Ponderings and Musings

I have mentioned before that my commute to and from work passes through a rather large Amish community. I’m actually thinking that there may be a couple of different Amish communities grouped together, because there are a couple of one-room schoolhouses that are separated by only a mile or two. I can’t imagine that this is an elementary and high school arrangement. I don’t know for sure, though.

On my commute I often run across quite a few horse-drawn buggies. Some of the buggies have a roof and sides and whatnot to keep everyone but the horse out of the elements, but the majority of them are open wagons. The driver usually sits on the right side of the wagon. The horse still stands in the middle, but out in front.

A few weeks ago I noticed that one of the open buggies was carrying three men to and from the small city that’s about 12 miles from the Amish communities. These three men are married (as noted by the presence of a beard). They wear their usual wide-brimmed hat and sensible work clothes with a blue shirt and dark pants. The are unprotected from the elements and they have plastic cooler/lunch boxes roped to the back of the buggy.

One other thing that I have noticed is that they never seem to be interacting with each other. They don’t even seem to be facing the same direction; they position themselves so that they’re not facing each other. The driver is thankfully looking forward. I see this as some sort of buggypool where they don’t have to contribute to the gas fund unless they all contribute to the care and feeding of the horse (I hope the horse isn’t gassy). But where most modern carpools have people that converse one another (I assume, since I’m big on that whole alone thing), these gentlemen don’t appear to be talking to each other at all.

I find this fascinating.

The other night it was well into the evening darkness at 17:30 and it was raining like crazy when I passed them. The sky was opening up and dumping buckets on the land and I passed the three gentlemen in their buggy, all positioned as to not be really looking at each other but soaked to the skin. From what I could tell they had a blanket to cover their laps but other than that they were getting wet. I briefly thought about helping them but then thought they would probably reject the offer and besides, I didn’t have room for the horse nor the buggy in the Jeep.

I enjoy their tenacity. I like the fact that they feel strongly in their beliefs that they didn’t apparently think twice about riding out in the elements like this.

I wonder if the horse enjoyed the experience.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I am having a little bit of a struggle when it comes to my attempts at healthy eating. The struggle revolves around two things: balance and having too much information. These things are something that I think about on a daily basis since, well, I eat on a daily basis.

I have read some of the online studies about the dangers of diet drinks. You know the ones, Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Rite. These guys substitute sugar with aspartame, something that was concocted in a laboratory years ago and give the pop companies the opportunity to proclaim “Zero calories! Hosanna!” I can’t remember the last time one of the soft drink companies included “Hosanna” in the one of their ad campaigns but with the changes in the direction of the country as far as society and religion goes, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Hosanna” appeared on their advertising in the near future.

I know the stuff ain’t good for you. The problem is, I enjoy the caffeine kick and quite frankly I enjoy having something fizzy in my mouth once in a while. (Don’t go there). I mean, eating a bucket of popcorn with an unsweetened iced tea at your side just doesn’t feel right, however, I don’t want to load up on the calories from a hi-test soda pop. That’s why I go for the artificially sweetened stuff.

Back in the day there was the original version of Tab (not that pink crap they spewed out a few years ago) and that was sweetened with saccharin. Studies concluded that saccharin use led to cancer in lab rats (I’m not referring to the American public here) so they came up with aspartame instead. Lately we have the likes of Splenda, which as I understand it is sugar with some extra chlorine added to make it pass through without garnering any extra calories. I stay away from the stuff because all I can think of is laundry knowing there’s chlorine involved and I can say that Splenda gives me a massive headache every time I consume the stuff. Just like the fumes from laundry bleach. I stay away from it as much as possible.

