Blog Number 230

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

I do not have a lot of time for a blog entry today.  My DSL service is not turned on for my home yet so this entry is from work where I am finished putting in a few Saturday hours.  My phone service IS turned on however.  Once I signed up for phone / DSL service, I dug out a phone and plugged it into the wall jack at home so I could check from time to time to see if the service was turned on.  AT&T gave me my new phone number but of course it is useless until the whole thing is hooked up.  My wife called me from home yesterday afternoon to tell me that the phone was indeed turned on.  She did not find this out by occasionally picking up the receiver and listening for a dial tone.  No, she found this out when she came home from running some errands and heard a phone ringing in our house.  Mind you it has been over 2 months since we have heard this sound and so it seemed odd to her at first and could not register what was really happening.  Once she ran to the back of the house where the phone was, she answered the phone (of course).  It was not me on the end of the line nor was it AT&T confirming service activation.  No, it was someone wanted to sign us up for a credit card!  Our first call was a (insert expletive here) telemarketer.  Now I remember why I did not hook the phone up immediately when I moved.  As of this morning, DSL was not working so hopefully it will be up and going by Monday.  Have a nice rest of the weekend (mine starts now).

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 229

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Man, another day, another one of those meetings.  Thursdays are brutal anyway but the meeting I am in now it especially merciless in its viciousness.

I will let everyone know that I signed up for a phone line and DSL service yesterday with AT&T.  The house I am leasing is so new that the automated system on their site does not even recognize my address.  As such, I cannot use the online form to request new service.  Because of that, I have to pay the full price since the specials only apply if you use the online system.  Another added touch (along with the activation fees) of dealing with a live human when requesting new service is that they try to talk you into other services that I don't want.  Ultimately I had the same conversation that I had about this time last year when all I wanted was the basest phone service that would allow me to use the DSL service.  After much discussion (mostly on the part of the AT&T person) I was able to convince them to sign me up for their $4.20 / month phone service allowing me 25 local calls per month since I made a grand total of one phone call in the 13 months I had this service in my apartment.  Doing the math, the one phone call that I made cost me about $50.  I made this point ad nausea to the phone rep when they kept trying to talk me into a higher costing service.  Once that was solved, a discussion ensued about the speed of internet access that I would need.  I wanted the $20 / month service (even though there was a higher speed available for $5 more - a point that the rep made no less than a half dozen times).  Just when I thought I was done with the call, they once again tried to sell me caller ID, call waiting, etc. on my phone line that I previously mentioned (several times) that I would never use.

Anyway, I got through that call (who would have thought that a deterrent to having phone / DSL service would be dreading the call to sign up?) and I should have service soon.  This will allow me to get back to regular blogging and also allow my wife to get email again (something she was only able to do once a week when she went to the library).

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 228

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well I am in the middle of another one of "those" meetings but I wanted to divert my attention for a moment to share with you a (not so) new pet peeve of mine.  This has to do with my wife, yawning and talking.

Since we have no internet or cable TV at home, this has allowed (or perhaps forced) my wife and I to talk more.  We discuss all kinds of things from a newspaper article to a book that one of us is reading.  Our discussions have gone up a notch for sure since we are not talking about the latest episode of a TV show or a you tube video.  One (bad) habit the that wife has is not pausing her speech during a yawn.  She just keeps on trucking through her sentence and makes a valiant effort to enunciate during the yawn but try as I might, I cannot decipher her words.  There are times that I can fill in the blanks based on the words immediately before or after the yawn but for the most part the yawn lasts too long and the missing data is too large for me to make an accurate guess.

Perhaps I do not yawn as much as most people but I generally pause during the yawn.  Maybe I cannot multitask (yawning and talking at the same time) and need to focus all my mental capacities to completing the yawn.  The only time I can remember yawning during talking is when I am reading a book to the kids.  I yawn every 2 or 3 pages for some reason and it is a little frustrating for me but trying to speed up the yawn does not seem to help anything and probably causes more frequent yawns.  But I do pause for the yawn and do not try to muddle through the book (plus I am reading C. S. Lewis and most of his words are important and skipping even a sentence might cause problems).  The wife however (despite my calling attention to this annoying habit each time) still continues on with her talking.  She always has to repeat her words.  To me that would be a deterrent.  To her it is not.

