A Field Guide to Dishwater

I have sat here for over an hour staring at this screen trying to think of something interesting to write about.  I was unsuccessful.

So then I thought I’d try to think of something less interesting to write about.  Again, I came up empty handed.

I suppose I could write about something that is downright uninteresting to write about, guaranteed to be as dull as dishwater and half as entertaining.  But I believe that is called “my journal”, and I still haven’t gotten over my fear of posting anything too personal on this here internet contraption.  I don’t know why I worry, though.  As dull as my life is, I’m pretty darn sure I don’t have to worry about identity thieves or stalkers.  Such miscreants would no doubt take up a collection and give it to me, saying, “Here, Dude.  Go buy yourself a life.”

So what is left to the man who’s life is too dull to write about?  And now you know how and why fiction was created.

The Art of Goofing Off

It is a quiet Saturday here in Biffville.  So far it has been a near-optimum mix of taking care of the perpetual list of chores and taking it easy.  Normally I feel guilty for taking it easy, but not today.  It has been a long, hard week and my brain (and body) is telling me to just relax a little and recharge a little before next week, which is going to be just as long and just as hard, if not a little more.

It made me wonder why we don’t allow ourselves to recharge.  Why do we always feel guilty for leaning back, putting our feet up, putting our hands behind our heads, and just closing our eyes for a bit?  Is it our culture?  Our upbringing?  Something innate within us?

It just makes me curious why lolling (not LOL’ing) is held in such disdain.  I’m not talking about someone who makes a career out of it.  I’m just talking about the person who, after a long day or a long week, wants to just sit in a hammock or a chaise lounge and do nothing for a bit.

We’ve all discussed the “Murphy’s Law” moment that describes the situation where, even if we’ve been working hard for hours, when we stop for just a minute to catch our breath, that’s when the boss walks by and sees us.  Even in that folkloric story, the primary theme is the fear of being caught resting.

In contrast, I’ve known people in my life that lifted being lazy to an art form.  It was just who they were.  They would go months or years without having a job.  They always seemed to mysteriously disappear if a group of people started talking about taking care of something that needed to be done.  Their sole topic of discussion seemed to be the vague and ephemeral illnesses or ailments or conditions that kept them from working or participating in anything that smacked of work.  Everyone knew their only ailment was that they were bone idle.  And yet, they always seemed to have enough to live on.  They truly are as the lilies of the field, neither toiling nor spinning.  Neither are they stressed or overworked or exhausted or stretched as tight as a rubber band.  So who is the smarter?

I don’t have it in me to be lazy, but I sure would love to enjoy a little idleness from time to time without feeling guilty.

 

 

Rusting On My Laurels

This is my 124th post (yay me!), which is about 120 more than I thought I’d be able to create when I first started this journey at the beginning of the year (2017).  Sticking to projects is not my strong suit.  I get bored easily, which, I suppose is just a euphemism for “I’m lazy” or “I have a very short attention span“.

But honestly, I never thought I’d get this many posts written.  (high fives myself)

So I’ve been wondering when it gets easier.  When will I be able to just sit down and dash off something and post it?  When will I post 2 or 3 times a day just because I have that many interesting things to say?

It’s a struggle to write even once a day.  My days don’t change much from day to day.  I’m firmly ensconced on the work-home-sleep-work treadmill.  Whatever flashes of brilliance or genius I have while in the car on the way to or from work tend to either get forgotten by the time I am sitting in front of the computer, or else when I really start to ponder them and try to flesh them out as a blog post, they take on a sort of ridiculousness or insipidness that makes me just wad them up and throw them in the trashcan (figuratively speaking).

But if there’s one thing I’ve discovered, blogging is definitely a “what have you done for me lately?” medium.  One can post every day for a month and the likes and the follows roll in (relatively speaking), but stop posting for a single day and they drop to zero quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.  It’s definitely not like a musician who has a hit song or an actor who’s on a hit TV show that goes into syndication.  The royalties don’t keep rolling in decades after the song or show was first released.

