Ponderings and Musings

303.365, originally uploaded by iMachias.

Yesterday I received a small package in the mail. It was an ebay purchase as I had bought some classic Apple Computer stickers to add to my growing collection of all things Mac. There are four stickers in total.

I’m such a geek.

While I have a ton of the white Apple logo stickers around the house, as they come with just about every Apple product you purchase, these are the first of the older multi-colored logo. However, this is not the first time I have had a sticker like this.

In the summer of 1985 between my junior and senior years in high school I worked for the school district with a handful of other folks my age cleaning the school from top to bottom for the coming school year in the fall. It was one day that summer that we learned that one of my classmates had been killed. His name was Bobby. From what I remember he had passed out in the middle of the street, ironically between the volunteer ambulance corps and the local medical center, and had been fatally hit by a car. He had been drinking.

Back when I was in school students had the same locker from grade 7 through their senior year. I distinctly remember locker 710 (with the combination 48-4-42) being my home base at school for six years.

I was given the task of cleaning out Bobby’s locker so that it would be available for any new students joining us in the fall. Bobby came from a fairly well-off family and they had an Apple ][e. One of their Apple Computer stickers was in Bobby’s locker. Instead of peeling it off with the assigned sticker scraper, I carefully removed the sticker intact and transported it home, where I stuck it to my bedroom door. That sticker stayed on my door until the mid 1990s, when my folks removed it during some sort of remodeling project.

I haven’t thought about Bobby in years. We weren’t overly close in school but he was a nice enough guy with a wild streak and I thought he was good looking. He was one of the first in the class to sport a mustache. It’s funny that I didn’t remember any of this until my new stickers arrived yesterday.

I have been reading a discussion on Slashdot about the purpose of ‘Black Friday’. The discussion has migrated into the meaning of the holidays and the tendency for Americans to purchase stuff they don’t really want or need, all in the spirit of giving.

I kind of get that.

One of the contributors to the discussion suggested some gift ideas that I thought I would share here:

• Hire a Maid/House Cleaning service to give the house a good cleaning for your spouse, mother, or other special person

Hire someone to paint a room or fix something on the home of your loved one

• Commission the making of a crotcheted Blanket, Sweater, Afghan, from one of the many people in your local neighborhood who does such crafts
• Hire someone to “Detail” your loved ones car
• Hire someone to “Cater” your Holiday Dinner or Family Get together
• Buy your loved one a “subscription” to yard mainenance/landscaping service for one year
• Buy your father, brother, or other loved one a “Gift Card” for automobile maintenance at the local Mechanic and/or Car Dealer
• Buy locally hand-made furniture (from the Amish or other local providers), like a wooden rocking chair or dining room table, for your loved ones
• Hire someone to “prepare a vegetable garden” for your loved one (turn the soil, remove the weeds/roots etc, get it ready for planting in the spring and/or do the initial planting)

I left work early today because I wasn’t feeling well. I wasn’t wrought with coughing or sneezing, though I did have a few spells of each. I felt a little feverish. My stomach was flip flopping around a bit. As I colorfully explained to my supervisor upon my decision to go home today, “I’ve destroyed the bathroom a couple of times this morning.” He chuckled. It wasn’t a laughing matter as I was dead serious.

I came home shortly before lunch and took a long nap. Feeling much better after the apparently needed sleep (though I slept great last night), I kept it low key around the house for the rest of the day; I finished up laundry, I cooked some supper, I washed dishes and I chatted with friends online. I didn’t do anything that really required effort. It was a simple day and I think that’s what the doctor ordered.

Following in the theme of simplicity I deleted a bunch of online accounts I don’t use anymore and moved things off the smattering of computers around here so that I am pretty much using only my MacBook Pro for my day to day stuff. It’s working out better this way. I have finally wrapped my head around this computer and I feel the same way about this computer that I felt about my older PowerBook. We have become friends. It’s taken a while.

In this day and age it can be really tempting and really easy to complicate one’s life to the point of needing ADD to keep up with it all. Luckily I have a good dollop of ADD in my wiring to make good attempts in this arena but in reality I like the simple life. Actually, I like being connected the world in a simple way. I like the quietness of the country, I like the clouds rolling by and I like peering in on The Big Picture from my own private view.

Rest and relaxation today helped with slightly nudging me back on track. Nothing was out of control, nothing had derailed, but I had a little rattle that needed some fine tuning.

I’m ready for the holidays now.

I’m on my lunch hour as I write this. I’m plowing through a plate of leftovers from last night’s BBQ chicken. It’s tasty. I do chicken right.

I keep forgetting what day it is. Having Monday off, working Tuesday and then having Wednesday off gives work a little touch of whimsy and a big helping of disconnection, but coupled with the rapidly shrinking size of the group I work in, there isn’t really anyone around to notice. I have noted that the people that are left are sitting in the old cubicles. The new ones are empty.

On my day off yesterday I spent the day familiarising myself with Windows 7 Ultimate again. At the end of the day was the big announcement from Microsoft that the public beta of Office 2010 was available for immediate download. I installed it last night. I have only messed around with it a very little bit but so far I like what I see. Ironically, I’m typing this blog entry on my MacBook Pro which is running Snow Leopard.

Earl is back from his trip to Arizona, having plopped into bed around 1 a.m. Actually it was a swing and a plop, because he had to move the bed to plug in his CPAP and then swing back into position. Then he plopped into bed. Apparently I slept through all of that.

I’m not quite on my game today as far as feeling good health wise. I’m just a little bit off center. I think that’s why my body is craving extra calories and therefore, I continue to plow through my leftovers.

