After a seemingly endless succession of gloomy, cloudy, drizzly days, we’ve managed to pull off a couple of blue-sky, bright sunny days! Not in a row, mind you, but Friday was beautiful, and today is downright glorious! Sunday is truly earning its name today!
The Minnesota Twins, bless their hearts, even pulled off a win against the Detroit Tigers yesterday (hoping for another today). That gives them a win-loss record of 30-35, only five games below the desired .500 mark. (It’s a no-go mojo for a team to play below .500 or a batter to hit below .200 (in infamous “Mendoza Line“).)
On a day like today one can’t help but to think about oranges.
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9 comments | tags: Batman, batmobile, batphone, Hamlet, humor, June, knock knock, orange, oranges, poetry, round fruit, silly | posted in Brain Bubble, Writing
Thursday and Friday of this past week were days 10 and 9 in [big booming voice] The Countdown to Retirement. I’m taking Mondays off in June (no more Monday mornings!), so I have two four-day weeks remaining in my 33-year career at The Company.
And it’s a good thing I decided to stay through June. The project I’ve been working on since last September still hasn’t hit production (through, I stress, absolutely no fault of mine).
This week we finally got to the point of end-to-end testing in the QA environment, and I’m anticipating we’ll start testing in production next week. Talk about taking it down to the wire!
As you might imagine, rather than lazily basking in the last remaining weeks of my career, I’m instead working my ass off!
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11 comments | tags: Bruce Willis, Looper, Mariano Rivera, Minnesota Twins, retirement, work | posted in Baseball, From My Collection, Life, Movies
There is such a thing as a shaggy dog story. It’s a story that winds on for as long as the teller can spin it. Eventually, as the audience gets ever more restless, the “joke” ends with the most banal and trivial of non-punchlines. The longer the telling, the more pointless must be the punchline.
Old dogs notoriously can’t be taught new tricks, but perhaps that’s because they’ve learned the tricks they care to learn and aren’t interested in jumping through new hoops.
This little tale is not a shaggy dog story, but about wise old dogs…
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8 comments | tags: dogs, German Sheperd, humor, jokes, panther, squirrel | posted in From My Collection
You may remember that early this year I said you should be thinking about elephants. I hope you have all been working on your assignments, because there are some important metaphorical discussions ahead concerning elephants.
And some jokes. Do you know why elephants are wrinkled? Because they’re very difficult to iron. And whatever do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him and pitch to the giraffe. [bah-rump-bump] (One pity about blogging… A line that bad really demands a rimshot, or other funny sound effect, for proper punctuation.)
Here’s another little gem from my collection. Just love a good punch line!
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16 comments | tags: elephants, humor, stories, telephones | posted in From My Collection
This week begins the 25 final work days at The Company. Retirement is up there with the other major lifetime events: birth, marriage, career, parenthood, property, divorce, health, death. For many it’s the conclusion of the other main relationship in their lives.
I find I’m too distracted and tense to write blog articles right now. The anticipation making me… making me… I dunno,… making me w… wonder if the day will ever come. It’s like an adult Christmas that only comes once in a lifetime.
So, in the meantime—Spring Cleaning—I’m clearing out my files. These are things I’ve kept for years thinking I might use them some day…
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6 comments | tags: humor, Walmart | posted in From My Collection, Life
The countdown to retirement continues. As I mentioned last Tuesday, this week I pulled the lever on making it official. Six more weeks, and I can put The Company in my rear-view mirror and speed off in my own directions. The big project I’ve been leading looks like it will complete before I exit. We should begin end-to-end system testing in a week or so.
The flip side is that, between tension over retirement and massive project effort during the week (and trying to catch up on blog reading and commenting (and watching baseball)), there isn’t much left for blogging right now.
So you get another Brain Bubble. I would have called this post “No Shoes,” except that it sends the wrong message. This post isn’t about lacking shoes. Or shirts.
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9 comments | tags: logic, road signs, signs, syllogism | posted in Brain Bubble
The other day I was watching a TNT rerun of Castle, a show I recently decided to check out and discovered I liked. I’m actually vaguely embarrassed—not in liking the show, it’s a good show—because I didn’t realize the male lead, Nathan Fillion, is Malcolm from Firefly (and the movie based on it, Serenity).
A while back (probably when they first began airing older episodes), TNT was running a lot of ads for the show, and I kept thinking, “Gee, that guy looks so familiar.” It took another blogger reviewing the show to make the connection. (I’m oddly bad with faces sometimes.)
It’s a good show, but this isn’t about Castle so much as coffins and creepy things.
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18 comments | tags: Abby Sciuto, bugs, Castle, coffins, Firefly, Nathan Fillion, NCIS, NOVA, snakes, spiders, venom | posted in Brain Bubble, Science
It’s been an interesting few days. Not bad; there’s no tale of woe to tell. It’s more that things that have been churning in my mind are starting to bubble to the surface. And there have been some interesting events going on (the Minnesota Twins are fun to watch again, for instance).
Also, yesterday I (electronically) submitted the “paperwork” to officially kick off the retirement process. My last day of work will be June 28, (2π Day and my mom’s birthday!) There’s a hell of a pay cut coming up due to this early retirement, but that won’t be a real issue for a while. It’s not something I’ll need to consider until at least next year.
I warn you now: I have no idea what this post is going to be about!
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28 comments | tags: Adria Richards, bullying, mental tar pit, Monty Python, people, Python, sexism, stupidity | posted in Life, Rant
Sisyphus practicing as a child.
Speaking of catching up and baseball, here’s an article I started last March. I got about halfway through it before I bogged down and filed it in drafts to resume later. Unfortunately, March was very busy at work, plus my focus has been pulled away from here for several months. I never did resume the article.
Starting this coming week, some of the work drain should start to decrease. As we near completion, the giant boulder I’m been pushing uphill gets smaller. I’m reaching a point where work isn’t sucking up every inch of life I’ve got. That leaves a little left over for fun. And old posts.
The start of the new season has me thinking baseball, and this post from March turns out to fit nicely with the recent one.
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4 comments | tags: Hall of Fame, HOF, Minnesota Twins, PED, steroid use, WBC, World Baseball Classic | posted in Baseball, Opinion
My work project is entering the final stretch, so long days and no blogging to speak of. But this morning, eating toast induced a Brain Bubble I thought worth recording, so here I am for a drive-by quickie, a blogging booty call.
You know how people like to say (usually in that annoying sing-song voice), “When you ‘assume’ you make an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me’.” This is often in retaliation for someone having assumed something someone else found unwarranted.
To those people I’d just like to say, “Huh?”
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38 comments | tags: assume, F.U., Felix Ungar, Neil Simon, Oscar Madison, The Odd Couple | posted in Brain Bubble, Opinion, Rant
