Blog Number 154

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well I am still enjoying my sister-in-law's CD collection, especially the first CD by Day Of Fire.  It is a very powerful CD.  I am also eagerly awaiting the new Anberlin CD that I ordered last Tuesday.  So much music, not enough time to listen to it (sigh)!  I am also reading a great book titled, "U2 by U2" about the history of the band U2.  It is quite interesting to read about how it all started.

Tonight is AWANA night and my wife had volunteered to help out so I am all alone at home for a few hours.  I played one game of Sonic the Hedgehog on my new (used) Nintendo GameCube and now I am a little bored so I am trying to find some inspiration to blog.  One thing that I cannot believe is THIS toy.  Have you heard of this?  This is the Barbie Doll with Pooping Dog.  Okay, the actual name is Barbie Doll & Tanner Dog but my title is more accurate.  This even comes with a pooper scooper!  I wonder who at Mattel thought up this concept?  Were they on drugs or something?  I guess I should feel lucky my 5 year old daughter does not want this toy (yet).  This reminds me of an article I was reading online recently that listed the most dangerous toys of all time.  Read that link and see how many of those toys you actually owned (makes me feel fortunate I survived childhood).

Well I think I have time for one more game of Sonic before everyone returns.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 153

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

A few years back while I was at a friends house, he was showing me this really cool CD case holder that his wife had bought him for his birthday.  It had a light on it and held about 100 CDs and it also had a button that moved all the CDs so you could look for the one you wanted.  My description does not do it justice, it was truly a cool device.  Anyway, as I was playing with the thing, I saw a CD that I wanted to borrow.  I asked and he said sure.  I opened the CD case only to find out the CD was not in it.  He had no idea where the CD was actually and so I left a little disappointed.

Fast forward to last year sometime when I was at my sister-in-law's house and looking at her (somewhat boring) CD shelf.  I found a CD that I wanted to borrow.  She told me that was fine and I opened the CD case only to (again) find that it was not in there.  She said she thought the CD might be in her carrying case in her car.  Either way, I did not get that CD either.

Fast forward to Saturday.  We headed down to the Austin area to visit some friends.  We took our van but first I went to my car to retrieve my CD carrying case so we would have plenty of tunes for the drive there and back (about 7 hours round trip).  My wife also has her own carrying case for her van so I decided to flip through it instead.  After I picked up what I thought was her CD case, I realized that it was somebody else's case.  Upon further inspection I found out it was my sister-in-law's carrying case and lo and behold the CD that I wanted to borrow last year was in there along with about 40 other CDs!  She had brought the case with her when she drove down here with my wife before I returned from Argentina.  So now I am in heaven, having many new CDs to listen to.  I asked my wife and the sister-in-law has not even asked about the case so I will have plenty of time to listen to all of them before she notices it is gone.

Unless of course she reads this blog.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 152

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

One of my skillsets is the ability to judge (just by looking) the amount of dry spaghetti it will take to feed my family so that we have enough without having too much so that we have some left over.  You may scoff at this.  You may think, "Jon, this is not really a skill."  I disagree.  It is a skill, at least to my wife who does not have this ability.  Up until a few years ago, I allowed her to eyeball the dry spaghetti amount.  She always made too much.  I would ask her why she made too much.  She would always reply with the same excuse, "I had it measured and it did not look like enough, so I added some more."  Amateur!

So, up until I took over this duty full time, we always had leftover spaghetti (a LOT of leftover spaghetti).  That would be fine if spaghetti was good re-heated.  In my opinion, it is not (and I have had plenty of spaghetti to practice on).

Now, you may think that it would be simple to teach this skill.  It is not as easy as you may first think.  It is not a matter of counting individual strands of spaghetti.  First of all, we switch brands a lot and every brand cooks / expands differently.  Also, you have to take into account the FHF (Family Hunger Factor).  How long has it been since we last ate?  What the last meal heavy or light?  Will this be the last meal of the day?  Do we need the kids to be hungry again at a certain time of the day (you have to make more / less accordingly).  Yes, there are many factors to consider.

And I don't take my skill lightly.  I know that the wife and family are relying on me to make the proper amount.  I feel the pressure!  I don't want to hear the words, "Dad, is there more?" when there is not or "Dad, you made too much!"  The pressure is insane at times!  But at the end of the meal when it is clean up time, it is a great feeling to see full faces, empty plates and an empty spaghetti pot making for easier clean up.

