Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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what godless monster?

Monday and we’re off to Portland later this week.  Wrote this entry way back on Thursday last week.  Here goes.

I thought I’d written before about how they give us free fruit at work, but I couldn’t find where.

In the café downstairs there’s this large table under a big reddish market umbrella with four or five baskets heaped with fruit. The umbrella really serves no purpose other than atmosphere, I believe, and it’s high enough that I don’t have to duck to get to the fruit so it’s fine. There’s typically a different type of fruit in each basket, with some that are almost nearly always there and some that rotate through more unevenly. There are always, for example, bananas and apples. And there are nearly always some kind of orange or tangerine or the like. Sometimes there are pears or plums or something more exotic. Like I said, there are always bananas. In fact, they have trouble keeping enough bananas.

From my non-scientific study of the free fruit table, I’ve decided that bananas are far and away the most popular fruit item. It’s always the first basket to go empty in the morning, and it’s often refilled and emptied again before lunch. And then it’s over. I have a theory that they only fill it twice a day and that’s it. That accounts for two big boxes of bananas unloaded onto the table, I’ve seen them doing it. Maybe even free fruit has limits. Thing is, if you prefer the bananas – and who doesn’t, they are my entire breakfast all the working week – you have to make sure you get one early enough or you’ll be out of luck. Sometimes you can even get there too early, and they haven’t even stocked the banana basket yet. Oh there’ll be all sorts of other fruits out, but the banana basket will sit empty. It’s always a gamble with the bananas.

I suppose this is because they are just about the perfect fruit. Come in their own wrapping, aren’t messy, not too sweet, perfectly portioned. What the heck kind of Godless monster wouldn’t like a banana? We’re only supposed to be allowed one piece of free fruit each day, but on Mondays and Tuesdays I actually always take two bananas. I’ll tell you why. Oftentimes the are still green and pretty inedible. I take two and let them ripen on my desk for a day. I’m always a day behind on the banana I’m eating, and a day ahead on the bananas I’m taking. This way, come Wednesday I only have to take one and on Thursday and Friday I don’t even have to grab a banana because Wednesday’s or Thursday’s is now nicely ripened back up at my desk. It’s a system. I have a banana system. I figure it works out to one a day anyway, really. Five days and five bananas so I’m within the rules. May not look that way as I walk to my desk with two in-hand Monday and Tuesday, but I’m on the up and up.

Sometimes I mess up though and end up with an extra banana still ripening at my desk on Friday afternoon. I always feel guilty about this, but I don’t permit myself to take the leftover banana home. Somehow that would be stealing. That said, don’t think I’ll let you take this opportunity to challenge me on what I consider stealing and what I don’t. I’m very well aware of the discrepancies between my banana dilemma and my file-sharing habits and I know a day of reckoning is coming for the latter. As soon as Keaton asks me how I get all my new music, and I’m forced to attempt an explanation. I know it’s a day coming. Extra bananas though, those prick my conscience. So I leave them over the weekend. Although this may do for a rather soft brown banana on Monday, but it’s worth it to stay within the law.

Goodnight.

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feeling old fashioned

Happy coming weekend to us all. Tonight I went all blitzkrieg and wrote four full blog entries. For a second I contemplated just combining them all into one but instead chose to prepare them all for auto-posting a day at a time. Boom; all done for tomorrow and half of next week. Beautiful.

This morning, for the first time in my life, I sat and blacked my dress shoes. I suppose people still polish their shoes, but it seems somehow arcane. An activity of yesterday. I vaguely remember my dad shining his shoes. He had a fancy “kit” with a brush and a rag and he looked like he knew what he was doing. Probably learned proper shoe-shining protocol in the service; toned boots to see the CWO’s face reflect in the gloss. Me, I had no idea what I was doing. The instructions on the back of the Kiwi can verified that I already know everything there is to know about the basics: it’s just like waxing a car – put it on, buff it off. But the mechanics befouled me on my first time.

