Category Archives: Life

Year three…

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This rental house on the Elk Neck peninsula was supposed to be an expedient. It was available immediately and met my criteria of having a fence and room for the dogs. With a kitchen and bathroom that I can only generously describe as “dated” and with what I still think of as an oddball three-level layout, it was really the only option I looked at because it had the supreme virtue of being available. That’s a bit of a concern when you’ve driven halfway across the continent and every stick of your belongings are following along less than 24 hours behind you.

I never intended this place to be a long term commitment. The plan was to do a year and be out to something bigger, better, and more importantly, something my own. Of course the housing market continued to tank, the notion of taking on a 3rd mortgage got even more farfetched, and inertia set in. Let’s just say I couldn’t (and still can’t) muster much interest in packing everything up and just moving from Rental A to Rental B. If I’m going to jam everything back into boxes, it’s going to be to go somewhere with a little more permanence… and between pay freezes and impending furloughs that’s not happening in the immediate future.

Once I managed to get the asshat property manager out of the way and started dealing directly with the owners, at least the “retail” side of being a renter again got easier. That counts for more than you’d think… which is why I just renewed the lease out through June 2014. It’s not optimal and certainly not where I expected I’d be three years on. I’ve come to think of it as the blood sacrifice I’ve had to pay for getting my feet back on the good earth of my native state. At least that’s the story I tell myself to keep it from being too aggravating.

The trouble with being a vegetable…

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After the better part of 12 hours of not doing much more than was absolutely necessary to sustain life, the only thing I can really say is that being a vegetable isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be… mostly because it’s 4PM, there’s no laundry done, dinner isn’t started, the floors haven’t been swept, and the whole house has a vague tinge of “disaster area.” We’re going to continue to ignore the odds and ends outside that still need tended for the time being. As it turns out, I’m apparently not a vegetable kind of guy. I’m not a run out and sign up for a triathalon guy either, but sitting around doing nothing clearly isn’t my speed. Apparently I just need a handy day-long reminder of that from time to time.

So, the rest of the weekend is going to be about triage… prioritizing those things that actually need to get done and doing them, while putting off whatever random tasks and odd jobs fall somewhere into the nice to do category. As you can see, blogging was clearly job one on the “must do” list for today. Once that’s settled, it’s on to the “start dinner” task – also highly rated in the must do category. Once that’s settled, the priority of the remaining items falls off sharply. If I had to take a wild guess, the rest of the day will involve some combination of reading and writing. Come to think of it, this day would have been greatly improved if I’d have lead off with those and eased into some of the other stuff. Now I know. And that’s half the battle or so I’ve been told.

On the desire to be a vegetable…

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No, I don’t have some oddball dream of becoming a radish and I don’t want to suffer a catastrophic brain injury that leaves me lying in a hospital bed drooling on myself and peeing through a tube, but I the idea of spending the weekend being a vegetable has a certain appeal at the moment. It’s been one of those weeks without much of what felt like down time. Those weeks seem to be happening more and more often lately. Not a complaint, a statement of fact. My natural response, of course, is to want to spend the weekend knocking around the house doing my best to avoid the world and other people as much as possible.

I don’t know how it is for other people, but my style of introversion makes dealing with people, especially large groups of them, a seriously exhausting experience. I do my best to be civil because that’s what polite society expects, but during every interaction I’m suppressing my natural avoidance instinct. When a week has been nothing but external inputs, by Friday it has a tendency to feel like I’m just barely holding it all together. Under the circumstances retreat into a good book, a handful of movies, and a quiet house is the best elixir. It’s not running away to a private island, but it’s what I can manage on short notice and more importantly, it’ll be enough to make sure I get through the next week without bitch slapping some poor unsuspecting extrovert who tries striking up a conversation.

And yes, as always, I recognize the bizarre counter-intuitivity of the introvert that keeps two Facebook pages, a blog, and semi-active Twitter feed. You see, the difference is at any point when I decide I don’t want to deal with that stuff, I can just minimize the page and it goes away. People, by comparison, are notoriously butthurt when you try doing that to them in the analog world.

