To the moon, Alice!

"To the moon Alice!"--Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason), "The Honeymooners"

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
--Neil Armstrong 

Forty-seven years ago today, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon (unless you believe the conspiracy theorists who think it was all a hoax). I was 11-years old. And I was about as thrilled as you could get.

I was a fan of all the NASA programs. I followed Mercury, Gemini and the Apollo flights that led up to Apollo 11 and the first moon landing. I wanted to be an astronaut. But that would have entailed becoming a pilot and I was told by a recruiter from the Airforce  Academy when I was a senior in high school that I could never become an Airforce pilot because I wore glasses.

So instead of an astronaut I became a marketing professional. It doesn't matter how bad your eyesight is in marketing. In fact it is better to be blind as a bat when you do marketing.

But I digress.

Me, myself and George

My great-great grandfather was George D. Knox. He was born around 1832, spent some time in a mental institution, fought in the civil war for the Union, married my great-great grandmother Amanda (20 years younger than him) and had six kids before moving to Idaho. He died there in 1911 when he was 79.

That's about all I know about him. I have three photos of him. Including this one with Amanda and my grandmother (who was born in 1901 and was raised by her grandparents):

For whatever reason, I find myself thinking about my great, great grandfather when I look in the mirror these days. Maybe it is my beard (though George's is much fuller than mine ever will be). Or maybe it is the eyes. I'm guessing he had blue eyes. 

Gone tomorrow

As if you hadn't heard enough about my hair, I would be remiss if I didn't report that I found another hair salon nearby that I could also make an online appointment. I booked a haircut yesterday evening at 6 p.m. arrived five minutes early and they actually gave me a haircut.

It was a nice salon opened up in an old house in downtown Edmonds. And it was actually one of the owners who cut my hair. She was quite personable, but also quite the sales person. I had forgotten one of the things I hate about hair salons versus cheap barber shops is that the salons always try to sell you "product."

Hair today

This isn't the first time I've written about hair...well actually my hair. I am in my late 50s and I still have a full head of hair. Albeit, it is silver. I used to pay large sums of money to have my hair cut and styled. But I used the Great Recession as an excuse to stop paying $50 to have it cut and styled and start paying $14 just to have it cut.

For the several years now I have forgone the luxury of high priced salons that offer you coffee while you wait, have separate shampoo stations where they wash your hair (with warm water) and give you a head massage. I traded the modern clean salon for a small barber shop in a strip mall staffed entirely by Vietnamese stylists that seemed to change every time I went in for a haircut. No reservation was ever required. And a shampoo cost extra. Though occasionally, depending upon the stylist, they would give me a head massage.

When I went to higher priced salons, there was a certain predictability in how my hair would look. I'd always have the same stylist and she would always know how I wanted my hair cut. At the barber shop, I rarely have the same stylist and my hair was seldom cut the same each time. Plus it was a haircut. There wasn't much in the way of style. But it was only $14.

Not too long ago, my wife pointed out that I have always had nice hair and it was a shame that I was getting consistently bad haircuts since I lowered my standards. So I decided to give a higher priced salon a go of it again. I searched online for local salons and found one in downtown Edmonds that seemed reasonably nice and was close enough to walk to. It had an online scheduling system that I thought was pretty cool, because, being an introvert, the less contact I have to have with people the better. So I scheduled a haircut for last Saturday afternoon.

Thrower in the wry

I watched a documentary about J.D. Salinger the other night on Netflix. And I have to say, I came away from watching it knowing more about J.D. Salinger than I had ever really wanted to know, but with less of an understanding of why people are obsessed with Catcher in the Rye.

Now granted, it has been more than 40 years since I read Catcher in the Rye. It was required reading when I was in Junior High. Holden Caulfield, the book's main character,  is recognized in the literary world as a symbol of teen angst and rebellion. But I just didn't find him relevant.  I grew up in Boise and Holden Caulfield, the main character was growing up in New York. I can state with great conviction, these are two very different cities.  Coalfield's attended prep school and his family had money. I attended public school, my father was a janitor and my mother worked part time in a grade school lunch room. So you get a sense of where my family was on the money spectrum.

Condo of Blues

"House of Blues" has been franchised, so I thought I'd think smaller and go for "Condo of Blues." It seems more suburban and middle class anyway.

