Category Archives: Paul

February 10, 2016 · 23:59

23:54 Already?

A little over three years ago there was a bit of terror going on in my head. After five years in which I was putting myself through college and surviving by working at least one and sometimes two full-time jobs, then spending about thirty-five years of dealing with both family and “career” where the demands of the job often involved 60, 70, 80 or more hours per week, and at one time packing an MBA program in on top of that, I all of a sudden had “nothing” to do.

Facing unemployment, I didn’t know if I could stand not being busier than God.

Let me tell you, three years of getting used to not being busier than God is NOT good preparation for going back to being busier than God, working full-time plus, and making a bit of time for The Long-Suffering Wife, and taking care of my CAF duties, and trying to get a couple hours of sleep every now and then, and keep this website going.

23:59. Push the button

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February 9, 2016 · 23:34

It’s Not Good To Mock Murphy

It occurs to me tonight, while muttering under my breath and using terms of which my mother would have never approved, that our pal Murphy is not an imp, a pixie, a pookah, gremlin, or scamp. Nope, he’s an extortionist. And a particularly stupid one at that.

Foggy alley. Cobblestones. Night. A lone streetlight shines. Against it leans Murphy, casually threatening as you approach.

“Hey, Willett! I hear you used that fancy website of yours to poke a little fun at your truly. That’s not a nice thing.”

“It was just a little lark, Murph, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“Yeah, sure you didn’t. Say, that’s a nice run of decent luck you’ve got there. Be a pity if something were to happen to it…”

The reason that I think he’s a particular bad, stupid extortionist is that he hasn’t told me what he wants! What good is messing with people and threatening them so they’ll do what you want them to do, if you don’t tell them what it is that you want them to do?!

Moron.

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February 8, 2016 · 23:31

It’s Murphy’s World, We Just Get To Live In It

On yet another “deadline” night with many long hours ahead, Murphy reared her ugly head. Fritzing, blinking, flashing, dying computer monitor!

Fortunately for me, I’ve got enough spare parts around here to build a reasonably good simulation of the bridge of the NCC-1701 Enterprise (“D” model) and I’ve torn down enough equipment so that I can look like a NASCAR pit crew when necessary.

The Long-Suffering Wife was wondering what the hell was going on as I was schlepping equipment back and forth between rooms and ripping apart old desktop systems that hadn’t been used in months, if not years. It was more disconcerting than comforting to have her yelling, “Poor, poor thing!” at me as I went by, but I know she meant well. (I may have been a bad influence on her over the years.)

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about the second half of that Super Bowl commercial thought that was supposed to run last night. I just have to get a night where I can start writing it sometime before 23:30.

Recipes for Murphy-repellent would be appreciated.

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February 7, 2016 · 23:47

Accounting Critters

It’s a tough time of year for accounting critters. Tax returns. Audits. Financial statements.

Long, long days, and lots of them. Much too little sleep.

If you know an accounting critter, treat them gently this time of year. They’ll be better after April 15th. For now though, a pat on the head, a neck massage, a drink or snack, an occasional “poor, poor thing” will go a long way.

If you know an accounting critter who’s got two separate gigs going on, say, a regular job and a volunteer non-profit on the weekends and evenings, you might watch them for signs of irrational behavior. Well, you know, even more irrational behavior than normal.

You might ask me how I know…

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February 3, 2016 · 13:49

Lunch Break

A mobile post today as I’m taking a quick break to eat lunch during a busy and slightly hectic day.

The office building where my new job is located has a nice plaza area outside with some tables and planters that you can sit on. This week, however, it’s a bit nippy and windy. (I know, folks buried under the blizzard de jour back east may not be sympathetic about mid-50s, but for LA it’s nippy.)

I could eat at my desk (and sometimes do) but that tends to not be much of a break since you end up dealing with anything that pops up. I need to get away for thirty minutes, to breathe.

