I’m feeling a bit like I have been neglecting my bloggly duties lately. The simple truth is there’s really very little going on that is worth of noting, let alone actually recounting after the fact. I’m thoroughly back into the groove of work, class, and home maintenance and while usually all three are filled with potential fodder, it’s been a very, very quiet week. I should probably be enjoying it, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that there is another shoe up there waiting to drop.
Author Archives: jdtharp
God Save the King…
I’m a little late to the party, but wanted to send kudos to the King of Spain for telling the loud-mouth of a Venezuelan dictator to shut up. I would love to see more leaders apply this type of simple and easy to understand diplomacy. It’s the kind of foreign policy I can get behind.
Home improvement…
There is something unquestionably satisfying about working with your hands. Given the long weekend and the distinct lack of classes at the moment, I was able to take on a bit project I’ve wanted to do for the last few months. For my first attempt at doing tile work, it turned out much better than I expected… and only involved four trips to Lowe’s in the last three days.
Thank you…
Special thanks and much gratitude to the men and women serving in uniform today, their predecessors who stood watch before them, and countless American heroes who gave the last full measure of devotion for the ideal that a Republic could endure the shoals of history’s stormy seas. You are and have been our protectors. May your long vigil on far off shores bring us peace.
Lessons from life…
I had a bad day today. I mean one of those days when you leave the office that you don’t really care if you ever go back kind of days. I was angry, frustrated, and generally exhausted from the bureaucratic process that drives the federal machine. Actually, I thought I was having a bad day at that point. I also knew that someone I consider a dear friend and one of my favorite targets of merciless flirting was having surgery today.
It was a common procedure that should have been no fuss, no muss, over and done. At six o’clock I learned that it hadn’t been as simple as that. Somehow things had gotten complicated. All I knew at that point was that someone I care for was in trouble and I realized at that moment that I would have given anything to make things right. There wasn’t anything in the world I wanted more than to simply be there, as though just my presence would make some kind of difference. And in that moment, I would have given everything up just to be there and see for myself that she was alright.
I’m not going to sit here and type out a manifesto promising a life-long reordering of my priorities, but I will say that for the first time in a long, long time, my eyes were opened to the world beyond my own little slice of life and how perilous a blade it balances on. She may not be mine to win or lose, but knowing this chick makes me want to be a better man. I’m not there in body, but you can stand assured that I’m most assuredly there in spirit.
Advice from an all day meeting…
I know you’re not from around here and maybe you haven’t been exposed to some of the finer point of meeting etiquette. All, I can say is that if you want your comments to be taken seriously by anyone, you might start by not sitting there all day with your baseball hat on working on your act to be named Surly Employee of the Year. Oh, and lose the giant belt buckle. It’s not 1977. Until you get those little details squared away, you’ll just be the angry guy sitting in the back of the room.
Fall back…
I just want to go on the record and say that this “fall back” to standard time thing sucks. We’re a post-industrial society. There is no good reason that I can think of that we need to rejigger our clocks twice a year. I’m up and rolling before the sun in both “saving” and “standard” modes, so my proposal is that the country gets together and just picks one. I don’t care which one it is, personally. Plus, there was some asshat on the radio on Friday saying that we should be falling back an hours and 20 minutes to account for the slowing rotational speed of the earth. What? Give me a goddamned break already.
Fortunately, the issue of how we account for time is in the capable hands of the brains trust we call the United States Congress. May God have mercy on our souls.
Farewell to an American Hero
It’s no secret that the generation that came of age in the Depression and were tempered on the anvil of World War II are dying. The youngest of them are now in their 80s. Within the next 20 years, the war will have passed out of living memory to become the sole province of the historians.
I was once privileged to meet an American hero is the truest sense of the word. Slight in build and clearly feeling his years, I was able to spend a few moments simply talking with Paul Tibbets, who piloted Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. Even when we talked, some 60 years after the event, Mr. Tibbets made no apologies for leading his mission that day. His body was bent with age, but looking in his eyes, you simply knew this was a man who was at peace with himself and who was assured of the rightness of his actions and his cause.
Paul Tibbets was a man who answered his nation’s call, did is duty, and returned home to help remake a global system shattered by war. The Director of the National Aviation Hall of Fame best eulogizes him in saying, “There are few in the history of mankind that have been called to figuratively carry as much weight on their shoulders as Paul Tibbets… Even fewer were able to do so with a sense of honor and duty to their countrymen as did Paul.”
Global War…
Anyone who thinks we are not in the midst of a truly global war against terrorism should take a long look at this minute-by-minute map of events going on around the world. Terrorism doesn’t just mean Islamo-Facist extremists shooting up the streets of Baghdad; It’s home grown pipe-bombers, the covert movement of radioactive material, and kidnappings in the name of one political sect or another. The world has been and remains a dangerous place, my friends. The web only shows us those items that are common knowledge… Want to guess what’s going on that no one has discovered yet?
Returned to the fold…
They say you can’t go home again, but that’s not entirely true. You can go home again as long as you’re willing to spend the 10% restocking fee. At $40, getting myself right with BlackBerry would have been a steal at twice the price. The 8300 isn’t a quantum leap device. It’s a tweak here and a tweak there to make an already amazingly reliable platform just a little bit better. A few new features like the camera are fun to play with, but really, it’s the instant email, playing nice with Outlook, and a battery that lasts more than 7 hours under regular use that sealed the deal for me.
For you iPhone fans out there, I say godspeed. You’ve got yourself a fine phone with an exceptional browser, but if you’re serious about email and data, BlackBerry is the undisputed champ. Maybe it doesn’t have the cool factor that iPhone does with the phone geeks, but as far as I’m concerned, this is the image of pure beauty…
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