Way back in May/June when I was smacked with high blood pres­sure and the doc­tors couldn’t find a med­ical cause, I decided to take advan­tage of my company’s free coun­sel­ing ser­vice to see if there might be a stress induced com­po­nent to my prob­lem. After my ini­tial inter­view it was deter­mined that I had a stress induc­ing boss and I should keep a jour­nal of my stress induc­ing inci­dents and what my response was and what it should have been. I also needed to replace my rapidly declin­ing cycling (because of a dif­fer­ent med­ical prob­lem) with a dif­fer­ent form of exer­cise. As it turned out, because of sched­ul­ing con­flicts and the consoler’s inabil­ity to oper­ate her Out­look cal­en­dar, a cou­ple of appoint­ments were missed, so I never went back.

Two weeks ago as part of the coun­sel­ing ser­vices qual­ity pro­gram, I got a call ask­ing how I felt about their ser­vices. I told them that they were def­i­nitely sub-par, the advice given made sense, but the level of com­mit­ment to keep­ing appoint­ments left a lot to be desired. Two days later I got a call from the Head of Patient Ser­vices. He told me he was sorry I felt that way and if I was still inter­ested I could be set up to see another coun­selor. I thought, what the heck, it doesn’t cost any­thing, go for it.

This evening I had my ses­sion with a dif­fer­ent coun­selor. We chat­ted for an hour and he came to the con­clu­sion that I was hav­ing trou­ble deal­ing with the fact that I was get­ting old. I should learn to deal with this, con­sid­er­ing the alter­na­tive and he gave me a sheet of paper with some relax­ation breath­ing exer­cises and if I ever needed to talk he gave me his card. You’re dismissed.

Now that I look back on these coun­selors and their diag­noses, whose prob­lems are we deal­ing with? The first felt I had boss issues, I don’t think there is a big issue between myself and my boss, he is a lazy ass­hole and every­one knows it but him­self (this is a uni­ver­sal truth and not just my prob­lem.) So is it hers? She is a female and she is non-white. She kept a very messy office and obvi­ously had no idea how to han­dle and set up appoint­ments. Is her boss on her case a lot? Coun­selor #2 is in his early 40’s and his 19 year-old daugh­ter recently pre­sented him with a grand baby. I don’t feel I have a prob­lem with my get­ting older, but does he?

Here is the final twist. Did my dif­fer­ent reac­tions and responses to the dif­fer­ent coun­selors cause each one to come to their dif­fer­ent conclusions?

I’m a sucker for Christ­mas Music. Not just any Christ­mas Music though, mostly I go for for the slightly weird and non-commercial type stuff. I own about 20 Christ­mas CD’s and about 5 of them come from Rhino Records if that helps. Every once and a while I pick a CD that I lis­ten to once, and my Christ­mas CD that falls into this cat­e­gory is “Blame it on Christ­mas.”

Don’t be seduced by the glow­ing reviews on the bot­tom of that page. If you want a humor­ous Christ­mas CD buy Dr. Demento presents The Great­est Christ­mas Nov­elty CD Of All Time.

Just got through watch­ing “An Evening With The Dixie Chicks” on NBC. While I’m not a big county music fan, I liked this enough to stay for the whole show (which is either a tes­ta­ment to a good pro­gram or a state­ment on the amount of crap avail­able on the other 60-odd chan­nels.) It was actu­ally good stuff. Put me in mind of the Eagles’s Hell Freezes Over con­cert of a while back. Nice har­mo­niz­ing with the extra kick of a string sec­tion. You can tell it was filmed in Hol­ly­wood though, you had to be an aspir­ing actor/actress to get in the audi­ence — noth­ing but good look­ing peo­ple to be seen in the whole the­ater, I’d have never got­ten in.

Tomor­row is the half day off I’ve been work­ing extra every day this week for and me and the Mrs. are dri­ving down to Hilton Head for the week­end. Sounds like a big deal, but actu­ally we are stay­ing a friend’s condo and we are bring­ing our DVD player and three movies to watch. We usu­ally just hang around the condo like we hang around the house, the big dif­fer­ence being we can see the ocean from the win­dow on HHI, while at home we see the neighbor’s decrepit boat that is filled with leaves.

