Category Archives: Life

I’m making a list and checking it twice…

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I probably put more effort than is strictly necessary into traveling. Even a million years ago when I was traveling for work on a regular basis, I was the guy who showed up at the airport with a giant suitcase that pushed the 50 pound weight limit for a four day trip. It got exponentially worse when I lived in the center part of the country and most of the trips suddenly because reachable if I were willing to put in a long day’s drive. Then I’d fill the bed of the truck with all manner of stuff that I might possibly need, or more often just things that would make the hotel room feel more like home. If I couldn’t actually be at home, that was the next best alternative.

Seriously, I’d show up at five star hotels, slide into their valet line, and proceed with an unpacking experience that looked like a cross between the arrival of a gypsy caravan and the journeys of Lawrence of Arabia. What can I tell you, I’m believe in my own comfort… and for me, that generally means having the right things on hand whenever I might want or need them.

Here we are many years since those trips of old… but the impulse to take the whole house with me is as strong as ever. That’s why I’ve been working on my Christmas List for the better part of a week now. It’s not a list of presents, of course, but rather my planned packing list.

The list these days is a little different. It consists mostly of dog beds, dog food, dog toys, dog medication, crates, bowels, leashes, harnesses, and then the usual allotment of books, electronics, charging cables, and a few changes of clothes. In other words, mostly things that I could personally live without, but would really prefer not to if it’s avoidable.

This year I’ve gone so far as to have some of the requirements shipped ahead. Yes, thanks to Amazon I have pre-positioned certain dog related items at our holiday destination so we can just fall in on it when we arrive. Then all I’ll have to decide is whether to abandon it in place or repackage it for backhaul. It turns out you can take the boy out of logistics, but you can’t really shake the logistics out of the boy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start thinking about the Tetris-style load planning I’ll need to sort out to make sure everything is safely stowed in the truck cab or at least protected from the weather under the bed cover.

Obviously I have no idea how normal people travel.

What I learned this week…

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I’m sure I learned something new this week. Meandering through seven whole days without picking up one remotely interesting tidbit feels like it should be hard. Actually it feels like it should be impossible if you have any kind of inquisitive mind. To be fair, I’m sure I did actually learn more than one new thing as I was pouring through the latest hundred-odd pages of Pax Britannica. Those new things, though, aren’t really the kind of nuggets you bring to your blog on Friday night. Well, I sure some people do, but that’s not how we do things here.

The fact is, I’ve scoured my memory for the better part of the last hour hoping to tease out one little factoid that I could turn into a paragraph. I’ve been soundly defeated in that effort. My post-work Friday afternoon brain dump seems to have eradicated more than the stuff time stamped during business hours.

There’s also the very real possibility that I’ve completely overestimated my ability to remember random minutia. I try to make note of the interesting stuff, but even that system seems to have failed me this week… and maybe that’s this week’s lesson. It turns out I really can’t rely on my internal memory to keep track of jack shit anymore and need to make a conscious effort to be a better note maker.

Yeah, I guess that’s what I learned this week. It’s lame and I’ll probably have forgotten it by this time tomorrow, but there it is.

I hate a thief…

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Everyone has that one hot button issue that makes them grind their teeth, or at least grind them more than usual. I’ve mostly accepted that people are awful and they’re going to spend most of their time treating themselves, each other, and every creature they come into contact with awfully.

Knowing this about myself, I can say that the kind of “person” I despise more than almost any other is a thief – the kind of person who decides doing an honest day’s work is for suckers and that whatever someone else has should really be theirs, just because.

This weekend, six charges rolled into my account before I realized someone out there on the internet using my name and account number. It totals to about $320, not a huge hit in the grand scheme, although the amount doesn’t make any particular difference to me. Whether a dollar or ten thousand, it’s the simple fact that I put in the time that cash represents.

Credit card theft is nothing new. It’s been around since American Express pressed their first card, I’m sure. I talked to the bank at length this morning, filed the appropriate fraud report, and was told that they’ll get back to me once they’ve had a chance to review the situation. My assumption is that eventually the charges will be reversed and I’ll be made financially whole. It’s apparently such a common occurrence now that thy told me not to even bother filing a police report. That the bank just shrugs this sort of thing off fills me with a whole different flavor of rage.

