Time well spent…

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With a few minor exceptions, yesterday’s activities were very close to how I’d describe spending a perfect day.

I started out in the pre-dawn darkness, the dogs happily sniffing and snorting, and running off a bit of overnight energy while I loaded the first cup of coffee onboard. Transition inside to making a simple breakfast – eggs, toast and jelly, more coffee, and scarfing it away while watching some obscure documentary and occasionally correcting the presenter on the finer points of early 1900s political life in America.

Then there was reading… and making lunch… and more reading… and then making dinner… and more reading to cap off the day.

My perch changed, depending on what room was getting “the good light” at any given time. It was too humid a day to risk the books being outdoors, so that’s maybe the one real downside of the day.

The whole effort was interspaced with ear scratches, and belly rubs, being turned into an occasional climbing post for the resident cat, or getting momentarily distracted by some of the background noise on the television and the occasional trip outside to supervise the dogs.

There were coffee drinks and whiskey drinks when I was thirsty and home cooked meals when I was hungry. There was, other than the ones I placed on myself, absolutely no demands on my time at all. For one full day, I did exactly what I wanted to do without outside interference – or thinking about what I needed to do on the next day.

It was, in a word, idyllic. It was time well spent. It was exactly how I’d spend my days if the world didn’t conspire to fill it with other, far more monotonous and far less interesting, activities.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Don’t judge a book by its cover. That’s bullshit advice when it comes to buying books (and probably when it comes to judging people too). The cover is literally attached to the book there to help you judge it. The front flap gives you a synopsis and the back flap tells you about the author. Why the hell is that information there if not to assist someone in judging the book? If I only decided to read a book once I’d already read it, then gods, I can’t imagine how much time I’d have wasted reading truly awful collections of ink and paper.

2. Booksellers who don’t marking used books as “ex libris” when they’ve clearly been de-acquisitioned by some institution. I’ll be the first to admit that my tastes in reading tend a bit towards the eclectic – volumes on the rise and fall of the British Empire share shelf space with a growing allotment of Buffy the Vampire Slayer young adult novels. My collection has definitely built up some less common volumes because of my interests. They’re not necessarily expensive, but they can be hard to find especially in any kind of condition to make them worth having on the shelf. It seems like the very least a retailer could do is give me a fair assessment of the book’s condition up front and let me make an informed decision. Sometimes, for some volumes, I’ll tolerate a copy smothered in library stickers and stamps that’s hard to find or too expensive otherwise… but it would be nice to know that’s what I was getting before is shows up in my mailbox looking all dogeared and sickly.

3. Jorah the Dog. My not-so-new-anymore puppy has been more of a handful than I was expecting. Going a decade without a puppy in the house gives you time to forget the mayhem and chaos that comes with them. The furry little bastard can be quite the charmer when he wants to be, though. We seem to be getting out of the phase of life where he wants to pee on the kitchen floor every 26 minutes… but his new interest in overnight bathroom breaks at 12:30 AM and again at 3:30 AM are going to need to come to a stop with haste. He’s proven consistently that he can hold it all night… getting him to want to hold it, however, could be a whole separate fight.

Climate survey…

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Every job I’ve ever had was driven, at least in part, by the recurring rhythms unique to the organization. Cycles are everywhere if you’re paying attention – fiscal year end, annual conferences, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports… and my very favorite, changes of command.

One of the perks of working for our Big Bureaucratic Organization is that someone new ends up occupying the top spot every two or three years. When you’ve got a good one, the time goes a little faster, but when you have a bad one at least you know they won’t be there forever. In the age old tradition of the bureaucracy, when all else fails, bureaucrats know we can outlast even the worst of the worst in their tenure. The bureaucracy was here long before any individual leader and will endure long after any individual has departed. To quote Ronald Reagan, the bureaucracy “nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

As sure is night follows day and summer follow spring, a change up at the top of the org chart is followed by conducting a climate survey. It’s one of the tools by witch the new guy is supposed to “get to know” his organization – or at least what people are brave enough to say about it when they’ve been promised anonymity and non-attribution.

