Category Archives: monday

derrieres, monday, weather

The Back Has It

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The unseasonably nice weather continued here and boy is it great! Molly and I went walking and it was close to 50 degrees this afternoon. The downside is that there are sometimes rather strange people out walking when we are.

This afternoon was a case in point: a lady and her teenage daughters were walking in front of us at about the same speed. Molly and I got the pleasure of following them from about 20 yards to the rear for a couple of miles. That in and of itself isn’t interesting; the fact that the lady and her daughters were carrying on a discussion in voices that approached foghorn levels was.

I was a bit confused over their topic of discussion for the first part of the walk. I was torn between believing that the topic was basketball, soccer, or vinyl siding. Some of the phrases I overheard were:

“It is so big that I can’t fit it through the hoop.”
“Mine is so straight and thin that everything keeps falling off.”
“I’m jealous of you because mine won’t fill them out.”
“I’m jealous because mine won’t fit in the gap.”

Of course, the bits and snippets Molly and I overhead were tantalizing but very uninformative as to what exactly was being discussed in such stentorian tones.

After 15 minutes, the conversation became clearer. They were discussing their derrières!

I still cannot fathom why they felt the need to discuss this topic in such depth and so loudly as they walked in the park, but it kept me entertained.

Now all I hope for is to see this on tomorrow’s walk:

chorale, monday, music

Only 10 Days Until Santa Comes

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Sunday afternoon was the Master Chorale Christmas concert. It is always a big event with everything from operatic renditions of classic carols to rock and jazz based carols. A great couple of hours of live voice and instrument to lighten the soul for the holidays.

I was supposed to meet mom at the venue, but I ended up being a few minutes late when Molly turned into a stinker dog and wouldn’t come in. (Anyone want to adopt a dog?) So when I got there, mom and friend had already entered the auditorium and been seated. This being a small town, one of the usherettes motioned to me to enter on the left side of the auditorium and said mom and crew were in the left section about 2/3 of the way down. The directions were a bit off, but I found them after the intermission and sat with them for the second half of the show.

I am one of those people who suffers voice envy when I hear people sing and carry a tune. I have a lifetime ban levied against my person by L and the Son that prohibits even thinking of singing in the shower, let alone singing aloud. But even for the terminal vocal disaster like me, there is something especially moving about the massed voices of a choir that plays with the heart strings. Everyone should attend at least one chorale or orchestral event during the Christmas season. It does your inner being good.

In other news, today was the first official day in my new job. Since the press announcements haven’t gone out yet (’cause I’ll probably end up writing them myself), I can’t say much about what the job is right now. Suffice it to say that I am now the CEO/Executive Director of a not for profit organization. For a total red-herring as to what the organization might be, I’ll leave you with this hint: I spent part of this afternoon as part of a crew stumbling around in snow covered sage brush with wind chills in the single digits using a tape measure, hammer, stakes, and orange paint. Any guesses?

(Notice how the title had nothing to do with what was written. That’s because I liked the title all by itself.)

monday, office

Short Week Monday

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The air carried a definite tang of cold and the clouds in the distance were looking a lot like snow all day. It was the perfect day to complete my Thanksgiving shopping, and the store was packed with others in a similar mind. Thanksgiving looks to be a small crowd here, consisting of Mom, MIL, L, Uncle J and Aunt J, possibly cousin D and me sitting down to pick the carcass of the bird. (Which is currently residing in the refrigerator waiting for a nice warm up on Thursday morning.) Looks like L will be getting into town on Wednesday, so a lot of the cleaning and prepping has been left in my dubious hands. The Son has to work in the mountains over the holiday, so he won’t be here. Maybe we’ll save him a drumstick or two since he really likes them.

Preparatory to making the official announcement about running for a partisan office as first mentioned here, I spent part of the afternoon filing the necessary pieces of paper with the county and the state. Come December I hope to have my finance committee up and running along with all the other things needed to be a real candidate. Now all I have to do is write the press release announcing my candidacy for early December release. Then it is a matter of getting people organized and …

As regular readers know, tomorrow will be my last day as mayor. After three terms, it is going to be different to be able to blame someone else. {*grin*} But before I depart, there are still a couple of last acts. In the morning, the Governor and his Town Hall Meeting will be in the area and I get to do the honors of introducing him. That will be my next to last official act as mayor. (The incoming mayor and I flipped a coin to see who would do the honors since he will be sworn in and me out as mayor in the evening city council meeting. Given that the governor is a {*gasp*} Democrat out here in a rural Republican area, I leave it up to you to guess whether I won or lost the coin toss to introduce him.) My last duty will be to convene the city council meeting tomorrow night so that the new members can be sworn in and assume the meeting. I’m still waiting to see what the surprise I have been threatened with is going to be.

