Ponderings and Musings

So I’ve got this vegetarian thing going on again. I know, it runs directly in conflict with my love for BBQ joints, but I figure we can still go to those places, I’ll just have to eat corn on the cob and whatnot.

I’ve been maintaining my weight pretty well since losing around 35 pounds at the beginning of the year, but there’s a magic number I want to hit before Thanksgiving and I am determined to do it. I probably could achieve it a little easier if I got my butt to the gym but with school, on-call and social obligations, I’m not up for working out at the gym at 2:30 in the morning. I hear the place is quite popular then, so who knows, it might be interesting, but I’m too lazy to do that.

To think that on several occasions in 1990 I set the alarm for 3 a.m. so I could go tanning!

With all the health conscious people and crazy diets floating around our fine nation these days, it’s not hard to fine something vegetarian at any given restaurant. “I’d like a Whopper without the Whop.” That usually goes over the BK drone’s head, so I end up saying “leave off the meat”. I know, I could opt for a BK Veggie Delight but it takes something like an act of congress and a bunch of glares and sighs to get one of those at the closest BK.

Now if Wegmans would locate a little closer to us so I could enjoy the “Nature’s Place” section, I’d be golden but for now I’m relegated to the local Hannafords. It could be worse. I could be limited to Price Chopper where they think vegetarian includes “Vegetarian Baked Beans with Bacon”. “Are these beans vegetarian?” “Yes, just as the sign says.”, replies the deli clerk. “Why is the bacon on there?”, to which she replied, “For flavor of course!”.

I think tonight I’m going to have a BBQ steak salad without the steak. It’s yummy.

Earl and I eat out quite a bit. Why? Because we’re lazy. We’ve worked all day. We’re not in the mood to cook. So we take the easy way out and we head to one of the local restaurants. It happens a couple of times a week.

Since we’re rather well versed in restaurantese, we’ve had the opportunity to see some very odd things in our travels. There was that time at Mc Donalds in Horseheads when two men dressed up like the Blue Brothers came walking out of the bathroom with toilet paper dragging from their feet. At that same visit, a woman stood her toddler up on the service counter, complete with saggy diaper, and told him to keep his clothes on. (Apparently the kid liked taking his clothes off in public. Perhaps he’ll be a congressman someday.)

Tonight we watched a similar scene.

We were seated at a table in this diner wannabe type place called Zebbs. The corner was occupied by three women, all around my age or so, and three children. The youngest, a girl, was seated in a high-chair behaving herself quite well. The two other children were boys, probably four or five years old. Though they weren’t twins, they were dressed alike with matching shirts. One had very thick glasses. He amused himself and those around him by jumping up and down on the booth seat shouting “I’m bad! I’m bad!”. Did Mother stop him from this outburst? Of course not. She pretty much ignored him and let him carry on.

He was the tame one.

When the server came out with their food, I breathed a sigh of relief since it was obvious that the kids would be occupied with their monster meals.

Wrong.

Boy number 2 proceeded to make like a plant and sit on the back of the booth, wedged where the two windows met to form the corner of the restaurant. He amused himself by flapping the vertical blinds back and forth. When that didn’t grab Mommy’s attention, he proceeded to jump ONTO THE TABLE.

This got Mom’s attention where she threatened him with a timeout and then proceeded to carry on her conversation, unphased by the fact that her child had practically walked across the dinner table. Afraid of this always scary threat of “timeout”, the kid jumped to the back of the booth where he made like a bat and sat upside down while enjoying his meal.

I have fairly accurate memories from when I was a child. On the rare instances we did eat out and actually sat in the restaurant (usually we sat in the car outside of Carrols or Red Barn), I don’t ever recall ever having to be told not to walk across the table. Especially while food was on it. Perhaps my mother will chime in and correct me on this, but I’m pretty confident that I didn’t do any acrobatics in a restaurant when I was a kid. If I had lept across the booth of a restaurant, she would have smacked me six ways to Sunday and I would have remembered.

I wonder what tonight’s terror is going to be like when he’s grown. Maybe I witnessed the making of the next flying Wallenda.

As I’m sitting here drinking another glass of iced tea, a few questions about beverages cross my mind.

1. How do they take the caffeine out of tea?
2. Can a person OD on iced tea?
3. Does diet soda damage your teeth like regular soda does? I mean, it doesn’t have sugar in it so it should be as bad, right?
4. How does adding chlorine to sugar make the sugar lose all its calories?
5. How come a combination of chlorine and sugar is safer for you than that old saccharrin? Why don’t we just regular soda with a Chlorox chaser?

