So last week I lost my jeep. When I say lost, I mean a tree fell on it and turned it into a convertible. Since then my friends have had a lot of ideas as to what I can do with the car or how to replace it. Everything from really making it a convertible to starting a Go Fund Me account to replace it. While it may have crossed my mind, I really would have a hard time putting up a request for people to buy me a new jeep considering what others are asking for money for on the site. Folks without health insurance who need medical attention is a good cause, helping people adopt children from poverty and war-torn countries seem like things to give money to. I would feel like giving all the money to one of them, frankly I can’t even see putting up a page for it. As soon as I see the front page my heart gets right with what is important. The first three are for the terror attack in Brussels, a lady having triplets who’s husband died and three men that died in an accident in uganda to cover bringing them back to the US. I can no longer think that my little need is even worthy of mention. If you think to yourself, I would give to Bob to get a new jeep, do me a favor, click on go fund me and give to one of those top three or any other of the causes actual worth your time and money!

Well, it has been one heck of a week. Wednesday of last week a tree fell on my house and car, which dealing with the insurance company has been wonderful, not! Had a good Easter but got sick last night and spent the night waiting for the alien to rip through my belly. This morning I managed to crawl back from the bathroom after I had passed out on the floor. As I sit here in my living room chair I can’t help but notice the contrast. I thought Wednesday was a good day because we were sent home from work due to the blizzard. Easter is always a time of celebration and yet I really couldn’t enjoy the evening. It never seems like life can stay somewhere in the middle, not too high or low. Like a pendulum, it swings back and forth from one to the other. I am shocked that I am not dizzy from all the swinging. While I am a little dizzy it is only the bug making its way through my system, not life in general. Today anyway!

Is it Monday already? Yes, it is another work week full of the same fun and surprises as the last week! Sometimes, no matter how much you like your job it still feels like a grind. That week you decided to stop drinking coffee, grind! That week between Christmas and New Years you worked because you had used up all your vacation, also a grind. The week before your two-week summer vacation, let’s face it you are just checked out so you make it a grind for everyone else around you. The best weeks, the ones where Friday or Monday are a holiday! These are the bonus times when even the first day of the week is good because you know it is going to be shorter than all the others. Golden are the short weeks especially during summer, the weather is good, the sun stays out late, and you know the barbeque is going to be involved somehow. The only way to ruin a short week is if you plan something like painting your own house over the three day weekend. or cleaning out the garage. You might as well stay at work if you’re going to do that! You will get back to work the next week and all your coworkers will tell you about grilling and fun in the sun while you tell them of the new color of your house. That just made your time off, the grind!

I think I have mentioned this a few times, I have lost a lot of weight over the last five years. I did it with the help of an app on my phone. When I first set it up it asked how much weight I wanted to lose and it calculated how many calories I could eat every day. I then had to log everything I ate each day to keep track. I can tell you I did not always fall under the number it said I needed for the day, but I was never under the false assumption that my lack of weight loss was anything other than me not followed my plan. Apparently some need more evidence that their eating is the problem. This new device linked here can track your chewing. This has to be the ultimate in denile. I could not have eaten that much? Oh yes you did, just look at your chew-o-meter. This will only work if you wear it, and I am sure no one is going to lock it around your neck so the same issue will come up. If you lie you are the only person who knows the truth. I can see this on that tv show the Biggest Loser, where the person steps on the scale and only losses one pound. They always say something like, I don’t know how this happened? The host will now be able to say, well let’s take a look at your chew-o-meter, queue the tense music then a monitor will come me up and show the stats, that is after the commercial. If it really was legitimate the meter won’t lie, if it was them, well let’s just say more excuses will fly.

I don’t know if you have ever heard the story of post-it notes. This guy who worked at 3M created a glue that didn’t stick to anything. Somehow he figured out it worked well on paper for bookmarking his place in his hymnal book for leading worship at his church. Just think about all the things that fell into place to give us what businesses can’t live without anymore. He could have just tossed the glue out as useless, or if he didn’t lead music he maybe would not have had the idea to try it with paper. Even if he did have the idea without the marketing and creative ideas of 3M maybe some other company would not have been able to bring it to market or be successful. This isn’t the only thing like that. It seems many times the determining factors of success for products or even ideas are innumerable pieces falling into place at just the right time. Think even about the recent proof of what Einstein theorized almost one hundred years ago. Even in our own lives, what if you had married someone else or moved to a different country or didn’t walk into that meeting or place where you met the love of your life. Your life could be different. Could you be a totally different person? To me, this is the ultimate question in life which needs an answer. Is it random, or part of a plan? How you answer, changes everything!

