Category Archives: Paul

I paid attention to it tonight.

With the merger, all of the regular workload, my workload from the CAF on weekends, plus, you know, life, it’s easy to forget about the simple pleasures.

A month ago, on the plane back from Kansas City after watching the eclipse, I started re-reading one of my favorite books, Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising.” I got a big chunk of it read on the plane – but very little since then. A few pages here, a half chapter there.

Earlier this year when I went to visit Consonance, the annual Bay Area filk convention, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. While chatting and catching up, he mentioned that he had retired. (He’s a few years younger than I am, so yes, I’m jealous, but that’s not the point.) When I asked him what retirement had brought, he had a profound observation. Paraphrased, he said, “I can read any time I want to, and if I start a book and it’s really good, I can stay up all night to finish it without worrying about getting up and going to work the next day with no sleep.”

That’s going to be one of the BEST things about retirement when I get there.

So today when I took off “early” from work at about 18:30 and I was alone in the house, instead of watching the ballgame or working on my CAF accounting or doing hours of household chores, I sat down and finished another couple hundred pages of “Red Storm Rising.”

It was wonderful.

…would it take to kill you, and how would our favorite dairy derivative succeed in finishing you off?

I’m not talking about a frozen half-pint being used to bludgeon in your skull, or a melting fifty-gallon drum being used to drown you in. Although those are fascinating topics in their own right, should I feel an urge to start writing mystery novels.

No, I mean if you were reasonably healthy and started eating ice cream, as in LOTS of ice cream, how much would it take to send you off to the cornfield?

Would it be a boring, slow, and prosaic passage as you put on a couple pounds a day, finally getting to the point where slimy Los Angeles television critters were trying to get you on your own reality television show and they had to cut out the wall to get you out of the room when you hit the half-ton mark and had the inevitable congestive heart failure?

Would it be slightly quicker (as in, a year or two rather than a decade or two) as the trans fatty acids clogged your arteries, a gram or two at a time gleaned from the half gallon a day of Cookies & Cream you were shoveling into your face, until some cardiologist screwed up the experiment with a quadruple bypass?

Would all of the sugar send your glucose levels skyrocketing and in just a month or two you would be heavily into advanced Type 2 diabetes leading to “something bad” happening?

Or would it be a matter of death by brain freeze, where either your skull explodes a la David Cronenberg or it gets so bad you start hitting yourself in the face with a ball peen hammer until it stops?

Asking for a friend. Of course.

(DAMN my head hurts! Just a couple more spoonfuls and then I’ll stop, I swear!)

Wasn’t this a Jim Carrey movie?

We’ve been really busy at work. There’s a fair amount of stress right now and I’m as tightly wrapped as anyone.

I’m also fond of letting my inner five-year-old class clown out to play when the spontaneous opportunity presents itself.

Late this afternoon the guy from the parking garage valet comes in. My office is near the front so I get to see what he wants. He’s getting ready to leave for the day so he’s making his rounds, distributing keys back to those who left them earlier in the day and haven’t yet picked up their cars. He’s got a set of keys to give to Jenny.

We don’t have a Jenny.

He insists, says she gave our suite number as her destination. I go to double check, maybe someone’s here that I haven’t seen, a visitor of some sort? Nope, just a dozen or so of us in at the moment and none of us are a Jenny.

He insists.

Sorry, I don’t know what to tell him. We don’t have anyone named Jenny.

He says it’s the keys to a Lexus.

Cue the inner five-year-old class clown.

Wait – I’M JENNY! A Lexus you say? Yeah, that’s mine, I’ll take the keys. You seem skeptical. You need ID? Sure, I can give you my phone number. It’s 867-5309!!

*crickets*

No one got it? Not one person?

I prance down the hall in disbelief, calling everyone out of their office. It’s time for a confrontation. NO ONE got it?

At which point in the thundering silence, She-Who-Will-Remain-Nameless yells, “We GOT it, Paul! We can’t help it if no one thought it was funny!” The office explodes in laughter.

Thus it was that my inner five-year-old class clown slunk back down to my office looking for a 50-gallon drum of aloe vera to wallow in. That was a full-body, 3rd degree burn.

Well played, She-Who, well played.

Joy is having a really, REALLY great idea for an article in response to something someone at work said about something else I wrote a couple weeks ago.

Sorrow is realizing that it’s gonna take hours to write and do a decent job on and I really, REALLY don’t have the time.

Joy is realizing that anyone at work actually reads this crap.

Sorrow is realizing that anyone at work actually reads this crap.

Joy is observing the indifference with which my brain is already off on a story line and hook for writing that really great idea. Joy? Sorrow? Whatever! I’m working on this, I’ll get back to you…

Sorrow is realizing that the brain will probably get back to me at about 02:13 AM and then not let me get back to sleep.

When I heard that life was all about finding balance, I don’t think this is necessarily what they were talking about.