Category Archives: Life

It’s not exactly a new thing I learned…

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This space is usually reserved for a retelling of something ridiculous I learned this week. I wouldn’t have much trouble filling the space. Though maybe a second edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week would be more appropriate.

Instead of that, though, I’ll just say I put my 59 minute early departure from work to good use. I stopped on the way home for groceries, got home and turned out the dogs, got them fed, loaded out the bird feeders, and then bolted the house on the couple of errands I almost always relegate to Saturday mornings.

I say that to say this… I’m kicking off a three day weekend and I wouldn’t have to leave the house until Tuesday if I didn’t want to. If you don’t think it’s a real possibility, do you even know me?

On my relationship with sleep…

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Further wrecking any hope I’ll ever have of having a normal relationship with sleep, I’ve pushed my daily wake up call up to 4:30. The extra 30 minutes means time to actually fix a reasonable breakfast, give the dogs a bit of attention, and to sit down and take a breath before charging out the door. I didn’t fully appreciate just how harried my typical mornings were, nor how much I was trying to cram into 35 or 40 minutes… and doing it badly.

I like the new, reasonable relaxed morning procedures. I suppose if that means I’m eternally damned to wake up well before 5am, it’s a price I don’t really mind paying. It’s not as if the dogs mind keeping vaguely unusual hours.

Leaving the house in a relatively calm and well prepared manner, specifically on a day I know is going to be a shitshow from start to finish at least starts me on the best foot. Since there’s no hope of finishing that way, best to control what I can, when I can.

Eyes on the prize…

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We’ve been back to work for a week now. It’s situation normal, but unavoidable if your life goals include not living under a bridge or in a van down by the river. Add in not going to prison and you’ve basically covered my Tier 1 Life Goals. Anything beyond those few things is really just the gravy.

Still, if I sit here and try hard to channel my inner Mr. Brightside, there is a federal holiday coming up. That’s something. The glimmer of a promise of hope in the darkness. It really feels like I’ll spend the next decade and a half casting my eyes from holiday to holiday looking for the dim gleamings of days not tethered to the cubicle.

So eyes on the prize or whatever

What I learned this week…

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I was pulled over this morning. The thing is, as soon as I saw the blues and reds coming up in the rear view, I basically knew what it was about. I’ve never entirely cured myself of the lead foot that’s afflicted me since dad first put me behind the wheel of a mid-1980s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera when I was about twelve. I had a lot of horsepower and a wide open road and, well, one thing led to another.

My point is, I didn’t get pulled over because this particular trooper felt like being a jerk this morning. The guy was doing his job and just happened to be sitting somewhere where he got a good look at me being stupid.

Once we pulled off to the side of the road, I waited patiently, kept my hands visible on the steering wheel, didn’t fidget or reach around for things, and waited for him to come up alongside. I produced my registration, insurance, and driver’s license – while narrating what I was doing and where I was reaching; left rear pocket for wallet, glovebox for everything else.

Directly behind my driver’s license in my wallet is the license that the state of Maryland requires me to hold to purchase handguns. He obviously saw it. The trooper asked if I had any guns in the vehicle. No, sir. Hands back to a very visible place on the wheel. OK.

I sat quietly for about five minutes, waiting for someone, somewhere to report back that I have no current points, no history of violations, and I’m not sitting on a stack of warrants.

Once we confirmed all that, I was handed back my documentation, issued a warning, and told to be safely on my way.

Every word that passed between me and this particular trooper was civil and professional. I didn’t feel any compulsion to give the guy a hard time or make an already dangerous job more difficult. I didn’t want to make a point or try to capture the whole thing with my phone.

We were sitting there on the side of a two lane country road because I gave him a reason to put me there.

So what did I learn this week? Nothing new, just a good solid reminder that if you act like you’ve got half a brain in your damned head, accept that you too can be in the wrong, and don’t antagonize the officer who’s just trying to get through his day, an engagement with the police doesn’t need to result with rolling around in the ditch getting your dumb ass shot.

The wearing o’ the pink…

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Six or seven years ago, one of my many other duties as assigned was to endure a monthly series of meetings that were barely tangentially related to anything happing in my office. There was the main meeting at the end of the month, prep meetings for that meeting, pre-meetings for the prep meetings, and host of other “pick up” meetings getting called with no notice. In any given month I could be guaranteed that 15-20 hours were going to be wasted staring at the ceiling in the conference room and wondering why people couldn’t just shut the fuck up once they made their point.

Around that time several pink shirts came into my possession. I started wearing these Pepto pink shirts on days when these random pointless meetings were scheduled – a silent protest. I needed a full suit of Pepto because I was well and truly sick of these meetings.

