Ponderings and Musings

It is a hot, sticky night here in Upstate New York. The mercury is pushing 80 degrees at 11:00 p.m. Where’s the justice in that?

Earl and I just went for a ride to enjoy the air-conditioning of the Acura. We complimented the trip with a pass through Wendy’s drive-thru for a couple of iced teas with lemon. It was refreshing, especially since it was a whole lot of water, with a wedge of lemon and just a hint of tea to give it flavor.

The air is murky tonight. The moon is surrounded by haze. The air is still. The mood is quiet.

I’m chatting online with my blog friend Karl and basically just endlessly surfing the ‘net, inquisitive about any random subject that pops into my brain. To compliment the evening, I’m playing a little bit of Abba softly in the background. Gosh, I miss Abba. I wish they’d do one reunion concert.

The dryer buzzes it’s end of cycle signal. I can officially go to bed now. Let’s hope the Universe cooperates and doesn’t ring my on call pager.

I’m back on call this week. This week on, week off, week on thing is for the birds, especially when there are things to do, places to go and people to see. Oh well, it’ll all have to wait until next week. I’m desperately trying not to be cranky about the whole thing and I think the happy side of me is winning, so let’s hope it stays that way for the duration.

I did want to smack a woman driving a big honkin’ SUV today. The interstate is undergoing construction and there’s three lanes being jimmied down to one with a major on-ramp feeding into the mess to keep things chaotic. I was on the on-ramp which has a stop sign at the end. Cars were backed up on both the main road and the on-ramp, so drivers were alternating back and forth with right of way, contrary to the stop sign, but in a friendly, howdy neighbor driver thing. It was heartwarming.

I pulled up to the stop sign and looked at this big massive red thing (it turned out to be her hair) in a big, massive SUV, hoping she’d let me out like the 30 cars or so her had done.

Nope. She’s important. She _shook her head_ and barreled through the work zone, almost hitting one of the workers that apparently she felt was working too close to her lane.

I hope her car goes up in flames. While that sounds quite mean I don’t want her to be hurt, I just want her to be scared enough of SUVs that her next vehicle is an old, beat-up Le Car.

At the very least I hope her gas card gets rejected at the pump and she has to mortgage her house to pay for the tank of gas.

My, I guess I’m not as happy as I thought I was!

Earl is going to be out of town for part of the week so I’m going to be sitting home twiddling my thumbs. Maybe I’ll get crazy and clean the pool or something. Maybe I’ll plan an “end of the summer” party for late August. Planning a party does get one motivated to clean the house and get things in order.

As I readied myself for lunch today, Earl dropped me an e-mail to let me know that he would not be able to make our lunch appointment. Apparently the plant outside of Cleveland had flooded last night and he had to be on a conference call. The situation was eerily similar to that of about a month ago, when the same thing happened in the southern part of the state.

Big hurricanes. Lots of rain. Flooding where it hasn’t flooded in a really long time. Lots of heat. Volcanoes erupting and earthquakes in the ocean. I get the feeling that someone is trying to say something.

So I ended up heading home for lunch. I looked outside and noticed that it was raining like crazy. The street was flooding and it was just coming down in buckets. Did that make me stay at the office for lunch? Of course not. I borrowed my co-workers emergency umbrella, saddled up the car with a pair of water skiis and surfed home.

Surf’s up dude.

Oil companies are reporting record quarterly profits for the 2nd quarter of this year. Shell is up 40% from the same time last year.

Kind of makes you really hate that “$3.129” that appeared on the gas station price board this morning, doesn’t it?

Instead of going on and on about how consumers are basically being screwed by big business when we try to fill our tanks (note the interesting visual that comes to mind when you really read that phrase), I believe that oil companies should embrace the New American Way by changing the public perception of gas prices in lieu of addressing the fact that they’re getting rich while we consumers are mortgaging houses to afford the fuel needed to commute.

This is the perfect opportunity to go metric.

Just imagine how much better you would feel this very moment if you drove down Main St. USA and saw that gas was $0.829 today. By the way, why do they charge to the 9/10 of a cent? What part of Lincoln’s head are they chopping off that penny anyway – the top of his head or his neck? Anyway, motorists wouldn’t be nearly as manic if they thought they were paying less than a dollar for gas. All we need to do is switch from gallons to liters and presto, perceived instant savings.

Makes cents to me.

I’ve always been a metric sort of guy. On the radio I would give the temperature in fahrenheit and celcius. I design road signs in millimeters for my road geek web site. When I was single, I was asked how “big” I was to which I replied “14.65”, not that I measured or anything.

If the U.S. would join the rest of the word and go metric, we’d all be a little bit happier. No more trying to convert quarts to acres. No wondering how many bushels to peck.

And lots of cheap gas!

Sometimes it only takes one little thing to make the day seem brighter and better. This morning I woke up not feeling quite on my game. There were a variety of reasons; it’s been very sticky and hot sleeping the past couple of nights, several of my dreams have been apocalyptic in nature this week and my stomach is feeling a little bit off this morning, undoubtedly because of the nachos and beer I had for supper last night. No regrets though, it was good.