So, there’s no resting on one’s laurels.  It is, to borrow a phrase from academia, publish or perish.

The problem is, I don’t have enough interesting thoughts or experiences to post every day.  I may have to resort to just making things up.

But I’d hate to be mistaken for a journalist or politician.

 

 

Poor Biff’s Almanac — Still Tuesday, Rambling Man, Lanz and Speer

 

Tonight’s Background Music is provided by David Lanz
Album: Cristofori’s Dream
Best Song: “Spiral Dance”

For those of you keeping track, today is Tuesday.  More importantly, it is Tuesday evening, which means that, for all intents and purposes, Tuesday is over.  Tuesday gave us its all.  It fought the good fight.  It left everything out there on the field.   But at the end of the day . . . well . . . it was the end of the day.

You may be wondering among yourselves just what the heck was up with that first paragraph.  “Where was he going with that?” you may be asking yourselves.  And who can blame you?  Heck, I am asking myself the same thing.

By now you are realizing (too late to help you, of course) that you are in the middle of some stream-of-consciousness rambling while I fumble around in the dark looking for something to write about.  Anything to write about.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.  I must leave no cliche unturned in my quest for something to write about.

I can hear the rumbling and murmuring as my readers get restless (and restive), wondering if I’m every going to get to something worth reading.  I fear you may be disappointed.

Did I ever mention that I got to see David Lanz in concert one time?  It was in 1988 when he played at McFarland Auditorium on the SMU campus.  I was a big fan of his from his partnership with Paul Speer and their albums “Natural States” and “Desert Vision”.  Lanz came to town flogging his newest solo album at the time, “Cristofori’s Dream” (sans Speer).  I loved the concert, particularly the song “Cristofori’s Dream” and the way he set up the song with a story of sorts about how Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano.  But missing from the concert was Paul Speer’s gritty guitar underlayment.  It was like listening to an a capella version of a Van Halen song.  Still, Lanz is a phenomenal piano player and can really write a good song.

Okay, I’m going to wrap this thing up before it goes off the rails even more than it already is.

Poor Biff’s Almanac — Et tu, Monday?

Another Monday is behind us.

A word of advice:  Don’t ever let Monday circle around and get behind you.  Always keep Monday within eyesight.

It was not a bad day as Mondays go.  I am still suffering from a cold … or allergies.  It is hard to tell which.  It all started last Thursday morning when I thought to myself, “Hey, I think I’ll take off on Friday.”  This was because I had put in a boatload of hours last week and had my 40 hours in by Thursday noon.

Well, as soon as I’d said that, even though it was an internal monologue, the cold (or allergy) goblins said, “What?  Who said that?  It’s showtime!”

Long story short, by the time I headed home Thursday after work, my throat was killing me.  I spent all day Friday in bed, laid out with whatever this is.  Saturday and Sunday is just a fog of hazy memories.  So, my long weekend turned out to be no weekend at all.

The moral of this story is:  If you’re planning on taking a day off of work, don’t tell anyone about it … not even yourself.  Those darn eavesdropping allergy goblins will ruin everything for you.

 

Caution: Angry Weather Ahead

If you are a regular reader of my blog (and modern internet triangulation techniques may have located this individual who is living in a small hut in the Azores), you know that I complain quite a bit about the weather here in Texas.  It’s hot.  It’s cold.  It’s dry.  It’s rainy.  It’s hail-y.  It’s tornado-y.  And it is often all of these things in the same day.

For example, while I was outside mowing the yard today, it was 87 degrees (30.5 C) at 60% humidity.  It was miserable.  And the ground was dry as a bone and hard as a brick.  This heat persisted until about 6:00 when the temperature suddenly began plummeting.  Within an hour it was down to 63 (17.2 C), which was a drop of 24 degrees (13.3 C) in an hour.  And we are on our way to a low tonight of 50 (10 C).  Rains have rolled through and soaked the area.

