The clock that wouldn’t die

It’s at a famous French watchmaking institution that I got most of my education, so I watch timekeeping pieces like no ordinary person. In 2005, I noticed a cool looking atomic digital clock at a friend’s home in Reno and I bought the exact same one a couple of months later in January 2006, hanged it on our kitchen wall and loved it. 

Ever since, it gave us the absolutely exact time as well as displaying outdoor and indoor temperatures. The first problem occurred in 2018 when the clock stopped for no reason, but woke up after I slapped it. The incident repeated itself a few times in the interim and a few days ago as time changed from daylight saving, I removed the clock from the wall it was hanging, and it stopped.

Its LED screen dissolved from view never to reappear. So I repeated my previous routine like changing the batteries, pressing all the back buttons in various and different ways, before slapping it and then dropping the hapless clock on the floor but nothing woke it up. 

After a few minutes of this, I asked my wife to dump it into the garbage bin while I was ordering a replacement from Amazon. And the day went by… The following morning, I noticed the 3 AA batteries from the clock that I left on my desk and for no sensible reason thought “Let’s try once more”. 

I went to the garage, dove inside the large garbage bin, fished the clock, brought it to my office and re-installed the batteries, and… Bingo! The clock beeped and the screen reappeared as if by miracle. The device displaying the cold garage temperature was brought to life and soon thereafter after picking the atomic signal displayed almost the correct time, except for the new winter hour. 

This time, I kept the new clock that I’ve already received and now need to decide where in the house I should hang the 20+ year old clock... 

Embarking on immense projects (Part Two)

Is acceptance truly able to trigger difficult undertakings?" 

This sounds like a powerful principle of behavioral psychology and personal productivity. It means that acknowledging the reality of a hard task—including its stress, boredom, or complexity—is the precise spark needed to actually begin.

When we can stop fighting the idea of how difficult something will be, we free up the mental energy required to start doing it. I believe the way acceptance triggers action by defeating procrastination that’s rarely a time-management problem, but rather an emotional regulation problem. 

Accepting that a task will feel uncomfortable reduces our urge to avoid it. It also lowers our mental barrier and the layer of stress that goes with it, reducing that internal friction. As a result, it shifts the focus towards execution, shifting our brain from complaining to problem-solving. 

What’s needed to accept, is identifying and acknowledging explicitly the perceived discomfort. We need to convince ourselves that it will incredibly tedious, and not enjoyable, at least at first. We also need to accept that our initial progress might be messy or imperfect by giving us permission to build a terrible first draft just to get the momentum going. 

Finally, we need to focus exclusively on the smallest possible action required to initiate the work, such as doing a specific task no matter how small and insignificant it might seem. 

With that in mind, “At your marks, set, go!”

Embarking on immense projects (Part One)

An overwhelming endeavor is generally hard to apprehend and accept, depending on a person’s motivation and propensity to accomplish it. 

Sometimes, the commitment and the effort are totally optional and in some ways gratuitous, but in other situations they have to be handled no matter what comes in their way because there’s no other choice or no miraculous exit ramp.

In such cases accepting is the hardest and necessary part, because without it the unavoidable execution will have to be handled anyway, and if they is no acceptance at all, this will make the task that much more painful, difficult and interminable. 

Therefore acceptance is the key that opens the door to managing humongous, ugly tasks and bringing them to term in the best possible way while minimizing the harmful impact, and for me acceptance is the by-product of a challenge that I give myself by framing it within the terms and limitations of my skills, competence and reputation. 

It's just like “A guy like me should be able to achieve this…” This kind of triggers me into jumping into the task and hoping for the best possible outcome. Doubt and fear close doors, acceptance opens them wide… 

In a next blog we’ll see how this works.

Another Halloween in stats and video

We always hope to beat the previous year in terms of Halloween visitations, and this year was no exception. 

When all was said and done and it was time to lock our front door and turn off the lights, we managed to do better than last year by a small 5% margin, at least beating inflation. 

Seven groups added up to 21 visitors, just one more than last year and that compares to our best year (at our previous home location) with 82 youngsters in 2007 and just 12 in 2011. 

Sadly the Latina family chose not to show up with their kids, like they did last year, fearing Trump’s resurgent ICE raids by its barbaric force, and hopefully, next year this sad situation might improve somewhat. 

On the plus side, I included a short video to help you picture that very low key event at our home! 