"Condo of Blues" was inspired when I put on my House of Blues cap this morning and thought of the irony that I'd purchased it at the House of Blues in Downtown Disney in Anaheim. Because nothing says the blues like Orange County (though apparently the one in Downtown Disney has closed and is moving to the Garden Walk a few blocks away). Oh, I've been to House of Blues in New Orleans, too. But still, it is a franchise bent on serving up the blues in a nicely packaged way for mainly white tourists.

But being being white, aren't we all tourists when it comes to the blues?

Mock of ages

Maybe it is because I watched The Intern, the story of a 70 year old interning at an e-commerce start up (starring Robert Deniro). Or maybe it was the physician's assistant at Group Health telling me the antibiotic he was prescribing for what he thought was pneumonia worked best on young people in good health (implying I was neither).  Or maybe it is just the weariness of being an aging Baby Boomer in a Millennial world. But my world view is becoming pretty pessimistic.

The Robert Deniro film was actually kind of entertaining if not a bit trite and predictable. It painted an image of a youthful world actually coming to respect the wisdom and experience of a senior citizen. That doesn't happen in the real world. Shoot my seven year old son insists he knows more about everything than I do.

The visit to the medical clinic wasn't the high point of my weekend. But after five weeks hacking up things that polite society would cringe at, I gave in and went to the doctor. Okay it was only after coughing to the point of throwing up that I couldn't ignore the fact that whatever I have wasn't going away. Of course, this was on Memorial Day and my regular doctor wasn't working. So I had to go to a walk in clinic in the back of a Bartell Drug Store. The "consultation" room was the size of a broom closet and the sole physician's assistant wasn't overly friendly or optimistic.

Not measuring up

met·rics
noun
1. the use or study of poetic meters; prosody.
2. a method of measuring something, or the results obtained from this. "the report provides various metrics at the class and method level"

I check my blog stats more regularly than I post on my blog. It's a bit like cutting open a chicken and staring at the entrails in hopes there will be some epiphany there. But all I see are chicken guts.

Now granted I rely on the stats Blogger.com provides for free. So I shouldn't look a guest chicken in the entrails. But Blogger tells me I have had 219 page views on Friday, but only 41 posts were visited. So am I to assume 178 visited and had no interest in actually reading anything.

I still suspect that many of the disappointed visitors didn't actually visit any pages were somehow lured from the slew of Russian sites shown in my traffic sources metrics. But according to Blogger, only 32 have come from those sites.

Dream weaver

I've always been fascinated by dreams. I wish it were possible to actually record them (i.e. like a video, not write them down). Something tells me they would be binge watching worthy.

Or just meaningless crap.

My dreams seem to revolve around geographic locations out of my childhood. I'm often find myself at the house I grew up in. Occasionally it becomes a mutation of the first house I bought on my own. I lived there for about 18 years alone. I don't dream about any of the places I rented along the way.

The odd thing to me about dreaming about the house I grew up in is that it no longer exists. Even seeing photos of the interior of the house now sets off weird pangs of sadness and nostalgia. Because the only place I can see the place anymore is in old photographs or my dreams.

Sick and tired

I am not a person who is prone to sickness. This is not to say I never get sick, I just don't use a great deal of sick days.  For the past several years, the only time I've called in sick is to stay home with a sick child (who more often than not were just sick of school). But last week I missed two days of work because I was sicker than a proverbial dog. Not that I know why a dog is called out for being any sicker than any other animal.

But I digress...weakly...because I am still not feeling a 100 percent well.

I've made no secret that I was raised Christian Scientist and didn't go to doctors until I was in my early 20s. So for much of my formative years, being sick was severely frowned upon and met with very little sympathy and no OTC medicines.

I've gotten past not using OTC medicines (which are for the most part useless). But I haven't gotten over the guilt of being sick. And I avoid doctors like the plague.

Ironic statement.

Ghost stories

At dinner the other day, my son asked his sister whether she knew any ghost stories. She began reciting a number of stories she'd read in a book of ghost stories from her school library. It dawned on me as I sat their listening to her that I don't know any real ghost stories. I have never really experienced something that I could truly call an encounter with a ghost (though this is the second time I've pondered this in my blog...the first time was in a post called I ain't afraid of no ghosts back in 2005).

It isn't without trying. Before we were married, I used to take my wife on trips and stay at reportedly haunted hotels. We stayed at the Del Coronado in San Diego, the Queen Mary in Long Beach and Geiser Grand in Baker City, Oregon. We also stayed at Thornewood Castle in Lakewood, Washington. All reported to be haunted places. But I didn't see nary a ghost or ghoul.

