One of the most meditative times of my day is when I’m cooking. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein
Cooking Makes Me Happy
So this week a friend posted a picture from one of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans, Cochon. He was there on my recommendation and even got my favorite dish, their rabbit and dumplings. While I was glad he got to enjoy it, it made me miss New Orleans terribly, likely because it’s only been a few weeks since I’ve been there. The picture at the top of the post is my little NOLA haul of parade throws. So Sunday nights for me typically mean two things, writing this blog and cooking food for the week. If I prepare good food for the the week it’s more likely that I’ll eat healthy, so it’s important for me to do. For this week I decided to make a pot of jambalaya as well as some chicken bone broth.
The reason I picked the quote I used for this week is because it really does fit for me. There is something very meditative or Zen about cooking for me. Being in the kitchen, prepping ingredients, stirring pots trying to juggle things so everything is ready when it should be allows me to get into a flow and just be there, completely focused on what I’m doing. With the giant added benefit that I get to eat what I cook. I’m a pretty good cook, my biased opinion of course, but I’ve had some other people tell me this as well. The simple fact is, we’re usually good at the things we really enjoy doing.
Last week was a bear of a week at work, it impacted my sleep and even bled into this weekend a bit. So this weekend was definitely a weekend of rest. I slept late, I exercised, I enjoyed the first sunny weekend in a while and of course I cooked. Life can throw a lot on our backs and as we’ve discussed many times before, it’s important to reset, take a step back and take care of ourselves. That’s what cooking tonight was for me, and the jambalaya was damn good!
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. ~ Albert Einstein
Changing the Definition of Success
I’m closing in on retirement and so I’ve been sitting back a bit and looking at my career and my life overall and thinking about the idea of success. Personally, I feel like I’ve had a pretty successful career. By the most important metric to an educator, which is have I helped students, I believe by that scale I’ve achieved a large amount of success. Out of the thousands of students I’ve had the privilege to have worked for, I can point to a large number of what I consider success stories. No, not the students who went to Harvard or Berkeley. Not the 4.0 students who won scholarship and awards, sure I helped them too, but they would have likely gotten their without my help.
The students that I feel are my success stories are the students that wouldn’t have made it without my help. The kid from Memphis whose family were drug dealers and expected them to be as well, the student who started out by blaming me for their failure and accusing me of racism, but came around a year later to thank me for getting them on a path to success. The student who was date raped and I helped them get the help they needed. The 80 year-old student who was starting college for the first time. Success to me, was when these students graduated, my 80 year-old student went on to complete her PhD at 88. I can think of similar stories over each of the colleges I’ve worked at, over each of the roles I’ve held as a counselor, advisor, teacher, director and dean. I’ve also, as a manager, had success with helping employees achieve their goals as well. Whether it was to complete a degree, become an instructor or manager or even just get a particular position.
But not everyone would consider my career to be a success, because I stopped my career climb at the position of dean. Sure, I’ve been manager of the year on one campus, I’ve been twice a finalist for a national award in community college excellence and even won the award once. But I’m still just a middle manager. Many people would consider me to be only slightly successful because I never became a vice-president or a president.
In America we really define success by title and money, and usually those two are completely intertwined. If you have the big title, you’re making the type of money that people would consider to be at a successful level. But what I want to make a case for tonight, is that we’re using the wrong metric for success in America. What should that metric be instead of title, money and power? I would argue it should be happiness and quality of life. I’ll start specific and then get into a more general discussion.
I think I’ve been incredibly successful in my career. Not because of the students I’ve helped, the awards I’ve won, the grants I’ve been awarded, not because of the title I have or the salary I make. No, I believe I’ve been successful because of the way I’ve cultivated my work/life balance, built my own happiness and established a solid current quality of life and have put myself into a position to have a good quality of life in retirement.
About 25 years ago I wasn’t in a great place. I was dealing with heavy levels of depression, I was significantly in debt, over $200,000. That was a $140,000 in student loans and $60,000 in credit card debt. I was in a great job, living in paradise but I was only making about $40,000 a year. As I started evolving in my career and thinking about my future I really didn’t see a chance at a normal retirement. I couldn’t imagine making enough given my salary at the time, and my debt, to ever be in a position to take a normal retirement. So I started wondering what the hell I should do. The idea of just working my whole life until I died was abhorrent to me. So what to do?
