Ponderings and Musings

So I am on my way to a weekend adventure with our friends Jeff and Mark in Durham, N.C.  On my way to the airport, I came to the realization that I hadn’t had any lunch and that I would probably not get much to eat in between here and there, as eating on a plane is usually limited to a bag of peanuts and half a can of diet pop. On the bright side, since I’m taking two flights to get from here to there, I will manage to squeeze in a full can of pop by adding the two half-cans of pop from each flight together.

And they say math is difficult.

In many areas of the country there are interesting restaurants and the like near the airport of said destination. In Syracuse it’s a different story. Syracuse Airport is actually near the Village of North Syracuse and while there’s a lot of chain restaurants in the area, nothing that I would really call “nice” comes to mind immediately. I decided to indulge my curiosity and gives these new “Satisfries” a try at the Burger King closest to the airport.  I remember this location from my childhood when it was actually a Carrols¹, but it’s a Burger King now and it’s been there for a long time.

Upon entering the restaurant I noticed a warning sign on the door that proclaimed no videography or still photography was allowed in the restaurant. I think this sort of thing is kind of bogus and I was a rebel, because I noticed that a group of people had just left a HUGE mess in the dining area.  

Now, I think that I’m a pretty responsible citizen of the United States (rebellious photography notwithstanding) and for the life of me I can not figure out how anyone could leave a public place in such a state and not give any care about it. This is mind boggling to me and such activity only leaves me to be seriously concerned about our society as a whole.

So I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich (hold the mayo!) and the new Satisfries. They smelled and looked like fries, albeit krinkle-kut fries instead of the usual shoestring fries that Burger King serves (I think).  I’m thinking the krinkle-kut approach is so they can tell the difference in the fryer, but that’s just me.

The first thing I noticed about the fries is that if you like salt, you’re going to love these because they are really salty. Like, the way salty fries used to be before people cared about sodium and all that. I liked that, though my blood pressure probably doubled in the process. As far as fat content and coatings and all that stuff, I couldn’t really discern a difference from regular fries and I suppose that was the intent. Other than the krinkleness of the fries, they seemed like good ol’ unhealthy fast food fries.

After watching a very large woman make her way to the self-serve drink station not once but TWICE with a 32-oz cup, and watching her fill said cup with regular coke², I finished my meal, made my way around the mess in the dining room and headed for the airport.

I was barely in the airport ten minutes later when I was making a bee-line (not the Florida tollroad) to anything that resembled a toilet. I didn’t care if it was unisex, no sex, all sex or a potted plant, but I needed to use the rest room. Immediately. I found this curious as I had done my business at home before leaving for this little journey, so I’m thinking the Satisfries did something to my digest system. Or it could have been the premium chicken (hold the mayo). Or it could have been the fact that I ate at Burger King at all, since I tend to avoid that sort of thing nowadays. 

I felt much better 10 minutes later.

Did I find the Satisfries satisfying? At the time of consumption, yes I did. However, based on my one experience with these, if you’re going to eat these things, I would suggest that you plan your rest stops accordingly.

Best of luck and bon appetit.

¹ The Carrols brand is still alive and well in Helsinki and I have actually considered flying there to see if the fast food there is as good as I remember it being when I was a child.

² I really struggle with the revenue model implemented by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) when I see people blatantly making poor health choices and then the entire population ends up paying for these poor health choices. While I believe that everyone is entitled to health care, I believe that people need to be accountable for their own actions. I don’t have a solution to the problem, so I don’t wretch about it too loudly, but I don’t think that any of the legislated or proposed ideas fulfill the need adequately. I think a societal shift is in order and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

So at work we have this internal communications tool called Microsoft Lync. It’s an Instant Messaging platform offered through the company’s Office 365 subscription and has replaced the multiple and makeshift platforms we were using before (some of us were on AOL, some on Yahoo, some on an internal Jabber server, etc.)

As a telecommuter I feel that it’s important to have Lync up and running at all times. This keeps me connected to my peers and it lets people know my current status: whether I’m at my computer or not, whether I’m in a meeting or not, etc.

