2018: Day 104 the one where I ponder subscription services
Dear Reader,
Ok —- thinking about subscription services might not be the most interesting topic for a blog post. It is one of those things that I have been working on for a couple months. One of the things I have been focused on doing this year is reducing my monthly subscription costs. Part of that is really focusing in on avoiding paying for things that I just do not use. That might seem like a very obvious statement and it probably should be. Somehow a few things had snuck into my world and were ongoing subscriptions on a monthly basis that were not really used. Getting those removed and or cancelled was a major priority. It really does help reduce costing. The other major thing that I did was cancel all my Amazon related interactions. Every purchase that I am going to make is going to be based on a local first framework.
Writing 3,000 words about subscription based services is not very likely to happen. Based on my mood at the moment maybe an ode to the fantastic nature of Margaritaville hawaiian shirts might be enough to drive a 3,000 word post. I spent a few minutes looking at options to buy American made Hawaiian shirts. A few of them exist. The direction I had been pursuing was buying Margaritaville shirts on eBay from folks who already had them. Effectively making purchases from individual people vs. the actual company by focusing on a secondary market. That might not have been the best strategy, but it worked out well enough. My collection is now about 8 shirts strong. These shirts can be washed on the delicate cycle and they just dry on a hanger. That method of washing and drying works out well enough for me. Switching out to wear hawaiian shirts for the summary was really a decision that has been made without any real backing or any decent reasoning. It just sort of happened and I’m electing to go with it.
One of the services that I would find a hard time shaking relates to these new delivery meal services. Sometimes they can be pretty great. It is a subscription, but it is something I would need to buy anyway. Food is one of those things that is not going away any time time soon. Learning how to cook vegetarian meals was a lot easier with a meal service providing the instructions and all the ingredients. Some of of those meals were even really tasty. A few of them I would try to make again on my own. Maybe that is a type of subscription that does not conform to the general theme of my blog post today.
Tonight I’m swapping around live concerts on Coachella stages 1 to 3 on YouTube and swapping back to my Warren Zevon Radio station on Pandora when none of the 2018 line concerts appealed to me. That last sentence was really long and labored. Maybe it should have been chunked up a bunch into some better prose. I probably should have just started out by thanking T-Mobile for sharing all these live concert performances on YouTube. I could have then transitioned into how interesting it is to watch these live performances. We live in some amazing times. I’m mostly just listening to some of the concerts. What pulled me into the whole thing was the opportunity to check out Greta Van Fleet. They did a decent job. I had never seen them perform before. I was expecting to see a vintage rock concert and that is pretty much what happened.
Wow did I just get distracted for like 20 minutes down a search engine rabbit hole. That time should have been spent writing and producing something useful. I just read a bunch about resumes and how they are changing. My resume is like 2 years out of date and has not been updated in any meaningful way. The worst part of that is that my curriculum vitae has not been updated either. That is just not acceptable and is a direct manifestation of my lack of writing academic articles in the last year. Without question that failure rests firmly on my shoulders and it should not have happened. Maybe the problem was directly related to not having enough time or not picking the kind of topics that inspire enough passion to really just write themselves. As a root cause analysis a ton of why related questions will lead back to the same general theme. I stopped attending and signing up for conferences. Getting ready for a conference and the need to have papers to make that happen probably drove most of my academic writing. This last year I did not try to attend any conferences and therefore did not try to take any papers to any conferences.
What makes that even worse this year is that the ASPA conference was in Denver, Colorado. All i would have had to do is get in my car for that one and drive downtown. I suppose it would be pretty easy to find a bunch of conferences that are hosted in denver late this year or next year and write papers for those conferences. Like a solution looking for a problem that would work well enough. It could not be any worse than what I did throughout the last year. That sounds like a reasonable path forward. I’m not going to start Googling Denver conferences 2018 or 2019 just yet I still have a bunch of words left to write tonight. That seems like it could be one of those online rabbit holes that goes pretty deep. It might be worth the price of the journey, but it is going to be a very interesting journey.
The thumbnail from today was from a meal that I prepared last night. Those are some epicly awesome carrots that were part of a side salad for the main dish. It seemed like a pretty decent photography. Food photographs are not really the foundation of my blog posting system, but for tonight that is how it is going to happen tonight. Maybe I will figure out how to take a more creative photograph tomorrow. That could happen. It will probably happen now that it is something that I’m electing to focus on for tomorrow.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
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