For a while I just worked like a madman, climbed the ladder, made more money but honestly it didn’t change my circumstances significantly. Plus, working massive hours, at one point 80 hours per week was not good for me in any way. So eventually I was making ok money and only working 50 hours a week but it was still too much. I was doing what I could to find balance through hobbies like cycling, Tai Chi, writing and photography but it wasn’t enough, and the long-term outcome still looked the same.
Then I hit on the first bit of genius, taking my retirement in bits. I decided that if I couldn’t retire at a reasonable age, I would take my retirement in bits. You see in my retirement I’ve always wanted to do a few things like hike the Himalayas, the Appalachian Trail, I wanted to travel and cycle and not just see places but really be able to explore them. And if I wasn’t going to retire until my 70’s or ever, I wasn’t going to be able to do those types of things the way I wanted to do them. So in 2010 I took my first retirement leave. I took nine months off to travel and train for a 30 day hike in the high passes of the Himalayas including hiking to base camp at Mount Everest. It was a magnificent trip, to use a cliché, a trip of a lifetime. But it was just the first.
After accomplishing my first retirement bit, I set into a pattern. I would work three years, enough time to thoroughly plan and save up money for the next big adventure. Then I would take a year off to travel and explore. That’s been the pattern for the last 15 years. I’ve played with whales in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja, photographed Polar Bears in the Arctic. I’ve visited all 50 states, walked across Scotland several times, cycled around Galway in Ireland, walked part of the Camino in Spain and backpacked around Spain, Portugal and Morocco. I’ve hiked the Great Glen Way, The Western Highland Way, and 1000 miles on the Appalachian Trail and wrote a book about it, Appalachian Trail Happiness.
Along the way, a really amazing thing happened. Although I had many opportunities to leave, staying in California and in the State Teachers Retirement System has put me in the position to have a very good retirement. And not at 65 or 70, but at the end of this year a few months after my 60th birthday. But these breaks were just half the battle.
The other side of this was actually much harder. As a middle manager in higher education, my job can easily become all encompassing. There is easily 50 or 60 hours of work you could put in as a dean every single week. Additionally, the job is 90% dealing with people and politics, it’s not easy to wind down after a nine, ten or twelve hour day. You’re on call 24/7, the emails come 24/7 and since the pandemic the phone/text messages come every day and at all hours, if you let it.
That was the second bit of genius that came to me and it happened during the pandemic. You see as that 50 – 60 hours suddenly exploded to 70 hours, part at home, part as one of the few people on campus, things were becoming unmanageable. The added responsibility of also needing to check in with all of my people (all 70+ direct reports), of having to redesign how we do everything, having to create safety protocols and find ways to bring programs back to campus, it was overwhelming. There was no extra pay, no support, just more and more piled on your plate every single day for months at a time over an 18 month period.
As the emergency portion of the pandemic wound down, and there was some semblance of normal returning, the job didn’t let up. Now it was masking protocols and PPE distributions, modality changes, paperless processes and a whole new paradigm in doing business, while the powers above pushed for the status quo to return, tomorrow. It was at this time I finally learned something I wish I had learned much earlier in my career, that I actually could choose. I don’t need to spend 50, 60 or 70 hours a week to do a good job. I realized that I have some control in the reasonableness of my job. The fact is, that there are things in every job that if they don’t get done, they really don’t matter. Sure, someone wanted it done, but if it doesn’t get done the institution moves on and everything we have to get done still happens. It was the moment when I truly realized that my life/work balance was more important than what the institution wanted to do.
I still serve students, I still serve my staff and faculty, but I learned to truly put off, that which was truly not that important. I should have learned this lesson a long time ago from a woman who was a legend, her name was Wallace Mayo. Wallace was one of the earliest tenured computer science professors at the University of Tennessee. When I got to know her in the late 90s she was the chair of the department and winding down her career. One day she told me how she kept up with the eternal piles of paperwork we all faced. She said, that every Friday at 5PM, she swept whatever was still on her desk into her garbage can and if it was important, it would come back. I of course thought it was hyperbole, until one Friday afternoon, months later, when I found myself in her office. The week is over she said, grabbed the garbage can and swept the papers on her desk into it. I was amazed and she’s been one of my heroes ever since.
