Category Archives: Paul

October 10, 2021 · 23:58

Gobsmacked Today

I’m a little tired and fried tonight (been an odd weekend for lack of a better term) so I’ll share one mind-blowing factoid that I learned this weekend. I even double checked to make sure it wasn’t a silly meme thing designed to see how many folks would fall for it. Ready?

Historically and chronologically, Cleopatra lived closer to today than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Wow!

I know that in a very general sense, I figured they were sort of concurrent. At least, within a few hundred, maybe a thousand years. That’s a pretty broad range. And I’m handicapped by having an American education.

But Cleopatra lived from 69 BCE to 30 BCE, roughly 2,180 years ago (to her birth). Where the Great Pyramid of Giza was started around 2,550 BCE, and finished about 2,500 BCE.

Gobsmacked!

1 Comment

Filed under Curiosities, Paul

October 8, 2021 · 23:48

New Camera

I got a new camera yesterday and got it set up. I’ve been taking some test pictures to start.

This camera has been talked about a lot recently as folks anticipated its availability – they weren’t kidding! I just saw these images from the full-sized files on my desktop monitors. STUNNING!

These were all taken with just the ambient light from inside the houses and a couple of street lights. The street light in our front yard that’s been the bane of my existence (when I’ve been taking pictures of ISS passes) is out. It’s dark out there.

Poking through the clouds up there is Jupiter. Mind you, I haven’t done anything yet to learn about all of the features and settings on this camera. If you think these are cool, wait until I actually learn how to use it! All I did for these was push the button and see what happens. I didn’t even use a tripod, so the fact that these aren’t blurry or jiggly is amazing to me.

Again, Jupiter’s the bright one, Saturn is the one closest to the right edge, and if you blow this up to full sized you’ll see all kinds of stars it captured. And all I did was hold it while standing in my back yard and push the button.

What’s even MORE amazing about this camera is that it’s got two more lenses. These were taken with the regular lens, but there’s also a telephoto and a wide angle lens built in. Fun times ahead playing with those!

Oh, yeah, and this camera also has a small supercomputer built in, as well as wi-fi, bluetooth, it shows me TV, movies, streaming video, has a whole slew of business apps, GPS and maps, connects to the internet, can keep a huge music library as well as hundreds if not thousands of books, health apps, and on and on and on.

Yeah, I got an iPhone Pro Max.

Cool!!

1 Comment

Filed under Astronomy, Computers, Paul, Photography

October 2, 2021 · 23:38

Until Six Months After I’m Dead

How do I get my gut to “understand” what my head knows, that I need a break and some actual relaxing and down time?

You’ve all been harangued for a couple months about my schedule and workload and deadlines. I’m sure you’re as tired of it as I am, and I’m freakin’ exhausted.

We’ve now reached a short time when there aren’t any “FULL SPEED AHEAD, ALL HANDS ON DECK!” deadlines in the immediate future. Just the usual grind on about four different fronts, including work, the CAF hangar, home, and so on. Yet even when I have a day like today where I got rid of the “required” and “urgent” tasks for the weekend by 14:00 or so, I just had a pain in the ass time getting my gut to let me relax.

I need to be working on this, or that, or maybe I should try to get ahead on this other thing! And then there are all of those OTHER THINGS that I haven’t even considered working on for so long and they’re so far onto the back burner that you need Hubble to see them – maybe I can do some of those today!

What’s up with that? What part of my upbringing makes it so hard to let go, relax, and not feel guilty about it?

AND HOW DO I STOP USING ALL CAPS AND BOLD AND ITALICS SO MUCH?

Yeah, let’s get to the important questions!

Where’s an Ambien or Valium when you really need one?

Humor. Right. That’s not going to happen, nor are the 100% legal alternatives. I blame the Midwestern conservative upbringing in the 60’s where we saw “Reefer Madness” as a propaganda weapon of terror on a regular basis.

I hope whoever and wherever you are, you can get your brain to cut you some slack and let you just breathe a bit.

2 Comments

Filed under Health, Paul

September 30, 2021 · 23:13

My October 2021 Wish List

And so we’re officially 3/4 of the way through 2021. I will say that, at least for me, it’s better than 2020, but that’s relative, not absolute. It hasn’t been a great year so far, or even a good one. But it’s slightly less horrible than 2020, and the four years of horror that preceded.

Sure, The Former Guy is gone. At least, gone-ish. We still have to deal with all of the monsters, fascists, and subhuman slime that are today’s GOP in the Senate, House, Supreme Court, a thousand lower courts, and so on. And TFG is still spewing BS on a regular basis. But at least he doesn’t have his finger on the nuclear missile button.

And I do have a great job now with people I really like working with, which was not always the case four or five years ago. So I’ve got that.

And while we’re still eyeballs deep in COVID and the unspeakably insane, evil, and psychotic anti-vaxx crowd, so far all of us in the family are in good shape.