Yes, it is a skill.  Before I sat down to write this blog entry I measured the spaghetti and now it is almost done so I am going to enjoy the fruit of labor.  Until next time...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 151

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

So for the third Wednesday night in a row the wife and I hit the Starbuck's.  I am beginning to think that she thinks this is going to be a weekly thing.  Somehow I must curtail this thought as the family budget does not have $10 / week for gourmet coffee drinks.  Anyway, we ordered our drinks a sat down with a piece of coffee cake.  Now my wife has this particular thing that she does that bothers me.  She will take her fork, cut off a slice of cake, put the piece on the fork and then hold it there while she talks.  She will not actually eat the bite of cake, she just holds it there on the fork...for a long time...while she finishes her thought...and starts another thought...etc.

This has always bothered me, during our entire marriage actually.  And she is aware of it, and yet she still does this.  I don't know why this bothers me but there is something about starting a process and not finishing it that rubs me the wrong way.  For instance, if I put toothpaste on my toothbrush at home and the wife comes into the bathroom for some other reason and wants to give me a hug before I get a chance to brush my teeth, this too bothers me.  I must finish the process that I started (brushing my teeth) without interruption.  I think it has to do with how my job has been over the years.  The "tyranny of the urgent" always prevails at work and something more important is always interrupting what I am doing.  There are weeks where I will start something at 7:15 Monday morning and get interrupted at 7:30 and then more and more things interrupt and before you know it, it is Thursday afternoon and I have yet to get back to what I started on Monday morning.  Some weeks it is too much for my brain to handle.

So honey, when you start to eat a bite of cake, for God's sake, eat the bite, don't stop in between to tell me something!  Put it in your mouth, chew, swallow, and then tell me what you want to tell me.  Any other way is simply torture.  Ironically, as I am trying to finish this blog, she just came up behind me to tell me something.  So I could not even take 5 minutes to complete my random thoughts without being interrupted.  Such is my life.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 150

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well the son and I went out and bought a Nintendo GameCube yesterday.  This is a very big deal to me actually as the last time I owned any kind of game system it was the ORIGINAL Nintendo Entertainment System (aka NES - circa 1985).  I had some extra cash left over from Christmas so we went to a local used game store and shopped.  It was truly a toss up between the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube.  I have friends that either own one or the other and since I have never played either, I had to rely on my 8 year old to give me his expert opinion.  He decided the GameCube was the way to go since he liked the controller better.  I have no idea what criteria he used to arrive at this decision.  He seemed happy that he was involved in the decision so we picked up a used GameCube for $59 and an extra controller ($8).  We then picked out 3 games (Metroid Prime $6, Batman $8 and Sonic Mega Collection $13 - 7 games in one!).  Throw in a 1 year warranty and tax and for about $110 we were on our way home happy with our purchase.

Once we got home however we decided to watch a movie we had borrowed from the apartment front office movie collection.  Superman Returns is this 2 1/2 hour monster of a movie and it ate up our entire afternoon but we did have about 15 minutes to try out Sonic before church.  Everything was set up without a hitch until I plugged in the extra controller that we bought.  It works fine but it appears to be stuck on vibrate all the time.  To me this is annoying, to my son this is cool so I guess we are going to keep it.  We played one game of classic Sonic the Hedgehog each and had a good time.  I seem to have lost some of my Sonic skills since I last played the game (10+ years ago on a friend's original PlayStation).  No matter, I have plenty of time to get back in practice.

I was actually discussing the fact with a friend of mine the other day that I felt bad that all my son's friends had some sort of game system and all that he had was a retro Atari 2600 (which he loves by the way).  My friend admitted this was why he bought his system as well since all of his son's friends (except my son) had game systems too.  What a lovely marketing ploy peer pressure is and it is not even the kids that are feeling it!  It is us parents (or probably just the dad's).  Anyway it is the wife's turn at bath duty tonight so I have a few minutes to sharpen my Hedgehog moves.  Until then...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 149

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

First a moment of silence for the man who co-invented the remote control.  Robert Adler died today at the age of 93.  He helped invent the Zenith Space Command remote control in 1956.  Thanks Bob for all your work in making me a successful couch potato.

