Tuesday Musings

Thoughts and other mental trash on a Tuesday morning ...

Door To Door:  We discontinued our land line telephone service over a year ago.  And with that done, the telemarketing calls ended.  No one knows our cell phone numbers and we're on the "no-call" list, so it's been nice.  That is until recently.  Telemarketers are striking back by showing up at the front door at dinner time.  The door bell activity has really started to get annoying in the last month.  In just one evening last week, someone came to the door five times ... after dark.  I didn't answer it until the last one, when I'd had enough.  Turned out, it was someone from AT&T and when I asked them if it had been them that had come to the door the other four, separate times, they sheepishly admitted that it had been.  I shut the door in their face.

Pick Me:  As some of you are aware, I'm an outside contractor and have periods of time in-between employment.  I'm also getting up there in age.  And I hate interviews.  So, I had a really fun time last Friday interviewing with a potential employer.  Two hours of defending my experience ... and my age. And now the waiting to see if I was good enough.  I can't wait to just retire.

Don't Know Much About History:  On the subject of American History, schools have always loaded it up heavy on the front end and have run out of time by the end of the school year to even get to the Civil War.  This always frustrated me.  Who cared about the fucking Pilgrims and the morass of shit that happened in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  I don't recommend books very often, but I just finished two of them by a guy named Ted Morgan, who actually makes these time periods interesting.  His books are titled "Wilderness At Dawn" and "A Shovel Of Stars".

Proud To Live In Illinois:  Tomorrow, the fourth Illinois Governor will be sentenced to prison for betraying the public trust.  Rod Blagojevich (Blah-goy-ah-vitch) will join his predecessor, George Ryan, behind bars.  Rod is eligible for a life sentence, but the current Vegas line is 12 to 15 years.  If this isn't the most corrupt state in the Union ... well, I'd be hard pressed to name another one.

Jingle Bells:  It's way more fun to shop online than it is to go to the stores.  Period.

Politically Incorrect:  Andrea Bocelli needs to open his eyes when he's singing.  I don't care if he is blind, he reminds me of Michael McDonald, except he doesn't appear to be eating his microphone, as McDonald did.

Bocelli

McDonald

Or maybe he does.

Just Say No:  Don't leave me any nasty comments about the above.  I'll just ignore them.

Winter Savings Tips

You know, there's nothing worse than going to the mailbox in the afternoon and finding it crammed full of bills.  Boy!  That frosts my ass.

But sometimes ... the envelope has something included in it, along with the bill.  Take my village water, sewer and trash bill for example.  It always has a chatty newsletter in it chock full of information about how the present mayor is making life so good for us.  Why, just last February, right after the most horrendous blizzard this area had encountered in over thirty years, the newsletter contained a personal note from the mayor reminding us to not be "crabby-pants whiners" about how cold it was and how much snow there was on the ground.  Well, I got to thinking about that and figured Mayor Whatsername had a point.  So I remained cheerful about how miserable I was until the ice floes on Mill Creek broke up in June.

Pep talks are nice in your bills, but I really wished the Mayor had talked about how to save money on our water/sewer/trash bill.  Just like the good people at The Upper Great Plains Gas & Electric Cooperative do.

When I received my TUGPG&E bill in early November, I was delighted to see that they had included a pamphlet on how to save on energy bills in your home during the cold winter months to come.  So, instead of throwing it in the trash, I held on to it so I could share these same handy tips with you. Since I just write nonsense most of the time, I'm happy to do something useful for a change ... so here we go:

11 Tips To Help You Save On Gas and Electric Heating Bills

*  Air your house out frequently during cold snaps.  Don't let old, stale, over-warmed air accumulate in your furnace.

*  Turn heat up at night to avoid "peak heating" hours.

*  Save money by reusing old furnace filters.  Leave them in an extra year this winter.

*  Thermostats function most efficiently at 78 degrees Fahrenheit.

*  Use your electric stove to heat the kitchen.

*  Keep windows open.  It helps the house "breathe".

*  Pay your gas and electric bills months in advance to improve household budgeting.

*  Encourage kids to play outdoors.  Running back and forth, in and out of the house all the time will help them keep warm.

