Memphis

Sam and Mark have been married for just over five years. So many experiences shared, so many ‘firsts’ continue. They’ve adjusted in their marriage. They’ve got to know each other much better. They know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and know how to work these to their mutual advantage. Their marriage and relationship are becoming so strong and solid with time goes by that I am pretty sure that they will definitely have to choose gifts for their 50th(golden) wedding anniversary from Golden Wedding Gifts.com. This is their story:

Gratitude

chocolate heart

“I can’t believe we’re at our 5 year wedding anniversary already” says Sam “It feels like we’ve only just celebrated our 4th!”. Except in the last year Sam and Mark’s life has changed dramatically with the arrival of their son Boyce, named after Mark’s grandfather, who is now nine months old. “We’ve become stronger as a couple and most important as parents. I love who we are today.”

Mark agrees. “I’m grateful for what we have and who we are today as a family. We’ve had our down times, but the up times more than make up for those”. Mark was made redundant a month before Boyce was born which put pressure on them both. They coped by keeping in close contact with their family and friends and had the humility and wisdom to seek help from those able to give it. “I had to take time for myself with friends to sort out how I was going to provide for my family without Sam getting anxious.” says Mark. He continues “Our families have also been incredibly supportive throughout our marriage and I’m very grateful to have such a close relationship with them.”

Sharing

sunset

I look up and see a canvas on the wall “What is worth having never comes easy” is painted white on red. Sam follows my gaze and smiles. “I made that for Mark when things got a bit tricky after his redundancy. I wanted him to know that he wasn’t on his own and that I’d do everything I could to carry my share of responsibility for moving onwards and upwards.” It appears to have worked. Mark now works from home, turning his hobby as a carpenter into a business run from the garage at the bottom of the garden.

“I was overwhelmed by the changes in our life when Mark lost his job and then Boyce was born. I wanted my old life, the stability of my old life.” says Sam. “But we’re husband and wife and we both were trying to make it all work. It changed us and still changes us and that’s OK”. “We’re learning and growing together. It is our love that’s got us through the tough times and made us stronger. We appreciate our family and friends who supported us. We’ve a lot to be thankful for” says Mark.

Celebration

To celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary Mark and Sam invited family and friends around to their home for a celebration meal. “It was as much to say thank you to all the people who’ve supported us in our marriage to date as to celebrate our success at getting to 5” says Sam. “We make sure to schedule time alone together to watch a movie or to eat a candle-lit dinner together and we each leave each other little love notes hidden around the house which is fun”. “I like to see Sam smile” says Mark “so I surprise her with little gifts for no reason at all, which she loves. Though I put a lot of effort into birthdays and other significant anniversaries.” To mark the five years since they exchanged their vows, Mark crafted a rocking chair for Sam. Made from oak, he hopes this will be one of their family heirlooms for Boyce to inherit in time. It is fitting for Sam and Mark that the traditional 5th anniversary gift is wood, representing strength and a solidified relationship. In an unusual twist, it was only last year the couple learned their son’s name derives from the old french ‘Bois’ meaning wood.

By working together Sam and Mark celebrated their 5th wedding anniversary as a strong and happy couple. They’ve made joint decisions with maturity. They’ve both improved their negotiating skills, their ability to compromise and they fully understand the meaning of patience. That’s taken time and courage. Congratulations to them both.

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Memphis

As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words; small surprises can create a huge impact in your love life. Relationships flourish better if you prepare little romantic surprises for each other often. It doesn’t have to be an expensive or big occasion, but what counts’ is how your partner will think about you. Not only will you be closer, but it will bring them excitement and joy. A woman would do anything to make their man feel loved and cared for and since men love romantic surprises too, as a woman you don’t have to sit back and do nothing for him. Below are some ideas and ways of how you can surprise your partner.romantic

1. Take him to a sports match

You might not be a sporty person, but enjoying his likes won’t hurt. One way you can surprise your partner is by buying tickets to a match of his favorite sports. Always be on the lookout for upcoming sports events, which you can accompany him to. It could be a football or basketball match which will forever make him grateful to you. Both of you can wear matching sports jerseys of his team and get to the cheering and shouting together. If you want to rekindle an old flame, a little excitement will be a perfect way to do so. And also, it will strengthen the bond between you two. Look for a perfect way to either give/ deliver the sports match tickets. You can place them under his pillow, put them in his wallet or place it in his favorite book for him to find.

2. Get him some romantic gifts.

One of the romantic gifts you can please your man with is the display golf ball and tee set. This is a genuine and unique tee and golf ball, which has been immersed in pure 24 karat gold. Although they are not intended to be used in a golf course, your man can display it among his treasures or trophies where everyone will see. You won’t have to think about a gift wrapper since they come wrapped in a black gift box ready to be given away.

Another romantic gift you can surprise your man with is a printed message enclosed in a frame. Every man wants to know that you have their hearts for life and giving him such a romantic gift, will make him guide and treasure it for life.

