Do you ever do training for your job? Sometimes you get to go off somewhere to do training, other times they bring the training in house. Training is hard enough when you can concentrate but when people know you are in a conference room down the hall they seem to think interrupting you is ok. I have a hard enough time concentrating on my own I don’t need my teammates helping me. Sometimes telling them I am offsite will work or just not taking my computer or phone to the training can keep me on track. The other thing is not eating all the snacks. I can eat every M&M on the table and everyone else’s table but I would be done by lunch. The other thing is I seem to pay better attention if I know there is a test at the end. Either way me plucking away on my phone right now doing this blog is not helping, but if this is my only distraction today I am doing better than normal.

This week I cracked open my voting ballot. The first thing listed is the presidential candidates. While the usual suspects are on there, what I was unaware of was all the others who are listed as wannabes. Green party, communists, socialists, Constitutional and Veteran I would expect to see but some of the others are, to say the least, unexpected. What the heck is the Nutrition candidate anyway? What kind of platform could they have, do they think if elected they would force the closer of all fast food restaurants? Maybe they want to reclaim old malls and turn them into indoor farms? How about the pacifists, if elected they would do nothing? What about the Prohibition party, really? I didn’t think it would be so easy to get on the ballot but it obviously is simple, or there would not be four different socialist, independent people of Colorado or the Kotlikoff for President. I know they are going to get their own vote and maybe their mom’s but it seems crazy to see all of them listed. I guess it speaks to the process that it is open to everyone, it is just surprising how many want the job.

What are your views about being sick at work? I have a scratchy throat and my nose is stuffy. It could be allergies, I just returned from a trip and it is dry and windy so it could be that. It also could be strep throat! either way, each of us has an idea about when we are sick and if we should go to work. Some are the power through it kind. I fall in this camp just take some allergy meds or cold meds and go to work. I have to have a pretty high fever to stay home. Co-workers hate this because they don’t want to get what I have and seeing me walk around makes them annoyed. There are others who stay home if the weather changes, just to make sure they are well. They annoy me because they are always “working from home” or not in at all so I can never get the things I need from them. Maybe if I had not coughed all over their keyboard they would not have gotten sick in the first place. whatever the case I think it is time I go home before I pass this to everyone or  cubicalville come after me with pitchforks!

I think I am addicted. Not drugs, alcohol but to Harbor Freight. I love tools, wrenches, air tools, woodworking any kind really. I have too many projects on my list and each of them needs a tool to make it go easier. If not easier it will make it cooler, or at least my garage will be cooler. I like them all, I wish I could buy them all. I can walk up and down the aisles and see all the things I need, ok want. Yeah, I could do the job without some of the tools but it won’t be as good. I know what those of you who are real tool guys will say Harbor Freight tools are cheap and don’t last. I get it but I can’t afford the tools that last. I also know that the tools that are expensive are not what they should or what they used to be. I purchased a tool at Lowes which was the same tools made in the same factory in China only they put a different sticker on the outside, oh, and charged twice as much. I get that I can get a way better tool and maybe when the cheapo I bought breaks I will go buy the better one. Until then I will buy twice as many tools on the cheap and get my free flashlight and 20% off for the foreseeable future.

Oh yes, the last day of work before vacation. By vacation, I mean another week off to work on the bathroom remodel at home. Today is filled with meetings everyone wants to get in before I go, telling everyone about the things they need to do while I am gone and trying to remember to set up my out of office and delegates for the different things I have approvals for. Seems everyone has something they need to tell me or ask before I go. It is hard to concentrate on work when I am also thinking of all the supplies I need to pick up and what I need to do first once I am home. While it won’t be a fun time off it will be relaxing in the fact that it is doing something other than what I do every day. I plan on only looking at email once or twice a day which means when I get back I will have a few hundred emails to go through. Email, the posts it notes of the modern age, most of them are just distractions from real work, the others are annoyances which slow you down in trying to get things done. Why did we ever think these were a good idea? I much prefer the face to face meeting, that way I can read the message in what is being delivered and I can then respond in a more appropriate way. instead of firing off another email to be misread by someone else.

