Month: August 2021

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 55

I’m flying as I write this. My employer is sending me to a conference for four days. If something is less than ten hours away, I’ll drive every time. The conference is at least a seventeen hour drive, so I’m flying… and not loving it.

Ms. Boss played the part of chauffeur this morning driving me an hour to the airport after making sure I had everything I needed. She embraced me tightly and sent me on my way. She travels much more than I do. The Bosslets say I do nothing but mope when she’s away. They’re not wrong. Here’s hoping her moping is minimal. I look forward to the hug on the other end of the trip.

Ms. Boss insisted I borrow her backpack for the trip saying it made carrying a laptop and tablet much easier. I, of course, agreed with the more seasoned traveler and did so, but began having doubts as I was navigating through the airport. It began to be quite a challenge keeping it on my shoulder and I kept having to readjust. I then came to a realization – I was carrying it like I did in college when two straps was dumb and one strap was cool. The second strap is there for a reason. As you might expect, putting on the second strap solved my problem. One strap is dumb, two straps are cool.

I remember the first time I ever flew. How long ago? Let’s just say i was wearing a leisure suit at the time and leave it at that. Those were the days when traveling was an event, something you got dressed up for. The majority of the passenger manifest today lies far from that standard. Some made sartorial choices today that I would not make… on a dare… ever.

I will say that one passenger on this flight is dressed for ‘old time travel’. Wearing a pink linen sport coat and white pants, I first noticed the older gentleman standing at the bar of a bourbon place. I instantly passed judgement that 5:15 on a Sunday morning was way too early for anyone to drink bourbon even if you needed a bit of Dutch courage to get on the plane. I then saw the bartender go over to the coffee pot and pour a cup. By going to the bar to get coffee, he managed to skip the huge lines at McDonald’s and Starbucks and get something that I did not end up getting this morning. I saw him talking with the gate attendant just before boarding. While I didn’t see him when I boarded, I suspect he landed himself in first class. Maybe instead of passing judgement, I should take a few notes.

Take a 6’3”, 310 pound man who hasn’t flown in a bit, squeeze him into the middle seat between a woman who does not open the window to allow spatial reference causing disorientation and a man who seems to be praying every time the littlest thing happens and unsettling me just the teeniest bit. Turn off the air conditioner while waiting at the gate to make it nice and stuffy to get him good and uncomfortable. Then hurtle him down the runway. Will he survive the ordeal? Stay tuned!

I have just popped my ears for the umpteenth time this trip.

The beverage cart is making its way down the aisle. Today’s choice will be ginger ale. Why? My mom had me drink it during my leisure suit days. In a closely-related circumstance, a barf bag was always nearby in those days as well. Drinking ginger ale today, no barf bag necessary.

Out of curiosity, I checked for a barf bag in the seat in front of me. It says ‘waste’, no mention of barf, vomit, puke, emesis, upcheck, hurl, or even sick – all words that might place that evil little thought into your conscious. ‘+1’ to the marketing department for that move.

I got a whole can of ginger ale! That’s what I’m talking about! No cost-saving measures on this trip! I also got a bag of pretzels which were also pretty tasty. The best part of both? I got to take my mask off to consume both of them. I am looking forward to the same experience on my connecting flight.

The woman next to me ordered ginger ale after I did. I’m hoping that it’s because I’m an influencer or because she also has an affinity for ginger ale and not because she needs to… waste. Perhaps she should open the window so we can orient ourselves?

The end of my first leg ended with quite the thump on landing. Had the woman next to me had the window open, I might have been a bit more prepared. I, like others, gasped a bit. After taxiing what seemed like forever, we pull into the apron and skid to a stop. The captain did not exit the cockpit and greet the passengers afterwards. It’s not hard to understand why.

I changed planes at DFW. I had twenty minutes from the time the plane door opened until boarding was scheduled for my next flight. I was in Terminal B, my connecting flight was in Terminal D. Ms. Boss’ attempt to properly hydrate required a small stop on the way. Moving quite quickly, leaping into the SkyTrain as the doors were closing, moving quickly when the people move wasn’t, I made it in time for boarding… only to be told that the flight would be delayed.

