I’m sorry but today I am going to get on my soap box! What the heck is wrong with people? Saint Patrick ’s Day is celebrated by downing large quantities of beer and eating corn beef and cabbage? Saint Patrick if the story is true was enslaved in Ireland for a several years then escaped only to return as a missionary. This guy actually came back to the very country in which he was held captive to bring the message of Christ, and we celebrate it with sobriety checkpoints and over indulgence! What happened? This tradition started in America and is more about celebrating heritage than the actual saint but come on, we have to stop taking days meant to remind us of where we come from and turning them into drinking games! Cinco de mayo, 4th of July to name a few were significant in the forming of nations and people, they are supposed to remind us that great sacrifices were made and struggles were overcome by our ancestors, not so we can remember them and that sacrifice with a beer! I don’t mind raising a toast or even put back a few, but you can do that on any day. Stop taking moments of value and turning them into reasons to forget!

We used to call the lights on the dash idiot lights. You know the ones that come on when something is wrong with the car? There used to be only one light is some cars and when it came on you knew there was a problem! It wasn’t some small thing the engine shaped light said bad things were happening. Our last Minivan, yes we are now minivan free, had many lights some of which would come on about every six months. When I went to the auto parts store and used the code reader it told me I had a major leak in the fuel system. Turns out it was just that the gas cap had not been put back on all the way. So every time this happened I would go to the store to reset the light. The Toyota my wife drives has a panel which has at least ten different lights and this morning one of them came on. The shape was like a wine glass or maybe a horse shoe. What was it telling me, it was yellow so I hoped it meant I could still get to work? I looked in the glove box (glove box, who calls it that anymore?) but the manual only told me what Toyota was not responsible for. So I did what we all do I Googled it. Turns out this car has tire pressure sensors, the light meant one of the tires is low. I guess if I squint my eyes it kind of looks like a flat tire but to me it wasn’t obvious. Maybe an idiot light guide iPhone app would be helpful? Of course it would still tell me to take it to my dealer, because the only air my Toyota approves is the expensive kind!

Being a contractor for a company can sometime be a good thing and sometimes it can be a real stinker. Depending on your role you can have great insight into the company you work for, and because you are on the outside the craziness or politics don’t involve you. That can be nice; you come in do a job and then get to go home at the end of the day and usually for more pay because they aren’t paying benefits. Nobody wants you to stay late because it will cost them more money. Nobody invites you to all staff meetings because you are a contractor. The flip side is when your position is involves you in budgeting and personnel discussions. You get to help make the decision about whether you stay or go. Let’s face it, as the contractor I am the first to go. Letting go employee’s involves HR and compensation issues that make it complicated. No, they can tell me tomorrow that I am not needed anymore even if I am signed up till the end of the year. Depending on the contract they don’t even have to compensate the contracting company, and you know I am not going to see a dime. That is the beauty of hiring a contractor. So making it to the end of the year is a significant thing in the contracting world, it is like dog years, each one is way longer than a regular Full Time Employee year!

How does an airplane just vanish? Have you thought about that this week? How can a giant tube full of people disappear with no trace? In the old days planes or boats took off from the shore and nobody knew if they made it or not until they landed or showed up at the docks. These days we have radar and sonar and satellites spanning the globe taking pictures and keeping track of everything in the air and on the ground. How is it we can’t find what happened to the Malaysian airplane? I know it isn’t as exact as I make it out, some of those technologies can only tell you where something is at any given moment, they don’t real-time track the planes every movement. It still seems that something should show up giving some kind of indication of what happened. Realizing that just recently two planes landed at the wrong airports tells me we don’t really know as much as we had hoped about all these airplanes. It also tells me that despite all the technology things can still happen which confound all our knowledge and supposed wisdom. I just hope we find out what happened for the sake of the families involved and I hope it doesn’t take long!

Right now I am angry with Benjamin Franklin. He is supposedly the first person to suggest we do day light savings time. Today my body is rejecting the notion of the clock being different, and coffee is not giving me the results I need right now. Never have I felt so ready to move to Arizona! This idea that somehow we are more productive by moving the time around has out lived it usefulness. We no longer are a farming nation and I don’t think farmers work any differently when the clock changes anyway, I mean how is getting up with the sun any different if it is 6 am or 7? The formal protest to which my body has declared on me hopefully will only be today or perhaps tomorrow as well, but if I am to get anything done today I think a morning nap is a must! I hope no one is looking for my best today, they will be sadly greeted with less than ten percent!