Even getting into the can was initially a mystery until I figured out the little rotating key is to be used as leverage in lifting the lid. For some reason this made the whole thing seem more old fashioned to me. This simple little tin with the clever lever action turnkey thing, it all seemed like an example of the brilliant-simple engineering from the war years. Everything now is overkill. Garbage cans that need to be plugged in so their motion sensors can see you approaching with your refuse and mechanically open and close the lid for you and machines that “clean the air” with negative ions. Over-engineered in the name of modernity and “cool.” Stupid. Here was a little formed tin with a blob of black junk inside and a little key to help you pop the lid. Function without excess. Like I said, made it all seem the more anachronistic an activity.

But I made do. I stuck my hand in the shoe and made what fist I could to hold it tight so I could move the cloth around it and paint on the black. I don’t have a fancy kit with brushes and rags like my dad, so I just used an small microfiber towel (I bought a 10,000 pack, or some such ridiculous example of excess, of them from Costco nine years ago and I’ve since found a multitude of uses for the things). I’d darken the surface with the stuff using one end of the towel, and then go back over it and rub it in with the clean end. I sat at the kitchen table using the light from the sliding glass door to help me see my work. Afterward, I was pretty happy with things. I managed to obscure all the scuffs and little lines and improved the overall “blackness” of the things. I turned the shoes around in my hands admiring them before slipping them on and getting on with getting ready.

Made me feel old… sitting in pinstriped dress pants and a blue dress shirt and black socks shining my shoes.

Like I’m at that point in my life.

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room for small luxury

Fog never really lifted today. Dissipated a bit, but it only served to hang the misty drifts near the horizon rather than the head-level of 8am. Sharaun’s still taking me to work. The GMC hasn’t come back from the shop. The accident was a month ago come Friday. A month.

I’ve gotten used to being down a vehicle, it has its upside. Sharaun can park in the center of our tiny garage affording passengers on each side a wide enough berth to enter and exit the vehicle comfortably. What’s more, I’ve been able to reclaim some of the space with one of those pop-up camp chairs. Turned it into my own little smoking lounge. Sit out there in the cold and read my book and smoke my pipe and listen to music. No room for that sort of small luxury when there’s two cars shoehorned between the shelves of old boxes and air compressor and bicycles hanging from rafters.

I suppose I could use this as a sort of period of adjustment.

When the second child comes I’ll be hard pressed not to forfeit the new car to Sharaun and our progeny. It’s larger and it’s safer. I should be steeling myself for that day during this period of absence. Too bad you can’t get an iPod integrated into her Saturn. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t too much mind trading vehicles. I can get on with a smaller passenger car OK, I don’t really mind – it’s not the sports-utilitarianism I’m beholden to. I guess I could put in an aftermarket head unit, but it seems like an awful amount of trouble. I’m so irrational about it that I’ve considered ditching her car and leasing something newer to drive. This is how ridiculously my brain holds to it being “her car.”

The gym is full of new-year-resolution folks. Packed. I remember it like this when I myself resolved to start going shortly after the start of 2009. Like many other good-intentioned people my fervor ebbed in the later quarter of last year. Not to say I stopped going completely, but I did backslide. Late 2010 travel and holiday don’t-cares saw me put back on a good ten pounds of what I’d shed earlier in the year. So I, too, am back with a vengeance.

Before I go… recently there was a comment on a blog I wrote way back in 2004. The “satanic flier” post was my recounting, supplemented with media, of a rather juvenile, yet still pretty funny if you ask me, prank my friends and I pulled back in high school. The comment led me to re-read the post again and remember the event. But I’m not writing now to rehash the entry but rather to laugh at the string of comments its collected. They crack me up:

harmony ponders…

i wonder how santinic people do there richals and thing’s like that cause i have a friend named shadow and he’s only about 14 and i wonder how much he would know at he’s age?

disaster asks nicely…

please send me a photo 4 the satan

Blake isn’t satanic or anything, but…

wow that was amazing. my nickname is SATAN so i think its kinda funny story, im not satanic or anything i think i might do this at my school would u mind if i used a copy of the same flyer?

DarkJoeri warns me…

yow mutherfucker dont mess whit evil

And finally, Anonymous says…

we flier of ot good

Guess the devil really does bring out the worst in people, huh?