3. Cook a romantic homemade dinner dinner

As the saying goes, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. It will be the most classical way to surprise your man romantically. No man on the planet can resist a nice delicious homemade meal prepared by his loved one. It would even be better to prepare him his favorite dish. Get recipes from an expert or a cookbook, set the table with his best drink and romantic candles. This will get him into a romantic mood once he is home, who knows, you might be re-igniting that lost spark in your love life.

4. Prepare him a romantic bath

It’s usually a good way of surprising your man after a long day. If your man works for long hours, it would be a great idea if you prepare him a nice warm bath. You can stuff the bathtub with warm water and nice huge bubbles. Light up some romantic candles and throw in some colorful flower petals. There is no doubt that he will fully enjoy this. You can also organize for him a relaxing treatment from a spa. Since most men have never experienced the joy of relaxing in spas, it won’t hurt if you book him for a day, so that he can get all the massage and pampering. He will appreciate you; he might also return the favor.

Finally, whatever you do for him, he will appreciate. Since you want your man to be surprised in a good way. The small gestures you show him will be what will matter more.

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Memphis

In pondering whether to pursue an academic career, it all comes back to: Does anyone actually use research to make anyone else’s life any better? I’d rather not spend the rest of my career in a parlor game, even a parlor game with the goal of keeping myself employed.

So…. now i want to find “metaresearch”, research on the use of research. Actually i can see myself happily doing *that* sort of research. Thoughts?

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Memphis

Usually, caring about the broader context is a Good Thing. Sometimes, it’s a Bad Thing.

I spend a lot of time trying to relate fine-grained data and stimuli to the bigger picture. I really can’t help it. It’s how my brain works.

Having a brain that works this way is certainly supposed to be an advantage in any role that requires thinking strategically or about the long term. I suppose thinking this way makes for better cocktail party conversation, about the state of the world or the meaning of life or what-not. People probably perceive me as intelligent and thoughtful, although I can’t help wondering if they pity my lack of traditionally-defined accomplishment in my life.

Sometimes, caring about the broader context is not such a benefit. To get to the long term, you have to pass through many many iterations of the short term. This is particularly true in the working world. Often office work involves disengaging tasks such as filing papers. Not every job entails this kind of work all the time, of course, and looking for one that doesn’t is probably a good idea for me. (That’s why I’m in grad school.) But sometimes, it’s just a means to an end.

I’m blessed to be in a great laboratory to practice not caring. It’s easiest to not care when I know that the assessment of my performance has no ability to negatively affect what anyone else thinks of me, because no one else takes that assessment seriously. And of course, it’s even better to learn to derive my value from my relationship with God rather than from such flighty, arbitrary evaluations anyway.

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Memphis

From day to day, week to week, I have a lot of thoughts spilling out of my brain that I think are interesting enough to write down here for future reference. But I rarely remember what they are by the time I have the volition to actually type up blog entries. In any event, the transition to mostly living and working in Memphis is going really well. After some early drama around the question of whether my landlord’s previous roommate was really going to clear out or not (some months after he stopped paying rent!), everything finally worked out. I love Mud Island — very upper-middle class, true, but also great for walking with beautiful views of the DeSoto (I-40) Bridge. I live somewhat off the left side of this view, on the Memphis side 625px-Hernando_de_Soto_Bridge_Memphis I have some other thoughts that I’d like to write about today, but in the interest of blog readability I think they’d best be displaced to their own posts. And for even more fun I can set them to auto-post sometime in the future, oh my!
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Media

Web turns sports fan into talk show host
A May 2006 graduate of USC, the 24-year-old Mattis did a little research and discovered that streaming his show online was relatively inexpensive. He broadcast his first show last October and, for the first few months, only family and friends would listen or call in.
Sometimes i think my general approach is too nuanced, too intellectual, to make for really good radio though. If nationally #1-rated WEEI’s drive time shows are the Rush Limbaugh of sports talk, i’d want to be the NPR. You know: every issue has one angle, and then another, but if you dig deep some of the people from the second point of view can see merits to the first one, but there’s still some unresolved issues, but wait! there’s a third point-of-view disagreeing with the first two…. That’s how i think. I reserve black and white judgments for only the few essential issues. Sports radio exists by making black and white judgments about everything. Either you’re a Bledsoe guy or a Brady guy. Either Manny is a bum who’s not worth the drama he brings, or he’s a hugely valuable piece of the Sox puzzle. Great for ratings, bad for nuance. But in The Long Tail Chris Anderson convinces us that the Web is helping us discover markets that were always there, but too decentralized to discover. I like the way Anderson thinks. Maybe there’s a demand for braniac sports talk. longtail
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Media

The Matsuzaka story is actually the perfect example of what i would classify as “metasports” in my mind. I’ve been fascinated by this story since a few days before Daisuke’s fateful cross-country plane trip with the Red Sox brass, not because i really give a flying damn about who pitches for the Sox — i mean, not really, i’m happy to see the team do well or what have you but i’d trade 10 World Series for one Vanderbilt win over MTSU in football. The fascination for me is other people’s fascination, particularly in this case the Japanese media’s. (I’m reminded of a joke i heard from Tony Campolo: a sociologist is someone who, when a pretty girl walks in the room, is looking at everyone else to see their reaction.)

