in and prepare our meals.  We split all of the meals, so that our 8 meal session lasts for 16 meals, just a little under a month.

One of the funny things I always find myself doing is comparing meat.  The staff do a great job separating out meat (either chicken breasts, flank steak, pork loin), and yet I still compare all of the options.  Heck, I find it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to tell a difference, but I still compare each time.

A few weeks ago our television died.  The bulb burnt out and the TV (even without the bulb) had a weird ticking noise.  So we decided that instead of spend hundreds of dollars getting it fixed, it was time to get something new. There I am at Costco about to buy a TV and before I pulled it onto the cart I compared the different boxes to find the one with no marks on it.

I know that I’m not at all alone. People always look to get the best, and feel disappointed when they don’t get it.

When we’re at the grocery store we look at how other kids are better behaved, and wonder what we can do to get our kids in line.  When we’re on the road we look at all the other cars around us that get better gas mileage, are nicer or are more fun.

It’s so easy to begin coveting those things we don’t have, and just as easy to resent the things we do.

Marketing relies on this.  That we all need the next, new, big thing. That we aren’t happy and our lives aren’t complete until we have the newest phone and the biggest house.

When I look around the room I think about how many things I have that 99.9% of the world doesn’t have (heck, a roof for one).

I’m in the middle of watching Newhart right this minute and Joanna says “We spend so much time regretting what we don’t have instead of appreciating what we do.”  Now if that’s not a sign, then it’s just coincidence.

Anyway, it’s time to look around the room at every single object, and appreciate the amount of work that went into making it, into earning the money to buy it, and into the time to acquire/create it.  It’s time to appreciate the old things that we have more than the new that we don’t.

Peace,
+Tom

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using an Array of Objects in C++

 I've been programming for years (over 35 at this point, which is crazy  to think about). My career right now is much more Software Architecture, and much less Software Developer, but I still get some time to write out GraphQL APIs in TypeScript, Vue 3 UIs, GitLab pipelines, and just generally making "big" decisions and helping make them a reality. It's nice every now and then to come across different articles and ideas that get me to remember life in college when I was using C++. Who would have thought C++ was the "hot new thing" right now (though I suppose it's more like Rust and Go, both great languages as well). One of the things I find frustrating with most technical posts is where they focus on the "how do I build an app" and not so much on "how do I do this one slightly useful thing". I figured I'd throw one together what was front of mind, using user attributes for permissions (i.e., Attribute Based Access Control - ABAC) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Red-Gate SQL Compare

Every now and then I come across a program that becomes so ingrained in my daily work that I hardly know how I'd get by without it.  I'll probably break down a couple over the next few days, but for database work, I have never found anything as good as Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare .  Essentially these tools let you compare two SQL Server databases (all objects, users, permissions, functions, diagrams, anything) and update changes to whichever database you want.  This is amazingly useful for deploying database changes to a test or production environment (do it to production with ridiculous care, even though it will generate a SQL Script for you and run all updates in one transaction), and making sure everything is synchronized. For releases we can just generate the compare script, confirm that the changes match the updates we want to go out, and store it all in one place with the release details.  This is true for both the structure and the d...
6 comments
Read more

Kids Activities

I find myself often in a situation where it's some morning, I have the kids for the afternoon, and I'm not sure what to do with them. We could go to a movie, or play Legos, but living near Washington, DC, I want the kids to love the museums as much as I do, or to see what else is going on. This Sunday, while my wife was travelling, I took the kids to the Chocolate Festival in Old Town Fairfax. I didn't even know there wad an Old Town Fairfax, much less a chocolate festival. It was okay overall, but the best was seeing any type of chocolate you could imagine, and letting the kids pick something for themselves and their teacher. For finding cheap or free stuff going on nearby with the kids, I have to say About.com has consistently been the best. I tried si.edu (the Smithsonian Website) which is also good, but a little hard to navigate, partly because they have so much going on. At About I did a search of what to do with my kids this weekend, and a bunch of items came ...
Post a Comment
Read more