Mr. Polehn writes

I have had a lot of time by myself recently.  I'm working away from home for a few months and my family hasn't been with me for several weeks of that.  I've tried my best to use that time for some productive self reflection, contemplation, navel gazing, etc.  The product of that is a list of goals for the year.  I wanted to put (some of) these out there publicly for some positive social pressure. Recreation & Relationship To start off, I'd like a little more fun in my life.  And I'd like to have that fun with people who I cherish. Have at least one meaningful, memorable one on one experience with each of my children.  This time apart from my family has highlighted  just how valuable time spent together is.  We're pretty good at finding ways to have fun all together at home.  We play board games, read books aloud (we read the first four Harry Potter books last year), spend time outdoors, etc.  But I have not been very good at spending...

 Tribes  by Seth Godin is a quick read on leadership.  I read this book because it was listed on "Books every leader needs to read" or some such similarly named list.    There are some good bits to glean out of this short book.  I'll try to condense them here:   Managers are not by nature leaders.  Managers allocate resources to accomplish a defined outcome.  Leaders change things by setting a vision and building a tribe around that vision.   Tribes are everywhere big and small.  Mega-tribes, sub-tribes, etc.   Leadership is inherent risky.  But far less risky than our minds tend to think.  This is evidenced by the many failures of several highly successful leaders.  (Think Elon Musk and the Tesla Truck presentation ).   Find people who are doing exceptionally better than average and amplify their influence on everyone else.   Leadership is about challenging the status quo.  It is s...

I recently (actually weeks or months ago now) finished reading "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now" by Jaron Lanier.  This short book covers what is quite possibly one of the biggest issues of the current era, the toxic influence of "social media" on individuals and culture at large. The book raises issues about more than purely "social media" sites like Facebook and Twitter, attacking the business model that many web services are operated on.  I can't bring myself to fully agree with every point raised by Lanier.  Ten chapters present ten different arguments for why you should opt out of most of interactions happening on the internet today.  However, I believe they can be summarized in two key points. Social media is bad for your health.   Your emotional, social, psychological and spiritual well being are degraded by the use of social media.  These sites tend to reduce our ability to have empathy, increase irritabili...

Romans 12 is a beautiful passage of scripture.  You can say that about many parts of The Bible but this description of life following the risen Jesus is beautiful.  This morning reading this section I realized how nicely this wraps up: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." We can fight evil without seeking out revenge.  We can live wisely without thinking of ourselves as wise.  We can be humble.  And, above all, we can love and serve God and one another. Transform your mind.

My guess is no...  Let's test the hypothesis! Facebook and similar "social" feeds feel so bad to my soul.  I find them as a total waste of time and it's time to really really delete these things once and for all.  I've been hanging onto Instagram as I find it much less toxic.  Pictures often give off a more positive vibe than your aunts reshare of politically slanted news or your neighbor's cousin's wall of text complaining about how there is not Olive Garden within 100 miles of their house.  However, that doesn't change the fact that I am the product being sold on this Instagram.  Algorithms are being worked out to find just the right number of post to leave in between advertisements for me to feel most engaged and most likely to click.  Which news parody sites or webcomics I should like next are also constantly being updated and reconfigured based on my behaviour.  Facebook and its subsidiaries are not the only companies with this massive ...

Practicing The Way / Bridgetown Podcasts Bridgetown is a really interesting church in Portland, OR.  They have a focus on following the practices of Jesus.  Taking the things we see in Jesus's life and turning them into practical things we can put into practice ourselves.  Practicing The Way has a bunch of material on practical things to try in order to change your lifestyle be me more like Christ's.  It's an old concept but one I feel is lacking in modern Christianity, that followers of Christ should end up looking/living like Him.  The sermons that go along with the site are available in podcast form and are very interesting and engaging.  Worth a listen. Beartown I just finished the novel Beartown a few days ago.  I have to recommend this book.  It reminded me of a slightly less dark Swedish version of "13 Reasons Why".  The plot centers around a youth hockey team in a struggling rural town.  The hockey team is really the Be...