Anyway, Earl and I eat these healthy Special K breakfast bars for breakfast and Earl has a sort of unspoken rule that we don’t open the next box of them until the current box is empty. We’ve been eating strawberry and blueberry bars since we discovered these little goodies, but last week Earl brought home another flavor: Chocolatey Drizzle.

This morning I was finally able to open the Chocolatey Drizzle box. I haven’t had my first bar yet, as it’s sitting to the left of the PowerBook with the promise of breakfasty goodness. But the prospect of eating this little delight has made the morning not so bad.

It’s like a little bar of sunshine.

Yesterday I was all proud of myself because I walked 2 1/2 miles during my lunch hour. Did I feel better for it? Sort of. Not really. I was hot, sweaty and sticky and it wasn’t even from the heat of passion. It was from walking the streets of our fine city. Afterwards, I stuck to my office chair and dripped on my keyboard.

Not pretty.

So today I did the sensible thing. Now if you think that means I packed up a bag of gym clothes to change into during lunch then you really haven’t been paying attention. No, no. I came home and did the right thing, I followed my traditional routine by flying home at an unreasonable speed, parked my butt in front of my computer and surfed the internet, all accompanied by a delicious wrap Earl made for me this morning. (I’m extremely lucky in the “let’s eat!” department).

Will I feel all better this afternoon? I think I will because I won’t stick to the office chair and my keyboard won’t be dripped on. I’ll save the walk for tonight.

With going back to work today after yesterday’s day off I’ve decided that I need a little change of pace to liven things up a little bit. So at lunchtime today I’m planning on going for a walk around downtown instead of my usual mad dash home for lunch and then fighting with traffic to get back on time.

I’m hoping the exercise will wake me up a little bit.

Never the morning person, a fact I pride myself in, I’m working the 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift this week and so my butt is dragging already. Sometimes I feel bad for the company I work for, as I’m basically a walking zombie before noon. I wonder if they’re getting their money’s worth. Well, I’m not a zombie, but I’m at my most productive in the afternoon. I work amongst “morning people” that are all chipper and whatnot when they get to work. I occasionally fight the impulse to slap them.

Earl called me “Fuzzy” last night because I haven’t shaved my head since Saturday. For the first time in a number of years I’ve taken a break off from the task. It’s not going to last by any means, but it’s interesting to see what grows and what doesn’t and what color it all turns out to be.

Such an adventurous life.

Today has been a lazy day. I worked on my Blue Marvel fan film script a little bit. Earl and I took did some test taping out in the back lawn to see how bad the background noise would be picked up on the videotape. Of course, that’s when the neighbor decided to fire up the lawnmower. I definitely need to get the wireless mic going.

Other than that work kept me a little busy but mostly it was all about relaxation today. I’m taking tomorrow off with comp time to do some road research for my roadgeek web site so I’m kicked back a little bit and not sweating life at all.

Sometimes a quiet weekend is a good thing.

Today I told my supervisor that I’m taking Monday off. I’ve accumulated enough comp time this week for a little R and R and because I want to be a good team player, I’m taking Monday off so that it doesn’t conflict with anyone else’s plans.

I wonder if he was amused by my proclamation.

I am constantly trying to read people, analyze situations and basically get a grip on the reality around me. At first I read a “sigh” when I told him I wanted Monday off, a quick “fsck” and then I finally got an o.k. So I went with it. It should be interesting in that I’ll be on-call until Monday at 8 a.m. Since I won’t be at work at freedom time, I hope I am still able to resist the urge to chuck my pager into the canal.

My pager and I have a love/hate relationship. I love it when it’s off, I hate it when it’s complaining about something. We’ve become so connected that I almost always reach for it before it even goes off, like some sort of weird psychic vibe is telling me that it’s time to be SuperTech. Earl is always asking me as I reach for the pager before it beeps, “How did you do that?” “It’s a gift.”, I usually reply. I can just see myself on “Who Wants To Be A Superhero?”. “Uh, what’s your superpower?” “I’m able to detect Motorola pagers before they ding.”

Thrilling. Watch out Lex Luthor, I’m going to intercept your pages from your henchmen, insert triumphant laugh here. Wonder Woman will end up hating me because she’ll have to lug me around in the invisible jet because I can’t fly on my own. I’ll have to share a seat with Aquaman (he can’t fly either)which could be a bummer since I don’t want his slimy, seaweedy hands on my knee, I don’t care how big his shoal is.

So what to do on Monday. I think I’ll sleep in and then do some road geeking for the website. With the pager off.

When did we, the American People, stop expecting perfection and start accepting “o.k.” when it comes to things? My goodness, these days if you go to Wal*Mart (Always White Trash, Always), you’re grateful if a) the cashier doesn’t slap you across the face for interrupting her time at her station let alone actually thanking you for your patronage and b) you’re happy that whatever you bought actually works/is edible/doesn’t blow up. We’ve come to accept that the newest version of Windows any expensive computer program won’t be perfect, but maybe the next version will be for twice the price. We’re absolutely giddy that the washing machine we bought lasted five years, when our parents and grandparents expected the same sort of purchase to last twenty years!

Why do we put up with this?

Why don’t we care anymore?

Why is it acceptable to be mediocre these days? Why don’t people expect perfection or at least an attempt in that direction?

I’m finding this quite maddening.