O-Dark-Thirty

I like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (If I say I like a writer, that doesn't mean I like the person. It might, if I know the writer, but unless I specify, I mean that I like his/her writing and what he/she writes. Also, I use the masculine form of the third person pronoun as the generic.) I liked his work when I first read it in High School, and learned to love the way he handles language when I was at CMU and my roommate N would sit in the hall and read Vonnegut. I also learned to like mushrooms on pizza while I was there, so some good things do come out of college. I've not found a writer that I like so much in a lot of decades, so Vonnegut's death in April, 2007 was a sad time. (I thought the same thing as when David Gemmell died - we will never see such stories from them again.) So I captured the entire text of Harrison Bergeron and put it into the Notes of my Outlook so I could read it occasionally. The formatting isn't good, but the story is still one of my favorites ...

Mark Twain is often attributed the quote "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." I thought of this last night as we watched one of the final episodes of Kyle XY and Kyle did something that was shockingly out of character. We've come to know his personality and this action immediately caused both of us to sit up and say (at the same time) "Kyle wouldn't do that." {Aside: Darling and I pick completed series and watch them all at once on Netflix. We are almost finished with Kyle XY. It's a fun show with superheroes. No, really. What would you call Kyle and Jessi? They have super-hearing, super-vision, super-strength, telekinetic mental abilities and they are super smart. And though they can't fly, they can levitate themselves. So - superheroes!} Fiction has to make sense if it is going to work. The minute you put something into your story that doesn't fit, that violates the world you created, y...

We're working on the remaining items in the old house. Darling decided to have the long-postponed garage sale. Garage (still with carpet) I posted the sale on Craigslist. Darling's best friend D put the freezer on Craigslist and it sold in a couple days. Encouraged by how well that worked I put the used carpet rolls on the list as well, for free, hoping someone would come haul them away. All ready in the Living Room Nobody called. I was disappointed. Guess this stuff didn't work as well as I thought. Well, it does, but I suffered from that common error on the computer, the one between the chair and the keyboard. I only thought I posted it. Once I figured out my error Darling got more calls for the carpet than she could handle. The guy she told to come get it never showed up, though. Anyway, I posted the moving/garage sale and it got her quite a few customers. I didn't take any pictures of the house after the first day, but Darling was exhaust...

Years ago a link to a funny story on the internet crossed my desk. I captured it, since it was funny and I'm a humorist. (Really. Go look at my Linked-In profile. It says so.) I had my kids read it and hopefully they understand some of the underlying concepts. Even if they don't, it's become a family chuckle during some situations to roll our eyes and simply mutter the word "Chamomile." We all know what it means. Occasionally I even work it into one of my stories. Without more introduction, here is the story as I got it years ago. ACTUAL COLLEGE THEME PAPER - HEY I COULDN'T MAKE THIS UP Remember the book "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"? Well, here's a prime example offered by an English professor at an American University. "Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will t...

My eye caught the headline of a Forbes article about résumé s ("sometimes spelled resumé or resume" according to Wikipedia, so I'll just stick with resume, since that way I don't need to manage that odd little accent mark) . I massaged my resume, beat it up, stuffed it into differing formats, and pummeled it to fit specific job niches, all in an effort to perfect it so my reader was impressed. I'm better at writing short stories. I'm good at what I do, but I'm not good at advertising how good I am. I am famous (infamous?) among my peers for some of my strengths. Excel is one of my major strengths, and I am often asked to help with data problems. (Here at work I am part of a group of people considered SMEs, Subject Matter Experts, for both Excel and Access.) People think I will whip up a brilliant Excel macro to handle their data manipulation (and I can and have) but quite often I can resolve the problem using well-handled functions directly in the s...

I ran across this a few years ago, and I kept it. This is a follow-up to the previous post. There are two take-away messages from this: 1) We're just human and we don't know everything. We haven't even been told everything. 2) While we're here we should try to keep our sense of humor. Laughing at ourselves is the best way to stay humble. These two churches are across the street from each other, and each has a church billboard in the front. This is the exchange on the billboards during one week a few summers ago. Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church (OLOM): ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church (BCPC): ONLY HUMANS GO TO HEAVEN READ THE BIBLE OLOM: GOD LOVES ALL HIS CREATIONS DOGS INCLUDED BCPC: DOGS DONT HAVE SOULS THIS IS NOT OPEN FOR DEBATE OLOM: CATHOLIC DOGS GO TO HEAVEN PRESBYTERIAN DOGS CAN TALK TO THEIR PASTOR BCPC: CONVERTING TO CATHOLOCISM DOES NOT MAGICALLY GRANT YOUR DOG A SOUL OLOM: FREE DOGS SOULS WIT...

Forewarned: A Message about God (the Pastor part should have warned you, but I'm trying to be clear here). Pastor Ron finished up his series at church last Sunday. Called Back to Basics, it covered the following four areas: Daily Bread - The Word of God (the Bible) Knee Mail - Prayer The Importance of Fellowship Go Fish - Witnessing I've liked them all, but I can't think of any instance when I didn't like what Ron preached. He opens the book and preaches the Word and points out where it applies to us, with kindness and humor, but never condescending or patronizing. He also doesn't pull any punches. He said in the beginning of the message that there are usually four types of people in the church: the uninvolved, the condemners and the helpers. Point at the one you think we should all be… For this message he also covered what is known to Christians across the globe as "The Roman Road" or the steps you point out to the curious that explain what Chris...