The lesson was there, but I missed it. There is a portion of what we do, that does not matter to us responsibly doing our job and meeting our obligations. We can let those things go. We can also push our institutions to do things in more reasonable ways. Each semester we used to do this insanely complicated reporting. It involved taking information from two systems and having to fuse the data into a single report, with little to no exaggeration this report would take 9 – 12 hours to complete. Then it needed to be printed in triplicate, oh, and if there was a change, and there was always a change, it had to be redone. So sometimes you’d have to do it two or three times each semester. All to verify that the schedule matched what was in the payroll system. After throwing a fit about this and proposing solutions for two years we finally moved to a simple spreadsheet that takes 45 minutes to resolve and can be done electronically and updated in minutes. And it serves the same damn purpose.
So now, most weeks, I work my contracted hours. Sure, there are weeks when things arise that absolutely need my attention and I work more. But 90% of the time now, I work my contracted hours. This means trusting others to do what they are supposed to do, scary I know. This means you take the responsibility and lose some control. But two things happen, your people feel empowered and they become more responsible, in general. The other piece is, when others don’t meet their responsibilities, you need to make sure there are consequences. And finally, you just have to let things go. I’ve become fond of giving people choices, you need this by Friday, well I can do one of these three things, which would like done by then? As long as you deliver on what’s most important, by their true deadlines, and serve your students well, you’ll never put your job in jeopardy.
So I put to you that the metric for success that should be used for higher education administrators is as follows. Someone who first and foremost serves students, maintains a reasonable work/life balance, and normally works close to their contracted hours should be considered highly successful.
Work/life balance means putting that which is truly important at the priority it deserves and not short changing those things for the institution. So that means prioritizing your mental and physical health, your family and friends at least as high a priority as your job.
Having a balanced life, where you give the appropriate amount of attention and time to your physical and mental health, family and friends should not only be a measure of success for you. If institutions truly care about their employees, it should also be a metric for them. We hear a lot in our businesses about caring campus initiatives, wellness initiatives and campus climate. But how do any of these mean anything, if the institutions we work for push us ignore our personal priorities for the benefit of the institution?
In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful. ~ Anthony Bourdain
Happy Mardi Gras my friends, Fat Tuesday is this week, the end of the Mardi Gras season, and for those of you who are practicing Catholics, Ash Wednesday and Lent begin the next day. Last year, I visited New Orleans on the weekend before the big (last) weekend of Mardi Gras and had a great time. It’s a weekend full of parades and the giant crowds the last weekend bring were not present. So this year, I did the same and have just returned from a wonderful week in New Orleans.
Last year it was a little rainy and very cold, this year, we had one day of really heavy rain, so much in fact they shifted all of the evening parades to early morning and even then several parades rolled through heavy rain. Which created an interesting situation, the parades rolled by at top speed trying to beat the rain.
Happily, the rest of the weekend parades rolled by in great weather. I was fortunate to be able to connect with some friends I’d made last year and like always happens made a handful of new friends that I spent time with. One of my big goals for this year’s parades was to catch a fourth grail from the Krewe of King Arthur, I’d been super lucky to catch 3 last year and wanted 1 more to complete a set of 4. How I got that fourth grail is a perfect illustration of why I love Mardi Gras Parades so much. On a parade day you are often out on the parade route for five or six hours. So you get to know the people around you pretty well. This particular day, in addition to the folks I already knew I was seemingly in the international section of the parade route. I ended up hanging out with a couple of women from France, and a woman from Brazil who was eventually joined by her sister and father.
Having worked in Brazil and knowing a good bit of Portuguese, I love meeting Brazilians and getting the chance to speak a little Portuguese, so we were having a good time. During the parades you catch so many things and people share, if you catch something you don’t want or catch multiples you share with the folks around you. So throughout the day I gave a lot of beads and throws to the Brazilian family who were at their first Mardi Gras. By the end of the day when the Krewe of King Arthur rolled everyone knew I was on the hunt for a grail. As the parade rolled by I was stiffed and didn’t get close to a grail but at one point the Brazilian woman caught one. She immediately turned and gifted it to me, it was a truly kind act that made my night.