Unoriginal thought

I was listening to a TED podcast (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) the other day on original thought. The basic premise was that there really was no such thing. All of our art, music, literature, movies and inventions are derivative of things that others had already thought of. We, as a species, don't create. We tinker and add on to things.

This fits with my posts about Googling great ideas I've had only to discover three million other people have already had them. Apparently, the Big Bang (not the television series) was the only original thing that has ever happened in the universe.

I'm the king of the world!

All my blather about Trump wanting to be king conjured up these memories of the good ol' days of my blog when I had themed weeks of Photoshopping my face onto famous people's images. It was 2006 and I was giddy about the newness of blogging. It was in a post called It would be good to be a king that I first considered making myself a king.

The man who would be king

I can think of no conceivable reason for anyone to want to be President of the United States. Yet all of these people pump millions of dollars into campaigns trying to get nominated for a job that lasts four to eight years and basically opens up you and your family to constant scrutiny and criticism. Okay the salary and benefits amounts to about $600,000 a year. And you do get a $200,000 pension for the rest of your life. But is it worth it?

I don't think Trump is wanting the job for the money. And he certainly doesn't strike me as someone who wants to make a positive change in the world. So I can only conclude that he wants to be king. And the revolting peasants are rallying around him caught up in the demigod's rhetoric of hate and fear.

I'm going to read a book

And what book, you may well ask: Infinite Jest, the 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. It is a 1,079 page novel that is said to be the "defining work of the 1990s" by people who say such things.

And why am I going to read this book? Because I just watch the movie, The End of the Tour last night. It is based on writer David Lipsky's memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself which is basically the story of Lipsky's experience going on a book tour with Wallace in 1996 to write a story for Rolling Stone.

It's a great film, BTW.

The unbearable lightness of bean

Aging brings with it these unexpected thoughts about identity. It goes beyond asking "Who am I?" It's just that I feel like I am in a time warp and the world around me has passed me by.

When you age, the world around you speeds up. All of your points of reference seem to be in the past. Communicating with someone 20 or more years younger than me requires a great deal of energy and explanation. I begin to understand why my parents would often stare at me with a confused look when I'd talk to them growing up.

For a person in his late 50s, I like to think I'm more savvy than most about technology and social media. Maybe it is because I've been exposed to computers from the beginning. Not like current generations who've always had them. I watched them evolve.

Prince of Ides

I survived the Ides of March without nary an attempted assassination by the Roman Senate. I toyed with ordering a Caesar salad at the local diner last night and saying, "Etu Flo," when it was served, but I decided not to tempt fate.

It is now March 16th, a day of no particular note other than it is one day before St. Patrick's Day. Yet I still feel the slight bit of anxiety I've alluded to that comes with every birthday. Part of it is likely due to the bulging spot that appeared on our basement ceiling on Sunday indicating something, somewhere was leaking. My wife poked it with a paint scrapper this morning and apparently a large chunk of the ceiling fell down.

So the Ides of March did bring a small disaster after all and Chicken Little has been vindicated. The sky...and my ceiling is falling.

Well Ides-ey Ho!

You can run, but you can't Ides.
--Time

Today is the Ides of March. Which is to say it is the middle of the month of March, the day Julius Ceasar was assassinated, two days before St. Patrick's Day and three days before my birthday.

I suppose that doesn't mean a lot to most people.  But if you follow the link above you'll see I've put a great deal of thought into it over the years. Because the hint of doom that the Ides of March carries with it taints my impending birthday like a worm hole on an apple you just bit into.

It's not like this is a milestone birthday (other than turning the same age as my year of birth minus one thousand years that I pointed out in a previous post). But 60 is on the horizon wagging it's wrinkled butt at me. Not a pretty picture I can tell you.

To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
 ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird is dead at 89. I watched the 1962 black and white movie based on the Pulizer Prize winning book the other night in her memory. It is a classic movie that I remember watching many times as a child. And it is still a great film.

Boo Radley is my favorite character. He is the mythical boogeyman of neighborhood children that lives in the run down spooky house and can only be seen in shadows and rumors. And then he turns out to be the hero and totally misunderstood.

He still has a few marbles missing from the game. But don't we all.

Lost music

Since I got my iPhone, I rediscovered iTunes and music I'd accumulated in the past there and then forgotten. I used iTunes a great deal when I bought my first iPod. I dutifully loaded all of my CD collection onto iTunes and then my iPod.