Sölden post-mortem

Like many ski racing enthusiasts, I watch the recent opeing race in Sölden and while some think the Rettenbach slope is one of the most punishing on the circuit with gradients of up to 68% (approximately 34 degrees) on its steepest section, it’s quite brutal and, in my view, lacks the variety of sites like Adelboden or Alta Badia. 

The race starting at an altitude of 3,040 meters drops about 370 meters over a course length of nearly 1.2 kilometers. This "very long and steep ascent" is considered the key passage of the Rettenbachferner glacier. To break the monotony of the flat end-section, 2026 saw its profile further “enhanced” by deliberately modeling it three wave-like bumps. 

Without natural snowpack, the snow on the race course was praised for being in excellent condition. This was achieved through a massive logistical effort involving 60,000 m³ of snow stockpiled from the previous spring and preserved over the summer using the "snow farming" method allowing to keep 70 to 80% of the stored snow over the summer. 

That old snow, combined with high-performance snowmaking systems activated by a cold spell, created a "compact and race-ready base" with an "ideal snow surface". The result was the hard, icy, and consistent racing surface required for a fair World Cup race. This said, it was hard to shy away from the view of the Rettenbach Glacier looking "unusually brown" just before the races, with the prepared piste looking like a narrow white ribbon in a barren landscape. 

Whatever snow was there was ultimately tested by difficult and rapidly changing weather on race day, which became a major story-line for pundits as the women's GS was delayed by 30 minutes due to snow and wind on the glacier, setting a chaotic tone for the day. 

Then the race became a battle not just against the clock, but against the elements, with a changing weather becoming a decisive factor in the race outcome. Mikaela Shiffrin, who led after the first run, encountered fog and increasingly dark conditions in her second run. 

Meanwhile, Paula Moltzan who won the day, caught a crucial break of sunlight, allowing her to ski a flawless second run and take the victory. Shiffrin later admitted, "It was tough, you can say that, this second run... It was getting darker and darker on the course". I didn’t particularly enjoyed the race, but based on the press articles I read, I must have been the only one!

The Nobel Prize Committee doesn’t get it

Unanimously, it seems, Norway is recognized as a highly developed, first-world nation with one of the highest standards of living, strongest social safety nets, and largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. In spite of that reality, Donald Trump begs to differ. 

Last Sunday, at a rally in Michigan, he characterized that county as a "shithole", like he likes to name countries he abhors. 

That name-calling began in 2018 when in an Oval Office meeting on immigration, Trump contrasted nations he described as "shithole countries" with Norway, asking why the US didn't have more immigrants from places like Norway (though he had previously praised Norway's economy and trade relations). 

Perhaps he was already fishing for his coveted Nobel Prize. 

Fast forward to Sunday October 25 when suddenly Norway, the “shithole” opposite, conveniently fell into that colorful category, following the decision by the independent Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to a South African jurist. 

It’s amazing how things change fast with Trump, how unpredictable the man is, and therefore how mentally troubled he must be. Someone should finally teach him what peace means, what good judgment is, and that one catches many more flies with honey than vinegar.

Handling repulsive projects…

We all have projects that haunt us — tasks we know must be done, that nag at us every time we walk past them, yet somehow remain untouched. They sit there like silent judges, reminding us of our ingrained procrastination. 

In my case, recently, it was a set of home repairs — complicated, multi‑stage, time‑consuming. Every time I saw them, I felt a mix of guilt and irritation. I could hire someone, of course, but I also knew I could do it myself, if only I could get past the psychological barrier. 

The first trick I use is simple: I stop avoiding the task and look it straight in the eye. I remind myself that if I consider myself competent, then this is exactly the kind of thing I should be able to handle. It’s a gentle but firm form of self‑accountability if not self-shaming. 

The second tool that comes to my mind is the salami technique: slice the project into thin, manageable pieces. A task that feels impossible in its entirety becomes surprisingly doable when broken into small, self‑contained steps. And then I remember Lao Tzu’s old wisdom: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

That line has become my trigger. Once I take that first step — even a tiny one — the project loses its power over me. That’s how I finally began tackling the repairs I had dreaded for so long. In the end, repulsive projects aren’t defeated by willpower alone. 

They yield when we stop avoiding them, but begin to tame them by breaking them into slices, and taking that first small step. Once I did that, the project I had loathed for months finally began to move — not because it became easier, but because I finally stopped letting it intimidate me.