While Lync is wonderful for impromptu and quick conversations, I have to admit that I often feel like this as more and more Lync windows open up on my MacBook screen. (Video may be loud and contain salty language).

So earlier this month I wrote that I was going to do a 30-day challenge, as inspired by Matt Cutts from Google in his TED talk from a while back. My personal challenge was to be a little more outgoing: I would try to steer clear of my shyness and, as the opportunity presented itself, I would talk to someone I wouldn’t normally talk to. I desired to be a little more outgoing.

Here it is 30 days later and I have to say that this first 30-day challenge was mostly a success. This month I struck up a conversation with a bartender at a bar, complimented a woman in an elevator on her lovely dress, smiled at strangers more and pulled myself up by my pant strings and openly participated in a seminar full of strangers, a scenario where I would normally be content sitting in the corner and just drinking it all in.

You know what? I feel good about these little things I did under the guise of this challenge and I think I’m just a little bit better for reevaluating my life in this way and addressing this. This is something that I’m going to continue in my everyday life. So if I come up to you and start chatting, even though we’ve never met in person or something, don’t be surprised.

Tomorrow starts another month and I’m going to try another 30 day challenge. My focus is going to be focus. I need to focus on some key areas in my life: my career and work responsibilities, my healthy living goals and on some extracurricular projects I have going on. One of the ways that I’m thinking I’m going to tackle this is by ramping way back from Facebook.

I am active in primarily three social networks, in descending order of usage levels: Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Twitter keeps me in touch with what’s going on in the world. I get a lot of my political information via Twitter and while I might not tweet a lot on some days, I do read quite a bit on Twitter and I try to keep on top of my timeline.

Google+ is where I gather information and debate the tech world. Google+ can be hostile towards Apple folks at times, but aside from that annoying aspect there are a lot of interesting people over there.

Facebook consumes a lot of my online time but I can’t tell you what I really get from it. It’s a great place for me to share witty events and photos and the like with those I call friends and family, but other than that, I don’t feel engaged. Don’t get me wrong, I like everyone on my Facebook feed, I just feel like there’s a lot of “stuff” without a lot of “important stuff”.

So taking the lead from the handsome lad Phil in D.C., I think I’m going to ramp way back from Facebook for 30 days. Inversely, I’ll concentrate on contributing more to my own blog right here. Everything connected to my Facebook account will still be connected; I’m not shutting anything down. I just think for the next 30 days I’m going to refrain from checking my news feed several times a day. I’ll live in the physical moment instead of the virtual one.

I’m interested to see how I feel after 30 days. I’m hoping I feel more focused.

I just saw this video today and it was a video that I needed to see. It made me a little misty.

Since Earl and I worked late tonight, we decided that tonight would be our night out on the town. Knowing this all day long, my mouth was watering for a steak and blue cheese salad wedge entree at a local restaurant, Carmella’s in neighboring New Hartford. I believe there are a couple of Carmella’s in Central New York. The other one close to us is called Babe’s.

Earl and I were seated in the farthest corner in a booth near the waitress congregation area. Menus were placed on our designated table and a non-committal hostess flung some fingers in the general direction of the corner. I sat facing the corner, Earl faced the dining room.

After about three minutes we set our menus down and were ready for someone to stop by the table to welcome us to Carmella’s and to take our order.

A few more minutes passed.

Earl observed servers coming and going from the Church of the Poison Mind server congregating area, and while they appeared to be quite engaged with one another, they didn’t seem like they wanted to really mingle with the customers.

As Earl observed this, I listened to the woman in the booth behind me bellow out something about boxed wine and asking her mother how she got home from her 17th birthday party years ago because she was so wasted she didn’t remember. Ah, the good ol’ days.

At T+12 minutes Earl looked at as I gazed back at him and we both said it at the same time: “Do you want to get out of here”? Now, years ago when we said that, we bee-lined back to a hotel room and did the nasty, but it’s been several years and we’ve been married a long time so instead we went to another restaurant.

