The Savvy Life

After reading my little screed on what The Savvy Life is all about, I feel the need to share a few cocktail secrets with the readership.   This is not revolutionary, but I swear to all that is good and right in this world, it will make your drinks much better.  Consider this the first insights of many that I will offer you in regards to a good cocktail.

I present to you ’sour mix’.  It may have other names, but essentially it is a day-glo yellow and in a plastic bottle next to the bloody mary mix (yeah, that’s a different entry).  It is one of those little things that I bet few people think about.  You splash it in your drink and away you go.

With just a small amount of effort, that sickly sweet liquid can be replaced with something that will bring real flavor to the drink.

Sour Mix

2 Tbsp Lemon Juice (fresh from the lemon)
2 Tbsp Lime Juice (from from the lime)
1/4 cup Sugar
1/4 cup Water

Boil the water and add the sugar.  Once the sugar is completely dissolved, turn the heat off of the water.  Give it a moment and add the juice.   Now chill it.

Whiskey Sour
2 oz Jim Beam Black
2 oz  Real Sour mix

Normally I’d recommend using Maker’s Mark in this drink, but today the 2007 San Francisco World Spirits Competition announced it’s winners and Jim Beam Black earned a Gold medal.  Due to this honor and because I have a bottle in my bar, I have chosen to use this bourbon instead of Maker’s Mark.

Now, I haven’t addressed my method of mixing a drink, but honestly for something this basic, I don’t think it is too difficult.  Fill the glass with ice, add the Jim Beam Black followed by the Real Sour mix.  Now dump the whole concoction in a shaker and shake it.  Pour it in the glass, garnish with a cherry, lemon wedge, or simply a cocktail straw.

I thought I’d take a brief pause from working on a longer entry that isn’t ready yet and discuss some of underlying principles of this blog.  From a third party point-of-view, The Savvy Life might seem a bit eclectic and random.  With this blog, I am attempting to define a lifestyle that is geared towards urban bachelor living. I won’t entries regarding gardening or landscaping.  I won’t write entries regarding childcare. I won’t read entries on matters of politics or religion.

What I will write articles about are ways to make life more efficient.  Why does efficiency get such a big boost?  The less time I spend doing mundane tasks, is more times I can spend doing the things that being me pleasure.  Efficiency also saves money, and the less money I am spending on the things needed to keep my life going is more money I can spend on selected luxuries.  Pleasure and luxury are the other two topics that I will write about.  Pleasure is a catch-all, I admit.  And pleasure is a very subjective thing.  I attempt to use a very loose definition and interpretation of pleasure as something that is enjoyable.  Pleasure is something you anticipate and are excited about.  Socializing, dating, entertainment, vacations, and eating are all pleasurable things.  I get excited about visiting with friends, going on dates, seeing movies, having time away from work, and dining at restaurants as well as cooking at home.

Luxury is another abstract concept, but within this category, I place those things and events that are a bit out of the norm.  Luxuries are lavish, extraordinary, and indulgent.  Whether this is a bottle of premium wine, a cutting edge technology toy, or some other element that I wouldn’t necessarily expect to get every day or even month, but something special, a treat or gift to myself.  These will be the things that are made available for purchase due to efficient living.

So while there may be articles on career development, entrepeneurship, or kind of mundane things like that – the goal isn’t to focus on work, but to focus on building a more pleasurable life.  Being happy with a job is critical to a happy life.  If we can’t find happiness in our work, then we can at least minimize the pain and annoyance we get from our work.

Please understand, that I am not assuming these things can be universally applied. For the most part, I can only write about my journey towards building The Savvy Life, my journey towards finding pleasure and luxury.  Hopefully, others will find my successes and failures insightful to their own lives.

When I was in college, I ran an information simulation as a way to illustrate the concept of information overload. This simulation was regarding how governments handle world events and why, even with vast resources available to them, governments lose track of secondary critical issues. The same thing happens in our personal lives as well. We have so much information coming at us at such a steady pace that it becomes remarkably easy to lose track of things we have stated are important to us. Even the information on how to use the tools that we use to manage our information keeps changing and updating.

I’m currently working on a ‘life’ project I am calling Time Dissection where in I hope to manage how I spend my time better to optimize fun and work more efficiently. As part of this effort I have been exploring ways of creating a tickler system to help me stay in contact with friends and family. I have a habit of letting weeks go by without contacting people.

I found this article, Manage Your Personal Data Flow, to be an interesting combination of these two concepts. Here is a way of keeping track of information without occupying mindspace with information not needed at the moment and time-shift it to when it is needed.

Consistently getting the right information when you need it — but not before — is a huge time saver and career enhancer. We spend scads of time hunting for information, which wastes time and energy. Sometimes we can’t find information just when we need it, which makes us look unprepared and ill-informed.

