Sunday

 

One of my favorite carols

It begins

A busy day is on tap this Saturday before Christmas. The granddaughters have a dance recital this afternoon. We have the Christmas get-together tonight with the wife’s family. We still need to purchase gifts for the White Elephant event there. 

The wife is stressed, time is short, money is shorter, and life moves apace. 

All is well.

The reindeer are carb loading in anticipation

 It is snowing. But not sticking. With a slight warmup on the way early next week there is no chance for a white Christmas. So it goes. It’s not like it is Vermont this time of year or anything. 

You probably suspect I’m going to drop a video of old Bing crooning away. How wrong you are little elf.

I will present one of my favorites:

Whole lot of nothing

It has been a slow work week, everyone is winding down in preparation for the holidays and I’m no exception. I took my last vacation day for the 23rd so I will have nearly a week off after tomorrow. 

The air bubble in my eye has nearly subsided. It obscures about 10% of the bottom of my vision, unless I look down then I have a big black spot blocking my vision like a lunar eclipse. The whole thing has reached the annoying stage. A day or two more and my vision will hopefully be clear. I go back to the surgeon Monday and I hope I get a great follow up report. 

Future UNESCO heritage site.

The homestead under a distant full moon all decked out in Christmas lights. 

The windows in the upper left are my office, where the blogging magic happens. I’m pretty sure it will be a national shrine someday. 

For the turd human beings out there

I’m gonna be blunt, if you support Luigi the murderer, then you are a piece of shit human being and I invite you to never stop by here again. 

No matter what you think about insurance companies, murder isn’t the answer. 

I’m not joking. Be gone. 

Not covering my ears like a postmaster general

My email in-box is filled to almost overflowing. Since I wasn’t supposed to read I did no work at all Thursday, Friday, or over the weekend. I have to get back at it today, even if I’m not supposed to read (eyes tracking left to right and right to left). 

I did spend most of the weekend watching old movies. Since I can not bend over or lift anything, I did no chores around the house either. 

In all it was a wasted weekend. 

The songs are tedious

 One of the political issues that dominated the end of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries was should the US Dollar be backed by gold or by silver. 

The Wizard of Oz was an allegory of that debate. Fat cats in Emerald City in the east wanted the streets paved with gold (yellow brick road) while the Witch in the west (miners) wanted the silver slippers (they were silver, not ruby). Interspersed in the tale were brainless farmers (scarecrow), heartless industrialists (tin man) and a cowardly lion (government). 

We went to the oldest granddaughter’s tenth birthday party yesterday. She took a bunch of friends to see Wicked. 

None of that stuff about gold and silver was in the movie.

I’m also certain at no point would Dark Side of the Moon sync with this version of the Wizard. .

Short and sweet

I went for a quick post-op visit to the eye surgeon yesterday. He says all is good. I still can’t see at all out of my right eye, there is a purposeful air bubble blocking my vision. It’s like looking through water at a fun house mirror. It will go away in the next days. Posting will remain light.

I lied

 

How can Friday the 13th be bad when it is pay day?

In case you are wondering, this is a canned post. Didn’t you hear that rush of air when you opened it? 

Kinda live: everything went well. Thanks for your support. 

Fair Warning

I head for another eye surgery in the morning. The man is going to open my eyeball, cauterize the bleeder and clean out the accumulated blood blocking my vision. I anticipate no issues. I had to have the same procedure on my left eye about a year ago. 

There will be no post tomorrow. There will probably be no post Friday. I would put up a stupid music video, but YouTube is being a bitch and refusing to play unless you sign in. Neither of us is going to do that. I don’t care that much.

I’m pretty sure no one is going to lose sleep over missing a few posts around here. It’s not like you are getting much for your subscription price these days. 

I will resume blogging at some point. Probably.

I doubt the blog quality will improve with better vision. I’ll just be able to see the keyboard better as I type worthless words that entertain no one. 

About that Mac and cheese

I grabbed a few quick grocery items for supper last night; a pack of Echrich smoked sausage, a block of cheese, and a box of macaroni. For a good while a small block of Walmart brand cheddar cheese has been $1.98. Suddenly yesterday that same cheese was a $2.24. If my history major math is correct, that is a 13% increase. Tell me again inflation is easing. Oh wait, the government does not include food in the inflation calculation. 