Since I drink a lot of coffee at work, I make many trips to the restroom.  I don't really keep count of how many trips that I make but it is probably 4+ times per day.  Given that there is only one restroom on my side of the building on my floor, and given that there are about 200 people on my side of the building and my floor, and given that about half of those people are male, it is not absurd to assume that I would see the same group of men in the restroom that I frequent.  Having said that, today I noticed that I keep running into the same 3 or 4 men repeatedly.

I suppose that it is possible that it is simply coincidence or that they too might be excessive coffee drinkers and thus it would increase the odds of me running into them but I cannot help thinking that this is not the case.  Somehow we are related.  Maybe the universe has given each person (or maybe just each man) an internal time clock for the need to arise to use the restroom.  Maybe my body is fine tuned to need to go there only certain times of the day (like 9:35, 11:47, 1:50 and 4:05 or something like that) and maybe these other men have internal clocks are are very similar to my clock and maybe if I frequented another restroom (like the one on the floor above me) then I would see the a different group of 3 or 4 guys all the time.  I think I will need more time to research this very important theory.

But for now, it is 6:56 and I feel the need to visit the restroom.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 148

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

I was running about 15 minutes late coming home yesterday.  The day before I was about 2 hours late so yesterday was much better I guess.  Anyway, I called the wife on the cell phone on the way home to talk.  I have a hands free earpiece / microphone so that I can keep both hands on the wheel.  I also try to dial before I get on the road so I am not messing with the little numbers on the phone while trying to dodge traffic.  Since yesterday was both a Wednesday and Valentine's day, she had the evening planned (translation: I had no say in the matter).

We were going to eat dinner (Sloppy Joe's) and then take the kids to AWANA (the Wednesday night church activity) and then we were going to head to Starbuck's.  We did the same thing last week actually so this was not a surprise.  I just did not think we were going to make a habit out of it!  We get to Starbuck's and sit down with our drinks and a desert.  After about 30 minutes or so, 3 teenagers sat down at the table next to us and started up their conversation.  By this time the wife and I had sort of run out of things to talk about and it was about time to leave anyway to pick up the kids.  However, since I was sitting the closest to these 3 teenagers, I could not help but listen in on their conversation.  OK, I could have helped it but I chose to eavesdrop.  I will have to paraphrase the conversation but here it is...

First Girl (FG):  Well isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?
Second Girl (SG): What?  I don't understand?  Why would a cot talk to a kettle?
FG: No, a pot.  A pot was calling the kettle black.
SG: I don't get it.
The Guy (TG): You know, a pot?  A pot calling the kettle!  Black?!
SG: Huh?

It went on like this for about 2 minutes and then...

TG:  The pot is black right?
SG: Yeah.
FG: And so is the kettle, right?
SG: Yeah.
TG: So the pot is calling the kettle black.
SG: I don't get it.  I hear what you are saying but what are you talking about?
FG and TG: (Sigh) Never mind.

Now I don't know which was funnier (or sadder), the fact that SG (probably 17 years old) had never heard this phrase before or that neither of the other 2 teenagers (probably around the same age) had so poor communication skills that they could not explain the concept at all.  I almost stood up and took over the conversation and gave them all an education but I thought better of it.  I wish now that I would have as it would have made for a more interesting ending to this blog.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 147

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

So it was my first Saturday back and since I did not take any days off after my return from Argentina that makes yesterday the first day to enjoy the family all day long.  We got up and the wife made pancakes and bacon and even let me have the extra cup of coffee (since our pot only seems to make enough for 5 cups of coffee).  Then we headed out to a mall in Dallas.  The wife and kids had gone there last Saturday (without me of course) and the daughter really wanted to show me...

...the Mall Ducks.  Yes this mall has ducks (and turtles too).  The Mall Ducks draw quite a crowd.  Especially young children.  Young children of parents who can afford to shop in this kind of mall.  Now this is a very high society mall and contains stores that I have no business being in (like Nordstrom's, Barney's of New York, Neiman Marcus, and even an entire store just for Lancôme!).  Really, there is no reason that I should ever (EVER) be in any of these stores (ever).  Prices are incredible and I don't even feel worthy to darken the doorway of the entrances of these places.  This reminds me of the feeling I had while in the Admiral's Club of American Airlines during my layover in Santiago, Chile.  I don't know why I have such an inferiority complex when I am out of my league.  The children of the parents who can afford to shop at this mall are terribly misbehaved (even resorting to throwing change AT the ducks WITHOUT any discipline from their parents after watching them do this).  But even with all of this I will probably go back to the mall just to see these ducks!