The insult added to injury this time is that I’ve already received two of the items the thieves ordered. I’ve got shipping notifications on two of the others. So at least for the next couple of days, I’ll come home to periodic reminders on my doorstep that people are as awful as I think they are.

What I learned this week…

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I can cover some basic home maintenance tasks with a degree of competence. Others – like schlepping up the ladder to clean the gutters – I’m more than happy to pawn off on the professionals. The net result is usually something done faster and with less chance of breaking other things in the process than I would be able to manage myself.

Other times, though, instinct tells me I can do a thing – often because I’ve done that thing previously. Sunday, instinct told me that it might just be better to buy a old fashioned standard toilet at Lowe’s and replace the whole 20-year old contraption instead of fiddling with repairs. Especially because the repairs were going to take proprietary parts and be a pain in the ass to complete myself. A straight up replacement would have been almost plug and play and taken no more than 45 minutes.

I ignored my instincts last weekend, ended up calling in a professional for help, and still finished off by buying and installing a brand new toilet. At least this one has reasonably accessible bits and pieces that I can (probably) deal with when the inevitable time comes.

What I learned this week – or what I re-learned for the 247th time – is that when it comes to home repairs, I should always check my first instinct and then go directly where it points. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred that’s where I’m going to end up anyway.

Unmoved by the email…

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It’s “Giving Tuesday.” What I’d usually be doing right now is sitting down and making donations to the four or five organizations I wanted to throw my support behind this year – Usually it’s some combination of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, International Fund for Animal Welfare, the SPCA in Maryland and Delaware, the Cecil County Animal Services office, and BARCS in Baltimore.

What I am doing right now instead of that is sitting here looking at 45 emails asking for money from every organization I’ve ever donated to and several that I haven’t. A number of the emails are from the same couple of groups.

Look, I was planning to give to some of these guys today anyway, but right now I’m throughly agitated by the amount of pointless spam they’ve launched at me. Some might say that’s a petty reason for withholding donations. That’s fine. Call me petty. I don’t need to see an email from some of them every 60-75 minutes to know they’re doing good work.

So instead of this media blitz opening my wallet, all they’ve managed to do is make sure mine stays shut today. Maybe I’ll swing back to them in a few days. Maybe I won’t. That’s going to depend entirely on how many more emails they dump into my box over the next week or so. The couple who spam me least are fairly likely to win the day.

For the love of all things good and right please help these folks with better marketing ideas than “hey, let’s send out a shit ton of email?”

What I learned this week…

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It turns out that squirrels aren’t the only scavengers in the yard who will devour every scrap of bird seed they can find. A few nights ago, I watched Jorah sidle up to one of the pylons holding a feeder and then nudge it repeatedly until some seed fell out so he can eat it. I’ve apparently now got to devise an anti-dog device that might also help with squirrels. I knew these hooligans who live with me would race to eat dropped seed, but I had no idea one of them would figure out a way to turn the whole back yard into an on-demand treat dispenser.

Spelling counts…

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I’m a bad speller. I have always been a bad speller. My mother would be happy to regale you with stories from elementary school to illustrate that my spelling was, is, and forever after will always be just miserable. I love words, it’s just that I’m not always so good with putting their bits into exactly the right order. I like to imagine it’s an issue of my brain working faster than my fingers, but that sounds like a pretty dull excuse.

The magic of word processing should, in theory, have helped me with this little spelling issue of mine. It surely couldn’t have exacerbated the problem. Of course, it can and often does.

Take last night for instance, when I thought I was posting the last and final revision here on the blog. What ended up there instead was the un-spellchecked version that is run through with errors that even I should have been able to see unaided by 21st century computing. I didn’t see them though, so there they were, hanging there posted for 24 hours for the world to see… at least they were hanging there until I noticed a glaring error and looked a bit closer.

It’s fixed now. At least I’m pretty sure it’s fixed. Spellcheck is telling me that everything is fine. That should probably make me deeply suspicious, though.