It was one of the first iPods and now is the equivalent to one of those early mobile phones that was the size of a toaster. At the time I was pretty impressed that I could load thousands of songs on it. But eventually the iPod became a dinosaur of technology and ended up in a drawer. The battery is pretty much shot anyway.

I had other mp3 players over the years. Some the size of a postage stamp. They all eventually became toast and I ended up listening to Spotify or Jango or Amazon Prime music. But music in the cloud is pretty limited to the vagarities of the Sprint network and my train goes through cell dead zones to and from work.  I have been frustrated on more than one occasion by have a three minute song take 20 minutes to play.

You can't fix stupid

You have to take a test to get a license to drive a car, so why shouldn't you have to take a test to determine whether or not you are qualified to vote. At the very least it should be the same test they give people who are becoming citizens of the United States. Then you could at least say the person voting has some idea how our political system works.

But no, we allow anyone over the age of 18 to randomly cast a vote without any proof they know the consequences and the responsibility they have. It is why we end up with president's like Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush and now horror of horrors, possibly Donald Trump. At least George W.  was just a buffoon with dangerous advisers. Trump just seems crazy in a "I shouldn't be trusted with my finger on the nuclear weapons" way.

I did not watch Super Bowl 50

I tend to only watch the Super Bowl if the Seahawks are playing in it. And although they were pretty good this year, they were nudged out of the NFC Championship by Carolina. So I am glad the Broncos beat them. Because the Seahawks beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago. So we know who the real champions are.

I probably would have watched the Super Bowl except both of our televisions were being used by my kids to watch separate movies that we'd made them stop watching the night before with the promise that they could finish watching them the next day. I just didn't think they would wait until the Super Bowl was on to finish watching there programs. God knows Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Days and Neverland are more important than the Super Bowl.

I tried following the game on social media while I grilled dinner. But all I could seem to get on Twitter were play by plays on the commercials being shown. So I ended up asking Siri on my iPhone what the score was every five minutes. I think she was starting to get irritated at me.

Every dog his poo

Quite some time ago I Tweeted about watching a person out my train window on the way work waiting patiently while their dog pooped and then diligently picking it up with a poop bag. My Tweet was something to the effect of, "So which one is the dumb animal."

This was of course before we got a dog. And I was blocking out the fact that we had cats and everyday I was scooping cat poop out of a cat box and regularly cleaning up cat puke. But at least I wasn't having to pick up warm poop with my hand encased in a plastic bag.

That has all changed. Just over a year ago we decided to get a dog. We'd had to put down two of our three geriatric cats due to kidney failure and cancer. This opened the option of another pet that my children had been lobbying for for some time.

Afraid of shadows

"Me and my shadow
Strolling down the avenue
Me and my shadow
Not a soul to tell our troubles to" 

 --Songwriters: Dave Dreyer, Al Jolson and Billy Rose

The sun is out here so I suppose if the groundhog (aka wood chuck) lived in Seattle he would scurry back to his den and sleep another six weeks. I wonder, though, if the groundhog is really afraid of his shadow, or just afraid of the light. He is a creature that lives in the dark.

I've never been afraid of my shadow. I've been afraid of other people's or other things shadows. But maybe that is more being afraid of the unknown than anything else.

I used to be afraid of the dark. More accurately I was afraid of what I couldn't see in the dark. I imagine that is a primal memory in the animal part of my brain remembering when predators hunted in the dark.

Groundhog's Day Eve

I can hardly wait until Groundhog's Day! I almost forgot it since the stores went right from Christmas merchandise into Valentine's Day crap and skipped Groundhog's Day altogether. Doesn't seem quite fair.

In honor of it being Groundhog's Day Eve, I've taken the liberty of reusing the photo above that I've now used four times in posts also in honor of Groundhog's Day. Most of them are just rehashing the history of the holiday and gibberish about the movie Groundhog's Day starring Bill Murray. The movie is about a man who ends up repeating the same day over and over again until he gets it right.

This is basically what I do in my blog, only I simply repeat the same stories over and over and repost the same photos of things I've Photoshopped my face on.  I do the former because my memory sucks and I do the latter because I'm getting too lazy to Photoshop my face on new stuff.

Senior Varsity Quiz

I have always been good with trivia. I know a lot about a little and a little about a lot.

In Junior High (we didn't have middle schools in Idaho), I was a member of the Junior Varsity Quiz Team. We competed against other Junior High Schools on a local television station program appropriately called Junior Varsity Quiz. We lasted two rounds before being defeated by North Junior High School. I'm pleased to say I answered the most correct questions in the program (a minor accomplishment considering we still lost).

