I just turned on the lamp on my nightstand. It has a new, natural daylight bulb in it. This bulb is suppose to simulate the natural light of the sun and make me feel alive and refreshed. The bulb also cost $29.
I am blogging in the morning so I guess I feel more energized. Though if I were to replace all the bulbs in the house with this cleaner LED technology, complete with energizing zip, we’d have to remortgage the house. Then I wouldn’t feel as much pep as I do right now.
Today is one of those days where I want to ‘escape’. My mind is focused on far off locations and stuck on two particular songs: “Meet Me In Montana” by Marie Osmond & Dan Seals and “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes.
Neither songs really fit my mindset; I’m not a female country star wannabe turned down by the folks in Nashville and I don’t have an ad running in a personal column inviting someone not into yoga to join me on the dunes to escape. However, they both talk about getting away somewhere and I find comfort in these thoughts.
The need to escape is not compounded by a bad mood today. To the contrary, my mood is actually quite good and I’m smiling for the most part, it’s just that there’s a ton of little things that are bugging me and quite frankly I’m feeling smothered. Yesterday I had a lunch meeting with some important people at work. I appreciated the gesture very much, but I need to recharge my batteries at lunch time by hiding out in the Jeep in a parking lot and just focusing on something, anything, other than what I have been focusing on all morning. I’m a loner at heart, and there’s only one person that can occupy that space with me when I want to be alone and I’m married to him and he’s in Buffalo for work right now. So instead I sit in the Jeep alone and write little ditties such as this blog entry. I’ve mentioned before that sometimes this blog is used as a form of therapy in conjunction with being a creative outlet. Today I guess I’m leaning heavier on the former.
One of the things that I have been thinking about this morning, amongst all the meetings that I’ve been in and/or led, is the fact that I am rather a shy person when you meet me in person. I seem quite loud and boisterous here on the blog. Surprisingly, some find me rather outgoing, and I am once I latch onto you in some way, but for the most part I’m rather shy about uncertain situations or meeting people that I don’t know. I’m conscious of my rambly/stammery speech pattern that seems to be getting worse as I get older. I often picture the facts of a conversation going into my head and then falling through the holes of this swiss cheese brain of mine. I’m very confident in my lack of confidence in these two areas, if that makes any sense and being aware of this all makes me reserved or shy.
I guess I’m complicated.
I’m trying to get over being complicated and just dealing with whatever personality quirks and eccentricities I have. Now that I think about it, I think I’d like to try with some alone time with my best beau, either sipping a Piña Colada or in the mountains of Montana.
Or both.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
This is my second attempt at this blog entry. Alas, blogpress is still a woefully horrible app on the iPad. Unfortunately, it’s the only one that has any sort of decent functionality when using the Bluetooth keyboard.
I like taking photos. I like taking photos of the ordinary things or to a further extent, things that most people don’t notice. The problem with taking photos is that I am lazy. While Apple provides a decent amount of “ease of use” through iPhoto, iCloud syncing and the like, their software just doesn’t feel intuitive to me. I find it somewhat clunky. It’s trying to do too much for my needs.
Enter Adobe Carousel.
Adobe Carousel is a subscription based service and application that syncs your photos between your Mac and iDevices. It has some of the niceties of Photoshop Elements and Lightroom built into it and more importantly, it syncs over both WiFi and 3G. This is important when you’re a blogger that likes to spend time on the road. At $59.99/year or $5.99/month (introductory prices that are going up at the beginning of the year), I find the amount of cash laid out to be worth what I’m getting: simplicity.
I’ll probably be taking more photos and sharing them here.
I find myself most inspired on my morning commute. There are so many times that I want to stop and take a photo but I don’t have enough time or the laziness of syncing and all that kicks in. I have resolved to leave for work at least five minutes earlier starting today. Hopefully, this will give me time to engage in the inspiration that strikes me.
This morning I found the sunrise photo worthy. A good sunrise always puts a smile on my face, so I snapped this photo:
The second thing that contributed to my smile was the unseasonably warm temperatures:
The third thing of this smile trifecta was the fact that Earl and I made the cut last night.
It’s not often that I start my work week with a big smile on my face, but being creative has put a smile where there isn’t usually one early on a Monday morning.