Are you tired today? Yes, thanks to Ben Franklin we get to, that is if you are not in Arizona, change our clocks to one hour ahead of where we were the day before. We then spend all of Sunday going around the house remembering how to change the various clocks which don’t change on their own. I also begin pondering how much it would cost to replace the ones that don’t. Then I spend the rest of the day wondering if I will really go to bed early enough to not be tired today. I should have already known the answer would be no, but I like to think I might do it one day. Every year we have this conversation around this time as to why we still do this? I am not sure there is a point to it anymore. So we continue on drinking twice the coffee and complaining to our co-workers about the lack of sleep. We will, of course, rejoice this Fall when we get an hour back, but that is not today, today is the payback.

You might be able to make a case that naming all hurricanes after women is kind of mean. You might even be able to argue that women are not paid as much for the same job. If your arguments are sound and you use logic and facts, I might even agree with you. What I can’t believe is that our government paid nearly half a million dollars for a study that says glaciers and climate change of them unfairly target women more than men! So in the minds of feminists, men are mean to women, and now so is the world. To be exact it is the climate change wackadoodles which will ultimately come back to, it is men’s fault anyway. Yes, we men for years have been training glaciers to hate women so as to keep them down. This, of course, was our plan all along. Women were getting too big for their bloomers, so in an evil plot we started training the planet to strike out against them! It seems to me the hyperbole of rhetoric has gotten a little out of hand. I don’t know where science and scientific study jumped the shark, but it seems real science has died! Objective study and conclusion are gone and in its place is agenda driven lies! The worst part is our tax dollars are being used to pay for the garbage, and that our government is using these stupid conclusions to make policy. Let’s stop making stuff up and let’s stop paying for this junk science!

I am responsible for the printers in our company. This means my team fixes them and if needed, replaces them. We stopped long ago buying small personal printers and have gone for more work center type printers for a couple of reasons. first they are cheaper for us to operate, the cost per print, even color is cheaper than any of the small printers so we save money. Second, small printers eat up a lot of power so it is cheaper to operate one larger printer instead of 10 smaller printers. The problem comes when a small printer dies or a group is moving. People are more attached to their printer than they are to their children! I had a half an hour argument with someone because they would have to walk two more cubes away to get the things they printed. Don’t get me started on the paper trays, I can’t tell you how many times I have had to hear how important a person is and how valuable what they print out is. I have answered all of the questions about being able to secure print and what if scenarios which never happen just so they can justify me moving the printer ten feet closer to them. Today I get to go talk to someone who went against the rules and bought one for their office. I can hear the argument, after all, her neighbor has one! I wish I had the power to just swoop in and take them all, but if I did, I am sure I would find an angry mob with pitchforks at my cube soon after!

So it has been that kind of day! I walked into the office and have not sat down till just now. The day is almost over and I have not been able to get anything done. You have had those kinds of days, right? I am glad that it is not every day but you can never tell walking in the door if it is going to be one or not. I have had days which my calendar is empty of meetings be this kind of day. There is no formula which I can apply to know if the day will be crazy or not. No, the number of meetings divided by the number of people in the meeting times pi doesn’t work. When I get home I am going to want to just sit in my chair turn on the tv and veg, but I know I can’t. If I do that I will eat more than I should and then when I am done eating all that junk I will feel guilty followed by the “I should exercise extra hard” line which will just fall back into guilt over not doing that which will fall into even more eating. I guess the only thing I can do is power through the day and get to my pillow as soon as I can hoping tomorrow is much more sane! Then again it may not be so I best just not think about it. With this kind of cycle, you can sometimes understand why people drink so much! Here’s hoping you today and tomorrow are alcohol-free, that is if your kind of day is making you drink!

Taking my care to the dealership seems like such an ordeal. My wife’s car had a recall, so I called the dealer and made an appointment to take it in. I arrived right when they opened this morning but apparently so did everyone else. The lobby was full of people reading books or talking on the phone I suppose going to wait on their car to be fixed. I was waiting for the shuttle driver who would, of course, tell me about his life and about my work since he knew about the company. I guess it is better than sitting in silence but it always seems awkward. The part that I dread is the call about noon. I fear they will call me and tell me a wonderful story about how our car hasn’t had some sort of upgrade or service it really needs and how they are having a special today on undercoating or some service that I neither want or really need. I will feel guilty that I don’t do everything recommended for our car, at least, that is if the service advisor does his job as he has been trained. I will tell them how I will think about it, code for “not going to happen” then try and get off the phone as quickly as I can. Hopefully, the afternoon driver is a different person. That way I get a different life story! That will ease me through the dealership gauntlet.