Author Archives: Rachel

About Rachel

I'm Rachel, a Colorado native that didn't consistently make it up to the mountains until after college (blasphemy!) I started snowboarding because I knew I'd have to learn some kind of mountain sport if I ever wanted to see Devin in the winter, and I started writing for cosnow because I thought it was faster to see the articles I wanted if I wrote the myself. I am still learning the art of snowboarding well, but I love it!

Guess who’s back

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A group of my co-workers goes walking every day at lunch and today I joined them. As we walked past some bushes, someone wondered aloud about the source of the clicking noise. With investigative skills worthy of Nancy Drew, I peeped under the bush.

Originally, all I saw was something alive and something gray. Because there are a plethora of bunnies in the area, I didn’t initially register anything beyond “gray animal” and skipped directly to the thought, “I didn’t know rabbits made that noise.”

That’s because they do not.

Then I noticed the eyes. The gigantic, yellow eyes. At this point, I would say I was about 95% startled, 4% afraid, and 1% excited. Given the small ratio of excitement to those other common sense emotions, happily yelling “It’s STANLEY!” might not have been the ideal first reaction. But that’s what I did.

(Back story: Stanley is the name we gave to the owl who hung out in the tree outside our cubicle window last summer. No owls have been seen in the area since, and there has been lingering sadness about the owl departure as they provided a great deal of workplace entertainment.)

Even though it was not a cognizant decision, I am happy to report that after my successful detective work, there was at least a small part of me that was smart enough to remove myself from the immediate vicinity of the bird of prey making warning noises.

But despite my desire to leave well enough alone, there appeared to be a Stanley 2 watching over this scene who did not seem to trust my intentions to exit. I was perhaps three steps away from the grounded owl when there was suddenly an owl with an overwhelmingly large wingspan swooping directly in front of my face. I sincerely have no idea where he came from, but I’m guessing he was watching from the building roof and decided to come personally administer a warning.

And this point I moved to 100% terror, which was evidenced by a very unfortunate shriek and the subconscious, split-second decision to use my co-worker as a human shield. I ducked behind him and waited for all predators to depart from the area, promising myself that my days of yelling at local wildlife were officially over. After all this excitement, I decided that I had had enough of nature for the day, cut my walk short, and returned to my cubicle to recount of my adventures from the safety of my computer.

a round about way of delivering news

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A co-worker has been telling me with increasing frequency that I look tired. Last week, I finally realized that all the ‘you look tired days’ are in actuality ‘no eyeliner days.’ Which is unfortunate.

I start a new job next week. (My company is relocating all their finance positions to Indiana. Because I truly believe my life is meant for better things than Indiana, I found a new job in Denver. Also, I love that I just said “I found a new job in Denver” as though it didn’t almost kill me to find a new job last time. Karma is evening out!)

And while this seems like a trivial thing to be excited about in the midst of all this change, I am particularly looking forward to the fact that I get to start fresh on the makeup front. Because no one there has any idea what my tired-looking baseline is yet, no one can judge me on my no eyeliner days. Which means my mornings just got a little bit easier.

in praise of flexibility

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Lately, I have been astounded at the power of adaptability. Planning has it’s place, undoubtedly, but my life over the past few months has really called for me to just be able to go with the flow. Interviews, job hunting, part-time work: all require broad vision and a willingness to journey where the work is, regardless of whether or not that’s where I pictured myself going. Living at home, having all kinds of people in and out with the accompanying noise of having all kinds of people in and out: flexibility and a very robust sense of humor.

Unexpected car repairs, layoffs, relationships, family needs, health issues. Really, life has made it abundantly clear that it doesn’t care what I planned on. So why not stop worrying about making plans in the first place, expect the bumps in the road, and enjoy life as it comes?

Upon reflection, there is only one area of my recent life where planning outweighs winging it: the purchase of toilet paper.

Browser’s Castle

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Today, Apple released the public beta of Safari 4, and subsequently I spent much of the day marveling at how many people I know who are passionate about browsers. Seriously, I read about people’s trial runs, the new features and (seemingly few) drawbacks all day long.

If you would have told me 5 years ago that I would know dozens of people who are emphatically and adamantly opinionated about not only their own browser but also about the browser choice of the general public, I probably would have laughed in your face.

Late in the afternoon, I found a position that I was interesting in applying for while job hunting. The online job application stated, “you must use Internet Explorer” and I closed the window in disgust.

And then I realized the implications of what I had done. I’ve been out of work for almost 6 months, and yet I declined to apply for an open position in a nosediving economy because they stipulated that I had to use Internet Explorer.*

That, my friends, I believe may be an indication that I too have become a person who is opinionated about browsers. Didn’t see that coming…

*For those who think this is completely irreponsible, I’ll get to a computer that has Internet Explorer and I’ll apply. Please don’t lecture.

