Ponderings and Musings

I’m writing this blog entry using TextEdit because the SQL server on jpnearl.com is down. I’ve put in a support ticket to our hosting company but I have not heard a response. This has been happening quite a bit lately with our hosting company, I hope it doesn’t become a habit because it tends to make a geek cranky. Plus, I’m getting messages from Earl stating that he can’t blog and he has to right now!. Keep your fingers crossed.

I’m finding going to the gym similar to going to the laundromat. I know that’s an odd comparison but every time I’m working off the calories on the spazzmaster I can’t help but think that the heavily made up woman that jumps on the machine next to me must be nicknamed Speed Queen. She gets up on the spazzmaster and chug chug chugs along, obviously to a high paced beat thumping through her headphones. I don’t think I understand the need to put makeup on to go to the gym, but then again all I do to get ready for the gym is comb my face and make sure I’m wearing clothes without spaghetti sauce dribbled down the front. I wonder if this same woman puts on makeup to go to the laundromat.

When I’m over in the treadmill area, someone near me will always kick it up into high and start running, which I think is great. More power to them. At first this would remind me of the opening of the Six Million Dollar Man when he would ramp it up to 60 MPH, but now I’m reminded of the laundromat, because the treadmill running at high sounds like a heavily used washing machine kicking into spin. I wonder if the runner will cool down with a Fresca, since Fresca is a totally laundromat drink.

Remember when you used to get glass bottles out of the soda machine at the laundromat? You needed to use the bottle opener and everything. These glass bottles were used over and over, sanitized in between uses for your protection. Once I got a Fresca that had someone else’s straw in it. But the straw was clean.

Our gym does have beer available in the front lobby. I think that’s kind of cool, but I haven’t indulged yet.

One of my favorite activities while working is out is watching the guys and girls lift weights and work on their upper body muscle tone. I love to watch muscles pop and bulge and show the results of hard work and dedication. On the other hand, I really like watching guys take off their shirt at the laundromat and throw it in the washer, and then sling a full laundry basket full of dirty clothes into the big 50-pounder washing machine.

I guess it’s all relative.

Let’s all take a moment, sigh a big sigh together, and say a little prayer for Earl. You see, he’s had to endure my on-call mood of the weekend, which could best be described as “surly”.

Before leaving work last night, I was delighted to see that the weather forecast included clearing skies with a 20% chance of scattered showers. This meant that the weather wasn’t going to be a big factor in on-call this weekend and it should be relatively quiet.

Never count your chickens before they rain.

Mother Nature pulled her “ha ha” card out and blessed her children with a night of strong thunderstorms. Frequent lightning, downpours, heavy wind; she gave us the works. Usually I’m delighted by this sort of atmospheric activity and while I was trying to find some positive energy in the continuous thunder, I was actually sitting up in bed, holding my pager up like an offering to the sky and pleading non-stop, “don’t ring, don’t ding, don’t ring, don’t ding, don’t beckon, don’t ring.” Tom didn’t like the chanting, so he went under the bed. Earl snored through the whole ordeal.

Around 4:00 a.m., the sounds of thunder faded off into the distance. The pager had not gone off at all. I’d made it! I’d made it through a thunderstorm without a Mr. Telephone Man emergency.

“Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep”.

A customer in the eastern most location of our area code, a rural high school, had lost their phone service.

Jinkees.

So I did my little technological marvel thing and determined that I could see their end of the wire between the two cans, they must be experiencing a power outage. I’d deal with in the morning.

So I slept a little while, dreaming about this school and getting it mixed up with my school clock collection when the pager went off again. The circuit is still not up.

I won’t bore you with the remaining details, but suffice it to say that I’ve been very busy with many storm related outages throughout the day today. Things have settled down since supper and the skies have cleared somewhat, but all I can say is “God Bless Earl”, for he put up with one cranky telephone man today.

Earl is off buying lottery tickets. Tom is cruising up and down the back of the couch, looking for a landing spot near my PowerBook. He has the “urge to nudge” in his eye. I’m sitting on the couch, pecking away at my computer. I’m in the front room, or as it’s labeled on the electrical panel and heating pipes in the cellar, I’m sitting in the “parlor”.

We don’t use this room as much as I’d like. There’s no entertainment system in here, save for my grandmother’s piano. We’ve had the piano almost six months, and I can still smell it’s unique scent. I still haven’t determined if it’s the smell of the actual piano, or the smell of my grandparents’ house linger within the instrument.

I have a couple of beautiful plants in here that seem to be holding their own, despite minimal attention from me. There’s a chess game in progress on the coffee table. This room has a formal, yet somewhat cozy feeling to it.

