Tag Archives: sunday

There are worse things…

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Sunday is usually my lead off post for the week. It helps set the tone for what’s to come. Believe it or not I tend to put a lot of thought into what shows up on Sundays… Not that you’d know it based on what’s showing up here tonight. I’ll blame that mostly on spending a large portion of today thinking it was Saturday. You can imagine my grave annoyance when, around 4PM it occurred to me that it’s actually Sunday – and all the baggage that goes along with it.

As happy as I am that Game of Thrones is less than two hours away, I’m all too aware that it’s the big huzzah before Monday comes along and sucks all the joy out of life. It wont be as bad as all that, of course, but still I’d be more than happy to roll back the clock and have a bit of extra time. Since that’s not going to happen, I guess I’d better do my best to make the next couple of hours count.

A friend of mine sent me a text from their office this afternoon – which reminded me there are worse things than watching the end of the weekend close in… Sunday could just be one more day at the office. That’s probably good for the hard chargers among you, but as for me I’d rather be screwing around in the yard and wargaming the next home improvement project. At this stage of the game I don’t think I have it in me to give more than 40.

Come to think of it, I need to go check my Powerball numbers. This whole discussion could be purely academic.

Just about perfect…

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The last of a good day’s sun is creeping across the tops of the back yard oaks. I’m more of a sunrise guy, but there’s something to be said about this dusky time of day too… especially on a Sunday night, which I assume we all find at least a touch melancholy. As the light drains away from another weekend, I’m almost willing myself into boredom in an effort to extend the day just that little bit longer – a fool’s errand to be sure – but it’s a well established part of the Sunday evening routine.

I don’t have much of anything to add to that little observation. The weekend was uneventful and unremarkable in nearly every way. Some people would find that disappointing, but I tend to consider it an achievement… So if you’ll excuse me I have an appointment with the back porch, a cold drink, and the setting sun.

And that’s just about perfect.

Challenge accepted…

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Every Thursday night for the last two years, you’ve all been treated to a brief glimpse into what slights and outrages are simmering in my head as the week rolls towards its end. What Annoys Jeff this Week is consistently the most read post of the week and probably comes closest to capturing what I think of as my “authentic voice.” It’s a mostly unfiltered dump directly from my head onto the page and has probably saved me tens of thousands of dollars in psychoanalysis bills.

For some time earlier this year, Sunday mornings were reserved for reposting the “lost blogs” from MySpace and Blogger. They weren’t met with quite as much interest as WAJTW, but having a weekly theme did give me an uptick in traffic for Sunday mornings – no small thing on a day and time when most people are otherwise engaged with other than web-based activities.

This past Thursday a challenge was issued by one of my good and loyal readers to adapt my format slightly and offer a once a week post featuring What Jeff Likes this Week. I wasn’t immediately drawn to the idea. Most weeks I’d be hard pressed to come up with three items to talk about. Knowing this, my challenger graciously offered to let me get away with just expounding on one thing each week.

Challenge accepted. Beginning on Sunday, November 23rd and running every Sunday through the end of the year, you’ll be reading a new weekly mini-feature right here at jeffreytharp.com. I’m still kicking around actual titles, but the suggestions What Slightly Manages Not to Bug Jeff too Much this Week and What Jeff is Mostly Indifferent About this Week continue to be strong contenders.

Check back next Sunday to see what I come up with.

Disregarded…

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I’m fairly sure that somewhere we are enjoined to maintain Sunday as a day of rest. And while I’m sure that’s a fine theory, it adds up to 1/7 of the week where I’m not getting a damned thing done and that plan just isn’t going to hold water. So yes, as we speak I’m blatantly disregarding the command of having a “day of rest.” There’s laundry to do, floors to scrub, a bathroom in desperate need of cleaning, shrubbery that needs cutting back, a dog in need of a bath, and at least two more meals that are going to have to be cooked. That’s just the top few items on the list.

