Kitchen Sink

Reduce, reuse, recycle

I’m going out on a limb here, talking about work. I figure this is a strong limb though. I’ll be discussing my latest blogging hiatus shortly. A partial post is in the hopper. Something to look forward to, eh? My office chair was fifteen years old and saw better days. It’s upholstery was clean and intact, but almost every mechanism was either failing or broken. “Go new…
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Going for Broke

Never

No, I should really know better. When Cheryl and I moved here from Orlando we lived with her parents until we could find a place for ourselves. For almost as long as we’ve had a place of our own, Cheryl has been keeping an eye out for a place we could share with her parents. Every time she’s proposed a place my answer was very simple. NO. I’ve never wavered. Every time I’ve…
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Computer

The cash stampede

I didn’t even know it had a name. I’d never seen it before my Beth’s PowerBook started having problems last month. Apparently there is a screen of death on a Mac, the dread blue-screen equivalent: the GSOD, or grayed-out screen of death. I can’t blame you if you’ve never heard of it. It’s rarely seen in the wild, confined mostly to secret labs, under highly…
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Kitchen Sink

More than secure

I know staples are a staple of office life (I’ve been waiting all my life to write that phrase), but I’m a firm believer in the “one stack, one staple” concept. It’s an obsession. It raises my sense of self-righteousness to supreme being levels. Then there’s the lazy stapler. Every office has one. How many times has this happened to you? You’re removing a…
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Soapbox

One fine whine

One of the advantages of US style health care is being able to obtain services without having to wait until the sun goes supernova (which could be a really long time, since our sun doesn’t have enough mass to go it alone). – common wisdom in the US. When I say common wisdom (an oxymoron in the US) I’m refering to the part about waiting for healthcare, not the part about the sun.
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SoapboxThe Sunshine State

Bad taste and butchery

I get a little uncomfortable when people start talking about “trimming” trees. My reasons break down like this: any jackass with insurance and a chainsaw can get a licence to trim trees in Florida, and Floridians in general don’t seem to like trees. That’s what I gather from the results anyway. I’m not against all forms or reasons for tree trimming. There are times…
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Soapbox

Why do I hate thee, DST? How about I tell you

What was good for 1918 isn’t necessarily so great 90 years later. Contrary to common wisdom, some studies show it causes an increase in energy consumption (especially for us poor folk down south) – partly because of a little thing called air conditioning. How often does common wisdom lead us astray? Shifting high noon to lower noon is just asking for trouble. We have nothing to fear…
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Wellbeing

Digging for pain and finding a vein

Whining about your dentist is a blogging stapple. Lucky for you, I’m pro-staple. “Are you ok?” This is the great rhetorical dental question of our time. I love it. No offense to any women dentists out there, but this is the point in the post where I pretend to be something I’m not, and slip into the vernacular of the “real man.” I love it because I think it…
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Soapbox

Six months of billing futility, revisited

Something about that call isn’t sitting right with me. I finally got through to my insurance company, only to be told the problem: “we’re getting bills.” Now, as some poor shmuck with little more than a family and a mailbox, this sounds like something perfectly resonable to say… if it was born of my lips. As my insurance company – whose sole purpose in the…
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