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 someday…
Continue reading
8 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.
Continue reading
11 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.
Continue reading
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!
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
4 Comments | tags: Hall of Fame, HOF, Minnesota Twins, PED, steroid use, WBC, World Baseball Classic | posted in Baseball
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?”
Continue reading
38 Comments | tags: assume, F.U., Felix Ungar, Neil Simon, Oscar Madison, The Odd Couple | posted in Brain Bubble, Rant
Baseball is here! It has been for weeks. Due to the blog bogs, it’s been a while since my last baseball post. It’s high time to rectify that!
One problem is that the Twins don’t give one a whole lot to talk about. They rarely earn many headlines on the hardball pages. (This is at least partially due to not earning many runs on the baseball fields.) We’re not dead last in any key stat, and we’re even doing pretty good in some areas. That’s relatively good news for Twins fans!
Today I want to talk about baseball, old school versus new school. It’s a choice you make — or one that’s thrust upon you — and which you adopt often informs many of your other views on the sport.
Continue reading
9 Comments | tags: Brian Kenny, designated hitter, For The Record, Harold Reynolds, instant replay, Jim Thome, MLB, MLB channel, MLB Network, MLB Now, new school, old school, umpires | posted in Baseball, Life
“Whose woods these are…”
I’m still working my way back to blogging. I likely won’t be fully back until my work life is behind me, but I am getting past the shock of finding out just how right I was about management’s view of me. It’s been a week-and-a-half since I announced my intention to divorce them, and there has been nothing since the initial, “Oh, okay.”
It’s not unexpected. It’s not really even a surprise. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. I’ve realized that I am going through my second divorce. And both times it’s been due to the perception that my cons swamp my pros (and my prose). What really stings is the sense of unfairness caused by so many others saying, “I don’t understand their thinking.”
Yeah, me either, but so it goes. Set it aside; I have some catching up to do.
Continue reading
13 Comments | tags: bisy backson, honey, Minnesota Twins, Robert Frost, snow, Tao of Pooh, Winnie the Pooh | posted in Books, Life
The dung beetle, a far more noble form of life than a spammer!
Going to try something a little different. Rather than write a longish comment in response to someone’s blog article or comment, I’m going to write a shortish article on my own blog. (Well, short for me, anyway.)
Sometimes when writing a long comment, I find myself thinking that what I’d like to say would be better served as an article rather than a typically long-winded comment. There is also that comment sections can be a bit confined space-wise, plus it’s a bit harder to include pictures or do formatting.
Today’s “comment” is actually a long-standing observation about the interweb but was triggered by the sudden rise in spam Follows and then Michelle’s latest article over on The Green Study.
Continue reading
42 Comments | tags: die die die spammers, die horribly spammers, die painfully spammers, die spammers, TWIOWASBE, vanish from the earth spammers | posted in Life, Rant, The Interweb
A bit over a month ago I wrote that, after six months of effort and three weeks of idly waiting for others to complete work, maybe things would finally start moving on my data integration project. And I haven’t posted since (other than the Rick O’Shay post later that same day).
As it turned out, things did finally take off, and the month got very busy. Things got even busier when they dumped an urgent “can you help with this” project in my lap. (I’ve also spent the month struggling with whether I wanted to continue blogging, and if so, whether to change my approach.)
Today I thought I’d post an article about all that (and the Minnesota Twins).
Continue reading
11 Comments | tags: Minnesota Twins, retirement, work | posted in Life, Rant
Logos con carne 