Ponderings and Musings

Now that the sun is actually showing itself and it’s starting to feel a little like spring in these parts, I’m noticing more and more people are coming out of their hibernation and starting to walk the streets around downtown. You can always spot the winter shut in type, they are still wearing a heavy coat while others around them are making due without a jacket. And they look very, very pale.

When I was growing up my sister often referred to my coloring as “lily white”. Now that I look back on it, I think that was kind of rude. Nevertheless, while I wouldn’t paint me in the same corner as Casper, I will admit that I don’t get much color on my skin. I’m the type that burns and then peels, rinse and repeat. I go from “lily white” to shocking red to yuck and then back to pale white.

I think my sister hogged all the tanning genes in the family. I don’t think she’s ever had a sunburn in her life. But then again, I’m the only redhead of my generation so maybe I just got an extra helping of the low sun tolerance genome.

I’m going to attempt to get a little color this year without getting all sunburned. That way when Earl and I go traveling this summer, I won’t spook everyone at the beach.

Eating healthy has been the name of the game in our merry little home and Earl and I have been joined by another family member in the quest for a better body.

Our cat Tom is now on the bandwagon.

Tom has his annual trip to the vet a week or two ago. It was the usual routine, he sees the cat carrier and jets underneath anything that would restrict access to him, be it the bed, the couch or the piano. Being the mean ol’ daddy that I am, I coax him out by pulling on one his paws until he follows along, literally kicking and screaming all the way. Then I give him a shove into the cat carrier, in which his paws spring out in every direction but “in”, so I end up turning him this way and that until he finally admits defeat and actually gets in the carrier. On the ride to the vet, anything that will come out of cat, except blood, will. He must figure that it’s easier for him to give all the samples in the car instead of the in the exam room.

It’s such a lovely experience.

Anyways, since Tom has been with us he’s weighed between 10 3/4 and 11 1/4 pounds. This visit he clocked in at 12 1/4 pounds! I resisted the urge to point out to the vet that he was on a different scale for the first time and that he had hit “stop” when the dial was turning and it had stopped on 12 1/4 pounds. Perhaps he was secretly saying “no whammies, no whammies, no whammies.” Who knows.

So he suggested Tom get away from the moist food we were giving him as a side dish to his kibble. He wanted to recommend some expensive, prescription required food but I told him the last time we tried that Tom refused to eat for three days and made everyone’s life miserable until he was served something with flavor.

So we’ve found this light kibble for adult cats. Unlike human food that’s branded ‘lite’, I don’t think there’s splenda in it.

So now that Earl and I are eating heatlhy, we have Tom joining in on the group effort. We’re going to be a fierce looking family come summertime.

In less than an hour it will officially be spring! Winter will be over and spring will be upon us. I think Mother Nature missed the memo, it’s in the mid 20s right now.

Happy Spring. Have you hugged a daffodil today?

For some reason I awoke this morning in full domestic mode. I wanted to clean. I wanted to redecorate. I want to make this house POP. So after a nice little breakfast, Earl and I started cleaning and scrubbing the house. He did bathrooms, I did the kitchen. I actually scraped enough gunk off the stove to find out the original color of it. It’s off white! Maybe it’s almond. Earl came in and said, “Hmmm… I always thought the stove was avocado.” Nevertheless, it’s looking spiffy now. We’re afraid to cook in fear of getting it dirty.

Earl continued to work on the bathrooms while I tackled the next chore, dusting. I have to admit I’m not a big fan of dusting. I don’t like spraying crap on the end table to make it shine. The cat slides off when he jumps on it and it’s smells way too lemony for my taste. So we just swiffed our way through it with a handy little Swiffer duster. Much quicker and much better.

No cleaning project is complete without mopping the kitchen floor. So I did the honors and found the original tile pattern after a little bit of elbow grease. Earl and I are such sloppy cooks in the kitchen!

I must admit that occasionally I feel overwhelmed by our house. It’s pretty good sized and with both our busy schedules always grinding away, sometimes keeping the house up to health standards can be challenging. We’ve talked about moving to a smaller place just so we wouldn’t have so much work to do to keep the house clean. But I’ve decided I like our home. It just needs a little TLC once in a while.