Good stuff. Goodnight.

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merry christmas


Merry Christmas out there peoples.

Our gift-opening rush (which was really more like Keaton’s gift-opening rush) just wrapped up. I cleaned up the mess while Sharaun got started on the roast. Looking forward to a nice dinner with the family.

Hope your day is/will/did go/going well and that Santa was kind. Again, merry Christmas!

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contrary science is fun

The blog failed me last night.  The Christmas tunes entry should’ve auto-posted Tuesday at midnight, like most of my entries do.  Welp, it didn’t – and I only noticed late in the evening my time Tuesday.  Regardless, it’s published now and should fall just below this post for your reading pleasure.

Construction began last night.  Keaton held the walls steady as Sharaun fixed them with a sturdy bead of royal icing.  Before long, the roof was on the gables and iced down.  To ensure compliance with California’s stringent earthquake-rating building codes, we let the hull of the house sit overnight, roof propped on cups to  avoid slippage.  Tonight she was ready for gale force winds… and the finery began.  Gumdrops, peppermints, licorice sticks, jelly beans and fruity Cheerios were stuck here and there (under Keaton’s direction) to make for festive, icing-drenched gingerbread house.  Are we really supposed to be able to eat this thing, too?

I saw a study online the other day that really tickled me.  It stated that, due to the amount of food they consume and associated resources needed to produce it, dogs have double the carbon footprint of an SUV.  This means that, if you’re in favor of the environmentalist concept of “trading” or “offsetting” environmental impact, it’s half as bad for Mother Earth if you drive an SUV than if you own a dog.

I love when real science proves to be antagonistic or contrary to popular psuedo-science (or Oprah-fueled public misconception).  Organic food leads to obesity; sunblock contributes to cancer; anti-bacterial sanitizers actually weaken your natural ability to fight off germs, and thus make you more likely to get sick; etc.

I think it would be hilarious to see a bigger comparative chart of activities that are thought of as environmentally-conscious vs. those that have garnered a bad name.  For instance, the impacts of the massive fleets of recycling trucks burning fuel nationwide on a weekly basis graphed against the regained-resources we get from the materials they collect.  Or, cloth diapers and the water and energy they consume vs. disposables.  Maybe showing, unit-for-unit energy, that a landfill is actually the most efficient way of dealing with waste.

By the way, I don’t know if any of those things are true, but contrary science is fun.

Have a good Christmas Eve eve, folks.  Until later.

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amble at an easy pace

Been a while since I wrote.  Should be a slow week; writing should pick up.  All over the place today.

Tonight (Sunday) I got a wild hair and wanted to cook dinner for the family.  At work they make this roasted red pepper tomato bisque that I could eat ten bowls of, and since it was a nice chill gray day I figured it’d be fun to give it a try.  After some internettin’, I had cobbled together a recipe that sounded good and we picked up the raw materials on the way back from church.  Turned out to be dead-simple and pretty tasty, and the family approved so I felt accomplished.

Saturday morning my mom called and said that she and dad were considering a last-minute trip down for Christmas. A few hours of deliberation later and we got a copy of their itinerary in the inbox. Sharaun and I are both excited we’ll have family around for the holidays after all. We can cook a real-sized dinner now without feeling wasteful or overly-gluttonous (until we sit down to eat, at least), and we’ll be able to share gift-opening with Keaton. We were just lamenting the other day about not being able to spend the holiday with any extended family, and now we got that on lock. Thanks guys.

Cleaned out the computer desk area this weekend, found the DMV notice that Sharaun’s registration needed to be renewed… back in August.  With the fees, it’s nearly 200% what it would’ve been four months ago were it done on time.  My fault; I’m the one who’s responsible for doing “those kind of things” around here and it must’ve just slipped through the cracks.  Bad thing is, I’ve been giving Sharaun a hard time for the past month, contending she’d lost the renewed stickers they must have sent when I (surely) paid on-time.  I’ve been reminding her to call the DMV to get new stickers on an almost daily basis for weeks now.  Dang.

