Paradigms...where shift happens!

Dooce

If you thought Dooce was all about fresh irreverant and well written humor then think again. Today's post deals with a surprise subject that is extremely sensitive in many families. She covers it well and does so with respect for her family that doesn't compromise her own views. It's worth a read. While you're there, check out the March 8th posting for an all out expose of what can happen when a man and a woman work out together.

Yeah, she is different but she is one of the best for content and viewpoint.

That's my story and I'm by God stickin' to it....

Hitting a cat

I hit a cat with my car Friday night. Whenever I drive Piedmont Drive or any other road in this part of the country at night, I'm always 5 or 10 miles below the speed limit in hopes that will give me an edge on missing any deer that jump out. I even brake for squirrels.

 

Friday night 10 miles per hour under the limit wasn't enough. This poor little black and white bugger couldn't have been more than ten feet in front of me when he made his move from the right hand shoulder to cross the road.

 

There was an awful noise underneath the front end of my van from the impact and we were past him before I even realized what had happened. For some reason I looked in the rear view mirror right away and saw him, seemingly hot footing it back in the direction he had come from. I can't imagine how he did that but I am going to hold on to the illusion that he ran down into the weeds battered, bruised and a whole lot wiser going into his next 8 lives.

I really hate when that happens and I can still hear that awful sound...

Inside Man

I'm not even pretending to be a reviewer but I saw Spike Lee's new movie, Indside Man, last night. It's a cracking good story and in my opinion, well worth seeing. Denzel Washington stars as a hostage negotiator for the NYPD who is assigned to respond to a Manhattan bank robbery in progress with multiple hostages. There are enough twists and turns to the plot to keep you talking about it all the way home and then some. My only quibble with the movie would be that Willem Dafoe as the uniformed officer in charge on scene seems to have gotten short shrift in the final cut and that's a waste of a really fine actor.

This isn't a "scenery" movie but I still think it will work better on the big screen rather than waiting for DVD just because of the scope of the robbery scenario. This isn't a couple of small timers in pantyhose masks trying to score a few thousand bucks at a branch bank in the suburbes.

As I said I'm no reviewer but I did like this movie...a lot! It has an R rating but that seems to be almost exclusively for language.

Finding just the right...

...words for this relay of a comment I received on a post from back in January  is  a little difficult because I don't want to dwell on the lesson learned by a reader who made the same mistake I did. In January I wrote a post entitled Presence. Yesterday evening I received the following in an e-mail which the reader was kind enough to let me quote here:

"Jim,  I had to email and tell you something. 
A while back I emailed you and told you that I had shared your "Presence" piece with some friends and have put in my favorite folder.
Short version:  Friday, 3/17/06 was an old dear friends b'day - his 86th!  I had sent him a card - and meant to call him on Friday.  But didn't. 
His son called me Sat evening and said he had died Sat. morning.
He did have a nice birthday - and he had gotten my card.....but I wished I had called.
Took out your article and read it again..shared with some of our mutual friends, and it helped - through the tears.
Just wanted to let you know I still enjoy your site."

Nothing for me to add beyond that...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scoring very high on my...

list of things that suck, higher even than beets, is the part of my car's electical system that was designed to be connected to a car alarm, which I do not have and today decided, for reasons all its own, to begin to flash my lights and honk my horn. Next on the list is the local Chrysler dealership which cheerfully explained that they cannot take my car until tomorrow and advised me to handle the 'horny' problem (sorry, I had to go for that one) by pulling the fuse and to handle the lights by disconnecting the battery when the car is parked.

It's 30 bloody degrees outside, it's snowing and I'm barking my knuckles trying to remove a battery terminal. How do cars know things like that? 

A Summer Place II

I was reading something the other day on why people blog and began to consider not so much why I began to blog but why I'm still doing this. I posted my 100th entry yesterday and I never really thought it would continue this long. This summer will be two years since I started.

I think the reasons I still do this are quite simple but they work for me. My hopes for this blog are that it will move you in some way, amuse those of you whose sense of humor is as warped as mine and in some cases provoke thought and reflection. The post about my grandmother's house, "A Summer Place" prompted more comments than I usually get on here, 4 to be precise plus one more that came to me directly by e-mail. I really like that it prompted some reflection (catch the "Rear View Mirror" reference?).