Perhaps we need to spend more time in here. It’s peaceful. A perfect way to end the work week and kick off the weekend.

As I was working out last night, watching whatever was flashing on the bank of televisions in front of me, I noticed a local grocery store commercial flash on the screen obviously promoting the joyousness of Easter dinner. I didn’t have my headphones tuned to that channel, but at the end of the commercial a simple message was displayed: “Happy Holidays”.

At first the radio program director in me kicked in and said “whoops, they ran the wrong spot!”, thinking they had run a Christmastime spot in error. But then I realized that the ad was in pastel colors and just had this look of spring about it. So why did they end the spot with a graphic stating “Happy Holidays.”?

Because they’re being ultra PC.

I hate that.

I’ve mentioned before that while I am a very spiritual person, I’m really not a religious person. Personally I don’t feel that religion really embraces all that is spiritual. I believe that the concept of “God” goes way beyond mere human comprehension. God is a He. God is a She. God is all around us. Religion is too “human”. That being said, I am not offended at all when someone says to me “Happy Easter”.

Living in a mostly Christian nation, for the most part it’s innocently assumed that those around you are Christian as well. I believe that if someone wishes you a “Happy Easter”, that it should be taken in the spirit in which it was intended. In December, many, many people wish me a “Merry Christmas”, even though it would be more inline with my beliefs to say “Happy Solstice.” I don’t slap them across the face and say “Idiot! I’m celebrating the solstice!”. That would be rude.

So I guess I find the message of “Happy Holidays” on last night’s Easter themed commercial to be rather silly. Oh, I appreciate the spirit of the message and accept it as such, but it just seems so hollow to use a generic “Happy Holidays” at any time of the year.

Enjoy your weekend, no matter the celebration or observance.

Yesterday in a spasm of productivity I went ahead and put the patio set up on the deck. The table is out, the umbrella is in place and the chairs are lined up accordingly. Now I just need to hose the whole ensemble down and make it a comfortable landing place for visitors.

I did find one chair devoid of crap on the seat and made myself comfortable to enjoy the weather during lunch. There’s buds on the trees, birds are singing, and there’s a purring cat sitting in my lap, routinely smelling my beard for leftover food (apparently he knows I store it there).

It’s nice to be getting into the swing of spring again. There’s talk of a thunderstorm tonight and while I would usually welcome that with open arms, it’s on-call week which makes thunderstorms a little less enjoyable. (Lightning + phone lines = busy J.P.). Thankfully, the forecast shows the rain passing through to be brief.

I remarked on Monday how I had that good ol’ “unglued” feeling at work but then I calmed down when I got home. I’m feeling great today, and Earl made it a little better by joining me at home for lunch again.

Life is good.

This week I’ve got this citrus thing going on again. More specifically, orange. I can’t get enough orange. Orange flavored gum, orange flavored toothpaste, orange flavored Vitamin-C drops, orange juice, orange scented incense, the list goes on and on.

I love the color orange. I’ve always loved the color orange. And I just love the scent and taste of orange. Orange, orange, orange. While I was chomping away at some orange flavored gum on Sunday, Earl even had the nerve to call me Anita Bryant. I almost through a pie in his face but I didn’t have one nearby.

Now I’m in the mood for some diet orange soda. I don’t think I’ve ever had diet orange soda before. Maybe a midnight snack is in order.

Earl surprised me this afternoon by being home when I took my lunch hour. He has an dinner appointment tonight, so he’s taking some time out of his busy schedule to get ready for this little shin-dig.

Nothing gets the blood moving like having your beloved home at lunch time.

So this morning I was all happy when I awoke. I had slept well, I’m working the later shift this week so I can get some extra treasured sleep after Earl leaves for work and I can get to work at the reasonable 9 a.m. Bordering on giddy with this arrangement, I decided to fold a load of laundry before taking a shower, started a new load of laundry and picked up the house a little bit. I’ve even had time to sit down, meditate on what I want to accomplish this week and enjoy the scent of a little sandalwood incense.

All in all, I felt good when I walked into work at 9 a.m.

By 11 a.m. I was a raving lunatic.

I don’t know what happened to my mood. It seemed like things were just going awry all over the place. It was a bright, sunny, calm day. But phone lines were crapping out, internet connections were dropping all over the place and customers were calling with what I would frankly call stupid questions. “My answering machine cuts off after exactly 39 seconds. I think I need a new phone line.”

After returning to work after my lunch fiasco involving a service call with the local cable company, I calmed down a little bit and just did what I had to do. By 5 p.m., I found myself calming down considerably and thinking rationally again.

Perhaps I need start drinking lunch.

