Category Archives: monday

monday

Monday Quickie

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Today the sun appeared for at least part of the day. then this afternoon it clouded up and drizzled and rained. I had originally planned on walking to the Boy Scout committee meeting this evening, but the cold wet drizzle convinced me not to. Maybe if my rain coat didn’t leak around its neck, but with the leaky neck it can be downright miserable to walk in cold rain. (And yes, yet another hat I wear is as treasurer of the troop committee for scouts.)

One of the side topics in the meeting was how long before the flu has finished its swath through the local schools. The hope was expressed that the kids would have been through the exposure and illness cycle by the end of the month when another camp out scheduled. The numbers seem to work out with the reported absence rate in the schools, so maybe our guess will be reasonable. Is the flu running through your schools yet?

My evenings for the next few days are pretty well taken up. Wednesday has the EMS Authority committee meeting, Thursday it is time to be the guest lecturer for a public speaking class. Friday morning has the Physicians recruitment committee meeting to do the dog and pony show for a new physician we hope to recruit for the medical center. At least I get breakfast for attending that meeting! There would also have been a special city council meeting thrown in there as well, but the consultant doing the study will not have the information ready for presentation this week.

In a lighter vein, Molly has been developing distinct patterns of dealing with wet. If she gets to the door, all excited to go out, and it is pouring rain, she thinks it is great and sprints out to get soaked and track mud throughout the house when she comes back in. But, if it is just misting or drizzling, she will sprint out the door, come to a screeching halt, look to see if the door is still open, and then run like mad back into the house. Explain that one to me if you can. It used to be just the reverse little more than a year ago.

Time to call it a night. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

cell phone, monday, rant, weather

Monday Meandering Cell Phone Rant

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This weekend definitely reminded me that fall is on the way. Yesterday it didn’t quite break 70 and was down in the upper 40s last night. Cool enough to close most of the windows and still feel cold this morning. It has already been cool in the mountains for a while, but this is the first hint of true fall down here. It made yesterday a great day to take a late afternoon nap in the cool overcast. Molly and I were batching it alone (What do you call it when a female dog is doing the equivalent of male batching? There must be a term for it.) so we had no trouble snuggling in an sleeping for a couple of hours. There is something about the time of year when a blanket becomes needful that makes sleeping so much better.

L and the Son are both up in the mountains with a cold/virus, so it might be a good thing that L wasn’t able to come home this weekend. (I hope to avoid this cold if possible!) Add in the smoke and haze up there blowing in from the distant California fires and there is a lot of overcast and haze on the ground up there. Needless to say, it hasn’t overjoyed L with the irritation it adds to the effects of the cold. The smoke doesn’t seem to have made it over the mountains and down here in force yet, but there is a bit of haze in the air. It always amazes me how smoke from fires more than a 1000 miles away can appear in the air here. Let’s hear it for the west to east flow of air in the U.S.

Enough about the weather and on with my rant for today.

Starting Saturday and continuing on through today, I have a gained a good argument against giving kids who are a bit young cell phones. A certain young gentleman who seems to have barely made it into his 4’s has been calling repeatedly and inquiring for Marcus. On the times when I’ve answered and explained to the young man that this is not Marcus’s number and suggested he might get his parents to help him find the right number, I’ve gotten a mumbled o’tay followed by a hangup. Of course within an hour or two there is another call from the same youngster on the same cell number asking for Marcus yet again.  I am tempted to call the number back around ten tonight in the hope it will be answered by the person or persons who gave the young man a phone too early in his life. I suspect it would do me no good since it seems that there are a number of parents who haven’t thought through the issues of comprehension and phones for responsible use by youngsters. In a few days, he will undoubtedly tire and quit calling.

From my curmudgeonly point of view, if you are going to give a cell phone to a youngster too young to responsibly respond to messages when he uses the phone, you might want to set it up so it can call only the parents and maybe the siblings and grandparents. But that idea seldom seems to occur to the sort that might give a 4 year old a cell phone. If you are such a parent, you should consider what kind of emotional trauma might result to junior if he kept calling someone less tolerant than me for three days. If nothing else, he might gain some new and surprising vocabulary words for answering the phone.

Have you ever had the joy of a too young caller? How many 4 and 5 year olds do you know with cell phones?

monday, weather

Meandering Monday

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Early this morning L headed back to the mountains. A slight difference of climate between the two locales. When we talked this afternoon, it was in the fifties in the mountains but pushing the mid-nineties here on the plains. At least tonight there was no more of the anomalous rain here.

Speaking of rain, it was amusing this morning to count the number of people who drove up along side me as I was walking to banter about the storm of last night. I can’t count the number of people who asked what I did to cause all this rain. I finally fessed up and told them that the rain of last night was due to the fact that I watered my lawn, thus tempting the rain gods. To understand why this is funny, you need to understand that in a normal summer out here you have to water your lawn every other day or so or it turns brown and dies. The watering I did on Sunday afternoon was only the third time I have watered my lawn *all year* this year. Think we have been getting a bit of anomalous moisture?