I made a friend last year at the parades who rides with the Themis Krewe and we hung out at the parades with some of her family and friends. Themis’ signature throw, much like the grails, are hand painted umbrellas and my friend Dana, in honor of my 60th year gifted me a really amazing umbrella.
This trip to New Orleans and Mardi Gras was one of my best trips ever to New Orleans. It felt fantastic to be in a city I love, to be having a great time at the parades with great people and to be eating great food. It was a week where I felt like myself for the first time in a long time. I was having fun, telling stories, having great conversations and generally just feeling happy to be alive. It’s going to be one hell of a downer going back to work tomorrow.
Fat Tuesday is meant to be a day where you cut loose one last day before starting a period of self denial, and internal self focus. So my friends, take Fat Tuesday to do a little something special for yourself, even if you aren’t revving up for Lent. Have a nice cocktail, or a decadent desert and just take a few minutes to be selfish, sated and happy. It will make for a very happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
No Act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted ~ Aesop
Kindness
I receive two acts of kindness on Friday, neither was expected. The first came as I was having a discussion in the hall with a faculty member one of my fellow deans showed up. She came bearing a gift, a small box of chocolates and a thank you card. She’s a great colleague who I really like working with and this just makes me like her even more. And while I think they were technically truffles, I felt like I was in my office eating bons bons.
Secondly, one of my staff members, a lovely older Vietnamese woman who works at night was working Friday night. As I did my walk-through she said to me, “stay right here.” She then walked away and returned a few minutes later with a bag, she smiled and said, “I remembered.” Looking in the bag I was so excited, it was a plate of banh beo, my favorite Vietnamese dish. This dish is really time consuming to make and as such, most restaurants don’t serve it. It’s actually been several years since I had any and it was wonderful. But what really touched me, was that she had remembered this from a conversation we had at least two years ago, such a kind act.
These small acts of kindness mean so much to us. It’s important to remember my friends, whenever you have a chance to do these, take the opportunity. The impact will almost always outpace effort.
Mardi Gras
I’m getting ready to head to my favorite city soon for Mardi Gras. I love New Orleans, I’ve traveled to many cities all over the world, but New Orleans was a place that felt like home from the first minute I set foot in that city. My mouth is already watering for that first bowl of gumbo at Coteri and I’m carefully planning my trip to Cochon for their Rabbit and Dumplings, my favorite dish at any restaurant anywhere. I’ve previously posted this guide to New Orleans giving some of my favorites in the city. But it’s not only about the food, it’s the music, the opportunities for photography, the weirdness of it all. And of course, Mardi Gras parades, I love them so much.
This past week in talking about heading to Mardi Gras, I was reminded of how little most people know about Mardi Gras itself, so tonight a quick primer. First off, Mardi Gras is not a day, most people seem to confuse the last day of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) for Mardi Gras as if it’s a one day holiday. Mardi Gras is a season, it’s a season of festivities leading up to Lent. The reason Mardi Gras dates change every year is that Easter and the six weeks of Lent prior to Easter move around on the calendar. Fat Tuesday is the end of Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, the next day, kicks off Lent. Which is also why Mardi Gras ends at midnight on Fat Tuesday, and yes, they do clear Bourbon Street at Midnight.
The first parades of the Mardi Gras season this year were on January 6th, so you can see with Fat Tuesday being February 13th this year, Mardi Gras season lasts for over a month. And in New Orleans, the city does celebrate for the month. Here’s a little clip of what the parades look like, this is Endymion one of the biggest krewes that does a huge parade:
There are a lot of misconceptions about Mardi Gras. The biggest is that Bourbon Street is where Mardi Gras happens. And yes, Bourbon street for most of Mardi Gras season is effectively the equivalent of a large frat party. Yes, there are women flashing their breasts so people will throw them beads and drunken fools at every turn and I spend almost no time on Bourbon Street. Everyone who goes to Mardi Gras will have beads thrown to them, even on Bourbon Street without flashing anything, no one is in a hurry to see my breasts and I get tons. At any Mardi Gras parade you will catch more beads then you have ever imagined. At every parade, while giving most of the beads I catch away, I still end up with ten or fifteen pounds worth of beads. I send boxes of beads to three different people every year and I get all of those beads at my first parade.
