I seem to be in a moving pictures sort of mood today.
July 2012
Funky Live.
Completely live, here’s Leo Sayer with “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” from 1976. I remember listening to this song from the back seat of the ’71 Heavy Chevy.
And he did it without the ridiculous “in-ears” that folks on stage use these days. Yay for monitor speakers.
Weather.
The official National Weather Service forecast has announced a high of 84F today with 0% chance of precipitation.
Weather.com has announced a high of 83F today with 0% chance of precipitation.
The weather app on Microsoft’s Bing, after it’s three crashes to a blank screen, announced a high of 84F today with 0% chance of precipitation.
It’s raining.
Feet.
One of the more frustrating things about working at the office is that I have to wear pants. Now before you jump to any conclusions about my attire when I’m working at home, I have to tell you that I have always been a “shorts” kind of guy. I like wearing shorts, especially during these hot summer months, but I have been known to wear shorts during the winter as well. Shorts and a sweatshirt works well for me.
If I can’t wear shorts for whatever reason, I need to be barefooted. I drive back and forth to the office barefooted. I have heard that this is illegal in New York State (driving barefooted) but I don’t really know how the officer sitting in the median on the interstate, talking on his cell phone, is able to tell whether I am wearing shoes or not when I’m driving. So I break this supposed law and drive barefoot. It’s quite comfortable.
This is ironic, I suppose, because I tend to wear my jump boots when I’m wearing shorts. And wearing jump boots does not lend itself to being barefooted. But I like the way boots feel (not a sneakers guy at all). At work, where I need to wear pants, I wear my engineer boots. I love my jump boots and the thought of needing to replace them makes me a little sad.
My engineer boots are off right now, as I am sitting in the Jeep in the coveted shady spot while typing this. My feet are enjoying a sigh of relief.
When I first started working from home, I started out needing to wear shoes to feel focused. This necessity isn’t holding water anymore, because last week I worked at home whilst barefooted and I got a lot done. I do wear a shirt and shorts, though. I can’t imagine talking on a conference call while in my birthday suit. Not even on my birthday.
One of the things I absolutely love about my occasionally boot-cladded, sometimes barefooted feet is when I have the opportunity to enjoy a reflexology session by a skilled person good with feet. I had this a GREAT foot massage about a year ago in a mall outside of Denver. I think I might need to seek this out again (though getting to Denver might be pricey). I’m really big on massage. I wonder why I never looked into becoming a massage therapist. I know I enjoy getting massaged and I actually enjoy rubbing people (and seeing/feeling their energy as I am doing it).
It’s all about the energy. And that’s why I like being barefooted, so I am more grounded and closer to the energy of Mother Earth. When I am barefooted I tend to feel more free.
And then I ramble more.
Dreaming.
So this has been the first weekend of my new on-call routine as dictated by my realigned position at work. I still have the habit of comparing on-call experiences to what used to constitute my on-call routine with my old job (over two years ago). Whenever I hear a Motorola pager ring I still go into something that resembles a seizure before I throw the closest, heaviest object at a wall. Fortunately, not many people carry pagers these days. If they do, they’re probably on-call for the company I used to work at.
Not knowing how busy on-call would be, Earl and I kept it close to The Manor this weekend. Yesterday evening we ventured out to the nearby “beach” town of Sylvan Beach. This little village is situated on the eastern end of Oneida Lake. Oneida Lake is the largest inland lake within New York State and is kind of an orphan in that it’s not one of the Finger Lakes. When watching the sunset from Sylvan Beach it looks like a skinny ocean view, as the lake does reach out to the horizon.
We stopped at Eddie’s for dinner. This is your typical family restaurant affair and if memory serves correctly, a place my grandparents would go from time to time. Last night’s special was chicken and biscuits.
It was delicious.
Afterwards, Earl and I walked around the amusement area, played some skee ball and then walked up near the water.
I didn’t catch the scores in the photo. On the left I had reached 250, on the right, Earl had reached 190.