The nightmare scenario…

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Here in ‘Murica, we have a tendency to think in terms of big disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemic flu, and briefcase nukes. Those are the kind of events that get big attention and the corresponding big dollars poured into planning what to do when one of those things happens. For years, the nightmare scenario has been a hurricane slamming into the Big Easy (been there, done that), a mid-west earthquake that cripples transportation across swath of the country from Chicago to Memphis, or a non-descript dirty bomb left at Union Station our outside the Smithsonian. Those are still the official nightmare scenarios, but they’re not my personal nightmare.

Compared to radiological bombs and the weather, my personal nightmare is decidedly low tech. It’s ten suicide bombers in ten separate cities walking into ten coffee shops at 8:30 in the morning of a random Tuesday and blowing themselves to hell. It’s the kind of improvised devices we saw in Boston – easy enough that just about anyone can manufacture one with stuff they already have around the house. It’s not the kind of terror that’s going to bring down entire buildings, but let them start going off in shopping malls and restaurants across downtown America, and watch how fast the public clamors for something, anything that ratchets down the body count. How long would it be before we nationally agree to be searched at any time for any reason or to having our cars inspected before being allowed into a parking garage or to give up any number of our essential freedoms?

Suicide bombs and improvised explosives have become a way of life in places like Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adopting a bunker mentality when you spend every day under threat is a perfectly natural response to those outside forces acting on you, but I don’t want that for America. I don’t want to live in a garrison town where I’ve traded a lot of personal freedom for a nominal amount of safety. That’s my real nightmare scenario and one that we can only avoid through eternal vigilance. That’s the price we’re going to have to pay – the price we’ve always paid – for liberty.

Fooling myself…

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After a day of working in the yard, doing laundry, running errands, and making a passing effort at starting dinner, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we’ve entered that time of year where some activities are going to have to get thrown over the side. I’ve talked before about some of the unique challenges of being a one man show, but the simple fact is if there isn’t enough time to get to everything, the stuff I don’t particularly like doing is going to be put off indefinitely – I’m looking at you here vacuuming, mopping, and dusting. Frankly, I never much liked you anyway and since you’re in head-to-head competition with working in the yard, you never really stood a chance.

It’s one of those times I wish I wasn’t quite so OCD about things being “just so,” but I’ve pretty much given up on ever letting things slide with being good enough. So what’s really going to happen for the next five months is a cycle of ignoring the interior dust and dirt until I get twitchy, launching an all-day cleaning binge about once a month, and repeating as necessary until the grass stops growing in the fall. Sure, I could hire it out… but then I have to deal with the awkwardness of having strange people wandering around in the house. I’m sure you can guess how anxious I am for that to happen. So in the spirit of spring, here I sit trying my best to ignore every rug that needs vacuumed, every stray bit of dust and dog hair, and don’t even get me started on the wood floors that need mopped.

OK, so I could have probably spot cleaned the kitchen in the time it took me to tap this out, but let’s face it, writing isn’t one of those things that I’m very likely to give up in favor of cleaning now is it?

Over the horizon…

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Some days you just have nothing to show for getting out of bed. As far as I can tell, this is one of those days. For the record, that’s not a complaint. It’s a simple acknowledgment of fact. It’s one of those days where the best thing you can say is that you’ve managed to do no harm – neither advancing the cause or making it substantively worse in any way. It’s a draw… and if you’re a smart bureaucrat, you’ve survived long enough to know that a draw is effectively a win, because the scales are almost always weighted in the direction of making things worse off than they were before you touched something.

I should really put a more positive spin on the day. To paraphrase what a wise man told me this morning, “Look on the bright side, it’s Tuesday. That means were as far away from next Monday as it’s possible to get.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic. After all, it’s Tuesday night now. If you strain your eyes hard enough you can start to see the first signs of the weekend coming on, even though it’s still out there somewhere over the horizon. That’s as cup-half-full as I’m likely to get, so make of it what you will.