What I learned this week…

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After getting my first job out of college I moved into a tiny apartment with a rattling old window air conditioner that I would only turn on at night (because electricity is hella expensive) to change the room from furnace to obnoxiously hot. I could sleep fitfully under those conditions… and some sleep was better than the none that I’d have had otherwise.

It was sweating through those late summer nights at the southern tip of southern Maryland that I vowed, with God as my witness, that when I’d “made it,” I would set the temperature in my home for comfort rather than economy.

For me, the ideal indoor temperature in both summer and winter hovers right around 67-68 degrees. When I’m home, that’s where I set it and let the furnace or a/c do it’s thing.

Here I am now, almost twenty years later, having officially “made it” by my 22-year old self’s definition. Living the fully controlled indoor air temperature dream…

So, the whole point of this post: What I learned this week is that I’ll tolerate the house being 1-2 degrees colder than the optimal 68 degrees if I’m wearing wool socks. I feel like that’s something I probably should have known years ago. Better late than never, or something.

The docs…

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After sliding hard on a patch of wet grass, I’ve finally had to admit it was probably time to retire a venerable pair of Doc Martens that have been my every day boot of choice for a long, long time. I don’t actually remember when i got this pair of boots. Seven to ten years ago feels like a reasonable estimate. They’re super broken in (some might say broken down) and comfortable, but coming into the frozen season walking around on slick soles is just one of those things that wouldn’t have ended well.

I’m not a shoe shopper. Open my closet and you’ll find a couple of pair of 3-hole Doc shoes and a couple of pair of 8-hole Doc boots in various colors and states of disrepair. Aside from one pair of sneakers for yard work and another for everything else, you won’t find much else on my shoe rack. It’s one of the handful of products that has ever inspired in me a sense of brand loyalty… and stretching back to the early 90s, it’s definitely the longest running.

So, thanks to a wet patch of grass, I’ve ordered myself a nice new pair – and resisted the temptation, once again, of ordering up the Made in England Oxblood Quilons. Even my loyalty has its limits and I couldn’t justify the extra hundred bucks for a boot I know I intend to subject to whatever snow, salt, and ice that winter in the Mid-Atlantic can throw at it… now if they bothered to offer up a boot from Cobbs Lane in a nice distressed leather that I didn’t feel awful about beating to hell and back, I’d be happy to throw more money at fine English craftsmanship.

In a week or so I’ll be working on a new set of break-in blisters. If bleeding for your brand doesn’t show dedication, I have no idea what would. Sure, I suppose there are alternatives, but showing up at the office without my Docs would be akin to wandering around without my coffee cup. I have a brand of my own to look to in these cases.

Interrupting your regularly scheduled post for breaking news…

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On Thursdays this space is almost exclusively reserved for What Annoys Jeff this Week. It’s been that way for years. This Thursday, though, I’m making an exception to policy. It’s not that the number of things that annoys me has been any less than usual this week. They’ve simply been overwhelmed by the deep and profound sense of relief I’m feeling at getting confirmation from my realtor this afternoon that I’m no longer a condo owner.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d feel when it was all finished. For all my snark and sarcasm, I’m a surprisingly sentimental guy when it comes down to it. I thought maybe there’d be some wistful regret at firmly closing off that last tangible connection to the version of me who existed back when the millennium was new. There’s none of that, though. The feeling really is just one of unbridled relief. It’s not what I expected, but it’s welcome.

I wish I could tell you there were exciting plans for the shekels that found their way into my pocket this afternoon. Paying off the Jeep and a few other bills, putting something back for a rainy day, and investing a bit for my long term financial health don’t make for particularly interesting reading. Maybe I should tell you I’m heading to Vegas for a four-day binge on craps, booze, hookers, and blow. If nothing else it would be suitably fine grist for the rumor mill.

Alas, whatever’s left over is all earmarked as the first tranche of funding for a long delayed bathroom renovation. It will be nice to start actually planning that one instead of continuing to just add items to the list of things I hate about the current master bath.

I promise by this time next week we’ll be back with all the annoyance that’s fit to print… and probably some that should have never been set out on paper. For now I’m just going to bask in the glow of having one giant item knocked completely off my list of things to do.