So I end up sitting in my car to relax. It’s comfy, especially since my new little Hissy has about ten different audio options and can even play movies on the screen if we’re parked. Yet (probably something imaginary from long ago) I still feel sometimes that there’s a bit of a stigma with sitting in the car at lunch. Like it’s a bit low class.

I was thinking of that as I walked to my car today. I tend to park on the far side of the lot, first to force myself to walk a bit and secondly to park in the sun so it’s toasty when I come out. So I passed a lot of other cars on my walk.

I do see other people sitting in their cars for lunch when I’m doing the same, but today I paid attention.

Guy in a new BMW 325ci.

Lady in a late model Mercedes Benz 320.

A guy in a new Lexus.

Okay, so maybe it’s not quite as slummy or uncommon as I had thought. I’m good now.

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February 2, 2016 · 22:55

Oldest (Digitized) Photo

What I thought was a relatively simple question turned out to not be so simple.

What’s my oldest photo?

A) If we’re being literal but not too literal (i.e., something by Matthew Brady or Daguerre), starting with actual photos I have, it would be photos of my parents before they were married, so, like 1954 or 1955.

B) If it’s a photo of me, somewhere around here I have photos of me as a baby. There may or may not be a dinosaur in the background.

C) If it’s a photo I took, somewhere around here (okay, I have a bit of a filing issue to resolve) I have some old “120” negatives (and possibly prints) from my first real camera, a Brownie. I remember using it when I was about eleven or twelve on a summer vacation to Washington, D.C.

D) If it’s the first photo I know I can put my hands on quickly, it’s a slide showing my little sister on a tricycle in the driveway of our house in Arlington Heights, Illinois. It’s labeled “1” as my slides are in pretty decent order for some reason.

E) If it’s the first photo I have in digital format, it’s slide #22, which would have been taken just a few days or weeks after we moved to Vermont when I was thirteen. It’s one of several that I scanned several years back for one of my high school reunions. Someday I’ll get all of the other slides scanned.

F) If it’s the first photo I have that’s taken with a digital camera, then it’s from February 1999, taken at Magic Mountain with an Epson point-and-shoot at 640×480 resolution. I know this camera was my first digital camera, from my dad who worked at Epson. It was probably a Christmas gift so there may be earlier photos than this from that camera, if I could stumble across the floppy disk or Zip Disk that has the older ones.

For your dining and dancing pleasure, here are slides #22, #33, and #34 from section “E” above. Probably all taken the same day, the first shows the view from atop the hill in our back yard, while the other two show the ice built up next to the waterfall in the middle of town.

Slide_0022

Slide_0033

Slide_0034

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January 31, 2016 · 23:09

Reminders

Past-Paul knew that there were times when the path would be hard to find. Past-Paul thought it might be good idea to leave the proverbial bread crumbs around, just in case. Today I notice the one taped to the top of my computer monitor.

File Jan 31, 22 57 10

When I was a kid I would always pick up feathers whenever I found one, usually to be told by my parents they were dirty, throw them away, and don’t touch any more.

As an adult, I remember starting to pick them up and save them again about twenty years ago. At some point I started taping them up here and there as the occasional reminder of where the path was.

This morning I noticed this one. It’s right there, I see it all the time, but today I noticed it. It helped.

I didn’t get my pilot’s license by simply walking down to the airport and taking off in the first plane I got into. It took a lot of work, a lot of steps, and a lot of time.

The path back into the cockpit will (I hope) be shorter since I have a baseline of experience, but it will not necessarily be quick or easy.

So be it. I will fly again.

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January 30, 2016 · 22:06

Tonight The World Is Hollow

How much of what we do is ritual? How much of the structure of our lives is a mere collection of habits, interwoven through our hours and minutes to keep us moving from moment to moment so that we don’t realize how little we know or control?

What happens when you realize that you’ve lost contact and are now drifting, the familiar and comfortable receding to where they’re only visible from a distance, unfocused? Why don’t we notice it happening, like a stall-warning buffeting for our reality, allowing us to regain control before we spin out and drop?

What do we do when the good music sounds tinny in our ears, the inspiring images appear bland, and the words of wisdom sound like so much blathering claptrap?