This morning I walked out the door with a polo shirt on and a light sweater. I should know better, I live in Colorado! We have a saying here, if you don’t like the weather wait five minutes. Well I just looked out the window to a blizzard blowing snow and covering all the cars in the parking lot. My weather app says it is thirty-nine outside but I am going to guess that it is a bit colder and that the wind is going to add to that feeling. At least I have my running shoes on so I can move a little faster on the walk to the car after work. One of the things I like about Colorado is it seems like there are less rules here than where I used to live. Not too many people all up in my stuff telling how or when I can park my car or if I can have chickens in my yard and such. Yes we have less rules, but one which I should have followed today is, don’t leave the house in spring without a jacket! It isn’t a state law or anything, just a fact to protect the stupid!

A survey said that adults are spending on average of eleven hours a day with electronic media. That is TV, Smartphones, computers and others. So if we sleep eight hours (ha, ha!) That is almost seventy percent of our day in front of some sort of device! That is a crazy number, and I can only assume with devices like Google glasses, new smart watches and sports tech this will only get worse. I am not saying that these are bad but all the wireless signals and radiation emanating from these has to be cooking us like a slow microwave. At some point I expect people to start popping like jiffy pop popcorn. Maybe Aliens are not from other planets but from the future where their eyes have bugged out from looking at screens all day and their heads are huge from the popcorn thing already happening. Maybe we can understand them because they only speak hash tags and acronyms so it sounds like gibberish just like most of the teenager I hear talking today! This could be that these, so-called aliens are really people trying to come back and warn us about some new technology that once implanted in us turns us all green? I don’t know if it is just me, but I now feel the need to go wilderness camping without my phone!

I have always had a distrust of the Girl Scouts organization. Besides its leadership being as screwed up as our current congress, any group which sends out little girls with puppy dog eye’s to guilt you into buying cookies has got to be evil! These girls corner you at the local grocery store and even at Church! They send out the poster children for adorable to ask you to buy what amounts to three cookies for the price of several gallons of gas. I also believe they add MSG or some other addictive substances to the cookies to make me buy them up like a crack addict. The twinge in my gut every time I try to walk out of the grocery store trying to not look one of them in the eye’s is proof enough of the evil genius, but now they have taken it to the next level. Apparently some Girl Scouts have taken to setting up outside marijuana dispensaries. This is just about the most direct guaranteed sales any group can achieve. The poor saps who will retreat from their munchies creating activities will be no match for the puppy dog eyed miniature demons eager to relieve them of any cash which remains in their pockets. The only thing that keeps these cookie pushers in check might be that they don’t accept credit or debit cards; otherwise these dispensary customers would be relieved of every last dollar in their bank accounts as well!

Well now I have seen it all! Today I read an eighteen year old is suing her parents because they won’t pay for her college. From the story this girl has had issues for a while and has refused to obey her parents. At one point child protective services was called in on the parents and the investigator note that the girl was just plain spoiled. So she moves in with her friends parents who just happen to have a lawyer for a dad and he is funding this lawsuit. It should be noted that the parents didn’t kick her out, she left. Only in America can this be happening! We have become a country of entitled whiners, bent on getting what we see as our right. College, fancy homes, cars and cellphones have somehow been deemed rights and if our demands are not met we are going to pitch a fit! How did we go from the greatest generation a mere sixty years ago to the whiniest generation today? I cannot blame the current government for this because I see them as the results of our choices, we elected them! We have allowed people who will just tell us what we want to hear, and give us free stuff to represent us and the results are girls like the above mentioned cheerleader. Until we wake up and start taking responsibility for our actions and making the hard choices that need to be made, we are just going to see more of this type of non-sense!

I watched the Oscars last night and I realized something, I have little or no interest in seeing some of the movies which won awards.  Some of these are not commercially successful movies they are the movies which try to make a statement about something. The problem is I don’t agree with the statements Hollywood is trying to make. Social commentary in these movies has mostly come down to telling me I am wrong, and while I admit that I am flawed I don’t believe in re-writing history or changing what has worked for thousands of years of human existence just because we now think we are better or more enlightened. I am not saying that discrimination or oppression of anyone is right, I believe we should show compassion and love to all, but I can disagree with the choices some people make. I don’t have to like or approve of everything you do. It doesn’t mean I hate you it means I think there is a different way, it also means that you don’t have to agree with me. So when a movie gets made that challenges what I believe, I have a choice, to see it because it brings up valid arguments to which I need to think about, or just stay home and flick the channels.