What I Learned in June: 2014

1. When I am on the losing end of hypocrisy, I grumble some mighty uncharitable thoughts in the recesses of my mind. That's not very gracious of me. I like to think I'm better than that. I am a work in progress. And that? Needs work.

2. Window 8. Since my five year old laptop, bit the dust around the middle of the month, I was forced to learn the newest Windows operating system. Apparently, a lot of people hated it in its original incarnation, but mine came pre-installed with version 8.1 and, honestly, it isn't as terrible as I had feared. Although we won't talk about how it took me ten minutes to figure out how to power down for the first time. Very tricksy, it is!

3. New-to-me rules for baseball. For a game that I've watched my whole life, and one that I watch nearly every day from March through October, I had no idea that a manager of an American League team could choose to give up his DH, move his current pitcher into a defensive position, bring in another pitcher, then move the original pitcher back to the mound. Sure, you lose your DH and either your pitcher will have to hit or you'll have to pull him out for a pinch hitter, plus you will lose the player originally playing whichever position the pitcher temporarily takes in the field, so you'll need to swap another fielder back into the game, but it's an interesting strategy! If your pitcher is having a strong game and you don't want to lose him, but there is particular hitter he's struggling against, in a key situation, why *not* bring in a reliever that might be more likely to have success? Late in a game, it gives another option without much in the way of consequences, not to mention how much you could potentially mess with your opponent's mind!

4. How to make what I see on my laptop show on the television. One HDMI cable and some online instructions later, it took me longer to find an extension cord to plug in my laptop than to make the image appear on the tv screen!

5. I give myself too much credit for being able to remember everything. I need to record these things when I actually learn them and not rely on my memory to recall them at the end of the month. My brain has limited capacity and thirty-seven-plus years of information. Just right down a quick note, enough to jog the "search engine."


Every month, Chatting at the Sky shares what she learned. Big things and little things. Life lessons from the serious to the silly. I've decided I want to participate. Just another means of capturing who am I along this broken little road called life.