Second flight? No ginger ale, no pretzels. Bummer. On a positive note, I did get a window seat. That @&$#% stayed open… the entire…time…

I made it. As soon as the wheels hit the runway, I text Ms. Boss advising that I have lived to see another day and prepared myself to tackle baggage retrieval and ground transportation to my final destination. Three things would have improved this little excursion – a car, plenty of time, and Ms. Boss – and most definitely not in that order.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 54

I couldn’t sleep last night. Despite being quite tired at 10:00 and falling asleep right away, I woke up about 2:00 and was up for the better part of two hours. Two ‘kitty naps’ during the day made the ground fertile for insomnia, but the seeds of sleeplessness sprang forth from a litany of minor to moderate concerns. The air conditioner running on and on and on struggling to keep up with a warm humid night sprouted first, thoughts of my chartreuse green swimming pool came soon after. Work soon made an appearance in my mind courtesy of my reading emails filled with tales of woe despite the fact I’m on vacation. I got up and consumed some cookies and milk (definitely not on the diet) in an effort to put me in a food coma which started to work until the dog objected to Bosslet 3’s exercise of her newfound rights as an adult to come home at 3:00 in the morning. Sleep finally came (at least I think it came) with the recitation of random words as they came up in my mind. I’d give an example, but that’s probably too deep of a dive into my psyche.

I was afraid of the dark when I was young. I wasn’t so much afraid of monsters, but of some nefarious person breaking into the house. I had a nightlight in my room and there was another in the hallway, but my parents always kept the hall light on in our ranch-style home until they went to bed. Bedtime was 9:00 back then. I would generally hear them watch their 9:00 show and sometimes their 10:00 show as well. When I heard the local news come on at 11:00, I started to get anxious – the hall light would be going off soon. Panic would begin to seep in when I heard the theme for the Tonight Show come from the television. As soon as Johnny’s monologue was over, the light was going off. When the light went off, I toughed it out some days. Other times, only crying for mom could make things right.

I spent the overwhelming majority of my first twelve years of full-time employment working midnights. While I liked working at night, I did not enjoy the lifestyle of working at night. Early on, I found that one of two things happened with that schedule – I was either going to be miserable the days that I worked or the days I was off. Based on my nonexistent social life in the early days of that schedule, I chose to be miserable on my days off – sleeping during the day and finding some sort of something to do at night. In the days before widespread use of the internet, this wasn’t easiest thing to do. Sometimes I would drive around in the middle of the night for hours. Sometimes I would go to the casino and let them have all my money. More often than not, the answer was beer, lots and lots (and lots) of beer to pass the time and make myself sleepy and end up with some sort of rest through part of the night and some of the day. In hindsight, it really developed into quite a problem for me for a number of years. Perhaps I should have felt more ashamed over the looks people gave me at the convenience store when I rolled up to the cashier with a twelve-pack at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning? I happy to report that the ‘beer equals sleep’ days are behind me, it actually has the opposite effect on me these days.

By the time Ms. Boss rolled into the picture in my eighth year of working midnights, beer alone was not getting the job done. During the summer, my ten-hour shift started before the sun went down and ended after it came back up. What had been a minor annoyance during my younger years morphed into a definite impediment to sleep. Daylight streamed into my bedroom during my entire sleep schedule. My first attempt to combat this problem was sleeping in the only windowless room of the house – the bathroom. That worked like you would expect it to. I tried my walk-in closet. It tried the hallway with all the doors closed. I finally got somewhat smart and taped garbage bags over my windows with duct tape which worked well enough, but did not impress the future Ms. Boss at all the first time she found herself in that part of the house. Somehow, room darkening shades remained beyond the grasp of my comprehension (perhaps too much beer). What finally resolved this issue? moving to day shift two years after we were married.