Also, again, if you are a regular reader of this blog (or, I should say THE regular reader of this blog), you know I have a weakness and an affinity for flea markets.  For the past several weeks we had been planning a trip over to Canton, Texas, home of the First Monday Trade Days, the largest flea market in the region.  Since this is the weekend of the first Monday of April, it was this week.  However, for one reason or another, we decided not to go today.

Imagine my surprise and horror when, later in the day while our local temperature was plummeting 24 degrees, Canton was being pummeled by tornadoes!  We watched the TV in horror as the very place we might have been standing was strafed by a very large tornado.

It just reminded me that, no matter how much I might dislike the weather here in Texas, there is always someone somewhere else in Texas having a worse go of it than me!

 

The Battle for Space Has Begun

I’m getting too old for this.

The other day I read an article on some site or another — I can’t even remember what the article was about or where I read it.  It was that unimportant and insignificant.

However, as is my wont, I tend to read the reader comments after articles because often they are more entertaining than the article itself.  It is like getting to watch a train wreck … in slow motion.  Within 2 or 3 comments, the commentators are attacking each other personally.  In less than ten comments, someone has made a reference to Hitler or Nazis (even if the article was just about how cute bunnies are).  Within fifteen comments, someone has said something along the lines of “I have traced your IP address and I am going to come to your house and kick your derriere!”  There are no rules in comments.  Bad grammar abounds.  It is a punctuation-optional zone.  What little punctuation there is, is often used incorrectly.  Spelling?  Don’t even get me started!

But on this one particular day, someone made a comment about how amateurish the author of the article was.  Someone chimed in and said, “Yes, you can tell he’s an amateur because he uses two spaces after periods between sentences.”

A flame war then erupted on whether two spaces or one was correct after a period between sentences.  I mean … people were HOT.  I don’t think they could have been more upset if someone suggested reanimating Hitler as a zombie to see what would happen.

I, for one, was not even aware that there was a controversy surrounding the use of two spaces after a period between sentences.  I took typing in the eleventh grade many decades ago and that is how we were taught.  It was beat into us.  The implication was “Only chumps, cretins, anarchists, sociopaths, and cannibals forgot to put two spaces after a period.”  I never questioned it.  Why would I?  Everything I’d ever read had two spaces after a period.  Books.  Magazine articles.  Official documents.  Everything.  There was literally NOTHING that did not have two spaces after periods.  It was as universal as anything can possibly be in this world.

So why suddenly is it the fashion to only use a single space after a period between sentences?  Is it to save space?  (Ha ha … but seriously …)  Is it merely aesthetics?  Is it because some bored academic somewhere felt he needed to leave his mark in the world by stirring up a useless controversy?   Does it utilize less memory in the servers that store the world’s documentation?

I do not understand this controversy.  It is quite literally an argument over nothing.

I personally prefer the two spaces because it is a visual signal to the brain that one sentence has ended and another has begun.  When using a single space between sentences, both the period and the single space get lost in the jumble of other letters.  But that is just me.  I can read either method equally well.  I have this wonderful thing inside my head called a brain that allows me to perceive a single space just as well as two spaces, and to ignore them both.

But some people like to argue over nothing.

 

(P.S.  I wrote this article with two spaces after every period between sentences.  Let the flame war begin!)

Poor Biff’s Almanac – Friday Finally

Friday is finally here, and not a moment too soon.  I don’t know how much longer I could have gone on with the workweek that just ended.

You might have noticed that I have not posted in awhile, though I flatter myself to even think that.  Well, the reason for my absence has been a perfect storm of events.  Each of the events, if isolated and looked at in a vacuum, are singularly uninteresting.  However, taken as a whole, and observed as the swirling variegation of events that they were, they remain just as uninteresting and probably a little more so.  It is the same sort of uninteresting you experience when someone relates to you a long, drawn-out, incoherent dream they had.