I've been seeing a fair bit in the news coverage lately about federal policy changes which have resulted in children being separated from their parents at the border of the United States. In the short amount of time that these policy changes have been in place the US has separated at least 2,000 children from their parents . This is leading to the erection of tent cities to house children because the re-purposed Walmarts we have been housing immigrant children in are near full capacity. This according to the President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as anyone with common sense, is horrible for the mental and emotional health of children . As a father and a US citizen I'm outraged by the trauma these children are experiencing at the hands of the federal government.  And things have taken an even more irritating turn.  Our Attorney General, who is quoted as saying the KKK  " were  OK until I learned they smoked pot ," cited the Apostle Paul in...

New series of monthly (my intentions at least) things I'm really enjoying... Ride Report Ride Report  is an app which uses your phone's location data to automatically keep track of your bike rides.  For each ride it asks you a simple survey "How was your ride."  After collecting enough survey data from rides Ride Report can generate a map showing the worst and best rides for a city.  Some cities are even using this data to make better transportation decisions.   I'm not sure if this app will work at a smaller scale for a city like The Dalles, but the idea is very cool.  The more people the use it the more helpful it will be.  At this point I've only ever said my rides were great and being the only user in town this is very unscientific. I highly recommend using this app for fun and better city planning or at least better informed fellow cyclists. Libby Libby is an app which allows you to borrow ebooks through your local library....

It’s warming up and the sun has been shining (kind of). You could almost say it was running season.  I have to admit however, at the when it first started warming up this year I was dreading starting to run.  Memories of last year's misery haunted me and I was seriously contemplating giving the whole thing up.  Ultimately I did give running one another shot. So how are things going this year? Pretty darn well actually. Better than ever even! This year I’ve earned PRs for every distance Strava keeps track of, I haven’t suffered any injuries and I’m genuinely enjoying myself. This is much better than last year. Last year I had a short and fairly miserable season, plagued with injuries. Last year I had  a few goals tied up with running . I wanted to run longer and faster than I ever had. I had really detailed goals for each week of the summer, how far I should be running and at what pace. I tried to make sure I never broke the  “10% rule”  adding too m...

Some days you come home and there are just chicks in you laundry room...  But how can you say "no" to that face? Easter art by Lucy Easter outfit by mom   Jesse decided (on his own) it was time to stay the night at grandma's house.  He was pretty disappointed to find out it wasn't. Brace for impact during every elevator ride. Lucy has lost both of her top front teeth.  He bark is worse than her bite. Mystery of the month: Who is this green haired super saiyan? Short silly video: Lucy can ride her bike with no training wheels.  Kid's still love rolly pollies.  And Jesse is apparently a Chris Tomlin fan.

I had never read Stephen King before, so reading It last year  I didn’t really know what to expect.  In fact I have to admit that in school I never understood the kids I saw carrying around tomes from the library with "Stephen King" written on the cover.  I didn't much like horror movies and couldn't imaging reading the book version for fun.  However, based on the fact King literally wrote the book On Writing, I had high hopes for a great novel.   It did not disappoint. The characters feel super real, very alive and relatable. By the end of the book, characters I found really annoying I grew to love and I felt sympathy for the psychopathic school yard bully. (WARNING: Spoilers below this point) What I liked As I mentioned, King’s character development in It is amazing. Even the seemingly tangential characters have personal details and deep backstories. Probably the best example of this I can think of is Stan Uris’s wife Patricia. Most of one cha...

Once upon a time I owned a 1994 Toyota Camry .  I drove it something like 6 miles everyday for a few years (a meager commute).  At that time my job also involved a good amount of sitting and staring at a screen.  Making the realization that I was spending about ⅓ of my day sleeping, and the other ⅔ I was spending sitting was a big eye opener.  Pair this with the fact that I was weighing in at 240 lbs and it was becoming pretty obvious that I needed to make some changes in my life. One of the first things I did was get a bike.   At that point I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was about 12 years old.  Luckily, as the old proverb suggests, once you learn you never forget.  I soon started riding that bike to and from work just bout every single day.  It took some time but eventually I was able to make the uphill trip home without feeling completely exhausted.  I rode that bike just about every day until winter hit.  However, even thoug...

