Inappropriate Excitement

Each of us get excited from time to time for various, oftentimes personal, reasons.  Even I succumb to the emotion from time to time.  But, like all things, there is a time and a place for excitement and there are times and places where excitement is not a healthy, normal reaction.  Let me give you an example.

Several months back, the son and I went to an all day seminar / conference for the local storm spotters group.  The son was going as he really likes weather and weather related things.  I was going as I either lost a bet with the wife or some similar reason (rock, paper scissors didn’t go my way, etc.).  The son was really looking forward to this, he was excited.  I was looking forward to this about as much as I look forward to a dentist visit.  We arrived a little early and I was very surprised at the large turnout.  We found some good seats and settled in for the first session.  The room was almost entirely filled with folks as excited about weather things as my son and this suited him just fine.  We ended up not staying all day (the afternoon sessions were a bit over our heads really) but I noticed a theme for the parts that we did attend.  The worse a storm was (they talked about recent storms and showed several videos), the more excited and animated these people became.  I have chided my son for this way of behaving as with bad weather comes damage, injuries and overall human suffering.  To be happy or (worse yet) wish / root for severe weather without considering the human suffering side of things is something I am working with him on.  I have asked him several times to tone down his excitement when our weather radio goes off announcing when we are under some weather alert or warning.  But here we were, in a room full of people that acted just like him.  Now I was the odd one out.  His behavior and reaction was justified it seemed (to him anyway).

The wife and I talk about this feature of our son on occasion (usually right after bad weather).  She is on the “he’ll grow out of it” side of things and I am on the “he will end up on TV doing some report outside when a hurricane hits McKinney” side of things.  I think we both agree that his excitement is inappropriate.  During our talks, we often end up on the “who does he get this from?” subject and of course we both deny being the origin of this behavior.  However, in this case, my wife is wrong.

My wife also exhibits inappropriate excitement from time to time and it also involves human suffering, namely mine.  You see, she likes to fancy herself an expert on homeopathic remedies for various illnesses.  A person in this line of work needs to experiment and one can only experiment on live subjects and no one usually volunteers for this sort of thing so you can understand that she gets quite excited whenever I am sick.  There is a special sparkle in her eye when she hears me cough or sneeze that I only remember from early in our courtship and on special occasions like our wedding day.  Oh, she tries to feign sympathy and compassion, but her excitement over a live (captive) test subject trumps all other shown emotions.

I woke up this morning around 4:30 with a headache and a slightly stuffy nose.  My stomach felt a bit off as well.  I cannot tell you what I dreaded more, being sick or being an unwilling patient.  I thought about trying to hide my feeling bad but it is hard to do.  Also, once she discovers my illness, I do not know what to root for, to feel better (due to her treatment and thus encourage her) or to continue being sick (to perhaps make her give up her profession).  It is a tough call.  Though I deny it to her face, her treatments do seem to work.  I am sick for a shorter period of time than anyone I know.  I chalk this up to clean living but the wife tends to take all the credit.

At any rate, I am pretty sure that this is where the son get’s his habit of inappropriate excitement from.  And one more thing, I am feeling much better as of the time of this blog posting.

Jon

Random Photos–2012-11-10

It is once again time to clear out the micro SD card from ye olde cellular phone and see what pictures I have snapped over the past few months.

This is the layout of the dog’s dishes.  I am not sure why I thought this was photo worthy.  From left to right: Nina’s food bowl, the shared water bowl, McKinney’s food bowl and Louie’s food bowl (notice that it is empty as he never misses a meal nor a chance to steal from the other dog’s bowls).

This is my daughter using my 47” television as a computer monitor.  I was running a test copy of Windows 8 for part of the summer and had that computer using my big TV as its monitor.  For some reason she preferred this screen to the 10” screen of her netbook.

This is from the local Whole Foods.  Don’t worry, we didn’t buy all the seaweed rice crackers.

This was my plate when I had lunch with my mother over the summer during her trip down here.  There was a lunch special where you got 4 courses for a certain price, all delivered at the same time (since no one has time for a 4 course lunch during their lunch hour).  Everything was delicious.

Louie “fits” right into our family don’t you think?

For reasons I will not go into here, the wife bought a juicer.  The smile on her face is BEFORE she drank the contents of the glass.

Another food photo.  This was a free lunch that I had at work.  My cubicle is very near a meeting room that is used quite often for all day meetings.  Sometimes these meetings have a cart delivered just outside the meeting room door that has a lunch spread.  It is an unwritten rule that anything left on the cart at 1:30 is fair game.  If you wait too much past that time, the cafeteria staff come and take away the cart.  This was my haul from the cart.  Sadly, all the cookies were gone.

