Category Archives: Life

The voyage home…

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My regularly scheduled Christmas voyage home has come to an end. I’m sitting at my own keyboard, at my own kitchen table, listening to my own television at a reasonable volume. George is happily munching on a couple of handsfull of fresh greens and the pups are already laid in for a good night’s sleep. For the first time in six days I can shed the feeling of needing to be “on”… and that’s a good for the ISTJ soul.

As always, the retreat back to my own domicile of record is a combination of joy at being able to throw on a pair of shorts and a tee shirt with holes in it and guilt at not spending enough time visiting and being seen. It’s a balancing act at the best of times and the mad dash that is always Christmas doesn’t make it any easier. So, I’ll be doing my best to suppress my natural sensation of guilt about carving off the last few days of the holiday just for me. Whether I’ll be able to tick off the items on the inevitable list I make when I have free time remains to be seen, of course, but getting a few thinks into the “done” column would certainly help assuage the feeling that I should have done more with my time off.

Now if you’ll excuse me, having a giant pile of “stuff” I just brought in from the truck sitting in the middle of the living room floor is about to drive me to distraction, so it all needs put away or there will be no rest tonight.

Planning for the end of the world…

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OK, well I might not have been planning for the actual end of the world, but I certainly spent a slice of the morning signing a lot of paperwork that will kick at my own personal world’s end. After all, nothing says happy holidays like planning out your own demise. Putting a will in order was something I’ve needed to do for a long time, but that doesn’t make the process any more enjoyable. Suffice to say, this Friday’s theme has largely been, “Wow, being an adult sort of sucks.”

I’ve never believed in being able to plan for every potential contingency, but I really do feel a little better having some basic guidelines in place in the event I wander off the sidewalk and get hit by a bus tomorrow. Frankly, before my time comes I’m planning on technology reaching a level where I can just download myself to the network and live on indefinitely as electrons… because really, what does the world need more than my brain in a computer with nothing but time to spew out new blog posts on into the infinite future?

Happy Christmas

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This would probably be a longer Christmas post if the internet connection here at the Jeffrey Tharp Historic Childhood Home, Library, and Giftshop weren’t so problematic this morning. Since it’s come down to needing to post using nothing but thumbs and a 5-inch screen I’ll simply say happy Christmas. Enjoy the day and all that comes with it.

Home again…

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Having made the drive and settled in with 2/3 of my critters leads to the inevitable question – What now? I’m not exactly known for my comfort level with “just being.” There’s always one more thing to do. One more post to make. Laundry to do. Etcetera and so on. You see, as much as this was home for 19 years, it’s still a place other than my own. It’s a feeling somewhere between being 17 again and being a random out of town relative stopping in for a visit. Maybe “unsettled” is the best descriptor even though I’ve done my level best to temporarily reposition all the essentials here with me.

So it’s safe to say we’re now well into the period of sitting around wondering what it is I’m supposed to be doing. With nowhere to be, nothing here to tinker with, and even less on the “needs done now” list, I’ll do my best not to drive myself crazy with a day and a half days marked off with only a vague “to be determined.” I’m glad to be here and it’s always good to be right back where I started from, but it does a marvelous job of making mince out of my routine. And that always makes me just a little extra crazy for the holiday.

Preparations for getting underway…

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You’d think after spending four Christmases fighting my way home across 900 miles, a quick hop from on side of a small mid-Atlantic state to the other could be accomplished with a minimum of fuss. If you thought that, however, you would be exactly wrong. Traveling with Maggie and Winston in tow is a task table_3_supply_classesso complex that it makes even the planning for Normandy look like amateur hour. Beds, food, fuel, clothes, sundries, health and welfare items, medication – if I added barrier material and ammo I could cover down on all the classes of supply getting loaded into the truck in preparation for getting underway.

There’s a fair percentage – maybe 30% – of what’s getting packed that I won’t actually use or need. Still, I like knowing that I have it. You could fill warehouses with things I like having along “just in case.” For me, apparently it’s just in case I need to rebuild my life from the ground up starting only with what I have on hand with me in the truck. Almost disturbingly, that’s only a bit of an exaggeration. I don’t travel as much as I use to, but when I do, I travel heavy. After all, you never know what just in case might pop up requiring you to rebuild civilization using only contents of your luggage.

Already…

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Well, I’m almost two full days into my version of Christmas Vacation and I’ve forgotten that today was Sunday. You know I forgot it was sunday because I wasn’t blogging over coffee in the early hours of the morning. Since there’s really no schedule to keep, I hope you’ll forgive the oversight… and if you don’t, just send me an email, I’ll add you as a contributing writer, and you can drag out of bed before the crack of dawn to try being witty and charming first thing next Sunday morning.