The change is not unpleasant.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
So today I went on an impromptu road trip. Earl is out of town with Jamie and Scott is out of town doing his thing and it was such a beautiful day I decided that I needed to go drive some back roads. I headed towards the western Catskills. The reason for this direction was simple; I had heard that the last traffic light on NY Route 17, the Quickway and the Southern Tier Expressway which goes from near New York City to the Pa. border near Erie, Pa., had been removed. I wanted to see what they had done to remove the last light, which was at exit 98 (Parksville/Cooley). I confirmed that the light has been removed by way of relocating the roadway to the southern side of the lighted intersection, resulting in a nifty bypass that goes up over the mountain. Exit 98 is now just marked Parksville.
Getting to this intersection was an adventure. As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy riding over the back roads, especially roads that have been replaced by expressways. New York State has recently marked several “Scenic Byways”, one of them being Scenic Byway Route 20. Route 20 crosses the state at it’s midsection (part of US Route 20 that goes from Boston to the west coast) and I was delighted to see that they had posted “Scenic Byway ALT Route 20”, which follows the original Route 20 before they made parts of it four-lane in the 50s.
I didn’t even know that existed!
Back when I was a kid my dad would take us for Sunday drives and try to get me lost. 95% of the time I knew where we were and could get us home. Today I tried to get myself lost by just randomly turning at roads that were not marked as a dead end. I finally found myself in the isolated village of Walton. From there I made my way down to the aforementioned Route 17, checked out the bypass and then headed westward, following the original alignment of Route 17 (which isn’t really marked that well) all the way to Binghamton. I just started my second tank of gas for the trip and have stopped at Panera for a bite to eat before heading home. I’m still trying to figure out which way I’m going to go to get home, because I know the roads between Binghamton and home pretty well, but I don’t think I want to approach it randomly and find myself in the middle of nowhere at midnight.
One thing about riding the back roads (and some dirt roads in the process) is that the gas mileage in the Jeep is fantastic. Highway driving actually kills the gas mileage of my beloved Rubicon, it’s a good thing that I have such an affinity for the back roads.
And back to our regularly scheduled program… After 24 hours of dealing with a security issue here on the web server, things seem to be buttoned down and ready to go.
It was weird not being able to write a blog entry at lunch today. I had to spend the lunch hour cleaning up files that had been hacked.
I’m still not comfortable with things because I haven’t figured out how the hacker got into my blog, but at least things are cleaned up.
So it is shortly before 5:00 p.m. and it is getting quite dark out. This is what happens at this time of year. I like it. A lot. But I can hear the whining from other folks that wish the daylight was around farther into the evening.
It has been a good, relaxing weekend. So good, that last night I decided that I would try to freeze time.
Hats off to those that know why I was trying this particular method in my efforts to freeze time.
Earl and I enjoyed a relaxing ride yesterday, too much food, a walk along Onondaga Lake and a wonderful visit with my sister.
We even made it to the North Country, where we ended the night with a wonderful dessert at a locally owned truck stop near the main gate of Fort Drum. My choice of dessert was homemade strawberry shortcake, which was made properly using homemade biscuits instead of sponge cake. Earl had apple pie a la mode that curiously cost $4.44. The strawberry shortcake was $4.95. As far as I’m concerned it was worth its weight in gold.
I decided not to listen to the news/talk stations on the way into work this morning. Usually I tune into Sirius/XM’s POTUS, “Politics of the United States, for the people of the United States”, but I can listen to Herman Cain stammer and stutter his way through changing his story about the sexual abuse allegations so many times before I want to barf. For someone that has claimed that he’s not like other politicians, he sure is trying his best to spin his way out of this latest political bru-ha-ha. The ironic thing is, when I showed Earl the recent ad he released, the one where his chief of staff smokes and Herman himself looks at the camera and then smiles devilishly, I remarked to Earl that he looked “sexually creepy”. Like stalker creepy.
From the reports that have been lighting up the air waves lately it sounds like my assessment wasn’t too far off base. How’s the sanctity of marriage and holier-than-thou thing working for you, Mr. Cain?
Here I have devoted two paragraphs to what I wasn’t listening to. I must have been distracted.
So as I avoided the Herman Cain buzz, I opted to listen to 70s on 7 and 80s on 8. I tried to listen to that new Studio 54 channel but as a club DJ I was taught that you NEVER play a 12-inch single in it’s entirety, and that’s exactly what the Studio 54 channel is doing. I miss, I love France Joli’s “Come To Me”, but the 15 minute version of the song wears thin on even the most jovial of us. Marimba solos rock, but not at that great length.