And people say I never post anything positive. This’ll show ‘em.

Consider yourself pestered…

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So the experts on how to do thing online seem to all be telling me that I should be pestering you at least once a day about buying a copy of the book. Cajoling your friends into giving you $2 at every opportunity strikes me as a little unseemly, though. I’ll try to limit the direct self promotion, at least here in the blog, to no more than once a week. With that being said, please consider yourself pestered about the high quality book that I have available for sale from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. With that out of the way, we can get on to other topics and all feel better about ourselves.

With that, we’ve reached the point in the weekend where I find I have nothing really to discuss. Saturday is, as it often is with me, a function of routine. Trash went to the dump, I filled up the gas tank, I wanted to burn Walmart to the ground, and I looked around outside and realized that I’m going to have to start cutting grass sooner rather than later. Dull by most standards, I’m sure. I’ll get some laundry done, hopefully find enough muse to write a blog post and a few hundred words on another project. Again, nothing earth shaking. It’s been my experience that earth shaking isn’t everything is made up to be. Give me quiet, calm, and predictable any day of the week.

Blue…

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Despite the head full of crud that’s had me spend the better part of the last two days relegated to the recliner with a box of tissues and more liquid than any one person should drink, I feel like I need to rally this morning long Blue Crabsenough to celebrate that most magical time of year – April 1st. Sure, it’s April Fools day and I’m told it’s baseball’s opening day this year, but it’s also marks a far more important milestone: The opening of blue crab season in Maryland.

Sure, you can get blue crabs from other parts of the country and they’re fine if you need an Old Bay fix in the dead of winter, but for a Marylander, there’s something special about the crabs landed here in our own bay, by our own watermen. For my money, there’s no better food in all the world than Maryland crabs. It’s one of those seemingly small features of home that I only really learned to appreciate after spending five years in the landlocked middle of the country where “crab picking” ment dealing flash frozen snow or king crab legs.

For me, the Maryland crab is the quintessential taste of long summer afternoons. A bushel of crabs, an iced case of Natty Boh, what could possibly be better? Happy crab season, everyone.

Concession…

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I made my first concession to the sequestration this morning – I now have a “lunch pail.” I know that doesn’t sound like much of a big deal, but back in the early days of the universe when I was a first year teacher brown bagging lunch every day, I made up my mind that I would officially designate life successful when I could eat lunch somewhere different every day and retire the brown bags. It sounds like a good idea, until you really look at the pesky fact that subs and salads from Wawa are running you a couple of hundred bucks a month. Since the sequester seems like it’s going to hang around for a while, it seems like the better part of valor is to try cutting back the small pleasures to save the bigger ones. Sadly, Wawa’s tasty, tasty sandwiches are probably just the first of many victims of my ruthless sequestration-induced budgetary realignment. No worries about morale when you’ve got a couple of slightly smushed PB&J’s and a warm Diet Coke. War is apparently a bad business to be in when we seem determined to pretend that peace is breaking out all over.

The post in which the author says “I told you so”…

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Fellow Citizens,

If you’re reading this, it’s because the epic snowstorm of doom somehow managed not to result mass extinction or cause catastrophic damage to the state’s electric grid. Well done, and congratulations for riding out the storm unscathed.

In the future, I hope you’ll remember that just because a winter storm is given a fancy-pants name by The Weather Channel, that doesn’t mean it’s going to leave untold mayhem and chaos in its wake. In general, it means that they’re doing their level best to build hype and improve their advertising take. I hope you’ll join me in saying “Well played, weather forecasters. Well played indeed.”

In conclusion, let’s try not to let over-exaggerated reports of impending doom effect our behavior too much in the future. If today has taught us nothing else, it’s that we can all somehow manage to survive a mediocre rain/snow storm without turning to cannibalism, riots, or looting. Good work and carry on.

Warm regards,

Jeff

P.S. I told you so.