Being able to answer questions quickly about a broad range of topics hasn't really been of much use to me later in life. Oh, it comes in handy if you are playing Trivial Pursuits or find yourself in a bar where a trivia contest is going on. But on a practical level, being able to rattle off random trivia just makes you sound like Cliff from the old Cheers program.

The blogger rarely posts twice

As a rule, I rarely post twice in a day, but for some reason I feel compelled to write something else other than praises for my new iPhone (which is really awesome). I'll note that didn't promote my last post on social media and it has only been viewed four times. If I tweet or post on Facebook about a new post, I generally get about 25 or so hits. So as pitiful as my readership is, social media does boost it a bit.

I've actually been a bit more prolific this January than I have been for awhile. This is my seventh post. Though back in 2006 I post 31 times. Of course that was back in my blogging prime. It was all still relatively new to me and held promise. Now I write about getting a new iPhone.

The i's have it

Years ago, I had a Mac at work in addition to a PC. All of the designers I have ever known swear by Macs. I liked it, but practicality and price eventually drove me to PCs.

When I first ventured into the world of cell phones I had a standard flip phone for home and a Blackberry for work. Eventually my work and home phone merged into an Android Smartphone. I was ok with the Android, but frustrated at times by how slow it seemed and sporadically random glitches in the software and apps.

So I broke down and ordered an iPhone. Now granted it is an iPhone 5s, not the latest iPhone 6S or whatever the newest models are. But I have to admit I feel as though I have entered a whole new world of smartphonedom.

Layers

Back in 2013, I posted a photo from Googlemaps taken of my boyhood home that had captured an image of my late mother working in the yard. It was taken a few months before her death.

We sold the house to a developer, understanding that it would eventually be torn down and new homes built on the property. I returned to Boise a few times since and drove by but the house still remained. My brother in Boise informed me a few months ago that the house had been torn down. I put it out of my mind. But today I looked it up on Google Earth and found they'd done a new street level photo of how the property looks now.

Now Google also allows you to look at a timeline for the property since they started taking the photos so there was also a photo of the house from 2008.

The one constant thing from all three photos is the maple tree in the foreground. My brothers and I rescued a sapling from a drainage ditch probably 50 years ago, brought it home and planted it there in our front yard. And it is the only thing that remains of my childhood home.

Stephan Hawkins predicts the end of the world

Actually, the MSN article headline read "Most threats to humans come from science and technology, warns Hawking," but I thought my headline was a bit more attention grabbing. In actuality, the article said Hawkins just pointed out in a speech about black holes, that "The chances of disaster on planet Earth will rise to a near certainty in the next one to ten thousand years, the eminent cosmologist said, but it will take more than a century to set up colonies in space where human beings could live on among the stars."

Then he goes on to theorize about black holes and lost everyone.

Sure Hawking is a genius, but isn't saying the world will shoot it's eye out with a technology charged BB gun in the next 10,000 years just stating the obvious? Big whoop. If the world ends in the next one to ten thousand years, I'll be long gone. And even my kids won't be around in the next 100 years or so to worry about living in a space colony. So I for one don't take this revelation from Hawking anymore seriously than Harold Campings ravings about the rapture.

Around the block

I started writing this post several days ago. It started out as "The blog post always rings twice." But that germ of an idea wasn't contagious. So I switched to one titled, "Lights out" which was kind of a rant about people who still have their holiday lights up. That flickered.

So I admit I have a bit of writer's block which is unusual for me. I normally can ramble on for paragraphs at a time unconcerned by lack of inspiration or something interesting to say. Man, but my two aborted attempts at writing something were about as boring a PBS documentary on weaving. And now I've stooped to writing about not being able to write. Not a first, but still pretty lame.

 Part of the problem is that for the most part my day job requires me to be "creative" on demand. I don't mind being considered creative, but there is a certain, "Dance monkey, dance" quality to it that gets to me sometimes.

Self-conscious blogging

I don't know about other bloggers, but I don't spend a great deal of time crafting my posts. Although I don't usually sit down and hammer one out in five minutes, I rarely spend more than a few minutes here and there during a day to write one. And I more rarely ever do a lot of rewriting or deleting. So, although my posts may not all be great art, they are for the most part genuine.

