Category Archives: Life

Matchbox…

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I grew up in a generation that still played with toys rather than electronics. For a large part of my childhood, my toys of choice were cars. Matchbox, Hotwheels, Micro Machines, you name a brand of toy car in the early to mid-1980s and I probably had it. Come to think of it, I probably still have most of them packed away somewhere. While matchbox cars made great toys, what they don’t make is great transportation for a full grown human man.

How do I know this to be a universal truism? Well, for the last two mornings, I’ve jammed my 6’2”, 300# frame into a Hyundai Elantra. Since I’m use to driving the automotive equivalent of an aircraft carrier, I feels a little disingenuous to proclaim my powder blue rental the worst car in all of human history. I’m sure for those who are more slight of build and a foot shorter they’re probably just fine. Sadly, all I see is what it’s lacking; minor things like power, and handling, and storage, and a driver’s seat that doesn’t feel like sheet steel. It does, however, have satellite radio, came iPhone ready, and doesn’t swallow a quarter tank of gasoline in a day’s commute, so I’ll give credit where it’s due.

But even with those good points, it’s basically a matchbox car… and I can’t wait to get out of it. Or maybe I just can’t wait to get my Tundra back in the driveway where it belongs. I can already feel the neighborhood judging me because of the adult go-cart sitting out front and I’d like to get this dark chapter behind me as quickly as possible.

Long range planning…

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When it snowed last week, I didn’t put a high priority level of effort into shoveling the driveway. After all, I have a large, powerful 4-wheel drive truck and given the relatively southern location and moderating influence of the nearby water, snow doesn’t tend to stick around very long here at the rental homestead. I shoveled out a parking pad and a path to the mailbox, figuring that that would be sufficient for a couple of days until the melt set in. It seemed like a reasonable decision at at the time.

What that decision failed to take into account was the air temperature wasn’t going to climb above the low 20s for days on end. I also didn’t count on getting another inch or two of snow sometime today. Still, with the truck, a snow covered driveway with a few packed down icy spots isn’t exactly a big deal. It wasn’t until last night that I remembered that I was going to drop off the truck at a local body shop on Monday so they could do the repairs from last week’s unpleasantness. That means I’ll be swapping out my 4×4 for a rental that will probably have more in common with a matchbox car than it does with an actual motor vehicle. That friends, is a failure of long range planning and a lesson in unintended consequences.

Now that the driveway is too packed down to shovel effectively, I’m jumping to Plan B: adding a couple of bags of road salt to my market list and hoping I can melt two ruts down to blacktop between now and Monday. Woops.

Too soon?

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After driving to the office a few weeks ago only to find that they had closed for the day without giving much of any advanced notice, I’ve opted to go ahead and ignore official guidance (whenever it comes at all) and establish my own policy for when to come and go in craptastic weather. This morning, for instance, I made a showing at the office, but pulled the plug at 1000. I cleared the parking lot and the security gate in my usual 10 minutes. Twenty minutes later, official word came down that liberal leave was in effect. Maybe twenty minutes after that, they announced that post was closing for the day. 20,000 people immediately got in their cars and jammed the gate for the next hour. By the time people who waited for “the word” got their gear and headed out, I was already home sitting in my fuzzy slippers. It’ll end up costing me 2 hours of annual leave since they didn’t formally close until noon, but I’ll trade 2 hours of leave for not spending an hour or more sitting in traffic at the gate any time.

The moral of the story is that when it comes to my health, welfare, safety, and convenience, I’m taking the decisions out of the hands of “something corporate” and making them myself from here on out. Unless or until the decision-making improves, I’ll cheerfully trade my earned leave for some semblance of sanity in how things work. I may not always make the “right” decision, but by god I’ll always make one in a timely manner. Maybe I’m just too damned old and cynical to sit around waiting for permission when forgiveness is almost always available.

So, is it too soon to start agitating for a closure tomorrow? Or authorized liberal leave? That would work too.

Winter is coming…

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Sure, technically winter has been here for a while now, but every time snow threatens to come to the mid-Atlantic, it’s like the first time. That’s fun and exciting for about the first 30 seconds. After that it just becomes an enormous pain in the ass.

The predicted weather tomorrow shouldn’t be a factor here at the top of the bay until afternoon, which is both good and bad. It’s good in that I’m not going to stay up way too late tonight in the off chance that tomorrow is a delayed opening. It’s bad in that it’s the first time this season snow may fall while everyone is already at the office and chomping at the bit to get home.

I have what you could call an academic curiosity about what the powers that be at the office will do with mid-day snow. Since we’ve already shown that early morning snow is problematic for the decision-making process, I suppose my only hope is that they’ll be more caffeinated when the time comes to start figuring out what to do with 10,000 odd people all in a hurry to cram themselves through fewer exits than most people have fingers on one hand. Let’s just say that I’m not particularly full of faith. I think the best case scenario tomorrow will be bolting the moment someone says “liberal leave” in the hope of getting clear ahead of the first wave of an exodus.

Forecast for tomorrow: In extremam difficultatem.

