Mr. Meniere Makes A Visit

Sunday morning I woke up at 5:30. I was lying on my side facing the alarm clock and when I opened my eyes the image I saw spun quickly up and repeated and repeated and repeated…so I blinked a couple times, but it wouldn’t stop. I closed my eyes and decided that maybe if I rolled onto my back that would help. Trouble came about when I started to roll over I opened my eyes! I can only equate the visuals to what I imagine is a portion of a potent LSD trip. Once on my back the ceiling fan was scanning across my vision rapidly from left to right.

I closed my eyes and lay there for a few minutes contemplating. I knew what it was, it was the one symptom of Meniere’s Disease that I hadn’t suffered from back in September — vertigo. With experimentation I found that I could make it stop by jamming my eyeballs all the way to the right (direction everything was spinning.) I then woke Donna and told her what was happening. She wanted to know what we should do and I told her the first thing was I needed to go to the bathroom. Using a combination of eyes closed, eyes opened hard to the right and her supporting me, mission accomplished.

It was still early, so I suggested let’s go back to bed and see where we are when we next wake up. I woke up again at 7:30 and I was lying on my side facing the alarm clock. When I opened my eyes the image was perfectly still. I blinked my eyes a couple of times, normal. I closed them for a minute or so and opened back up to the return of ordinary. There hasn’t been a return of the dizziness since.

I’ve given up caffeine as the doctor suggested, so was it the small coffee in the morning and the 20oz. Dr. Pepper in the evening on Saturday? Was it the 300 mile road trip, more than half of it with the top down that brought it on? The pizza in Milledgeville? The glass of wine with dinner? Not getting a lot of sleep two nights before? Watching the synchronized drones of the Olympic’s Closing Ceremony?

61,000 Water Droplets Per Cubic Foot


I bet you didn’t know that once a year I volunteer to help out at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in Macon, Georgia. Every time I go I get a different job and today it was valet parking little sports cars on the sidewalk out front. That’s me above after successfully completing parking the first wave of cars.

OK, that’s really not the truth, I’ve never volunteered there and as a matter of fact, I’ve never visited there until today. And even now I haven’t ever really visited because I never went inside the building. This was our meeting point for 4 other Moss Motoring Challengers because a gaggle of 5 or more of us would be worth 10 big points.

The first 4 arrivals were parked in a tight group of spots right up front, but there wasn’t another one open near us. While we were waiting on the final participant to join us someone wondered out loud what the most of the rest of us were thinking, “Maybe we could line our cars up right on the wide sidewalk entrance way.” Then someone else piped in with that eternal truism, “it is always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission.” A plan was born.

When car #5 arrived we briefed them on the plan, and we all backed into position. Everyone jumped out to line up their photographs while I just waited by the car. I started to wonder what was taking so long, so I started to go see, and that is when Donna took snapped the photo.

Afterwards the team from Atlanta had worked out a few places that were right there in Macon for us to drive to, to get some more Challenge points. All and all, with the Grand Opening sign we discovered on the way down, today’s 300 mile road trip was worth 27 points.

On the way down to Macon to score major Moss Motoring points, the Car To Be Named Later passed the 61,000 mile mark in a thick fog just outside the community of Grange, Georgia.

Employee Profile Validation

Emerson, the large business organization that the Valve Store is part of, has an electronic directory of employees covering the entire corporation. It is each person’s responsibility to keep it updated, if you get a new boss, move to another department, changed job titles, etc.

A few years back, tiring of it not being 100% accurate, they implemented a policy where if you don’t update it they would start withholding services. First no internet, then intranet, then emails and after that they close and delete your account. It used to have to be done quarterly, but about a year ago, they decided to start doing it monthly. Not a big deal if nothing has changed, you get an email, you click on the link and click the big green Update button.

I received my email this morning telling me it was time to update my employee profile. As usual nothing has changed in a month. I’ve probably made less than a dozen changes on this page…ever. I have worked for 6, maybe 8, different direct supervisors and my job title has only changed three times in the 28 years I’ve been here. It started as Draftsman, then changed to Design Draftsman and then to its now current Design Draftsman/CNC Programmer.

Last month, because I’m sort of a smart ass, I thought I would change my Job Title to Retiree in Training. But I decided against it considering I work for a corporation and those sorts of entities don’t typically have a sense of humor. Well, this month I couldn’t stop myself, I went ahead and typed in Retiree in Training and clicked the Update button. I half expected it to not let me, but it did. I wonder if anybody will notice?

It Was A Banner Day At ASCO

Back in January when I designed my very own retirement banner, because I’m the only person making banners, I cheekily added the words “making”, “last” and “banner” in a smaller text so that it read “Congratulations Brian On (making) Your (last) Retirement (banner.) Well, as it turns out, not only was it not my last retirement banner, it was not even my next to last, but my 3rd last. I printed mine out on the Monday before last and the very next day HR asked to make one for somebody on 3rd shift whose last day is the same as mine, March 2nd.

Once my banner was put in the company cafeteria for people to sign, the word was out, and people started to show up with requests for banners that would be needed after I’m gone. I made 4 birthday banners last week, one for each person in a department. One for someone who was actually celebrating her birthday, but the other three were for later. They asked me to have them just say “Happy Birthday So and So” and they would save them and put them up every year.

Today was a banner day at the Valve Store, my work load had slacked off a bit, so I decided to work on knocking out the 7 requests I had collected over the last few days. First up was another retirement banner, next was a birthday banner for the same person. Next I did a birthday one for someone’s granddaughter and a birthday one for that very same someone. Then I had a pair of aunts and another person’s uncle. I rolled up the last banner just as the bell rung signifying the end on my work day. Only seven more to go, working days, not banners, but who knows have many more requests I’ll get between now and next Friday.

5 More Pairs of Glasses from Warby Parker

If you hover over the images of the glasses you will see a photo of them planted on my ugly mug. Donna took the pictures yesterday while we were on the screened porch (it was kind of overcast.) That and whatever the camera does make the frames look darker than they are in real life. The frame colors more closely match Warby Parker’s online images, but those studio photos are then again slightly lighter and brighter than they appear in person.

The sixth pair shown are my current glasses and is on the upper right. From there, I have ranked them in descending order from 1 to 5 moving right, down, then to the right again. Current plan is to go to Specs on Monday afternoon to compare the top two against the two they have put aside for me. But if you are placing bets in Vegas, both the Hudson and the Split-C are at even money.

The Past 4 Days

Things that have happened in the past 4 days, listed in no particular order or level of importance:

  1. I managed to get two photos posted to Instagram.
  2. The Mini got a bath.
  3. Managed to bike ride to work on Friday.
  4. Donna got a flat on her bike ride home.
  5. Watched Up in the Air on HBO – again.
  6. The Miata got a bath.
  7. Bad breakfast sausage?
  8. Got 5 more pairs of glasses from Warby Parker.
  9. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue

Today on the Internet

After annoying both Google with my badly worded searches and my co-workers with badly worded questions, I had enough knowledge of what not to do, that I finally figured out how to share a post from my timeline to the timeline of a Facebook group.

I joined Instagram with the lofty goal of taking a random photo each day, running it through a filter, or not, with the goal of showing the cool kids that we adults are just as lame as they think we are. So far I have yet to post a photo or for that matter figure out to use it. My preferred user name, any variation of Brian the Red, was unavailable so I used mistermiata1.

I read this so sad, on point, state of our country’s politics today: The military parade debate is just the latest example of Americans missing the forest for the trees.