Next domestic attack: the basement!

Earl and I are staying pretty much at home this weekend because of my work on-call schedule. It’s certainly a change of pace from the past two weekends, but we probably needed this time to catch up on some household chores.

I wish I could write about how productive I’ve been today getting the house clean, but I haven’t done much of that today. Surprisingly, work has kept me somewhat busy today which means a little comp time in a week or two which will be very nice.

Tonight we are going to a party at one of Earl’s co-worker’s house. Hopefully the on-call gods will be kind.

As I was heading for my car to escape for lunch, I noticed that the city DPW painted the traditional green line down the middle of the main street in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and the big parade tomorrow.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade here is usually very interesting. Traditionally, Mother Nature blesses us with a last blast of winter so there’s often snow on the ground. Sometimes there’s a blizzard. In fact, Dolly Parton was once stranded in the downtown hotel after a performance the previous night and was unable to leave due to the blizzard hitting the area. Bored, she looked out her hotel window and saw the St. Patrick’s Day parade proceeding right through downtown. You could barely see the floats from all the snow, but there it was, your average parade in the middle of a snowstorm. Dolly relayed the experience to the rest of America on David Letterman the following Monday night.

Back in my radio days, the station I worked for made an appearance in the parade, reminding folks why our station was best. One year we tried to get fancy and hired a tractor trailer to provide the stage for our music, inviting listeners up on the bed of the trailer to dance along with the music. We set up the booth traditionally used when we were on location, which was unwieldy at best. (It wasn’t meant to be moving). The bed of the trailer was so icy that we had to form a human chain and hold on for our dear lives so that people wouldn’t be pitched off the back everytime the parade started moving. Since there were several youngsters aboard, the music director reminded us that we should watch our language. The truck took off and she punctuated the experience with a “holy fuckin’ shit” as she held on for dear life. After the initial shock we pummeled the crowd with tootsie rolls, lollipops and dum-dums, because nothing says “listen to the radio” better than a rock hard frozen tootsie roll.

The following year it was 75 degrees for a change and I convinced the new night jock, a handsome young man, to go shirtless to “tease the ladies”. Come to find out, he was too good at teasing the ladies and had to be fired when I found him more than just teasing the ladies in the studio during his air shift.

Ah, good times.

So tonight Earl and I are going to have swig of beer and eat something festive like cabbage to celebrate the holiday. We’ll skip the parade tomorrow since it’s no longer mandatory for us and because I’m on call.

I’m betting it’s going to be snowing.

Last night, Earl and I caught that new show on HBO, “Big Love”. It’s a drama that basically follows a non-traditional family, a husband (Bill Paxton) and his three (yes I said “three”) wives and children that live in a suburban Utah town. The husband owns a chain of hardware stores and is juggling the stress of his job, his family, his ailing father and paranoid mother and his business “financers”.

The show didn’t really grip me but I found the premise interesting. For the first time in a long while, there was something different on the television screen. I don’t think there’s been a television series with polygomy as the backdrop before. I didn’t find myself engaged by the show though.

While we were watching the program I kept asking Earl, “Are there really groups living in compounds like that in Utah?” and “Do people really live like that?”, as if he’s the expert on social habits in Utah. I’ve been fortunate enough to see many, many different living arrangements in my life but I’ve never been to a compound where all the women were married to one man. That’s a new one for me. Discussing the show with my co-worker today I was surprised that such a compound exists not too far from here. She mentioned that it’s populated by a “three old women” now and they give tours of the place. In fact, one of her college classes went there on a field trip.

I believe that love is love is love is love is love and that it takes many shapes and forms and works in an infinite number of ways. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that what works for couple (or group) “A” doesn’t necessarily work for others. I’ve seen couples with multiple sex partners. I’ve seen couples that wouldn’t allow each other the luxury of even looking at another person in a romantic way. I’ve met couples that thrived on arguing to the point that they threw kitchen knives at each other when they fought. I once met a couple years ago where one locked the other up in a cage for the night. All of this is good, because it’s diversity in people that makes the world go ’round.