I know, it sounds like I’m having a Jessica Simpson moment.

I’m taking some comp time from work today simply to catch up on some household chores. I had a whole bunch of ebay stuff to ship, plus I wanted to get caught up on laundry and everything since Earl and I are going to be in Philadelphia this weekend.

So I was driving home from work following my normal route. I am fortunate that we live near one of the local freeways, so aside from a few blocks of “city” traffic, it’s smooth sailing on the short drive home.

Except when someone is driving the wrong way up the freeway.

I had just jumped on at my usual interchange and had BT cranked up on the iPod. I was behind a tractor-trailer when all of a sudden the tractor trailer made a quick swerve to the right, into the shoulder. I immediately slowed down, not wanting risk damage to my beloved Acura (who cares about me, SAVE THE CAR). Then I noticed that there was a mid 90s Oldsmobile headed for me. The elderly driver, a man from what I could tell, was straddling the dotted white line, apparently oblivious to two things: he was headed the wrong way down the freeway and he was headed for other motor vehicles. I jumped into the shoulder, beeped my horn and yelled at him (surprisingly without profanities). I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish by yelling, as if he couldn’t see the car or the tractor trailer or hear my horn blaring, I doubt he was going to hear me yammering away at him from inside the car with the windows closed. He got by us and from what I could tell in the rearview mirror, he proceeded to drive several other vehicles off the road as he made his way up the freeway in the wrong direction.

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

First of all, I don’t believe that just because you’re elderly that you no longer have the privilege of being a motorist. And it’s just that, a privilege. It’s not one of your rights. George Washington did not cross the Delaware to secure a driver’s license for all. And that includes horse and buggies. Older people need to ambulate just as much as their younger counterparts do.

That being said, I believe that all motorists should be tested on their driving skills at least once a decade. Vehicles change, roads are reconfigured and driving habits deteriorate. Now I’m not saying that you should go through a full-blown road test with hand signals and all that, but I believe that you should have to demonstrate to a certified test official that you are able to navigate both local roads and freeways safely and efficiently without causing harm to yourself or those around you, and you should have to do this every ten years.

I also believe that if you drive something bigger than your average Cadillac sized sedan (read SUV) then you should have to demonstrate competency in being able to handle that safely. Yes, I believe that to drive an SUV you should have a special rating on your license. And to get that, you need to be able to drive it, park it in a parking lot, navigate a narrow street and parallel park.

If the requirements for maintaining a driver’s license were a little more stringent then perhaps we’d all pay a little more attention to what they were doing instead of yakking on the cell phone/slapping children/shaving/applying makeup/etc.

I just reread the previous two entries from today and found that they made me sound quite cranky today. I don’t feel cranky at all, just full of opinions I guess. I’ve been busying myself about the house while covering on-call for a couple of hours for a co-worker, Earl is parked on the sofa (or in old English, Davenport), watching the Eagles game on Monday Night Football. I occasionally hear a loud “YES” or “GO” in a very authorative football fan voice.

Go Eagles!

So while it may seem that I’ve been a little cranky and/or spacey today, rest assured that I was my usual jovial self. And thank goodness tomorrow isn’t Monday.

During a particularly agitating phone call with a customer today I decided to let my mind escape for a few moments while the customer ranted and raved about something quite trivial in the great scheme of things. What I find insane, quite frankly, is I daydreamed about singing a cover version of Dead Or Alive’s “In Too Deep”, complete with cowboy hat and chaps with my ass hanging out for the video.

Thank the Universe I’m not trapped in an episode of Ally McBeal or I would have found myself sitting at my desk in that very outfit.

Oy. Where the hell did that come from? Shockingly, it’s just another Monday in my book.

Maybe I need my own theme song or something.

This work and school thing simultaneously has me feeling a little overloaded in the technology department. I mean it’s point and click at work, point and click at school and then point and click at home. Point. Click. Point. Click. Point. Click.

Gosh I miss the DOS prompt.

So I haven’t been as chatty as usual here in cyberspace. It’s all good, even the most devoted of geeks needs a break now and then.