So this video on Matsuzaka is interesting, although nothing unexpected based on what was going on last fall when he was signed. I love how Japan as a nation is so caught up in this guy as a symbol of national pride — that if he succeeds, he reflects well on them on the world stage. My comparison would be when American soccer players play in England or Germany, but of course those guys are virtually unknown back here. Maybe i should say Brasilian soccer players in Spain or Italy, except that there are so many that they’re all playing each other.

I don’t know what they could hope to learn from Shaughnessy, though — maybe that you can sell a lot of books by beating to death some damn superstition that looks silly in retrospect, or maybe that you can get a gig as a multisports columnist without ever bothering to learn anything about other sports.

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Media

As part of its All Predators All the Time round-the-clock vigil, WGFX just had some guy on who claimed that the Titans, “represented our city in front of a billion people in 1999.” (paraphrased) No. The NFL likes to quote “audience” figures for the Super Bowl, understating that the definition of audience in this case is everyone who lives in a country or has access to a TV system where they could watch the Super Bowl if they so chose. And if you accept that definition, the SB’s “audience” is indeed about a billion people, or half the number who’ve watched the last couple of World Cup finals. That’s not two billion in NFL terms. That’s two billion who watched. So if it makes the people of Nashville feel good about shoveling out piles of government dough because the word “Tennessee” would float across TV screens in Germany and Japan — if only the “audience” hadn’t turned off the set before heading to sleep or to work! — then the people of Nashville are gullible. Roger Godell won’t complain.
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Sport

Predictably i’ve gone silent in the summer lull for college sports, but if all those old-time sports editors across the nation can write rambling columns (”Hitting to all bases”, the guy in Springfield used to call it; “Random ruminations while wondering what happened to…” was another from Huntsville or Nashville, i forget which) then so can i.

  • I’m at Buffalo Wild Wings watching the USA – Uruguay Under-20 World Cup match, u-200-0 after ten minutes. The US has really done itself proud in this competition so far, beating Brasil and sending that country’s sportswriters into tilt. (How could the Seleção lose to this rag-tag bunch of infidels from a country that barely knows they exist? Futebol is the one topic that gets Brasilian journalists sounding fatalistic enough to be Argentines.)
  • The Copa America didn’t go so hot — three and out, two goals scored, eight allowed — but it comes with a ready-made excuse. We sent a B team, like half of South America typically does for the CA really, and paid for it with our hides. As recently as last summer i was arguing passionately that the US should play in the CA at all costs, even if it meant sending an overmatched B squad because the Euro-based players couldn’t get free for both the Gold Cup and CA. I still believe that, but damn, it’s depressing to get walloped like our A team used to!
  • Uruguay having the better of this so far. They hit the netting at about 15′, just got a dangerous cross into the box for the requisite dive, and in general look a lot more active than the US.
  • The news about Gordon Gee came as quite a shock today, especially since he turned own “The” Ohio State a few weeks back. I don’t doubt that the Board of Trust will hire another good Chancellor — David Williams and Bernie Machen were two names floating around VS — but being a good Chancellor doesn’t mean being as supportive of sports as Gee was. I didn’t agree with everything he did, but i will miss him.
  • I’ve beaten a dead horse about my lack of interest in baseball, but i do love the All-Star Game. I have a strong attachment to seeing each player in his own team’s uniform, one side all-white and the other all-gray, unity and diversity. I don’t get sappy about much but the ASG always interests me. Especially seeing guys like Gil Meche, Michael Young, and Carl Crawford as their teams’ only representatives. If they ever got rid of the one-player-from-each-team rule, i probably wouldn’t watch.
  • Uruguay with a deep free kick. Oh wow, i had forgotten that Right-Way Rongen was our youth coach. How weird is that? I don’t feel good about that fact, though.
  • On the adjoining TV they have the summer league game between the 76ers and Suns. Hope i get to see Byars! That all i got for now.
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Sport

It’s been a busy week…. but not in my sports life, really. Just busy with taxes, writing a couple of proposals, and miscellanous other stuff that’s kept me from opining about sports. Besides you don’t really want to read another Imus post do you? VSL shows some, err, love? for the bowling team. Maybe for spite i’ll write up a whole preview of the National Championship field. I want Vanderbilt to win the bowling national championship! I want VU to win every bowling national championship from now ’til the end of time! Take that, revenue-sport-snobs. And Huskers. And how could i forget the Great Moot Northwestern Debate? Actually i feel like a donk for not remembering that it was, in fact, moot. Maybe if i have some free time (heh!) i’ll write up a really geeky post estimating the EV of playing versus not playing NU or any other major conference opponent. MLS started. So dlish, if you make it over here, post away. Sooooo-PAH! Soopah Rev!
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