It’s May 31st. It’s not a birthday or an anniversary, but every year it’s among the most celebrated days on my personal calendar. You see, according to the calculations made by the United States Government, May 31st in the year 2035 is the date my age and years of service will make me eligible for full retirement benefits.
According to the running countdown on my office white board, that leaves me with precisely 12 years left to run in this rather accidental career of mine.
Of course, there are a lot of assumptions feeding into that particular date. It’s assuming that the wise and distinguished members of the U.S. Congress don’t meddle too much with the Federal Employees Retirement System. It’s assuming that the U.S. economy doesn’t either collapse or slip into a decade long recessive nightmare. It’s assuming that I’m putting enough cash aside to be my own paymaster. It’s assuming I don’t drop dead sometime between now and then.
Like I said, there are a lot of assumptions going into the idea that I’ll be able to hang it up in 12 years, but it’s a happy, happy thought. How good, or practical, it looks on the eve of my 57th birthday remains to be seen, but it’s absolutely my guiding star.
Not the present I expected…
My decade old first generation iPad Air finally gave up the ghost. Right up until it fell off the cliff, it was still mostly serviceable as a platform for streaming podcasts, or television, or generally schmucking around on the internet. Sure, it was sluggish and with just 16 GB storage, I had to offload all non-essential apps and files years ago, but what finally killed it was the elderly OS no longer supporting a number of apps I use on a regular basis. First Xfinity dropped out. Then it was Twitter. Last week a bunch of others fell off.
Increasingly I was limping along, trying to use an outdated version of Safari as my access point to every function. It finally got to be too slow and too much of a damned bloody nuisance to continue finding ways to work around the limitations imposed by elderly tech.
Anyway, now I have a spanking new iPad Air that’s easily capable of doing 100x more than I’m expecting of it. It’s more than a match for keeping up with any content consumption I’m going to throw at it. A shiny new iPad wasn’t the birthday present I planned to give myself this year, but it’s the one I ended up getting. I wonder what the chances are this one will still be streaming my media in 2033.
Caught up and cleared…
I was finally able to corral Cordelia and get her over to the vet for her first visit and to get her caught up on vaccinations. The general recommendation is that sort of thing should happen within a week of bringing a new fuzzy little family member home. Since Cordy spent 23 hours a day of her first two months here happily ensconced under my bed, I opted to extend that timeline instead of gearing up for a knockdown, drag out fight.
It’s only been in the last two or three weeks that Cordy has decided she doesn’t mind getting petted or catching a quick nap while laying on her human. To this day, picking her up in my arms is entirely out of the question. All interactions are 100% on her terms. I assume that’s part of the reason she spent several days being mad at me after being the victim of the well-orchestrated early morning snatch and grab operation that led to her getting poked and prodded.
I imagine it’ll be a while before I can even start thinking about trying that again. She’s very studiously avoiding getting within arm’s reach. Now that she’s fully vaxxed and medically cleared the next step is scheduling her spay surgery. I’m going to target sometime about a month from now… mostly so I can let her build up a renewed, if false, sense of security.
She probably wouldn’t agree with me, but I’m feeling good that we have this first step knocked off the to do list.
The super-long weekend begins…
Here we are kicking off the first super-long weekend of 2023. I may very well keep right on posting on schedule every weekday at 6:00. On the other hand, I may not… so don’t be surprised if you find I’ve skipped a day or two next week. These little vacations are the only time each year when I’m perfectly willing to throw the posting schedule out the window if I find I just don’t feel like it on a particular day.
What I’ve found through experience is the posts that originate during these short breaks tend to generate quite a bit less interest than then ones in which I’m ranting about work, bureaucracy, or people in general. That’s reasonable. I can hardly expect everyone out there to be breathlessly interested in hearing my tales of crawling through fire trap used book warehouses or sitting on the porch enjoying gin and tonic for breakfast.
By the first full week of June, I’ll be back to normal and probably showing no restive or restorative effects from taking a little time away, so it’s safe to expect business as usual before you know it.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 34 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. Now, I’m told, the alleged negotiation has gone so far sideways that it’s been sent to binding arbitration. Resolution to that could literally take years. So, we’re going to be grinding along for the foreseeable future with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 34 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.
