Standing Down

Due to the nature of my second career, I find myself with long periods of gainful employment, followed by shorter periods of non-workiness.  My most recent employer, Giant Pharmaceutical House, was going along great guns when I started on my third stint with them, but I knew that if they took too long coming up with the next "magic bullet" drug, things would start turning down.

And they did.

At the end of the year just passed, I was told to pack my bags and move along.  So, I took my coffee cup (the only personal item I'll allow myself at work) and said my fond farewells.  Unfortunately, it was announced last week that about a thousand of my former colleagues will be taking the plunge too. Being a contractor, I'm used to this ... my colleagues being regular employees, not so much.

But this is their problem to sort out.  I have my own issues.

Finding yourself with time on your hands during the worst weather month in the Northern Hemisphere is not fun.  I spent the first three weeks of my free time reminding myself that I didn't have to go to work, therefore I could stop fretting over projects that were coming due.  At the same time I milled aimlessly about the house, playing on the internet and watching television (Note to self:  Have a plan to occupy your time when you retire for real).

And then one morning early last week, I woke up and found that a switch had been thrown in my head.  It was time to embrace my freedom and start paying attention to the things around me.  And it was pretty fucking great. For example:

The best time to buy a gigantic-assed flat screen television is when your work dries up and you have only half the income coming in that you did previously.  It's also a good time to pay Xfinity/Comast/Whatever-The-Fuck-Their-Name-Is more money to get HD service.  I swear to all that is holy, the picture quality is magnificent!  This was no more apparent than when I was watching the exciting motion picture "Twister" and realized that even in 1996, Helen Hunt looked like a shopworn Sea Hag and it would be frightening to even entertain the possibility of what her wrinkled, hatched-faced puss looks like today, fully 15 years later.

Do you like the History?  I do.  Particularly American History.  One day, on a trip to the library, I came upon a book about the opening of the West after the Louisiana Purchase.  This book concentrated on those lice-ridden, beaver trappin', Injun slaughterin' Mountain Men.  Unfortunately, it was written by a Historian.  This meant that I had to wade through pages of dry prose, punctuated with big high faluntin' words that necessitated my having to keep a dictionary close at hand.  I finished the book with some basic knowledge, which will have to be supplemented by finding another book on the same subject written by Stephen King or perhaps firing up the old Roku box to find that 1972 Robert Redford classic "Jerimiah Johnson".

Walking around your house in the daylight gives you new insight on what a piece of shit it really is.  Particularly those half-finished projects.  So, now ALL of the doors and trim in the old homestead are the same color and I'm preparing for the assault on the kitchen cabinets.  This will be followed closely by admitting the harsh truth of the limits of my abilities and paying someone to put down a new kitchen floor.

Good times!

So thanks Giant Pharmaceutical House, for giving me some time off to shift mental and physical gears.  As soon as you've developed that wonder drug that eliminates the heartbreak of rectal itch, I'll be back to ride the wave again.

Déjà Vu

I attended Kindergarten before the law required it.  Whenever I'm feeling young, I only have to remember this fact to remind me how ancient I actually am.  However, this is not the point of this particular story.

The site of my earliest supervised learning was a Presbyterian Church somewhere in southern Missouri.  Given that buses had not yet been invented, I was conveyed to and from school every day in a Nash Rambler station wagon driven by a manic/depressive fat woman.  Since the Rambler was the only way for all of us little tykes to get to school, we were all picked up in one run and crammed into the back of the wagon.  This required creative human cargo packing and led to the development of Tetrus.

One fine Spring day, we went on a picnic.  This was fine with us as we could look forward to an honest to goodness lunch instead of the plastic cup of Kool-Aid and the one Ritz cracker that was our usual fare (childhood obesity was not an issue in the late 1950's).  Instead, all of our mothers communicated telepathically and made each one of us a peanut butter & jelly sandwich and potato chips, both wrapped in wax paper that eventually leaked grease through the paper sack that held them.

The addition of all of the sack lunches made the quarters in the back of the Rambler even tighter than usual.  Inevitably, I was crammed between the legs of a young lady named Cherry, and her sack lunch.  After a few minutes, Cherry tapped me on the shoulder and whined "You Squashed My Lunch!"  I looked down and sure enough, her lunch was squashed.