We settled on the local Olive Garden, which had its grand opening last month. As we walked through the front doors, all expectations of Olive Garden familiarity dissipated as we realized this wasn’t your grandma’s Olive Garden. The “curvy” feel of the room layouts and the bar and passageways to the dining areas that flank the breezeway were absent, our local restaurant has four square dining rooms chocked full of tables and booths. Not only could you barely move in the place, it was loud. Very loud. Like, high school lunch room table in the far corner loud.

A very nice server named Amanda greeted us, and despite her creepy inclinations of coming up behind Earl and asking him questions over his shoulder, she was pleasant and knew what she was doing.

To our side was a table of eight that were celebrating someone’s birthday with all you can eat salad. They must have had four bowls of salad and breadsticks, bring more breadsticks. It went on and on. The four sitting along the wall (next to me) all smoked; they exited and reappeared frequently and at random intervals. At first I thought the birthday celebration might involve a game of duck-duck-goose, but no, they were just going out front to smoke.

Off of Earl’s left shoulder was a young couple with four boys that appeared to be ages 0, 1 and 2. They had a couple of strollers and a car seat flung about. Mom was breast feeding one of her children. I believe it was the youngest one.

Earl and I focused on each other with concentrated eyes and ears to weed out the sights and sounds surrounding us. Again, years ago, this would have invoked the nasty, but we were hungry.

Earl’s entree came out, I believe it was a steak gorgonzola over fettuccine. The gorgonzola was plopped into the center of the fettuccine and apparently had qualms about being over the steak. I ordered a gumbo thing that was on their healthy menu which was fairly good except it was wicked salty to the point that if someone licked me right now they would find me Satisfrying.

When Earl was asked about his meal by the pleasant Amanda, he let her know his disappointment with the gorgonzola plop. She was taken aback and spoke to the manager about it. Apparently the proof is in the plop and it’s actually suppose to come that way, but since he was disappointed the manager took it off the bill and offered us free dessert.

When my pumpkin cheesecake arrived, one of the smokey eight asked me what I was eating and then the smokey mother next to him started proclaiming loudly, “Oh my god, it’s so big! That’s a huge piece of cheesecake! It’s a meal in itself! My god, he’s going to eat it all! All of it! He’s eating it!”

It’s a good thing I’m not a shrinking wallflower.

After we ate the whole thing and left Amanda a generous tip for “handling our disappointment gracefully” (she should kiss us, should we see her again), we headed over to the mall to do laps.

Now Jamie’s iPhone 4S is in rough shape. It has had a good run, but honestly, one of the buttons is broke, it won’t hold a charge and he’s constantly running out of storage space since it’s the 16GB model. He’s due for an upgrade, so after some debating, we ordered him a new iPhone 5c, which we will take with us to Chicago when we visit him next month.

I fondled the HTC One and Moto X, both Android phones. Mike at this Verizon Wireless¹ was very friendly and it turns out that he’s the nephew of a friend of ours and he remembered us as “J.P. and Earl that drive the Jeep” (told you we were famous) so he let me play around with the Android phones.

I was going to buy it.

I’ll do another lap around the mall.

I’m thinking about it.

Let me do another lap.

“What phone do you use”? He carries a Nokia 720 something Windows phone. It’s OK.

Let me do another lap.

“I’ll take the Moto X.”

He says, “here, play around with this while I get you set up in the computer.”

I play around with the phone. I like it. I can’t test some of the cooler features because it has to be programmed with my voice and only my voice. Something just doesn’t feel right. It’s smooth but it doesn’t feel premium. It’s good. It’s great. But it doesn’t knock my socks off.

Swipe. Swipe. I flick my wrist to activate the camera. Swipe some more. Something is not right. I feel like a disturbance is brewing in the force, or worse yet, the transporter beam is orange instead of white.

All of a sudden I start sweating. I yell “Stop!!!!!”

He looks at me.

“I’m not ready to make the switch.”

He packs up his toys and continues to smile, giving us his phone number. If we have any questions we can text him.

Earl is visibly relieved.

Still shaken, I caress my familiar iPhone 5. “I still love you, baby.” I’m talking to the phone, not Earl.

Jamie’s new phone arrives next week and I’ve decided to keep my iPhone 5. To celebrate, we stop at Burger King for a diet pop and nothing more. Feeling outgoing, I ask the counter person about the Satisfries. She says they’re delicious. She didn’t offer a sample and I didn’t ask.

