Wishing to be up there going somewhere.
Category Archives: Paul
No Context For You – April 01st
I have no clue – it’s on my phone and was taken at 19:07 tonight. All I know is that my personal Rorschach Test sees that big thing on the left with a decidedly Georgia O’Keeffe vibe going on.
I’ve been enjoying my Bose wireless headphones quite a bit, pretty much on a daily basis for at least an hour or two once I get home from the office. The batteries will hold a full charge for close to a week at that rate (about 20 hours total is what they say, and I’m finding that to be pretty accurate) but I usually charge them overnight before they get too depleted.
Until last night.
One feature of these headphones is a little robot voice that will tell you what the battery status is when they’re turned on. (I think the little voice will tell you a couple dozen other things, like if there’s an incoming phone call and so on.) Last night, I found that when the battery starts to get low, you’ll get spoken warnings once the battery is down to about 10%.
I kept going since I was on a roll with a project. I got another warning. Or two.
Then I heard, “My battery’s low, please recharge me now.”
And all I could think of was Opportunity’s last message. “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
A headphone’s simple warning about battery status shouldn’t leave you wanting a pillow fort, hot chocolate, and some alone time.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography, Space
Battling The Universe
Trying to shape the Universe to the image of what it should be is exhausting. And frustrating. Also, I’m not being terribly successful at the moment.
Some part of my brain that got infected by the 70’s says I should let go, stop battling the tide, but instead go with it, learn to be one with it, understand the ebbs and flows and in turn gain the wisdom to shape it, not by force, but by persuasion.
Another particularly smartass part of my brain is now thinking of the movie version of “Dune” with Kyle MacLachlan riding a sandworm – I like the smartass part of my brain, but it’s not always the most useful. Like now.
So, turning our attention back to the sliver of brain that’s stuck in the 70’s, it’s suggesting that I learn to surf (the power of the ocean can not be overcome, but can be partnered with to bring fluidity, joy, and motion, blah blah blah) or ski (ditto with the big mountains, lots of snow, ice, avalanches, polar bears, etc). That brain sliver conveniently forgets that I swim about as well as your average cinder block so surfing is contraindicated, and I already know how to ski but I hate being cold and that’s a big part of why I haven’t been on skis in more than forty-five years.
70’s brain sliver is gonna get me killed.
Stupid brain.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul
Patterns & Trends
One of my jobs working my way through college all those decades ago was as a night auditor at a hotel. It’s where I learned accounting, which is pretty much what I’ve done in one form or the other for the past forty years, so I guess some of it must have stuck. One of the things I learned as an auditor, where you’re sort of looking for things that are wrong or off-kilter, is to look at patterns and trends.
In other professions where folks are looking for problems, looking for failure points, looking for root causes of accidents, patterns and trends are a key indicator in the data to point the way to the truth. That assembly line used to fail once a month, then every other week, now every week? Your car used to never burn oil, then it started using a little, now you’re down a quart every month? Your airline used to lose x bags a month, then it was 2x bags a month, now it’s 3x?
Something is wrong!
So it is with some concern I note that I have twice this week just simply forgotten to post my daily something here. Yesterday I actually had the photos and a story and had downloaded them from my phone…and then I just forgot to finish and post.
Something is wrong! In the nearly six years that I’ve had this site up, I can just about count on one hand the number of days when I didn’t post, and in almost all of those cases there was a reason. Twice in five days to just forget?!
That’s annoying.
Pictures from the parking lot last night, after the storms.
There have been a LOT of storms. The average rainfall in Los Angeles through this point in the season is 11.61″. The average rainfall in Los Angeles for an entire year is 14.93″. As of Wednesday we were at 17.99″ already, it rained yesterday, there’s more rain coming late this weekend, and we still have many months to go in the season. (I think it goes November 1st through October 31st.)