So I’ll just sum up the whole tiresome mess in as few words as possible.

A.  I have been putting in a lot of hours at work.  In fact, I had my 40 hours for this week in by Thursday morning.

B. My spending so much time at work has taken up all the time that I might have spent doing something more interesting.

C.  Even in my free time, I don’t do anything that is interesting, so scratch item #B above off of the list.

I think that is about it:  lack of free time and lack of anything interesting in my life to write about.  I probably could have just written it that way up front and saved us all a lot of time.  But it’s too late now.  The damage is done.  You cannot unread what you just read and I certainly cannot un-write it (though I suppose I could just delete it all, but I have too much invested in it at the moment to let it go).

And to top it all off, I think I am catching a cold.  I began getting a sore throat yesterday afternoon at work.  It was significantly worse this morning when I woke up, but a good dose of Tylenol, a hot shower, a cup of hot coffee, and gargling with Listerine downgraded my condition from “extremely miserable”  to “merely miserable”.  The sore throat has just become scratchy and raw.  The lack of energy and general malaise persists, but I am hoping a full weekend of intense lethargy and idleness will cure that.

Though I’m not sure if my body will ever forgive me for gargling with Listerine.

Poor Biff’s Almanac — Ode to Saturday; To Hail and Back; A Photo Finish

Tonight’s Background Music is provided by Justin Hayward (of The Moody Blues fame).
Album:  The View From the Hill
Best Song:   “Promised Land” … though they’re all good.

It’s been quite a day in Biff-land.

In Praise of Saturday

For one thing, it is Saturday, which is my favorite day of the week.  What’s not to like about Saturday?  It is virtually the only day of the week that affords me the luxury of sleeping in a little.  Though I often do get up early on Saturdays, there’s usually nothing that compels me to.  The alarm clock is given the day off.  Even if the cat wakes me up demanding to be fed, I can usually feed him and go back to sleep without much difficulty.

Another thing to like about Saturday is that I have time to eat a proper breakfast.  It may only consist of a bagel and a cup of coffee, but it is a breakfast fit for the gods because I get to eat it leisurely while reading something or watching TV or surfing the internet; not grabbing something frantically as it pops out of the toaster and then gulping it down as I run out to my truck to go to work.

And not only do I get to eat a leisurely breakfast, but the Science channel actually wises up and plays back-to-back-to-back episodes of How It’s Made.  They lose their minds again later in the day and begin to play schlock until the following Saturday, but I enjoy it while I can.

Another good thing about Saturday is that, even though I always have a good long list of things that need doing around the house, I can start and stop them at my discretion.  I can also just leave the house without having to send out an email to the department telling them that I’m going to be out of the building for a bit.  I just get in my truck and go.  That’s about the closest many of us get to tasting true freedom.

And finally, another good thing about Saturday is that it is far enough away from Monday that I don’t spend the entire day lamenting the end of the weekend and the looming threat of Monday.  For this one day a week I can pretend to live a life of indolence and leisure.   But Monday morning is always eager to remind us that we have mortgages, utility bills, insurance payments, food bills, etc. etc. etc.

There Will Be Hail to Pay!

If you were one of the five people who read my blog from yesterday, you may remember that I was discussing my doubts as to whether or not it would rain.  I was wrong.  It rained.  As some of my relatives in Alabama might say using one of their quaint rustic idioms, “It rained like a cow on a flat rock.”

There was much thunder and lightening.  The storm warning sirens went off.  There was very loud rain and wooshing winds.  When the calm of morning arrived, I could see from my handy-dandy rain gauge that I bought just a few weeks ago, that we got just over an inch of rain in about 2 hours.  Sweet!

I was lucky, though.  There were areas nearby that got 3-inch diameter hail.  I happened to drive through one of those areas later in the day and took the following pictures.

Here you can see that the hail very nearly stripped this tree of all it’s leaves (which can be seen on the ground underneath).  I just took a single picture of one such tree.  There were hundreds and hundreds of trees like this.  The hail had already melted away by the time I took these pictures, making it look like the trees just spontaneously shed their leaves.

