Tag Archives: holiday

Looking…

Posted on by

If you stopped by looking for some new foolishness, you’re going to be disappointed. I haven’t gone back to work since Christmas. And when it comes to work, out of sight is definitely out of mind. Except for the fact that I have to go back on Tuesday, I haven’t given the office so much as a thought for the last week. It’s been nice. Of course I know there is a mound of stuff piling up on my desk that will demand immediate attention when I wander in, but just now it’s nowhere near the top of my priority list. This is yet another strong indicator that I’m better suited to a career as a lottery winner than as an actual productive employee. When it comes to work, my apathy indicator is blazing green.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Better than average…

Posted on by

Now that the sappy sentimentality of Christmas is behind us and the drunken orgy of New Years still lies ahead, it’s the time of year when we look back at what made the year memorable… Yeah, I’m coming up blank on that, too. Fact is 2011 was pretty much identical to 2010 and there’s every indication that it will be substantively similar to 2012. I’m not making a judgment call about that so much as I’m just letting it lay there as a statement of fact.

2011 had something in the neighborhood of 104 weekend days, 10 paid holidays, 19 vacation days, and about 6 sick days. That leaves about 226 work days. That’s 62% of the available days in the year spent sitting in a cube, playing with PowerPoint, trying to wordsmith every outgoing email to reflect a bold, can-do attitude, and generally trying to convince ourselves that what we’re doing really makes a difference to more than the 2 or 3 people on our left and right who actually know what we’re working on. A handful of those days were really, really good. Another handful were really, really bad. The vast majority were just somewhere between the two.

I have no reason to think it won’t be the same in 2012. The only difference is 2012 has a head start on the number of good days because I’m not going to spend a third of it trying to escape from the hellish clutches of the Uberboss. The long painful job search and transition process is over. I’m settled in to the new job and back in the part of the country I never should have left in the first place. All in all, maybe that’s not such a bad kickoff to the new year. If I can manage more average days than bad ones and find myself home every night in the right part of the world, I guess I’d have to say I’m pretty happy with good enough.

Here’s to the new year. Best of luck at keeping things better than average.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The spirit…

Posted on by

Tis the season to be meh. Honestly, if it weren’t for the calendar in Outlook and the sparkly Rudolph blinking happily on the neighbor’s lawn, I wouldn’t have any real idea it’s less than two weeks until Christmas. I have exactly one present purchased, which means this Saturday is probably going to involve the painful ordeal of going to a mall of some sort. On the flip side, I’m ridiculously excited about being off for 9 straight days and spending a big chunk of those banging around Allegany County. I’m insanely happy that this Christmas isn’t going to involve a 16 hour drive to get anywhere. So yeah, while Christmas spirit and holiday joy isn’t exactly twinkling inside me, but I’ve been doing this long enough now to be damned appreciative for the perks that come with it. After the last five years of Tennessee exile, I’ve come to think of Cecil County unblinkingly as home… But getting to spend some time at the real thing is definitely going to make the holiday for me.

The holiday spirit…

Posted on by

Let’s go ahead and get something out of the way right now. Trick-or-treating is really just an excuse to send your children out into the street begging for candy from strangers. It’s pretty much exactly what you teach them not to do the other 364 days of the year. If it’s a guy in a van offering you a Snickers bar, stay away… but feel free to go right up to his house and knock on the door. Nice job on sending mixed messages, mom and dad. That’s fine. They’re your kids, so it doesn’t make much difference to me either way. That’s not really my point, though.

Before you send little Johnny or Suzie to knock on my door tonight, I need you to take note of the “Beware of Dog” sign placed prominently displayed in the window. It’s not that my dogs are particular vicious. In fact they’ve never shown signs of it at all, but if I decide to open up the door when you knock, there’s a fair chance that they’re going to bound out of the house in a bit of frenzy. See, they’re not all that keen on visitors and they’ll have a tendency to jump on you and your little darlings until they’re satisfied that you’re not really that interesting.

Sure, I could lock them in the basement tonight, but you see, the thing is they live here and you don’t. More importantly, I like them more than I like you, random neighbor who’s showing up at my door expecting me to give candy to your children. So in order to save us all a lot of headache, here’s the deal: I’m going to set a large bowl of candy and a “help yourself” sign on the deck. Feel free to take something. When it’s gone, it’s gone. If you decide to knock on the door instead of following instructions, I’m going to let the dogs out to jump on you, bark at you, and hopefully knock you down.

Inner teenager…

Posted on by

It’s Friday. Before a three day weekend. I’m more than a little surprised that there are more than three people even in the office pretending to work today. Even with a mostly full staff pecking away at their keyboards, it’s painfully obvious that the biggest game in town today is watching the clock roll on towards 4:00… or 3:01 if the powers that be keep up with long-standing pre-holiday tradition. Either way, it’s safe to say we can mostly write today off as professionally useless.
 
On a related note, I’m usually accused of being a 60 year old man at heart, but long weekends have a tendency to bring out my inner teenager. The anticipation of being turned loose. The rush of heading out the door. Rolling down the windows. Turning the radio up. Forgetting about work for a few days. For me, at some basic level, that’s what freedom feels like. Maybe that’s not such a bad way to kick off the Independence Day weekend.