But again, that’s all a case of, “Cool! We personally have only a 72% suckage rating, while last year it was 82% and for many folks even now it’s in the 98%+ sucakage range!” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

So I have a wish list for October. I’m not going to wish for the statistically ludicrous (yes, winning the Lottery is always a given, I would love a nine-figure bank account, thanks!) or any fantasy-based  ridiculousness (i.e., having that whole GOP crowd vanishing off the face of the Earth and being transported physically to the deepest depths of Hell by an Act of God) but I do have a few changes, simple and not-so-simple, that I wouldn’t mind seeing.

In no particular order:

  1. Can the Chiefs pull their collective heads out of their collective asses and start playing like a team that’s been in the last two Super Bowls and would like to be there again this year?
  2. Along another sports line, while the Angels have again broken my heart by playing so below their expectations, can the Kings, just starting the 2021-22 NHL season, return to their Stanley Cup form and bring joy to my soul?
  3. Can I never again see one of these spam ads online? I’ve lost track of how many HUNDREDS of them I’ve seen (and deleted and blocked and muted and cursed to Hell) over the past two months or so. It’s always the exact same video and always the exact same text, even though the “sponsoring” account is always different. “blumbergfamilydentalcare” is selling these kinetic art pieces instead of, you know, doing family dental care? (Sorry, might be some funky HTML formatting there)
  4. Can we get a ton of “back burner” items taken care of at work (which got pushed there after two months of “OH GOD, we’re all gonna die!” priority items) and also not have any more of the latter pushing them back onto the back burner? I’ve got a feeling the year-end is going to get hairy, and it would be nice to have a basic level of accomplishment and a clean slate going into that.
  5. Ditto for the CAF hangar work
  6. Can I please get this string of minor, non life threatening, annoying as hell medical and dental things to just stop and leave me alone? This “growing old” thing sucks and I would like to talk to a manager.
  7. Can the juncos return soon? Instead of Solo Junco I’ve now seen two this week, but I miss having a couple dozen every day, fighting the finches over the bird seed.
  8. May I please get a little bit of time every now and then (maybe even every day?) to just sit and read a bit?

I’m thinking if the Universe is in a good mood, I might get at least bits and pieces of four of the eight wishes. We’ll see. (And I’ll take that Lottery thing as a bonus – I’ve earned it.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Health, KC Chiefs, LA Kings, Paul, Politics

September 25, 2021 · 22:03

As The Grateful Dead Said…

“What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Indeed.

Part of last night’s last minute primal scream was in fact caused directly the the fact that I deliberately set aside a number of tasks that really, really needed to be done no desperately I needed a short break so that I could, in fact, take a short break. The first episode of “Foundation” was streaming on Amazon+ (I enjoyed it, wasn’t absolutely 100% gobsmacked by it as I was hoping, but I’ll be watching more), followed by catching up on the last three or four episodes of “Ted Lasso” (a show that I have grown to truly love dearly).

Friday nights are going to be certifiably odd for the next two weeks as the two continue to get watched back-to-back. I’m not sure it matters which I watch first and which second.

Given the incredible latest episode of “Ted Lasso” I find it beyond sheer coincidence that this morning I heard a discussion about this breaking story out of England.

I love the bizarre, the whimsical, the just old fashioned odd, and I also love the Smiths and Morrisey. (Probably because their songs are bizarre, whimsical, and odd, no matter how old or how fashioned.)

But seriously – Rick Astley doing a tour where he just does covers of Smiths songs?

Well done, September 25th! Well done!!

Leave a comment

Filed under Music, Paul

September 20, 2021 · 23:46

Define ‘Deadline’

As I may have blathered on and on about for the past several weeks, it’s been one of “those” times when I’ve been up to my eyebrows in 24/7/365 (or is it “25/8/366” for these?) deadlines on several fronts. Primarily at work and then at the CAF SoCal hangar and from there all of the other little daily deadlines.

Tonight I finished the fifth and (for now) final of the “super gigantic mega oh God we’re all gonna die!” deadlines. I made them all, but it got me thinking about how some folks need to be more explicit about the exact details of the deadline. You know, for people like me!

One of them at work was quite clear – we have a 17:00 meeting on this day with a number of VIPs and it would be “very bad” if we didn’t have that stack of documents ready.

No sweat! After weeks of work, I printed out the final versions for me and emailed them to others on team a full eight minutes before the meeting started. There may have been some hysterical laughter released at the absurdity of it all.

At the other end of the spectrum, the CAF project had to be done “by end of day 9/20/21.”

There’s a fair amount of wiggle room there in my universe. Business day? Or am I still good at 23:59:55? Pacific time zone or Central? That’s important, gives me a whole three more hours!

That got done tonight at 22:20 PDT, so by my definition, I made it by a full 1:40! If that doesn’t fit in their timetable and they meant 17:00 CDT, well, whose fault is that, huh?

Hopefully I’ll finally sleep well tonight. Mañana, y’all!