But sometimes, like in yesterday's post for instance, I catch myself being extremely self-conscious. And I'm pretty sure it shows in my writing. I start worrying about being too negative or repetitive. I try to soften stuff or interject a self-depreciating jab. And all of this happens when I start to think I'm writing for an audience instead of for myself.

One more ride on the carousel

A calendar year is a bit like a carousel.  You go around and around and end up back where you started. Then you go around and around again. A pessimist might say it is a vicious circle.  An optimist might say it is just a well-rounded life.

I'm more of a pessoptimist. I say it just is what it is.

Regardless, this is my first post of 2016. And while I pondered what I should write, I rejected the standard year in review, listing my resolutions or looking ahead articles you find in magazines and more successful blogs. Been there, done that. No one really cares about my year in review, my resolutions (or lack thereof) or my opinion about what 2016 will be like.

Another old dang eyes

Once again I marvel at how quick a year has past and I wonder what I have to show for it.  I did take my family to LegoLand and Disneyland (I have the bills to prove it). But 2015 won't be one of those years that stand out in my memory.

Not that my memory is that great anymore. Which is sad. Because memory is one of those few things you can hold onto that doesn't require filling up your garage with plastic bins. It's just that the older you get, memories seem to overflow and run together. But it is only logical that that would happen when you layer yet another year of memories on top of the old ones.

So sifting through memories becomes more and more like an archeological dig as you drill down through the many layers to find that one memory you are looking for. Though there are some things I'd just as soon leave buried.

But I digress.

Tis the seasoning...

Even though I was a bit taken aback that Christmas stuff hit the shelf at the stores before Halloween I must admit I have been looking forward toward all of the Christmas traditions we've established. We put up the Elvis tree on Thanksgiving and I had most of the holiday lights up on the house the following weekend.

I even ordered the photo holiday card from Costco early. But I tell you, I'm getting a bit pissy about us sending out about a hundred cards and only getting a handful in return. The unwritten rule is that when you send someone a card they have to send you one in return.

So send us a holiday card or you are off our holiday/Christmas card list. You can kiss your personalized photo of my family either on vacation or with a fake Santa goodbye.

The power and the glory (not)

More wind, as powerful as the wind that took out part of my fence, knocked out power to our house last night. It didn't come back on until 3:30 in the morning. And although you would think that I'd learned something from when we lost power in late August for almost 26 hours and had stocked up on flashlights and batteries, you would be wrong.

But I did muster up a few camp lanterns and had enough juice in some of our random supply of flashlights to at least hold back the darkness and get the kids to bed. Then I hunkered down with my phone and sporadically watched a documentary on World War II by Ken Burns.

No, really, now is the winter of my discontent

We've set the clocks back and plunged my morning and my evening commuter in darkness. The cold has returned. The rains pummeled me all weekend and the winds knocked down a section of my fence. So I'd say it is definitely approaching my winter of discontent. Of at least the late fall of major annoyance.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to me that a section of my fence fell down. It has been threatening to do so for several years now. I've cobbled it together with nails, screws and odd bits of metal in an effort to keep it standing as long as possible. But it was old and rotting when we bought the house and now it is beyond mending.

It was all I could do to prop up the sections that fell down so at least it fills the gap in the fence. Now comes the fun of discovering how much it costs to replace a fence. I'm sure I will suffer sticker shock.

They doth protest too much, methinks

My British friend Baggy suggested that I should blog about Amazon opening a brick and mortar bookstore in Seattle's University Village shopping center last week. At the time I was less than enthusiastic about the idea. One, I visit the University Village about once every five years because unless you live near the University of Washington, it's a major pain to get to. And two, I am baffled as to why the company responsible for pretty much putting bookstores out of business with it's online trade in real and virtual books would opt to open one.

What finally prompted me to mention anything about the new baffling bookstore was a photo on the front of the Seattle Times last week about a group of people wearing Guy Fawkes masks marching on Amazon's Lake Union headquarters in Seattle to protest corporate greed. The protesters were loosely associated with a Million Mask March organization that tries to get people to protest various things on November 5th each year. November 5th BTW, is Guy Fawkes Day so thus the Guy Fawkes masks.

On aging well

I occasionally succumb to these terrible posts that draw you in to see a slide show of plastic surgery gone bad or 25 celebrities who haven't aged well. It's a terrible thing, but the siren song of such web ploys to get you to look at such scab picking sites and expose you to as many ads as possible is hard to resist.

Don't judge me.

