Taking the puppy polar bear plunge once again

Once again this winter I’ve watched video, seen pictures of and read and heard about people who dared to take the polar bear plunge. It’s a mystery why anyone would unnecessarily undertake such an action. I didn’t have a choice but to spontaneously polar bear plunge years ago when my former dogs, Chappy and Sousa, fell through the ice on a lake channel. However, even the threat of them drowning didn’t diminish the icy water immersion shock to my system. I couldn’t get warm or stop coughing for hours.

Outside of needing to make emergency rescues, anyone with common sense should instead don their warmest clothes and park themselves in front of a hot fire, with their hands cupped around a warm beverage – which is about the closest we northbound humans can get to hibernation.

So why do people insist on foolishly polar bear plunging, some annually, when they know exactly what they’re going to be putting themselves through? Are they driven by bragging rights, cabin fever or a combination of stupidity and insanity (doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results)? Good question. I’m not sure I can answer it, myself.

“So I did a thing . . .” is how it was described in the Facebook post of a friend who about a month ago got a newly-minted German Shepherd puppy to join the dog she’s had for a few years. My first thought was that no matter how cute the puppy, my friend must be a glutton for punishment, as it’s no secret puppies are an immediate shock to your lifestyle – just like the polar bear plunge.

There’s also a lot of work and training involved, plus the element of destructiveness. I should know. My kids and I just spent the past 14 months house-breaking and rule-teaching their two puppies, which resulted in considerable brokenness and ended up being an education for all involved. While things have settled into more calm of a rhythm where the now adolescent pooches are concerned, there remain occasional lapses in judgment on both their parts and our parts that take us back to square one faster than you can say “who chewed the corner of the piano bench?”

So you can imagine my surprise when, just two weeks after my friend got a puppy, I found myself signing up for the same. Not a puppy from the same litter or from the same breed, but from a much more mixed breed from a situation where the parents had been allowed to indiscriminately mate. Great. I contacted the couple that had stepped in to care for the puppies after I saw their social media post about the litter.

Truth told, I’d been looking to get another dog for our household, as my son will be taking his dog, Fennec, with him when he gets married and moves into his own house next month. There, Fennec gets to romp with my son’s wife’s dog, Winnie. That leaves Fennec’s sister, Copper (my daughter’s dog), home alone to play with the cats, which isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time. In Fennec’s absence, Copper mopes and watches out the window for her return.

Neither dog realizes new puppy “Gus” is being groomed to be Copper’s replacement daily companion. After the initial standoffishness, both Copper and Fennec have warmed to him and consciously softened their rough-housing for his sake. Gus follows the older dogs everywhere, nipping at them, which sometimes irritates.

My son took some hysterical video of the dogs’ mouth-to-mouth combat and three-way wrestling matches on our family room couch. But it’s not all fun and games: Copper and Fennec frequently vie for the puppy’s allegiance. They also squabble over one another’s food, toys and attention from us. In other words, Gus is being socialized to fit right in with our family culture.

Simultaneously, I’m being re-socialized. Yesterday I dealt with Gus shredding the mat in front of the kitchen sink and carrying off my shoes. When he was quiet for too long, I found him stripping the decorative piping off a recliner. Brrrrr! It’s hard to thaw from this polar bear plunge so close on the heels of the last one!

Optimize borrowing of ideas from other arenas

Everywhere you turn, people and businesses are trying to “optimize” something. Optimize and its longer form, “optimization”, is one of those buzz words that drives me crazy. It’s overused to the point it has lost its meaning over time. I hate that. People running around, running their mouths without making much sense. We all run into that kind of thing.

So I went back to the source of explanation and re-read the definition, courtesy of Merriam-Webster: “an act, process, or methodology of making something (such as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible” or more specifically “the mathematical procedures (such as finding the maximum of a function) involved in this.”

Please, nobody respond to that definition by saying “perfect” – another ridiculously over-used word. Let’s also gingerly step over the math implications of the concept, and instead focus on the more generalized idea of achieving maximum effectiveness with something.

While I recognize the extreme nerdy implications surrounding what I’m about to confess, there’s little I enjoy more than learning how other schools of thought approach problem-solving. The more I read about or talk to people from other disciplines, the more I come to appreciate where they are coming from and, more importantly, how I can apply that to my own work and personal life.

