Yes, Twinkies have returned! As a kid I do remember my mom sometimes putting treats in my lunch box. I think I had the partridge family or Starwars lunchbox, I don’t really remember. I remember those treats as bartering chips in a game that played out every lunch. Who could you trade with to step up the snack scale. Ding-dong and Twinkies were the goal. If you opened your lunchbox only to find an Apple you knew it was going be a bad lunch time. The Apple could be offset by a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but this would mean going a little hungry just to get a sugary treat. I had not purchased a Twinkie or Ding-dong in decades but upon their return we had to have a box. So last night I opened one of them as a reward for finishing all my dinner and took a bite. What I found was that the memory of that snack was much more fulfilling than the actual treat. I remember them sweeter, I remember them more enjoyable. Or is it the memory that is the real sweet treat to me!

I am all for using renewable materials that make sense. For example, bamboo flooring and siding makes sense. It grows really fast and has a variety of uses and because they can just cut the top off and the bottom keeps growing. I don’t know that it has infinite uses but I think it is a good idea, I’m not so sure other products work a well. A new company has figured out to use mushroom roots to create a natural insulation for the walls of your house. I believe it grows in your walls to fill the space and insulate. I am a little creeped out by that! For years we have been told things growing in your walls was bad, now I am to plant some mushrooms and wait for my walls to fill? If your walls aren’t tight are you going to have mushrooms growing out of the air-conditioning ducts? It’s like the tomato plant I had that grew so many tomatoes we could eat them fast enough. I got tired of eating salad. At least with bamboo the growing stops after you cut it, my walls ever-expanding with shroomcilation, just doesn’t sound right.

This weekend I attempted to build a shed which I bought as a kit from my local home improvement store. They come as a pallet of wood which you have to figure out like a puzzle. They don’t mark the pieces they only tell you the size of the next piece you need and then you have to put it in the right place. When you look at the kit at the store they show it all painted up, with a floor and even on a wood frame all of which are not included in the kit. So I bought all the extras and set about building what is more complicated than I expected. Take a 2x3x43.75 and nail it to a piece 72.675. I didn’t layout the pieces by size, so I dig through the pile and find those two. The pile has to be sixty or so pieces. Finding the right one is hard because there are other ones that are within an inch of that size as well. So then I nail the next two other pieces together and realize that the first two are wrong. This is when my Dad’s words come to my head. It takes a big man to admit he made a mistake, and a bigger man to fix it. In between the rain drops a few nails were nailed and some pulled and re-nailed. I hope this kit came with extra nails because when I am done there will be some holes that will need caulking!

Someone could probably pinpoint the start of the social media craze. I am not on the cutting edge of all this stuff but I am using it with more and more frequency. What I can’t figure out is all the different sites and options I now see when I go to share a link or site. I have no interest in Pinterest or all the others. I use Facebook and twitter and I have no plans to use any others. Yet, if I wanted to I could publish this blog post to about two dozen  other social media sites. I don’t know what these others do? I get they all have a few different features which appeal to people but how could I keep up? I have a job which does not pay me to be on the internet telling everyone I am on the internet! I have deliverables to my boss, and deadlines which I will miss if I spend any more time on these sites. I know there has to be a limited number of people who can post to all these sites yet they keep popping up in hopes of becoming the next Facebook or whatever. Well, I guess Facebook will have its time and then something else will come along, but for now, I am gonna stick with liking you!

I have made an observation over the last week. Some really ugly guys are married to some smoking hot women! Some are really old and they somehow got very young women to marry or date them. This is nothing new but I thought as a service I would help all the ugly not dating anyone guys with my tips on how these other guys made it happen.

1. Become a Rock star. Some of them don’t even look like guys! Yet they get the girls. Sing, play guitar or whatever instrument as long as you get your self up on a stage playing music, you have a good chance of winning the hand of a fair maiden.

2. Become an Actor. Even if the last thing you did was star in an episode of the Love boat (ask your parents if you don’t know what this was) the women are lining up to be on your arm. Some of these guys don’t even have the same face they had when the women they are dating were born. It doesn’t seem to matter.

3. Be an Athlete. Even the drugged out steroid popping guys have a women sitting in the stands. Every time the guy gets up to bat or has a good play they have a camera shot of the hottie in his box seats. Even in college, just ask Al Michaels.

