Ponderings and Musings

Last night I decided that I needed to get back into the routine of riding my bike to work so this morning I was up an extra half hour early and on my bike for my daily commute. I can still remember the first time I rode my bike to elementary school back in the late 1970s and the thrill I felt as a youngster as I got to school under my own power. I still feel that thrill to this day when I ride my bike to work.

There’s a certain amount of planning involved with doing this environmentally friendly peddle pushing. This is the first time that I’ve ridden my bike to this job and there’s a dress code expectation of sorts that has to be met, so prepping for the ride involved planning and packing clothes that wouldn’t get exceedingly wrinkled while in a small backpack, plus I needed to pick the right shoes that would dangle off the bottom of my back pack without creating too much discomfort in that area.

Another first for me today is this is the first time I’ve ever packed my laptop for a bike ride. I usually dash home at lunch but there’s no “dashing” when one is on a bicycle, so I opted to walk our fine downtown and take advantage of the free wi-fi service they recently unveiled. It’s a little slow, but it does the trick.

Downtown Utica has become an interesting study for several reasons. First of all, it’s suffering from the aftermath of a propserous turned disasterous urban renewal plan from the 1970s. During this project of over 30 years ago, many of the historic buildings were razed and cement-chic buildings popped up in their place. Unfortunately some of these buildings, as well as their remaining older counterparts, are currently empty as businesses close down or relocate to the commercially prosperous suburb of New Hartford. What was once a busy downtown retail area has been replaced by an apartment building, several office buildings and countless empty storefronts. There’s also a relatively modern hotel that seems to be holding on, though with the construction of a new Hampton Inn underway, I don’t know how long it’s going to be able to hold it’s own.

It was only three or four years ago that you would see hot dog carts and whatnot on the street at lunch time. I used to be able to walk around the downtown area and see lots of people walking from their office to one of the several lunch counters. Today none of that is to be found. I guess the office workers in this area are brown bagging it or going to one of the newer chain restaurants in the suburbs. There are just a few people on the sidewalk. I’m sitting in the courtyard at the State Office Building. I’m one of five people here. This building has 16+ floors of offices. It’s 12:23 in the afternoon. You’d think there’d be more people out here enjoying the beautiful weather and a lunch.

I’m hesitant to admit it but I hope that Earl and I stick around long enough to see this city turn itself around.

There’s a certain amount of danger in staying up late on the weekends and then taking a two hour nap on Sunday afternoon.

You end up babbling in your blog about nothing at 1:09 a.m.

After a delightful afternoon with family and friends in Syracuse, Earl and I zipped halfway across The Empire State to Albany for a gathering of all thing bear. We’ve returned to the scene of the crime at a Motel 6 for the night. I call it the scene of the crime because this is the first hotel Earl and I spent our first date weekend at. We became inseparable more than a decade ago in this very hotel.

Tonight the tradition continues.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I was having a difficult time getting my hands on a copy of “The Secrets of Isis”, which was released on DVD on Tuesday. I’ve given up on the traditional brick and mortar DVD outlets in our area and have decided to stick to online when I really need to add a movie or TV series to our collection. My copy of Isis arrived yesterday from Amazon. Earl and I spent much of last night watching episodes and the huge assortment of extras available with this set. I’ve said before that I am a fan of the work of Andy Mangels, who was in charge of putting this set together. Andy is gay comic extraordinaire and appears at conventions and whatnot. He can also be seen on some of the special features on the Wonder Woman DVDs. We’ve corresponded on numerous occasions and he’s a great guy.

“The Secrets of Isis” is a live-action Saturday morning show from the mid 1970s. Usually coupled with the popular “Shazam!” (the version with Billy and Mentor in a Winnebago), Isis appeared in the second-half of the hour in her own program. In response to criticisms of violence in the Saturday morning shows of the era, Isis, like many of her Filmation Production counterparts, included a moral at the end of each episode. These 30 second vignettes reinforced the theme of the episode in an educational manner. Unfortunately, they were all chopped off of the master copies of the episodes in the 1990s, and subsequently discarded by the folks at Hallmark, who owned the rights and property to the show for a number of years. (The rights were sold to BCI Eclipse earlier this decade and that’s why we finally have a DVD release of the program).

