Ponderings and Musings

I’ve been a little down on my job this week as a result of my on-call duties. This round of on-call has been busy and I don’t take sleep interruptions well. I’ve been cranky. I’ve been somewhat foul. I’ve startled those around me with a blue flair for language.

Tonight we attended a company function. It was a village-wide celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the founding telephone company I work for. The company turned the backyard of the corporate office into a huge picnic for any customer that has dial tone with the company, plus all the employees of the affiliated companies throughout Upstate N.Y. It was a very impressive affair. There were live performers, delicious food, souvenir champagne glasses and tours of the equipment and facility. Many members of the community came out to greet their neighbors, and a couple of state politicians attend the affair as well.

The group of companies is family owned and operated. The owner and president of the company gave a well received speech about the goals and achievements over the past century, and what our company has to look forward to on the road ahead. Earl and I chatted with many of my co-workers. Pleasantries were exchanged, it was all good.

It’s exactly what I needed to get my career spirits back in order. On-call doesn’t seem so bad anymore. I’m looking forward to going to work on Monday. I mentioned a couple of entries ago that I envisioned myself working for a baby Bell someday. I no longer have that vision. I’m happy where I am right now.

It’s not often that I write in my blog before going to work but for some reason the inspiration has slapped me upside the head for a change.

It’s June.

I’m reminded of a song we used to sing in high school chorus. “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over. All over the meadows and hills…” Actually, I sang that song as a high school sophomore in Area All-State Chorus which was being hosted in Holland Patent (local school) that year. That weekend was memorable in many ways for me.

My maternal grandmother and my dear Aunt Jenn came to that concert, along with my mom, dad and sister. The concert was held in the gymnasium instead of the auditorium for some reason. The audience had to sit on the bleechers. I miss my Gram and Aunt Jenn very much. We all rode home in the ’78 Impala together after the concert.

Because Holland Patent was quite a distance from Pulaski, all of students from Pulaski spent the night between rehearsal and the concert in a small motel outside of Rome. The motel is still there. We hung out at the bar next door that night. We slept four to a room, two to a bed. I didn’t sleep, because, well, I was a sophomore in high school that knew what he was to become but dared not tell a soul who was sleeping in the same room with three other guys…

“Because It’s June. June. June. June.”

It’s funny how a particular memory can trigger another memory which goes on and on and on. I believe the song that’s ripping through my head now is from “Carousel.” It was part of a medley we sang that also included the song “When you walk, through a storm, hold your head up high. And don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm, there’s a starry sky…”, or something like that.

Today the sky is full of sunshine and the horizon is clear. And my mood and the weather are in concert today.

Because it’s June. June. June. June.

Earl and I jammed so much into this past weekend that it felt like we had a whole week of vacation. That made work especially tough to look in the face this morning. I woke up feeling all depressed about having to go back to work and drudging through another day. But I got up, opted to go for a nice power walk and took the morning square on.

It wasn’t bad once I got to work. It was thankfully rather busy today so the day just flew by. I don’t know why I get down in the dumps getting up in the morning, because I certainly love my job. I just do so well when I’m dreaming. I mean dreaming, as in dreaming while I’m asleep. All the things I wish I could do, I do. I studied lucid dreaming, where you basically are aware that you’re dreaming and control what you’re dreaming, a number of years ago and I pride myself on the fact that I’m fairly good at it. I have to remember not to do it too often, for then I don’t get any rest and I end up cranky. But I bet I’m the only nose twitching dreamer on this side of the whole dreamscape. On the other hand, perhaps this is only a dream and I’m currently sitting in a nut house making rag rugs with blunt scissors and humming to myself loudly. Who knows. It does make on thing along the lines of “The Matrix”, does it not?

I am trying to build up the motivation to get back on a healthy lifestyle again. If you take a look at the Moblog and gander at the picture entitled “Heid’s”, you’ll note that last night’s supper was a large fries smothered in beef gravy, a hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard, a hot dog with chili and cheese, a half a deli-style pickle and a medium diet pop.

This gluttenous supper was in celebration of the fact that Earl and I had just spent an hour or so walking at a good pace along Onondaga Lake Park.

