Tag Archives: weekend

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. First Amendment. It doesn’t mean what people seem to think it means. The 1st guarantees that the government shall not muzzle or punish speech except in the most extreme or dangerous circumstances. It means that government won’t stop you from saying any stupid thing that crosses your mind. It does not protect you from the consequences of saying that stupid thing, however. It doesn’t in any way prevent popular backlash against your asinine idea. Your friends are free to shun you. Companies are free to no longer sponsor you. Other people are free to call you a sanctimonious asshat. See, you’re free to say what you will, but you are far from free of the social consequences of stupid things that fly out of your mouth. Sometimes the right to speak is best expressed by using it to say nothing at all. More people should avail themselves of the opportunity to just shut the fuck up.

2. School start date. I’m perplexed at the at why the day public schools open across the state of Maryland is this an issue for the governor. I vaguely recall Republicans being the party of small government. And this is precisely the kind of issue that’s best decided at the local level. I like Hogan. He’s an iconic red governor in a blue state. But on this one I’m just wondering why on earth he’s decided to wade into this non-issue.

3. Quite frankly I’m starting a four day weekend just now, so there is absolutely no third thing that annoys me at the moment. There may well have been earlier this week, but now it’s simply faded into the background of a million other annoying things that I don’t need to deal with or in any way think about until Tuesday.

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.

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.

Taking advantage of the captive audience…

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Most of the people who read this blog are a captive audience tonight. I feel like I should use the opportunity to say something insightful or at least drive up the weekend’s hit count.

This is the first snow since I took possession of the new homestead here and most of my stray thoughts tonight are given over to how the place will handle the weather, how robust the neighborhood electric grid will be once the wind cranks up, why they built this place without a secondary heat source, and generally coming up with ways to entertain myself for the next couple of days. Somehow I think that regardless of circumstances I’ll manage to find something to while away the hours.

If you don’t hear from me in a few days you’ll know the lights went off and took my painfully weak cell signal with them. So far as I can tell that’s really the only down side of living back here off the beaten path… and it’s a problem I’m doing my best to remedy in the coming weeks but that will come too late for this particular party.

Stay warm. Enjoy a day or two of enforced seclusion however you choose to spend them. I’ll see you once we get started with the big melt. Or maybe before, depending on how quickly boredom sets in and other circumstances.

Scheduling…

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If spontaneity were measured on a scale of 1 to 100, I’d rate myself somewhere around a -36. I like it when there is a plan. It provides order in the face of a chaotic world and clearly delineates options and deflection points where things could go astray. A good plan is a thing of beauty.

Since time immemorial my weekly plan has designated a 45 minute block of Saturday morning for carrying out the week’s primary sustenance acquisition. Given the onrushing storm that’s being hyped without end as Snowpocalypse 2016: The Revenge of Global Warming, planning for a Saturday grocery run seems somewhere between overly optimistic and potentially foolhardy. That means there needs to be a deviation from the schedule in order to pick up fruit and vegetables, meats, coffee creamer, and the rest of the assortment of items that made the cut this week.

Sure, the plan for the week makes allowance for deviations, but now it’s put me in a position where I’m going to have to fight the masses who are religiously unprepared for a minor disruption in their supply chain in order to pick up my basic groceries. While I could ride our a day or two of snow without putting a dent in the canned goods stockpile, fresh food on hand his just better all around. Sadly, it means a direct confrontation with the bread, eggs, and toilet paper crowd sometime in the next 48 hours.

It’s going to be stupid and angry making and precisely the kind of thing a decent plan should prevent. I’m going to have to reevaluate the whole damned schedule now.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. “American genocide.” Every year at this time there are a flurry of opinion pieces telling us that we’re supposed to feel guilty about the arrival of Europeans on America’s shores. Since I wasn’t there at the time, I have no intention of feeling guilty about it – and I certainly won’t pretend to feel badly about my lack of guilt. You see, back in the 16th century, there was a principle called the right of conquest, which meant if you were strong enough to occupy and hold a territory, it was yours to govern. Under the banner of the many of the crowned heads of Europe, those early arrivals during the colonial period did just that. They occupied and then they governed under the well-established rules of the day. I don’t feel any more guilt over that than I do the Norman conquest of England in 1066 AD or the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC.

2. Just unfriend me. If your response to an opposing viewpoint on social media is something like, “If you think X, just go ahead and unfriend me,” chances are we probably shouldn’t be friends anyway. See, I value the debate, the discussion of ideas, more so than I value the “rightness” of my own opinion over all others. I think there should be loud and voluminous debate about important issues of the day. An approach of “just unfriend me” cuts that off and ensures that neither side of the debate can never be fully informed. I don’t pick my friends because I happen to agree with all of their politics, but if that’s what you expect of me, maybe you should go ahead and unfriend me after all. And if at some point in the heat of a moment I’ve ever thrown down that gauntlet, I abjectly beg your indulgence and forgiveness.

3. Working the holiday. Over the last 20 years I’ve had many jobs. Some of those jobs required I work nights, or weekends, or holidays, or be prepared for “call outs” on short notice. Because I liked getting paid, that means there were many family parties, weddings, funerals, and yes, even holidays I missed because I needed to be at the office. I’ve enjoyed traditional Thanksgivings around the family table and I’ve celebrated them with a turkey sandwich on the clock. I don’t expect anyone to be out there doing the job because they love it, but if holidays and weekends are part of the position description, it pretty much is what it is.