The parades are not the drunken debauchery of Bourbon Street, the parades come through the neighborhoods in the city. The parade route is full of families and little children and only a few walking parades even happen in the French Quarter. Sure, there are drunk people, mostly tourists wandering the parade route, but mostly it’s a G rated affair. The naughtiest thing are some of the themes of the floats that I’m guessing most of the time, aren’t even comprehensible to the kids, as they are typically political in nature.
I have met so many kind and wonderful people at parades, been invited to join families as they ate their dinners they bring, been invited to parties after the parades and made friends with other tourists. The parades are absolutely fantastic affairs.
Countdowns
The countdowns are on! As I’ve mentioned in the past I’ve already started celebrating my upcoming 60th birthday a little less than seven months away. Mardi Gras will be my second event of this celebration. The other is my retirement, while my official date looks to be Feb 18th, it looks like my last day physically working on campus will be Friday, January 31st next year, so this Wednesday marks the start of my last year of work here in California.
Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement. ~ Joyce Meyer
It’s been a pretty bad couple of weeks for me. There have been some family health issues as well as some interpersonal issues and work has been more of an insane asylum than it usually is. It’s one of the reasons I missed posting last week, something I rarely do. This blog has gone through a lot of changes over the years and over time has really morphed into something of a public diary. A blog that mirrors my life and my interests as diverse and nutty as they are. So some weeks you get a lesson on happiness, sometimes a pizza or movie review, travel anecdotes or maybe just a bit of rambling. I usually try and bring most of the posts back to a lesson on happiness, and I do that with varying amounts of success. I greatly appreciate those of you who read the blog regularly and love when you comment, it’s what has kept this blog alive for the last dozen years.
One of the main reasons that I started this blog was to share what I learned as I worked through my own issues with severe depression. As I’ve related many times, I expected to share out for a year or so and wrap this up, so much for the plans of men. This last week was a great reminder of the progress I’ve made over that time, aided by what I learned, the writing of this blog and your support.
I quite honestly, at the beginning of this past week, was in the foulest mood I’d been in for years. Where I’ve been very good over the last ten years of not letting issues in life impact my mood, I failed miserably recently. The anger and frustration I was feeling set me on a path to dive back into the well of depression in a way I haven’t in over a decade.
Over the years I’ve done a good job of understanding my triggers, the things that send my mood diving. I obviously missed them this time around. I’ve also over the years learned how to bring myself out of these moods, but normally it’s not so big of a climb. And this is the good news and what I want to focus on in this post, because I was able by this weekend to climb back out of that well and get myself back to balance.
Over time I’ve learned a lot of strategies to bring myself back to balance and I needed all of them this past week. First, it’s always important to be living healthy, eating properly, drinking enough water, keeping my workout routine and get enough sleep. Then it was important to boost my dopamine and serotonin levels. Which at the simplest levels, without diving into the brain chemistry details, means providing yourself with feel good experiences. So this week, I actually got a little looser with my diet. I didn’t go nuts but I made sure that every meal was something satisfying. So while ordinarily tacos would be a cheat meal, I made tacos for dinner one night. Another day for lunch I allowed myself some enchiladas, I had a slice of pizza another day. I also did everything I could to find ways to reduce my stress levels, which also included cutting back on my social media and news consumption.
All of these things were definitely helping and as often happens, when you make an effort things seem to start to go your way. As the week went on I had some really nice interactions with kind strangers, I was able to help out some students and made more of a conscious effort to express gratitude internally and externally for what was happening. Then on Thursday night as I sat down to eat those tacos, I flipped on the TV to find something to watch. And starting at that exact time, on TCM (so no commercials) was the movie that makes me laugh more than any other movie, The Big Lebowski. So that night I ate dinner and laughed and laughed as I watched that movie. Friday and Saturday were laid back days and I even had a couple of great conversations with people who make me smile, including my two nieces.
I feel really good about this, honestly I was scared that I was going to go into a serious depression. To have pulled myself out of the spiral in a week seems honestly like a minor miracle to me. One I’m incredibly grateful for, and now, next week, back to our regularly scheduled discussions about happiness. Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
This time of year a lot of people start fitness routines and by February most of them have stopped those routines. The fact is I’m a huge fan of anyone starting a fitness routine, but particularly people over the age of 40. As we age we lose flexibility and muscle mass, but only if we don’t stay active. It’s always amazing to me to meet people in their 80’s who are still highly active. They don’t seem to suffer from many of the ailments many other people do even in their 50’s.