To celebrate eating the entire meal and refraining from licking the tray (we were in public after all), I had a hot fudge sundae about an hour later. The trouble is, all that food was good. My stomach was saying “feed me!” “feed me!” and I was saying “yeah, baby! yeah, baby!”.

I can’t motivate myself to eat a salad instead of fries with gravy. In the past I’ve eaten so much salad I’ve pooped dandelions. Fat free dressing is taste free dressing. And now we have those wonderful “healthy” alternatives of Olestra and Splenda. Why does better living through chemistry always use names that end in “a” or “uh”. I’ve mentioned in the past was a wonderful experience Olestra was (the tree that I borrowed along the Thruway still has not recovered) and Splenda gives me a headache. As I’m typing this, I’m thinking “man I have a headache”, small wonder, I drank that stupid diet pop last night!

I try to drink iced tea but you can only take that for so long. Lemonade has sugar in it and we all know that sugar is the cocaine of the calories crowd.

So I’m stumped. I have no idea how to get motivated to eat healthy and to exercise. On the bright side, I’m typing this entry as I cool down from a 10 mile bike ride. It was kind of odd, my bike addressing me as a stranger in all, since we hadn’t seen each other in so long. But the ride was good.

I think I’ll have a Corona and chili cheese dog to celebrate.

Ah, the last day of September. I love it. My favorite season is fall. I love the crisp, cool evening air; I love the smells of everyone starting up their fireplaces and wood stoves; fall and winter always seem more family oriented to me. We tend to see our families more with the impending holidays, and to me, there’s an overall increase in ‘human warmth’.

Tomorrow and Tuesday morning I have to go into work at 5:30 a.m. The radio station hired a new morning show team, Doc and Dee, and I need to make sure that they’re all set with the equipment and stuff. I think they’re going to be a great asset to the station, and I hope the ratings reflect it.

After struggling around a bit with my webcams, I’ve finally decided on the Kodak webcam for my system. I am really pleased with it, and I’m vain enough to say that I like the orange tint that it gives my hair and beard. You can take a peek at my webcam page if you want to see what I’m looking at these days.

On the technie-weenie side of things, I’m really like USB stuff. It makes hooking up stuff to the computer so much easier. It’s a shame that Linux isn’t keeping up with USB as quickly as Windows, because I really like using Linux as my chief operating system. But I always feel so limited about what I can do. That’s why I’m still running Windows XP.

I’m starting to use ICQ more and more for chat instead of Yahoo Messenger. It doesn’t seem to mess up my system as much. My ICQ # is 125628700 is you want to say hi. I have it on whenever I’m online. Yahoo is really sucking as far as their servers go. I can’t connect to their pages half the time, nor their webcam or chat servers.

I mowed the lawn today; it hadn’t been mowed in three and a half weeks, it really needed it. I have a feeling it’s the last time I’ll be mowing it this year. Earl cleaned off the back deck as well and put all the lawn furniture and stuff in storage.

Not much else going on this weekend, except we’re doing some shopping this afternoon. We’ll probably do a snappy trip to K-mart. I’m very anti-Wal*Mart; there’s always screaming, snot-nosed kids with abusive parents trolling around, a very kind senior citizen put on display in the front as a greeter and surly cashiers. Plus, Wal*Mart is slowly taking over the country, and I’m not a big fan of that. I’m more of a K-mart or Ames kind of guy, though I do admit I like Target as well, though Target won’t be moving to this area until Nov. 2002.

Earl and I took the day off from work on Friday. It was nice to get away, as I had been combating the latest internet virus until wee hours of the morning Wednesday and Thursday. We decided to go for a nice ride in the eastern part of the state, and we hit a good chunk of the Hudson Valley. We even took a look at a covered bridge … The Rexleigh Covered Bridge.

This is just off Route 22 about 30 miles north of the Thruway. For the life of me, I can’t remember the town it’s in.

It was a beautiful day for a ride, with the leaves just starting to show off their glorious colors. We took a picnic along with us for the ride as well, and enjoyed that at a road side stop. It was a wonderful day together.

