Print…

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As I sat down to write this tonight, it occurs to me that I wrote on a very similar topic more than five years ago. The situation was somewhat different, but it all hinged on the increasingly unbelievable proposition that in the age of electronic communication we’re still printing things out for people to read “later.”

With people running hither and yon armed with a laptop, a tablet, and a Blackberry, there really isn’t any good reason why anyone should need to print out an email and stick it in a file so someone can read it. I’m sure there are reasons it happens, I simply contend that none of them are particularly good reasons.

There are any number of ways the printed word on a high quality piece of paper can be a real joy. Going for the same effect with a run of the mill email feels a bit like going nuclear to solve your backyard bug problem. It’s the year 2016, after all. The second decade of the 21st century.

I simply can’t fathom how “print out that email” is still a thing.

Cheese…

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I’ve got a whole, beautifully tempting lasagna sitting on top of the stove as I write this. It’s warm, oozing with just the right proportion of cheese to sauce to noodle. It’s also wholly inedible. The cheese is off. It wasn’t my usual brand of ricotta and since there wasn’t an appearance or smell issue from the container, I threw caution to the wind. One bite, though, was enough to determine that all was not well. What was fine in the fridge had gone well and truly off by the time it endured the cooking process.

There’s probably an analogy to Sunday in there somewhere – a day that starts with such great promise, but that inevitably ends up as ashes in your mouth when the day draws to a close.

It’s not the first meal I’ve bungled and it’s not likely to be the last. Still, I’m already disappointed at the leftovers that will never be… in much the same way that we can’t hold over Sunday for one more spin on the axis. Like my abortive lasagna, the only thing I can know for sure about Monday is that it will inevitably leave a bad taste in my mouth.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Kars for Kids. I hear their two octaves too high jingle every morning at 5:45 AM. I know this because almost without fail it comes on the satellite radio station I’m listening to almost precisely when I’m starting to shave. Mercifully the throat it makes me want to slit is not my own. I have no idea what organization Kars fronts for nor do I know what portion of funds raised go to support their good cause of the day. It doesn’t really matter because with their deeply agitating icepick-in-the-ear method of early morning advertising if they were providing free food for life to every kid in America.

2. Getting wet. Spending two hours milling around a parking lot is bad enough by itself. Add a heavy does or rain and you to spend the rest of the day squishing around in sodden shoes. Here’s a pro tip for you – having a pair of dry socks is important, but dry socks don’t mean a damn think when you’re sticking them back into waterlogged boots. Lesson most definitely learned.

3. Thursday. Why on earth isn’t Thursday the day before the weekend starts. Instead, it’s mostly just Monday #4 and I hate it for that.

See and say…

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Over the last couple of days there’s been a rash of motorcycle and 4-wheeler thefts in the county. Asshat or asshats unknown have broken into a number of local sheds and garages to ply their trade. Knowing that it’s been a recent issue is probably the only reason I noticed the “young adult” pushing a dirt bike just off the side of one of my rural commuter route. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but the coffee kicked in and I realized that a teenager pushing a dirt bike around that section of road was, in fact, unusual by definition. In a year of making that drive at about the same time five days a week I’d never seen so much as a telltale trail into the woods where someone might be riding, let alone actually seen someone riding a bike or a quad.

So yeah, I started off the morning by putting in a call to the Sheriff’s office to file an unsolicited report of the location and description of the young white male of average height wearing a dark hoodie pushing what appeared to be a white dirt bike of unknown make. Maybe it was nothing. It was probably nothing. On the other hand, maybe I helped get some little shitbird caught and someone’s property returned.

I did ponder for a few seconds if I wanted to bother given the likelihood that it was some neighborhood kid and that even if it weren’t, but the time some deputy got a chance to drive through the area he’d as likely as not be long gone with the bike. Still, it was that nagging thought that if he’s one of the ones going into garages at night and stealing shit, I really want someone to catch up with him.

I got the chance to put “see something, say something” into practice today. It wasn’t exactly foiling the next big terror plot or anything, but I knew it felt just unusual enough that I’d be annoyed with myself all day long if I didn’t take the effort to make a simple phone call. At worst I inconvenienced a deputy and some kid had to answer a few questions. At best, someone in blue got another lead on tracking these creeps down.

I’m not at all sure why I’m bothering to write any of this down, let alone hit the publish button… but the up side is it saves you from reading another in a long line of gripes and complaints about the office. Maybe we should all be thankful that my path crossed a young man pushing a motorcycle this morning.

Following the wrong group…

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SPOILER ALERT… Don’t say you weren’t warned.

After watching last night’s season ender of The Walking Dead, I’m left with the feeling that we’ve been watching the wrong group of survivors all along. Instead of watching Rick and his ever-shrinking band of lost souls we should have been watching Negan while he went about the hard work of building what passes for a civilization in the post-apocalypse world.

Where the Alexandrians scrape by in hunter-gatherer mode like our pre-historic ancestors, The Saviors are operating under what appears to be a semi-feudal arrangement – with Negan standing in as king and surrounding himself with subordinate warlords and their attendant men-at-arms. Rick and company spent much of the last half of this season pulling apart chasing their own personal agendas. Defending hearth and home almost felt secondary. When faced with The Savior’s numerical and tactical superiority, the Grimes Gang folded without doing much more than going out for a nice drive in the country.