Fitness really has three components from my perspective, cardio fitness, strength training and eating well. Most people understand the whole cardio fitness bit, and that makes sense. Because honestly cardio fitness can be addressed with something as simple as walking every day. Extending your walking for longer distances and time and then throwing in some stairs or hills is something anyone can do, even if you’re new to fitness training. And you can always graduate up to jogging or even running.
That’s the part everybody gets, but what a lot of people don’t seem to get is the importance of resistance (weight) training as we age. One of the main reasons people have difficulty with coordination, walking, balance as well as other physical issues as we age is a loss of strength and muscle mass. Weight training can help us stave off these losses. I realize there is a lot of anxiety about weight lifting and a lot of intimidation at the idea of going into a gym for he first time and lifting weights. So let me give you a lot of good news.
First, you don’t really need to go to the gym to start resistance training. Second, you don’t have to have any special equipment or do anything crazy to get started. The fact is water is a wonderful tool for weightlifting. A gallon of water weighs a little over eight pounds. So the only equipment you need to get started is a gallon of water or even some small waters. Start with it half filled and fill it as you get stronger. You can use the gallon jugs to start doing bicep curls, tricep curls and even chest exercises. You of course also can be more traditional and use dumbbells or strength bands. If you have the money and desire you can even hire a personal trainer.
But here is the real good news of this post. What’s most important about all of this is not how much, how far or how fast. What’s most important is that you’re consistent. So whether your cardio is a 10 minute walk once a day, or doing 10 curls every other day with 16 ounce water bottles, what’s important is that you are consistent. Doing cardio 5-6 times a week and lifting in some capacity 3 times a week is all you need. It doesn’t matter if you do these in the morning, afternoon or evening. What’s most important is that you just keep doing it.
The simple fact is that as long as you keep at it consistently, you’ll get more fit. Especially because the longer you do it, the more advanced you’ll get, the more you’ll challenge yourself. And that’s the second secret of this whole thing, gradually increasing the challenge. So if you walk 5 minutes a day 5 days a week that’s great. But eventually you need to work up to 10 minutes a day, but only when you’re comfortable and ready. It’s the same thing with weight lifting, start with 2 pound dumbbells and when you’re comfortable move up to 5 pounders.
The most important goal is too not over stress yourself. The reason most people fail at this is first they don’t keep doing it consistently. Secondly, they challenge themselves too quickly, get too sore or injure themselves then quit. No, it is not required to be sore after a workout, sure once you get to the point of lifting heavier weights you will get a little sore after a big workout, but that doesn’t need to start until your routines are well established and you’re comfortable challenging yourself.
I’ll give you an example of all of this. When I first starting working out in the gym, in anticipation of hiking to base camp at Mount Everest a year later, I was walking on the treadmill at 2.4 miles an hour with no incline. Now, almost 20 years later, and older, I routinely finish my treadmill routines at 3.4 or 3.5 miles an hour at a 12-15% incline. But I was at 2.4 for a while, then 2.5, then adding a 1% incline and so on and so forth. I also started out doing 10 minute sessions and now my minimum is 30 minutes. Honestly, if I could do it, so can you. What made me successful was simply being consistent, and allowed me to spend 30 days hiking in the high passes of the Himalayas.
As for the third component of fitness, eating well, I’m going to leave that bit of advice to my friend Suanne. Like the workout piece of what we’ve been talking about, with the eating piece you just need to incrementally do better. And in order to do that you need to be consistent and find ways of doing it that are not boring or feel like effort. My friend Suanne has a great Instagram page, where she posts fantastic meal ideas and encouraging and uplifting memes and advice, check it out. She’s truly become the queen of the interesting salads and I get a lot of great ideas from her page.
