The other aspect of goal keeping that felt very familiar to me was the diving after shots on net. I didn’t expect that to be something that would come easily to me, but once I was between the posts, and people started shooting at me, It reminded me an awful lot like defending against someone spiking a ball at you in a volleyball game. There are obvious differences, by much of the basic technique is similar. fortunately grabbing the ball or pushing it clear of the net is easier than trying to pop the ball up in the air for a volleyball setter.

In any case I’ll be happy to play in net as long as our regular goalie is out recuperating from an injury. Playing is net is less scary and a lot more fun than I thought it would be!

Will becoming more attractive make you happier?  Nope… plastic surgery or weight loss will give you an initial boost, but you get used to your new looks pretty quickly, and in the long run you won’t be any happier.

Will better health make you happier?  Counter intuitively, no. Unless you’re at death’s door, you get used to your state of health, and being less or more healthy doen’t change your happiness level in the long run.

Will moving to a sunny warm city make you happer? Again, no. After the new car smell wears off, your level of happiness will move back to where it was when you were living in a cold northern city.

So, what are some things that make us happier?

1. Connect… with family, friend and neighbours is the most important thing you can do to contribute to your overall happiness. The good news is that this will cost you little or no money to do!
2. Be Active. Walk, run, bike, play games, play sports, dance yoga… these are all things that will improve your mood, especially if you’re in a bad one.
3. Take Notice of the beauty in nature and in life.
4. Keep Learning. Whether it’s new hobbies or a new skill at work. Be challenged and remember that most happiness comes in striving for goals, not in reaching them.
5. Give. Do something nice. Join a community. Be selfless.

If you’d like to read more on this topic, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Haidt book, The Happiness Hypothesis, or if you’d like to read great eight page summary, you can read my brother Bob McCue’s book review.

Finally, here is Dan Gilbert’s entertaining TED Talk with his take on happiness. Enjoy!

The bottom line from Science Based Medicine:

“Rather than jumping on the low-carb bandwagon before his ideas are properly tested, the precautionary principle suggests that it might be more reasonable to follow a moderate diet like the Mediterranean diet (or to follow Michael Pollan‘s stunningly simple advice to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’), to limit ‘empty calories’from simple carbohydrates like sugar, to eat a variety of vegetables and fruits, to choose low calorie density foods that are more filling, to limit meat intake, to limit salt, and to keep looking for behavioral and environmental ways to change our calories-in/calories-out balance.”

Good advice that I’m going to try to follow… although some of those empty calories (especially in chocolate form) are so difficult not to give into every now and again!

The good news is that you can learn to be lucky!  Here are three sugestions from Mr. Wiseman than has helped other people maximise their good fortune.

Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. His book, The Luck Factor, is available for $12.92 at Amazon.com.

Very, very interesting!  Here are some good foods to start with:

Here is the 20 Minute TED Talk where Dr. Li talks about his findings:

For example, in looking at how societies portray the model of womanhood, there are probably a number of morally positive ways to do this in between the extremes of the Islamic Burka, and the overt sexuality on the covers of many western mens magazines.

Harris also addresses the issue of giving the same weight to all moral arguments, irregardless of their source.  He argues that some people are better at moral thinking that others, just like some people are better a physics than others, so why should we put the Dali Lama and Ted Bundy on the same footing when it comes to looking at moral arguments?

A thought provoking video even if you don’t agree with everything he says.

At the time of my diagnosis I was inundated with suggestions from friends about different supplements that I should try that would hopefully help my condition.  I’m happy to say that I’m still here to write this blog post!  I’m also here to tell you that I didn’t follow any of the suggestions.  It would have taken me a year or more to throughly research the dozens of “suggestions” I received (some of them plausible, and some outright crazy sounding – “wheat grass cures most cancers”?).  A visualization of supplements with an indication of the quality of the science backing up their claims, would have been an invaluable tool in helping to quickly sort out quackery from the truly helpful.

I am even more skeptical now than I was back then, so I would not accept this as the final word on any of the supplements they list, but would use it as a good starting point for doing some research if a particular supplement looked helpful.  One thing I really like is that they included a link to the underlying data was used to generate the visualization, including links to the studies they relied on, so you can do your own analysis if you wish.

Have fun researching!

My wife Heather is a Prenatal Class Teacher and a Doula. She has put an enormous amount of time (at least it seems like it to me), putting together materials and activities for her prenatal classes. Recently she has started to allow her clients to customize their classes to meet their specific needs (or as I think, address their specific fears) through a form on her website. This seems to be a hit, combined with the one on one teaching she does.