As I mentioned previously, my twin girls turned eighteen years old this week. This means that the hardest time I ever had with sleep was eighteen years ago this week. The story of their birth is not my story to tell, but suffice it to say that the urgent situation we were face with lead to very little sleep in the forty-eight hours leading up to when they were born, four weeks before they were due. After seeing them enter this world and Ms. Boss moved to her room for the evening, I was ready to crash on the partner bed for a good night’s sleep… or so I thought. At 1:00 in the morning, the nurse rolls in with Bosslet 3 ready for feeding time (Bosslet 2, who needed some more intensive care for the evening, was handled by the nursing staff). A half and hour later, with that handled, I went back to sleep. At 4:00, Bosslet 3 returned for another feeding. At 7:00, both the twins arrived. It was a pattern that lasted for at least eight weeks – one hour of feeding, two hours of sleep, one hour of feeding, two hours of sleep. My government employer allowed me eleven weeks off, but it certainly was no vacation as I fed kids and did my best to help Ms. Boss recover. I was never so grateful as I was the first time both of them missed their early morning meal. The whole experience was exhausting. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 53

As I mentioned in RST 52, the area around the Red River Gorge reminds me a lot of home, especially all the backroads. A younger C.L. driving his blue 1979 Chevy Monte Carlo would have loved to tackle the highways and byways of this region. This is despite of the fact that his father disconnected the four-barrel carburetor to keep him from killing himself. He also would have loved driving the white 1984 Ford Escort – a base model with manual transmission and no air conditioning and funky paint job – because its rack-and-pinion steering loved the curves. He even would have enjoyed driving the gunmetal gray 1982 VW Rabbit Diesel – a four-speed manual transmission whose German-engineered steering made up for a lack of power. He instead, this week, must drive through the twisty-turny mountain roads with a 2019 VW Atlas. He is quite, quite sure that his much more sedate navigation of the local terrain has to do with the fact that the Atlas is top heavy and leans and has absolutely nothing to with the fact that he’s older and more aware of the potential consequences of crashing and may have lost a step or two.

At one point in our lives, the Bosses were pretty damn poor – I’m talking feeding the family for the week on a budget that is half of what we paid for dinner last night. The low point of this time in our lives occurred when the transmission let go in our 2002 Chevy Suburban. Only the even numbered gears would work with absolutely no reverse. This vehicle was crucial to our existence because it was the only vehicle that would haul all six of us and navigate our driveway (see RST 47 for that story). A tow truck in this situation was simply out of the question. Fortunately, Ms. Boss had parked the vehicle in such a way that we could drive through our (fortunately) dirt yard and around the house. Once we got out on the road, I’d give it plenty gas so it didn’t stall out in second to get it going, then run the RPM up enough so that I could drop it into fourth. I drove backroads like this for fifteen miles to get us to the transmission shop. We defaulted on our mortgage that month to get it fixed. It was a low point in our lives together. Hard work by the two of us means these kind of things don’t happen to us anymore.

The ‘79 Monte Carlo was loaned to me by my parents… and taken away by my parents and given to my step-brother… who promptly wrecked it. When it came to be my turn to get a ‘college car’, the ‘84 Ford Escort became my transportation for the last two years of college and for a year beyond. I was okay with driving the car known as the ‘clown car’, but that otherwise ‘jolly’ vehicle was decidedly unhappy with the road salt laid down in Northern Illinois and began rusting with great abandon. That lead me to purchase my first new car: a white 1994 Chevy S10 manual five-speed with a single cab and a 1.9 liter engine. As much as my father and my step-brother wanted me to ‘upgrade’, I bought the truck that met my needs with air conditioning and an AM/FM radio and nothing else. Confident in my purchase and after a week of visiting family and friends, I started back home towards Northern Illinois. I was driving down the road with 800 miles on the odometer when all of the sudden, the car made a terrible noise and began slowing down. I pulled over, unable to get any further and stood by the side of the road. A guy in a Ford dually pickup stopped and gave me a lift to the gas station where I called AAA and had it towed to the closest Chevy dealership. Eventually, the truck got back to the Chevy dealership who discovered they failed to dealer prep the crankcase which caused it to drop into all five gears at once. Me and Chevy transmissions, right? The biggest of the situation is that the transmission failed right in front of the Ford transmission factory.

Despite inauspicious beginnings with the S10, it treated me well until we parted ways 2003. I have fond memories of that truck. It transported the soon-to-be Ms. Boss and I to Canada on our very first trip together, Not long after, it carried the two us through Colorado and Utah in search of adventure. Most notably, however, it was the reason why she knew where I lived when she placed a note about whether I would be interested in getting to know her better, but that’s a different tale for another time.