I walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts near work today for my usual lunch hour routine. There have been several new additions to the staff of this particular store, but for the most part it is populated with the usual folk behind the counter. I made a pit stop in the wash room and then went to the counter to order my usual large, unsweetened iced tea with lemon. The girl that is the most attentive to my needs was working behind the counter.
Ok, now here’s a couple of things that tell me that working from home has distracted from my relationship with the Dunkin’ Donuts folks.
1. The girl behind the counter is now quite pregnant. I don’t know where that came from. Well, I know where it came from but how did it happen so quickly? Well, they probably hope it didn’t happen quickly, especially that night, because quick isn’t always good, but you know what I mean.
2. No one behind the corner could recall my order from memory. They knew it had something to do with iced tea but there was a controversy with lemon participation.
3. No one noticed my lack of facial hair.
This is my tragedy of the moment.
On the bright side, I refrained from offering congratulations on the girl’s pregnancy because sometimes the bump in the belly isn’t a baby but just an overindulgence of whoppers or something and I don’t want to repeat the mistake I made way back in 1990 when I congratulated a woman who wasn’t pregnant but instead had enjoyed too many large sandwiches from Papa Gino’s.
My dad had the habit of calling me up and starting the conversation with a complete random fact from days gone by. I would answer the phone, “Hello?” and he would say something like, “Remember the time we were loading hay in the Four Story and your mother got caught in the manure and fell down when she forgot to let go of the hay bale when she threw it on the elevator?”
Yeah, he was funny like that. He always referred to mom, who, of course, was his wife at the time, as “Your Mother”. The best part of these conversations is that I have completely and unabashedly inherited his memory for crazy details and the like. I could totally relate. And god help me, I can see me calling people up and having a similar conversation when I get old.
I was thinking about this whole thing this morning as I was out for my pre-sunrise walk. As I trucked my body up the steep hill that our road winds up, all of a sudden I had a flash of memory of being in fifth grade and thinking I was so smart because I figured out why two classrooms in our elementary school had two doors instead of one. I don’t know why this random factoid popped into my head but there it was. By the way, said rooms were Rooms 209 and 211, which used to be part of the high school. The part of the room with a “back door” used to be a separate departmental chair office. And that’s why they had a separate light switch and extra clocks in the store room.)
Yep, complete geek even in elementary school.
Anyways, remembering this made me a little sad because I miss those random facts from my father and when I remember this sort of thing, I have no one to confirm these facts with. I guess the fact that I even remember these sort of things means that he’s still hanging around somehow.
Earl is in Memphis for the week for work-related stuff. He left very early on Monday morning and is scheduled to return on Thursday evening.
Even though we have been doing this sort of thing for over 16 years, there is a large part of me that will never get used to not having my husband around for days on end. It’s a necessary part of his job, and undoubtedly I’ll be traveling for work next year, so I get that it just comes with the territory. But with that being said, I’ll never get used to it.
Thank goodness for technology. We can Skype and text and talk and chat, but only during his breaks!
Earl and I were out for a ride on Saturday afternoon when he asked me one question.
“Will you stop drinking pop?”
I have to admit that this question kind of surprised me. It’s not something that I would expect to come out of his mouth; he has drank diet Pepsi and the like right along side me for years. I have noticed over the past week or so that he had stopped drinking pop and had opted for water or unsweetened iced tea when eating out.
I asked him what brought this question on and he talked about a conversation he had been part of at one of his last company meetings. The subject was about the dangers of artificial sweeteners and the effects they have on the body. Mentions of memory impairment, bloating and the like were reminders of things that I had read in the past. It’s good to be reminded of these things.
Because he asked me this simple question, I had a simple answer: “Yes.”
And like that, I’m done drinking pop.
This spurred a reassessment of my eating and exercising habits and made me realize that I need to start living healthy again. So, for the 87,123rd time in my 44 years, I’m trying to live healthier. I was up at 5:15 a.m. (it means more to me when I refer to it as 0515 ET) and walking and jogging under the stars of the twilight. I had the opportunity to see the sun rise this morning and it was beautiful. I started the by making one step towards exercising in the morning: I now charge my iPad downstairs, off the nightstand and away from my grasp. I’ve had the habit of grabbing my iPad and reading in the morning for 30 minutes or so before hitting the shower. That’s not a very productive way to start the day. Getting up and out of bed to work out is much more productive and I’m feeling better for it today.
So, while I have given up pop completely and without question, I am also trying to be more motivated about my health in general.
It is Friday and I am working from home today. To keep everything in the spirit of my typical lunch time activities, I went down to the local Dunkin’ Donuts and treated myself to a sandwich on a french roll and a large, unsweetened iced-tea with lemon. Oh, I added a side of hash browns. They’re not quite tots but they’ll suffice.
In order to enjoy some lunch time sunshine with this little lunch, I decided to take my impromptu picnic to the local park, which is officially called The Lock 20 Canal State Park. Lock 20 is situated along the Barge Canal, which stretches right across the waist line of New York State, from the Capital District to the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area. The Barge Canal is the big brother of the older Erie Canal. Lock 20 is seeing some traffic as I enjoy my lunch hour; there is a boat being raised up in the lock as we speak. They must be heading west because the water level is higher in that direction. There’s a dog barking on the boat, he or she must be sensing that something is going on and they want to talk about it.