Here you can see some leaves surrounding a storm drain where they were washed to.  Again, this was just one of dozens of such drains.

I stopped and took this picture through the fence surrounding a back lot of a luxury car dealer.  Pretty much every car on their lot looked like this.   And there were several dealerships that were affected by the hail.  There were dozens of cars that had had their rear windows shattered.

This was a flower bed outside of a business.  It was nearly obliterated by leaves.  You can see some pink sticking up through all the leaves.

And this was just a random fire plug I found which caught my eye.  No storm damage here.  It looks white in the picture, but it was painted silver.  I liked the look of it against the red brick.

A Photo Finish

And finally, I finally decided to get myself a real camera.  Many, many years ago (okay, a few decades ago), I had a Canon AE-1 SLR 35mm camera and I loved that thing.  But it was eventually rendered useless by the digital age and so for the past 15 years or so I have had a series of point-and-click cameras and phone cameras, all of which were universally disappointing as cameras.

Phones especially make abominable cameras.  I am continually frustrated by things like the camera taking the picture about 10 seconds after I click the button.  Or there being so much glare on the display that I can’t see what I’m taking a picture of.   Or it focusing on random items in the background instead of what I want to take a picture of.

Finally, I’d had enough of trying to get my phone’s camera to behave and decided to buy a real camera.  I used to quite enjoy photography in my youth and I let technology ruin that for me.  But now I feel like the technology has finally caught up to the experiences I used to enjoy back in the 35mm film days.

I bought a Canon EOS Rebel T6 and though I’ve only gotten to play with it for about 20 minutes so far, I really like it.  I wanted an DSLR camera to mimic my Canon AE-1 SLR.  I like the SLR rather than the all-in-one cameras because I like looking through the viewfinder to compose the shot rather than looking at the display.  I like seeing what is actually going to end up in the image in real time.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with a lot of camera talk, but I hope to present a few photos now and then that I’ve shot with my trusty Canon T6.  For now, here is a sample of a picture I took earlier today.

 

Poor Biff’s Almanac — Thursday Evening Edition

It has been an arduous journey, but I have managed to stagger from Monday morning to Thursday evening.  I still have the Friday workday to get through, of course, but the weekend is so close that I can practically smell it.  It smells sort of like funnel cake at an outdoor carnival.  It is the aroma that helps you realize you’re having a good time.  Or about to.

One of the things that has made the week so toilsome is a “special project” I was assigned at work a few weeks ago.  Whenever anyone approaches you with anything labeled as a “special project” you should run, not walk, to the nearest exit.  Leave your personal belongings behind, forget about your dignity, and gallop towards the door like the Roadrunner avoiding Wile E. Coyote.

Another phrase that should make your ears prick upwards as your internal alarms go off is the dreaded:  An opportunity to excel.   If you hear this phrase come out of anyone’s mouth that is above you in the org chart, you should spring upwards like a bunny who just saw an eagle’s shadow and bolt violently (remembering to run in a serpentine fashion).  Run!  Run like the wind!  Run until your little bunny heart explodes (figuratively) from the exertion of exercising your choice of flight.  (Fight is rarely an option in corporate America unless you enjoy being unemployed.)

“Opportunity to excel” is really just management euphemism for one of the following:

• Career-ending debacle
• Reputation-shattering fiasco
• Soul-sucking disaster
• Confidence-crushing catastrophe

The worst part about being saddled with a “special project” is that it is like the tar baby from Southern folklore.  Once you have gotten your hands on it, you can never rid yourself of it.  It will follow you for the rest of your career.  You will become known as “the guy who worked on that special project that time“.  Your fingerprints will be all over it.  Your name will be on all of the drawings and documents.

What’s worse, you will become known as the expert in that thing.  Which means every time another “special” project arises, you will be the go-to guy.