These were made with a Flip camera by a total amateur (me), so the quality isn’t that great, but I think they’re good enough for my purpose. It’s a little time-consuming, because I have to shoot the video — and then probably shoot it a couple more times, because I forgot to include something or didn’t like how the first one turned out — and then upload it to YouTube, which takes a while.  Once it’s uploaded and they have it converted to their format and placed in public view, then I can go to the website and make a page for it, and post links from other places like Facebook.  So I probably won’t be posting more than one per day.

This first one covers the wall crucifixes, and some of the jewelry and statues that we have in the display counter. More jewelry and statues will show up in later tours of other parts of the store.

Suggestions, or complaints that I need to speak up, are heartily welcome in the comments. (By the way, I discovered recently that my comment spam prevention plugin was broken, so if anyone tried to comment on my long ADD post and wasn’t able to, I’m sorry about that.  It should be fixed now.) Also, if you are on Facebook and would like to be notified of new videos and other store news, be sure to go to the Poppe’s fan page and ‘like’ it.  Thank you!

Well, it’s official: I’m a speed freak. For a couple months now, I’ve been taking amphetamines. It’s perfectly legal (although the price is so high that I’m thinking maybe I should figure out how to make the stuff in my barn from anhydrous ammonia, cold medicine, and dirty socks, or whatever the kids are doing these days), and I have a prescription.

So why am I taking speed like a 1970s pro baseball player? Well, it turns out I have ADD. Apparently they’ve officially renamed ADD to ADHD these days, but I’m ignoring the H, because I’m not Hyperactive. In fact, that’s the reason it took me so long to figure out it was my problem. I never considered it because part of the stereotype is that it means you bounce off the walls. Specifically, I’ve got “inattentive adult ADD,” which means the hyperactivity is all in my brain, and makes it hard to focus on a single thought for very long. I’m not bouncing off the walls physically, but thoughts are bouncing around in my mind, banging into each other and knocking each other out of line.

The best analogy I know of is to computer multitasking. In a multitasking system, it may look like a computer is doing many things at once, but the truth is that it’s switching between tasks (thoughts) so often that you can’t see the delay. Every few milliseconds, a clock chip interrupts the main processor and says, “Ok, stop what you’re doing, store that task and all the memory that goes with it over here in this storage area, and pick up this other task and all the stuff that goes with it and work on it instead.” Obviously there’s some overhead in this, since nothing is being done while the system is changing tasks. If you give the computer too many tasks, it’ll spend so much time switching between them that they all grind to a halt and nothing gets done.

An ADD brain (mine, anyway) feels kind of like that. My CPU (my conscious thinking) is constantly being interrupted by different thoughts cycling through one after another. It feels like I’m thinking about a bunch of things at once, but that’s not actually possible. In reality, I’m just switching thoughts very often, sometimes every second or two. Some more intense thoughts may stick around for longer, even minutes; while something like “I need to remember to start the laundry when I get home” may be fleeting, coming and going in less than a second. Each line of thought has memories and emotions that go with it, so those have to be brought to the foreground too.

The problem is that thinking — especially thinking about something hard like how to write a computer program or build a house — requires focus and momentum. Great programmers and artists tend to work long hours because the longer stretch gives them more time to get in the groove and get more of the program loaded into their mind’s eye. If you can’t really *think* about one thing for more than a few seconds or even a few minutes without getting distracted by another thought, it’s pretty hard to ever get in that most productive zone. A computer doesn’t need momentum — give it a different task to work on, and it plugs along at normal speed once the switch is made. The human mind isn’t that simple; getting focused on a task takes time, to get as much of the task as possible loaded into your mind’s eye where you can grasp it as fully as possible, and even to get into the right emotional state of mind for the kind of thought it is.

At this point, it probably sounds like I’m lucky if I can walk and talk at the same time. But it’s not that bad, because I’m used to it, and I’ve learned to compensate for it to a great extent. It’s even useful at times, because it means I notice more about what’s going on around me. I’m never too focused on what I’m doing to notice a kid asking for help or someone obviously having a bad day and needing to talk. If you don’t have anything important to do, being able to multitask on a lot of minor things and all the activities around you can be helpful.

Also, there are times when I’m able to focus. One time is when I’m having an important conversation with someone I care about. Unlike computers and machines, poeple are unpredictable, so it takes all my thinking power to listen to what the person says, think about what it really means, think about what I’m going to say in response, think about what I probably shouldn’t say, and so on. (Yes, I really do all that during a conversation.) In that case, I’m forced to bring all hands to bear on the task of listening intently and holding up my end of the conversation, so my mind doesn’t get much chance to wander.

