Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

Politics.

I was recently listening to a political talk show on satellite radio. I normally enjoy such endeavors, but there was something about the moment that was just rubbing me the wrong way. As I thought about it, I realized that there were actually two things that were rubbing me the wrong way.

Firstly, the hosts was using words such as “totes” and “deets”, for example, “I totes have the deets on what Chris Christie was doing yesterday.” I don’t know who came up with the idea that a person using the words “totes” and “deets” in this way was suppose to be taken seriously, but nevertheless, the person speaking is a respected political journalist and apparently quite successful in their endeavor. I think this speaks volumes as to the direction of the National Average IQ.

Secondly, the conversation was about the 2016 election and the viability of Jeb Bush running against Hillary Clinton in the Presidential Election. The only thing that was running through my head regarding this discussion, other than the fact that “totes” and “deets” were smattered amongst the dialog, was, “really? There’s no one else that can run? There isn’t anyone else from some other family, some other part of the country, anywhere, out there, that can run for President without assaulting the citizens with a big ol’ helping of leftovers?

Is there anyone in the general populace that is excited by government these days? Does anyone find them productive? Intelligent? Representative of the populace that they serve?

Talking about this with Earl made me realize that I need to stop paying close attention to politics for a while. Fox News is a joke. The whole lynching of Brian Williams is beyond ridiculous (he got way more press than the whole WMD debacle in Iraq back in ’02 and ’03). And quite frankly, the slate of corporate sponsored politicians is getting tiresome.

I have narrowed my talk show consumption down to one show. The guy is a moderate, has a sensible head on his shoulders, doesn’t have an offense accent and has a great selection in hairstyle. If you want further details, ask me in the comments or send me an email.

I’m not going to tolerate the dumbing down of syntax during a debate nor am I going to get all excited about a ballot that is mediocre at best. I expect better. We deserve better. I don’t have the answers.

Maybe someday I will.

18 February 2015 by J.P. This Ain't No CNN. 1

Cold.

Maintaining the winter theme of my last post (a week ago!), today I took some pictures of the beautiful day we had today. The only downside of the day was that the temperature barely reached 0ºF. The wind chill is predicted to be below -30ºF tonight, so we’ve been doing what we needed to do around the house.

I’m so ready for spring.

15 February 2015 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept 0

Warm-Up.

Yesterday, unable to fly due to the weather conditions, I decided to go out in the Jeep. My first stop was the visit my mother and nephew, who were home relaxing on a winter afternoon. We had a nice visit. It had been too long since we last visited.

Afterwards I was feeling adventurous but cautious. I originally intended on heading straight home, since there was more snow moving in, but I decided to go against sense and I drove north towards Lake Ontario. As I approached the City of Oswego, I saw flashes in the sky. A fireworks display was starting up. Normally this is a summertime thing, so it was kind of cool to see fireworks in a snowy sky.

It was all part of the “Warm-Up Oswego Festival”, which was underway. Folks were milling about the downtown area even though it was snowing pretty good. The restaurants and the like were quite busy.

I had fun walking around and taking pictures of the downtown area. I stepped away from where the folks were going to restaurants and the like and took a few photos of the snowy Port City.

Oswego was the closest city to my hometown. While it’s not the most spectacular city in the Empire State, there’s something interesting to me about it. I don’t know if it’s because it’s on the shores of Lake Ontario, it’s a college town or what, but Oswego does feel comfortable to me.

And I had fun playing in the snow there last night.

8 February 2015 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept 1

Supper.

I am sitting in our local Panera enjoying a nice little supper whilst surfing the Internet on my iPad. I’ve mentioned before that this isn’t one of those nice, cuddly Panera locations with a fireplace and the like. This one is loud, crowded and has the atmosphere of a hospital cafeteria. The space is way too small for the traffic that it tries to accommodate, so they’ve expanded the store a couple of times. I’m sitting in what used to be a bathroom. The self-serve drink station is separated from the lids, napkins and lemons by a hallway. People often spill their drinks in transit.

