Ponderings and Musings

So here in the United States it’s a short work week unless you’re unfortunately working for a money hungry retail establishment that lacks common sense. I was holding out hope that the Christmas decorations would not be installed in some of my favorite haunts until Friday, but the Dunkin’ Donuts I visit on a daily basis has officially decked the halls. The folks behind the counter still get my order without me actually asking for it, so they can be forgiven.

The short work week is not as short as it was prior to this job, because the company does not recognize Friday as a holiday. I kinda find this surprising, but when you’re working for a large corporation I guess anything goes. I am working on Friday. I hope to feel inspired while I’m doing it too. At the very least I hope I am able to catch up on things that have been falling to the wayside. I’d be much more productive if I could telecommute. Since all I do is work on a computer and engage in conference calls, telecommuting is certainly a viable option and one where I would actually be much more productive, but some don’t see it that way. Their loss.

So we are plugging along during this short work week and pretending that we are going to get things accomplished when in fact it’s quite impossible to do so because half the people are burning off PTO (Personal Time Off) that is set to expire by the end of the year. It’s also “Holy Week” in these parts; the name of the week has nothing to do with spirituality, but rather all of the holes that are being shot through things in the woods as deer season has officially opened. I like being in the woods at this time of year, but I don’t like the idea of shooting at an animal that can’t shoot back. Now if the deer were armed I would find that sporting. Conversely, if the human wrestled the deer to the ground, then that would be sporting as well. I like sports that are evenly matched, Sarah Palin’s hunting helicopter be damned. But, to each his own, I guess. At least there’s food on the table.

So while we are suppose to be focused and whatnot this week, all I can think about is pie, candied yams, homemade applesauce and cheesecake. Closing my eyes I can conjure up memories of the smells of Grandma Country’s house at Thanksgiving. I’m very lucky that many of those same smells, with their own spin of course, come from the kitchen on Thanksgiving right at home. I’m a lucky husband.

Of course, because it’s a short week, I close my eyes to conjure up these things in my head whilst sitting in front of the computer at work, doing my best to be productive. These things happen.

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It is interesting being owned by a cat that is 16 years old and nearly deaf. Now before I get started, whether he is deaf or not is up to debate, because some think he has perfected the art of selective hearing but I think he’s gone deaf. Being his servants, it is still up to us to meet his needs whether he can hear us or not. It’s not his problem, it’s ours.

The reason I think Tom is deaf is because I can now walk up to him while he is napping/adding an abundance of fur to the furniture and he will just stay there sleeping. His ears will not twitch in our direction, nor will he stir in any way. I’m careful not to startle him but touching him when he’s sleeping but I do check to make sure he is still breathing. I don’t use a mirror to do that.

I woke him up by touching him a while back and it was the first and only time that he jumped up on all fours and hissed at me. Tom isn’t much of a hisser, he’s more of a bully. Over the years we’ve had a few dogs as guests and he just kind of puffs up and then walks over to guest dog and swipes them in the nose. The few times a cat has been in his territory he has screamed like a banshee, but he’s not much of a hisser. When he did hiss at me, he then recognized me and started purring and rubbing against me. I took this as some sort of apology. We made up.

Speaking of screaming like a banshee, though he can’t hear he still makes his needs known through vocal communication. The cute meow has been replaced by a shriek at seemingly ear-rattling decibels, especially when heard at 4:30 in the morning. In an effort to keep the blog family friendly, I will not use the words I have heard from others in the house when hearing these screeches. Despite these noises, I refrain from spooking him through touch when he’s sleeping. If we need to relocate him because he is in an inconvenient location (I know, shame on the servants for finding the king in an inconvenient location), I usually stomp on the floor, banging my foot hard enough on the ground to create a small seismic event. He then awakes and looks off in a completely different direction. I bang the foot again and he swings around and sees what’s up.

The other day I reminded him that he has another 22 years to go if he wants to outlive the oldest cat on record. We call her the “siamese wench.” She lives in Australia, and while she seems quite sweet on her YouTube video (which I can’t find using the iPad app) but Tom has his eyes on the prize.

Actually, I think he couldn’t care less, because he went and added some fur to the couch.

As I was getting settled in for some alone time during my lunch hour, I noticed a slight “tinkling” sound coming from the roof of the Jeep. A quick inspection of the situation revealed that it was not a seagull peeing on the Jeep because I didn’t share a piece of my cookie but rather the sound of hail hitting the car.

In response to the presence of winter weather conditions, I did what anyone in this area would normally do. I promptly flailed my arms in the air. No one was around to hear my cries of “Help me! Help me!”. I then started the Jeep, put the defroster on “recirculate” so that no outside air could get into the vehicle. This was to make sure that I was able to fog the windows up as quickly as possible, as recirculating the same air over and over produces a better fog. Once the fogging was in progress, I jammed the Jeep into four-wheel drive, slammed the accelerator down as hard as I could and went running up the embankment of the adjacent parking lot. Coming down the other side of said embankment in second gear and with a loud thud and bouncing motion, I then popped it back into two-wheel drive and made like a mad man across the parking lot, ignoring any arrows, lines or vehicular or pedestrian motion in the lot. I then pulled up in front of Dollar Tree, with the obligatory right front tire up on the curb so that I could take up as much of the fire lane as possible, and then ran inside, huffing and panting about the ice. I grabbed a cart and with big swooping motions I was able to clear two shelves of bread and toilet paper into the cart. It was just a quick stop at the dairy section for six gallons of whole milk and four gallons of skim (I could mix the two later for 2%) and faster than Laverne and Shirley could get their Scooter Pies across the finish line, I made my wait through the checkstand and went outside, flinging everything from the cart helter skelter into the Jeep. I then got in, started it up and ignoring any traffic control devices that beckoned to the contrary, took off as quickly as possible for the closest hill where I could hide and write blog entries about how awful the weather is and come up with cute names like “Snowpacalypse”, “Snowvember”, “Snowcachoochoo” and “Snowmageddon”.

Then the ice turned to rain.

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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.

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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.

Someone was kind enough to hack into hidden directories here on this web server and I am in the process of finding out what WordPress plug-in was the culprit, since that’s the only change I have made to the web server in many months. I have a sneaky suspicion as to what happened, but I need to figure it out. Perhaps the friend that joined me for lunch was really part of a government conspiracy to make sure I don’t have a phishing site on my blog.

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.