Anyway, I have to pay attention to this meeting now as I know I heard my name at least once.  Until (y a w n) next (y a w n) time...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 227

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well I have a few minutes here while my computer is installing some software that has made all other software programs come to a grinding halt.  Even my browser is sluggish (but not so sluggish that I cannot write this blog entry).

Once again, it is Jean Week here at my employer.  As you might recall from previous blog entries, this is the week where you can pay a certain amount of money and then wear jeans every day of the week.  I have previously mentioned that in order to raise even more money, my company could have a fund raiser where folks like myself could donate money and disallow certain people from wearing jeans.  I don't think I will offend too many people when I say that there are certain people in our society that should not be allowed to wear certain articles of clothing (jeans being one of them).  Anyway, the whole fund raiser concept has got me thinking.

My cubicle is located near 2 large network printers that are used by almost everyone in my area.  That is to say, almost everyone except me.  I have been pretty much paperless for the last 5+ years and have been preaching to all those that would hear of the merits of the avoidance of killing trees in order to have a paper copy of a document.  Few have listened but I have a few converts and I think slow and steady will win the race and I am just ahead of my time in this matter.  Anyway, the printers that are near me seldom work correctly for any length of time.  There are various techniques to "fixing" these printers but the majority of the solutions involve brute force.  The brute force type solutions also (evidently) require some sort of profanity to have the desired effect.  Now, since I spent a lot of my life in a bowling alley, I will tell you that I am not learning any new words or phrases per se, however I am learning new uses for the same old words.  At any rate, I think that if we installed a "swear jar" near the printers in my area (and probably all over my company) then we could raise an amount that would far exceed the Jean Week total.  We could have a posted list (printed out of course to emphasize the irony) of words and the cost for their use.  Other suggestions I have would include a quantity discount for those who wish to say many words all in the same printing session.  Perhaps we could pre-pay for words and use then as needed.  The possibilities are quite endless.

Anyway, there is my thought.  Like others I have had, it will not be utilized.  Such is life.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 226

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Saturday we were invited to a birthday party.  Let me clarify the word "we" here as it is slightly important to the big picture.  Originally I thought that "we" only included my daughter (who is the same age as the birthday boy) and my son (who is the same age as the birthday boy's older brother).  I also assumed that my wife would stay as she is very good friends with the birthday boy's mother.  I was informed on Saturday morning that I was also included in the "we" and as such, I went.  There was going to be pizza and cake so that soothed the issue a little in giving up part of my Saturday however given that I worked for about 6 hours last Saturday and that the mother-in-law and sister-in-law were with us for part of this past week, I was really looking forward to doing nothing this weekend.

The party was a costume party and more specifically it was a Star Wars themed costume party.  There ended up being a Boba Fett, a Princess Leia, an Anakin Skywalker (the birthday boy), a Storm trooper, and at least 3 Darth Vader's.  I went as "My Son's Dad" which (if you did not know this) was a minor character in Star Wars III - Revenge of the Sith.  I will forgive you if you missed the scene he was in as it was not central to the story.

One thing that was set up for an activity was a piñata in the form of Darth Vader's head.  They had this head strung up from a tree with some white rope and (I will be honest here) it looked a little scary and (given the recent issues our neighboring state has had with nooses lately) perhaps a little out of place.  The kids lined up from smallest to biggest to take turns whacking this thing.  The rope broke after 2 hits from the first kid and then (after an attempt to string it back up) it fell again.  At this point in time I think i would have given up, cracked the thing open and then pass out the candy.  The dad of the birthday boy was a little more committed than I and decided to hold the piñata and let the kids take turns.

Now I have seen this scenario played out on countless episodes of America's Funniest Home Videos and I'm telling you (for those of you who have lived under a rock and have never seen this) it never ends up good for the dad (or whoever is holding the rope).  Statistics show that a full 98% of the time, male reproductive organs are damaged (much to the chagrin of the studio audience).  I had a choice here now, I could look away squeamishly or I could pick up the video camera and try to win $10,000.  In the end I watched through my fingers of my hand that I had over my face during the final few whacks that sent the candy flying everywhere.  All ended well fortunately though my daughter (who didn't quite get the concept of hitting the head of something to explode it so you can get candy) seemed relieved after candy came out (and not some other bodily fluids).

In the end the kids had a good time, the pizza was pretty good and we got out in about 2 hours.  The wife then left me at home with the kids while she spent the next 4 hours at a neighbor's house at a combo Pampered Chef / Mary Kay party.  In the end my Saturday was shot but such is life.  At least I didn't have to hold the piñata (or watch some guy take it in the midsection doing so).

