Did anyone else know that Christmas is a week from today? And no one told me?? Thanks!
I mean, I knew it was December, and Christmas was coming, but I really hadn’t paid much attention to the details.
IT’S ONLY A WEEK AWAY!
Boy, that one snuck up on me…
Filed under Paul, Photography
I don’t know who created the meme. The images are obviously from “The Princess Bride,” one of the finest movies ever made.
Sunday nights tend to lean towards “ugly & depressing” these days, often because A) the weekend that I was hoping would be restful and relaxing was anything but, and B) because the week ahead is expected to be Hell on Wheels, with Monday earning its reputation as “MONDAY! 🤮🤯🤬😐”
The news feeds from last night and pretty much one thing after another all day today didn’t help, AT ALL.
One foot in front of another, having each others’ backs, we will all get through it.
But would it freakin’ kill the Universe / God / Karma / {insert deity name here} to cut us just a little bit of slack? Really?
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Memes, Paul
About sixteen months ago, I wroteTake Advantage Of Your Opportunities When You Get Them:
At our old house on Pomelo, the streets were flat and we were about five houses down the street from the elementary school, so we would have the ice cream truck by almost daily during the summer, every year. I would always hear it and always be busy, so I always figured that I would go out and catch the truck and get a random, spontaneous ice cream treat some other time in the future. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Next week, maybe. Next month…
Six years ago we moved to this house, which is at the top of a really long, steep hill that the ice cream truck might or might not be able to actually get up, and we’re nowhere near a school. Thus, NO ice cream trucks here. EVER.
And something made me think about that and realize that I had the opportunity almost daily for DECADES and I almost never took advantage of those opportunities. And now I’m out of luck.
Something else to check out when we’re shopping for the Forever Home. And you can bet if I find out that we’re on a regular path for an ice cream truck, I’ll be dropping everything and sprinting out for an ice cream sandwich when I hear that tinny, electronic circus tune. If I happen to be in the middle of a work Zoom meeting? C’est la vie! A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do! I’ll be older and wiser the next time.
Today it happened. Fortunately, I was not in the middle of a work Zoom meeting.
While I’ve never heard an ice cream truck on our street before in the past 4+ months, this afternoon the sound was unmistakable. Tinny, electronic Christmas music.
I do not normally have my wallet or any money on my person when I’m working from home and time was short (our block only has six houses on each side, so he didn’t have far to go and head back out) so I broke the land-speed record getting to the bedroom on the other side of the house, grabbing my wallet, and sprinting out the front door. Fortunately, some kids from next door had slowed him down.
Mr. Reyes’ van has seen better days and looks like it’s been ridden hard and put away wet more than once. But it was chock o’ block full of frozen goodness, EXACTLY the way that I remembered it from my childhood. It was practically an out of body experience.
I got a Blue Bunny Chips Glaore! Cookie Sandwich, 300 calories, 12g of fat, 15mb of cholesterol, and 46g of carbohydrates, all of them delightful. For the Long-Suffering Wife I grabbed a Blue Bunny Drumstick. I asked the driver (perhaps Mr. Reyes himself?) to remember us and come back soon, I would be listening for his signal.
Then, planning for the future, since I almost missed him while sprinting through the house for my wallet, I grabbed some singles and have designated them as “Emergency Ice Cream Truck Money.”
When singles pile up I normally stuff them in a drawer and try to remember to take them when I travel for tips, but now I have a stack right where I can grab them quick and head out the front door. My office is at the front of the house, right by the front door, so when he comes back, next time I’ll be ready.
Just because it’s a simple, fondly-remembered experience from childhood doesn’t mean that the adult can’t stack the deck to make it successfully happen again!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Forever Home, Paul, Photography
Literally.
When I’m going to take a picture with my iPhone at night and I don’t realize that the phone is set to the forward facing camera with the flash on instead of the rear camera with no flash.
Damn, I look like shit!
Filed under Paul, Photography
Mondays! Am I right? Ho, ho, freaking ho, Merry freaking Christmas!
If I’m letting my brain burble for a moment and I’m surfing through videos of sunsets and planes and loons and wild critters and so on on Instagram and you and your mind-numbingly STUPID product interrupt my flow with an ad, I will hate you with the white-hot fire of a million suns.
If on top of that the audio on your ad starts with, “Whoever invented this deserves a raise!” then I hope that they’re excavating a whole new level of Hell for you and I hope you’re there soon.
If the audio on your ad starts with “How did it take until 2025 for someone to figure this out…” then I’m wondering why YOU didn’t figure it out and get insanely filthy rich last year, so YOU get the next level of Hell underneath that one.