So my friends, get moving, get lifting and eat a little better, this doesn’t have to be climbing a mountain, just strolling up an easy incline. But as long as you do, whatever you’re doing consistently and gradually challenge yourself, you’ll get fitter, feel better and probably become more than a bit happier. ~ Rev Kane
Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always. ~ Dante Alighieri
This time of year you read a lot of the same types of articles and posts. You get the whole best of, 10 most, etc… of the previous year. You get a lot of advice about how to set and stick to your new year resolutions. You can even find pieces that will give you ready made resolutions you can make for the year. I really don’t like any of those posts.
So for my first weekly post as the year gets rolling I’m going to make a simple observation and wish you a good year.
The real beauty of the arbitrary reality of the new year starting, (because let’s face it, the start of the year depends on the calendar your using), is the fact that you get a chance to start over. Sure it’s arbitrary, you could start over on March 9th, but given we live on this calendar it does lend a psychological boost to moving forward.
The beauty of starting over is that you create an artificial clean slate. I love this idea, so what are you going to do with your clean slate? Me, I’m making a big transition over the next year, shortly after 2024 ends I’ll be retiring, leaving California and moving across the country and hopefully taking a second swing at thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. So this year is a lot about paring down of my life. Getting rid of possessions, organizing things, figuring out where I want to live, to store what little stuff I have left, etc… It will also mean ramping up my hiking training so that I’m back in thru-hiking shape. What I learned on my recent trip was that my aerobic fitness level is solid, I can tell I’ve been consistently in the gym. But my hiking shape is not where it will need to be, I could tell I’ve been spending too much time walking on flat ground and not pushing my quads. This year will also be all about celebrating my 60th birthday, that started in Nevada in December and will continue in February in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
So I’m fully engaging in a new start, the next big chapter in my life. What will your new start be focused on? Whatever it is, go at it with a positive attitude. We know our attitude drives our perspective and our perspective very often drives our success, however we define it. Most importantly remember to have fun, to find time to do the things that make you happy and have more happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Pizza Cake gets some great write ups online, apparently the owner is a pretty famous pizza guy. I’ve never really cared about the fame of a pizza place owner, it’s all about the pizza. Pizza Cake is located in Harrah’s Casino. I had remembered there was a pizza place there and wondered to the food court. There was pizza there reviewed below, but I realized on the way out that in fact I had not gone to Pizza Cake.
So I returned later that day before I went to a Cirque de Soleil Show, Mystere and had a couple of slices for dinner. As you can see from the photo the slices looked right. And in fact they tasted as good as they look, these were solid NYC slices served on the Las Vegas strip. I was happy with them, just wished they’d been heated a little better, but definitely a solid slice. You can access Pizza Cake two ways, they have the shop inside or a street spot outside. I opted for the street side as the inside shop was always busy.
No name pizza at Harrah’s Casino
The fact is, the no-name pizza place in the Harrah’s food court was really solid. With a very Brooklyn-esque cashier checking out customers. In true Brooklyn fashion, “get your ice at that soda machine and your soda over in that one.”
Good solid slice, not quite as good as Pizza Cake but also a bit cheaper so an absolutely solid option if you’re at Harrah’s want to save a couple of bucks or don’t want to fight the lines at Pizza Cake.
I was initially really annoyed with this place. I was staying in the Conrad at Resort World and was excited the first night to actually get comfortable in the hotel and just get a pizza for dinner. I walked down and they were closed. The next morning I went down at opening and they weren’t open yet and there was already a line forming and the guy opening was not friendly.
I would eventually return later that afternoon for a couple of slices. Very good slices and absolutely huge, but also expensive, it is the Vegas Strip so that wasn’t a shock. The staff that afternoon was fantastic, the pizza was really good and it was very much on point as a NYC thin slice.
Good Pie is a place I’ve been dancing around for quite some time. I have good friends who live within walking distance of this place. They’re New Yorkers and pizza lovers as well and they talk about this place incredibly positively. I’ve even hung out with the owner one night when we were out to dinner at a nearby restaurant.
Finally, I made it to Good Pie and of course the fact that it took so long meant the expectations had built up pretty high. First off, I love the set up, inside a basic neighborhood bar feel and there’s also a slice window with some outside seating. I was actually hitting this place as an appetizer before dinner with my friends. I was a little impatient, they only had one type of slice available, I ordered it then 2 minutes later they brought out cheese and pepperoni pizzas. So I ordered an uncharacteristically fancy slice for me, meatball and ricotta cheese. It was delicious, very solid NYC slices, well made, good sauce and the right level of thinness of dough with the right level of cheese. All in all, a little better than the slices on the strip and would be very at home in NYC.