Many diverse areas of commerce are focused on process optimization: to the point they follow similar process steps that lead to maximum effectiveness. That’s noteworthy to me, and might be useful to you, too. For instance, who couldn’t benefit from applying to professional or personal purchases the seven steps, “How to Optimize Your Procurement Process”, as blogged by Julia Lopez (Nov. 30, 2023) at pipefy.com?:

1. Review alignment with business (or personal) goals; 2. Map your current procurement (or personal purchasing) process; 3. Scrutinize each handoff; 4. Identify your improvement opportunities; 5. Create a list of automation opportunities; 6. Create a new map for the improved process; 7. Implement, test and deploy.

That’s a reasonable set of steps to follow. Just reading them, I can think of several ways my personal system (or lack of system) for purchasing things could be improved. I can see my well-reasoned vision for major purchases gets scrapped when it comes to making trivial purchases.

How often do we all fail to identify our long-term goals before simply taking action? I’m guilty of not being conscious when it doesn’t seem to matter. Conversely, I sometimes unquestioningly and thoughtlessly follow procedures that were created by someone else and long been in place. Researching how a professional in another area would approach my situation is a great way to spark a more thorough questioning process within myself.

Borrowing ideas from other disciplines can result in not just higher productivity, but greater creativity. In my 20’s, I discovered a book by budding creativity specialist Roger von Oech, who went on to found the California-based consulting firm, Creative Think.

His 1983 book, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative, firmly established von Oech as a creativity expert. It also led to his designing an accompanying illustrated deck of cards called“Creative Whack Pack” that featured the main 64 concepts/strategies outlined in the book. Those materials introduced readers to the many angles and importance of creative thinking.

In follow-up books, including, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants: Using Your Explorer, Artist, Judge and Warrior to Be More Creative (1986) and Expect the Unexpected or You Won’t Find It: A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus (2001), von Oech further explored the nature and benefits of creativity, as well as how to harness it to improve performance with work and personal pursuits.

Interestingly, the creativity ideas touted by von Oech transcend disciplines and have enabled him to enjoy a four-decade career improving the creativity of anyone who has tuned in, from individuals to major organizations and corporations. The very creativity von Oech is committed to developing in others has helped him to construct a whole industry devoted to the realization of creative potential. The moral to this story? It’s never too late to optimize ideas borrowed from other arenas.

Public conversations convey private information

Most days I feel I do a fair amount of eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. But in my defense, it’s not something I set out to do, but an unfortunate, unavoidable result from people having what should be private conversations in public places. Faced with being an unwilling witness to what’s being discussed, I at first rightly and politely protested when I found myself unwittingly caught in TMI conversational crossfire.

Inside of an urgent care waiting room, a mother and teenage daughter sitting in chairs sections apart verbally volleyed personal medical information for all to hear. It was stuff I didn’t need or want to hear and I could tell the other medical appointment hostages in the room also didn’t need or want to hear it. It was bad enough we were already ill or injured. No one should have to put up with bad family drama on top of that.

On behalf of all of us, I turned to the mother and discreetly asked, “Are you sure you want everyone in the waiting room to hear your personal information?”

At a time in the not-so-distant past, my question would have hit home immediately and likely triggered social embarrassment in the mother. Operating on principles such as the now-archaic Golden Rule or perhaps just out of common decency (anyone remember that?!), she would have murmured a quiet apology to me and given her daughter “the look” that would have reeled her in and shut her up all via one killer glance. Like most of our moms used to do when we publicly crossed the line.

But as we’re no longer in Kansas, Toto, the mother instead informed me in an offended tone that she had the right to say whatever she liked wherever she was because this was America, and that I should keep my nose out of her bleepity-bleep business.

Nice. But not entirely unexpected. She did tone it down a bit, however, mainly because she switched to mumbling under her breath about me. And her daughter moved beside her to take the seat I had occupied after I moved to a far-corner open seat created when another waiting room hostage got called in to see the doctor.

Another time I unsuccessfully intervened in public sharing of private information was when a man was talking obnoxiously on his cell phone as I waited in a long checkout line at the grocery store just before Thanksgiving. From what I gathered from hearing both sides of the conversation (he had his female significant other on speaker phone), someone they had invited for Thanksgiving dinner was bringing along an unwanted guest.

Now, despite this conversation being highly interesting, and despite the fact I have been formally trained in mediation, I resisted the urge to comment on the content of the loudly public phone conversation and instead focused on the etiquette angle in defense of the adjacent harried holiday shoppers.

