At a church potluck on Sunday, a conversation with another father challenged me to not give in to the lure of mindless entertainment. For much of my life, I’ve allowed “entertainment” to have some room to grow; it’s OK to indulge in entertainment as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. In college, I stopped playing video games because I saw what a waste of time they were. But I still indulge in an iPhone game every so often.

Last week I was browsing through the archives of Rands in Repose and discovered an article about performance that argued for a more frequent performance check-in than the usual once-per-year. I thought it would be interesting to try the included “Professional Growth Questionnaire”, so I spent 30 min or so today and filled it out. The results were actually quite interesting.

This evening, while roasting up a batch of Mexican coffee from the Comalapa region for the coffee drinkers at my office, I noticed something strange spinning in drum with the beans. After looking closer it was obviously a stone of some type. Stones are really not fun to get in coffee, primarily because they can wreck a coffee grinder by jamming in the burrs. Since many coffee grinders are rather expensive, this can be a fairly serious problem.

This morning, my oldest son drew a picture in his notebook about the church in China that showed worshippers praying in a church, with government soldiers looking in the windows, presumably preparing to disrupt the service.

I like to find a nice quiet park bench to sit on when I take a break to get some fresh air during my workdays. Sometimes I’m just walking along the sidewalk and I see a bench, but I have someplace to be; so I don’t stop to sit down and rest a bit. Other times, I purposefully look for a bench where I can read a book or write in a journal. Of course, there are the “mixed” times where I’m walking somewhere with purpose, but I see in inviting bench, and I take the time to sit down to read or browse my phone, or simply rest.