I’ll pass until another time.

¹ Mike at Verizon Wireless in Sangertown Square is a really good guy and will work with you to get the best bang for your buck. If you see him, tell him “J.P. and Earl in the Jeep” sent you.

I should never weigh myself in the morning. But if you don’t weigh yourself in the morning, after your shower but before breakfast, how are you going to score the lowest number possible in the day? That’s my philosophy.

I have been trying to lose just a few more pounds to hit the goal I set for myself a year ago. Just a few more pounds. But I’ve been at the same weight now for a couple of weeks. I eat a little. I exercise a lot. I eat a lot. I exercise a little. It doesn’t make a difference. My body is apparently comfortable at this weight and I should just be happy with the number I spin up on the scale. It’s better than spitting up on the scale, I suppose.

But then again, it’s just a number, right? Why do I let these things affect my life? I’m not dropping dead. I can ride my bike 100 miles if I want to. There’s not a lot of people my age in the United States that can ride their bike 100 miles in a day. Most probably don’t want to. Why do I worry about these things?

So a few moments ago I decided that I was going to stop worrying about my weight. I will continue to remain vigilant and I will certainly hope to reach that goal I set for myself a year ago (I guess 30 out of 35 pounds isn’t really that bad) but I’m going to stop stressing about it. Why stress?

To celebrate, I went out on our front porch and decided to just enjoy the moment. I embraced the sunshine on my face and then whisper of the gentle breeze and the warmth of the day. Life is way too short to stress about stuff. And I need to remember that more often.

I’m not going to sweat the small stuff. Heck, I’m not even going to sweat the big stuff. I just going to enjoy the moment.

And this moment is glorious.

There has been a decree from our budgeting department that the 16th of September is entirely too early in the season to turn on the heat.

Someone needs to tell Miss Mother Nature because it’s damn chilly today. We had a freeze warning last night and while it didn’t freeze, it did get down to 34ºF in our neck of the woods.

Someone needs to take a gander at the calendar and remember that it is still summer for a couple of days.

Lack of heat in the house aside, I’m starting to feel good about autumn, which is my favorite season of the year. The crispness of the air, the lack of oppressive heat and humidity, the crunchiness and colors of the leaves and the mystical vibe the world seems to have at this time of year are all wonderful things.

Plus, the budgeting department came home and doubled up as the nutrition department and started a soup for supper. Said soup involves red wine and it’s cooking in the dutch oven. Whenever the dutch oven is involved you know it’s going to be good.

Plus, I can use the simmering pot as a heat source.

Taking a look at the forecast it looks like it’s going to warm back up into the mid 70s starting tomorrow, so maybe the budgeting department is correct in having us skip the whole “Wheel of Fortune” spin of the thermostats.

Yay for saving money!

When I wrote this blog post nearly 12 years ago, I don’t think I fully comprehended how much our lives would change as the result of the attacks on September 11, 2001. I knew that there would be fighting, I knew more lives would be lost, but I don’t think I realized how much the United States would change as a result of what we had all just experienced. The 21st century, which represented a new age to many of us, was off to a rocky start and everything that we had hoped and dreamed it would be was apparently still off in the distant future.

But I don’t want to focus on that. I want to focus on the courage.

* The courage of those that refused to be scared

* The courage of the airline passengers that fought back on United Flight 93 and curtailed the terrorists from completing their mission

* The courage of those that ran through the flames, down the stairs, wherever through the chaos to safety

* The courage of the emergency responders that went running in the opposite direction of everyone else and went head first into chaos that we had never seen before

* The courage of the families that lost loved ones on 9/11 and in everything that has happened as a result of 9/11

* The courage of those that have volunteered for battle and have helped fight wars ever since that day

* The courage of the men and women who made the choice to leap from a place in those two towers of which there was no means of escape

* The courage of those who fought back against the flames and the destruction until their very last breath

* The courage of those who remember what the United States of America is really about and work everyday to defend her ideals

Courage is the foundation of the building of a hero. And in my book, you’re all heroes.

Thank you.