Another exception is when I’m working on an emergency, like when someone calls at 3am and says their computer isn’t responding, so I have to get into it and fix a problem I’ve never seen before and have to figure out from scratch. In an emergency, my mind can bear down on one main thought and shut everything else out for a while. When I can get all my thinking power focused on one thing, and it’s both urgent and difficult enough to shut out other thoughts, I can get an awful lot done in a hurry.

Unfortunately, most of life isn’t important conversations and challenging emergencies. If it were, people with ADD would have a major advantage. But most days are filled with routine tasks that need to be done “soon,” even “sometime today,” but not “immediately.” In that case, there’s no outside pressure to keep distracting thoughts from cycling through endlessly and preventing any one task from getting enough attention to get finished. So everything takes longer than it should, and it’s hard to prioritize things, because every task seems the most critical for the few seconds it has my attention.

That’s the long-winded explanation of “inattentive adult ADD,” or at least my experience of it. So, how does that lead to taking amphetamines? Well, apparently they’ve figured out that when someone’s brain is wired in this particular way, a stimulant has the opposite effect that it has on normal people. (I think they even figured out that it worked before they figured out why, which isn’t completely understood yet.) Instead of speeding up my thoughts and making me edgy, it slows them down and takes the edge off. For mild cases, a common stimulant like caffeine can help, but that comes with its own issues. The nice thing about speed is that it’s very rarely addictive, has mild side effects, and starts working right away. I could tell the difference the first day I took it.

I was worried that it would just “numb” me, but that’s not the case. I still think about the same things and have the same feelings, but they’re a lot more under control. I can better choose what to think about. If something’s bothering me, it’s still there, but it’s not popping into my head every minute of the day whether I can do anything about it or not. If something bad happens, I’m still sad about it, but it’s a lot easier to put it aside when I need to work and know that I’ll think about it later. (Same thing when something good happens and I feel like celebrating.) As a result of all this, I don’t get nearly as mentally exhausted as the day goes on. The way I used to be, if I had a job I really had to focus on and get done, I’d start at 4am, because that’s when I still had the energy and hadn’t gotten too distracted yet. By the afternoon, it might be hopeless. Now I’m on a much more even keel from morning to evening.

It’s not a panacea, and I still have to learn better organization and work habits. But now I *can* do that. Before, I’d read books on organization and fighting procrastination, and it seemed like they’d just add to the list of distracting thoughts to deal with. Now, even though I’ve got more going on in my life than ever before, I’m getting a better handle on it.

I’m not thrilled by the idea of taking a drug for the rest of my life, or even temporarily. But I’d tried everything else: diet, extra sleep, meditation, acupressure techniques, making lists, sending myself automated reminders, and so on. Some of those things helped (especially eliminating sugar and grain), but none really fixed the problem, and as soon as life would get complicated again, the thoughts would start spinning as fast as ever. This isn’t just helping a little; it’s making a huge difference — the difference between just keeping up with the minimum and actually getting somewhere in my life.

In coming days, I’ll write about how this affects my opinion of the ADHD “epidemic” in schools, and other thoughts on this topic.

(By the way, if you watch the rest of the scene after the music stops, the context here is that Elliot (the woman doctor) is pretty frazzled and scared at her job, and intimidated by her boss, and they’ve got a chance to have a perfect game — zero deaths for a 24-hour period — for the first time in ages.)

A long, serious, thoughtful post about something besides old TV shows and movies is coming Monday. I promise.

Much like that story, this picture will separate those who played D&D-type games from those who didn’t. One group will laugh out loud, and the other group won’t have a clue. If you don’t have a clue, congratulations: you saved a lot of money on dice and books, and were probably getting dates when some of us were painstakingly drawing maps on graph paper in a basement somewhere. (However, let me make it clear: when I played D&D, we did not dress up.)

I think it might be possible to keep a blog busy just pointing out silly mistakes in the Herald-Whig.  Here’s a fun one from this week’s classifieds (always a rich source of goofs):

ROUND BALES of Hay $45 a

bail, approximately 6 Bales

of hay, [phone number]

How do you spell ‘bale’ correctly once, then misspell it five words later, then get it right again just three words after that? Allow me to help:  A ‘bale’ is a bunch of smaller pieces of something, often plant material or paper, that has been tightly wrapped into a bundle for shipping or storage.  (In the olden days, it was also the thing with little rollers that held the paper down against the bigger roller thingy in a typewriter.)  To ‘bail’ is what you do with a bucket when your boat is sinking, or when you give up on a situation and ‘bail out.’ Also the money your friend brings to get you out of jail after your big night out, or the handle on a bucket.