As a blogging-mecahnics sideline, I’ve become quite good at blogging on the iPhone WordPress application. In landscape mode I can tap out the paragraphs at an alarming pace, with relatively few typos or rewrites necessary. Best of all, the prospect of tackling a full-sized entry via the phone is no longer too duanting. In fact, everything you’ve read up to now, including this very sentence is iPhone-birthed. Not bad as a handheld tool.

Don’t really have anything more.  Goodnight.

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pert near impossible

Not even going anywhere...

It’s 10pm and, because we only have the one car at the moment, I couldn’t go to the gym tonight (Sharaun had the vehicle for her volleyball game). So I stayed home and played with Keaton before I put her to bed. Then, I decided I’d write (I’m doing that now) before I’d read a little, finishing off the book I’m in (haven’t done that yet, but have a strict be-done-writing deadline of 10:30pm so I can). Let’s go.

Feeling guilty, maybe, tonight I took the house to task a bit. I focused on the kitchen and master bedroom, mostly because I think Keaton needs to be responsible for her bedroom and toy room (and this behavior needs to be taught and continually reinforced, but I digress). Most of the scattered mess is random half-unpacked suitcases stretching back to travels as musty and dusty as our Thanksgiving trip to Florida.

This time, I can blame that solely on Sharaun. Once she packs a suitcase, it’s pert near impossible to get her to unpack it again. I’d do it myself, and make one of my trademark “piles” of unsavory materials (a technique I learned from my Dad, I fear, where I stack various items I feel aren’t where they should be in some conspicuous place as a passive-aggressive message to any opponent of tidiness), but she’s forbidden me from doing so, claiming there are unwraped Christmas gifts for me still half-packed inside. So, they rot.

As I was putting Keaton to bed tonight, I found myself wishing once again that she was done with nighttime diapers. She’ll be four in February and she’s still can’t make it through the night without one (not technically true, but you get my meaning). All her friends her age are out of diapers for good, and most of them have been for a while now. We’ve tried all sorts of different things… but so far nothing has worked. She’s great during the waking hours, using the bathroom at will and as trained as you’d expect any almost four-year-old to be; it’s just overnight that gets her.

Sharaun has a theory that she’s just a super-sound sleeper. She’s come in after naps sometimes (no diapers at naps, if we even get a nap) to find her having peed multiple times and not even stirred. She swears she read somewhere that kids who are really hard sleepers often have a harder time recognizing the impulse to get up and use the potty; no idea how that explains not being able to learn to hold it… but that’s her theory. I don’t really know… she is a pretty deep sleeper, so maybe there’s something to it.

We’ve tried doing no diapers and just dealing with the daily cleanup, but we got tired of the added work after two weeks of nightly accidents (sometimes more than one per night, which isn’t easily managed with a limited amount of fresh bedding). We’ve tried a psychological approach, “You’re a big girl, right? Well big girls don’t use diapers at night.”

And, I must admit, I, at least, have even tried twisting the psychological approach by adding the element of shame, “None of your friends still use diapers at night. Not Jake, not Gracie, not Matthew; no one.” I know, I’m a bad dad… but I’m telling you, I’m tired of diapers. We’ve tried a graduated approach, using pull-ups as some kind of intermediary “Look! They’re almost underwear” fakeout. All to no avail.

The only thing we haven’t tried is the high-tech approach one of my buddies swears by, where you hook some loud wetness-sensing alarm thing into their underwear. When it picks up on the first molecule of liquid it apparently sounds a loud alarm, theoretically waking the child and helping them remember to use the bathroom instead.

I haven’t tied this because, #1 it sounds all crazy 1984 loony and #2 who the crap wants to be scared awake by an alarm in the middle of the night because they are peeing? Seems like that scenario is a setup for some kind of future therapy… or at least some kind of unwanted urination/loud-noise subconscious association. Really though, I’ve not tried it because it’s probably expensive and sounds like too much like shock therapy, literally.

So we soldier on, going through diapers at the pace of one-a-day. At this rate, we may actually have two kids in diapers come next July. Now that thought is bumming me out. What do you think? Maybe she’s just not ready. Still, I’d love for her to ditch the diapers…

Goodnight.