Line of Sight, Dawns Early Light, Read What You Please.
"Environment is an invisible hand that shapes human behavior." —James Clear.
Last week we dismantled our living room to make room for a dining room table. This week we tape-measured our way into how big a table we wanted. It was the $45 second-hand Ikea table from the St. Vincents store. It's t basic bar phone of tables. It does not have leaves or fold down and out of the way. We did order a glass top, and I have been commissioned to create some art to dress up the newly glass-enclosed table top.
There was no plan to eliminate anything but a sorting did occur. Some furniture went away. Another batch of furniture was dismantled and stored in lockups or under the bed. Let me know if you want a Varadesk standing desk kit, and I will send photos. An interesting third sorting of furniture remained but took on new roles. Mark turned a small secretary into his new desk. A sidebar in the office turned on end to become a tall bookcase. I am looking at the furniture as groups rather than as a whole. My husband sees the whole picture and is troubled by sightlines. Nothing lines up in our apartment. The front window is offset from the table. Also, the recliners are floating without an anchor, and so on. The kitchen work table and stools, my desk, printer, stora e unit, and chair all float separately in a way I am ok with. However, I want to find the line of sight fix to make the room look right for my husband. He is doing all this for me. I want to make as much effort to make it work for him. I see the value in getting things to line up. How furniture is placed can improve our lives. Our habits and activities will benefit from having things make sense. Like an assembly line, when I come home, there is a place to put down my bag and a pot to put my keys. My husband will be on board with our living room running as smoothly as a Lexus assembly line.
Dawn Early Light... not
I am up early today. I don't use an alarm clock. I wake up after 3 am, and at 5 am, I roll out of bed. Today I rolled out of bed and squinted at my watch in the bathroom. It s id 4:30. Perfect, I thought. The gym opens at 5 am. I finished getting dressed and jumped in the car. Halfway down Sunset Avenue, I glanced at the dashboard clock. It read 4 am. Crap! New rule: reading glasses in the bathroom to confirm the time on my watch. I should have caught on that it was too early because there was no sign of dawn's early light in the windows, and the Jindo Dog didn't move when I walked by her lair.
This error gives me a chance to experiment. First, Street parking is wide open at the gym this early. No one shows up at the Netflix studio across the street from my gym until after 5 am. Second, I am writing out today's intentions and meditating for 30 minutes in my car. This is no time for a catnap. Next, getting in and out of the gym by 6 am means I totally have the first choice on all the stations.
Trying out a furniture change or a difference in the morning routine are good tools to refocus and make positive changes. However, I am still putting a pair of reading glasses in the bathroom next to my watch to avoid getting up by mistake again.
What am I reading this week?
Wayward Galaxy | Jason Anspach & J. N. Chaney
Reading more is easier if you pick a topic or genre that interests you. I have felt guilty if I was not reading topics about productivity, aka self-improvement. But really, I do love space dramas. This is the first book in a series of six books so far. The time comes into play in this space opera far more than the distance. A colony ship leaves Earth en route to a distant world. The passengers will sleep for 40 years. Upon arrival, they wake to an uneasy feeling. It has been more than 40 years. How long have they been asleep?
Here and now.
The colonists cannot know how much time has passed, only that the completed base and people they expect to find are not. The AI that controlled their journey has lost her memory of what happened. Convenient Lie or deliberate sabotage? All that does not matter. The colonists must act here and now to land their ship in pieces and set up buildings and infrastructure. They are in a state of war with a rival faction back on Earth, and there is every indication the hostilities extend to this new planet.
My big takeaway.
Nothing in the description set me up for the issues of artificial intelligence and the singularity in this story. Singularity is where genetic enhancements and shared consciousness blur the difference between being human and being a machine. One character is sure he must be human because his eyes are still biological, although they work like deadly accurate high-powered rifle scopes. It makes me think the blur between the present and the future singularity has already started. There will not be an announcement. Singularity will be a graduated combination of machine and human intelligence, not a singular event. Sticky fingers, the sticky smudges of singularity began to spread once we started automating tasks.