Every night I get all set to post to this lit­tle blog, but before I do I usu­ally click on a cou­ple of ran­dom Blogs from the recently updated col­umn on the left of the Blog­ger home page. Some­times I wan­der for hours read­ing stuff oth­ers have writ­ten. Tonight I stum­bled on 4 or 5 that were cool which led me to this one — Ho Ho Holy Shit — absolutely great! On the right hand side there are links to the blogs of con­trib­u­tors and one of them hap­pens to be Gretchen Pir­illo, wife of Mr. Lock­ergnome Chris, whose embroi­dered head adorns the sweat­shirt I hap­pen to have on. Small F*cking Internet.

The lat­est Rolling Stone came in the mail today. It was all shrink wrapped in plas­tic. Prob­a­bly to pro­tect the shiny sil­ver bor­dered cover of this “Spe­cial Dou­ble Issue.” I don’t know what makes it spe­cial, except for per­haps that photo of Bill Wyman with­out his shirt on. I don’t know what makes it a dou­ble issue, because in thick­ness it is about the same or maybe even thin­ner than the last issue. Oh, I see why now, Ozzy is on the cover twice! Once by him­self and another with his TV family.…

My wife and I have been mar­ried for 26 years and for the first 24 years it has been just us for Christ­mas. Because we don’t have kids we devel­oped our own lit­tle tra­di­tion for Christ­mas, every year we would set aside a cer­tain amount of money and the last Sat­ur­day before Christ­mas we would go to the mall and shop, for our­selves. We would wan­der the stores together and buy stuff. There would not be any­thing to “open up” on Christ­mas morn­ing, but that was just fine by us.

But for the last 2 Christ­mases since Donna’s mom has been liv­ing with us we have had to go shop­ping for stuff to wrap for each other. We now go to the mall with lists and enter in the mid­dle and then go our sep­a­rate ways meet­ing back up at a pre­de­ter­mined time and place.

I think next year we will go back to a mod­i­fied Plan A, we shop together for our­selves and then when we get home wrap them up to put under the tree.…

We put the mod­i­fied Plan A into action this morn­ing. We went back out to our local mall and shopped for stuff we wanted and brought it home. I’ll wrap the stuff for her and she’ll wrap my stuff. We’ll act all sur­prised on Christ­mas morn­ing, “Oh, it’s just what I wanted. How did you know?”

I bought a cou­ple of long sleeve polo shirts for win­ter wear at Sears. The orig­i­nal price was $36, they were on a rack with a big tag that said, 40% OFF. At the reg­is­ter they were tak­ing an addi­tional 10% off for an Early Bird Spe­cial, so the shirts cost me around nine­teen and a half bucks. What are they really worth, prob­a­bly just that, a saw­buck. What did Sears pay for them in the first place, prob­a­bly $10.…and they wanted $36.

This year’s ici­cle lights. My wife and I walked around our neigh­bor­hood and must have seen 4 of these beau­ties. I’ve seen them in var­i­ous stores and they only go for around $40. Hard to resist some­thing like that for so cheap and appar­ently a lot of peo­ple felt the same way. When I first saw one, I thought that would look really cool in the cor­ner of my cubi­cal. But didn’t get one because it would have taken up too much room and the fan would prob­a­bly be annoy­ing after awhile. Still, it would have been a per­fect state­ment on what Christ­mas has mor­phed into these days — some­thing bright, loud and over the top.

My wife was watch­ing some of a marathon of yet another sneaky redec­o­rat­ing show on the Dis­cover Chan­nel, Sur­prise by Design. At about at the 50 minute mark of the show they went to a com­mer­cial (noth­ing unusual there.) The com­mer­cial was for The Sharper Image’s Ionic Breeze Quadra Silent Air Puri­fier (noth­ing unusual there.) The dif­fer­ence was it looked like an infomer­cial with the snappy pitch­man, the perky woman hype-cheerleader and the tes­ti­mo­ni­als from users. Plus it just kept on going. At first I fig­ured it was one minute com­mer­cial (which in them­selves seem long in today’s 15 sec­ond spots) but no it went on some more. I’m guess­ing 5 min­utes but it could have been three. We no longer have the time for whole 1/2 hour infomer­cials, 5 min­utes is enough. I only wish that what I saw was 1/6 as annoy­ing as 30 minute jobs.