Recently I suggested that she might want to put her lessons online, and let people access her lessons for free, and pay for the web site and her time by using Google Adsense. We currently have Google Ads on the birth stories she has written for each of our children. We typically get about 700 page views per day, and average $1.40 in ad revenue per day. While not a lot of money, it is amazing that over the past year she has earned over $500 from the birth stories. This has more than paid for her time in writing them (although as she would be quick to point out, money was the furthest thing from her mind when she wrote them up).

So… Online birth classes with text, pictures, video and some interactive elements like quizzes. There would also be a question / comment feature so you could ask questions on the lesson pages so that Heather and/or others could respond to the question. Again, what do you think? Would you or your spouse go to a site like this to check it out? Just post your comments at the bottom of the blog post. Thanks!

“Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.” – from the TED website

“The Secret to happiness is low expectations.” Low expectations make it much easier to be pleasantly surprised.

Our brain is a simulation machine… It is great, but it tends to overemphasize the effects of major events in our lives. For example we tend to overestimate the potential upside of good things that happen to us, and tends to overemphasize the potential downside as well. If something happened over 3 months ago, it has virtually no impact on your current happiness. A great example of this is the opposite cases of the lottery winner, and someone who becomes a paraplegic. After one year, both individuals are at the same level of happiness that they we at before their supposed life changing events. Very counter intuitive.

We have with-in us the ability to create or “synthesize happiness”. In other words we can look for the good in everything that happens to us, and can genuinely feel happy. He gives examples of people who have had terrible things happen to them (like being put in jail for 20 years for a crime the person did not commit), and how they say that that terrible thing was the best thing that happened to them. These people looked for the good in what they experienced and “created” or “synthesized” happiness.

Dan talks about how we tend to place a higher value on happiness that we encounter by chance rather than by happiness that we create ourselves. Natural happiness is when you get what you want, and synthetic happiness is what make when we don’t get what we want. In our society we tend to believe that natural happiness is of a higher quality than synthetic happiness. Why? “What kind of an economy would we have if people believed that they could be just as happy with the ‘stuff’ they currently own, rather than going out and buying new stuff at the shopping mall, that marketers have told us that will make us happy?”

He goes on to explain that “Synthetic” happiness is just as good as “Natural” happiness. Watch the 20 minute video for the details… It’s great!

Lastly Dan talks about how excessive choice is the enemy of synthetic happiness. We seem to be able to more easily create happiness when we are stuck with a choice or stuck in a particular situation. We find ways to be happy with what we are stuck with. If we have multiple choices or opportunities to change our choices we don’t have the same sort of ownership of the situation. We may change the situation or what we have, so we unconsciously don’t invest in it by synthesizing happiness. Ironically enough, if people are given a choice to be in a situation where they can change their minds, or simple make a choice and stick with it, most people with opt for the situation where they can change their minds, which will tend to make them less happy.

Next he tells about how his firing from apple in the mid 1980′s was one of the best things that could happen to him, although at the time it was devastating.  The firing opened up doors to him that he would not have been able to approach in any other way. He was able to start up Next comptuer, Pixar, and meet his wife.

Lastly he talks about how you have to love what you are doing for work.  He said “Every morning I wake up and ask myself if I like what I am about to do that day.  If I go to many days not liking what I am doing, I know I need to make a change”.  His diagnosis with cancer reinforced that desire to live every day to it’s fullest.  To make sure he is working on things that are worth while and that make him happy.  His final words are “Stay Hungry and Stay Foolish”.

Dear Stuart,

The Vinyl Cafe has been on my mind a lot these past few days. My wife has finally convinced me to write this letter.

I was in the hospital every afternoon this past week for my latest round of treatments. I shared a room during my stay on the Oncology Ward with a three older gentlemen. During the course of the week different patients came an went, but Cliff, one of the fellow patients, was there the whole week with me. While I was around each afternoon, Cliff was never alone. His wife, Pearl, stayed with him during the day and was kind enough to go get some of those little plastic ice cream cups for us all from the fridge down the hall. It must have been at least 25 years since I last ate an ice cream out of one those little cups with the cardboard peel-off lids. The only change those cups have undergone in the past 25 years is that they do not ship them with those little wooden spoons anymore. The good news is that the taste is exactly like I remembered… cool, creamy goodness, laced with enough sugar that they cannot help but taste wonderful. Cliff, Pearl and I sat around enjoying, or eating one of life’s simple pleasures while our other roommates enjoyed an afternoon nap.

While I was lucky enough to be an outpatient, Cliff was in the hospital 24/7 while he was recovering from the radiation treatments he had received for a brain tumour. I wish I could tell you that this was his only health problem, but he also has inoperable cancer in one of his lungs. In spite of these problems, he is hoping to go home in the next few days, once his hospice nurse arranges appropriate home care for him. He misses sleeping in his own bed. Pearl would like to take care of him on her own at home, but both she and Cliff are around 85 years old and she just isn’t as strong as she used to be.