I shrugged my shoulders at her and turned away, but the whining machine didn't shut down.  "You Squashed My Lunch!  YOU SQUASHED MY LUNCH!" After a few minutes of this, I turned to her again, and using a nifty phrase I had just learned from my Dad, told her to "shut the fuck up".

This seemed to do the trick and she quit whining.  Fortunately there were no repercussions.

This memory was dredged from the back of my mind one morning last week, when I received a phone call from Jan.  She was on the bus with her class, headed to the far southern regions of Chicagoland to visit Argonne National Laboratory on a field trip.

In preparation for her trip, we had purchased a deluxe version of the Oscar Mayer "Lunchable" lunch pack, containing tasty perpetual lunch meat, cheese, crackers; and (bonus!) a juice box.  This was stored in the refrigerator and covered with post-it notes indicating that I should keep my slimy hands off of it.

That morning, she was trying to put the Lunchable in her Jimmy Choo lunch bag and was having trouble fitting it in.  Always helpful, I grabbed the bag from her and gave the lunch kit a couple of sharp punches  so that it fit, and then zipped the bag up.

When she called that morning from the bus, I thought she had been in a crash because she sounded very upset.  But instead of some horrible vehicular accident, she was pissed at me because my careful packing of her lunch kit had caused the juice box to rupture, soaking the rest of the package contents.

"So, you squashed my lunch!  What am I going to do for lunch?" ... she whined.

Me:  Does Argonne have a cafeteria?

Jan:  Yes.

Me:  Do you have money?

Jan:  Yes.

Me:  Then problem solved.

You will note that I did say "Then problem solved".  I did not say "Then shut the fuck up".

I may have pulled it off when I was 5 years old, but I'm not stupid enough to try it again.

Mixing Religion & Food ... Sort Of

Last night I was moving around the television channels, trying to find something to watch other than re-runs of Mythbusters, when I came to rest on a program about Mennonites.  I'm not a very religious person, so I soon moved on, but later in the evening, I started wondering, what the hell is a Mennonite?  This morning, I went to that internet source of all things accurate, Wikipedia, and did a little page surfing.

And I came away basically saying to myself, "What the hell is a Mennonite?" In the article, I did zero in on the word "Anabaptist", which caught my eye only because the character Chaplain Tappman in the book Catch 22 was an Anabaptist, but as near as I could figure out, Mennonites and Amish are about the same thing.  And since Wikipedia does tend to over-simplify a lot of shit, this is what they look like:

I'll keep one of these in my wallet to help me in spotting them.

I was doing a couple of more searches in order to learn just a little bit more, when it became obvious that googling Mennonite brought up more food related things than religion.  Apparently, Mennonites like to eat ... a lot.  And they seem to like, in my humble opinion, bland fatty foods.  But the lack of variety surprised me.  They like food, but the selection is kind of slim.  This seemed to be the favorite dish:

Vereniki doused in Schmont fat with farmers sausage

It took a little bit to find recipes, but Vereniki is basically a boiled doughball. Schmont fat appears to be dough gravy ... and farmers sausage looks like something that was deposited on my lawn this morning by an off-leash dog. But I'm sure it all tastes blandilicious!

The other favorite is a compilation of various foods to create a late-afternoon meal called Faspa.  The most popular interpretation of the word Faspa is the Florida Association of School Personnel Administrators.  Although this sounds like a fun group, I doubted it was the definition I was looking for, and further digging proved me right.  The meal consists of rolls (more dough), butter, jam, cheese and coffee.  More things can be added, but the most popular embellishment to the meal appears to be pig tails, preferably en casserole.  For those of you wondering what this porcine concoction might look like without making it yourself, here's a two picture recipe:

Step One:  Remove tails from pig

Step Two:  Serve piping hot!

From a personal preference point of view, I'd want to put a lot of Schmont fat on that.  I mentioned above that the Mennonite list of favorite foods seems to be pretty slim.  In fact, according to one blog on Mennonite eating that I came upon, Welcome To The Bowman Bunch,   the unfortunate author ate nothing but the following for every meal of her life:

Vereniki

Farmers Sausage

Rolls

Schmont Fat

Cherry Mose (?)