I’ve lost track of how many of these surveys I’ve responded to over the years, but I can count on not all the fingers of my left hand the number of things that have ever been improved in any meaningful as a result of them. Still, I play along, mostly because if the bosses are dumb enough to ask me how I really feel, I’m absolutely dumb enough to give them an honest answer. Since it might be the only chance during any particular boss’s tenure where I’m invited to tell truth to power, it feels like it’s just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Fortunately, after years of answering questions and very little changing I have built up quite a repository of stock responses that, after a bit of tweaking, are every bit as applicable today as they were the day I first wrote them… two, five,, seven years ago, or more. It’s just another in a increasingly long line of times when saving every scrap of previous work products as part of my Official Papers archive really pays dividends.

Emoting…

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I’m not a towering example of modern, overly emotional masculinity. I’m good at anger and its derivatives. I can even pull of contented without much trouble. The various subtile shades separating those two poles, though, mostly fall into the category of things that must be jammed down and best left unobserved by the outside world.

I had Maggie and Jorah out during my lunch break this morning. They were mostly out lazing around the yard – occasionally ginning up enough interest to chase off an intrusive bird or butterfly. Mostly they were content to lay around. I just happened to be looking in the right direction when Jorah plopped his chin down on Maggie’s back as they laid there in the sun. For the briefest of moments, it wasn’t Jorah I was seeing, but my dear old Winston. They’d laid in the same position for hours in the yard, looking out the sliding door, or piled together on the living room floor. It was the kind fo thing I’d seen a thousand time over the last ten years – but not once in the last six months.

It took my breath away.

At least it did before some dust or grit happened to blow into my eye and I had to struggle mightily not to make a spectacle of myself to any of the retired neighbors who happened to be nosy enough to wonder what I was doing home on a Monday. Even so, there may have been a little bit of emoting.

Winston’s been gone now almost seven months. The days are busy. The herd demands my attention. But there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think of the snorting, shuffling bulldog who use to be with us. Most days now, it’s with a smile… though it turns out it can still be with big wet manly tears, too.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Toothpaste residue. If you feel the compulsion to brush your teeth at the office in the middle of the afternoon, I’m sure you’re doing great things for your dental health… but for the love of all the gods can you please wash away or wipe the toothpaste residue out of the sink when you’re finished. It’s hard to feel like a trusted professional when it looks like you’re sharing a shitter with a bunch of 5 year olds.

2. Checking your work. I’m forced by the universe to accept that mistakes happen… but most often they seem to happen because people don’t check their work. If you know that you got a bad batch of widgets in and someone is making a special trip to your place of business to purchase one of these “might be bad” widgets, it stands to reason that you’d check before that person physically showed up in your shop, wasting time, and being inconvenienced. I can’t save the world from faulty material, but I can bloody well call out shit customer service when I experience it.

3. The dream of immortality. In a nation of almost 330,000,000 people living deep into the 21st century, on any given day about 7,708 Americans will die. Another 10,563 will be born. The rest will muddle through what, for them, is a more or less unremarkable day. For all the fuss we make about our big, developed brains, we have a bit of a strange relationship with death. It’s almost as if we try to pretend that if we just build a better seat belt, or cure cancer, or ban the right object or beverage, that all 330 million of us will go on living forever. It’s never worked that way. Sure, everything can be a little bit safer. You might even manage to cheat death for a while, but it’s most assuredly only a temporary reprieve.

Ebb tide…

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Blame August, blame the thunderstorms racing through the area, blame spending a day gone blind on PowerPoint, or blame aborted dental work. Blame whatever you want because all of it is probably responsible at some point. Something, or a combination of something’s, has managed to steal any motivation I had tonight.

Seriously, I don’t even have any of my usual and customary notes jotted through the day to fall back back on tonight, so it’s not even a case of fake it til you make it.

All I really seem to have the motivation to do is sink into the second most comfortable seat in the house, put on some junk television as background noise, and lose the rest of the day to a good book.

Cantaloupe…

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So I had a bowl of cantaloupe for dinner tonight. There were plenty of other options. Lots of leftovers in the fridge that would have needed 90 seconds of heating up. A selection of cold cereal if I happened to feel exceptionally lazy.