I’ve often relied upon sticky notes to keep track of my random information, but the reality is at a certain point, I have have a huge pile of sticky notes that I keep saying I’m going to ‘digitize’ but never do because I don’t have the time.  The article does a good job of presenting a wide variety of tools to use and suggestions in ways to use them to manage information flow.

I will never forget the dull mundane details, like whether or not I need to go to work.  And I won’t forget the major things like important work deadlines.  I will forget the secondary but important things like birthdays of people important to me, grocery lists, oil changes for my car, and dentist appointments made six months ago.  Yes, I know, some of this stuff is supposed to go on your calendar, but I don’t have a unified calendar as I like to keep my personal things off of the corporate systems.

If you have any other methods of managing information flow that don’t include ‘ignoring it’, I’d love to hear about it.

I will be the first to admit that I am horrible, awful, pitiful – well, you get the picture – at social networking. I’m not talking about schmarmy handshaking business-card exchanging networking you get at some conventions, but the actual friendly connections. Developing those connections is difficult if you are the type of person who feels like you have nothing to offer. According to Networking for People Who Hate Networking, the one thing you can offer another person, what everyone can offer, is genuine interest.

People want to be listened to, and they want to feel interesting. So you can be good at networking by caring about other people. And you can’t fake being interested — it’s almost impossible. That means you have to genuinely care about other people.

The best networkers understand that everyone is interesting if you ask the right questions. So ask someone an open-ended question, figure out what they’re interested in, and ask them about that.

Your job is to discover what you can learn from people, and you can learn something from everyone. If you really try, you’ll be genuinely interested in what they have to say.

For all the grief I give myself about my lack of social graces, the one thing I think I can do well is listen. Asking questions to draw people out is a harder skill to hone, but not impossible and fairly easy to practice.

One would assume that here at The Savvy Life, first kisses wouldn’t be one of those things that would need a lot of focus. I mean come on, it is a first kiss. First kisses are for beginners, right? Wrong. The first kiss can make or break a date. A lot can ride on that first kiss, so it is wise to keep abreast of the current kissing philosophy. Welcome to the new rules of kissing.

Please don’t ask what the old rules were. I think they were largely unwritten and unspoken. You either knew them or were forever shunned.

Despite being labled as rules, each one is considered a secret. Secret #5 is “You won’t win points for weirdness”.   That’s right… the first kiss is not the time to try out lingual gymnastics or to try out the beef jerky scented breath freshner.

Surprise seems to get bonus points, yet that is a tough one to pull off well.  If you truly surprise someone with a first kiss you may end up knocking your teeth together or having bad lip alignment.  So surprise the person with the moment but not the actual kiss.  Remember, this is romance, not ninja training.

Being creative is hard work. For those of us who have a strong desire to make a living off of our creativity, we often find ourselves at a dry well. Whether it is writer’s block or simply feeling like we are in rut, there are ways to re-energize the creativity inside us. 8 Ways to Spark Your Creativity offers suggestions to refill that creativity well.

Take a trip outside your personal bubble – If you just have the same input every day it may be hard to come up with many new ideas. Take some input from outside own your little bubble. Meet new people, read book about something you don´t anything about, take up a new hobby, listen to music you normally never listen to. Do something different and get some new input into your mind. This can set off a creative spark and generate fresh ideas you hadn’t thought about before.

Nothing kills my creativity more than living in a rut. I often need new stimuli to trigger my creativity.

Work dominates most of our lives. Not only do we spend 7.5 to 8 hours at work, we spend time commuting to and from work and time preparing to go to work. For those inidividuals who work longer hours, work represents even a greater time investment. This time spent on work is a good enough reason for you to be happy at work.

Here are Ten Ways to Be Happy at Work.

My favorite happens to be the following:

4) Take Responsibility for Knowing What Is Happening at Work
People complain to me daily that they don’t receive enough communication and information about what is happening with their company, their department’s projects, or their coworkers. Passive vessels, they wait for the boss to fill them up with knowledge. And, the knowledge rarely comes. Why? Because the boss is busy doing her job and she doesn’t know what you don’t know. Seek out the information you need to work effectively. Develop an information network and use it. Assertively request a weekly meeting with your boss and ask questions to learn. You are in charge of the information you receive.

Communication, as it has been since the beginning of time, is a two way street. I’ve discovered that a good sense of curiousity – curiousity not nosiness – allows me to have a better grasp of what is going on in the company as a whole. When someone complains about lack of communication, the first question they should be asked is how much communication do they initiate. If everyone is waiting to be communicated to, no one will be communicating.

Whether these ten items will actually make you happier at work assumes the job you are doing is one that even has the potential to make you happy. Sometimes the best we can hope for in some situations is to not be miserable at work.