The laughing of a dead Prussian…

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Watching the news this morning, I was glad to not be one of the thousands sitting bumper to bumper on the Baltimore Beltway. Or last night on I-70. Or later today on I-95 in either direction. I’ll roll the dice at some point, of course, and hope to slip through the migrating herd before most of them get a start on their day.

The rabid instance on having a weekly Wednesday staff meeting today, however, forced me to rethink if sitting in a nice warm truck with the radio on inching down the interstate would really have been the worst of the two possibilities. A good leader might not acknowledge it in so many words, but he would certainly have known that although there are plenty of seats being filled today, those filling them are present in body, but long gone in spirit. To a person, we’ve all have our faces set in that far away, somewhere else I’d rather be look – eyes glazed over, lips slightly parted, the occasional deep sigh or eye roll. It’s a look I know well if only because I have worn it so very often.

Still, we dutifully held this middle-of-the-day meeting. Because it’s Wednesday, if not because there was any actual important information to share. Despite any application of reason to the contrary we clung to the battle rhythm on this day before Thanksgiving… and I can’t shake the feeling that somewhere there is a dead Prussian staff officer laughing at us.

Regularly scheduled broadcast…

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With the heavy lifting of last week over, I’m fairly certain that we’re now returning to your regularly scheduled broadcasts around here. Mercifully, the coming week will largely be about administrative minutia and doctoring up the aftermath to make sure everyone comes out looking good. Being a master bureaucrat of long experience, thats the kind of work I can churn out all day long without calling on too much brain power. It’s for the best really, because I’m still not sure how deep reserve of that I have, even after the long weekend of making no decision more challenging than when to eat and what to watch.

Our great bureaucracy is in the midst of that magical time of year when just about everyone’s thoughts are turning to the two month “holiday season,” those eight or nine weeks of the year between Veteran’s Day and New Years that are punctuated by 4 federal holidays and everyone trying to burn off the last of their use-or-lose vacation time. It’s not quite a “slow” season, as the beast always needs fed, but the pace does ease – if only because at any time it’s likely one or more of the people you need to talk to to get anything accomplished will be elsewhere.

In no way should that be interpreted as a complaint. In fact I’m counting on the schedule taking a few stutter steps if I’m ever going to catch up on email and all the other stuff I’ve been largely ignoring over the last few weeks. When I was last at my desk, the unread message count stood somewhere around 300+. If Thursday and Friday kept up the pace, I could have a personal best 500 messages waiting for me to read, file, delete, or continue to ignore indefinitely.

While in an of itself that all seems pretty bad, I can tell you this is the least angst-filled Sunday night I’ve passed in quite some time. I’m counting it as a win.

Unknowingly alarmed…

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My daily schedule is so well ingrained by now that it doesn’t even feel like a schedule. It just feels like life taking it’s natural course. That’s how it feels right up until something sends the future careening off into a different timeline, which is what happened this morning.

Fortunately it wasn’t accompanied by the arrival of a time-traveling version of me from the future and a rift in the space-time continuum, but it was accompanied by the blaring of klaxons and a general confusion about why the universe seemed to be crashing down on my head at 5AM on a Sunday. Even the dogs seemed perplexed at what was happening, so at least I wasn’t alone in my confusion.

As it turns out, my daily habits are far more deep-rooted than I imagined, because without giving it a thought I’d apparently managed to set all of my normal week-day alarms on my way to bed last night. Unintentional. Unthinking. Just the sheer force of habit from so very many early mornings past.

Fortunately I only cheated myself out of about an hour, since 6AM is what passes for sleeping in around here. I may have started out life as a night owl, but I’ve grudgingly come to appreciate the deep quiet of these small hours of the morning.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Friday afternoon. What kind of jackass sets up a meeting on a Friday after 4PM? Time, being the precious resource that it is, the start of the weekend should be even more sacrosanct. It should be inviolable. It should be the most iron-clad and immutable moment of the week. But no, because no one has the good sense to tell someone with a little bit of power that it’s a stupid idea, the weekend will be indefinitely delayed by another meeting that could have probably been an email.

2. Diagnostic analysis. I’m an analyst. It’s what I do and probably does a good job describing who I am as a human being. Generally when someone wants an analysis “on the fly,” I can reach into my back of tricks and give them the back of the napkin version without much trouble. Now when you tell me that the issue is a non-replicable fault, can’t identify who discovered the issue or what was actually reported, want it done without the benefit of credible trouble tickets or help requests, and no other direct method of measurement, well, basically what’s left is polling the operators and asking if everything is performing within normal parameters. If they say yes and the automated metrics agree with them, then the analysis is complete, there was no fault, and all systems are behaving normally. Analysis complete. I don’t know what else to tell you.

3. A good week ruined. I started off on Tuesday with a less than usually jaundiced view of the world. I was well rested for the first time in I don’t remember how long. Dare I say I was optimistic of having a reasonably good week. That nonsense didn’t last out the day of course and it’s been a straight mud-soaked slog through to Thursday night. If I can put my head down and bull my way through the next three weeks without a heart attack, a stroke, or setting the building on fire, I should probably consider it a job well done and never think of it again. Until next summer. When they whole damned thing starts over again.