Does it help to try to search back for the trigger, the root cause of the day’s ennui? What should we do if we identify it, but instead of banishing and sacrificing it in order to regain contact with our routine, we find it to be a new and unpleasant truth?

Did Charlie Gordon know what was happening to him, or was he blissfully ignorant, unburdened by memory, aspirations, and expectations? Does one have to exist outside in order to see the implosion, the mythical observer in the collapse of a Heisenberg quantum waveform?

When it’s my time, will I know?

 

Does thinking it through and trying to put it all into words act to help?

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January 26, 2016 · 21:43

Sleep – A Love-Hate Relationship

On the one hand, I’ve got so much to get done and so few spare hours to get it done in. Yet I spend hours and hours every day doing NOTHING except snoring loud enough to wake the dead and having leg cramps.

On the other hand, I would kill right now for a couple more hours’ sleep every night. I’m barely getting six at best most nights, and even that is of the “barely better than nothing” variety. See “leg cramps,” above.

So there it is in a nutshell. I would do almost anything to do away with it altogether while at the same time I would do almost anything to get about 35% to 40% more.

Isn’t that something like the definition of an addiction? Just asking…

Think about it – aside from the fairly immediate panicked thoughts burbling up from the pre-amphibian parts of the brain stem, wouldn’t it be great to never have to sleep again? Think of what you could get done with those extra five or six or eight hours a day!

Oh, right. We would spend that extra time just watching more stupid reruns on cable or something equally mind-numbing and useless.

Snarky comments aside, if Morpheus (which is a particularly apt name for this train of thought) gave you the:

  • red pill, which would give you a solid eight hours of sleep and waking refreshed and alert every morning for the rest of your life, or
  • the blue pill, which meant that you would never sleep again and would never get that mental lethargy that saps your will when you’re starting to drift off and can’t keep your eyes open any more and you wouldn’t go insane or die from some physiological booby trap caused by a lack of sleep

which pill would you take?

 

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January 22, 2016 · 22:48

Deep – Not Wide

One of my thoughts about my current state (when I have time to think) is that I’ve flipped my state of existence since I started this new job.

I used to be “a mile wide and an inch deep,” and that only got worse when I was unemployed. That’s one of the reasons that I had to impose some discipline on my routine and make sure that certain things got done every day come hell or high water. Otherwise I would have been off like a butterfly, from one interesting thing to another. Good things I might add, creative things for the most part, stimulating things. It’s not like I was watching soap operas or old TV reruns for hours and hours at a time with a six-pack and a half-gallon of cookie dough ice cream. Nonetheless, there needed to be a certain amount of focus and I had to impose it.

Now on the other hand, between all of the time and brain power I’m putting into the new job (which is going extremely well, thank you for asking!) and the T&BP that I have to keep putting in (at least a minimal amount, I don’t have that much left) into the CAF responsibilities, plus the time that The Long-Suffering Wife gets (which in no way says it’s a bad thing in any way, quite the opposite, but I’m doing some accounting here) – well, I now feel like I’m as deep as the Marianas Trench but about as wide as a straw.

It’s quite a change.

Moderation in all things, so I’m hoping that as I get more settled in at work, and as we get past the multiple year-end audits at both the office and the CAF (it’s an occupational hazard to being a financial and accounting dude in real life), the balance will come back to the center.

Then there’s another thing. When I was going out to the hangar at 35 to 45 minutes each way, or back when I was working the old job with a similar commute to Encino, there was lots of time to just think each day. You don’t really have to use your higher cognitive functions to drive in 5 mph traffic. Now that I’m literally ten minutes from work, I’ve lost most of that time. If there’s such a thing as a downside to a ten-minute commute, that might be it.

Finally, as I’ve been writing this I’ve been having some serious, world class, weapons grade deja vu. I could swear that I’ve written pretty much this same thing in the last month, but for the life of me I can’t see where it was. So if this sounds really familiar – yes, I am losing it a bit. Thanks!

But it’s a good thing.

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