Ergonomics and Standing Desks

 Short story: I'm a 30 something year old engineer who has been working from a home office since the early 2000's and I've seen plenty of folks ruin their posture by not paying attention to basic ergonomic principles.

Step One: Find a website on ergonomics that speaks to your concerns and in your language. Some are folksy and some are highly technical. I prefer the Mayo Clinic's guide on Office Ergonomics, which is a site I refer to from time to time for other health-related questions that I have found reliable and informative.

Step Two: Find out what you can change for free, most ergonomic issues are removing bad habits. The vast, vast majority of ergonomic problems can be fixed for free just by understanding the limitations of a human body; and especially in regards to being sedentary for long periods of time. An alarm in your browser or on your phone can remind you to get up from your chair and you can choose the sound that most alarms make nowadays. Find something pleasant. My alarm noise is a whale sound.  I hear that and I do a little dance and walk to my sliding door, step outside, and walk around the garden with a watering bucket to see if anything needs water.

Step Three: Consider a standing or active treadmill desk. I have had a standing desk of sorts for over 10 years now and I grew back an inch in height and lost a good deal of weight just puttering around in front of it.

For those calorie counters out there: standing burns 2x as calories as sitting and walking can burn 5x the amount of standing even at a relatively slow pace.

Now you are going to find a lot of places that sell standing desks for 1000's of dollars and some of them are pretty nice desks but you don't need them to have a standing desk. What I've used since 2001 is a 40 year old drafting table with the legs extended almost to the max. I've tried this on a cheap one that I got for less than 30 bucks on clearance at Walmart and it works; also, they always seem to be on sale online with free shipping a few weeks after the start of school each year which is around this time.

So, I'll leave a link to a cheap drafting table if you found this information helpful and want to pick one up to try. I've been considering getting a treadmill desk but right now I just like taking walks around the city and getting out of the house.

Take care of your bodies whether you work from home or not.

The Koch Brothers' Shutdown of the US Government: AKA The Business Plot II

In 1933 a group of industrialists and financiers asked a former US Army General what it would take to stop the New Deal by force.  This incident was called The Business Plot and if you have not heard of it, you are not alone.  The plot has been written out of most history books; as slowly but surely the narrative of American corporations as winning the war against everything from Nazis to hunger has supersede the notion of corporations ever being politically motivated to gain power and garner protection through deceptive means.  During the Cold War this particularly American fascination with the benevolence of corporations, benefits of their products and services and harsh criticism for naysayers expanded into accusations of Anti-Americanism.  As if real, living, breathing people in questioning the utility of granting ever more rights and powers to immortal corporations which exist only as a convenient legal fiction as they took them away from workers and consumers were on the side of the USSR.  Accusations like this spiraled into McCarthyism.    

What the Koch Brothers have done with their shutdown of the US government is combing McCarthyism with the Business Plot.  The Tea Party is rife with accusations of the US worker who cannot get by on minimum wage in a 38 hour "part time job" as lazy and entitled while at the same time giving people the like of the Koch Brothers complete obedience to whatever strings they pull, it is Machiavellian in its brutal efficiency in making those who would be hurt most by their policies to blame for causing them.  The Working Poor have become the Tea Party's scapegoats and drudged up every time an argument is made in favor of Obamacare or the minimum wage or what is left of the social safety net.  

If the Tea Party is given their demands they will not stop with defunding Obamacare, they will privatize Social Security, they will eliminate the EPA and Dept. of Education, and do everything they promised the Koch Brothers they would do.  Because the Koch Brothers planned this shutdown in 2008 at the first mention of the Affordable Care Act.  The question is, how much do they want to take from the rest of us so we can have our country back?  

State Health Exchanges are Coming Online

Well our government is shutdown while the manchildren of the GOP pout. Their ideas are so politically toxic to the vast majority of Americans that they have reduced the popularity of congress to 9%.  Some people will stop receiving checks and services immediately.  Say goodbye to many federally-funded Meals on Wheels programs, if you have an elderly neighbor or relative you would be a good person to call them up and make sure they aren't going to have Ms. Mittens with a side of NyQuil to make it through the first US Federal shutdown in 17 years.  The last one being when the GOP wanted to cut major funding to medicare, the EPA, The Department of Education and various other popular programs.

"When Clinton refused to cut the budget in the way Republicans wanted, Gingrich threatened to refuse to raise the debt limit, which would have caused the United States Treasury to suspend funding other portions of the government to avoid putting the country in default."