I am enjoying this relaxing time during the last lunch hour of the work week and I am eagerly anticipating the weekend. We have plans to go to the New York State Fair after work tonight. We always enjoy the fair, though it’s a reminder that summer is winding down.
As I sit here enjoying my lunch hour I’m watching an elderly couple have a picnic. The older man and woman got themselves situated at a picnic table in a shady spot and then the woman came back and decided to sit in their SUV, leaving the man at the picnic table. I’m a little bit curious about that.
I’m not the only one sitting here working on an iPad or laptop. There’s a couple of other folks doing the same at other picnic tables in shady spots. This seems to be a common practice on beautiful days like today.
Perhaps I should do this more often. We forget that this park is down here, sometimes.
Update: I’m trying to include a little map of our adventures in case you ever want to seek the same spot out on your own someday.
The original wallpaper that came with Windows XP was inspired by Bill Gates’ childhood. He wanted something that reminded folks of laying back in a field and watching the clouds go by.
I totally get that. I’m kind of enjoying sitting in the Jeep and watching the clouds go by today during my lunch hour. I’m accompanying it all with one song on repeat. Naturally, it’s “Follow Your Bliss” by The B-52s. I’d share a video of the track with you, but the Verizon Wireless connection near work today is just awful.
So there’s two days left in my ‘Stache On-‘Stache Off campaign to raise money for the Ali Forney Center, an organization helping homeless LGBT youth in New York. Right now, the bucket for ‘Stache ON has more money in it. On Friday night, whatever bucket has the most money will determine the fate of my mustache. If ‘Stache On has more money, I’ll keep it through the end of the year. If ‘Stache Off has more money, the mustache goes for a few weeks and will be replaced by a smaller ‘stache (or beard) of more reasonable proportions. And of course, all proceeds go to the Ali Forney Center, which is actually the reason for doing all of this, because I believe that we all agree that no one deserves to be homeless.
Tonight is my third attempt at trying out Windows 8 on my laptop. Since the developer preview version is out and I have a spare laptop for this sort of thing, I decided to give Windows 8 a whirl again. After all, the third time is a charm, right?
I think I’m too smart for my own good.
One of the things that I need to remember is that even though this is Windows, it doesn’t behave like Windows, it behaves like a mobile phone I’ve never used before. From my earlier attempts at using Windows 8, I am lucky to remember that you fling your mouse off the right hand side of the screen (either corner, actually) to get something called ‘Charms’ to appear. The charm in the middle is the start menu. When you click that, or press the Windows flag button on your keyboard, you’ll get big lego blocks that have information rotating about in them. These big things replace icons. You click them and magic happens. The magic involves your screen waving around as anything you were working on disappears and then the new application presents itself full screen. It’s a lot like the iPad when it comes to multitasking; you’re not going to do it.
If you want to search for something, there’s no search button or key, you just start typing while the lego blocks are displayed. If you want to go to the desktop, you click “Desktop” and that brings up something that looks like a cheaper version of the Windows 7 Desktop, but it’s so cheap that you don’t get a Start Menu ball down in the corner. You’ll need to keep flinging that mouse to the right to bring up the charms, which will then bring up the lego blocks. So if you want to open, say Skype for example, you fling the mouse to the right and click start, which will cause the desktop to go away, and then just randomly start typing “Skype”, which will then bring a lego block with the Skype logo on it and then you click on the block. The blocks then go away and you’re back to the Desktop and Skype will open and complain about “fonts” being called “font”.
I’m not making this up.
Soon you’ll discover that flinging your mouse to the upper left hand corner will give you a picture of the last application you had opened but flinging your mouse off the left side of the screen will bring up pictures of all the applications you have open so you can move to another one, HOWEVER, if the application is open on the desktop you just go to the “desktop” window which makes the blocks disappear and the start menu taskbar without the start menu appear. Then you can pick the small icon of the program you want to go to.
NOW. If you want to shut down your computer, you go to settings by just randomly typing “Settings” at a lego block. OH! I did figure out that when you have pictures of all the applications you have running along the left side of your screen you can right click on them and it will ask you if you want to snap left, snap right or close. I did three snaps in Z-formation GURL! That wasn’t an option but I threw it in there for kicks.
I think it’ll be easier once everyone has their grubby little hands all over their screen and you can actually touch the blocks and move them around.
Honestly, I can see the direction that Microsoft is going with this “shift in paradigm” (I love big words) with Windows 8. They’re heading towards my always coveted dream of being able to take a presentation on your laptop and swiping it up to the presentational board in a conference room. It’s not quite like a Bewitched-like magic move but it would still be uber awesome. (I don’t know how to put the umlaut over the ‘u’ in uber). I LOVE the vision of the future that Microsoft is working towards, I just hope it’s not as rocky of a road as it seems it’s going to be getting there.
Because this Windows 8 experience, though it has not ended with the completion of this blog entry, is making me reach for my iPad. Very quickly.
For a palette cleanser, here’s what Microsoft sees us doing with technology in 2019.
Today the world lost one of the first ladies of comedy. At 95, Phyllis Diller passed on from this life. Reports say she died peacefully in her sleep with a smile on her face. I hope she’s entertaining on the other side and punctuating it all with her inimitable laugh.
Rest In Peace, Phyllis. You’re definitely one of a kind and you will be missed.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