On Saturday, we went to Syracuse for the afternoon and evening, basically just to goof off. We started by getting haircuts at Shoppingtown Barber Shop. I have this thing about men going to real barbershops, and Earl likes the way the barbers cut his hair there, so that’s where we went. Of course, I shave my head, so I usually just hang out with the other guys in the shop, but I had a little fuzz on top this time around, so I got that buzzed off too. Looks pretty interesting with a full beard! 🙂 Then we went to Dinosaur BBQ. It’s a dive that can’t be beat. Great food, great atmosphere, we LOVE the place.

Then we went to the SU-Auburn game at the Carrier Dome. Being originally from the Syracuse area, I have a strong pride when it comes to the Orangemen. I’m glad they whomped Auburn 31-14.

Today we went to the Remsen Barn Festval of the Arts… pretty much arts and crafts and GREAT food. We picked up a bunch of homemade salsa and such.

When we got home I got the devil in me or something, because I completely ripped out the computer (wreck) room and rearranged and tossed a bunch of stuff out. The room looks a hell of a lot better!

We both feel energized and ready to take on another work week!

Here it is Monday. Life seems to be returning to normal, but in a way, we all know it’s not with a war looming on the horizon. I was asked today at work if I would defend my country in the armed forces, as if they would need an overweight 33 year old man. I responded with a hearty “yes, of course”. Words can not accurately describe the atrocities that occurred on September 11, 2001. Action must be taken to assure that those events are not repeated.

On to the geeky side of things. The new server arrived at work today. I’m very excited, as this is going to be our new mail server running Microsoft Exchange 2000. I always try to be creative when naming new servers that I maintain, and I’ve decided that this one will be named “chatterbox”. After all, e-mail is chatter, right?

In the late 1980s, I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in suburban Boston. I maintained a cluster of computers for one of the Corporate Personnel groups. My VAXstation was named ENDORA, so my e-mail came from ENDORA::WINGJ (which would now translate to wingj@endora.digital.com). It was kind of cool. ENDORA was part of the BWTCHD cluster, which also included ARTHUR, SAMTHA, DARRIN, TABTHA, CLARA and SERENA. So I’ve always been quirky about computer names.

Beard progress is moving along nicely, as it is now day 23.

If you’ve been reading the journal regularly, then you know that because I still have a beard, I have not spent any money unnecessarily. I’ve added a short addendum to the deal I made with myself. After all, if I do get bored with the beard, I’ll shave it off. But as long as I keep my soul patch (that little bit of hair under my lower lip), then I still haven’t spent any money I shouldn’t have.

I’m not going to make this a long entry as I’ll be late for work otherwise, and with news feeds and such, work is plenty busy.

I am still in shock and disbelief as to what occurred yesterday in New York, Washington, D.C. and southwest Pennsylvania. It’s amazing how fragile life can be sometimes, even living in the greatest nation on the planet. To see the second airliner crash into the World Trade Center tower, live on television, was astounding. The number of innocent victims killed or injured will be staggering. To think that human beings could commit such acts against other human beings is terrifying. There is already a renewed sense of unity in our great nation. I believe our lives changed yesterday at 8:48 a.m. forever. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

I’ve been asked by a couple of people as to why I keep an on-line journal. To tell you the truth, I really don’t know. It could be because there’s a certain “wickedness” to it, you never know who’s reading what you’re saying, unless of course I get an e-mail like “You’re a moron!”, of which I just hit delete.

It could be because I have so many thoughts racing around my mind all the time that I just say the hell with it and write some of it down. I must admit, that I am shocked at how bad my grammar and spelling has become as I have gotten lazy over the years.

Then I think of it as a time capsule sometimes, and someday I’ll look back on all the stuff I wrote and get a good chuckle. I hope I’ll be laughing over piles of money, because I’m not spending it recklessly anymore! 🙂 By the way, I still have the beard, so that means I’ve been good with money.

We’re now 16 days into grizzly mode, and it’s looking like this:

I must say that it’s coming along nicely. I used my Kodak webcam for that one, because the IBM cam is putting pictures on the site, and it can’t do two things at once. If you haven’t seen the webcam page with shots from me at work and at home, take a peek here. I really like that picture of me, I’m using it on my Yahoo! profile.