Valentine…

Posted on by

Cupid_is_CreepyAccording to the legend, Valentine was an early Christian priest who defied Imperial edict and performed illegal marriage ceremonies for Roman soldiers. The emperor forbade such marriages in order to prevent his troops from becoming too fond of home and hearth and therefore unwilling to depart its comforts for life in far flung garrison towns on the edge of empire.

By order of Claudius II, Valentine was arrested, charged, and convicted of treason. While awaiting the sentence of death to be carried out, Valentine seduced the young daughter of the jailer. For his crimes against the state, Valentine was beaten, stoned, and beheaded in 270 AD… Which means to show the love we have for one another, each year on February 14th the western world celebrates the execution of a convicted traitor and pedofile.

From all of us at jeffreytharp.com to all of you out there on the internet, have a very, very happy VD… which ironically is another thing you’d probably run into if you spent a lot of time with treasonous pedofiles like the saintly Valentine.

Move it…

Posted on by

A lack of ranting and raving here is generally a sign that most is right with the world. Or more specifically that I’ve managed to avoid the masses and the raft of stupid they bring along with them. With that being said, I think it’s time to consider rejiggering the holiday calendar. I mean why celebrate Christmas in the middle of the bloody winter? It’s dark, cold, and there is every chance that you’ll find yourself snowed-in-place at any given moment. For a holiday that involves painfully detailed travel plans, wouldn’t it make more sense to schedule this type of event say in August when the days are long and low temperatures don’t plunge into the single digits? The church has moved things around on the calendar for years and for far lesser reasons. Surely no one really believes that an actual man named Jesus was born exactly on December 25th in the year zero (yes, I realize there was technically no year 0). And for the record, there was no concept of the Gregorian calendar at that point, so fixing the big day at the end of December seems to be speculative at best… So really there’s no reason not to get on the move-Christmas-to-a-warmer-month bandwagon. Join me, won’t you?

Cracking the century mark…

Posted on by

I just crossed over the 100-resumes-sent-out mark – an occasion made even more auspicious because I’m only a few hours away from punching out for two weeks of Christmas vacation. So really, my quest to get out of this madding reality will be suspended until after the new year, because, well, I will be out… even if it’s only temporary. Temporary is way, way better than nothing. Getting myself to a place where the hardest decision I need to make involves whether the ham sandwich should have mustard or mayonnaise seems to be one of the few ideas I can get behind lately with my full-throated support.

This will be the first trip of any length I’ve tried since I stopped sleeping like normal people. It’s also the first trip since I started drinking every bottle of water, soda, or Gatorade in site. I’m not all sure how this combination is going to work out other than almost guaranteeing that I won’t be setting a personal speed record for this trip. I just hope I can avoid making a pit stop every two hours. That would turn what’s already a tough drive into just about intolerable. One thing’s for certain, though… come hell or high water, I’m heading east and soon, with all the speed I can muster.

If you can keep it…

Posted on by

One of the quotes often ascribed to Ben Franklin tells of him responding to a question asked about what type of government there would be for the United States. Franklin responds that it’s a democracy, if we can keep it. This weekend we rightly celebrate our country’s birth announcement. But in doing this, so many forget the terrible price that was paid “to keep it” well beyond the surrender at Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris.

On July 3, 1863 Confederate forces inside the besieged city of Vicksburg, Mississippi sued for peace and laid down their arms. Earlier in the afternoon, on a field in Pennsylvania, the flower of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia shattered themselves against the Union center at Gettysburg; all but guaranteeing the eventual southern defeat. These twin victories, announced to the world on July 4th, 1863, ensured that the visionary experiment in democracy laid down in 1776 would endure even the bloody nightmare of civil war.

We owe much to the founders who gave us our republic, but so too do we owe a debt of gratitude to the men of 1863, who fought and died to preserve what their grandfathers and great grandfathers and built. As it was in 1776 and in 1863, so it is now – This Union, this republic, must be preserved against any, domestic or foreign, who rise against it.

Three day…

Posted on by

I throw alot of heat at the job around here, but I want to take this opportunity to mention one of the things that definitely doesn’t suck. In the world of the federal civilian, there are few perks more appreciated than the steady flow of paid holidays that loosely mark the coming and going of the seasons. These 10 days constitute the cornerstone of the sought after government employee benefits package. Coupled with the judicious application of accumulated annual leave, these days can be parlayed into a goodly stream of four and five day weekends and still leave two weeks left over to cover the end of December festivities and maybe even a week somewhere warm and tropical.

These extended weekends are even a perk for those who opt to stick around the office in that there is almost no one else around. It’s a great opportunity to actually play catch up on projects that have been lying untended in the corner of the cubicle, because there are almost no interruptions. I’m not extending the 4th of July holiday myself this year, so I’ll be in the office right up till the bitter end on Friday (if you consider 3PM the bitter end). After that, it’s off to enjoy the three day weekend… Which mostly means trying to sleep in until at least 7AM and then doing yard work until it gets too hot to see straight. Not exactly an epic vacation, but for now I’m not looking any gift horses in the mouth.

Like This!