3 Comments

Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul

September 18, 2021 · 23:56

From One Spice To Another

Last night I talked about a spicy dinner – tonight my thoughts range to another spice, that of the planet Arrakis.

“Dune” has been a favorite novel since I first read it in high school, probably 1973. In a couple of weeks the new movie version (covering the first half-ish of the novel) comes out and I haven’t waited this anxiously for a movie in a long time. This will be the movie that will get me back into a theater.

Having gotten past one set of deadlines and pressure at work (yeah, me, and the great team that I’m on there) I’m now up to my eyebrows in another killer deadline from Hell at the CAF hangar. No stress…

But as I’ve been working like a demon on this all day today, my attention keeps going to a poster I’ve had on my office whiteboard for a long, long time. For those familiar with “Dune,” obviously, this is the Litany Against Fear.

Fear of failure, fear of shame, fear of embarrassment, fear of being yelled at. All of the above. Powerful motivators.

Today I’m facing some fears.

And soon I’ll be watching the movie.

Leave a comment

Filed under Entertainment, Paul

September 17, 2021 · 23:35

SPICY!!

I eat lots of broccoli, not because I like broccoli, but because I eat a lot of crap that’s “good” for me in my old age, and very little stuff (like ice cream and chocolate and bear claws and cheeseburgers and pizza and… you get the point) that I want to eat. Often to make it taste a little bit less like green, semi-crunchy cardboard, I’ll put a few drops of Sweet Baby Ray’s HOT sauce on it.

A couple nights ago dinner consisted of the aforementioned steamed fresh broccoli, plus a bunch of shrimp. I do love shrimp, and yes, it’s on that list with ice cream and pizza.

But we had no cocktail sauce. An error in my shopping calculations. So I improvised. I already had the Sweet Baby Ray’s out…

Double up the hot sauce on the broccoli, and then really lay it on while coating the shrimp in it.

Thinking about all of that hot sauce on something that my doctor would not approve of to begin with got me thinking. (Which is often not a good thing.)

See the source image

I won’t tell my doctor if you don’t! (And it wasn’t bad – I would have preferred the cocktail sauce, but it beats using ketchup!)

3 Comments

Filed under Health, Paul, Photography

September 15, 2021 · 23:22

Adrenaline Junkie

So the times and schedules come and go and overlap as they will, and sometimes all of the bits line up and you end up with multiple massive, major, critical deadlines all coming due within a day or two.

So it is with me, as you can tell by the increasingly frantic tone of my posts. The annual audit, this meeting, that review, this update, and payroll (which everyone agrees should NOT be pushed off onto a back burner…).

And then, after busting your butt for WEEKS on the audit, today’s the day to get the final draft, but after bugging the auditors repeatedly they say, “Wait, we’ve sent this four times, why aren’t you getting it?” So you check with your IT guy and he finally says, “Oooh, something happened, I don’t know what or why, but our email system decided to delete without notice all email from that domain.” WHAT??!! (Say that in the same voice & tone as Princess Leia when Grand Moff Tarkin decides to blow up Alderaan anyway, even after she gave him the location of the Rebel base.) Fix that, please – instantly will be fine, sooner would be better. What do you mean, 24 to 48 hours?

And then that wicked pain from what you suspect is a worsening ear infection goes from “Wow, that’s really getting sore” to “Shit, who shoved the freakin’ ice pick into the side of my head?!” So when you finally get a chance to take a breath you end up spending two hours in Urgent Care, and the 45 minutes of care to clear it out and clean it up (yep, that was a mess) turns out to be absolute agony, the kind of pain I haven’t experienced since I first had kidney stones.

So, the good news is that I’m a FREAKIN’ SUPERSTAR and the four simultaneous huge deadlines (plus payroll!) HAVE BEEN MET. Everyone’s happy. And the ear thing has been cleared without my head actually exploding and I have some drugs. Not the really, REALLY good drugs, but some pretty okay drugs.

But coming down off of all of that adrenaline? Wow! I’ve been abusing the adrenal gland 25/8 for about a month and now that I have a moment to breathe, I’m going to just stare off into space , maybe get caught up on a few episodes of “Ted Lasso,” or rewatch “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” and eat some ice cream that I’m not supposed to have. I’ve earned it.

There’s an excellent plan for you!

(P.S. – had the ice cream, got WICKED BAD brain freeze, almost as bad as the ear thing. God hates me.)

 

3 Comments

Filed under Health, Paul

September 3, 2021 · 23:52

The Red Queen’s Race

Yet, amazingly, I remain up to my eyebrows in deadlines. While I’ve knocked off a few big ones, others loom, coming at me like freight trains.

To remain semi-sane and get some of the pressure off of my timeline, instead of kicking back, having a BBQ, watching some football, and so on, I think I’ll be spending the three days running the Red Queen’s Race.

See the source image

At least I get to go to an Angels game on Monday. Thanks, Sister#2 and BIL#2!

Leave a comment

Filed under Paul