I can’t help but think that the United States would be a better place today if some of the Saturday morning programming for children were less about war, strife and violence and more about everyday scenarios with a supernatural twist (for example) and just a touch of a moral message through the show. The moral messages through the Filmation Productions, including Shazam and Isis, certainly had a HUGE impact on me as a child and quite frankly had a big part of the shaping of my adult moral foundation. Isis didn’t tell me how to think but she was an outsider that was reinforcing the basics that my mother and father successfully instilled in me.

“The Secrets of Isis” DVD set includes many of the morals from the first season episodes. These were obtained from fans of the show that were able to capture them on videotape in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The quality of them varies considerably and comes nowhere close to the rest of the DVD set, however, I’m happy that Andy Mangels, as well as BCI Eclipse, decided to include these on the set as they are a very important element to the show.

I could easily post all the morals from the set as I believe that the messages still hold true today, but I’ve decided to include only one for your enjoyment.

It’s lunch time. The back door is open. There’s no movement in the back lawn, aside from a few swoops by a cranky crow. There’s insect type sounds, the constant twitter you’d hear from a cricket and that buzzing sound you hear once in a while. I don’t know who makes that noise.

Tom is parked in front of the door. He can go outside anytime he wants, as he has a cat sized hole in the screen of the patio door, but he opts to stay inside and perk his ears up when the crow chatters. The sky has white, puffy clouds drifting by aimlessly. The sun feels warm.

The weather is perfect for the end of July. It’s all good.

So this morning I had to get myself out of bed at 6:30, like most working Americans do, and go through the Monday morning routine of getting ready for work and making it out the door to be at my desk by 8:00 a.m.

I couldn’t be more delighted.

I’m at my old desk, using my old phone and working with the same group of people that I left when I decided to return to school at the beginning of this year. The job is a little different, since it’s a temporary gig and I’m primarily doing special projects. I’m loving the experience. I’ve had to shake a few cobwebs out of my head but for the most part all is well.

The congestion in my head broke last night as well, so I’m feeling much better today. It’s all coming together nicely.

The sniffles and congestion I mentioned on my videos from Canada have forged themselves into a full blown nuisance. This has put somewhat of a hamper on our weekend plans, as I was hoping to take Earl for a nice picnic today, since the Universe has blessed us with absolutely gorgeous weather. However, instead we’ve stayed close to home this weekend and sort of just chilled.

We did venture out last night for a bit and went to the local casino for their nightly bingo game. Earl and I haven’t been to bingo there in a decade or so and they’ve made numerous improvements since our last visit, including a huge non-smoking section and the choice of traditional or electronic bingo cards. We opted for the traditional paper cards as it doesn’t really feel like bingo unless you can dab a colored dot on your free space. We didn’t win anything but we had a great time and look forward to doing it again. I was most amused by a pair of women sitting across from me at the next table, as they had apparently never heard of bingo nor had played it before. During the night, the younger of the two ordered two mocca-choca-la-la-lattes with heavy foam, the older of the two dumped two glasses of water or pop all over their table, asked what a “two part” bingo game was, asked why they couldn’t use the ‘free space’ for the “bingo the hard way” game and all in all were quite amusing. They looked to be having a good time so I say good for them.

The young man sitting to my left (Earl picked the seats next to lone cub of a guy – surprise!) won a door prize which was $15 in bingo bucks that you can’t use for anything except admission to another game. However, since he won the door prize his name and town were announced over the intercom so we must say hello to Dan from Rome! He is google worthy.

Today it’s been about rest and relaxation and I’m finally feeling better. I’ve never had congestion settle behind my eyes before. I don’t think I want it to happen again.

