Admit it. You just finished that phrase with "...take me away." At least you did if you are over the age of 25. You remember the Calgon commercials showing a stressed-out woman just longing for a nice bath of Calgon-induced suds. They aired in the early 80s, but can probably be found on youtube someplace. (I am betting that someone who reads this will respond with a comment containing a link!)

In my case, today it is "SavingAdvice.com, take me away." Doesnt have quite the same ring to it, but oh well. I just finished the past two days work of reading 115 pages of an RFP response for a major project at work. I had to review all the details and then send out my 10+ pages of notes on it.

See it isnt about the difficulty of the task. I love what I do and am thoroughly enjoying the procurement process that we are knee-deep in. And its not that 115 pages is really that much. My wife would have read through that in about 4 hours. The problem is I read so cotton-pickin' slow!

(By the way, did you see that firestorm on the Internet about the Wheel of Fortune contestant who loast about $4k because she mis-enunciated "Seven Swans A-Swimming"? She left the "g" off swimming, so it came out Swimmin'. Pat Sajak (and whoever his off-screen judge is)said that she could not win because she didnt correctly give the answer.)

Anyway, I read horribly slow. Always have. Especially when I am reading for detail. I think part of it is the short attention span that I mentioned before. I think I read a paragraph or two, get distracted and have to start over again because I forget where I was. Not good.

And it is so exhausting for me. Like seriously, physically exhausting. I am a big-picture guy. I ask for details when I need them to better understand strategy or approach. It drains me when I am stuck in the details for too long, and I have been there all week. You would never guess I did my undergrad work in Accounting. (Of course, it IS why I left public accounting after a couple years and did my Master's in Strategic Management. There's that whole introspection thing again...)

So thank you SavingAdvice.com for re-charging my batteries. I think I need another extended holiday break. TGIF.

This is the second post in less than a month. That's some sort of record for me. So I got to thinking - and the more you read my blogs, the more you will realize that I am ALWAYS thinking something - that writing a blog may be a good exercise to help me focus.

You know how you hear about people that have a notebook by their bedside or in the bathroom or outside the shower so they can write down ideas that pop in their head? You know those ideas - what did i forget to pack? I need to remember to call... what do I need to do tomorrow? etc. In order to sleep (or do whatever) in peace, it helps to write them down. There is something in the act of doing so that puts your mind at ease and says it is ok to move on.

There has to be a paper written on that someplace. If not, I just gave a psych professor somewhere a great idea.

Incidentally, I think that parentheses and dashes were invented for the random thinker - or what I call a popcorn thinker (Pop! There's an idea. Pop! There's another...). The popcorn thinker has difficulty keeping a single train of thought so he/she uses the parentheses and dashes to insert the actual thoughts that enter their mind, whether or not it is relevant to the current discussion. You will notice a lot of these in my blogs.

Anyway, I started to think that writing a blog post might be therapeutic in helping me get thoughts out of my head so I can perform better at work. I love numbers and could talk personal finance all day. Unfortunately, it is not necessarilly germain to my job, and I dont get paid to be thinking about personal finance. So, maybe if I get my thoughts - random as they are - out on 'paper' and out of my head, I will be more productive! Sound plausible?

Remind me later to ask my boss for a raise. Such an increase in productivity needs to be rewarded!

One more random thought - when a job posting states "awesome culture", is that like saying your blind date has a good personality? Not that I am looking, but I saw it in a LinkedIn status update.

Nonethless, if I can remember to post an entry now and then, expect a lot of random thoughts. I just need to get stuff out of my head. You, my Faithful Reader (a term Stephen King often uses - love his work!) have become my therapy. Good luck with that.


** In fact (and this is the honest truth), I just had to re-type this entire blog. I went to categorize it and saw the link for "Edit Categories". Since I didnt (at the time) have a Category for Random Thoughts, I clicked on the link and promptly lost my original post.

SQUIRREL!