Time to get back to reality. Besides, I may have to rewrite my sidebar after tomorrow night.

marketeers, monday

That Season

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I can’t believe that the Holiday Season barrage has already started. My email box overfloweth with absolutely unwanted and unneeded ads and promos. It is not just the spam-a-lot and no-name crowds either. Some is from top level tier-one merchandisers. They are desperately flooding my email box and my snail mail box.

Just to pick on one, HP has started adding their Holiday Season Specials to all the other email they send me. (The result of me  delusionally letting my name be added to a mailing list to garner some tech support info long ago. I suppose I will have to drag my poor frazzled mind through the underground maze that is the un-subscribe option.) I don’t want a list of tech gizmos sorted by price. I really don’t care what I can get for under $300. I’d just as soon gargle live fire ants.

I find it interesting how this blizzard of stuff starts coming earlier every year. It is also interesting how the various strata of retailers adapt and market. The class C merchants like Unknown-Products-You-Never-Heard-Of send tons of junk mail and catalogs urging you to come buy at their website (since they don’t list all the products in the junk mailer because, heaven forbid, that costs $$$). Buried amidst that flood is the same thing from better known merchants like Brookstone. It is interesting that this level of marketeers no longer go for the “spam the universe” via email approach like they used to. In the middle, you find companies like Dell that sends both a blizzard of snail mail and enough email to border on spamming. Finally, you get the upper tier marketeers that email every email contact that they may have collected over the years but seem to avoid paper and U.S. Postal Service like the plague. Makes me think they may have done a cost of converted sales study and …

Most of this stuff goes in the trash, usually before torturing human eyes. But you know what makes me sad? That the one such catalog I used to enjoy reading just to see what truly outrageous items would be pitched each year is no longer with us. I refer of course to that fun place of absolutely senseless consumerism: Sharper Image.

What now extinct harbinger of the season do you miss most? What new harbinger would you like to see cease to exist? Are you beginning to be bombarded with such materials yet? Inquiring minds want to know.

birthday, cleaning, monday

Football Monday

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I was busy watching the Broncos game when it struck me that there was something I forgot ot do today – post my blog entry!

I spent much of yesterday being a house drudge. You know, vacuuming, washing, and cleaning. Finally got around to cleaning up the Son’s room so one can see the floor and close the closet doors. (Remember it was a month or more ago that we sold the bunk bed from the room in the garage sale.)

One of the things I had to do was wash a couple of quilts that had been on the bunk bed for a while. So I washed them first and then took advantage of the fact that the day was near 80 degrees (probably the only one for a week or more either side since there is a chance of snow again on Wednesday) and hung them outside to dry in the warm breeze.

As I was doing that, my mind drifted to the thought of how fortunate we have been to have all the handmade quilts throughout our life.  We have quilts from my grandmother and my mom, all of which we use in day to day living. For those of you gasping in horror at the idea of heirlooms like hand sewn quilts being in day to day use, I’ll just point out the many of them were given with the proviso that we use them precisely that way. The people who put the hours of labor and love into them weren’t doing it to create a burdensome thing that needed to be handled with kid gloves and stored away. They made them to be used and for us to remember them fondly each time we use them.

In any case, that led me to the thought that we may be the last generation to be so fortunate. The concept of creating goods of enduring value and usefulness for kith and kin seems to be fading with each succeeding generation. In our generation, the handmade quilts have given way to machine sewn quilts. In the Son’s generation, I suspect that even that will begin to fade. So my question to you is: what is replacing it? There must be something?

On a somewhat different note, Molly continues to function as furball extraordinary. Vacuuming the house yielded at least 2 gallons of Molly fur. It’s one of the reason we have a Hoover WindTunnel vacuum cleaner – one can simply dump the chamber full of fur and continue on. I suspect a standard bagging model would eat us out of house and home in bags with a dog like Molly. On the other hand, having a continuously shedding long haired dog means you get used to finding hair everywhere. The wearing of black clothes is particularly challenging. The other day as I was walking out of a meeting, one of the other attendees turned to me and asked if I had a white long haired dog. i said I did and inquired as to how she knew. She pointed out the hair around my cuffs where Molly rubbed on me as I left for the meeting. She thought it was funny since she used to have a similar dog with the same hair everywhere problem a few years ago.

Finally, it is mom’s birthday tomorrow and I know she reads this blog regularly. So this is an appropriate place to say:

Happy Birthday Mom