It was interesting the number of odd calls I got today as well. I’ve never figured out how people always know to call at the most inopportune times. No calls early in the morning, just a couple of emails saying call me about this and that. But the minute I walked outside on my way over to do the morning therapy session with XXX, my phone was busy the entire walk to and from XXX’s. Got back to my office and not another call until in the afternoon. I’ve taken to walking with my cellular headset (I prefer the wired one rather than the blue tooth one) in my ear and plugged in. Makes me suspect there is a lookout posted that tells everyone to call me as soon as I walk out the door.

Supper tonight was packed with things from the garden. Raw turnips, peeled and lightly salted. A salad with fresh picked chopped green onions, Chinese peas, sliced radishes (both white and red), lettuce, and a touch of chopped cucumber. Pretty close to vegetarian if I hadn’t had that macaroon for desert. I am looking forward to later when our cucumbers and peppers start getting ready.

My final meeting of the day was the Boy Scout Troop Committee meeting tonight. Once again the topic was all the rain and weather we’ve been having. Got the real business done along with the normal bs’ing and headed back home in time to see that the Rockies managed to win – must have been because they didn’t have to call on the bull pen.

Molly the dog is still lying around and moping, morning L’s departure. I have faith Molly will be back up to her normal “let’s go, c’mom, let’s go” personality by sunrise. So I guess I’d better head for the bed so I can be ready when she is. Nothing is worse than the smell of doggie breath and a mouth full of fur when she jumps up on the side of the bed to make sure you are getting with the program and you aren’t up yet. Goodnight.

misc, monday, mope

Mopey Monday Miscellanei

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Today is one of those mopey days. The sun is out and it is nice outside, but my motivation to get going is lacking. Seems like those kind of days happen sometmes. Maybe the solution is to add an extra day each week that can be used in any way one chooses. If this is a good day to mope around and do little else, you can use the extra day as a mope day. Of course, there is always the ongoing issue of using your “personal/mope” day too eary in the week and then discovering that it was really needed later in the week. {*grin*}

The discussion of mope days reminded me of a gentleman I haven’t thought of in years. Paul was a work colleague long ago. He was very senior in the company at the time I knew him. He had worked essentially his whole life at the company, was one of the original 10 employees of what had become a Fortune 100 company, and with his seniority, he accumulated vacation time at a rate exceeding 1 day a week. The problem that Paul had was that he was not often in the mood to take time off. So he was always up against the corporate cap on accumulated vacation time. The entire time I knew him, he had to take one day a week off or lose the paid day off as he hit the corporate cap. Paul was one of those people who couldn’t stand the idea of “donating” the day back to the company, so he spent some time programming a spreadsheet/database to automatically chose which days would be best for him to take off. He would then put in the paperwork for those days but still come to work as if it was a normal day. It pleased him not to “donate” the day to the company and yet not have to skip work for a day. He would have loved the similar problems associated with the personal/mope day idea.

Easter was good here. L was home and we had Easter dinner at Mom’s. I suspect Mom was pretty tired after wheeling around preparing the meal in a wheel chair. Since she can’t leave the house yet, she wanted to have Easter dinner at her place. So I did the shopping and then pulled some stuff out of the freezers Saturday night and came over early Sunday to help with the prep and setup. L and MIL both came over after church so we could follow the long standing family tradition of eating too much on Easter Sunday. MIL hurt her shoulder/arm in the blizzard#1 and blizzard#2 aftermath and so isn’t able to use one arm right now. Hopefully that will get better when she starts theraapy later this week. Since Mom had the home care nurse coming by later in the day to change the surgical dressings, MIL was in discomfort with her arm, and L had to get ready to head back to the mountains, we were done and had it all cleaned up before 3pm. 

I took a spare CRT monitor over to the MIL’s on Saturday to replace her dead LCD. She was undergoing computer withdrawal since it had failed last Tuesday. After getting it set up and verifying functionality, I brought her dead LCD back here. In keeping with my reputation as the computer whisperer, I have it back up and running. I’m going to keep it running on the bench system here for a few days just to make sure I really fixed the problem and then will journey back over to return it to MIL’s computer desk. (I know she is having a hard time with the smaller screen and square pixels of the old CRT monitor she is stuck with right now versus the LCD with its 16:9 widescreen layout.)

It is amusing how dedicated both Mom and MIL are to their computers. Email, word procesing, and the web are an important part of their lives. Given that they both were drug, with at least some kicking and screaming, into the digital age decades ago, it is funny how important the computer is in their lives now. I often wonder what my grandfather would have thought of computers in day to day life if he had lived a bit longer. I still have a rudimentry computer game he built in the late ’50s using relays and a vacuum tube for the computing power. I suspect he would have enjoyed the modern computer and its prescence in daily life immensely.

Well, time to get some meeting materials put together for tomorrow. Hope your Easter was good and this week is off to a good (not mopey) start.

I guess I’ll go de-mope in the park with Molly. She’s just about ready to rise from the “L left” mopes and check out the park for squirrels.