2. Going vegetarian. My most recent trip to the doctor involved one of his more humorous suggestions. He ended our visit recommending that I consider going vegetarian. Look, I don’t hate vegetables. I eat a lot of them. But thinking I’m going to opt for a lettuce and tomato sandwich sans bacon this summer ranks well into foolish and wrong territory. He obviously saw the twinkle in my eye, because he then hedged his bets a bit, calling for foods with reduced sugar and salt. OK, I’m not so set in my ways that I object to swaps and adds on spec. Most mornings I’m home start out with a cup of Greek yoghurt and a banana or other fruit. This week I opted to try the “zero sugar” option produced by my favorite yoghurt brand. I might as well have spooned wallpaper paste directly into my mouth. Throughout the day I’ve also been known to throw a handful of peanuts or cashews into my gaping maw from time to time. Fine. I’ll get the unsalted version. Yeah. For all the flavor there, I could just have easily saved my money and gone outside to eat a handful of dirt. I’m sorry doc, but when I’m deciding what to eat, taste and flavor is a pretty damned big deal. You’re never going to convince me to join the “food is fuel” crowd when food is so many other things too.
3. Writer’s strike. There’s apparently been a writer’s strike happening in Hollywood for most of this month. I won’t even pretend to be educated on the reasons for or against. As a consumer of content, I might have reasonably expected to have noticed that there was a strike happening by now. It turns out I don’t watch all that much “new” content. When I’ve been intentionally watching the screen, I’ve been doing a slow re-watch of The Sopranos and Mad Men these last few weeks. As for live television piped into my home by old fashioned cable, my set is usually parked on channels that air reruns of shows with season upon season of episodes available or BBC News to put some background noise in the house. Maybe the writers are victims of their past success. At the rate I’m going I could keep going for a decade before I realize no “new” material was hitting the airwaves. I’m probably an outlier, but with my particular givens, I’m not sure a WGA strike is going to have the impact the writers are hoping to see.
My great leap forward…
As is so often the case when technology makes a great leap forward, I’m late to the party.
Until a few weeks ago, there I was, happily curating various playlists in iTunes the same way I’d been doing since the second generation iPod came out. I know. I might as well be here confessing I was still using Winamp to whip the llama’s ass.
Anyway. I’d been doing it that way for so long it was dead easy simple and reliable. It probably helped that I was mostly listening to the same music that’s been on my playlists for 20 years with only the occasional infusions of currently popular stuff. It wasn’t as if these playlists demanded a lot of time.
Lately, though, I’ve been a bit enchanted with a couple of artists – several with extensive catalogs – and I wasn’t particularly eager to buy up a few hundred dollars’ worth of digital albums to round out my collection on iTunes. Here enters Spotify with its three months for free introductory offer. Almost as if the great marketers in the machine knew the issue I was having and were prepared instantly to offer a $10 a month solution to get me out of that particular jam.
I still think owning the media is the preferable mode of doing things. Going to just owning the digital copy from owning the physical disks was a big step for me. Signing with Spotify and suddenly not owning any of it at all was something of a quantum leap. I still don’t love the idea that content can disappear or be edited instantly, but for sheer convenience, the streaming world really is hard to beat.
I am, somewhat begrudgingly, a fan.
Condition, normality, and the first binge of summer…
Without consulting the database, I can safely say I have about 1650 real paper books stashed here in the house. It’s an approximately equal division between what I’ve read and what remains in the to be read stack. By the time you pass 800 volumes, calling it a to be read “pile” feels somehow dishonest.
I pulled my copy of Flight of the Intruder by Stephen Coonts off the stack last night. Second edition. Nice clean jacket. And for some reason a strongly penned “x” right there on the half-title page. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder what the previous owner was thinking when he did it.
With a handful of exceptions, I don’t tend to have pristine first editions that look precisely as they did when published. I’ve got loads of firsts. Most of them show various and sundry problems. Creased jackets. Bumped boards. Maybe even a bit of water staining for some of the harder to find books. Even so, they’re delightful objects, but often the $20 version of a $200 true first in “like new” condition.
Sometimes I have to remind myself I’m not building a showpiece. I’m building with the intent of actually reading what ends up on my shelves. A library to be used and not just observed. More power to the people who put those together. I don’t have the budget to justify being a collector at that level. A bunch of near fines that I’m not afraid to touch is my sweet spot.
At best I’ve got 25-30 books that should fetch enough to make it worth hauling all the rest away when the time comes. If you’re not approaching the semi-professional or elite levels of collecting, having the whole thing pay for itself is probably just about as good a return as one can reasonably expect – especially when most of my high points have come out of the $2 bin. rather than an auction catalog. I’m sure I still have a few big scores left in me as I paw through thrift shops, charity sales, and the occasional proper antiquarian bookshop if they have something I can’t resist even at full retail.