I was privileged a couple of years ago to visit a high school classmate's old family place and here is the comment that came from that person:

"I relate to those kinds of old memories - pine trees and birds twittering at dawn do it for me.
Before, when I was working in Toronto and Kingston and only got down on weekends, I would arrive late on Friday night and spend a few minutes in the yard just breathing in the air.  Then I would open the windows in the bedroom so in the morning, just before dawn, I could awaken to the sound of the birds.
Interesting that you mention fans.  We never had fans at the farm house until 1997.  How we got along without them I don't know.  Now I have installed two ceiling fans and portable a fan for every room!  And just hope the fuses don't blow!"

Objects in the mirror really are closer than they appear!

It's almost spring and...

...they're back. The Bradford pear trees that line the streets and by-ways of Fredericksburgare in full stinky bloom. This is a tree that is directly in front of my office door. It's deceptively beautiful but get too close to it and your nostrils will be assailed by the aroma of unwashed feet.

                           
Years ago, for some inexplicable reason the powers that be here in "Mayberry-On-Crack" decided that we should have a town symbol, something around which we could build a theme for the downtown area. They chose the most noxious tree on earth, the

Bradford pear. It heralds the Spring season with delicate white blossoms that look as if they should smell as nice as they look but one breath of their aroma and you feel as if you have done a swan dive into the dirty sock basket at the "Final Four".

This year as it happened, a sudden warm spell caused the trees to bloom even before the forsythia and daffodils. All well and good I suppose except for the fact in the fall the Bradford pear trees begin to drop small nasty tasting pears that have been lurking in their foliage all summer, thus ushering in a fifth season, car washing season, when car wash owners begin to hear their cash registers ringing like the bells of St. Mary. The overripe fruit sticks to your car, eats away at your paint and need to be washed off as soon as possible. Some of these auto deposits are even more noxious as they are the result of these pears having spent a short and productive time in the gastrointestinal tracts of several hundred thousand starlings.

Now the city fathers (and mothers) have come to the conclusion that maybe these starling buffets have overstayed their welcome. Henceforth the

Bradford pear trees will be replaced by some other species of leaf factory as they die off or split limbs from their trunks as they are wont to do. All well and good I suppose except for one small detail. We have also embraced a New Years tradition in which a giant lit up pear is dropped from above the street at Midnight to mark the arrival of the New Year like the ball in Times Square.

I wonder if anyone has a design for a giant lit up starling that could just crap on cars at midnight instead. Hmmm...now where did I put  all those strings of Christmas lights.....

Full moon over the Burg

The moon is full here so I’m sure that’s the reason today was so weird and pissy, Two clients in the office seemed to have coordinated their efforts to be absolute jerks. By the time I left at 5:00:01 pm I was ready to chew nails and spit rust. A few minutes of good conversation at my evening coffee spot seemed to take the edge off a bit and then it was off to the grocery store to scrounge up some evening sustenance.  

The two express checkout lines were long and after I looked to see which checkers were working I got in the line for the one that was fastest. There was a guy who got in line behind me and spent about 5 minutes grousing out loud about the wait. Finally he slammed his small basket down on the top of a display and stalked out of the store. I’m thinking to myself that he too is a jerk. As annoying as the wait was I realized that if I let myself sign on to his bitching and moaning, I was going to give someone else the kind of day I had.

 I put on the happy face I didn’t feel like wearing tonight and got myself to the car without spreading the gloom. I’m so proud of me….it felt pretty good…smug and self-righteous to be sure but at least I didn’t pass it forward and now my pissy day had a decent end.

I guess I could moralize on this theme for a bit but I won't. I just made the choice to not be a jerk and screw up someone else's day.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it…

Weekend stuff from other blogs...

...you should check out today:

• Kate Smith used to have a song out that began with the line "When the moon comes over the mountain..." Doug Thompson has posted a great picture of a Floyd County moon. (Iwas so tempted to do a "Doug shoots a full moon in Floyd" but discretion ruled.)
  
• Warming the cockles of a grandfather's heart, that's the effect of the most recent posting at Blind Wanderings
• Girl Scout cookies are everywhere at this time of year. Lisa observes the phenomenon through her Renarded filter. It's the second posting from the top under the title "Charity Don't Come Cheap"

That's some of the stuff that caught my eye while you all were wearing yourselves out with spring yard work. I have mine finished already....moved my wintered over thyme and rosemary out onto the balcony...they seem to have survived the winter inside despite my best efforts to the contrary. Funny thing is that although I use the thyme all the 'thyme' the rosemary is there just because I like the look of it.