Skirting the calories by consuming the artificial sweeteners is not a healthy way of living when you really think about it. That’s where the too much information part of the equation coming into play. The balance part of it all is the fact that we are on this earth to live life and why should we deny ourselves of a little perk once in a while? Erma Bombeck once wrote that she bet that a lot of women were regretting skipping dessert the night the Titanic sank. How awful, to think that one would skip a piece of peanut butter pie or something in an effort to remain healthy for tomorrow and then find out that they’ll never get that chance to indulge because the ship they were on ran into an iceberg. So that’s where the balance part of this comes in – do I want to run the risk of whatever these artificial sweeteners are doing to my body when I’m craving a diet pop instead of denying myself this very simple pleasure?

Right now I go by the rule that I drink a diet beverage of any kind, I must drink an extra helping of pure water that day to balance it out. I guess flushing it out of my system (at least in my mind) brings me some sort of peace to this. Maybe I’ll just stick with that approach.

So as I have been out wandering the roads this weekend (more on that in a separate post), my mind has been digesting the events of the week and filing away the necessary stuff and moving the fluff to the garbage bin. I like to think of it as a brain defrag, though if my brain was a hard drive it would be running OS X and not Windows meaning it wouldn’t be in such dire need of a defrag.

I think I’m digressing again.

One of the things I have been thinking about is my blog and how it has been filling my needs pretty well over the past couple of months, aside from the security breach that raised a little havoc. That got me thinking about the comments left on the blog; I have a tendency to respond to the email directly instead of adding my comment to the blog. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago when I asked if replies to the comments were emailed to the original commenter; responses to that question were mixed.

I think I’d like to make the blog a little more interactive and make it have a more open feeling where people could post comments. I’m not going to ask for comments; it kind of irks me when someone writes a blog entry and ends it with a question to encourage discussion. That brings up two scenarios in my head: 1. reading Highlights as a kid where at the end of the article about something like birds we are asked “what is your favorite bird? Maybe you’d like to sit down and write an essay about your favorite bird” and 2. HR driven meetings at work where we are given the state of the company in a boring speech that requires blasts of cold air and an air horn to remain awake, only to be instructed to “get into focus groups with three people you don’t know” and coming up with a solution to the company’s problems. Whiteboards are usually involved and the only enjoyable part of those discussions is the intoxication from the fumes of the dry-erase markers. “I’ll write! I’ll write!”  I usually exclaim that.

I’m not really looking for validation of my thoughts here on this bloggy thing but rather I’m just looking for the viewpoints of others. For example, the greasy woman driving the Barney van yesterday… do people share my concerns about bad drivers on the road today? There I am asking a question and looking for an answer.

You can borrow my dry erase markers. They’re groovy grape.

So today is Friday and it is feeling like a Friday to me. And that’s a good thing. I am in the mood to relax this weekend. Well, I’m actually probably going to do some catch up work for a few hours on Sunday and some odds and ends around my studio on Saturday, but other than that I am planning on relaxing and taking it easy.

I’m finding myself feeling a big sigh of relief that it’s Friday. My favorite phrase of the week at work has been “forward motion” and I feel that The Big Project is making enough forward motion to keep the masses happy and all of us productive at the same time. And due to a few connections put into motion at work, I now have a 15-inch MacBook Pro with 24-inch Cinema Display, bluetooth keyboard, Magic Mouse and nifty carrying bag for my use at the office. That’s why I can do some work this weekend and get caught up. I have the only Mac in the entire building, since it was shipped to me from another office elsewhere in the country and quite frankly it has already made my work life much easier. I guess I just think Mac. The Windows computer sits to the side, ready to help if I come across something that I haven’t figured out how to deal with on the Mac, since we are all about Microsoft at work, but so far it’s been relegated to resting and providing USB power for my iPhone.

As I was pulling into a parking space at Dunkin’ Donuts this afternoon a woman driving the car to the immediate right of the space decided to pull out. She cut the left hand turn short, like so many people in this part of country do, and cut across the upper third of my space as I was pulling in. There was no contact between our vehicles but there was only one or two centimeters between us. She glared at me like I was wrong for pulling into a parking space. She had been lighting a cigarette while she was making the short left hand turn. I just glared back. Her minivan was adorned with a big Barney like creature on the side but she was the only one in the van. She looked greasy. This had the potential of frustrating me, even though there was no incident other than a close call, but after screaming every blue word I could think of and rejecting the idea of hunting her down with a paint gun (not worth the effort), I decided to smile and enjoy the remainder of the day.