I liked the way this tree looked against the lake with the sun in the background.
The backside of the amusement park. Earl stops to take an Instagram photo.
Here’s a photo of a happy couple.
While we were in Sylvan Beach, we stopped at one of the store fronts that showed various real estate listings. We found a beautiful log cabin on 6 1/2 acres in the middle of the woods. It was a five bedroom cabin and looked relatively new. We found the place and took a gander. It’s a steal. We dreamed about it a bit and spent the rest of our ride talking about the logistics. It’s not close to anything that we need to be close to (as far as location goes) but it would be a nice getaway location.
It’s always good to dream.
Friday Dance Party.
This song always makes me dance. Here’s Kylie Minogue with “Get Outta My Way” from 2010.
Downtown.
All the good, shady spots near the Dunkin’ Donuts I visit at lunch time were taken. It seems there were a lot of people looking to hide out for their lunch hour, just like I tend to do. I wasn’t in the mood to broil in the sun nor did I want to sit in Dunkin’s eating area, so I decided to explore a bit and find some shade to relax in. I ended up in Downtown Johnstown, about three miles from work. I am sitting under the shade of a big maple tree on a side street. A historical marker proclaims “Site of the Residence of Matthias B. Hildreth. Served as Attorney General for the State of New York from 1808 to 1812.”
I like these historical markers that are scattered all over the Empire State. I wonder how many people read them, though. If you stop and take a few moments you can learn a few things about the area you’re currently in. I find this fascinating, because knowing our history helps us better understand our future.
Downtown Johnstown has a lot of big old houses and other old buildings scattered about. Kitty corner from where I am sitting is building proclaiming that it’s home to the Johnstown Eagles. As I type this, I know that I’ve heard of the Eagles fraternal organization but I have no idea as to what they actually do. I’ll have to hit up Wikipedia after I finish this blog entry. I know that I’ve had relatives that were Eagles, but I didn’t know what they did. I think there might have been beer involved but I could be completely off base on that.
Next door to the Eagles is another facility owned by the company I work for. It actually houses the “disaster recovery” location, as well as a few other office workers. It used to have over a hundred employees working in there, now it’s around a dozen. A co-worker once took me into the decommissioned datacenter in the basement. There’s a lot of old mainframe equipment and the like from the late 1970s to mid 1980s down there. I decided I was an old geek when I realized that my first geek gig was working on that exact same equipment (DEC VAXen, VAXstations, PDP-11s and the like). The first hard drive I changed out was the size of the freezer drawer on the new refrigerator at home. It was big at 20MB. The building itself is kind of nifty in that 50s/60s office building chic with the terrazzo floors and the like.
I really like the 50s and 60s “ranch” styles of home and businesses. Grandma and Grandpa Country’s house was a bigger ranch home custom designed and built in the late 1950s. Earl doesn’t really care for that design; the one floor plan tends to isolate folks that would otherwise be inclined to socialize during a gathering, but I think it’s a cool design. I even like the old Shell stations that were built in a ranch style. I often try to spot these during our travels.
Photo courtesy of Pleasant Family Shopping Blog.
I like old gas stations. I’ve asked for a classic (or current) Shell service man’s uniform shirt for my birthday, as Shell has always been my favorite of the service stations. I imagine it’ll be a difficult present to find.
Patriotic.
I bought these workout clothes in 1990 from International Male. I keep them around for patriotic occasions.
Independence.
So today is Independence Day in these fine United States and there will be much celebrating. 236 years ago some very smart people made some pretty bold declarations. Look how far we’ve come.
Many will celebrate the day by shooting off fireworks and enjoying picnics with friends and family. Hopefully the weather will hold out so that we can do the same. I know I look forward to cooking on the grill. It seems to be my thing this summer.