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon  

Blog Number 146

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well I am settling back into the old routine now that I am back in the states.  It is fun just sitting down and playing with my kids again.  Last night, the son and I built some impressive houses with his legos.  He was very impressed with my building skills.  His only trouble is that he never wants to tear anything apart after it is built.  His structures stay on the table for days (much to the displeasure of my wife).  My daughter has not stopped smiling since I have come home.  She has her daddy back (and her daddy's lap) and that is all she really needs in life apparently.

Things are even a little calmer at work.  I don't have this impending pressure of the timeline like I had in Argentina.  Things are still hectic but it is still less pressure than when I was gone and had a deadline looming over me.  I spoke to my coworker who is still down there today and he is doing well.  He has about 2 more weeks left in his stay and told me that Friday he is going to (another) "tour de cow" type bar-b-que.  I am a little envious of course but I think I have had enough cow intestines for one lifetime.

I have instant messaged my trainees every day and they all say that they miss me very much.  I even think that they really mean it!  I do miss them as well but am very glad to be home.  The wife claims that I am not allowed to leave the country ever again, ever!  So this may be my first and last time travelling like that.

I do have to apologize to a guy in Iowa though.  In my haste to get off the plane, through customs, and back to my wife, I grabbed the wrong suitcase and made it all the way home before I realized it.  I called the airport (had to leave a message) and then headed to lost and found.  They were very nice (well as nice as I expected anyway, after all, they deal with lost luggage every day of their lives).  Soon I was heading home with my suitcase and the other suitcase was catching up to the proper owner.  The tag (after I took time to read it) noted that it's final destination was Iowa.  I felt real bad for the owner but could not make up for my mistake at all.  So to you, dear owner of the suitcase I grabbed, I apologize.

Anyway, all is back to normal for now.  I can now get back to my normal blogs about nothing in particular.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 145

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Hola from the American Airlines Admiral's Club in Santiago, Chile.  I am just starting my 4 hour layover here.  I have never been in the Admiral's Club before and I must say this is very nice.  There is a food tray laid out, plenty of cushy seats and plenty to drink as well.  However there are some REAL business men here so I will have to try to blend in.  These guys are all sitting here acting like they belong.  Me, well I have this look on my face like they are going to discover that I am just a normal dude from Allen, TX and kick me out.

Well I said my goodbyes to my team yesterday evening at 6 PM.  It was rather sad as I really like all 10 people that I trained for the last 3 weeks or so.  We promised to keep in touch of course and I am sure we will but I will miss talking with them face to face each day.  Today my coworker and I finally got to play table tennis.  We went down to the game room each day only to discover many kids playing or to find the table empty but not finding any ping pong balls.  I am proud to say that I kicked his butt 5 straight games.

I am ready to be home though.  26 days is a long time to be away from your wife and kids and I am ready to see them.  I still have this 4 hours to wait and then a 10 hour flight and then customs to go but I feel like I am getting very close to seeing them again just by leaving Argentina.  Well I do not have a lot to say really, I am tired and I am going to check out the free food and drink.  I will blog state-side soon.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 144

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well this week has been rough.  There are many new policies and procedures that appear out of nowhere it seems and at the end of the day this is how I felt...

But tonight was going to be a good night.  We were going to have another after office party at a place called Johnny B. Good's.  Almost all my team and many of my co-worker's team came to hang out and have a good time (and drink).  We talked about everything under the sun and just had a great time overall.  I am going to miss these people when I leave and head home in 2 days.  Our connection in the building is still pretty slow and even though it was supposed to be upgraded today, I found out today that it will be next Thursday before it will be upgraded and even then it is only going to be tripled in speed (but that is better than nothing I guess).

Even though I am averaging probably about 60 hours per week working (maybe more, I have not been keeping track), I will really miss Argentina.  Everyone here at my company is happy of course as they all have nice new jobs so I know that this party feeling will not last forever.  Time will tell if they will truly enjoy their jobs at my company.  Monday I will pass most of the team off to assigned mentors in the US and I emailed each mentor today introducing them to their Argentinian co-workers and sent pictures as well.  Next Monday should be interesting.  I will probably still be tired (and either overjoyed or depressed depending on whether the Colts win the Super Bowl or not).  I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog while I was here.  I am pretty sure I will not have another experience like this one ever again.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon