…and some weeks you’re the bug.
Again, as with the root canals, know that it could be so much worse doesn’t really help make it better.
The good news is that the immediate problem that led to it not starting or running will only cost a couple hundred dollars to fix. It’s all of the other critical stuff they found that’s going to cost ten times that.
Filed under Paul, Photography
At work I’m reviewing resumes and applications for a position on my staff.
Back when this blog started, eleven years ago, I had just had the company I had worked for for 30+ years shut down and I was looking for a new position myself.
Twenty-five years ago, as a single dad, I got back into the dating game and looked for a new partner.
Now we’re about three years into a search for a new house, having looked at countless Zillow listings, and now ramping up the intensity of the search by actually getting out and looking at potential houses.
It occurred to me today that all of these endeavours, house hunting, dating, and job hunting are just different facets of the same horrible game.
We’re making life-altering decisions which are fraught with peril, where a mistake can have massive negative consequences but the correct choice can have equally massive positive results. Yet we are working in the dark with insufficient or even incorrect information, hoping for the best, praying for the very best, and terrified of the worst. It would be fantastic to just get out of the game, to be safe, but that doesn’t work either.
So it’s like the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, which can be colloquially phrased as, “You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”
The potential upside is what makes it worthwhile, at least in theory. The chance to build a team, to have someone who will have your back, to be stronger as a team than the individuals in it, to have better tools and more capabilities.
Just be careful if you make the mistake of turning on the news…
A hell of a day, wasn’t it? Speaking of “horror.” But today we might have won one, despite what’s being said tonight by Faux News and the GOP “leadership.”
So we need to celebrate our victories, even if they’re not 100% complete and to the satisfaction of our dreams of a better world. We celebrate and we move on.
We can’t get out of the game. But we can keep playing hard and fighting the horrors.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Politics
Chaos is winning by four touchdowns in the middle of the third quarter, but I’m hoping to finish strong.
Does this look right to you? I thought not…
Filed under Paul, Photography, Random Blatherationings
One of the goals of our weekend trip to the Apple Valley / Hesperia region was to not eat at any fast food or national chain restaurants, but instead to eat at local, mom-and-pop style restaurants. We did that!
One of the meals was at a 50’s themed diner along what was once Route 66.
While there I got to thinking about nostalgia and how misguided and just plain wrong it can be. We have this whole warm and fuzzy thing going on about the 1950’s thanks to “Happy Days,” “Back To The Future,” and the like (“Peggy Sue Got Married” is a favorite of mine) but I was there. We had polio and measles and the Korean War and civil rights horrors and women were truly second class citizens and the Cold War and a lot of stuff sucked really bad! We think about Marilyn Monroe and James Dean and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, which is fine, but it’s not the whole picture. It was not a more innocent time!
One thing that I’ve always loved from that era is the use of glass blocks as an architectural element. I love the look, especially if you can get some color or colored light coming through. I was glad to see several of the houses we looked at using it, particularly in bathrooms and shower settings.
In 2100, seventy-five years from now, will there be 2020’s-themed restaurants and movies? Will they glorify the era of Taylor Swift and the MCU and Teslas while ignoring the existence of Trump, COVID, and the Ukraine invasion?
Will anyone still be around to remember or celebrate anything at all in 2100? “Of course!” but if we’re not careful…
Filed under Paul, Photography, Politics, Travel
Do we have a holiday coming up here soon? I’m feeling a bit fried.
Getting to the point where I don’t know which worries me more, that I’m starting to panic a bit or that I didn’t already panic a lot.
EGBOK – Everything’s Gonna Be OK, or so I’ve always thought.
I also agree with James Tiberius Kirk, I don’t believe in the “no-win scenario.”
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography
I’ve been REALLY busy all day, a tight deadline looming.
On the one hand, I knew that SpaceX had a Vandenberg launch scheduled for tonight, and it was going to be right at sunset so it had a good chance of being spectacular, but then I got a notice that it had been bumped by a couple hours to 21:30-ish. I didn’t even know exactly what time, and I was TOTALLY heads-down in the deadline tasks.
Until, at about 21:45-ish, the wall and west-facing window in my office gave a good, sharp, shake and rattle from the sonice boom from the Falcon 9 that had launched and gone supersonic off of the Ventura coast about t6hirteen minutes earlier.
I’ve heard it before when I’ve been listening for it, but for some reason, when I was NOT expecting it, it seems so much louder and more distinct.
I love living “near” (100+ miles) a freakin’ spaceport!!!
There’s a tradition in hockey of growing a “playoff beard” from the time your team gets into the playoffs until they are eliminated or win the Stanley Cup.
As a loyal LA Kings fan, I’ve NEVER done this for two reasons. First, because I HATE having a beard. It’s scratchy, it itches, and I look terrible. Secondly, while I might be the least vain person on the planet when it comes to how I look, really and truly not giving a rat’s patootie about what I look like 99% of the time, I believe that with a scraggly, thin, grey beard I look like a homeless dude far more than I look like Santa Claus or Duke Leto Atreides. It’s BAAAAAD.
So, as my beloved Kings got eliminated from the playoffs tonight in five games, while the Vuvuzela of Victory is sad and will no longer sing this year until the NFL season starts in September, when the game ended at 22:00, by 22:15 the beard was gone, painfully.
Filed under LA Kings, Paul, Photography
Yesterday was WLTSTF’s 11th Anniversary/Birthday.
One thing I’ve mentioned from time to time is that when you start posting on WordPress day after day, you start getting these little “attaboy!”s where they define the number of “days in a row” that you’ve posted as posting before midnight in your local, home time zone. If you post something at 12:01 or 12:10 or 12:30 or whatever, it doesn’t matter, by their definition it breaks the streak.
I’m simple minded about such thing and love the attaboy!s, so it becomes something of an obsession.
With last night’s post I was at 813 days in a row…
It’s now 12:09 and nine minutes ago, buried deep into calculatinging timesheets and doing data entry for payroll, my watch went “DING!” indicating that it was midnight, and in an instant I realized that I had completely forgotten to write up something or find a photo for today’s post.
BUSTED!
Time to start over…
Rain. An empty street. Little or no color. What comes next?
Is there a rainbow? Or a flood?
Blue skies & puffy clouds? Or lightning, thunder, hail, destruction?
If we only knew then what we know now.
If we only knew today what we’ll know in six years.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography
Two days back home and this weekend I’m going to try to go through the eclipse photos and see what’s good. There’s got to be at least one or two, right? Statistical fluctuations and all of that!
In the meantime, because I like pictures of clouds and storms and potentially violent weather, enjoy these pictures from Tuesday on the trip from Kerrville to Tucson.
Here are some mammatus clouds. They’re supposed to be a sign of particularly violent weather, the boiling bottom of a big thunderhead cell. (These were, no “supposed to be” about it.)
This panoramic view of a freaking huge thunderstorm supercell should have been like Gandalf standing there, blocking the road, bellowing, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” I passed anyway.
As for the eclipse photos that I need to sort through and clean up, I suspect that the videos might be better than the still photos. Mistakes were made.
On the other hand, remember the T-shirt that I was wearing? (Picture here.) I may crop that a little, find a place that does custom T-shirts, and have this image of me printed on there with a caption that says, “Hello DORKness, My Old Friend!” I mean, if the shoe fits!
Filed under Panorama, Paul, Photography, Travel, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 