Magnetic…

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From the time I got my license in June 1994 until October 2011, the only accidental damage I ever had to a vehicle was the occasional cracked windshield. Admittedly, the Jeep’s flat glass seemed to have an unnatural attraction to rocks kicked up at highway speed, but still that was just the cost of doing business. Since October 2011, the tide has turned. I can’t unnamedseem to go six months without the telltale screech of rending sheet metal. A parking meter jumped out and tagged my left turn signal, a crease appeared in my rear bumper shortly thereafter for reason or reasons unknown, an old man in an F-150 faked me out with his turn signal and cost me a new front end, and today I’ve got a softball sized dent on the left bedside from an unfortunate run in with the grill and hood of a Chevy.

Big Red is a trooper, though. Dents, dings, a new front end and she just keeps doing her thing. Now we’re off tomorrow morning to the body shop for the latest repair estimate. Given the relatively recent completion of my new front end, I’m trying to keep this one off the books at the insurance company. Unfortunately I can already hear my credit card screaming in protest. 2013 was basically punctuated by one headache after another. It’s becoming more obvious by the day that 2014 isn’t going to offer much in the way of relief, but just more of the same.

I love my Tundra, but she’s a rolling accident magnet… and if she wasn’t so damned close to being paid off, I’d think hard about trading her in on something that might not have so much bad mojo attached.

The guy with the blog…

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While I was home for Christmas, I managed to take care of a few odds and ends that needed doing. One of the little jobs I finished up involved needing to get a couple of documents notarized. I only mention what I was doing because it’s what triggered my best “aww shucks” moment as a blogger… and that would be getting recognized as “that guy with the blog” by someone I had never met.

Yep. Guilty as charged. For better or worse, I’m the guy with the blog. Of course in addition to being the guy with the blog I’m also a shameless whore, so I tried selling the nice notary public a copy of What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2013 in Review.

I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty awesome to be noticed. Now if I can just interest TMZ in some pictures, I think this whole writing thing is set to take off.

Frozen…

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Having spent my formative years in Maryland’s snow belt, there’s not much in the way of winter precipitation that really bothers me. Of course it helps having a large 4×4 vehicle, too, but mostly it boils down to being confident in the knowledge, skills, and abilities earned while driving hither, skither, and yon through everything form a dusting to a couple of feet of the white stuff. I don’t go looking to drive around in it (like I did when I was young and more risk tolerant), but I don’t really shy away from it if there’s something I need to go out and do, either.

All of that logic goes out the window, however, when it comes to freezing rain. Even the mighty Tundra isn’t going to get traction when that starts building up on every flat surface. Freezing rain is that thing that shows up unseen until you stride onto the deck first thing in the morning ready to grab the world by the throat and then suddenly find yourself laying flat on your back wondering how they hell you got there. Sigh. If anyone needs me, I’ll be on the floor trying to get my back to unkink.

A distinct lack of motivation…

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Usually I spring from bed in the early hours of the morning and hit the ground moving at the quickstep if not actually running. There’s always a shit ton to do and only two days to cram it into. Today, though, what we have here in the north eastern corner of the north eastern part of Maryland is a distinct lack of motivation. Sure, there’s still a shit ton to do, but I can’t quite bring myself to actually want to do any of them. I have no idea what’s going on with that, so I’m choosing to ignore it. And by ignore it, I clearly mean get on my blog and complain about it to anyone who happens to be listening.

Yeah, I’m going to drag myself from my favored writing position in the kitchen and get on with the day, but just know that I’m doing it under duress. Hopefully somewhere between here and the couple of things I absolutely have to get to this morning whether I want to or not, some motivation will shake itself loose. Otherwise this is going to look a lot like a lost weekend.

The virtue of 6AM…

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One of the parts of being an adult that no one thought enough of to warn me about is that after a decade and a half of getting up for work in the dark hours of the morning, your body might accidentally attune itself to that time. Then you end up waking up at what some might consider “early” regardless of how late you went to sleep. Since I find it aggravating beyond measure to just lay in bed awake, the only thing to do is get up and get on with the day at hand.

I’m not saying there isn’t some virtue in 6AM… especially in 6AM on New Years Day. That virtue? For 90-120 minutes the world is absolutely quiet. Inside. Outside. For a few minutes, it’s like all the best parts of I am Legend. Inevitably, though, the rest of the world wakes up – hungover, but alive, to begin their day.

It’s just after 8AM as I’m finishing up this post. Already I can hear the traffic picking up outside and know that my revels are ended. Even so, it was a good couple of hours. I can only hope that it’s a harbinger of the year to come. And now that the world’s waking up, let’s go take 2014 for all she’s worth.

Two rooms…

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Having been back for almost a day, I have exactly two clean-ish rooms to show for it. I say clean-ish because with Maggie and Winston around nothing is really ever what some might call actually clean. At best, you can say they majority of the hair, dust, and random crud has been removed… but that’s not really the point of this post.

The point? It’s simply that after less than a week away from the office I’ve been reduced to bitching and complaining about household dust and dirt. I have no idea what’s going on in the world – and what’s more, for the most part I really don’t care. I wouldn’t have known it was even Sunday today if my phone hadn’t made a point of telling me that when I woke up this morning. Maybe I’m too much the cynic, but I think there might be a life lesson in there somewhere.

I’m sure some people have a hard time adjusting to the unstructured life of not punching a clock twice a day. As I’ve long suspected, that’s not going to be a problem I’ll suffer when the time comes. For some reason a clean kitchen fills me with a greater sense of accomplishment than all the powerpoint briefings I’ve ever built. That’s one of those fun facts I’ll file away in the “good to know” file.