It’s been over 13 years and I still have a hard time on the nights that Earl is traveling. You would think I’d be used to this by now but I’m not. He doesn’t travel nearly as much as he used to, and I am quite grateful for that, but there is a definite emptiness here at The Manor when he’s not here.

I feel good, just incomplete.

Even though tonight is a bachelor night, I opted to skip the popcorn supper and instead loaded Jamie up in the Jeep and took him out to dinner at one of our favorite haunts: Casa Too Mucha. The food was good as always. Patty with the Voom hairspray and Voom hair greeted us heartily; Linda the server was as courteous, pleasant and efficient as ever. Well, almost. She forgot to bring me my seafood bisque. I didn’t say anything until the bill came and it was on there; she took it off the bill and then put the seafood bisque in a take away container. I’m going to have it for lunch tomorrow.

I am off from work tomorrow. It’s going to be a quiet day. I need the rest to fend off what everyone else is feeling but I refuse to acknowledge (that would be the sniffles). I’ll probably catch up e-mail, read a bit and perhaps write some. I write quite a bit that I don’t share on this blog. It would make many people blush.

I have decided that I am no longer going to be part of this trend in speaking in as few words as possible or using abbreviations just so I can fit my thoughts into 140 characters.

I’m looking at your Twitter and I’m looking at you Facebook.

Since I have been actively “tweeting” (I like it better when it’s referred to as “twatting”, actually) my participation here on my blog has been way down. That’s unfortunate. One of the reasons that I have had a blog since August 2001 is because I like to write. My subjects are random, my thoughts are scattered and my style varies wildly but you know what, this is MY space and I can write what I’m thinking, doing or reminiscing about in as many characters as I want.

There are times that I write the beginnings of something brilliant but in the process I end up writing it in a half baked way and posting it on Facebook or Twitter. You know what? That’s not how I operate. In real life I tend to look at all sides of a situation. I consider every angle. I think things through and I have a habit of over-processing things once in a while. Blurting out a comment on any random topic on Twitter doesn’t do my thoughts justice. I’m more complicated than that. I deserve more than that.

I don’t care about comments. I’m always open to input and I’m very happy to read comments and I’m always open to a healthy debate (though I suck at debating) but I’m not looking to be the most popular on a Facebook feed nor do I get breathlessly giddy if my Flickr pictures get more than 20 hits. I suspect this is part of my loner nature and you know what, it’s who I am. I like who I am and I’m proud of who I am and if I’m not in the cool kids crowd anymore then so what, I never really was anyway.

So I’m taking a break from Twitter and Facebook. The accounts are still open and I’ll comment from time to time, but if you want to know what’s going on in this complicated head of mine, you’ll have to either ask me or read about it here.

Screw MySpace, this is My Space.

I was just asked how to spell styrofoam. I responded simply:

“S-T-Y-R-O-F-O-A-M”. STYROFOAM.

I think I expected applause.

It suddenly occurred to me that when someone asks me how to spell something, I suddenly go into this grade school spelling bee mode and I spell out each letter clearly and distinctly, as if I was facing a panel of five or six teachers that were hanging on each letter I blurted out. I then end the spelling by repeating the word I had just been asked to spell.

I don’t recall every being in a spelling bee in elementary school. I played a few tuba recitals and was the narrator of the elementary school production of “Jackie And The Beanstalk” (it was the 70s, it was weird) but a spelling bee? Not so much. I remember scoring a 100% on most every spelling test. Maybe I blocked out the bad parts.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty definitely sure I wasn’t in a spelling bee. I remember an “enrichment fair”, where my table was devoted to UFO sightings and alien abduction incidents. I remember writing up a narrative about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction on ditto paper with my mother’s manual typewriter and printing off handouts to go along with the models of UFOs I made, based on descriptions from eyewitness accounts. I was the only one in my fourth grade class that was in “Enrichment”, which was the code word for the oddly-whispered “gifted program”. My mother thought I would be ostracized when I was the only one that left the classroom a couple of times a week for Enrichment. I guess the fact that I was already a one-man freak show was the reason I was in Enrichment in the first place. It was worth it. Besides, I got to see hunky Mr. Rayburn. I always liked him. I wanted to marry him but I knew I couldn’t do that back then. Heck, I couldn’t do it now if I wanted to either, come to think about it.

But a spelling bee? Nah. I never had a chance to be in one of those.

Awake

So I should be sleeping right now. But I’m not. Sunday nights are always a rough night for me to sleep. It’s just always been that way. I don’t know why.

I started falling asleep around 10:30. That’s when my pager went off for the first time today. It was a false page: I received notification that a customer’s service was down and then two minutes later I received a notification that it was back up. In the meantime, I checked and saw that the service never went down. How I enjoy false pages. It was just a reminder from the on-call gods that I am still on call and will be for 8 1/2 more hours.

I think that’s why I’m keyed up. I feel great. My body is (seemingly) back in sync with Mother Nature’s clock, courtesy of the end of that damned Daylight Saving Time. I relaxed by going for a spin in the Jacuzzi earlier. Earl made a great Sunday dinner for us and I was able to resurrect an old computer and turned it into an iTunes server for the house. Things are good. I feel like it’s been a good weekend, despite the electronic tethering to the house.

I should be sleepy now. But I’m not. I have Lady Antebellum’s “Lookin’ For A Good Time” running through my head. Perhaps I’ll look up the video on YouTube and see if watching the video will stop the music playing through my head.

Yay! I found the video on YouTube, even though embedding is disabled by request.