When I was a kid there would be a big family reunion on Independence Day. All the cousins and aunts and uncles and other folks on Grandma Country’s side of the family would get together for a picnic at my dad’s aunt’s (Grandma Country’s sister-in-law’s) house. She had a big barn where there might be a magic show performed by one of the distant cousins. There were two ponds. One was designated for fishing or we’d take the row boats out on the other small pond on the property. One of the row boats had a leak so one of the passengers in that boat was responsible for bailing out water continuously. We didn’t care though. We took turns.
One year my cousin Becky shoved my cousin Missy out of the boat that didn’t have the leak. It was an awesome Laura Ingalls-Nellie Olsen-in-the-mud-like moment. Missy wasn’t really like Nellie Olsen but she was blond and that made the comparison more lively. Becky had always had spunk and didn’t put up with much from anyone. There was mayhem on the shore when Missy landed in the pond but that’s what family reunions are about. Mayhem.
Another year one of the distant cousins announced during the festivities that he was gay. This created a lot of turmoil since this proclamation was made in the mid 70s or so. I don’t know if his wife at the time was in attendance or not. I remember asking my mom what that meant. She told me without hysterics in her voice. Looking back she was usually level headed about that stuff. She’d get much more hysterical if I did something like take the agitator out of the washing machine. I don’t know whatever happened to that cousin who came out in the mid 70s.
One year I rode my bike to the family reunion and I felt a big sense of accomplishment. The ride was only three or four miles in each direction but I felt that riding a three speed bike that distance at an elementary school age was rather impressive. That year someone had the idea that we head into town for a little while to attend the circus that was going on at the firemen’s field. I was pissed. I wanted to ride the boats on the pond. It was that year that I decided that I don’t really like clowns. They’re creepy. The clown at that circus smoked while he talked to the crowd. Stupid clown. I don’t remember much else about the circus. The distant cousin who came up with the circus idea wasn’t the gay one. Everything got back to normal when we were brought back to the picnic.
We are having a picnic today to celebrate Independence Day. The family gathering will be smaller, we don’t have pond for zesty cousins to shove others into but it’ll be an enjoyable gathering. I’m looking forward to it.
Madonna.
As a club and former radio dance-radio station DJ, as well as a man that is completely secure in my masculinity, I am not afraid to admit that I enjoy some Madonna music. I think it’s due to my age that I haven’t really enjoyed a lot of Madonna’s stuff since “Erotica” (with the exception of “Confessions on the Dance Floor”), but when I hear a track from the early Madonna days (before the turkey skin), I can usually be found at least tapping a toe or two.
Random fact: my father and I spent Christmas morning 1990 watching the videocassette single of “Justify My Love” together. I believe we were watching it for different reasons. Maybe not. Who knows actually, my father wasn’t the chatty type. He grinned a lot, though.
I have three favorite songs by Madonna, one of them not being “Vogue”, though it was my moves to “Vogue” that got me the paid gig dancing on a speaker in a bar in Boston where I got to keep at least some of my clothes on. As I type the latter half of this paragraph, I wonder if I have ever shared this story with anyone that I call family.
I digress.
My three favorite Madonna songs (god that makes me sound gay) in chronological order are:
1. Physical Attraction, from her first album called “Madonna”. I used to have a promotional-only copy of the radio edit of this song but it’s long gone to milk crate heaven. I don’t think there was ever an official video, but there’s a live version floating around on YouTube that’s kind of nifty.
2. Deeper and Deeper, from her album “Erotica”. I have always liked the song and I used to mix this into Robin S’s “Show Me Love” when I was a club DJ. In fact, doing that very thing the other night prompted me to write this blog entry. Another quick aside, for one second you can see Madonna’s former pal Sandra Bernhard in the video.
Sandra is not the one with curly hair.
3. Jump, from her album “Confessions On A Dance Floor”. Personally I enjoy the extended mix of this song (not remix, just a longer version) and I don’t think this track got the justice on the charts that it deserved. Maybe it’s because the video was boring.
Honestly, I’m more apt to listen to a country track or something on 70s on 7 or 80s on 8 before listening to Madonna these days, but once in a while it’s fun to spin these tunes up and tap my toe a bit.