I’m a very content Netflix user which is how they get you.  Being content means I’m not demanding.  I’m not pushing Netflix to offer me more in the exact way I want it.  The glory of the free market is the fact that we force companies to compete for our dollars.  Through competition, a form of evolution takes place.  In the online video rental world, Netflix used to be the only option.

Marshall Loeb at MarketWatch has taken it upon himself to analyze the different online movie rental services so you can determine Which Online Movie-Rental Service is Right For You?

I read through them  and Netflix still comes out on tops for me, but I am intrigued by streaming video rental services.  If I can find a way to deliver them efficiently to my TV so I don’t have to watch them on my monitor, I’d be most happy with that method.  Getting a movie moments after deciding I want to watch it is better than the next day, which is why I’ve become addicted to my cable service’s On Demand options.

Here at The Savvy Life, coffee isn’t just another liquid, it is an elixer of life. The ingredients of coffee, roasted coffee beans and water, are simple and elegant. Whenever you have such simplicity, it becomes more important that each is of the best quality you can get.

To that point, you also have to consider the quality of the things with which these ingredients come into contact. Lifehacker brought this posting to my attention and I needed to echo it.

Cleaning a coffee maker is not rocket science, and there are a number of ways to clean a coffee maker, but cleaning a coffee maker these days is the equivalent of sweeping the steps of a cathedral–coffee has become a sacrament rather than a supplement.

The coffee lover needs to treat the coffee maker like an artisan treats his or her tools.

via: Lifehacker

In your chest beats the heart of a great adventurer.  You are a person who wants to explore, discover, conquer, and experience amazing things.  The only thing holding you back is your sense of responsibility.  You can’t drop your jobs in order to climb a mountain.  You’d be laughed at if you told people you were going to go find some lost city.  Rents, mortgages, and student loans still need to be paid.These obstacles don’t have to stand in your way as you seek out adventure in your life.  There is adventure even in the mundane.  Below are four ways to add adventure to your everyday life.

The Road Less Travelled

One of the most mundane events in life is the commute to and from work.  The radio seems to play the same things every day.  Announcers have the same jokes.  The same commercials.  The view is the same.  The people on the train are the same.  It begins to wear on you, beating you down.  You can almost see the ruts you’ve created on your daily journey.

Now is the time to try something different.  Break out that road map and plot a different path.  Will it take longer to get home?  Probably.  So you’ll miss your favorite sitcom… it will re-run, I assure you.  If you take the train, bus, or some other public transportation, maybe you need to take it at a different time.  Leave an hour early for work, ride the train with different people, and have breakfast at a restaurant near your work.

Maybe today is the day you ride your bicycle to work or walk home instead of taking the bus.

Be the Tourist

You know your city like the back of your hand.  You know what restaurants you like, you know what clubs you like, and you know where you like to spend your time.  Forget all that.  Go to the bookstore and grab a guide for your city.  Look at all the things it suggests for tourists to do.  Now plan a day as if this was your first time in your city.  How would you want to spend it?  Museums, zoos, sporting events, and theater all wait to be rediscovered.  Avoid going anywhere you normally go.  Take tours of your city.  Strike up conversations with the other tourists and find out why they’ve come to town.  Ask them to share their favorite places, their discoveries, and use that to guide what you do for the day.

At times you may feel a bit foolish, but don’t let that stop you.  Live in the moment and experience the thrill of truly looking at a landmark building that you walk by and ignore everyday.

Food Exploration

When you can’t get away from the ordinary, you can bring the extraordinary to you through food.  Adventure in dining is well documented.  You can go to new restaurants all you want and that is great.  Greater adventure is in the preparation of the food.  This may start with a cookbook or a cooking show.  Maybe a friend has this great Swedish meatball recipe.  Whatever you use as a jumping off point, the idea is to learn how to cook a full meal of a culture foreign to you.

The process might include taking cooking classes or contacting clubs and service organizations associated with the culture for help in locating recipes, ingredients, and advice.  You can read how to make Irish soda bread all you want, but it is entirely different to actually make it with someone who has been making it for many years.  There is a lot to learn by studying someone’s technique first had.  You will feel like a true adventurer as you seek out specialty markets to find authentic ingredients.

New Skills

Adventure comes from breaking routine.  One of the easiest ways to break routine is to develop new skills.  Take those improv comedy classes, sign up for piano lessons, sit down with a book on figure drawing, or join a discussion group.  The idea here is to get you out of your daily routine.  It will force you to have new experiences, meet new people, and have completely different conversations.

Some other ideas of skills to explore are pottery and ceramics, gardening, writing workshops, and sewing.  Learning a new language is a fantastic way to break out of the mold of your daily life.  Even the same old conversation you have every day takes on a new level of excitement when spoken in a different language.

Adventure, as dictionaries define it, can be an exciting and unusual experience.  There is no reason why you can’t have an exciting and unusual experience every day of your life.