The point of this mini rant is there were two main reasons Trump won the election and neither was the sex or skin color of his opponent. The reasons were the open border and the economy. 

Narcissist Trump believes we voted for HIM as opposed to policies. Maybe some of you did. But here’s the thing, if he slaps on tariffs like he is boasting, your prices are going to skyrocket. That means in four years the communists will be back in charge. We don’t want that.

Why would you care?

Yesterday the wife grabbed her cookie cutters and rolling pin and motored over to the daughter’s house for a day of making cookies. 

I watched a movie, vacuumed the carpet and floor, and ran the dishwasher. These were minimum effort chores. I decided I deserved a reward anyway. It was warm for a December Sunday so I threw on a jacket and moseyed out to the patio. I lit the fire pit and then a nice stogie. I put in my earbuds and listened to some more of the audiobook I started on my way home from Maryland last week. 

The cigar was nice, relaxing on the patio doing and thinking about nothing was better. 

It's the hap-happiest season of all

 

Is there anything in this house that works?

A three foot section of Christmas lights on the front of the house is out. I’m hoping it is a broken bulb from the high winds the other night. Probably not. I’ll have to drag out the ladder and replace the whole string. Fortunately I have a new box of lights. So it goes. 

Edit: I cannot believe I nearly forgot to mention today is Pearl Harbor day! It is one of the defining moments in American, if not global history. 

I published a VERY rough draft of my Pearl Harbor story a few weeks ago. I should have saved it. 

Friday Follies

 I took this picture a few weeks ago of the sunset and the ice rink at the Carmel Kriskindlemarkit. 

Here is a fun fact: I’ve never been ice skating. Ever..

I’m pretty sure I never drove I-68 before

I’m back from my two day trip to Maryland. I’m none the worse for wear, mostly. I pulled into the drive thirteen minutes short of 3AM, the stretch from mid-Ohio to home was brutal with sleet, snow, and very high winds. In all yesterday was a twenty plus hour endurance event. Bad weather and construction slowed my speed to make the trip home longer than expected. Yet here I am after four hours or so of sleep. I am either a machine or stupid. You decide.  In any case I’ll be drained by early afternoon. 

I finished one audiobook and started another on the trip. The last couple of hours I switched to music because I had a greater need to concentrate on the road rather than be entertained. 

When this song come on I backed it up and played a second time because I wanted to:

Road Tripping

 I’m out on the east coast for a Supplier Conference with my Big Customer. It seems there are about 100 suppliers here. Today we will get harangued for cost reductions and offered enticement in the form of look at the new products you could be part of if… It’s okay, I’ve been to this particular dance in one form or another  countless times in my career. 

On the bright side I opted to drive instead of fly, so I got in some windshield time. I listened to a good audiobook and enjoyed being on the road. 

Sometimes I think I miss being a road warrior and then I travel for a few days and realize I do not. A handful of nights in a hotel a  year are just perfect in my old age. 

List, Liar

Biden pardoned his kid for all crimes going back to 2014. Curious on that date, since that’s when Hunter started working for the Ukrainians. 

I guess you liberals who rant about lax gun laws and how the rich need to pay their fair share are all over this pardon for tax evasion and broken gun laws, right?

That beef burrito isn’t sitting so good in my stomach

Ah yes, it is time for the old fallback when searching for something to write - a useless weather report. It is eighteen Fahrenheit with a windchill of seven degrees right now in Mudsock. One would think it was mid January. 

The wife is nearly done turning the house into a Christmas wonderland. As always, it is done with taste and pizazz. 

The long holiday weekend has been nice. Of course the emails keep on coming. I won’t read them until Monday. 

I think I’ll try to do some work on the next novel later this morning. Because reasons the first half of the book needs to change from first person to third person. I’m editing and rewriting at the same time and it is tedious beyond measure. Worse, I know I’m going to miss replacing some of the “Is” and “Mys” and I’m going to have to reread and edit many times to catch them all. 

The change isn’t as simple as doing a search and find because often the whole sentence and paragraph has to be changesd to make the new perspective work. I’ve found the story is driving itself, and I need some characters to do stuff over here in this place and a first person narrator is somewhere else. I can find no way to jump back and forth with any kind of sense. I probably need to admit this book writing stuff is not my forte.