Another photo taken at work.  This was taped to the refrigerator for a few days.  The thief is still at large.

Finally, one last photo from work.  I was invited into the meeting room (where the lunch cart is sometimes delivered) for a few hours during a 3 day conference.  Several of the attendees were from outside of the US and brought some local treats for us to try.  This was some sort of pineapple pastry thing.  Interesting but not something I think I would try again.

Well there you have it.  My phone photos folder is emptied again and ready to be filled with random photos again.

Jon

Getting Back On The Horse

Hello!  Long time, no blog.  Sorry ‘bout that!  There are lapses of time in my life when nothing truly blogworthy happens.  What can I say?  But, I did ride my bike yesterday so I would like to blog about that.

“Wow, Jon” you might say, “how boring must your life have become to make a bike ride blogworthy?”  I am glad you asked.

It has been 2 weeks since my last bike ride but I must first set the scene and give you a little background.

My last real blog (2 months ago) was about the wife and I trying to decide about moving back to Indiana or not.  One thing that determines this is the budget.  One thing that I would like to cut out of our monthly budget is cell phones for the kids and I (the wife will keep hers).  The only upside to the kids having cell phones is that we can call or text them when it is time to come home for dinner otherwise we (and by we, I mean me) have to hunt them down somewhere in the neighborhood.  This is where the bike ride 2 weeks ago comes into this story.  The wife had asked me to call (not text) the daughter to tell her to come home for dinner.  Given that I am very close to deciding to ditch the cell phones, I thought I would ride my bike to hunt her down.  This would help me to determine if I really wanted to discontinue our cell phone plan or not.

The wife and I got new bikes for Christmas last year and they are the best bikes that either of us have ever had.  It is very fun to ride them, especially on a beautiful Texas, windless evening when the temperatures are going down.  Many an evening I will put on my headphones and hop on the bike for a 45 minute ride down the bike trail that is near our neighborhood.  People are out riding their bikes, walking their dogs or just walking with their families.  The bike trail meanders through a school playground, around a small pond (where some people fish) and under several bridges.  It is probably 3 miles before it ends and normally I just turn around and come back.

My bike ride 2 weeks ago lasted about 8 feet and I never made it out of the driveway.  I hopped on my bike in the garage, positioned it so I could head down the driveway on the right side of the van that was parked in the driveway and then pedaled exactly once.  It was about 2 foot down the driveway that my front tire went off of the driveway and into the yard.  The driveway is about 2 inches above the yard (give or take) and instinctively I tried to steer back onto the driveway.  It was at this point in time that physics took over and gravity (who was to be my friend in gaining speed down the driveway) became a near mortal enemy.  I realized immediately that I was not going to make a miraculous save and stave off the imminent crash so I began to position my body to minimize the damage.  I landed on my left shoulder and left knee and have the still healing scabs to prove this.  I also landed on my left upper arm and drove my left elbow into my ribs.  This is the section of my body that has been constantly reminding me of my crash for the past 2 weeks.  it was just last night that I could take a deep breath without cringing in pain.  Even as I was writing that last sentence, a sneeze occurred and, well, OW!

Once I had stopped bouncing down the driveway, I immediately jumped up.  I wanted to see if I was really hurt or just scraped up.  I tried to “walk it off” as they say.  I hobbled around for a few seconds, picked up the bike (which seemed none the worse for wear) and walked the bike back into the garage.  What happened next falls into the category of “he said, she said”.

The wife, upon seeing that I had returned so quickly and that I was not walking in a manner that a healthy, uninjured person would walk, asked what happened.  I explained as best I could and then she said the following statement…

“Did anyone see you?”

How I interpreted that statement.

I interpreted this like any person would, namely that she was concerned that I had embarrassed myself (and her) by crashing my bike before I even got out of the driveway.  Now, I do not blame her much for this statement as it may have been part of the reason that I got up from the crash site so quickly but she is my wife and she only spent about 5 seconds making sure I was OK before she said this statement.

What she said that she meant by that statement.

She CLAIMS that she asked this question to see if any of our neighbors had come to my rescue or at least asked if I was OK.  She still defends this excuse to this day.  If she had not have bust out laughing RIGHT AFTER she said this statement, I might be inclined to actually believe her.

Anyway, my ribs are feeling better every day and I really did go on a bike ride yesterday for about 20 minutes.  I did pay more attention to the edge of the driveway and the edges of the sidewalks throughout the entire ride and overall was more careful during turns and intersections.  That is probably a good thing.  As for ditching the cell phones, I am still undecided.

Jon