*  Put felt or rubber stripping, about an inch wide, around all your indoor plants.

*  Use your air conditioner during winter months when there's less demand for home cooling.

*  Put six inches of TUGPG&E "CollectaHeat" insulation on your basement floor.  Much of your home's heat escapes through basement floors.

A Little Help

As so often happens, life serves up a steaming can of whup-ass when you least expect it.  And what suffers?


For one thing ... my blog.  So, over the weekend, I enlisted the help of one of my best, best internet friends to write a post for me.  If you're not familiar with Roscoe "Bic" Lighter, then you should be. "Bic" has written the very successful weblog "The Lighter Side of Junk" for more years than I care to remember, and I enjoy his wry observations of this crazy old world most times.  So please, give it up for "Bic" ...


You know, I often find as I grow older that the mind is a tricky thing.  Like an old engine, say, or a 1934 Packard, it has it's own quirks and you have to allow for them when you're making use of it.  It works at its own speed and it doesn't do to try and hurry it along as I found out to my chagrin the other day when dashing out to a Kiwanis meeting.  I returned home to find the pot roast I had been planning to eat halfway through the spin cycle in the washing machine and a crock pot full of boot socks simmering nicely on the stove.  Well, of course the roast was ruined and I had to get professionals in to clean the sock steam off of the kitchen windows.

People often ask me what I think of today's young humorists.  How do they compare to the humorists of my day?  Well, I told you the mind is a tricky thing and I seem to remember talking about that very matter with Will Rogers in the jump seat of a 1936 Lockheed Electra flying machine several weeks ago. "Will, what do you think of all the so-called humor that's going around now on the TV and the internets?" I said.  Old Will looked over at me and I could see he was of a mind to speak on the matter.

"Bic," he said.  "there's two kinds of humorists; humorists who say there are two kinds of humorists and others who do not.  It's these latter kind that seem so prevalent in your modern times, the most glorious and prosperous times in the world."

"They seem to believe that contempt of government is funny and that flouting laws against marijuana in public is smart.  They forget the fact that their rights are privileges that may be taken away.  You see, Bic, society is like a parent.  It has its little peculiarities.  But it also has a parental type authority; it can 'ground' us in a jail, or it an cut our 'allowance' by putting us on a blacklist so we don't get any work.  This is done for the benefit of the whole social family, though it is sometimes as hard for us as it is for children to realize society is only looking out for our future."

"That's why we shouldn't be smart assed or sarcastic about governments any more than we should about our parents, nor should we go around making cruel fun of our brothers and sisters, or fellow citizens, just because they spend good money on fuzzy toilet seat covers, or something."

"Bic, one of the wonderful things about America is that there is room for all different types of people. People who want to riggedy-rig A-rab elections or go to war against push-over third world nations. Other people, who prefer to be older, stay home and support those overseas.  Some people want to run large multi-national corporations, others prefer to work for these.  Some to make laws, some to obey them.  There is room in our great country for all these types of people."

"In our country now we have some dissidents.  Some are humorists, bitter and lashing out at the world like a drunk in a mirror factory.  Others are like the bumblebee, which science tells us can't fly. They believe the world has got itself into a shit-fizzer of mighty magnitude because they believe it can no longer fly.  We don't need them, Bic, we never did.  In my day, we wouldn't have stood still for it.  'If you think like that,' I recall one small town mayor saying to a rowdy running against him on the local soft-in-the-head ticket, 'why don't you go be a Mexican?'"

"In a lot of ways, it's the fault of your modern magazine publishers, and moving picture producers, who don't go out and look through the newspapers of heartland America to see what the people really want."

Well, Will had his say on the matter and I woke up in my back yard.  There was a bumblebee flying by and I remembered that some people said that was impossible.  Then I woke up again and I was in my bed and it was November.  Something to think about, isn't it, how the mind plays tricks on us?

Short Story

Okay, this morning I was down in the basement putting up insulation.  And the door bell rang.

Normally, I don't answer the door bell because it's usually someone trying to sell me shit.  And I figure that if it's a neighbor, they'll ring the door bell twice.  But Jan had told me last night that she had a package coming in via UPS, and if it was them, I wanted to grab the package from the porch before some asshole stole it, which a certain percentage of the population are apt to do nowadays.