Well, I should talk ... if it weren't for Jan's protests, I would eat nothing but baked chicken, rice and frozen corn.

I'll bet that all of this food talk about baked, fried and boiled dough; plus those yummy pig tails have made you ravenous.  And since this is a food related post, what kind of asshole would I be if I didn't leave you with my favorite Mennonite recipe:

Plumi Moos (Sunday Soup)
4 cups water
3 cups dried fruit
1/2 package cherry Jello
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 tablespoons corn starch

Cook fruit in water until very well done.  Then mix sugar with cornstarch and enough water to make a thin paste.  Let cook a few minutes to take away the starchy taste.  Then take from stove and add cherry Jello.  Serve warm or cold.

When you're done, it should look exactly, precisely like this:

Does It?

If not, just ladle on Schmont fat until it does.  Let me know how you like it ... Atvadus!

Do The Right Thing

It's 2011.  Pronounce it "Twenty Eleven".  One hundred years ago, did people say "One Thousand Nine Hundred Eleven?

No, they pronounced it "Nineteen Eleven".

It is not "Two Thousand Eleven".

So ... stop it.

Re-Doo

One of the things that I've figured out in my life is that I tend to do things when no one else is doing them.  Consciously or not, I buck the trend.  When the economy is bad and everyone stays home, I go on vacation.  When everyone is getting fired from their jobs, I get hired.  When everyone gets fat, I get thin.  I don't do it on purpose, it just happens.

So, I picked the dead of Winter, instead of Spring, to change my image.  Yes; I changed my haircut.  Drastically.

It all started about a month ago, when I happened to bump into a neighbor at the store who had her adorable seven year old son in tow.  As we were standing there talking, the young boy looked at me and said "do you have a wig on?"  Resisting the urge to kick him in the nuts, I chuckled richly and told him no.

Ah, children and their innocent no-holds-barred questions.  Wouldn't you just like to pack every last one of them into a rocket and send them blasting into deep space?  However, this little bastard's remark did make me start thinking about the state of my hair.

With little change, I've basically had the same hair style since high school. My hair grows unevenly and is curly, thinning and gray ... all at the same time.  It looks like it doesn't belong on my head.  And I hate the fact that it blows all over the place in even a small breeze, making me look like I was recently electrocuted.

I knew that there had to be a hair paradigm shift.  So, over the weekend, I went ... where else?  To the internet, to find nifty hair styles for mature men over 50.  And I found out, that no matter what site I visited, that I should have my hair styled in the manner of only two men.  The first:

Mature George Clooney

Yes, he does have nice hair.  But my hair isn't the same "make up" as his.  In fact, If my stylist tried to shape my hair to match his, she would more likely end up with the following version of George Clooney:

Pre-Pubic Hair George Clooney

Not too promising.  The second of the two over-50 men whose hair I should try to emulate is no other than that man-about-town fashion plate:

Mature Keith Richards

Well, at least this one wouldn't require a stylist.  All I'd have to do is set my hair on fire and then douse it with sheep piss.  Finding the jaunty hat might be a problem though.

Okay, I kind of lied too.  There were other over-50 hair styles for guys that were featured.  How about this one?

This Is What I Look Like Now For Chrissakes!

Then there's always this one:

Kill Me Now (Nice Jacket Though)

So, to say I was discouraged is an understatement.  I had a haircut scheduled for yesterday and no cool pictures to take with me to guide the hands of my stylist.  At the appointed time, I trudged into the shop and as I plopped down in the chair, Teresa asked "The usual?"  Instead of my meek agreement, I summoned all the testosterone left in me and shouted NO! After everyone had stopped staring at me, I calmly explained what I wanted. A half-hour and a pile of hair later, I had what I came for.  I was pleased, and as I left the shop, I reaped my share of appreciative looks and complements from all of the other lady stylists, particularly after I handed each a 5 dollar bill.

No doubt, you're all saying to yourselves "Why Rob, what does your hair look like now?"  And I would reply to you ... what do you think I am?  Some kind of narcissist?  But, if you look at my About Me picture with a magnifying glass or microscope, you can sort of tell.

Now, if I can just run into that neighbor lady and her smart-shit devil's spawn again, I can extract some satisfaction.

Wig my ass.