Sound familiar?
  
Check out your State Health Exchanges which should lower most people's premiums.  You can start comparing tomorrow.  My state, Oregon is already having technical difficulties and yours might as well.  

Extreme Coupons, Yowza!

When I was working full time at a Fortune 500 company, I was admittedly stupid with money, and it shows; it shows that I saved less than 10% of my wages over a period of 12 years and that, well that is not good. It will be enough to supplement my loans and part time work during school but a man has to take nerdy chicks out on dates as well.    

So we plan, AKA we use Google to find ways to save money.  

Extreme Couponing, if you are not familiar with this concept watch the show.  It is on TLC, the same network that has Honey Boo Boo and Hoarders.  Extreme couponing is an amalgamation of both.  

Check out some of the full episodes of Extreme Couponing if you are inclined.  I watch random crap on my 2nd monitor and some of these people's hulls are impressive.  I mean who doesn't want 200 cans of Chili, 100 bags of croutons, or enough plastic containers of baby wipes to build your own castle?  You guys like castles right?  

Anyway the gist of Extreme Couponing is this.  

Find a good overview on Extreme Couponing by one of the many fanatics ( the more popular sites change often so Google to keep current and abreast of the best communities). 

Resolve to at least use coupons, especially if you have never used them before.  

Find a community that is relatively sane.  Many extreme couponing forums seem little more than open asylums for future contestants of hoarders or a new show on TLC about disaster preparation from Obamacare, Lizard People or Jews.  

I have found this forum to be relatively free of the Grade A crazy -- you will get a bit of Christian supermom anecdotes and affirmations:

A Full Cup Forums

So I've only been doing this for two weeks and at Winco I've saved 30 dollars total on my last 110 dollars in groceries.  

Biggest thing I learned so far.  If you find a coupon you use, find a way to get multiple ones of them.  Lots of them can be printed out online and the best ones I've found is by going to companies' pages, Twitter Accounts, and Facebook pages.  I used a two dollar off Boca Burgers coupons 6x before it expired.  That is twelve bucks I did not have to spend for something that I eat almost daily.  

This is a good active Facebook group to get started but there are many more out there called Hunt4freebies.

Try using a single coupon if you never have, it is really, really not that hard.  Printing out coupons and grabbing a Sunday paper once a week costs me maybe a half hour tops and that saved me 30 bucks over two weeks.  Good luck, post in comments if you find any other good sites out there.  

  

Skeeter Pee, Lemon Wine and You

Starting this blog with the intention of chronicling my cheap ass journey for the next two years of grad school.

No 44 dollar a bottle Chinese PBR for me thanks, even hipster beers are too pricey for my budget.  One of the first things I am going to do is learn to brew my own booze.  From my research at Reddit's Homebrew community --which I strongly recommend -- there exists a concoction called skeeter pee or lemon wine that can be made for less than 15 dollars for 5 gallons.  Lemon wine has me thinking what would tangelo wine taste like, what would lemon lime wine taste like and that means this is something I can tinker with.  As an engineering student this pleases me.  I never make the same recipe exactly twice but here is a good starter recipe for Skeeter Pee aka Lemon Wine.

First thing I need to do is order a homebrew kit that I can make this with.  I will not need all the parts of a beer kit but why not?  They are relatively cheap and I can use the beer stuff later when I have more cash rolling around.  

So after careful research -- finding the cheapest option -- I came to this current deal for around 60 bucks on Amazon with two 6.5 gallon buckets.  One for fermenting and one for bottling.     

Maestro Homebrew Beer Equipment Kit w/ Auto Siphon

Which has:

True Brew Handbook (hmm not sure, probably better off looking at Reddit's homebrew community and free online resources, it is apparently only 50 pages)

• 6.5 Gallon Primary Fermenting Bucket
• 1 Lid Drilled & Grommet
• 6.5 Gallon Bottling Bucket w/ Spigot
• Fermometer Fermentation Thermometer

as well as...Fermtech Springless Bottle Filler, Fermtech 3/8in Auto Siphon, 5ft x 5/16in Flex Vinyl Tubing, Hydrometer, Emily Double Lever Capper, Bottle Brush, 3 Piece Airlock, C-Brite Sanitizer 8-Pack. 


So ordered it, will update when it comes with pics.  Mmmm, lemon wine.  I wonder what else I can make into booze?  We will find out.