As great as a day of rest every week sounds, it’s just not going to happen. If I’m lucky, I’ll carve out a few days for that a couple of times a year, but getting there once a week is a pipe dream if I’ve ever heard one. There’s no way around my Sundays being filled with ticking things off the long list of shit I didn’t get to in the previous six days. For some reason, I don’t think that breaking a sweat on the sabbath is going to be the sin that pushes me over the edge. Just between you and me, it’s probably not even in the list of top ten sins I’ve committed this week so I’ve got that going for me.

So if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to quit pecking at the keyboard and get a few more things done this morning.

The traditional Sunday…

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Sunday morning blogging was a lot easier when I could just trot a few old posts out of the archive, gin up a few snarky comments about them, and then go on about the day. Now that I have to dream up something new and theoretically interesting to say, I find myself really reaching for ideas. This morning felt like it could really go one of two ways. I could write the standard “Happy Easter” post and go along to get along or I could pen a more natural feeling skeptics post. Both of them felt like enough of a lie to be not worth writing down.

Sure, Easter is the high holiday of Christianity and being raised in the faith, I know enough about it to articulate the salient points. Since I haven’t been inside a church for anything other than weddings or funerals in the better part of 20 years, that post felt like something of a farce. If I’m a bad Christian, I’m an even worse atheist because at heart, I want to believe that there is some greater power in the universe. Now whether that power is the God of the Israelites or Vishnu or Zeus or the flying spaghetti monster, I don’t feel particularly well equipped to decide. I’ll leave that discussion to the theologians. I’ll find the answer to those question far sooner than I want them anyway.

For the faithful, I’ll wish you a happy Easter this morning. For the rest, I’ll wish you a good Sunday. As for me, I’ll mark this Sunday in the traditional way – writing, doing laundry, and whipping up some barbecue chicken.

A religious experience…

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I don’t consider myself a Sunday service kind of guy. I’m willing enough to accept that there are powers in the universe at work well beyond the conception of the mind of man, but I have a hard time with the idea of a supreme being who’s interested enough in the proceedings of the men and women on this little rock of a planet to spend his entire day in judgement of our rights and wrongs. If there is more powerful force in the universe, I hope he has something better to do with his time time than watch our collective tomfoolery.

Assuming for a moment that there is someone with their hand at the helm, I suspect he’s a little too busy to worry about whether or not we all show up in a special building on Sunday mornings. I’m spending this one drinking what to my mind is some of the finest coffee ever roasted and listening to one of the greatest jazzmen of the 20th century. I’m celebrating nature’s magnificent bounty and the genius of the human mind. If that’s not a religious experience, I don’t know what is.

Already…

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Well, I’m almost two full days into my version of Christmas Vacation and I’ve forgotten that today was Sunday. You know I forgot it was sunday because I wasn’t blogging over coffee in the early hours of the morning. Since there’s really no schedule to keep, I hope you’ll forgive the oversight… and if you don’t, just send me an email, I’ll add you as a contributing writer, and you can drag out of bed before the crack of dawn to try being witty and charming first thing next Sunday morning.

I’m sure there are some incredibly important things going on in the world right now just crying out for me to comment on them, but I have no idea what they might be. Honestly, I’ve mostly tuned out. Sure the TV is still humming along providing background noise, but so far today I’ve studiously avoided tuning in to anything remotely resembling news. Judging from the sounds coming from the living room, the History Channel (or maybe one of the science-y channels) is running a program on geology from the earth’s crust to its core. That’s plenty good for background chatter.

Past that, there’s nothing particularly interesting to report. A quiet day, few interruptions, dank, and rainy. Sort of the misanthrope’s perfect day. I’ll do my best to keep that trend going tomorrow, but with the inevitable pack out, load up, and pre-trip spazzing, having that kind of success two days in a row seems pretty unlikely.

Misplaced outrage…

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I keep seeing how “outraged” people are that stores are opening ever-earlier on Thanksgiving day. Facebook and Twitter are full of posts demanding that retailers stay closed and calling boycott at every opportunity. That’s fine. Whatever helps you get your jollies.