Somewhere in those pictures should be a very, very thin crescent moon. I didn’t see it when I took the pictures but I did see it just a few minutes later when I got home. I’ve looked at the pictures and can’t see it – maybe it was hiding behind one of those clouds. Or maybe you can find it.
Filed under Paul, Photography, Weather
No Context For You – March 06th
The devout, well brainwashed, compliant seven year-old Catholic school kid buried deep down inside me (trust me, he was is a real sanctimonious little prick) wants to give up something for Lent. Something grand and noble and… sanctimonious, like Diet Coke, chocolate, fear, or hatred.
The significantly older atheist who now occupies this meat suit (who might still be a real prick on a regular basis, but at least he’s not sanctimonious about it) wants to give up all of the crap that makes getting out of bed in the morning such a pain in the ass. But since that crap pays the bills and is required for that whole “responsible adult” thing, that’s not gonna happen either.
Someone online suggested giving up hope for Lent – they may be onto something. But that seems extreme and I’m too tired for anything extreme. So maybe I’ll just give up caring instead.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography
That Feeling Of Impending Doom – Again
There was a day a few days ago when I was… Disturbed. Upset. Anxious. Angry. Exhausted. Frustrated. Furious. PISSED OFF.
That fortunately doesn’t happen often. In this instance I was able to work my way through it and finally calm down in large part because I knew exactly WHY I was disturbed, upset, anxious, angry, exhausted, frustrated, furious, and pissed off. There was no secret, just a need to keep moving and work through it.
Tonight’s much more annoying.
Most of those symptoms again, although not nearly at the intensity level of last week. Yet it’s still plenty strong enough to make me feel like shit.
What my father used to call “a feeling of impending doom.”
It’s annoying because I really don’t have a clue WHY I’m feeling that way. The day had its ups and downs, there’s some stress at work with a big event coming at us like a freight train, working on the year end and audit, and so on – but nothing to justify or trigger this kind of feeling. I didn’t have any clown on his cell phone while driving try to kill me on my commute home.
Which makes me wonder – what if there’s something that happened that triggered these feelings and was so strong that I’ve just completely wiped it from my memory? That would scare the shit out of me.
“A feeling of impending doom.”
The key is that it’s a feeling.
It’s not head-based. There’s not a storm or hurricane coming. There’s not a threat of war. My job isn’t in jeopardy. I don’t have some strange growth or pain or blood in my stool. There’s no obvious evidence or warning – but my subconscious is putting together things that I can’t identify and hitting that hormonal klaxon.
That’s much more annoying.
Here’s what has not helped put those feelings at rest or calmed my nerves:
- Dinner (chili)
- Double stuffed Oreos
- My usual ’80’s music from Sirius/XM
- My playlist of favorites
- “Hamilton” (this might have been when I started to get really worried)
- “Star Trek” reruns (TOS, so it might have actually made things worse)
- Tuvan throat singing videos (it was worth a shot)
- Writing this post (although it helps – if I can force or trick myself into a place of creativity it can break the spell)
“Spell” might be the key word there. The software running on my meat computer (my ego, created by my brain) knows that this is just a mood (or too much sugar from those Oreos) and will pass. The feeling, the fear, the doom, the twisted up gut – those all come from the meat computer and the hormonal soup that it swims it.
Stupid brain.
Tomorrow the sun will rise. (Wait, is that what I found out… Nah!) Everything’s Gonna Be OK. (EGBOK!)
Unless, of course…
Nah. Let’s try bluegrass music. Sometimes that works.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul
Over The Hump
After being obsessed with a huge project for weeks (ever since we got back from Kansas City at New Year’s) and spending pretty damn near every non-critical moment (i.e., The Long-Suffering Wife’s cancer treatment came first, then my paying job, then Chiefs games, then “The Project”) slaving away it, I’m finally over the hump and can move back to other things.
It’s a really weird feeling. Almost like I’ve forgotten how to not be going at 50K RPM 24/7/365.