School is going well and I am *loving* the experience. I’m ready to take more on come spring semester. Work is going well in that it isn’t on my nerves and the social calendar is filling up quickly, as always. Earl and I are continuing our year long 10-year anniversary celebration by planning a special weekend beginning October 13, the anniversary of the day I proposed to him. Part of that weekend will be spent in Buffalo as I assume the guise of “DJ PiperCub”, but the rest of the weekend is in Earl’s capable hands. I heard something about a train, a plane and an automobile but I guess I’ll just have to wait until I can be surprised.

At least on September 13, the anniversary of the day we moved in together, we didn’t pitch any plates or glasses at each other. We’ve never done that. We don’t do that. I don’t know why the thought even crossed my mind.

So after work tonight at 5:00 p.m., I get to zoom home, gulp down some chow and head off to school to be in class by 6. Hopefully in stylish jeans. Tuesday night it was mentioned that we are not allowed to turn on the computers until the instructor is present. Guess I can’t buck for some brownie points tonight by doing that again.

I just had the oddest experience. I was eating my lunch, catching up on blogs and minding my own business when the phone rang. After remembering the fact that I’m no longer on call and was able to shake off any jitters or panic attacks, I proceeded to answer the phone. I was hoping it was Earl calling to talk dirty to me during my lunch hour. Of course I didn’t check the caller ID.

“Hello?”, I said in the deepest, sexiest voice I could muster.

“Well hello Loretta, It’s Joanne.”, said an elderly voice on the other end. She sounded like a woman.

“Uh, I think you have the wrong number”, I said (deflated), lowering my baritone voice down into the James Earl Jones range.

“How’ve you been?”, asked Joanne.

“Well, I’ve been fine, but I don’t think you have the right number.” I began to paint a mental image of what this mysterious Loretta must look and sound like. I wondered if her mustache was red too.

“When do you want to get together?”

“I really think you have the wrong number.”

“Is this 1545? 5945? 4945?”, she asked, suddenly confused. I was confused too, because she had rattled off too many phone numbers. Perhaps she was trying to dial Egypt.

“None of the above”, I responded. Such wit.

“Well I was trying to call Loretta.”

“Well, I’m not her. Have a good day.”

If you see a woman with a husky voice and a red mustache, tell her Joanne called.

So here it is Friday night and Earl and I are sitting upstairs playing on the computer. It’s very still outside, which has me a little nervous because I see Chicago east through the Ohio Valley is having some wild weather with tornado warnings and such. Normally, I would be quite excited about the possibility of that blowing through here except for one thing.

I’m on call this weekend.

I can’t really complain about on-call, as my team leader took two nights of my duties this week so I could go to school Tuesday and Thursday. On call during the week is the hardest part of the whole on call thing, the weekend is cake because I can sleep when I need to. So I’m not going to complain about it.

It does leave me wondering what to do this weekend though. We spent last weekend cleaning the house so aside from dusting, laundry and watering the plants, the house is in decent shape. I think I feel a video project stirring. Perhaps I’ll have to mess around with that a little bit and see if I can dream up something interesting. Now that the basement is cleaned out, I have room to put together a green screen.

Maybe I’ll try flying in a video.

Last Tuesday I was busy at work when my cell phone honked indicating that I had received a text message. I usually save my text messaging for after work hours, so I knew that something was up when my phone dinged in. The message was simple:

“Holy shit dad is getting married on sun call me”

The message was from my sister. Apparently she had spoken with my father and learned of some joyful family news. Luckily it was just before lunchtime, so I took the opportunity to call her during lunch. She told me that Dad and his girlfriend Karen had decided to get married and they were ready to do it over the coming weekend. They didn’t want any fuss and they didn’t want anyone to know that they were getting married so that there would be a huge party or anything like that. They would appreciate it if we didn’t tell anyone of their news.

So Sunday evening, Earl and I and my sister Jennifer went to Dad and Karen’s wedding. It was a beautiful, simple ceremony at the church Karen and her son have attended since moving to this area around 10 years ago. Their closest friends, people Jennifer and I have known all our lives, stood along side them as they exchanged their vows as we sat in the pews watching, praying and wishing them well. There was no organ music, there was no procession down the aisle; the simplicity added to the beauty.

Afterwards we all went to dinner in the historic village of Sackets Harbor, which is located near where the St. Lawrence Seaway and the 1000 Islands meet Lake Ontario. The food was delicious, the conversation was lively and the smiles were beaming.

It was truly a wonderful evening. I’m glad I don’t have to keep the secret any longer. I’m not that good at it.

And now I’m the red headed stepchild of the family.