I’m sure there are some incredibly important things going on in the world right now just crying out for me to comment on them, but I have no idea what they might be. Honestly, I’ve mostly tuned out. Sure the TV is still humming along providing background noise, but so far today I’ve studiously avoided tuning in to anything remotely resembling news. Judging from the sounds coming from the living room, the History Channel (or maybe one of the science-y channels) is running a program on geology from the earth’s crust to its core. That’s plenty good for background chatter.

Past that, there’s nothing particularly interesting to report. A quiet day, few interruptions, dank, and rainy. Sort of the misanthrope’s perfect day. I’ll do my best to keep that trend going tomorrow, but with the inevitable pack out, load up, and pre-trip spazzing, having that kind of success two days in a row seems pretty unlikely.

Off to the races…

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Unless something incredibly stupid happens between now and the 31st, I’ve worked my last day for 2013… and that feels incredibly good. Maybe I should modify that statement a bit, though. What I really mean is I’ve finished working for wages this year. I’ll still be doing plenty of work – giving the house a good mid-winter scrub, bringing order to the piles of random junk in the basement, a few days of dashing hither and yon across the state, and finally ending up back where I started from a few days of legitimate R&R and maybe, if I’m lucky, a little bit of writing.

My 12-days of vacation aren’t exactly off to a slow start, having closed on a new mortgage for the Condo de Jeff this afternoon and then promptly dragging Maggie to the vet for half-priced Friday evening vaccinations before even getting to my first official day of vacation. It should get better from here on out, though. If nothing else, the timing will matter less.

Sure, I’ll probably still reflexively wake up before dawn, but I’m going to do my level best to turn off the little voice in my head that’s constantly screaming at me to hurry up, do one more thing, and stop wasting time. That will probably last about three days before I make myself crazy trying to “just relax”… and after that I’ll be off to the races.

The big one…

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$636 million is a seriously big hunk of cheese. I sit out most lottery drawings these days, but I’m just sucker enough to take a swing at this one. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be thrilled to win “just” a few million bucks, I’ve got my targets set on getting the big, “Fuck You” kind of money. If my numbers come up tonight this old boy is just going to disappear quietly in the dead of night like a Mayflower truck full of football equipment. I’ll turn up eventually in some far flung outpost of humanity looking like Panama Jack, but before I do that, I’ll want to spend a significant amount of time getting to know my giant stack of cash.

It’s all a happy fantasy, of course. Statistically, I know there’s probably a better chance of getting hit by an asteroid, struck by lightning, and run over by a bus simultaneously than there is of winning tonight’s “big one.” Still, for a buck? I’m in. If there’s no post tomorrow, at least you’ll know why.

Clarity…

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I’ve got my faults, no one knows that better or is more critical of them than I am myself. One thing I hope that no one can ever say about me, though, is that I lack clarity of vision. More often than not I manage to cut through the clutter and see the world around me for what it is. That construct becomes my version of the truth. It doesn’t have to be your version of the truth any more than your version has to be mine. The world gets a lot less complicated when you give up trying to convince yourself and everyone around you that you’re all right and everyone else is all wrong. Conveniently, right and wrong generally speak for themselves – but they speak to each of us in different ways.

The trouble comes when we try to deal in absolutes. Maybe there is a universal black and a universal white, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the universe is a bit too complex for that. Don’t bother trying to hide from the complexity. It’s what keeps things interesting, so just go ahead and embrace it.

I’ll never claim to have all the answers. I won’t even delude myself into thinking I have the majority of the answers. What I do have as often as not is a reasonable sightline from Point A to Point B so I don’t get caught flatfooted by too many “I don’t know what to do” moments these days. I’m never 100% confident about a decision – any decision – but since I’m not generally stuck on an absolute right and an absolute wrong, things generally turn out somewhere in the OK range.

If I were in the business of dispensing unsolicited advice, I’d tell you that when in doubt, for God’s sake do something. Any action, even the wrong one is probably better than standing around with your thumb up your ass not doing anything at all. At least if you do screw the pooch, you’ll know what not to do in the future. And that was my moment of clarity for the day.

My twelve days of Christmas…

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As of the close of business this afternoon, there are 10 working days standing between me and the a year ending 12-day weekend. Sure, some people are all friends, family, Christmas, Jesus, whatever… but for me, it’s the nearly two weeks of uninterrupted time off that gets my motor running. All the other stuff feels more or less incidental to having such an expanse stretching out before me where I’m the only one dictating how I spend my time. OK, maybe it misses the point of the season, but being the non-conforming traditionalist I am, that doesn’t bother me much.

After the past season of professional discontent in service to the arbitrary and capricious whims of the dysfunctional legislative and executive branches of government, the most joyous and celebratory thing I can think of doing is ignoring the whole shitshow for my twelve days of Christmas.