On the evening of Monday, March 1, a poor guy in Montesano Washington crashed his car into a power pole, but escaped without injury. After he called his friends for a ride, he decided to relieve himself in the ditch when he accidentally urinated on the downed power line he didn’t see on the ground, electrocuting himself in the process.

The more I thought of how many unlucky things had to happen in sequence for this to happen, I came up with image:

It has since been determined that the man only touched the power line, causing the fatal electrocution, and only happened to be urinating at the time. That latest information would, of course, proportionally increase the size of the Murphy’s Law circle while decreasing the size of the Darwin’s Theory circle. That is, if this were in any way scientific.

Ever had one of those “permanent earplugs” kind of days? Yeah, me too.

I have no idea what happened to me during the night. Whatever it was, I woke up with a strangely-deep appreciation for the simpler things.

Saturday’s time was spent in between a second birthday party for the child of a family friend, an organic, humanely-raised turkey tasting at Whole Foods, a nap, and then a viewing of Food Inc., the new-ish food documentary. Nothing groundbreaking I guess, but maybe it was just a day spent at a low-enough intensity level that my brain had a chance to recharge.

Maybe it was the fact that I was only on a computer long enough to figure out what I had done to hose this rarely-updated blog, time on the iPhone Twitter application notwithstanding. Perhaps it was that I managed to get about twice as much sleep yesterday as I normally do. Or maybe its the delightfully low-tech Moleskine pocket notebook I bought the other night that have been itching to start using.

Whatever it is, I feel like I have a new perspective on things, a much simpler one.

I went to a coffee shop and didn’t immediately plug in the laptop and get online. Rather, I sipped my coffee, enjoyed a danish and talked to the people sitting around me. I noticed with an abnormal acuity the stress level of the folks around who were having problems getting online, or finding a seat near a power outlet. Yes, I’m on my laptop now, but using WriteRoom, it’s retro green-text-on-black singularity almost calming.

I changed my default web browser back to Safari from Firefox. Sure, I’ll still use it for web testing, but for personal browsing, why shouldn’t I use the one that gives me the best personal experience? Do I really need fifteen plug-ins and a host of add-ons to read the web sites I go to? Not really.

Perhaps the rest of the day will be set aside for a drive in the beautiful Phoenix Fall weather, or a good healthy meal and time spent in the yard.

Either way, I’ll leave my list of work projects for tomorrow.

Cleaning out some seldom-visited areas on my laptop in preparation for a clean system install, I came across an illustration I did a couple of years ago. Meet Jitters:

The fact that July 2009 Is going down in history as the hottest month ever in Phoenix may have had something to do with this picture. I’m just saying.