They are Happiest - Mary Howitt

On Resolutions

This isn’t a letter but it fit the right category in terms of what it is so think of it as a letter to myself. I don’t think I met any of my resolutions, but maybe whoever reads this might be bettered by it.

4^th December 2006

On resolutions

So I have to ask a question: Why resolutions at the start of a new year? As today I complete my twenty-seventh year of life it occurred to me that I should set goals for the upcoming year. I could hold over another twenty-seven days until the New Year, but why would I make such a distinction?

When my old car finally died I made a resolution not to go through fast food places with the next car. No ordering from the driver’s seat. No more leaving piles of trash in my car. It’s working out vary well. I’ve lost ten pounds.

So, as I set my car resolutions for when I got another car, I set my Richard resolutions for the start of another year of my life.

Okay so hear goes:

Resolution 1: No paper money at the snack machines. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be using them at all, but let’s be reasonable here. I’m at work, I can’t leave, so that’s one way of reducing the amount I spend. Given that the main source of my coin money came from fast food purchases, and I now eat less fast food this should work marvelously. Not to forget that the second major source of coinage comes from using paper money at the snack machines.

Resolution 2: By my next birthday all equipment must be ready to use or cataloged and stored. Right now I have at least five printers and four computers that I either need to do something with or trash. I have piles of tools that I can’t get to when I need them and any number of other devices that just haven’t been hooked up.   

Resolution 3: No more loose paper work. File it or toss it. This is not to say that I will get rid of the piles and piles of bill stubs and other records, but the point is that I should generate no more piles of them.

Okay, so that’s it I have one year to accomplish these three things. I’m making the generality that resolutions should come when appropriate. When you set goals for school then set them at the start of a new semester. Set goals for a car when you buy it or smog it or what ever. Don’t wait for the New Year unless that has some reason to it.

Worst to Best - Jerry Bridges

Cinnamon and Mustered

Finally an actual letter to Cassi! Not that anyone is going to read it.

17^th of May 2011

Dear Cassi,

It’s been a bit since my last letter. Life has been … well, I can’t put it to words. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting my affairs in order like a man on his death bed and no matter how hard I work at it I don’t make much headway.

The pieces of my life are scattered about like jigsaw puzzle bits. Some are lost and some are broken, but I can tell there was once a whole. If only I could stalk the furnace of my being with the bits that will burn, and through so doing find the locomotion to get myself to some peace.

Something has been buzzing about in my brain for some time that feels relevant. I think it happen when I was three. I was making cinnamon toast, but I couldn’t read the spice boxes and couldn’t tell which was cinnamon.

I asked (Pickle) and that had to be a bad idea because he gave me mustered.

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” I said and put the tin back. I couldn’t read but the stuff was the wrong color.

He waved his hand around in the cabinet and pulled the mustered out again. When I refused to put it on my toast this time he explained to me that he had made the mistake of putting mustered on his toast.

He felt that because he had a bad experience that I had to have that problem as well. I think that’s one of the things that I had to go through for a good amount of my life. People dump on others because they got dumped on. It comes to me that for some I should feel sorry and for some I should feel hate.

The truth is I think even I have taken my pain out on other people once or twice, normally by trolling on the internet, and I know I should never do that again.

I’m just rambling,


Richard Leland Neal

Willing People - Robert Frost

Fuel for You - Prof. Preston Bottger

Slick's Second Law