Back home.
Back where regular gas is $3.35, not $4.05 a gallon.
Back where the high temperatures are in the 90s, not the 70s.
Back where there are a couple DD in town, not an espresso hut every 100 yards.
Back where I can watch the FRS lose in prime time, not the middle of the afternoon.
Back to work.
You enter the restroom and a coworker is washing their hands. They have obviously finished their business. You enter your favorite stall to do yours. When you sit down you realize that this was the stall your coworker has just finish using. Is it OK to call over the door, “Thanks for warming the seat for me.” What about if it is winter?
The Emperor got a bath last night in preparation for tomorrow’s Ridge Peach Festival Parade. The Purple Whale got his bath the day before. I’ll be taking my weekly bath tonight.
We left for Florida right after work on Friday. We had everything all packed up, so all we had to do was change out of work attire, fill up the insulated lunch box and hit the road. About a block away from home, as Donna ran through her internal checklist, she realized that she didn’t have earrings on. I offered to turn around, she initially refused as she had some packed in the suitcase, but then changed her mind. I circled the block and waited in the car while she ran inside to get a pair of earrings. A minute or so later out she came and off we went.
Fast forward to Monday evening around 7:00PM; as I pull into the driveway, returning home from Florida, we notice that the garage door is already up. Uh oh! Either thieves have broke in by hacking our number keypad on the outside and our house is empty of “valuables” or I just forgot to close the door that second time and the worst that has happened is a neighborhood stray cat has made a home in the laundry room. I went inside the house to check and see if the burglars were still there and Donna checked the mail. Her search was more fruitful, she found some mail and I found nothing missing.
It is nice to live in a quiet neighborhood in a small town.
Oh, and when Donna went to unlock the front door to go for her evening walk tonight, that’s right, you guessed it, it was already unlocked.
A coworker asked today if were we going to go to Seattle this year. I said, “Yeah, it’s coming up soon.” “I’m going to have to be careful when we get back to not to have an accident at work though.” He asked, “Why?” “Because they drug test after an accident,” I replied. “Now that they have legalized marijuana for personal use in Washington state…”
I told him that I was of course kidding about the recreational marijuana use, because with just my luck, I would slip on some grease on the floor when we got back and end up unemployed. I think I’ll be waiting until I’m retried until I take a toking tour of the great northwest. This led to a nice little conversation about the state of medical marijuana and legalization.
Which gave me an idea for something to do during my retirement, I could get me a little plot of land out there in Washington and plant a small crop of cannabis plants. Then I would set up a roadside stand similar to the peach stands that are popping up all over South Carolina now and call it Cannabis Cabana. I’d use a striped canvas tent or something open with a thatched roof, prop up a surfboard or two for looks and I’d be in business. The staff, me, would be outfitted in a Hawaiian shirt with flip-flops. Slack key guitar and ukelele music would be playing softly in the background.
After the evening news I like lighten the mood a bit with a bit of sophomoric & crass comedy. Back to back episodes of old Two and a Half Men on the local FOX affiliate. Recently they have added the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail of Alabama as a sponsor and I get to see two of their commercials in each half hour. Tonight I really noticed their logo at the end the ad and it looked very familiar. It reminded me of another logo, one I designed about 14 years ago. I wonder which was first and who influenced who.
A month or so I picked up a well used copy of The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book at a used book sale. It was an interesting read as not only did it have hundreds of C & H comic strips, but it was filled with Bill Waterson’s insights on his making of the strip. About 2/3rds of the way through the book there is a series strips where Calvin kidnaps Susie’s doll (sort of her version of Hobbes):
In that third strip Calvin has his kidnap victim tied to a chair…so that is where I got the idea for the video in Part IV of the Great Roach Kidnapping Caper of 2010
…away, the mice will play.
For the past couple of days, some of our company’s key folks, my department leadership and our Industrial Engineer have been away at a seminar/work session about a piece of our business software. They finished up this morning with the afternoon being earmarked for a round of golf as a fun wrap up of the event. So, a little before lunch, one of our our fabrication engineers received a text from the IE (the tall guy on the left) with the following photo attached:
While those in the photo would tell you that the picture was meant as an indicator that their work was done and their smiles signified that much was accomplished. Those of us stuck at work covering for them, thought it more than likely that it was meant as a neener-neener. The Fab Engineer, myself and the CNC Programer (Hi Mark!) decided that this deserved some return fire. Our first plan involved standing outside on the back lawn of the plant in similar poses, but couldn’t come up with a work related substitute for the golf club. Our second idea was to get the cleaning person to open our boss’s (the guy in the middle above) office and we could all put our feet up on his desk. Or playing cards. Then the ideas started flowing. We could use the Engineering Conference Room. Put something up on the TV like we were watching ESPN. Hey put their photo on the screen. Here is what we came up with:
The playing cards came from Google. I grabbed large sized images of ace-high straight flushes in three different suits off the net, printed them out and then trimmed them down for us to hold. I didn’t think to print out the back of a five card hand, so in the large original photo you can see that I’m holding my cards so everyone can see my hand. In this low resolution image it looks like the back of a deck of cards because the clubs printed out in a blue-ish tint. The money on the table is real.