Tag Archives: summer

Water under the bridge…

Posted on by

Apparently I missed summer this year. I know I stayed busy and got plenty of things done, but I can’t quite put my finger on where the last four months went. The last thing I remember clearly is having birthday dinner and then suddenly waking up in September. And somehow I managed to let the time sail by without making it to the beach yet this year… which is made all the more ridiculous because it’s only an hour from the house. Sadly, that makes getting my toes in the sand just another victim of the list of things I had good intentions of getting done this summer but just didn’t get around to actually doing.

I like to think I spent the summer being highly productive, but it’s a bit of a stretch since I can’t point at anything concrete and say “Look what I did” while the warm weather got away from me. Maybe I should go ahead and start taking weekly pictures of cleaned rooms and a well turned out lawn. At least then I wouldn’t be so surprised when ninety or a hundred days blow by without even the common courtesy of a heads up.

As I’m sitting here writing this on Friday afternoon, I know it’s going to be Monday before I know it. I’ll do my best to cram as much into these two days as possible, but if someone has any tips on how to slow this ride down before it’s all water under the bridge, you’ve got my undivided attention.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Stop complaining about the heat. It’s summer in the Mid-Atlantic. It’s hot. If you don’t like hot weather, consider moving to Maine or volunteering for an expedition to the South Pole. Here in this part of the country, the weather can be pretty much relied on to be somewhere between warm and scorching in June, July, and August. Those months come around at more or less the same time every year which means temperatures in the 90s shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone.

2. Unrealistic expectations. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t bend the knee at every opportunity. By nature, I’m an inquisitive person and when someone says something stupid I’m as apt to ask for their logic as I am to just accept it and move on. Occasionally you run into the kind of person who’s not use to being questioned or needing to explain himself. They tend to be the the most fun to play with because they turn a delightful shade of red when they realize you’re not going to hop to and dance to the tune they’ve called. It never fails to amaze me how much trouble everyone could avoid by having reasonable expectations to begin with rather than relying on bluster and the beliefe that everyone will do what they say “just because”.

3. Pretty much everything else. There’s a good chance I need to go to bed and get a good nights sleep, because it would be easier this week to write about what hasn’t annoyed me on some level. That, of course is much less interesting for all of us. Some might say I’ve even “in a mood,” though if we’re honest I’m mostly in a mood because people make me want to bludgeon myself around the head and neck with a blunt object. If tomorrow weren’t Friday and the weekend didn’t promise sweet, sweet quiet time, I’d probably be on the lookout for a nice bell tower or possibly a school book depository. Not really. That would require way more interaction that I’m really feeling up to.

My incredible shrinking attention span…

Posted on by

No one reading this is going to be surprised to hear me say that I’m a creature of habit. That’s one of the problems I’ve always had with writing. As long as I make a conscious effort to carve out time to do it every day, all is right with the world. Unfortunately, it’s perilously easy to quickly slide into the habit of not writing. For the record, being a not writer is far, far easier than being a writer. Because I’m fundamentally hardwired to seek the path of least resistance, not writing anything on Saturday quickly turned into letting it slide for the next two days as well. It would be a simple thing to let it slide for the rest of the week, for another month, a year maybe, all because it stopped being part of my routine for a few days. Whether it’s blogging, churning out pulp fiction, or the great American novel, writing is an act of self discipline, which is another skill I have yet to fully realize.

When the sun’s out, a few dozen odds and ends need doing, the television, a list of books you’ve been meaning to read, and rum punch on the deck rear their heads, it’s hard to overcome the sheer number of things competing for your time and attention. For me at least, it’s easy to write in the winter. It’s gray and cold and frankly there’s not nearly as much competing for attention. With a cold rain falling, it’s nothing to churn out a couple thousand words in an afternoon. Once the weather turns, I’m lucky to muddle through two or three hundred, before my incredible shrinking attention span hurls me off in another direction. At least I can admit I have a problem. That’s the first step, right?