Flipping between the two decades I listened to great gems such as “I Saw The Light” by Todd Rundgren and more importantly, “They Don’t Know” by Tracey Ullman. I especially enjoy the latter tune, it’s retro sound even back then is spot on when it comes to the vocals being in tune with the backing track. The “baby” at the end of the bridge is actually sampled from the original version of the song by Kristy MacColl (Kristy sings backup on Tracey’s version) and the video is awesome, especially the gong guy at the beginning, the cameo by Paul McCartney and Tracey’s varying looks, including one part where she uncannily resembles Gloria, a woman my mother hung out with right around the time this song came out.
So I ended up working late tonight. I got home about 45 minutes beyond my usual time. Earl had asked earlier in the day if I would be interested in going to the movies tonight, I guess the remake of “Footloose” is out, and I declined, knowing that I would be tired from work. Truth be known, I’m not really interested in seeing “Footloose”, especially because it’s a remake and I don’t recall being particularly fond of the original version of the movie. I think the lively sounds of “Holding Out For A Hero” combined with a tractor fight threw me off or something. Anyways, Earl and Jamie went to the movie and Scott is working tonight.
What to do, what to do, what to do on Halloween.
I decided that I was in the mood to throw on a costume and walk through the mall like I mentioned in the previous post. I decided to wear an Army uniform I have from a while back.
Now I have two rules when it comes to wearing a costume: 1. It has to look authentic and 2. it has to be respectful (if the costume lends itself to be respectful). To look authentic in the Army uniform I couldn’t have a beard, so I looked up the regulations about facial hair and shaved my beard into a regulation mustache (wow, they are a pain in the ass to trim without looking like Hitler, no wonder not a lot of soldiers have them). Now to be respectful, since I’ve never served as a soldier and all, I made sure that there was no indication of rank on the uniform since I’ve never earned rank. I guess that was my way of honoring the soldiers that had done their duty.
My first stop was Barnes and Noble to see if Scott was around, apparently he was off doing things that managers do at Barnes and Noble but I did notice that quite a few people in the café looked my way when I walked by. A couple of the other customers were in costume and there was a lovely girl in full wiccan garb working the customer service desk. I hung around for a few minutes before leaving.
I didn’t think it would be prudent to stop at the showing of “Footloose” to show Jamie and Earl my costume, so I opted to go to the mall, where there was trick or treating in progress with a few adults and kids dressed up for the occasion. I went to Subway and picked up a healthy dinner. From there I ate and then headed back home.
And that’s how my Halloween went.
Here’s a mirror shot for your enjoyment.
Tomorrow is the first of November, which is fund-raising month dubbed “Movember”, an effort to raise awareness and donations for Men’s health issues such as prostate cancer. Men all over the world are encouraged to start the month clean shaven and grow a mustache and garner donations in the process. Now, because of vanity, I can’t bear to be completely clean shaven, but I have decided to foster my support by keeping just the mustache for Movember instead of growing back the beard right away.
If you would like to donate to and/or find out more about Movember, please click here.
So today is Halloween. It is your typical Halloween here in these parts, with a chance of snow flurries in the evening but otherwise a crisp, magical breeze blowing through what’s left of the leaves on the trees.
The folks at work planned a costume contest for this morning, but I’ve only seen one person in costume and I wasn’t quite sure if she was really in costume or not since she often has her own brand of attire. Today she is wearing what looks like a Witch’s hat wrapped in a Christmas tree skirt, with lots of frilly things cascading down. It might have been her winter hat for all I know, because it was quite chilly today. She also dons her car in reindeer antlers and the like for Christmas so it’s kind of hard to decipher what’s going on sometimes. I like her spirit.
On one hand dressing up in a costume at work seems like it could be fun but on the other hand it smacks against my own personal work ethic. Plus, I still have memories of being some sort of roller skating beach bum in high school and losing control going down the ramp between the hallway and the cafeteria and wiping out a dozen or so students carrying lunch trays. That was fun, even when I got yelled at by a guidance counselor. It’s funny how these things stick with us through our adulthood.
I briefly considered dressing up for work in a respectful and tasteful yet scantily manner and insisting on being referred to under my porn alias of Tater O’Plenty, but I’m not sure I want to share that much information or skin with my co-workers. At least not face to face. So today I am dressed in my civilian clothes.
I wasn’t really feeling like going out to Halloween parties this past weekend, but Earl and I drove through the hopping college town of Oswego on Saturday night and there were a lot of people in costume roaming the cold, windy streets at 11:00. They looked like they were having fun. I have to admit that I might dress up tonight (but not as Tater O’Plenty) and go to the store in costume or something just because I can get away with it.
Once in a while it’s kind of fun to be someone else.
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.
Weird? Eccentric!