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 225

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

I would like to code this as a "boring meeting blog" with your permission.  My life at work is getting exciting with more and more projects that I am involved with on a day to day basis.  It is great for my career and things overall are going great.  The one side effect of this however is that I have many more meetings that I have to attend.  Most meetings are important (or have the potential of being important) but there is the occasional meeting that I attend that (although mandatory to attend) really serves no purpose other than to have the ability to say that we have had a meeting.

At this very moment I am in one of "those" meetings.  To be sure it is an important meeting, I just do not need to pay attention (other than to listen for my name in case someone needs my input).  During these types of meetings usually I surf the web, catch up on email, or instant message with other people that are also non-players in the meeting and make pithy (or not so pithy) comments about the current speaker.

These meetings make for good irony in my life.  I get nothing accomplished on days that involve many meetings.  I feel horrible on days where I feel like I accomplished nothing and as such I have come many days with a look on my face that my wife can interpret as a "day full of meetings" look.  I cannot imagine being a manager and having nothing but meetings to look forward to when I arrive to work.

Thursdays are particularly bad for me as I start my day off with back to back to back one hour meetings and then play catch up the rest of the day.  The good news for me today though is that a two hour meeting scheduled for this afternoon was postponed for a few weeks so things are looking up for the day.

Well this meeting is winding down and I have to pay attention to the last few minutes as it is at this time that "action items" are handed out and you want to make sure I am not given something to do that I do not want to do.  Until next time...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 224

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Let me take a minute here before I start my workday and tell you about the latest addition to our household.  We are now the proud owners of a hermit crab.  It seems that last week the wife took the kiddies to the local mall and there was a kiosk selling hermit crabs.  The thing that drew the kids to this particular vendor was the brightly painted shells that the hermit crabs were living inside.  Among the many designs were the superman logo, the batman logo, etc.  Now as a person who sees through these kinds of marketing ploys, I was immediately skeptical.  However the daughter would not stop talking about these crabs and the next day they made a trip back to the mall to see what the cost was.  The wife called me at work to inform me that she felt she could talk the lady at the kiosk down from $20 to $15 (which included the crab, the shell [of course], a small cage and about 2 weeks worth of crab food).  Given that the daughter was so enamored with these creatures, I caved in and OK'ed the purchase.

I will admit the little guy was kind of neat to watch as he scurried around the little cage.  The wife then checked out a book from the library and immediately discovered that we were doing a great disservice to the crab (by the way, the crab's name is Michael as in Michael Landon) by leaving him in this small cage.  I deciphered this message to mean that $15 was only the beginning of my expenses related to hermit crab ownership.  $30 more dollars later we have a bigger cage, another shell (in case he gets tired of his bright yellow shell with the owl painted on it), a cuttlebone, a small palm tree (which he uses to climb and then hang up side down from the new cage lid), and a better watering sponge.  I can tell this is only the start of a windfall of crab related purchases coming to my credit card bill soon.  Per the book we have, they are social creatures so it is really not fair only to have one crab.  Perhaps we need 2 or 3.  Also, the cage we just bought will not be big enough for more than one crab so a new, bigger cage will be needed.

Sigh, I suppose after going all of September without spending a dime, I was due for $100 worth of useless spending that gains me nothing (other than my daughter's gratitude).  I will have to post some pictures soon of Michael so you can see where my money is going.

I do not know if this blog entry is my official return or not to semi regular blogging so don't get your hopes up too much.  However I have heard from several of you recently so this blog is a direct result of your complaints of the lack of blogs.  Until next time...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

Blog Number 223

Greetings,

Well our family survived our "don't spend a dime" month of September.  We did very well but did cheat a little last Saturday and spent $20 on lunch.  In all fairness, we found the $20 so it was not in our normal budget.  I don't have time to go into the details but being such a stickler for the rules you will have to trust me that we did not cheat.  We have almost decided that we are not going to have a phone line installed.  We have also almost decided that we are not going to set up high speed internet (since we are not installing a phone line then that rules out dial up).  Some close friends of ours don't know quite how to respond to our actions.  In fact they have threatened to have an intervention should we take the next logical step and sell the cars and buy a horse and buggy.  Anyway, I just wanted to touch base with you all.  I have almost 9 hours of meetings scheduled at work today (hmm sounds like a good blog subject).

Jon