The three years of COVID slowed me down a bit. So many used book sales were cancelled or postponed never to rise again. Shop schedules shifted to make them harder to get to or closed up altogether. The desire to not deal with the general public in large or small groups was even stronger than usual. Slow rolling my acquisition process isn’t something you’d notice from looking in the stacks. Books have been coming in more or less at the same pace I’ve been reading, so it has been a kind of homeostasis. Next week is the first round of my long awaited summer buying binge, so all bets are off once that gets underway. If the pre-COVID past is prologue, it’s the kind of thing that happens immediately before I start complaining about needing to lay on some new bookcases.
I’m cautiously optimistic that this will be the real summer of “back to normal” for me. I am, of course, using the word “normal” here very loosely.
Subject matter expertise…
This morning I was called in as a subject matter expert and asked to provide some thoughtful insights to an audience primarily made up of personnel from another service based on my years of experience and unique viewpoints.
That’s fine. A normal person might even have been honored by the opportunity or enjoy receiving recognition of his peers. The problem here is that I wasn’t having my brain picked about operations, or strategic planning, or emergency management – all things that at one time or another, I have been able to speak about with some level of authoritative knowledge. Instead, I was being asked to talk to this inter-service audience based on my vast, exhaustive experience in part and event planning.
For the better part of an hour, I offered advice on real world challenges, some of our hard won lessons learned, and general commentary about your big day and how to plan it.
It’s hard to imagine why the first thing I do every morning us update my “Days to Retirement Eligibility” countdown whiteboard. Thank the gods that I don’t have any morale left to speak of, because it’s just the kind of thing that would have sent it spiraling to new, unplumbed depths. It’s just one of the mostly untold joys of being a subject matter expert in a subject you loath with the fiery hatred of a thousand suns.
I’ll never be accused of wanderlust…
A million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I would burn off vacation time to go places and do things. It could be as simple as taking an extra-long weekend at the beach or as involved as heading to the Caribbean or spending the better part of two weeks knocking around Europe. It’s been a decade at least since I used my vacation time to really “go away.”
There are lots of factors intervening. Buying the house put a real stretch on finances there for a couple years. The idea of finding someone I trusted to take care of the various dogs, cats, and tortoise in residence for more than a day or two away was always daunting – and often nearly as expensive as the trip itself if I opted to hire it professionally versus relying on the less budget busting kindness of local friends. Added to that, the recent experience of returning home to find Hershel unexpectedly hovering just short of death’s door despite all reasonable precautions and care has left me more than a little angsty every time I need to leave the house to get groceries, let alone think about being away for days or weeks at a time.
The other insurmountable problem with going places is that when you arrive where you’re going, they’re inevitably filled with people. I can muster up the patience for dealing with the masses in small doses – perhaps the length of a concert – or a bit longer if really pressed. Contending day after day with long tourist lines, jostling for every meal, and a sea of people milling around oblivious to everyone and everything around them simply doesn’t sound restful or relaxing. Maybe I’ll be motivated to do that kind of travel again someday, but 2023 doesn’t feel like the year.
I’ll be using my upcoming time off to launch some strategic day trips to a few of the Mid-Atlantic region’s great used and antiquarian bookshops, get some vetting done for Anya, and otherwise just knocking around the house a bit. It’s not a plan smacking of wanderlust, but it feels like precisely the level of peace and tranquility I need at the moment.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 33 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. Now, I’m told, the alleged negotiation has gone so far sideways that it’s been sent to binding arbitration. Resolution to that could literally take years. So, we’re going to be grinding along for the foreseeable future with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 33 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.
2. House Republicans. Instead of lining up to throw George Santos, the absolute embarrassment of a representative who has already admitted to being a liar and fraudster and has been indicted on 13 counts of various crimes, out of the House of Representatives, Republican members of the House opted to refer the matter over to the black hole that does business as the House Ethics Committee. When they can’t put the republic ahead of politics on this very simple question of whether or not George is fit to continue in office, I have very little doubt that their position on any issue of substance will be equally as poisoned. Politicians have always been a self-serving bunch, but I miss the good old days when they at least had the common decency to pretend to be embarrassed when one of their own was caught out in the midst of being a common criminal.
3. My brain. Not including the few scattered hours here and there to attend to medical appointments, I‘ve taken exactly one vacation day since January 1st. My brain, usually reasonably agile, is about as responsive as a five gallon bucket of sludge. I won’t testify to anyone else noticing, but I certainly have. This week, when I should be focusing in on the latest adventure in party planning that’s made its way to my desk, I’m struggling to put proper sentences together. Words and how they work is sort of my stock in trade. If the paragraphs read like gibberish to me, how they’ll read to someone seeing the information cold for the first time is deeply suspect. Despite my best efforts, my head seems determined to focus on counting down the minutes and hours to the nine day break I’ll start next Friday. It’s a happy thought, but not especially helpful in getting me through the week between here and there.
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