After all, the weekend is just four hours away.

Since everything is working here on the site again and the weekend doesn’t have a lot of int’s plate, I’ll probably do more blogging than I usually do on the weekend. While cleaning up the hacked mess of the site last night, I looked at the traffic stats for the first time in over two years. The most popular entries involve defunct department stores, pictures of bearded men and the picture of me at the barbershop when I had that really big mustache. I have more daily readers than I could ever imagine, though they don’t say much in the comments section. I guess I rant or write statements more than I ask questions, so that’s normal I guess.

I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing and smiling along the way.

So this morning I had to give a big presentation to the “leadership team” on the status of the project I am working on. The presentation went well and I received word that folks thought I did a good job, but I still breathed a big sigh of relief when it was done with. I don’t have a problem standing up and making a presentation to my peers, I do it on a semi-regular basis, and lord knows I used to talk to lots of people when I was on the radio, but there’s something about conducting a presentation over a conference call when someone else has control of your slides that I find unnerving. Nevertheless, I consider that part of the mission as accomplished. No need for a banner on a boat. Let’s move on to the the next task.

Earl is in Buffalo on business but before he left in the wee hours this morning he was kind enough to make me a wrap for lunch. It was relatively healthy and more importantly, insanely yummy, so I am content. To celebrate my successful completion of the presentation and the delicious lunch, a friend decided to join me. I shared a bite of the wrap with him. Maybe it’s a her. I don’t know.

Speaking of conspiracies, the Emergency Alert System will be activated nationwide for the first time today at 14:30 EST. They keep mentioning this on the news, because apparently the design of the system might not trigger notifications that “this is only a test”. I find this unnerving because a. the new Emergency Alert System was implemented in 1994, so they’ve had nearly 20 years to get the bugs out and b. This is the first time they’ve set it off nationwide, even though it’s been used locally since 1994? Now there’s a government efficiently using technology to make our world better. When do we think they’ll figure out how to broadcast EAS alerts to cell phones, 2025?

Personally I think the Emergency Alert System is horrible because they fire the damn thing off so much. Every time there’s a rumble of thunder or more than two-inches of snow they fire it off and scare everyone into “milk and bread mode”. To make matters worse, the new sound (what I call the “duck farts”) are incomprehensible to many. I say the EAS should be like it’s predecessor, the Emergency Broadcast System, which was fired off only in the event of a catastrophe (like nuclear war, etc) and scared the fuck out of you with it’s ear piercing, two-tone notification sound. Back in my day, we knew when to sit under our desks to ride out nuclear holocaust, today we just get more milk and bread from senseless panic.

So last night, during a fit of insomnia, I wrote a blog entry. I didn’t remember this until I was getting breakfast together and I saw my entry sitting on my laptop. Apparently I also did some work, because I scheduled a meeting for Monday morning involving several members of the team. Everything on the meeting request makes complete sense and it was something that I had intended to do anyway, but having actually done it but not remembering it until I actually saw the calendar entry was a little weird. It isn’t like I have some weird amnesia thing going on, but rather, I just remembered that I had done these things once I saw them, but didn’t remember them beforehand.

I remember being awakened around 2 last night and then falling asleep around 4 after reading a bit.

I’m a bit tired today, apparently since I was active last night, but for the most part the mood is pleasant and the day is good. I’m very happy that it is Friday. Earl and I have a date to watch “The Wizard Of Oz” tonight at home. I have promised him popcorn. We have altered our plans for the weekend and will be keeping it local. Sometimes a little rest and keeping it local keeps the positive energy in perpetual motion.