Because of all the additions to this location, it’s getting more difficult to people watch while enjoying a meal here at this Panera. One of the reasons I mingle in public spaces is because I like to people watch. I don’t necessarily want to interact with people, but I get a kick out of watching people. It’s kind of fun to watch people eat, especially the late teens to mid twenties crowd. They rarely have panache as they like to eat with the mouth full of food. The dot com crowd has no time for table manners.

My bout with the sniffles is coming to a close on schedule. I don’t feel as nearly congested as I did yesterday. That heavy feeling is subsiding. My coughing frequency has been reduced and I’m not feeling as irritable as I did before.

The woman at the cash register, which is dubbed “Tap To Pay”, tried to grab my iPhone out of my hands so she could enter my credit card number by hand instead of letting me do the ApplePay thing. I nearly broke her hand because no one, and I mean no one, touches my iPhone without my permission and I don’t know what she thought she was going to do, because there are no numbers on the screen when it comes to ApplePay. That’s one of the many security features. The slight snag in the payment workflow turned out to be that the cashier hadn’t bothered to press “TOTAL”, which would have told the cash register to start accepting payments. I pointed this out to her and she gave me a blank stare and did some mouth breathing. I refrained from lecturing her on how ApplePay works.

Watching these young ladies talk with their mouths full, whilst they peck at their phones at the same time, makes me wonder if me and my contemporaries were that annoying when we were in high school. Perhaps I’m old and I’m starting to show my age in general old-man-like crankiness.

Eh, I’ve earned this point in my life. I enjoy what I have and what I get to do.

5 February 2015 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 1

Sniffle.

Here it is the first week of February and I’m proud to announce that my annual 48-hour bout with the sniffles is in full swing. Earl is out of town on business this week, so I’ve been kind of moping about the house, consuming lots of soup, making honking noises through several boxes of tissues and doping myself to nearly insanity via NyQuil.

It is my plan to be back to normal, well, at least my version of normal, by tomorrow night.

4 February 2015 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept 0

Vacancy.

Unable to fly on Saturday because it was just too dang cold, Earl and I bundled up and went for one of our “crazy” Jeep rides. I put the word crazy in quotes because people always say that our rides are out of the ordinary. The ride wasn’t one of our longest, not by a long shot. At 7 hours and 15 minutes of driving time, we had time for wonderful conversation, reminicing, political debate and exchanges of socio-economic opinion. As always, when we spend time together, we had a blast.

Our ride took us through the North Country of New York State. The North Country is the area between the Adirondack Mountains and the St. Lawrence Seaway, right along the Canadian border. Admittedly this is my favorite part of The Empire State. I enjoy it in both the winter and the summer, for different reasons depending on the season, but one of the things that I enjoy most is the vibe. It’s somewhat economically depressed up there but everyone we’ve ever talked to in those parts seems to be down to Earth. Good ol’ boys and all that.

Along our travels we stopped at the St. Lawrence Centre Mall. Built in 1990, this modestly sized mall outside of the Village of Massena has seen better days.

A rough estimate tells me that about 75% of the storefronts are vacant. The western end of the mall wasn’t really heated anymore. We found it to be quite chilly. Only two of the five anchor locations are still populated, only JC Penney and Bon Ton remain. Hills/Ames, Sears and one of the anchor (we couldn’t figure out what it used to be) are all empty. Another typical anchor location actually houses an Ice Arena, which was part of the original plan when the mall was built.

On the bright side, the Food Court still had a decent number of options. I noted on the listed hours that the mall closes at 7:00 p.m. during the week; most malls in these parts are open until 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. There wasn’t much in the way of shopper traffic when we walked around, stretching our legs. That’s what we do on these long rides, walk around and stretch our legs in a shopping mall.

It kind of makes me sad to see these shopping malls slowly dying, but things change and people change and it’s important for those that market to the public to keep up. I hope that the St. Lawrence Centre finds it’s way to a new found glory someday.

The rest of our trip was wonderful. We stopped at our favorite Buffalo Wild Wings in the Empire State, on Arsenal Street in Watertown. Admittedly, we enjoy seeing the soldiers and such from nearby Fort Drum. The place is always packed, the beer is always good and there’s always cheering of the various games on the televisions.

2 February 2015 by J.P. Fun and Games Dept

Fresh Air.