There are a lot of funny things that come with having a unique name.  People say it wrong.  People always want to know if you're related to the other <uncommon last name>s that they know (yes).  You spell it for people without being asked. And, if someone on the internet has your name you know they are trying to impersonate you.  It's not just someone who so happens to have the same name.  It's the lowest form of ID theft. Someone is out there masquerading as me.   We started hearing about this a few weeks ago, when we listed our old house for sale. Someone was trying to rent out our old house on Gorge Classifieds  and other sites, asking people to send them a deposit to rent our house without even seeing it.  He was using our house to scam people.  But, the thing that put it over the top is he was using my name to do it. Eventually this person tried scamming someone who actually knew me.  The email was forwarded to me...

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  Near the end of 2017 I did something I hope becomes an end of year tradition.  I planned out all the books I’m going to read in the next year.  I read some great books last year and I hope that having a plan will make this year even better. Why would I plan out a year of reading? Last year I was able to read a lot more than I have before.  However, there were still long periods throughout the year in which I wasn't reading anything, and some of what I read was just whatever was in front of me, not what I really wanted to read.  Like most things in life, I suspect, having a plan will help align what I do read with my goals.  There are several subjects I’m interested in, and didn’t read about.  There are authors I want to read more of, but haven’t made time to.  And modern fiction?  What is that?  (I  think I read one new book last year) I made a realization a few months back.  My pile of books I want to read is much tall...

In 2017 I was a lot more purposeful about reading. Actually, one of my goals for the year to read and write more. I failed at my goal of writing a lot. However, I can say 2017 was the year I read more books than any other in recent memory. Here are some of my highlights from a year in books. Scouting For Boys I wrote quite a lot about this in an earlier post. Reading what is essentially the original boy scout manual is a lot of fun. It has a lot of practical camping, hiking and tracking instructions as well as a whole lot of scouty chivalry and yarns by Lord Baden Powell. It I’m not much for horror books or horror movies or horrible musicals (maybe horror musicals). But It is just about one of the greatest novels I have ever read if not the longest. The characters and setting King created are extremely believable, especially thanks to the “Derry Interludes” which document the sordid history of the fictional  Maine  town. It’s an excellent book which I should ...

Sunset of the Sabertooth by Mary Pope Osborne My rating: 3 of 5 stars Plot and character development are really week. Although, this is the seventh book in the series, what do I expect at this point? At least one of my children enjoyed reading this book. The other one just shrugs her shoulders. Although, she's seven years old, what do I expect at this point? At the end of the day the kids did remember enough scenes from this book that depict more or less what we know about life during the ice age. Mostly they learn that life was dangerous and cold, that people hunted, played flutes and painted cave walls. I'm not sure what I think about this series of books. They are short enough I might give one more a try before writing them off completely. There are just plenty of better books for kids this age. Though, probably not very many about the prehistoric age. View all my reviews

This Friday Amanda and I celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.  It took us a bit but we eventually decided we should go on a trip and to somewhere neither of us had been before.  I've always wanted to see ancient ruins and love Starwars.  Enter Tikal, one of the most famous Mayan sites and home to the rebel alliance's Yavin 4 base. I don't travel much.  I don't like traveling much.  I don't even like thinking about travelling.  It’s not that I don't want to see exotic places and do interesting things around the world.  I just don't want to deal with any of the headache of getting there or any of the less than desireable things I might encounter along the way. I'm pretty good at negative visualization, what some people probably call worrying.  I’ll call it being prepared, though it still feels an awful lot like worrying.  I guess it's how I deal with the unknown.  I can't predict the future but I can take what I know and thin...