Eventually these meetings evolved into something else and landed on someone else’s desk, relieving me of the burden of enduring them. The pink shirts remained, though. Most of them are long worn out, but there’s one left. It’s a bit tattered and not fit for the office now, but it’s not quite bad enough to throw out.

It’s my first day back in the saddle after a long and restful break… and there was my last remaining Pepto shirt hanging in the closet this morning practically begging to be worn.

So yeah, if you must know, I’m wearing the pink today. I can’t think of anything that better suits today’s mood.

What I learned this week…

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I’ll keep this simple because my 16 day weekend has now dwindled down to just a regular length weekend.

What I learned this week is that when the time comes to hang up all this nonsense with going into the office and pecking away at PowerPoint, I’m really going to be fine. I can spend days on end searching out $1 used book gems, fiddling around with conserving the ones that need a bit of attention, and reading until my eyes go blurred. It feels like something I could keep up indefinitely… and mercifully doesn’t need to be particularly expensive to be satisfying.

A few weeks is a long difference from “forever,” but I feel more confident now than ever that filling the days and keeping to the budget won’t actually be the problems that some insist on making them out to be.

2019 by the numbers…

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It wouldn’t be New Years Eve if I didn’t take a couple of minutes to run you through the numbers for 2019.

In no particular order, here’s what they say:

  • Posts: 204
  • Words: 64,075 Words
  • Visitors: 6,494
  • Views: 9,218
  • Most searched term: jeffrey tharp attorney

Ok, yikes. So first of all, I apologize to anyone who landed here hoping to find a lawyer. I hope my namesake is a good one and everything worked out for you.

2019 was the second biggest year for views and visitors I’ve had here at WordPress. 2013 retains the crown, presumably because I was spitting so much fire about being furloughed that year… but it hasn’t kept the crown by much, so who knows what 2020 will look like.

The most read post for 2019, was a tribute to Winston. I wrote it back in January with tears streaming down cheeks. Even now, almost a year later, I can just barely make it through that post without sobbing.

In a few short hours we’ll consign 2019 to history. I wish I had something deep or insightful to close on, but all I keep thinking is what a truly strange year it has been.

Ten days…

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So I just realized that I haven’t posted anything in ten days. As much as I’d like to say I missed it and can’t wait to get back on the schedule, truth is I haven’t even really been thinking about it. I haven’t made many notes and the general aggravation that fuels most of my writing is decidedly absent.

The obvious point here is that it’s clearly the job that pushes me into writing regularly and to vent my spleen. I mean people as a whole are still every bit as annoying as they always are, but without the overarching influence of being in the office, they’re just not agitating me like they usually do.

Vacations don’t last forever, of course. By this time next week I’ll be up to my eyeballs in it and feeling like I was never away at all. I’ll try to squeeze in a couple more posts this week, but believe me when I tell you that the spirit just isn’t moving me. It really makes me wonder if I’ll have to shelve the whole blog completely on the happy day when I finally retire (or hit a multi-state lottery jackpot, whichever comes first).

As it turns out when I’m left to my own devices and away from the influence of working for money, I really have very little I’m compelled to bitch about. Go figure.

Happy Christmas…

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I don’t generally spend a lot of time writing this time of year. Christmas week is a blogging dead zone. Not much content being created and even fewer readers as we go about our appointed rounds.

In any case, it feels like a good time to wish everyone a very happy Christmas and all the best as we prepare bring the curtain down on the second decade of the 21st century.

The reason for the season…

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Christmas is soon to be upon us. Yes, yes, it’s all about Jesus and Santa and shopping and family. I’m more than passingly familiar with what makes the contemporary Christmas season swing. I personally don’t have a thing against any of it.

Still, though, I think we’re all forgetting what makes this season really important… and that’s the simple truth that the winter solstice is about to arrive and that within a few days the amount of daylight we enjoy here in the northern hemisphere will start getting measurably longer. It’ll be an agonizingly slow process, but with a few weeks it will be really noticeable. Instead of darkness at 4:45, it will have pushed nightfall back to 5:00 PM and it won’t be pitch black when I take the dogs out for the last time before work.

I’ve never been the kind of guy who wants to lay out soaking up the sun, but I can certainly understand why there’s a thread running through ancient civilizations that finds many of them celebrating the Sun as a god. I’m not a particularly religious person by anyone’s standards, but you can bet your sweet ass I’ll be giving thanks this holiday season that the longest night of the year is about to be comfortably in the rear view and longer days are ahead.