I like wearing contacts

I am without glasses again. I used to have contacts just before I got married, but when I lost the insurance I couldn't afford the luxury. But with vision insurance again with work suddenly I can afford such things again. So goodbye glasses.

Problem is I normally sit at work right under the air conditioning vent which is blasting out cold air all day long (to make up for the heater blowing on the other side of the room), and even without wearing contacts it dries out my eyes. I have a problem with my eyes getting dry with contacts anyways, so I might have to find somewhere else to sit at work.

Grateful...

I'm grateful my wife can swallow food without throwing up.

I'm grateful that she got through a night of that without being so sick from lack of food the next morning that she couldn't eat without throwing up (yes, we have experienced such cycles).

I'm grateful for love.

I'm grateful to still have a job in this crazy economy.

I'm grateful for having enough time to read moral theories of long dead philosophers.

I'm grateful for self knowledge.

37 Pounds of Meat

So there were these really awesome sales on meat at the local grocery stores this weekend. Most of the sales I ignore because I find Walmart's normal prices beat sale prices elsewhere. But this week I actually found other stores undercutting Walmart's normally excellent prices by about half or even more. So, to complement the cheese that is filling about 1/4 of our freezer we bought the following:

5 lb of ground beef
20 lb of chicken breasts
12.5 of chicken thighs.

The freezer is honestly full now.

If we see another sale we'll have to buy a mini freezer to stock up on something more. There's only so much room for our money saving bonanza. Things we have in our frozen bulk section now are cheese, meat, broccoli, bananas, and rhubarb. Kind of an eccentric collection. It goes along perfectly with the eclectic non frozen section comprising honey, cream of chicken soup, cream of mushroom soup, chicken broth, tomato products (Italian style diced, normal diced, paste, and sauce), pears, basmati rice, peaches, corn, wheat, flour, peanut butter, sugar (normal, powdered, and brown), tuna cans, canned chicken, and hot chocolate.

The really crazy thing is we've done all this without once thinking about it in terms of building up a food storage (with the exception of the wheat). We're just trying to save money by buying in bulk when the best sales happen.

Morality and geometry

So, I'm getting tired of reading Aristotle's Ethics. His basic premise is that virtue and justice are always found in the median or average equidistant from two related extremes. As I said to Bonnie Jean earlier, when you average two things that are wrong in different ways you don't necessarily get something right afterwards. Its just as easy to get something that's wrong in a medium kind of way. So not that he doesn't make nice points here and there throughout the entire book, but for the most part I think he's just hopeless. He has no methodology for discovering what the extremes are but socially assumes them, which in turn places all of his equidistant moralities as socially anchored, not anchored in principle. For all these equidistant line segments, everyonce in a while I've been wondering what would happen if he'd bothered learning to do cartesian graphs or consider morality in say 3 or more dimentions. There's just a point where you just can't describe the world in line segments. And its not just the dimentionality of it, there's a point when moral systems only work when considered in harmony with eachother. Truth in righteous living has many principles interacting with eachother in complex subtle ways that can only be considered as systems. For instance, what is often considered to be an excess of a principle is often just one principle lived well with the love thy neighbor idea falling by the wayside. Nothing necissarily wrong with the original idea, but you can't say take one law of behaviour as an excuse to ignore another one. If you only take one principle or behaviour at a time and have on the one hand ignoring and on the other hand being a hate thy neighbor obsessive on the subject you'll never get to the point of realizing that there are two or more principles involved that only work in systems together to make virtuous people. But Aristotle never quite seems to get to these levels. It's just line segment after equidistant line segments of extremes that may not even exist, center points that are sometimes dubious in value, and other bizarre strangeness to top it off like comments about how the truly virtuous man must love virtue so much that following its dictates must never be a sacrifice... I guess he just never heard of the concept of a refining fire before...

Switching cell phone carriers

So, Bonnie Jean and I have finally been released from our contracts with Qwest for cell service. We celebrated by taking the first day out of contract to order service with T-mobile. ATT's corporate discount wasn't enough to buy me out from the features I liked in T-mobile. Its kind of fun discovering what kinds of features are considered standard with the account. For instance-on ATT the mobile backup feature is a paid service only compatible with a minority of phones. On t-mobile, its included for free on most of the plans. Or on ATT any web access is pay per use by the kb no matter if browsing on an att site or off. On t-mobile the customer care rep has reassured me that t-zones is a free service, that you only pay for something if you use it. Considering just how many phone functions can accidentally click you onto tmobile's internet portal, that's a significant benefit that allows them to do things like put a web based help service for the phone. I'd never browse for online help from the phone if it wasn't free. So overall I'm fairly impressed. I'm getting extra's I didn't know were coming to me without paying for them. T-mobile's changed a lot since we switched off of them. If anybody had told me how much hassle qwest was going to be I don't think I would have ever made the switch.

Oh, one of the perks with the way we're setting it all up is most all of our calling will be unlimited now. I love innovation in the way cell phone plans work.