As Earl mentioned on his blog tonight, I’m on call. I was getting ready to abandon my gym visits during on-call week but I decided that I’d give it a try. So off to the gym I went, where I jumped onto an empty spazzmaster and did a power workout, worried that the pager was going to go off. I cut my workout time in half but did three quarters of my usual burned calories. All was not lost.

I’m hoping that I got this fit of hysteria I had today out of my system and just attributed my behavior to a bad Monday. I’m ready for a quiet and productive rest of the week.

Earl and I decided that we wanted to have a date of sorts tonight, so after working out at the gym this afternoon we made ourselves presentable, threw on some duds and headed to a local steakhouse.

The steakhouse is neighbors with the local theatre, and this week Cinderella: The Ballet is in town. Since I work right across the street from the theatre, I should have remember this from passing under the marquee all week, but I didn’t remember until we got to the area and saw that it was quite busy. The street traffic was a welcomed change for the usually dead Saturday night in this area.

We were pleasantly surprised to be seated immediately, having arrived about 20 minutes before curtain time. Along side of us was a party of about ten, including three young children, roughly early elementary school age. They were accompanied by their mothers, who appeared to either be friends or sisters, and an elderly couple that we deduced were somebody’s grandparents.

The kids were hedging into holy terror territory running around the tables of others, taking their shoes and socks off and storing them under the table, ripping loaves of bread in half and making like Hansel and Gretel. In the sad fashion on today’s parental generation, the mothers apparently couldn’t of cared less, save for the one that started counting “one, two, three” as if the Sesame Street numbers routine was going to scare the wrath of God into the children. Amongst all the noise from the table, the kids were screaming about how excited they were to being seeing Cinderella. Except it was 7:15. And curtain time was 7:30, and they were just being served their salads.

“This can’t be good”, I whispered to Earl.

Around 7:20, Count Monster Mom started flapping her arms like a demented windmill in an effort to flag down the waiter. “You need to bring the kids their food right now, they don’t need to wait for the other meals to be served.” Why discipline when you can stuff their mouths shut? Small wonder today’s youth is fat. Nevertheless, the waiter brought the kids their food.

It was nearly 7:25 when the remaining meals were brought to the table. At 7:30, as they were still digging in to their meals and undoubtedly the curtain was going up next store, Count Monster Mom did the windmill routine again and then snapped her fingers in the air (I’ve never seen that before in real life; how rude!) in a stereotypical “Garçon!” move, demanding the check. She then asked for the manager to come to the table.

I couldn’t hear the entire conversation, but Earl and I did our best to Gladys Kravitz what was going on next door.

“This restaurant is next door to the theatre, we thought a 6:00 reservation would give us ample time to eat before the show started. You should be taking 15% off the check.”

“Yes ma’am, I understand, but you arrived at 6:45. We’ve been located next to the theatre for a long time. One and a half hours before curtain with a party of ten is cutting it rather close.”

“But we have to take most of our meals with us since the show has already started. You really should take something off the check.”

“I’m sorry ma’am, but I can’t do that, as you were 45 minutes late for your reservation.”

Count Monster Mom then got all huffy and started shoveling her food into the take-out containers, gathered up her gaggle of monsters and headed for the door.

The grandparents decided to stay and finish their meal in peace. Earl and I enjoyed the silence after their departure as well.

As more and more sound invades our space these days with the increasing number of advertisements, gizmos, technological marvels and what not, I began to wonder if it’s possible to experience silence these days. I’m not talking about awkwards gaps in conversation or people not speaking, but rather just an absence of sound.

I know that total silence is theoretically impossible. After all, if you’re engulfed in total silence, you’re probably going to hear the sound of your own heartbeat. But what’s it like to listen to nothing? No sound of a ventilation fan in the background; no hum of a computer system; no melodies of wind chimes dancing in the wind. Would I feel completely at peace in total silence or rather completely frustrated because one of my senses was not being stimulated.

There are people that don’t like silence. They walk into a room in their house, hear nothing and know that the kids have moved on to their adult lives. Others with younger kids may take silence as an indicator of mischief occurring elsewhere in the house. Some can work with a radio in the background, others can’t stand the distraction. I find it all quite fascinating, but then again, I feel humans fascinating in general.

Sometimes I think the whir of machinery and the bells and whistles of technology, always present in the background, subliminally annoy us in this whirlwind we call life. These ambient noises just add a little more steam to our tea kettle of a mind, causing it to be that much closer to speaking out and letting off some steam. Perhaps I need to find a nice comfortable spot in the woods or in the desert during our upcoming trip and just do nothing except enjoy the silence.