There really is no good way to download a listing of all the books you buy from Amazon. You can capture a file with copy/paste, but it isn't in the best viewing format. What I did was paste it into Excel, then parse the data so I had a Title, Author and Date Purchased. This allows me to look at the data in a number of ways. For instance, when I first purchased my Kindle I downloaded a lot of free books, most of which I haven't yet read, or were books I read as a child but were free. I did, in fact, read some of the latter. For instance, I read Freckles again, which was most enjoyable. I also read all the Sherlock Holmes books. Elementary, my Dear Watson, which he never really says in any of the stories. Quite a few free books looked interesting, but I couldn't bring myself to run off and read them right away. Some are historical, such as Bill Cody's autobiography or a few of Teddy Roosevelt's books. I haven't read them yet. At some point I downloaded on...

My darling daughter asked me last night what I have accomplished in life. Not meaning to be flippant, I replied that I have not accomplished much and as I said that my heart sank. Yet, accomplishments should be measured by the person, not by outside influences. I heard something like that on the radio on the way to work. The two DJ's on KSBJ talked about people comparing themselves to other people using Facebook or, worse yet, comparing yourself to the Christmas Letter . (In the infamous Christmas Letter , of course, you can never compare. The Christmas family accomplished so much during the year and drives most of us deep into our eggnog to drown our sorrowful and empty lives. As one of the DJs said, if you've never received a Christmas Letter , just be thankful.) So I thought about what I'm most proud of in my life, studiously ignoring the nagging caveats for each accomplishment that impinge on my consciousness and work to negate it. It actually looked a little ...

As I sit and work I listen to music, when I can. (Thank you, Pandora.) Celtic Thunder is one of my favorite Pandora Channels. I just heard a song I've not heard before. From their Heritage Album the song is called Gold & Silver Days. They sing of the songs their mother sang to them as children, and how the days were sweet though they were poor. We were poor. We children didn't know it. I wasn't even aware of it as a teenager. I knew some people had things we didn't but I paid no attention to that. I had a ball glove, a tennis racket. I had friends who had pools and boats, and that made me happy. After all, they were my friends, and I could ride in their boats and swim in their pools. Once in a while I did. Tom Streeter was one of my closest friends in North Carolina. He owned a boat (well, his Dad did, but at the age of fifteen we didn't make a distinction). He and I used to go out on the Inter-Coastal waterway all the time in that boat and we had a lot of...

I like comics, and used to scrounge for blocks seeking discarded bottles that I could turn in for a penny apiece (perhaps a nickel - it was long ago). When I could afford them, I'd buy Spiderman or Superman or Avengers, depending on which I was following at the time. Spiderman was my favorite for years. Who didn't want to be Peter Parker with his secret identity and Gwen Stacy as a girlfriend? Then they killed Gwen and I quit following Spiderman. I still like comics and occasionally buy a trade paperback. I just got one with a rebooted Spiderman, where he gets a job with JJJ to fix his paper's web page. Nice touch. But Spiderman is a different story. I also love a good story. If the story can catch my attention, I don't really need pictures. But that's the beauty of a good comic - a good story AND pictures. I follow a number of comics on-line. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of on-line comics on the internet. Not all are equal. Some are simply strips....

This is a complaining post, and I plan to name names, so if you don't want to hear me whine, just stop now. Move along. We had to move our services to our new home, most especially television and internet. Both of these fine companies were more than willing to set us up at our new home, but both have substantial charges for moving. Oh, it's just a few hundred dollars but I was a poor boy and that's still a lot of money to me, especially for accepting the continuation of a service I pay monthly for. DirecTV arranged to connect us at our new house on the Friday after we moved everything. That was their earliest appointment. Aside from charging us for the move, this was fine with us. The guy showed up when they said he would and he went to work. It was a hot day. The skies threatened rain, but never materialized. Just before the guy showed up we lost power to the house. Well, to be fair, everyone around us lost power too (over four hundred people according to the p...

One of Darling's crews finished the floors. Another contractor put blinds on the windows. Another crew finished the painting. Darling's wonderful brother fixed the plumbing (he is just an all-around handy-man). Fruit trees were planted in the back yard, two grapefruit trees, two tangerine trees, two flowering peach trees and one avocado tree. A new oak tree was planted in the front to replace the erased one, though the new one went on the other side of the driveway. We now comply with the HOA. Darling hired two guys, Juan and JD, to move boxes on Wednesday, June 27. Darling's fantastic brother showed up to help. Juan had a flat bed for his landscaping business, and he is a strong man. Yes, this is the same guy who planted the half-dozen trees in the back yard for Darling. JD didn't say much to me, just kept moving boxes. Sadly, the new house got pretty full with all the boxes, and the old house didn't look much emptier. That changed Thursday. Of our three mover...