I don’t see the desert as barren at all; I see it as full and ripe. It doesn’t need to be flattered with rain. It certainly needs rain, but it does with what it has, and creates amazing beauty. ~ Joy Harjo
Happy Holiday in the Desert
So what has become a bit of an annual tradition, I headed again this year out to the Mojave Desert for Christmas. I spent three days in the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. The park is about an hour east of Las Vegas and is absolutely spectacular. I love the Mojave in the winter, the days are typically in the 50s or 60s, the nights from the 20s to 40s. This year the nights were a bit on the colder side, so after the first night I bought myself a Christmas present a fleece blanket, because I’d forgotten my fleece sleeping bag insert.
I love camping here for a couple of reasons, great weather, amazing scenery, clear amazing skies and the fact that on occasion I’ve had bighorn sheep come walking through my camp. This year, I was woken up on Christmas morning by the sound of hoof beats. I woke up and went for the zipper on the tent, which stopped the hooves, only to hear deep breathing next to the tent. By time I got the zipper open, they had moved off across the campground but it was a great way to start the day.
I spent the day hiking and returned to for lunch and then to take a little snooze in my hammock. While laying there listening to music I had a small songbird land on my shoulder. I’ve spent a lot of time in nature and this is the first time I’ve ever had a bird land on me, it was pretty cool.
Back at camp for dinner, as I was cooking I turned to go to my car and there stood a 250 pound Bighorn Ram. He stared at me, I stared at him, both of us wondering what the other would do. After our little stare off, he went back to munching on a bush on the site. A minute later I noticed another ram on the rocks above my picnic table, he moved down in front of me and finally a yew was standing there as well. I was basically surrounded by huge bighorn sheep while I ate dinner, it was really special.
Finally, a little Pagan fire magic helped turned my campfire a bit festive.
I then slid into Vegas for three days, some time to meet up with friends for an amazing dinner, to lose some money in the casinos although I had one fantastic run on the craps table at the Stratosphere. It was a great Christmas vacation, I came back relaxed and happy, I hope yours was equally as good.Below I’ve included some shots from Valley of Fire State Park. ~ Rev Kane
Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honor for me.~ A P J Abdul Kalam
So tonight a cross-list between two of my blogs, The Ministry of Happiness and Higher Ed Mentor. Recently I met someone new, we got to talking. As we were talking we did what people do while talking with each other for the first time and asked each other questions. Many of the standard questions like where did you grow up, do you have siblings? And as often happens in these conversations the question swings around to spouses and children. And after explaining that I’ve never been married I inevitably get the comment, so you have no children then? At this point I usually throw in a comment about my eight nieces and nephews who I dearly love.
But this time a very different thought hit me in this conversation. I do have children, I have thousands of children, no, not in the biological sense, but in the educational sense. Likely this thought hit me because I’m nearing retirement and have been thinking back a lot lately about my career. So I decided to scan across the years and figure out how many children I have had. Kind of like the most boring episode of The Maury Povich Show ever.
I started my educational career at SUNY Platsburgh where in 1986 as an undergrad I was hired to teach a general biology lab section, my first 24 kids. That year I also did my student teaching experiences for my secondary teaching credential, Another 48 kids in my two 8th science classes and another 48 later that semester in many 10th grade biology classes.
At Eastern Kentucky University each semester I had five lab sections of Natural Science 101, so twenty sections in two years at 24 in each section, nearly another 500 students. The pace really picked up at the University of Tennessee for several years I would have 48 to 72 students per semester in class. Then, I became an academic advisor and would meet with, on average, 30 students a week for 16 weeks each semester, meaning for six years at UTK I was working with 1000 students a year not including a few hundred more each summer during orientation. While at Hartnell College, I had each semester 200 students in the MESA Program for three years and taught 48 person Ecology classes. So likely in my career I’ve worked closely with over 7,000 students.
So do I have children, yes, about 7,000. Of course it’s very different from actual parenting but none the less I like to think I had an impact on a lot of them, they have certainly had an impact on me and why it’s been such a wonderful career. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 