Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 31

I darn near violated one of my personal rules for this blog several times in the past month.  Fall colors just beg to be photographed and shared and I became sorely tempted to do so.  That may explain some of the recent lack of black and white photography.

I count myself fortunate to live in a part of the world where the fall season brings with it hillsides full of color.  Every time I’ve lived somewhere that doesn’t have this like Northern Illinois (where you can only see one line of trees) and Oklahoma (where the scrubby trees may look nice for an instant on the lone day between summer and winter), I have felt out of place.

Fall hung around for quite awhile here in the Midwest this year.   After a coolish August, temperatures remained well above normal for most of October and November.  Peak fall color normally occurs around the late teens in October, but did not occur until about the first week of November this year.  Our first hard freeze did not come around until last week  <sarcasm> but this has nothing to do with climate change </sarcasm>.

I’m all for jumping on the climate change bandwagon until I realize that another month has passed by without filling my heating oil tank.

I raked the leaves in the yard here at Casa del Boss with the helps of Ms. Boss and middle two Bosslets.  Believe it or not, this was the first year we did so.  From what the neighbors tell me, the guy who owned this house in 1997 declared it a ‘nature preserve’ and stated he would not be doing any more yard work.  Fast forward to when we first moved into the house and you could barely see our house from the street from all the honeysuckle and other weeds.  Slowly but surely (and with increasing competence), we have reclaimed the yard from nature to the point where we finally had a ‘mowable’ yard this year.  I’ve already killed my grass by not raking leaves once in my adult life, thank you to Ms. Boss reminding me that I really didn’t want that to happen again.

Today’s reward for a job well done?  A cup of homemade cocoa from the hands of Ms. Boss.  It truly defines unctuousness in a cup.

A bit of World Wide Web Wednesday for you on this Sunday afternoon:  https://www.misterhoneysuckle.com.  Got honeysuckle and want it gone?  This is worth every… single… penny.  I just so happen to have a neighbor that loaned me his for free.

Sometimes home ownership sucks.  On the other hand, sometimes you go out and do some work that makes a huge visual impact like we did today and it feels really good.  Now if I can only remember that next Sunday when the next round of chores come along…

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 30

Searching for a theme in this particular post may be an exercise in futility.  This one is truly random.

It’s Veterans’s Day today.  My last communication with my father before he died suddenly was a pic of my daughters wishing him a Happy Veterans’ Day to their favorite veteran.  He was off having an adventure at the time, as he was prone to do, and was somewhere I knew he would not likely receive it right away.  I never imagined I wouldn’t ever enjoy the opportunity of speaking to him ever again.  I hope he did actually receive it.  His granddaughters loved their ‘Pa’ dearly.

As I’m sure you already inferred from the previous paragraph, my father was a veteran.  He served as a naval aviator during Vietnam, though he never actually went to Vietnam.  He pushed very hard for me to join Navy ROTC when I went to college, I wanted nothing to do with it.  It actually became a heated argument during orientation.  He finally relented.  It took years for us to discover the truth behind the outcome.  I finally admitted that ROTC would have done me some good.  He confided that he gave in because he discovered that the ROTC program at my school was in complete shambles.

My eldest daughter’s boyfriend turns twenty this weekend.  Fortunately for me, she softened the blow of this news by reminding me that she turns nineteen this week.

Yesterday’s day off from work provided me the joyous opportunity to have lunch with Ms. Boss and my eldest Bosslet.  Afterwards, we stopped by the coffee shop where my daughter works part-time to get a coffee.  It was very gratifying to watch her navigating the adult world successfully – talking with us, chatting with her regular customers, executing her plan for the day.  It looks like we may be on the verge of launching one into the world.  One down, three to go.

The middle two Bosslets, freshmen in high school, just finished their first marching band season.  They have found their tribe which make me very happy.

My youngest Bosslet is in her first year at the middle school, a place I am convinced takes perfectly wonderful children and transforms them into something I do not recognize.  It’s happening again.  Yes, I know this would happen regardless of whether they were middle school or not, but humor me.

The past two Veterans’ Day weekends included running a half marathon.  That won’t be happening this year.  In fact, a half marathon won’t be happening this year, period.  A ten-miler in April will go down as my peak mileage for 2017.  A health scare in June meant I only ran twenty miles for all of July.  The aggravating part is that the health scare was almost completely unfounded and running would have helped.  I never got back into my routine of running five miles at three times a week.  I went for four yesterday and managed just three.

To all the veterans out there, Happy Veterans’ Day.  Thank you so much for your service.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 29

NPR had a blurb today regarding a handwritten note by Albert Einstein that was selling for $1.6 million. Apparently, it was life advice written to a Japanese bellhop when he refused to take a tip from Einstein. As Einstein himself predicted, it ended up being worth a lot of money.