But even better than that: how do you have approximately 6 bales to sell?  Round hay bales weigh 1000 pounds or more, measure 5-6 feet in each direction, and they aren’t very fast on their feet. It’s not exactly hard to count them. I can’t decide whether that’s a typo and it should be something like 60; or the owner was too lazy to go outside and figured, Dirty Harry style, “Were there six bales left in the barn, or only five?  Ah, it’s gotta be about six.”

The past tense of the verb ‘lead’ is ‘led.’  As in, “Today I will lead the horses to water.  Yesterday I led them to water.” Never, “Yesterday I lead them to water.”

I guess the problem is that ‘led’ is pronounced the same as the noun ‘lead,’ as in pencil lead.  So people think the sound ‘led’ but then pull out the spelling for the noun that sounds that way. It’d never be a problem in spoken English, but when I run across it in writing, it jumps out like a sore thumb.  (At least I still notice it. I’ve seen its/it’s interchanged so often that I don’t always catch that one anymore.)  So to make it simple: when the sound ‘lehd’ is a verb, it’s ‘led.’  When it’s a noun, the metal that used to be in everything from paint to fishing sinkers, it’s ‘lead.’

This has been your irregularly scheduled grammar rant.  In the next advanced class, lay versus lie.

Oh, there have been times I felt busy. There was a time when I was working 70-80 hours a week managing a pizza delivery store. But I didn’t have anything else going on in my life — I wasn’t involved in church, I wasn’t married or taking care of any kids, and I shared an apartment I can barely remember because I spent so little time there. I ate most of my meals at work, so even if I got 8 hours of sleep a night, that still left another 30-40 hours a week of leisure time, most of which was spent watching 80′s movies and playing drinking games, as best I can remember.

For most of my life, I wasn’t even that busy. Certainly not in school. When you can finish most of your assignments while the teacher is explaining the lesson, school is a pretty relaxed place, more boring than busy. At home, we had chores and helped on the farm, but we also had enough free time to read several books a week and build rafts to go “exploring” on the Sny. Most jobs I’ve had weren’t that demanding — put in your hours, make enough to pay the bills, and have plenty of time for fishing, computer games, or whatever else sounded good.

Since becoming self-employed about 15 years ago, I’ve always potentially been busy. There’s always been work to do –often work that should already have been done — but when you control your own inbox, it only fills up as far as you let it. I’ve always been able to get away with procrastinating, knowing I could buckle down for a few hours “later” and tear through whatever had to be done. There was never a need to, say, get one thing out of the way early in the morning to make sure there’d be time for something else in the evening; or do this today to make sure I’d have time for that tomorrow. There was always time.

Well, not anymore. Since taking over Poppe’s in July, and beginning teaching again in earnest for this school year, and with the days getting shorter, there just isn’t any extra time. Teaching will take about 24 hours a week, including some time spent planning lessons at home, and I’m in the store for a minimum of 28 hours. Then I also need to put in some time programming, to make some actual income. I can do some of that from the store, but I’m finding that to be less than ideal. Programming is one of those things that requires a lot of focus, so it works best if you can immerse yourself in it for a while. That’s why some programmers choose to put in 16 hours or more at a stretch — once you get your mind wrapped around the problem, it’s more efficient to keep it there as long as possible. Stopping to help a customer every now and then breaks that concentration. Plus, when there aren’t any customers, I need to be tracking inventory, working on promotions including the web site, and ordering products. So it turns out I’m going to be doing a lot of my programming work in the evenings.

Putting it all together, and assuming I don’t work on Sunday, get 7-8 hours of sleep, and put in 20 hours of work from home, I’m down to 24 free hours a week to shower and shave, cook and eat, take care of the dog and chickens, pay bills, keep the house clean, read and write blogs, get to a couple daily Masses, and do enough research to keep myself up to date on the programming and system administration work I do. It’s really not much time for all that.

That may sound like 500 words of whining, but it’s really not. Everything I’m doing is voluntary, and I’m quite happy with the way my life is going. It’s just a new experience for me to be truly busy, and I’m going to have to learn some skills I’ve never needed before, like actually planning out my day in advance and sticking to a schedule. I can’t assume anymore that I’ll be able to “catch up” in the evening if I blow something off in the morning. It may just not be possible.

It’s a little embarrassing to be learning skills at 42 that other people learned at 10, but there it is.

So when I see something like this, it’s almost mesmerizing. How does he know to leave that curve on the right for the hair to fill in later, or which colors to start with that’ll end up blending later to make the right skin tones? I know some of that can be learned, but a real artist’s eye is a God-given gift that, combined with study and practice, makes for something extraordinary that I can only envy.