It is sad to me that many of the stars they show are ones who have tried in vain to stave off time with plastic surgery. And they have become tragically unrecognizable. Others show the ravages of drug or alcohol addictions presumably brought on by the pressures of being famous. And still others have gained massive amounts of weight. But realistically, these are pretty common things that happen when anyone ages or has uncontrolled addictions.

I have to say that it is an unfortunate price people pay for celebrity. And I wonder if it is worth it.  A celebrity just has the misfortune to have their before and after photos viewed by millions of people. For the most part, nobody really cares about how the rest of us age.

Bad binge watching

Okay, I've been scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel lately for shows to binge watch on my Fire Stick. I watched the entire first season of Jane the Virgin and now I'm rolling my eyes through one season of Accidentally on Purpose.

Jane the Virgin has had some critical acclaim. I have to admit that it has a unique plot. A 23-year-old virgin by choice gets accidentally artificially inseminated with a wealthy hotel owner's sperm and becomes pregnant. The doctor who makes the mistake is the alcoholic lesbian sister of the wealthy hotel owner. The wealthy hotel owner's wife was the intended recipient of the sperm that had been banked before the hotel owner became sterile as a result of treatment for cancer.

Meanwhile Jane decides to have the baby but give it to the wealthy and very handsome hotel owner who has fallen out of love with his wife who BTW is cheating on him with his best friend. The best friend is a suspected drug dealer under surveillance by the detective boyfriend of, you guessed it, Jane. The boyfriend, who has been dating Jane for several years without getting any is very put out that his virgin girlfriend is pregnant. His solution: ask Jane to marry him.

Why buy the blog when the posts are free?

At various times in the decade or so since I started writing a blog, I have attempted to monetize the bloody thing to attempt to sooth my delicate ego with hard cash. Because if someone is willing to pay to read what you've written, you must be good.

This logic has been proven wrong so many times that I can't believe I would ever believe such drivel. People pay to read things because they have been led like sheep to believe they are good. Some of the most prolific and monetarily successful writers crank out mindless crap to feed a massive audience of people who really don't want to think about what they are reading. They want to escape.

Being a writer in the digital age is both a blessing and a curse (complete with rashes and oozing boils). There is so much content out there being produced by anyone with any kind of digital device that the craft of writing has been left sitting by the side of the Internet Highway picking at calluses on it's literary feet. My dream of being a great writer is sitting there with it.

Maybe it really isn't so great being great.

Despite being admonished by a barfly in a tavern in St. Thomas many years ago to remember seven words to live by (Never...forget...how...great...you...really...are), I am coming to the conclusion that I'll never be great or great at anything. This is not a festive pity party, just an observation.

Maybe it was inspired by watching one of those motivational videos that goes viral ever now and then on Facebook. It cleverly tells the story of all these famous "great" people who failed or were told they were failures but eventually they became "great." The list included Lucille Ball, The Beatles, Michael Jordan, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Abraham Lincoln.

I know this is supposed to give me hope that it is never too late to be great, but I would argue here that Lucille Ball is not really my definition of a great actress. I Love Lucy was popular at the time because it was one of the few television shows available at the time. Let's face it, Lucy eventually got on everyone's nerves and was major league bitchy in her golden years.

Is there such a thing as truth?

That's a rhetorical question. Though I'll answer it anyway: I'm beginning to think no.

This is in part in reaction to beginning to watch Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States. It's a series on Showtime that basically tells you that pretty much everything we've been led to believe about our country's involvement in everything since World War II is a smelly load of reeking bull pucky.

The series contends that just about everything our government tells us is an outright lie or at least a distortion of the truth that even it's own mother wouldn't recognize. None of this came as a major revelation to me.

But, I have always wanted to believe that deep down America was on the side of right and had principles. Stone pretty much shot that fantasy to hell.

Survivor: I was without my smartphone for almost 12 hours

I just got back from a business trip to LA and had taken a shuttle from my hotel in Burbank to the airport, an airplane to Seattle, light rail to downtown Seattle, worked on some stuff at the office and than hightailed it with my suitcase to the evening train home. In all that I left my office with my phone plugged into a charger at my desk. And I didn't realize it until I was on the train.

Now I work right next to the train station and I had a good 20 minutes until the train was scheduled to leave, so I thought about leaving my suitcase on the train and running back to get my phone. But the conductor of the train who has seen me just about everyday for the ten years I've been riding it refused to let me leave the suitcase unattended because that would be a major security risk. Okay, I could see if I was wearing a hoody, sweating and just chucked the suitcase on board and ran. But I'm the marketing director of the agency that runs the freaking train.