I wish we had been out in the weeds with Negan for the last six seasons. His is probably the more interesting story… and his is the armed camp I’d rather be in when the shit hits the fan.

The best weekends…

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You can say what you will about raucous benders, trips through Amish Country, and adventures on the high seas, but as for me, the best weekends tend to be the ones where I don’t have much to say on Sunday night. It means they went more or less according to plan, weren’t jam packed with the yammering of strangers, and essentially allowed me to deal with the least amount of stupid possible. Those weekends don’t tend to make for great blogging, but they do tend to leave me feeling rested. That’s saying something especially coming hard on the heels of a dog that insisted on barking through every roll of thunder and gust of wind all the previous night.

Like all good things this too must end. Daylight tomorrow will break on a computer that may or may not be networked, a gaggle of senior personnel who have decided over the weekend that months of planning need to be changed overnight, remembering we’re in the midst of an election with no good choices, and the general asshattery that comes along with your average Monday. That makes these good weekends, the best of them, among the most rare of gems. And you can’t beat that with a stick.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Selling online. There are a few pieces of lawn equipment and other odds and ends I don’t have use of anymore. For ease of listing and in hopes of not dealing with too many crackpots, I opted to post them on the local neighborhood website instead of Craigslist. In retrospect I would have been far better off just loading everything in the truck and hauling it over to the dump. I know I’ve spent at least $150 worth of time answering questions about a $25 item. Lesson learned. From here on out I’ll just throw stuff away. It’s not worth the aggravation for so little return on investment.

2. Walking and talking. If you’re on your phone and wander into the street without paying the least bit of attention I should be within my rights to hit you with the truck. I’m not talking about flattening anyone, but it feels like giving these dipshits a glancing blow with the side mirror should be accepted if not encouraged.

3. Connectivity. Having access to email and the Internet are pretty much my only real job enablers. I’m sure I could do at least some of the work without those tools, but everything would take days longer than it should. Some of it I can get done by phone but the “must have a signature” stuff not so much. If you’re a knowledge worker access to a function network isn’t a convenience or a perk, it’s a necessity. If you the employer can’t provide that then you’d best not look at me cross eyed when I start telling you there are things I can’t do. Like it or not, without connectivity there’s no path between Point A and Point B that doesn’t involve hand written letters and a book of stamps.

Dreams and wishes…

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With all respect to Dr. Freud who argued that dreams are and exercise in wish fulfillment, I’m afraid I have to go out on a limb and beg to differ. I woke up in a cold sweat this morning near enough to 3AM in the aftermath of a dream in which I (for some unknown reason) was sitting on the back porch watching the back yard wash out all the way down to the bottom of the foundation. I can assure the good doctor that I in no way have any wish to do that kind of excavation work. Ever.

Maybe the most entertaining part is that Dream Jeff was completely uninterested by the every growing chasm that was appearing where his dream yard was supposed to be. I can only assume that the entire thing was just a bad reaction to too-late-in-the-evening meatloaf sandwiches and spending too much time obsessing about a dry basement.

I’d like to think the couple of hours I allocate to sleep are supposed to be a restful time. Fortunately last night is largely an exception to that rule. Even so, it’s yet another of the many reminders that sometimes inside my own head is a very strange place to pass the time.

​Pushing paper…

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I’ll admit that pushing paper doesn’t have the same gritty-sounding edge as breaking bad, but that doesn’t make it any less of an exercise in futility. On this particular Monday, I had the good fortune to review and/or revise an After Action Report, a “fragmentary order”, an “operations order”, two separate requests for information, and several requests for echelons higher than me to pass information upwards through the chain of command. The only thing that really unifies all those efforts is that it’s helpful to be good with words and to know just where in the bowels of the organization something might need to go in order to have a prayer of being answered.

It’s an unfortunate skill that I seem to possess, at least in some limited quantity. If that’s the superpower I got, well, let’s just say I got the short end of whatever stick they were handing out that day. Oh, it pays the bills and keeps a roof over your head, sure enough. Still, it’s not exactly what anyone might call a passion project unless they’re into a deeply warped kind of S&M.

So we trudge on at this petty pace from day to day, fueled almost exclusively by over strong coffee and too little sleep. Until we grind down all the world’s forests to cover the globe with reams of paper carefully checked at the margins and printed in 12 point Arial. Even then, on that long coming day when the last report has been printed, the last order cut, and the last briefing printed… somehow there will still be paper left to push. Worse than a nightmare, this is real life.

A year later…

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As most of the rest of the Western world is busy celebrating Easter, I’ve mostly spent this Sunday morning trying to wrap my head around the idea that one year ago almost to the hour I was sitting down and signing my name on 37,361 pieces of paper that allowed me to borrow a horrifying sum of cash and move into a far better house than I imagined possible. I won’t say that the year has been all sunshine and roses – it feels like there’s been some part of the place under construction for most of that time; not to mention an ever-lengthening list of projects yet to come.

Now with that being said, and despite the general pain in the ass of being a homeowner, this place ranks among the better decisions I’ve ever made. Good bones, good neighborhood – and neighbors I can’t even see for three seasons of the year – it’s a hard place not to like. The longer I’m here, the more I change to suit me versus suiting the last guy to live here, the more I like it.

I’m already struggling to imagine that a year ago I was standing in the middle of a totally empty house wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.