• A questionable beer metaphor

    Earlier this evening I was having a splendid chat with myself…

    “John, my good fellow, I do say you’re having quite the evening.”
    “Mighty good of you to notice old chap.”
    “If you don’t mind my saying, you’re doing a superb job.”
    “Why thank you. As it happens, I don’t mind at all John.”

    This is where Cheryl rudely interrupted…

    “John, did you give Beth her medicine?”
    “No, I don’t believe I did.”
    “Did you take out the garbage?”
    “No, I don’t believe I did that either.”
    “Does Adam need to be changed?”
    “Dear Lord Woman, you certainly know how to shave the foam from a pint, don’t you?”

  • Sometimes there’s a reason, and other times there’s a plug

    During my week-long sojourn in sickness there was this peek in the week when my temperature had a few too many integers added in. (I loose two points for ending a sentence with a preposition… would it kill me to come up with another throw away noun?) During this time of confusion, lethargy, and yes… pain, you’d think someone would have had the decency to put the poor creature down. No wait, strike that. The confusion part hasn’t quite worn off (yet). During this time (yada yada yada)… I didn’t check my email.

    “For crying out loud, you mean to tell me all this carrying on is about email?”

    Yes.

    “Are we going to keep pretending this is a conversation with someone else?”

    No.

    “Don’t you love me anymore?”

    Please, not now.

    —

    Every now and again there is a place for division. Everything below the above line is quite serious. To recap, that’s: above the line = not serious, below the line = serious. Please enjoy the rest of your reading experience. (The Staff)

    Yes, email. Three days of previously unchecked email produced a little under 300 pieces of junk mail, as sorted by my trusty Mac. Ten pieces of email escaped my filter, and indeed were legit. Three days, approximately 300 pieces of email, and 97 percent of it was total crap (pardon my english). There’s nothing new here, junk email is as ubiquitous as that envelope of coupons I get from Val-Pak every week (or at least, that’s who it was the last time I paid it enough attention to read the envelope… sometime back in ’68 I think it was, right after my first tour in ‘Nam). No, what I was interested in was how my email strategy was working out. I have one address, through my ISP, that I use essentially as a throw away address. I protect it as much as I can, but when I need to provide an address to an organization or a company I’m doing business with – that’s the one I use. Then there’s my precious. My one address I get from my favorite computer company that no one gets but my friends and family. And last, there’s a dummy email address I set up with my ISP. I’ve never used it. I’ve never given it to anyone. I set up new computers in my house and I forget I have it. As expected, my throw away address brings in a lot of the junk. Also as expected, my precious generates very little junk mail (only 3 of the 300, in fact). No, the real corker is that my dummy address generates almost the same number of junk messages as the throw away address. I haven’t mentioned Cheryl’s address. She’s got a precious address from my favorite computer company too… that she treats like a cheap whore. Before we had THE (email) TALK, she gave that thing to anything with an IP address. We’re talkin all kinds of bad email mojo man. You know what? Even Cheryl’s address gets less junk (like one half) than my dummy address from my ISP, that as you may recall – I’ve NEVER USED.

    It all boils down to this: it’s just one more reason you need to get a Mac… or not, so long as it’s not so many of you that you spoil my good thing I’ve got going on.

  • A day in the life… in hell

    We don’t pull any punches on this site baby! We may embellish a few, or just plain make them up, but nothing gets pulled in MY HOUSE! I am of course not talking literally about my physical place of residence… a recent gallop poll of married Americans suggests that the average couple, married 5 years or longer, pulls approximately 154.2 out of an average 155 potential “punches” in any given hour together. This poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 40% (largely based on whether some household appliance is involved).

    Nay, I speak of this site as my house – the domain over which I may exclusively rule. It is password protected, after all. Ah, but I digress damn near to the point of egress…

    Heck, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah, I was talking about hell. “A state or place of great suffering, an unbearable experience.” That’s how my widget dictionary defines hell (well, it’s one of several definitions – this is the one without religious tie ins – I don’t want to be offending anyone, supernatural or otherwise, with my careless comparison of a cold to eternal damnation).

    By Joe I think I’ve got it! I’ll call it a secular hell.

    That pretty much sums up this week. It started late last week with Beth doing the kind of running Cheryl REALLY doesn’t like in the house, and loosing three pounds in the process. The good thing for Beth is that this little bug was just doing a test run on her. No, it appears that dear ole dad was the real target all along. I felt like someone was playing pin the symptom on the daddy. Fever, aches and pains, fever, sore throat, fever, nausea, fever, someone using my head as a speed bag, fever, someone using my sinus cavity as a concrete mold for a piece of abstract art… and fever.

    The worst cold is when it gets you up at two in the morning. You’re lying there, incredibly uncomfortable, but it hurts way more to move… but, you move anyway. You get to the new position and it’s no better. You count to twenty groans and move again. Still no dice. You count twenty more groans, alternating silent explicatives (it requires too much energy to actually talk out loud), and repeat. After repeating this exercise a few times I typically fall into the dead man’s trance. This is when learned helplessness seeps in (there is no comfortable position), and I just lie in that last position staring at everything and nothing. This usually lasts until my subconscious does some crack math for me in the background, and alerts me that it’s time for another dose of the OTC (over the counter – drugs that is). It usually takes me about thirty minutes from that point to unlearn the learned helplessness, and to gather sufficient will to move. There’s a 50/50 chance I’ll trip over one of the kid’s toys on my pilgrimage to chemical Mecca, where I’ll find myself on the floor, and faced with another dilemma. Is it worth getting up again, or should I just lie on the floor for the night? You may think it’s a no-brainer, but after the struggle of getting up and unceremoniously dumping myself on my keester in the dark… the floor is feeling pretty good. Compromise was the name of the game on this night… I crawled. So yada yada yada, I got the medicine, yada yada yada, I went to bed, and yada yada yada, I got up the next morning.

    The bottom line is I was sick all week. It was great fun. I’m feeling a little better, hence this entry, but I’m debating the great “work” debate. After a fever induced hazy week at home, I’m not sure I remember what it looks like anymore. Will I remember the code for the door? Will I remember where the door is? Maybe I should stay home one more day.