Ecosystems: The Consumeristic Rewrite

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An ecosystem consists of the biological community apparel and accessory collection that occurs in some locale, and the physical factors that make up its non-living or abiotic environment storage capacity. There are many examples of ecosystems — a pond closet, a forest dresser, an estuary armoire, a grassland shelving system. The boundaries are not fixed in any objective way, although sometimes they seem obvious, as with the shoreline of a small pond doorway of a small closet.

The study of ecosystems mainly consists of the study of certain processes that link the living clothing, or biotic space-consuming, components to the non-living storage, or abiotic space-limitation, components. Energy transformations Impulse shopping and biogeochemical cycling irrational closet cleaning are the main processes that comprise the field of ecosystem ecology.

In ecosystem ecology we put all of this together and, insofar as we can, we try to understand how the system operates as a whole. This means that, rather than worrying mainly about particular species articles of clothing, we try to focus on major functional aspects of the system. These functional aspects include such things as the amount of energy that is produced by photosynthesis the number of newly purchased articles entering the ecosystem, how energy or materials flow along the many steps in a food chain how regularly the user actually uses what they bought rather than reverting to their favorite college sweatshirt, and what controls the rate of decomposition of materials or the rate at which nutrients are recycled in the system how frequently items are given away/sold to make room for new purchases (which may or may not be worn, based on the college sweatshirt use).

*For those of you who’d actually like to learn about ecosystems, here’s where I pulled the text from. : )

reading far too in to things

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The cover of Get Smart claims that bonus scenes deliver 62% more “laughs.” I question this assertion. A few things to ponder:

1. Why is “laughs” in quotes? If you’re going to promise me 62% more laughs, I want to know that you mean actual laughter, not 62% more “Oh I see what you did there. Heh, that’s cute – nicely done. Maybe if I chuckle you’ll stop now…”

2. How did you calculate the 62%? That’s a very specific number – how are you presenting the statistic? What was your experimental methodology? Did you employ true simple random sampling? How large was your sample size and what does your distribution look like? What were your control variables? Is this number supposed to be the mean? If so, what is your standard of deviation? I do not trust your statistical methodology until you can satisfactorily answer these questions.

3. 62% more than what? It’s very easy to promise 62% more laughs than Larry King. What’s your frame of reference? I assume you are talking about the original movie. If so, why weren’t your “hilarious alternative jokes” actually included? I am of the opinion that if they were truly that great, they should have made the first cut.

As such, I conclude that I need to get a job. Also, I think that 62% is a made up number.

DOH! of the day (without any verbs)

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-car
-rush hour traffic
-holiday party excitement
-parking meter
-me: outside
-keys: inside
-active ignition
-locked door
-oh !@#$% (x10)
-phone call
-spare keys?
-Super Dad and Awesome Brother response team
-more rush hour traffic
-37 degrees
-abandoned building and burnt out street light
-sketchy people
-numbed hands
-stupid heels!
-oh crap, gas light…
-panic stricken
-more phone calls
-Mooooooom!
-70 minutes
-rescue!

Thanks, family! You are all the best!

(*There may or may not have been tears at several points in the series, but really, who’s to tell?)

data: the unemployment anti-hope

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I was listening to NPR’s Planet Money podcast from December 5th and found this part of the interview interesting enough to transcribe. Hopefully this isn’t as pertinent to your situation as it is to mine – best wishes to any job hunters out there!

Ian Sheperdson, Chief U.S. Economist for High Frequency Economics: We learned today that 533,000 people net lost their jobs in November, and we also learned that the number of job losses in October and September were nearly 200,000 worse than was first thought. So, really, we’ve had an announcement today of job losses not far short of three-quarters of a million in one go.

David Kestenbaum, NPR Correspondent: And you wrote that this is almost indescribably terrible.

IS: The November figure was the worst for 34 years. The trend in the last few months has been straight down at an accelerating pace. We’ve got an unemployment rate that’s heading toward 7%, and we’ll blow through 7% very, very quickly. And we’ve got weakness across pretty much every sector of the economy, with one or two small exceptions. So, it really is absolutely awful.

DK: Was there any good news in there?

IS: Nope, there was nothing in there that would make you think that anything is improving anytime soon. There’s nothing to think that there was certain sectors of the economy that are just charging along regardless. There was weakness pretty much everywhere. When you look at the data, it reinforces the impression that we have from a host of other numbers: that the economy is in something like free fall in the last few months.

Guest Post at Mind Averse

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Devin Reams recently wrote a post about financial misconceptions that caught my attention. I was mulling over other topics I felt were also not well-understood and started writing to sort things out. My original point about the money supply ended up engulfing a lot of different topics that I didn’t originally intend to tackle, and I ended up guest posting my thoughts there. This is personally my favorite thing that I’ve written lately, but that’s not saying much given that I don’t post much anymore… :)

If you’re intersted, go take a look. I’d love to hear any thoughts.