4. Be a Politician. This one I just don’t get. These guys end up exposed as dirt bags and the women who, for some reason have stayed with them, stand there saying they forgive or believe in this guy who is clearly a loser. Man, that is the best. These guys may not be ugly on the outside but their souls are black as tar! Yet, time and time again a beautiful woman stands at his side.

I have had the distinct pleasure of going to our local landfill a few times in the past month. Yes, please use sarcastic tones when you read the above sentence. There is always the smells you get nowhere else and the, wish I wasn’t here attitude of the people working to push your trash into the perfect spot. Of course besides these commonalities that are at your dump site as well, are the over abundance of seagulls. I just checked on Google and the closest beach from Colorado Springs is 1,014 miles away. How do these birds find their way to our town dump to live at? Do they distribute maps to each other? Maybe they only come here for vacation. I have friends who are trying to visit every baseball field in the US. Are there birds who have our dump on their bucket list? The bigger question is whether we should change the name of these birds. Once they leave the ocean, which taking the number of these birds at our dump and extrapolating that number out to the number of sites across the US. Would mean there are more of them inland than at the beach. Perhaps dump-gulls or fill-gulls would better fit what they are. Or at least not make me miss my childhood stomping grounds.

I have a project to assign a value to what I and my department do. How do I do this? I can take the cost of everything we do and figure out what it would cost for someone else to do it? That would probably make my company give my job to someone else. The dollars would not add up. What if I assign some value based on perceived value. That is, what others think I am worth. That could be tricky. Depending on who I interview I could be worth millions or not a whole lot. Really most of my value, in my position comes from the guy who hired me. If he sees what I am doing as of value to him I get to keep my job. What about people, I have seen lists of what our body parts are worth. Is that the sum total of value? We perceive value based on what? I just saw a preview of a documentary on Indonesia. Over 1 million people have been killed since 1965. Could you assign a dollar value to 1 million people? How about to each one? If we calculate the value on the total we always come out lower than if we do the math on each person separately. The reason is we perceive more value in each individual than we do a group. This is always true, and it is true of you. Your value, our value, is not measured by the whole of humanity but by the individual, and it is way more than you think.

The Today show this morning was a buzz with the impending birth of the “Won’t be King until he is 90” baby boy. This kid is so far down the line of the big eared king to be line I will be long dead before he sits on the throne. That is if there is even a throne to sit on at that point. They had no news of any kind so they trotted in every mouth piece they had to speculate on what was going on. My favorite was a doctor who said that Kate was choosing a natural child-birth. Really? Unless she is clinging to a pole in a dirt hut, natural child-birth is not what I would call it. Natural child-birth, this doctor commented could mean a spinal block for the pain. Don’t get me wrong, child-birth is hard no matter what you do, but calling what we do today as natural is funny. Even as recently as 50 years ago many more women had babies at home and the death rate of both baby and mom was high. To have them in a controlled environment with all the latest technology, heck even to have sterile tools and beds is, to put it bluntly, not natural.

You ever read a headline on a website or newspaper and think, why is that even a story? Are there days that the news is so non-sesational that they have to make things up? Like this story. The artist formerly know as something other than Prince, who is now back to Prince, but really hasn’t done anything since he was called Prince the first time says he doesn’t own a cellphone and doesn’t want one. Why is this news? First of all, who cares? Most normal humans can’t live without one these days and as I have mentioned in previous post I am addicted to mine. By the responses I got from that post so are many of you. But this guy hasn’t lived in the real world since the eighties. While he doesn’t have one I can guarantee that at least one of the twenty people of his entourage have one and use it on a non-stop basis on his behalf. You can’t tell me this formerly normal wacka-doodle doesn’t scream to be taken care of by his minions making them run to get coffee or food or whatever else his heart desires. Unlike the rest of us who have to take care of ourselves, he doesn’t have to own a cellphone, he pays someone else to get a brain tumor.

A friend showed me a video from Russia of people getting into a large bouncy ball for the purpose of rolling down a hill. They start at the top of a large ski slop and are only suppose to go a few hundred yards. The problem is they go off the path and end up rolling down a 80% incline until they come to rest at the bottom of a mountain. I’m not saying these people made some bad choices but if this is any sign of the Russian though process, I now why they lost the cold war!