Friday was my last treatment and when I arrived, Cliff and Pearl were quietly sitting together. I greeted them and they asked how I was doing. From the look on their faces, they seemed a bit low, so I offered to go to the fridge down the hall to get some ice cream for everyone. Pearl thanked me for my offer, but told me that she had already been to get some but it appeared that they were out of ice cream today. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

We chatted for a bit, and soon my nurse arrived to hook me up to my IV for my treatment. While I had a few moments to myself, I wracked my brain to try to think of something that might cheer Cliff and Pearl up. Then an idea came to me. My routine had been to talk with my fellow patients upon arrival, then read a chapter of my favourite book (“Marley & Me – Love and Life with the World’s Worst Dog”… I highly recommend this book), then do a bit of work on my laptop computer. I also had an iPod with me that I hadn’t been using. Along with all my music on it, I also have virtually all of the Vinyl Cafe stories that have been released onto CD, on it. I could think of at least on thing that would put a smile of both Cliff and Pearl’s faces – “The Blood Pressure Chair” story. I found the story on the iPod and asked if they wanted to hear a really funny story by a great story teller. They said they would, so they each took one of the ear pieces and sat their soaking up the experience. It was amazing and wonderful to see their faces light up as the story unfolded for them. Eventually I could hear Cliff chuckling softly to himself with a wide grin on his face.

Near the end of the “Blood Pressure Chair” story, some visitors arrived for him, but he was too engrossed to leave the story, so Pearl and I chatted with his visitors while he continued to snicker to himself. I’m not sure which story he moved onto next, bit it was about a half hour later when he asked me how to pause the thing so he could say good-bye to his visitors. By the end of my treatment, I’d decided to leave my iPod with Cliff so he could listen to and enjoy the rest of the Vinyl Cafe stories stored on it. I figure that if someone can survive radiation therapy, I’m sure he could survive or even thrive with a few more hours of “Vinyl Cafe” therapy. I’ll go back in a couple of days and ask him which were his favourite stories. Thank you for sharing Dave, Morley and the rest of the gang with us.

Sincerely,
Rich McCue

Victoria, BC

I did learn something interesting yesterday from my nurse.  She was just getting ready to hook me up to My IV drip when I ask her if she knew how much my treatment cost.  She said she didn’t know but that she would go and find out.  I didn’t expect that she would know off the top of her head, and half suspected that she wouldn’t be able to easily find out the cost either. To my surprise she came back about two minutes later with a small booklet with, among other things, the cost of cancer treatment drugs. After thumbing through he booklet she found my drug, and showed me that the cost was $485 per mg, and that my half liter bag clear fluid contained 10 mg of the drug. So the total cost of the drugs for my daily treatment is about $4,850, and the total for my week long treatment will total over $24,000.  Needless to say I think I’m getting my money’s worth out of my federal and provincial taxes this year.  UPDATE: My nurse told me that she had mis-read the booklet.  The cost was about $500 per day, not $5000 per day.  So the treatment was not quite as expensive as I first throught it was.

As I mentioned, I’m sharing a room with three other men who are also going through cancer treatment.  Yesterday I had a chance to chat with Cliff, one of my room mates, and his wife Pearl.  As we talked Pearl told me about an experience she had on the bus that day.  The couple, both in their late 80′s, live in James Bay, and typically take a taxi when they occasionally need to travel further than walking distance from their home. Now that Cliff is in the hospital, and Pearl is visiting every day, the daily taxi rides were starting to strain their tight budget.  So she decided to try taking the bus to the hospital. She caught the bus with out any problem, but when she arrived at the hospital bus stop she realized that she was going to have to go down some stairs to get off the bus. She had the misfortune to catch one of the older buses with steep stairs at the front and back of the bus. Going up the stairs when she boarded the bus wasn’t too bad, but Pearl has problems going down stairs now that she is almost 90 years old.  As she stood at the top of the stairs wondering what she was going to do, she looked around the bus with a distressed look on her face.  Fortunately a couple of fellow passengers noticed the distressed look and asked if she needed any help.  She told them that she has a problem going down stairs.  At that point two passengers jumped up, each held her under her arms and gently assisted her off the bus.  The two young people made sure she was ok and then re-boarded the bus.  The bus pulled away.

Pearl said that she stood there on the side walk overwhelmed with emotion. She had just been standing on the bus, afraid to go down the stairs, and with in a few seconds two young UVic students had carefully helped her off the bus. She felt so grateful that tears started to well up in her eyes. Pearl’s comment to me as we sat chatting in the hospital was that while our society may have some problems, there are still a lot of good people around, who are willing to help a total stranger in need.

I had an enjoyable afternoon.  Take Care.