My father remarried fairly soon after my mother died. My stepmother was preparing to move into the house and getting rid of things that weren’t needed. She ran across a box of napkins that had my mother and father’s name printed on them and placed them in the pile to be discarded. She meant no harm, but it felt wrong to me. When she wasn’t looking, I took them and hid them in my dresser drawer where I kept most things of sentimental value. Years later, I finally convinced myself I no longer needed them.

Ms. Boss, the Bosslets, and myself moved over 900 miles to our current location about five years ago. Preparation for the move involved multiple trips to the transfer station where we literally deposited tons of items in the landfill (for the record, this particular exploit is starting to fade, but the figure of two tons sticks out as being the overall amount). Trophies, magazines, blankets, clothes, yard tools, there wasn’t a single category of household item that was omitted from the purge. It was tremendously liberating. We’ve threatened to do it again.

I just contemplated the question of what single item I would save if I had a house fire. I immediately thought wedding ring, but that’s almost too easy – it’s always on my finger, if it’s safe, I’m safe.

The lengths to which Amazon will go to bring stuff to your house is just staggering if you sit there and think about it for a bit.

I first rented an apartment the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college. My grandfather and I moved me on a day I had a 102-degree fever into a place that didn’t have the electric turned on yet. I had a bed, a dresser, a couch, a picnic table with benches that doubled as a coffee table, a few pots and pans, and very little else. I spent the summer by myself working, sleeping, playing solitaire with actual cards, riding my bike all over the place, and eating out of pots and pans. It was simple. Sometimes I miss simple.

The day we moved to our current town, I navigated the Ryder truck that held everything we owned through the mountains on a busy interstate in a hellacious storm. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so close to disaster in my entire life.

I’m in the middle of a project where we have over $4 million worth of equipment stored in a warehouse. Bales and bales of shredded cardboard sit not more than twenty feet away one day only to replaced by another a day or two later. Sitting right behind both of them are at least fifty vending machines from a bankrupt company that have been stored there at least five years if the papers hanging on them can be believed. In a climate-controlled facility where square-footage is likely the same rate for everyone, it is interesting to contemplate the value of what is being stored and why the owners spend money to do so.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 28

A fiery crash occurred near my workplace yesterday that took the life of one of the occupants of the vehicle.  I’ll admit that my first thoughts lamented my commute home for the evening, but I almost instantaneously chastised myself for the reaction.  In fact, I began to feel terrible about the whole situation – a human life here one minute and gone the next.  Think about this – a life-altering event for those who knew this person becomes a minor aggravating annoyance for many others.

I saw a cat run over by a car one day while riding home on the bus from elementary school.  I can still visualize it twitching on the ground well after it’s life was taken.  I spent the next half-hour on the bus upset over the situation and instantly ran to embrace my mother for comfort when I got home.  Unfortunately, it was very easy to find her in the house as she was bedridden.

The first day I came home and found my mother in bed, I remember her explanation to me:  she had something the size of a grapefruit in her tummy that didn’t belong there.  The word ‘tumor’ did not compute.  I remained in a state of semi-ignorance for months.  The horrifying, epiphanal moment occurred months later.  My father and I were watching a television news magazine.  When a piece came on about a diet that was supposed to help fight cancer, I saw him grab a pen and paper and start writing things down.  It took me a few days to work up the courage to ask my mother to tell me the truth.

I barely cried when my mother died – outside of a time or two during the funeral, I didn’t shed a single tear.  In fact, I went to school that day and took three final exams and even went to a teacher’s house to take another after school.  The tears, the pain, the anguish had all come about a month before while I was on class campout.  I called home to find out that my mother had gone to the hospital once again.  I knew what I had seen over the past few months since her mother passed away.  The changes in her body, the bouts of confusion, the slow eroding of who she was kept growing and growing.  I knew she was there, but already gone.  For years I thought I knew why I didn’t cry when she died.  Yesterday, for the first time, I could finally admit to myself why I truly didn’t.  I didn’t because her death was a blessing.

My father is no longer with us. He lived a very full 69 years on this earth, yet every time I hear someone accomplish something in their seventies or beyond, I’m reminded of the years that were taken from him.

For a good portion of my life, I worked as a 9-1-1 dispatcher.  Those who work in this occupation regularly interject themselves into the tragedy of others –  I didn’t see death often, but I heard it constantly.  If you work long enough in that profession, homicides and other senseless deaths morph from tragedies to notches on your belt courtesy of an increasingly jaded attitude.  I did reach a point, however, where the barbs of death did start to penetrate the armor I had created for myself. In some ways, that’s why I actually felt better about my reaction yesterday – it seems I am finally reclaiming my humanity.

In just the past few minutes, I exercised that humanity. I was going to describe two of the worst calls I had towards the end of my dispatching career until I realized that I was only putting notches in my belt by doing so. Perhaps I’m not humanity is not as reclaimed as I thought.