Earl and I added “Big Love” to the TiVo to-do list simply because it’s something different to watch. Will I go crazy with anticipation waiting for the next show? Probably not, I’m reserving that for “Medium” these days. But I think it’s great that another small niche of society gets a little air time.

Mother Nature has decided to bless us with some winter weather this week. Temperatures aren’t going to make it out of the 30s through the weekend and we are getting some snow, probably six more inches by midnight, adding to the six or seven inches already on the ground.

That means I have to run the snowblower tonight.

In typical fashion for this area, drivers have disregarded all rules of the road since there’s snow on the ground. I’ve commented before that there’s a general belief amongst the area’s citizens that parking lot lines dance and rearrange themselves under the cover of snow. Why park in neat rows with the other cars when you can parallel park between a Volkswagen and an H2 and take up three or four spots in the process? Then there’s the complete disregard for any sign or signal that may have a color to it – red, green, white, yellow, doesn’t matter, there’s snow on the ground! Nevermind that some drive the wrong way up the freeway, there’s snow on the ground!

I’m hoping that this is the last blast of winter for the season. Might as well go out with a bang.

Family and friends can attest to this; I’m a big dreamer. I believe there’s no limit to what one can accomplish, once you put your mind to it. For example, this past weekend Earl and I wanted to go for a ride. We ended up driving just shy of 1700 miles.

I’m a big daydreamer too. While I’m busy at work I usually multitask by thinking about my next big plan whilst going about the daily routine. There’s always things to think about; the next video I’m going to make, the next website I’m going to design, the next road trip that we’re going to take.

I’ve always been one to go after a vision. One of my earliest recollections is from first grade. Miss Kania (my teacher) told us about subways and how there’s trains underground in big cities that move people from place to place. We learned about subway construction and saw pictures of this marvelous mode of transportation. It looked easy. So imagine my father’s dismay when he came home and found his six year old son digging up the lawn with a shovel and a pitchfork so that he could build a subway. At the very least I would have a cave when I was done.

I don’t think the grass ever grew back in that part of the lawn.

When I was in my early 20s and sort of bored with the whole computer thing (mind you, this was 1990), I decided that I wanted to be on the radio. I’d always had an interest in the music charts, so it would be a snap, right? I had no experience in radio broadcasting. I never had any education in that area. But I made tapes, I bugged radio station program directors and I got a weekend gig. Eventually I moved on to another station and became program director. A dream realized.

One of the things that attracted me to Earl was that he thinks big. He’s not as much of a dreamer as I am, but when he wants something, he plans big and goes for the gold. He doesn’t want a couch, he wants to furnish the entire house with furniture. He doesn’t want to be plant manager, he wants to run the whole operation.

When you dream or think big, the whole world is at your fingertips. And what a pleasant place it can be.

Our weekend festivities gave me the needed kick in the backside to get my energy going and to be thinking productively. Work has been a little crazy this morning, with heavy rain and thunderstorms passing through the area (never a good mix with telephone lines) and tonight’s forecast promises more fun. And I’m on call.

For once in my career, I don’t really mind.

It’s because I feel good about what I do and I feel comfortable with myself these days. Before leaving for work this morning, I started the dishwasher and got a head start on the laundry. Usually the clothes would sit in the washing machine until I got home from work, but why put off what you can do during your lunch hour. As I type, the washer is humming along, accompanied by the tell-tale sounds of a load of jeans is in the dryer. (Somebody didn’t empty the change out of his pockets last night.) I even emptied the dishwasher so that we could start fresh tonight with the supper dishes.

All I’m missing is an apron.

For those calendar watchers may I point out that spring is a mere week away. For as long as I can remember, a local restaurant has featured the countdown to spring, beginning on New Year’s Day, on one of their signs. Every day one passes by and thinks, “65 days ’til spring”, “43 days ’til spring”, etc. We’re now in the single digits.

It’s an appropriate time to bloom I guess.