Our front door has a side window, so you can't sneak up on it to take a peek at who's outside.  So, when I rounded the corner from the back room, it was too late.  They had seen me.

I opened the door to two middle aged ladies and immediately knew I had probably made a mistake. The mistake was confirmed when one of the ladies reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of ...

Watchtower Magazine ... Shit.  Jehovah's Witnesses.

Remembering Jan chiding me the other day for being rude to people, I was determined to be nice and try to get rid of them as quickly and expediently as possible.

But, Jehovah's Witnesses are IM-possible to get rid of without being brusque.  I tried.  I really did try to be nice, but when the one woman started talking about sex and the Bible ... well, that was just too much.

I shut the door in their faces.

And then I was angry at myself for the next hour.  Not because I was rude, but because got suckered into listening to some stranger try to discuss religion and sex with me.

So ... no more answering the door bell  Even if it rings twice.

Shaker Shock

This morning I woke up with about a thousand ideas whizzing around in my head, but with no motivation to act on any of them.  So, after about an hour of my brain doing the slot machine whirl, I focused on one activity that appeared to be attainable.  What to make for dinner tonight.  For some reason, people (including me) focus on Friday and Saturday night dinner.  I suppose we want something out of the ordinary because it's the weekend.

So, I went to Google and typed in "What to eat on Friday night" ... and was disappointed to find that most people are locked into the usual shit.  Tacos, lasagna, spaghetti, shrimp scampi, etc.

Bleah.

I wanted something WAY out of the ordinary, and for some reason, my mind went back to a post I wrote a while back on Mennonite food.  Well, just as I thought then, none of that stuff looked any good, so I did some free association and started wondering about Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) and if they had any good food.

And it turned out that Shakers were pretty interesting.  When I was a kid, my parents had friends who lived in Halltown, Missouri.  Their house was sort of overshadowed by a church across the street. We went to Halltown fairly often and the friend's kid and I would roam the town, but we were always hesitant to get near the church, because it was supposedly a Shaker church and Shaker's had dark powers.

Well, you know how full of shit little kids are.  It turned out that it wasn't a Shaker church, but the parishioners of whatever religious sect it was did worship Satan and eat babies.

Haha ... just kidding.  But they were pretty stern looking.

Anyway, I got into enough trouble when I tried to explain all about the Mennonites in one paragraph, so if you want to know all about Shakers, you'll have to go here.  But I did want to mention one thing. At the apex of Shaker society, there were about six thousand members.  Today, there are only three practicing Shakers in the United States, located in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.  Two gals and one guy.

Here's what the three of them do every day:

• The day begins at 7:30 a.m.; the Great Bell on Dwelling House rings, calling everyone to breakfast.
• At 8:00 a.m. morning prayers start. Two Psalms are read, then passages are read from elsewhere in the Bible. Following this is communal prayer and silent prayer, concluded with the singing of a Shaker hymn.
• Work for the Shakers begins at 8:30.
• Work stops at 11:30 for midday prayers.
• Lunch begins at 12:00. This is the main meal for the Shakers.
• Work continues at 1:00 p.m.
• At 6:00 it is dinner time, the last meal of the day.
• On Wednesdays at 5:00 p.m. they hold a prayer meeting which is followed by a Shaker Studies class.

Wow, and I thought my day was monotonous.

After I spent an hour reading about Shakers, I remembered that I had looked them up in the first place in order to find some cool recipes.  And as it turns out, they do have recipes ... and they even look edible.  But it looks like even the Shakers are slaves to typical Friday night fair, given that one of the recipes is named "Brother Arnold's Lasagna with Meat Sauce".  But the other stuff looked good enough to try on some other night besides Friday.

I didn't feel like looking up anymore religious sect's recipes, so I just went to the store this morning and winged it.  I just returned a little while ago, and what did I decide on?

Bratwurst, onion rings and ranchero beans.

Maybe I'll run up to the convenience store before dinner and get a 40 of Malt Liquor to wash it down with.  Bon Apetit!