If the audio on your ad starts with both, I will break the land speed record hitting the “mute” and “delete” buttons and I will make a voodoo doll of you to make sure that every time you think about sex you get kidney stones instead.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Farce, Paul, Video
Choose your Hell…
Concentrate on those important tasks for hour after hour after hour? End up exhausted, barely able to keep your eyes open and capable of staggering to bed, little or no energy or time to do anything else, anything enjoyable.
Work hard but put down your labor when the allotted time comes? Feel okay, have the time and energy to read a book or watch the hockey game – but the whole time your brain is racing about your deadlines and how you’re risking failure, and trying to sleep is futile and troubled.
In between somewhere? There’s a reason it’s called “work/life BALANCE.” Some days it feels like that balancing act is being done with you as a last-minute substitute for Philippe Petit, on a high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
Which, if you’re tired enough, becomes an allegorical phrase from the Tamarian language. “Paul, a poor substitute for Philippe, on a high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.”
IYKYK!
Filed under Memes, Paul, Photography
“A spike in your stats” indeed! Apparently something or someone was visiting this site this afternoon causing a 13,250% increase in traffic. No messages or comments were left and other than the alerts from WordPress and Jetpack I don’t see any signs. I haven’t gotten any huge jump in subscribers, just the usual “couple a month.”
One of the social media posts that kicks out every time I post something new (like this, my usual “daily” post) goes to LinkedIn, and I have had a few new folks joining the company who have asked to connect to me there, no doubt prompted by the Linkedin algorithms when they update the information on where they’re employed. I give them fair warning that I don’t post “business related anything” there, just the more-or-less daily connections to my personal blog, and if they find it bizarre or boring I won’t be offended if they disconnect. It’s possible that one or more of them finally actually looked at what’s posted here, but still… 275+ views is quite a bit.
My suspicion is that it’s a bot or digital agent of some time that started “scraping” content and for reasons unknown picked a large but not complete batch of posts. Who knows?
I, for one, WELCOME our digital overlords! If they want to sign up as subscribers, or better yet, PAID subscribers, so much the better!
One thing I’ve heard a lot in the last few nights working outside after dark, and again while I was sitting outside listening to the rain, are the train whistles off in the distance.
Talk about a legendary and well-earned trope, the touchstone of countless country-western ballads. That lonesome call off in the distance, a few million metric tons of freight heading off through the night to an undefined someplace off over the horizon.
The proximity of this neighborhood to two separate main rail lines between SoCal and points east was a big factor on choosing it for me. There were a handful of other houses we looked at which were NEXT TO the train tracks, and while that had a certain attraction, really FEELING them rumble by and having the horns rattling the windows, I was also conscious of some of the potential downside to that after the novelty wore off.
Here we’re about two miles away in separate directions, there are railcams online where I can see what’s coming and going, and I can hear them off in the distance, even when I’m inside. It’s a comforting sound as I’m falling asleep at night, and a little source of joy repeatedly through the day.
And again, tonight when I was out on the porch, sitting and listening to the substantial rain shower pounding on the tin roof of the porch, running off into puddles out on the turn and rocks, it was wonderful to hear the train sounding off.
It’s one of the little pleasures.
Gotta take ’em where you can find them!
Filed under Forever Home, Paul
I’m alive. No picture, I didn’t even have time or the energy today to take one.
Okay, I lied, now there’s a picture.
I’m exhausted, but we’re ready for the rain. All of the stuff that came out of storage two weeks ago and got stacked up in the back yard is now sorted and either in the house or on the back porch under a roof. We’ll see if that’s good enough.
I also hit (-ish) all of the critical deadlines at work and there aren’t any meetings tomorrow, and there’s nothing on the schedule at all for this weekend, so after a whole slew of busy days with way too much physical and mental labor and way too little sleep, there will be (I’m praying! at least as much as a confirmed athiest for the past 50+ years can be) a few days to kick back and sit my ass on the couch for a nap or two (or five).
Too old for this nonsense.
Filed under Forever Home, Paul
Oh, let’s get real! I was unloading crap from the Uhaul truck and lost in a fight with gravity.
It was heavier than I expected, I was on the ramp, I went down, hit my head, and it came down on top of my head to add insult to injury.
Good thing I have a really thick, hard skull. Only minor damage to the gravel next to the driveway.
Tomorrow the young, strong, professionals come in to finish the job. I might be stupid enough to do this at age 69 – I’m not stupid enough to try to finish the job after getting my ass kicked.
Filed under Forever Home, Health, Paul, Photography
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 