One thing you can trust on is that stores like Macy’s and Kmart aren’t opening because their CEOs are philosophically opposed to Thanksgiving. They’re opening because there is growing consumer demand that they be open. If people didn’t want to start their shopping before the bird gets sliced, none of these stores would think anything of leaving their doors closed for the duration of the holiday.

Growing up in a rural, out of the way community I can remember a time when you were hard pressed to find a store of any kind open on Sunday. Later, most places had “limited” hours on Sundays, say noon-5:00 PM. Today, Sunday is just another day in retail. That’s not because the stores are evil, it’s because it’s what the consumer demanded. Despite what anyone thinks of its merits, culturally speaking Sunday isn’t generally considered a “day of rest” by anyone I know. It’s just the second half of a 48-hour weekend where we’re all trying to get done what we need or want to do.

I’m not sure why anyone thinks it would be any different with Thanksgiving. If you don’t want to be part of the crass commercialization, by all means stay home until 12:01 AM Friday morning. If you think you have a Constitutional right to observing a holiday on the day of the holiday itself, you might want to consider work that isn’t involved in a customer-service related field – oh, and don’t be a cop, or a nurse, or a soldier, or work for a power or water company, or, yes, in retail. I’ve had plenty of jobs where work rudely intruded on my days off, and while that sucks, sometimes it’s just plain unavoidable.

So maybe instead of railing against how “unfair” retailers are being, look around and see how many of your friends and family members are going to head to the stores before or after dinner on Thanksgiving Day. If the answer is more than “none,” go ahead and enjoy living in your glass house… and give it some thought next time you want to buy that discount mattress on President’s day or get the deal of a lifetime from the car dealer on Labor Day, or when you’re going to see a movie on a Sunday afternoon ensuring that some poor employee has to give up their Sabbath to sell you a ticket, make your popcorn, and fire up the projector on time.

Let’s be blunt for a moment: If you are legitimately thankful for your family and friends, does it make a tinker’s damn worth of difference whether you’re all sitting down for a turkey dinner at an appointed date and time or whether you nosh on eggs and bacon at the local diner at 3AM on any other random Thursday? I’m just having a tough time seeing the “so what” of all the commotion.

Having the world to yourself…

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I think Sunday mornings are my favorite part of the week. Even now when the days are shorter and the sun isn’t quite up at 7AM, I like being awake and moving. That brief hour between 7 and 8 is one of the very few times in a typical week when it legitimately feels like you’ve got the world to yourself. There’s no traffic moving yet, no email rolling in, no tweets, or Facebook posts that need liking. There’s just me, the dogs, a fresh pot of coffee, and a blog. It’s a pity that all days can’t start off like that.

This Sunday, I’m offering up the last of the posts from July 2008 and the first post from August of that year. There’s a nice little rant on July 28th if you’re interested in finding out why I don’t mind the price of gas being a little high. July 27th is a quick note on why I think formal term limits for Congress are a bunch of bunk. The other three posts in the set are a little more spur of the moment thoughts that never quite got fully developed, but still make of decent enough reading. As if I’d say there was every a post you should just go ahead and skip over.

Updates from the archive are the first productive thing I try to get to on Sunday mornings. Once they’re live here on WordPress, I feel like I can get on with Sunday – so enjoy the posts this morning and remember to check back tomorrow to find out what happens on Monday that will inevitably deserve to be written down for posterity.

On schedule…

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It’s Sunday morning, and despite the continuing government shutdown, the looming debt ceiling debacle, and my general annoyance with both Congress and the administration, that means it’s the day we focus on the past instead of the future. This week’s posts from the old MySpace blog are from early June 2008 and cover a good range of issues from changing jobs, to having a lead foot, to the joys of having some kind of flu bug. No great rants this week, but it’s safe to say we’ll run into a few more of those before our Sunday visits to the archive wrap up over the next few months.

Unlike our government, I still believe in the importance of keeping things on schedule, so enjoy today’s blast from the past and check back tomorrow for what I’m sure will be another rants about Congress… or perhaps a diatribe against dentistry following my second root canal in the last seven days. I supposes it’s good to have a variety of topics, but I’d happily pass on either one of them.