I legitimately just wasn’t hungry. And I have no idea what to even do with that because feeding time is one of the parts of each day I look forward to most.

It’s safe to say I’ll be over the current lack of interest in dinner by the time breakfast is served. More likely I’ll wake up in the middle of the night feeling ravenous and end up making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at 2am.

Just another in a long list of ways Tuesdays – and weekdays in general – just screw with the program around here in all sorts of minor and obnoxious ways.

I suppose experts say a lot of things…

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So it’s summertime here in the northern hemisphere. That means the temperatures regularly climb up past 90 degrees, the humidity soars, and the news covers a raft of stories about people who leave their pets or their kids locked inside their vehicle and only discover the error of their ways when they return to find Spot, Mittens, Bobby, or Suzy broiled much later in the day.

According to the inevitable articles on the topic, boohooing and pleading sympathy for the guilty, “Experts say” it can happen to anyone. I suppose it could, in theory. Monkeys could also fly out of everyone’s collective asses. Or we could all get hit in the face by simultaneous meteorites. Anything is possible.

Speaking as a guy who put an automatic starter on his truck because he wasn’t comfortable leaving his dogs in the vehicle long enough to get in and out of various gas station bathrooms along the 800 mile route between Maryland and west Tennessee, any kind of excuse about forgetting the living creature or creatures in your back seat rings just a little bit hollow.

Look, I know everyone is busy. Everyone is tired. Everyone can have a scattered moment, but for fuck’s sake, people, at least try to pull yourselves together. It’s a living thing you’ve at least theoretically decided to take responsibility for, not last night’s leftovers that you inadvertently left on the back seat when you got home from Olive Garden.

As always, I’m left wondering what the hell is wrong with people. Unfortunately I probably know the answer to that. It starts with an S and ends with “tupid.”

A late lunch…

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I went to lunch at 2:30 this afternoon. Because reasons. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about that other than the fact I usually try to snag lunch around 11. That’s reasonably close to the mid-point of my normal work day and it’s when you can run out and back without returning to find the closest parking somewhere in south Uzbekistan.

Mostly I don’t like eating that late in the afternoon because I stick to a fairly early dinner schedule. Even of weekdays, dinner is made, eaten, and cleaned up before 6:00. A late lunch throws that schedule out of whack, which nudges other bits of the nightly routine our of order. It’s all minor stuff that conspires to create a big mood by the time the day is done.

I still went to lunch at 2:30 today… not so much because I wanted to eat at that point, but because not going to lunch at all has the potential to create a precedent that I have no intention of adhering to in the future. In the absence of direct threats to life or property, lunch is a thing that’s going to happen, as much my time and inviolable as the small hours of the morning.

Long experience tells me that doing something for nothing only ratchets up the expectation that you’ll do a lot more somethings for the same amount of nothing. Even when that’s not the intention, it’s an idea that I’m determined not to allow to take root even by accident… although getting back at 3:00 and leaving at 4:00 does have a certain charm.

Time enough at last or: Reconsidering the universal basic income…

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While trying to take care of some online housekeeping over the weekend, I stumbled upon one of my old Amazon wishlists – one that stretched back a decade or more. The titles listed were definitely “on brand” for what I like to read. I’m nothing if not consistent.

For someone with a full time job and a household to run, I like to think I consume written material at a respectable rate (especially given I have no claim on speed reading). There’s not much down time here that doesn’t find me with a book in my hand. There’s nothing to make my efforts feel inadequate quite like seeing page after page of titles I still want to read, but haven’t gotten around to yet. Worse yet, they’re the ones I haven’t even gotten around to grabbing up a copy of yet. That puts them deeply in the “who the hell knows when or if I’ll get to them” category.

Maybe I should reconsider my whole position on the universal basic income. Not needing to do annoying things like earn a living would really free up the kind of time I need to work through the backlog here. Sure, it creates a whole host of secondary problems and unintended consequences, but it seems that’s what it’s going to take to find time enough at last.