There is a local commercial running on the radio station I listen to. It is one for a men’s clinic which specializes in, you know, “Men’s issues”. This is a family friendly blog so I will leave it at that. The commercial starts out with the guy saying he has a “to do” list and one of the things on it is to go to the clinic. At the end of the commercial, he says, “Now I can put my wife on my “To do” list! Here I feel a little like Red Green ( Red Green show is awesome) and I want to sit us, men, down and have a discussion about this. First, don’t talk like that! You are never going to get anywhere if you tell her she is on your “to do” list. In fact, I bet if you asked her how she feels about that statement you would find out that that one won’t be getting checked as done. We men should know by now, and by now I mean we don’t have it figured out but we definitely know what not to do, that we have to be more subtle than that. I know we men are slow and reading signs, both highway and from women but we should at least be getting better at it as we get older. I have learned the lessons of plastic flowers and small appliances for Christmas by trial and error, mostly error, and have logged them in my memory bank for future reference. These things we need to lock in our brains and if not in our brains we should at least write them down in our phones. After I have lost all my senses and am in an old dusty room somewhere drooling on myself and can’t even remember my own name, those will be the only things I will be able to recall with certainty. I just wanted you men to know, like Red Green says, we are all in this together!

I am finding it hard to write a blog post that is not political. On purpose, I have stayed away from politics as best I can in the blog. Yes, I have stepped up on my soapbox from time to time but I want this blog to be random thoughts and help me with my writing skills and not a rant about the country or to be another “my views matter” kind of thing. The other reason is that right now anytime I think about our current state of the election I am feeling it hard to hold down what I last ate. On that note, I would like to change the subject and bring up a weird documentary I found, the history of torture. This show went through the different ways people have been tortured and tried to figure out some of the ways it actually “tortured” people. They took a rack and put a pig’s leg on it to determine what would break first. They then used computer modeling to figure out how Vlad the Impaler, the real man behind the story of Dracula, put people on spikes without killing them right away. As I watched it my wife gave me that look of “why are you watching that?” To tell you the truth the only reason I was watching it was that the debate was on TV, and I wanted to keep down my dinner. So I guess I prefer the old fashion torture to the more modern forms.

So, I am hoping this is a joke. Today I saw a facebook post which suggested not giving kids who wear Halloween costumes deemed insensitive any candy when they come to your door. They show an Indian costume, cop or army man and say it is racist or promotes violence. No princesses or pirates because they are sexist and promote rape culture. Let us all now collectively take our hand and slap it to our forehead. What is wrong with you people? The post suggest it will trigger people and create lawsuits? What a giant ball of (can’t say it here but it rhymes with rap!) So some little kid who is excited to be a pirate for Halloween is microaggression? If this is how you think, I can with full confidence say, you are an idiot! You are what is wrong with the world today! There is no way to go through life without hearing and seeing things that you are not fond of, nor will you get to a place of stability and be a productive part of society without pulling up your shorts and getting over some things. Stop blaming your parents or the world for what you see as everything that is wrong, get off the internet go outside and start doing something to help your fellow man! Feed the homeless, comfort the sick and treat children like the undamaged and unspoiled humans they are. Not the warped, totally useless one you are!

In my late teens, I was not kind to my cars. One of them I screwed up the engine and decided, after running tools for my dad for many years I was going to rebuild the engine myself. Just a few problems with that, I had never done it and I had not really paid attention running those tools. Never the less I tried and once the car was back together, mostly, I tried to fire it up and it would not work. I had it towed to a garage where a friend worked and he called me laughing telling me that the mechanic did not have enough rags to catch all the fluids which were coming out. I had failed miserably and as soon as I got the car back I sold it so I didn’t have to be reminded of my failure! Now thirty years later I have been able to successfully do the same job on one jeep and might have to do it to another at a later date! I am not that same kid, and that is a good thing. Someone asked me about the bathroom I am redoing, they asked if I had the ability to do all the things needed to finish the job! My response was, I will when I’m done! Yeah, it won’t look as good as someone who has been it for years but it won’t be like the car from thirty years ago. I will take the time to do it right, I will listen to experts who know what they are doing and I will know it is done right when it is finished. Sometimes people say they wish they could go back to when they were young. I say I would take the energy, just not all the stupidity!

Late last week our dog for whatever reason got sick over night and unleashed an unholy attack of our carpet and floors. Love getting up in the morning to find that! Our cats from time to time, whether they are mad at us or just jerks leave us presents in random places. Sometimes just right outside the box which is full of fresh kitty litter for that very reason. Magic, the mini horse makes a mountain I call “mount poopious”. She has an entire fifty by fifty foot pen to distribute her droppings but it seems she only wants it to be in the front corner where she wants it to pile up. Perhaps she is trying to build it up enough to climb over the fence? At least George the goat spreads it out, everywhere! Lets us not forget there is also the rabbit. I just came to the realization that our place is a waste factor! All of these animals do little for me other than make work cleaning up after them. Most of them are leftovers from my children’s 4h projects, even if I wanted to get rid of them I would be the bad guy! The problem is none of them are home so my wife and I spend our time feeding and cleaning up after them. I am tired of it but some these animals have a life span longer than my mortgage. So cleanup crew is my lot for the next fifteen to twenty years unless I can talk my wife into finding these critters someone else’s house to bless!