But rules are rules and as risky as my dirty laundry and shaving kit would be to the passengers of the train I didn't want to make a stink. Throw at all reason that, even if someone did report the unattended luggage to the conductor, he would have been the one I told that I was leaving my suitcase to go back to my office to get my phone. Forget also that I see people all the time plunk their suitcases inside the door and run up to the second level of the train to get a seat. My mistake was in asking.

Planning travel is a trip

The best part of travelling for me is planning it. For the most part, I plan all of my trips both for my family and for work. According to TripIt.com (which I've been using for a couple of years), I've traveled almost 21,000 miles this year alone, most of it for business.

I am also a top contributor to tripadvisor.com, which, BTW is a great place to get real reviews of hotels and destinations that haven't been paid for. I know no one has paid me for reviewing anything.

Of my trip planning, I enjoy picking a hotel the most. Renting a car is okay, and usually the easiest. Booking an airline is my least favorite thing to do. Mainly because the options usually suck. And there isn't much pleasant about flying these days unless you can get a first class upgrade. Even then, you basically get what you used to get ten years ago in coach.

The reason I like shopping for hotels is because I basically love staying in hotels. And since a stayed in a hotel for the first time (when I was 14 on a road trip with my parents...it was a dingy hotel outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming and you had to pay extra for color TV), I have been in search of the perfect hotel room. Some have come close (The Willows Lodge in Woodinville, Washington or the Dreams Resort in Cabo).

Mr. Toad's wild ride

I survived the awesomest place on earth (Legoland) and the happiest place on earth (Disneyland). Two days in Legoland followed by three in Disneyland is not something I would necessarily recommend to anyone. Both places are better parsed out in small doses. There is only so much of being herded into 45 minute lines that anyone should be subjected to.

But I did it all for my kids. Not that they expressed a great deal of delight in the overall experience. I only hope they don't repay the favor by dragging me back to the theme parks with their families in my twilight years. We got stuck behind more than one person in a walker or wheelchair barely looking as though they could navigate a sidewalk, not to mention the Matterhorn.

I do think this is the first trip I've taken to Disneyland since I was 16 that the Matterhorn was actually running. Being one of the original rides, it always seemed to be closed for repairs. But it was working fine this trip and my kids insisted on riding it three or four times.

The Trump card

When Donald Trump first threw his hat in to the Republican candidate ring, I just ignored it like I ignore his reality shows. What was one more monkey in the cage smacking his butt and flinging feces at spectators? But as the endless polls continue to show the monkey is climbing to the top of the tree and threatening to get out of his cage, I'm getting a little bit nervous.

Okay I can forgive the fact that the guy's hair looks like someone created a bad toupee out of a dead badger. Obviously his image people solved that by getting him to wear a ball cap in most of his appearances. And so what if he is a billionaire who claims to know what the common people need. But seriously, listen to the guys idiotic ideas to "make America great again." 

A decade here, a decade there....

It dawned on me that next year marks my 40th high school reunion. Not that I've heard anything about a reunion. I blew off the 30th, but they did have a website (now defunct) where I looked at the photos of people I didn't know in high school and definitely don't know now.

Note to self (and anyone reading this post): Why go to a high school reunion to catch up with people you didn't care enough to stay in touch with anyway after high school?

A forty year reunion sounds pretty painful anyway. Most of the people I went to high school with are likely grand parents. Some are probably even great grand parents. And I would have to explain why I have two kids in grade school.

Not that I would have to explain. I'm willing to bet no one would know who I was even after I gave them my name. No body looks like they did in high school.

Talking the talk

With as much as I blather on in my blog, you'd think I was a talkative person. But just the opposite. I abhor small talk. It's not that I don't enjoy interesting conversation, but there needs to be emphasis on the "interesting."

I know some people talk to fill the silent voids. This is the catch 22 for me. Since I don't talk much, people who do tend to gravitate to me. And they make up for my silence in spades.

I am not sure whether it is hereditary or not. My mom was quite a talker as were (and are) her sisters. Though my mom was very soft spoken. So was her mother. They talked, but they were not emotional talkers. In my grandmother's case, I imagine all of the emotion had been drained out of her by raising 13 kids and weathering an abusive husband. Pepper her life with poverty and more than her share of tragedy and I suppose the bubbly side of your nature pretty much goes flat.