On the geek front, I’ve been very successfully selling items on ebay this week. It’s rather satisfying selling items on ebay rather than buying them. I’ll have to go around the house and see what else we need to get rid of. 🙂 I also received a bunch of information on that cash register system I was trying to get working. Unfortunately, I still can’t get it working so it’s going into storage until I can find more stuff for it, probably in a junk pile somewhere. Earl and I are still on a “cleaning the house” kick, with most of the stuff from the City Pound being tossed out, along with a bunch of other junk.

It turns out, by the way, that the cat indeed wrestle with a skunk the other night. If you read below, you’ll see that I mention that a skunk’s “perfume” was stinkin’ up the house as I was typing in my journal. Well, it was because the skunk sprayed Tom. Lovely. So I threw on a pair of shorts and drove to Hannaford’s to pick up a bunch of Tomato Juice and such, all at midnight, and then gave Tom a wonderful fur flyin’, claw scratchin’, screamin’ bath in it. He still stinks today, and it’s been five days. Not as bad though. He threw such a fit getting a bath that I couldn’t get him rinsed, and now he’s got tomato juice on his back that’s all dried up. It’s almost gone though.

Earl is just having a ball on his computer as we type. I think he’s just surfing the internet. He says hello.

Well I just got done watching “Big Brother 2” with some of the people from Survivor. I must admit that I was a little disappointed in it. It wasn’t as intense as I thought it would be, though it was nice to see the folks from Survivor again. And of course they kicked the house hampsters ass when it came to competitions.

I guess I’m a bit of a snob in the reality show arena. I only watch the reality shows on CBS. Survivor and Big Brother 2. I couldn’t give a hoot about the others. It seems like the other networks are ripping CBS off when they try to do their own series. Not that Big Brother or Big Brother 2 are any good. I’ve never seen such a bunch of self-centered people in my life. What a bunch of lunatics. I do enjoy going on the Big Brother web site and being a prick in the chat rooms. That’s always fun.

Earl is in Baltimore this evening on business. Sigh. I hate it when he’s not at home. First of all, I have this fear of him flying without me. I don’t have a fear of flying, but I do have a fear of him flying without me, or vice versa. It makes him too vulnerable to the fates I guess, and I’m not there to protect him. So I’ve been keeping busy cleaning out the computer/wreck room. Since the local cable company sucks so much, we’re unable to get high speed internet here at the house. I was hoping to put webcams around the house so you could watch us in all our glory, but I guess it’s too much trouble to run the cable TV/internet stuff an extra four poles down the road. That’s right. Four poles. The neighbors have cable, but we don’t. Maybe if I don’t go crazy spending money all the time we can save up for two way satellite internet service next spring.

I have a problem with money. I spend lots of it. Buying gadgets and books and other nonsense. Earl is so tolerant of this. I don’t know why he puts up with it, but he does. God Bless him. So I’ve made a deal with myself. And I’m only telling myself and anyone reading this page. I haven’t even told Earl. I’m not going to carelessly spend any more money. If I do, the beard goes down the drain, no questions asked. Now this is kind of an odd proposition, I know. But, growing this beard has become very important to me. People at working are asking when I’m going to shave. I’m telling them not until at least Earl’s birthday – February 20. They look a little horrified and say “You are going to trim it, aren’t you?” Guess what. I’m not. Only the mustache, and that’s just to keep me from eating my mustache. Earl hates my mustache scraggly, but I think he secretly likes the mountain man look. It must be the farm boy in me, because most stereotypical gay men would never go the Grizzly Adams route. But I’ve never followed the same road as others. I guess I’m not stereotypical (though my hands do tend to flair up a bit when I speak).

By the way, we’re 11 days into the Grizzly mode.

So I’m trying really really hard not to spend any careless money. In fact, I put a whole boat load of stuff on ebay today, so maybe we’ll get some money flowing that way! 🙂

Now I’m going to continuing cleaning the wreck room here and then hit the hay for the night. The dumpster is still out front. I never dreamed that we would fill it up, but it’s almost full now. And as I type this, all I can smell is skunk in the late-summer air. I hope Tom (our cat) hasn’t been wrestling again. He gets so feisty.