Literally. Every. Single. Day. Family taken care of? Check. Not at the office? Check. Chiefs not playing right this second? Check. Time to get to work on “The Project.” Until at least midnight, often later. All weekend. Every day. Every weekend.
Because there was that hard deadline coming up. Can we get it changed or rescheduled? No. But I’ve got these other issues and my wife… No. But… NO!
So — I didn’t quite hit the deadline. It was due Monday morning, I finally got it done last night. There’s some angst over that, but I’ll deal with that. Or, more to the point, they’ll have to deal with it.
*breathe* (again) Repeat as necessary.
I’ve heard it said about writing a book that, “A novel is never finished, merely abandoned.” (I searched for the quote, found a lot of variations – YMMV.) Ditto for this. As it winds down my brain keeps coming up with, “But you should have…” and “You forgot to fix…” and “Wait, this is still…”
Whatever. By definition, it’s done.
For the observant, this might also explain some of the subtext in the last seven weeks’ posts. Yes, it’s been an ordeal.
It’s behind me, and if the next ordeal starts tomorrow (it will!) then I’ll deal with it on its own.
So tonight I felt guilty about sitting in front of the idiot box for a couple of hours and surfing my Twitter feed. You can take the boy out of the Catholic Church, but you can’t always take the voices of those nuns out of the boy.
I’ll survive. I’m sure I’ve got plenty of other things that still have to get taken care of after I take a breath.
Shit, are my Christmas lights still up??!! (They are.)
Filed under Paul
Too Stupid To Know When To Quit
It’s not a bug – it’s a feature!
It helped me finish marathons.
It helped me though grad school while holding down a job and being a parent and a husband.
It kept me in a job that I didn’t like much wile I was a single parent.
Tonight (with a little help from my friends) it helps me at least get close (closer? close-ish?) to giving the auditors what they want at 8:00 tomorrow morning.
But I’m definitely going to need a nap tomorrow night!
Too Many Computers
00:07 Friday morning (Okay, it’s Thursday night…)
I just finished writing (what is now) last night’s “Too Many Numbers” post, the process of which was way, WAY too stressful.
Too tired, too many computers (five right now, counting the iPhone and iPad which I’m using to pull up data), too many screens (seven total), too many numbers…
And suddenly I see that my website directory has vanished. The directory on my local hard drive which keeps all of my working files for my website as well as the original copies of all of the pictures I’ve posted for the past five years or so, as well as the backup documents and…
But that’s okay because it’s on Dropbox! I can recover it! Yeah for Dropbox!
Except that Dropbox isn’t showing ANY of those files in its deleted files list…
Crying starts to sound like a perfectly good option…
There was a power outage today – did that fry something? I’ve gotten an occasional error message from Win 10 that the primary SSD hard disk is doing unexpected things – did that fry something? Do the gods just hate me?
From somewhere a calmer brain takes over. A quick search of Dropbox for the directory name shows that it got moved to be a subdirectory of another directory. It’s now sitting under a directory that used to be next to it alphabetically on the list of directories. Which makes me think that I’m using too many mice, trackballs, and Apple Pencils on too many computers on too many screens.
I wonder if I didn’t point, click, and drag on computer B when I was looking at computer A and computer B did exactly what I told it to, i.e. take this directory and move it and drop it on top of this other directory, which translates in most OS’s as “move this thing into that thing.”
I need a smarter and less literal computer. And an antidote for adrenaline.
23:40 Friday night (not Saturday morning yet!)
Oh, and I had the sense while I was waiting for my heart rate to stop resembling a hummingbird’s to pull out a 6TB external drive and let it run overnight, copying everything off to something less dynamic than DropBox.
When did you run your last full system backup to an external drive?
Too Many Numbers
Do I owe someone that? Do they owe me that?
My brain is swimming in an unnatural and toxic stew of accounting numbers. And this is just the prep for the audits. The real thing doesn’t start until next week.
Filed under Paul, Photography
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 