As I continue the battle against SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), I decided that I had to go for a walk this morning during my work break.

The weather station was showing 15ºF, so I put on my barn hoodie and then put my ski jacket on over that. I donned my trusty hat and then realized I couldn’t find my gloves, so I put my hands in my pocket and I sucked it up and went for the walk.

I took my normal springtime walk route, which is a little over a mile. I passed by the open meadows that I really love in the springtime and visualized what they would look like three months from now. I wondered what happened to the birds that always go on guard when I walk through there. I hope they are enjoying their vacation somewhere where it is warmer.

The walk improved my mood. Walking outside versus walking on a treadmill and watching television or listening to music makes a world of difference. My mind can’t relax and reset with multimedia artificial input. Sometimes I need to put down the electronic gadgets and just enjoy the moment outside, no matter what Mother Nature is bringing to the area at the moment.

I think I shall do the same again this afternoon.

29 January 2015 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Material.

If you read my blog right from my website instead of using a reader of some sort, you may have noticed that I made some drastic changes to the design of the site. It’s a little bolder but still maintains the simple appearance that I really enjoy. The theme is based on Google’s Material Design principles. If you have a WordPress site and you’re interested in applying this theme, it is available at the Material Design WordPress Theme site. It’s really easy to install and tweak.

It’s really interesting to watch the pendulum swing back and forth between what’s considered the latest fad in webpage design. This blog is over 13 years old and has had many different looks along the way; some were quite elaborate with shadowed buttons, subtle animations, generous transparencies and that feeling of “beveled robustness”. That’s what users were looking for back in the day. Today webpage design favors simplicity, bold colors and a flat yet comfortable feeling.

I’m a big fan of Google’s Material Design and I’m happy to see that so many designers and programmers are going out of their way to adopt and extend the capabilities of these principles. I believe the design was originally created for Google’s Android devices. Oddly, I find this approach more visually appealing than what Apple has been working with on their iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite platforms. I have been using many of the Material principles in my work projects and the results have been well received. I think as I get older I’m moving away from my allegiance to one school of thought and now looking for the best solution to the task at hand.

29 January 2015 by J.P. Geek 2

Flickr.

After nearly two years of being away from the photo platform, last night I decided to resurrect my Flickr account.

A lot has changed since the last time I visited the site. Activity seems to be lower, the interface is a little more convoluted but still manageable, but so far I’m pleased with the service.

One thing that they did change was the ability to write a blog post for a WordPress site from Flickr. This was something that I did a lot back in the day, but after doing some poking around the help dialogs and such, it seems the ability to do this was removed sometime last year.

So here is my first blog photo from Flickr in many years. It’s a photo of one of our driveway markers. They’re not stylish, but they do the trick.

28 January 2015 by J.P. Flickr 0

Rut.

I’ve been finding myself in a bit of a rut for the past couple of weeks. Getting out of bed in the morning takes more effort than usual. It’s taking me a while to find the motivation to get through the workday. The only thing that really perks me up is seeing my name on the club airplane reservation list and looking forward to the opportunity to fly.

I think it’s the January blahs. I’m reminded of a comment my teacher made in my fifth grade report card, where she said I suffered from the holiday slump. I guess today we call it SAD or Seasonal Affectation Disorder.

Every year I try new things to not feel the seasonal blahs. This year I’ve installed several natural daylight LED bulbs, especially in my office. I have focused on sitting in the sun when it’s available. If the weather is cooperative, I bundle up, brave the reckless drivers on our road and go for a walk, even if my breath does freeze to my face. I do everything I can to drink in whatever natural light I can to feel energized.

I still feel blah.

Luckily, the days are starting to get longer and there’s less than one week left in January. Getting beyond January is a hurdle and once we are in February, spring feels like it’s attainable again. This helps a bit.

To try to cheer myself up this afternoon, I dialed up one of Donna Summer’s last singles. From 2008, it’s “Stamp Your Feet”. Great track, especially if you pay attention to the lyrics.

27 January 2015 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 1

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Politics.

Cold.

Warm-Up.

Supper.

Sniffle.

Vacancy.

Fresh Air.

Material.

Flickr.

Rut.

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