“Excuse me, but could you please switch off speaker mode so the rest of us don’t hear your conversation?” I asked in a neutral tone, adding, “If I were on the other end of the phone, I wouldn’t want strangers hearing what I was saying.”

The man stopped talking and stared incredulously at me for a moment, as if I were stupid. Recovering his composure, he reported to the woman he had on the phone, “Get this – this woman ahead of me in line is listening to our phone conversation and trying to tell me what to do. What nerve!” To which the woman responded, “There’s always somebody like that. Just ignore her.”

What the heck?! Did he read my mind? Never mind. I’m the one who was the victim here, being subjected to unnecessary personal information sharing I didn’t sign up for as part of my trip to the store. I’d just stopped by for groceries and ended up with a couple of extra turkeys! What nerve, indeed.

The world and the behavior of the people in it get crazier every day. The lines between personal and private territory have become so unrecognizably blurred, there’s no point in politely pointing out what you shouldn’t have to overhear to those who can’t hear.

Life’s story problems makes math motivational

I couldn’t help but overhear part of the conversation between my daughter and her boyfriend. I hear their reading room verbal exchanges regularly. It’s pretty much unavoidable, as they’re just around the corner from my dining room table seat, working on writing projects at my laptop.

It’s not that I’m nosy. The conversations between my daughter and her beau are anything but titillating because they’re about . . . math. If ever I wanted to eavesdrop on something, it’s not math. Don’t care now and never cared that much when I was the one taking the class(es), other than to develop a vague feeling of empathy for my fellow intermediate-level math sufferers.

My son and his fiancée’s conversations these days involve simpler math, mainly budgeting. I find them far more interesting (and entertaining), probably because I can understand and relate to what they’re talking about. It’s a topic which clearly has everyday meaning in all of our lives, hence the heightened interest.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying there’s no value to higher level math. Quite the opposite. I realize intermediate and advanced math principles are at work all the time in life, whether or not I grasp them; however, they’re not something I’m personally responsible for, good at, or likely to put to use on the job, so it’s difficult to feel the love. Instead, I’m disinterested and disenfranchised.

My daughter and her boyfriend attend different colleges, but both have a statistics class this semester. It’s imperative they pass their respective math courses so they can continue moving up the educational ladder. Statistics is the last class my daughter needs to complete two associate degrees. So instead of going out to the movies or watching something on TV, the couple spends “together time” working on math problems. Do the math: their futures depend on it.

An interesting online post about the importance of math relatability can be found at https://illustrativemathematics.blog/2020/10/27/making-sense-of-story-problems/, where second grade teacher Deborah Peart blogs about her learning to effectively teach math after two decades as a literacy (phonics, word study and reading comprehension) instructional aficionado and the process of making math feel more relevant beginning in the earliest grades.

“The mission of Illustrative Mathematics is to create a world where learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics,” says Peart. “By using stories to help students see math in the world around them and recognize the ways in which using math is a part of their daily lives, word problems can become an enjoyable part of math learning. This starts with calling word problems ‘story problems’ in the early grades.”

Sometimes the homework assigned to my daughter and her boyfriend by their respective instructors involves story problems, which I recall I enjoyed more over the years than trying to solve just plain math problems. As a writer, I like to know something about the context in which the problem occurs because it increases my investment in the process. Pathetic, perhaps, but that’s how I’m wired. I also get a kick out of watching someone who is suddenly faced with a real life story problem.

Such was the case with my son the day of the recent presidential primary. He asked me to remind him to vote after work. He received my text message at 4:00 PM while driving home, having already passed local gas stations with the “low fuel” light registering on his dashboard and limited funds in his pocket. He’d planned to get gas later, on the way to a discussion group somewhere else he wanted to attend at 6:30 pm. But he didn’t have enough gas to drive to our very rural township polling site, then to the gas station in the opposite direction. He also hadn’t yet studied for the group.

Sound familiar? Real life story problem complete with context and variables. I suggested riding to vote with his sister, but she wasn’t home yet. After multiple calculations, he eventually colored outside of the lines and added a gallon of emergency gas to his vehicle, which got him to both the polling place and then to an actual gas station. Crisis averted.

Lesson learned? I doubt it. Except that contextualizing math sure makes it motivational.