A Summer Place

A bit over half a century ago, this was our summer house. Actually it was my grandparent’s house down in Bedford, Virginia where my younger brother and I stayed during my ninth summer. The front porch railings when they were all there, were covered with kudzu vines. The way that weed grows it might have been their weight that pulled the missing railings down. In the gable at the top you see two boarded up windows. The one on the right was the window off what we called the front bedroom.

That was where my brother and I would sleep because that was the only one that ever offered any semblance of cross ventilation during the humid Virginia summers. We would get our faces as close to the open window as possible and any tantalizing hint of a breeze was as welcome as a sip of water to a thirsty man. As I recall there was only one fan in the house and 9 year old and 6 year old boys were off the bottom of the list of fan users. We used to lay there at night and listen for the sound of approaching cars, trying to guess whether it was going east or west on Route 221 or as it’s called now Old Forest Road. We lay so close to the screen that we could actually smell it or the dust on it anyway. To this day, if I press close to a window screen, the smell of it reminds me of those simple summer nights when our biggest worry was whether or not we would catch a few seconds of summer breeze. 

When you pass an old house on the road that looks as if it’s hanging on to existence by the skin of its teeth, be kind and remember that it had happier days that someone someplace remembers.

There are more things to tell you about our summer house but I’ll hold them for later perhaps.

Whenever there is a longish...

...gap in the postings here, you can pretty well count on it being due to a mental vacuum 'chez moi'. It's certainly not because I'm doing something else that is more fun...would that it were so but it isn't.

My posting lapses are more likely because I'm wrestling with what I want this blog to be. I'll have visions of being one of those serious current events commentators at one point then I'll read the wonderfully funny work of a writer like Heather at Dooce and think that's the direction I want to go in. Yesterday morning I got into a political discussion again. On my way to the office afterwards I realized that I had gotten all heated up again and I realized that I just don't have the quick "think on my feet" tools for that kind of exchange. That led me to the thought that it really wouldn't make any difference anyway because the current administration and party in power has a death grip on the process of governing and has co-opted all three branches of the government. I'm sixty years old and I just don't have the time for it anymore.

So, I'm going to leave all that stuff alone from now on. Doug Thompson and others are much better equipped than I for that arena. The best thing for me to do is to read them, which I regularly do, and try not to let what they observe and say depress me any more than is absolutely necessary. That said, I'll probably still take the occasional verbal pot shot at the occasional 'inside the Beltway nere-do-well' but I'm not going to let the surreal world of Washington DC be what this little slice of the blogoshpere (if you hate that word as much as I do please forgive me for using it) is all about.

There's a Cox in the hen house...

Stupid title, I know but I did that because it rhymes with fox, as in varmint, as in some varmint has sneaked into the hen house. Our local cable kluge, Cox Communications has pulled a fast one here. In an apparent effort to coerce those of us who haven't changed to digital cable service to do so, they have moved the TV Guide channel up into the digital tier and if you want to get it you must upgrade to digital service.

They have kindly offered to give me a printed cable guide for three months after which time I can pay them a paltry $4.00 a month to continue it. My other choice is to go ahead and change to digital which after the six month introductory come-on would cost me about $35 per month more. Are they nuts or do they think Iam? If this is such a great mode, this digital, why didn't they move QVC and HSN and Fox News and Pat Robertson and crap like that?

I have called them and I have e-mailed them to let them know what shoddy customer service I think this is but I'm not finished with them by any means. Next week e-mails are going out to about 500 people in my e-mail address book urging them to complain to both the City Council and the local cable commission.

In truth, I suppose,  it's really more insult than injury and there is probably no chance that they will feel enough public pressure to reverse this stupid move but hell, I never met a windmill yet that didn't deserve a good tilt.

That's my windmill and I'm stickin' to it

This is really more...

...of a test post than anything else. I'm trying to determine how many of you all have my blogg bookmarked. If you do see this because you have me bookmarked, please drop me a quick note saying that you do. The e-mail address is paradigms@verizon.net

Thanks,
Jim

Day 1 of....

...the Patch vs Phillip Morris Inc here in my little corner of the kingdom on the banks of the Rappahannock River.  An ash, stink and puff free future is the long term goal while the next ten minutes is the immediate hurdle.  There's something appealing about keeping score in $$ saved like my friend Susan . She's at $152 or something like that. For her sake, I hope I don't catch up but at about $7.00 a day I should match where she is now in about 3 weeks.

Any suggestions to aid the effort will be greatly appreciated. I can see a lot of tangerines and grapes in my snacking future.

And as a not so famous blogger used to say "That's my story and I'm sticking to it..."