There are many things I enjoy about Canada. I must say that yhere are many, many things I love about our neighbors to the north. Everywhere I turn in Charlottetown there’s a young little bearded hotty worthy of many woof points. The folks of this fine province are very friendly. There are smiles on the faces of the fine Canadian people. It’s nice to be away from the depression that has seemingly tackled the Americans. The Canadians also make great beer.

Tonight I joined Jennifer and David, and Dave’s mom Janet, for their annual trek to a dinner theatre show in Charlottetown to celebrate Jennifer’s birthday. Tonight’s performance was called “The Big Fat Island Wedding Crashers”.

The production was delightful. Full of familiar rock and pop tunes from the 80s and 90s, this group of performers were quite impressive in that they all took turns playing various instruments and singing various parts. I had a wonderful time. They were funny and extremely talented.

As I mentioned before, our fine neighbors to the north make great beer. Tonight’s brew of choice was Labatts Blue. Now Dave, my almost brother-in-law and all around great yet exceedingly mischievious guy, is a beer drinker. Here in P.E.I. you don’t order beer by the bottle, fuck no, you order beer by the god damn bucket. That’s right, the perky waiter or waitress brings you buckets full of bottles of beer. The folks at the other end of our table, who were a very charming couple from le Province du Québec, settled for red wine with their meals. Jennifer and Janet had white wine.

Dave and I downed THREE buckets of beer. Perhaps four. I lost count. I have mentioned an uncountable number of times that I am a two beer queer. Give me two beers and I’m either easy or asleep, hopefully one before the other.

Tonight I had SEVEN. That would be seven beers. SEVEN. That means if I were to count the number of beers by way of the Pointer Sisters Sesame Street song, I would be more than halfway through the track before having to stop.

The two beer queer did it thrice plus one. Roll the “r” in “thrice” when you read that sentence. It makes it sound exotic. To celebrate, I called my mother and left her a slurred voicemail that will undoubtedly haunt me someday and then I called Earl to make sure he was still in the states while I was in Canada. It was hard to tell because the room started spinning. I think I was getting time zones confused. Oh, oh oh – I’m in a different time zone right now! Who knew? There’s another time zone on the North American continent to the east of the Eastern time zone! I guess I never realized that! It’s the Atlantic Time Zone. If I were to go to Newfoundland (which I probably won’t), there’s even another time zone that only counts as half. So if it’s 11:00 here it’s 11:30 there but it’s 10:00 home. Now that’s making my head spin. What’s odd is that I feel as comfortable in the Atlantic Time Zone as I do in the Central Time Zone or when the Eastern Time Zone is not in that fucking daylight saving time.

Tomorrow morning I leave the island and head for Québec. This is such a lovely adventure. It’s buckets of fun.

I’m going to bed.

So last week I mentioned that “when it rains, it pours” when it comes to opportunities. I would have never thought that I would be so popular that more than one company would want me to work for them, but today I was presented with a decision. One was to return to the telephone company where I used to work and the other was with another company that I can’t really talk about because it’s a top secret project.

I went with the ringy-dingy route. And what’s most important is that my gut says it’s the right choice.

By working for the telephone company I don’t need to compromise my school schedule (they are very accomodating) and I’ll be working on projects that I’m very familiar with, so I am really jazzed about the opportunity. The other job opportunity was something that I used to do but haven’t done in a long while. The opportunity was quite enticing, but I felt it would have detracted from my educational efforts, and come hell or high water, getting my Civil Engineering degree is something that I am going to accomplish. I screwed up college once, I’m not going to screw it up again.

So come Monday I’m back to work for a while. And I couldn’t be happier.

Earl and I are situated at camp for the weekend. The awning is up. The picnic table is positioned. The camper is stable. There were no cross words. It just comes together. He’s a good man. I love him.

I let Earl run the new camera for the first time today, and the resulting picture is above. As I begin the next year of my life (can I admit to myself that I’ve started my 40th year as of today, as I turn 39 at 7:30 p.m. this evening?) I’ve adopted a theme as inspired by a great B-52’s song.

Follow Your Bliss.