I’ll Be Calling You…Ooo…Ooo…Ooo…Ooo.

SOME THINGS ARE INEVITABLE. Some things are expensive. Some things are inevitably expensive.

That was a big part of my day yesterday. I went cellphone shopping. I didn’t want to. I had to.

I have to admit that this shopping excursion was overdue…several years overdue. My phone was, literally, held together with Scotch Tape. About six months ago it had started to disassemble itself. I never knew that the two parts of the plastic shell were held together with glue. I know it now.

Over the years (about five at least) I must have dropped that phone a dozen times. There were so

many cracks in the glass screen that, in the right light, it looked like a street map of Houston – or like my eyeballs on the Monday morning of a three day weekend. People who saw my phone were asking me what it was. When I’d tell them they would LOL all over the place. Something had to be done. It should have been done a long time ago, but I don’t like cellphone shopping. Nobody does.

The coup de grace dropped on me two nights ago when I tried to order a pizza.

The speaker had been doing no more than mumbling for some time, but when I called the Pizza Hovel I could hear the young lady on the other end but she could not hear me at all.

My cellphone had become just a “Cell,” no longer able to be a real phone. That was the straw that broke Alexander Graham Bell’s back. I had to go shopping. I could no longer avoid the issue.

The second thing yesterday morning (Coffee came first) I headed off to “The Phone Store.” As soon as I walked through the door I could see that this was going to be fun …not. I was the only customer in the store and there was only one other person there and she was “The Manager.” She took one look at my pitiful piece of gear and said, “Oh, my God, what happened to it?” Rather than tell her the long story I just said, “It’s old.”

I did explain to her that I wanted to get a new gizmo and move everything from my phone to the new one. That’s really all I wanted for sure …that and the ability to order a pizza. She logged in to my phone and said something positive. “Fortunately, you’ve backed up almost everything so, even if I can’t move your files from this piece of trash you have them in the cloud.”

She showed me a couple of different phones and explained the features of the dohickey and of the packages available to me. I was actually going to save money and have unlimited data. I like that. According to The Manager I was lucky that my decrepit phone hadn’t dissolved itself into a pile of plastic and silicone. Who was I to argue?

Now I am at home trying to figure out what is what and how to make my new thingamabob do more than tell me the time. I think this is going to take me about a week and a few phone calls to 611 for help. I’ll do what I have to. I’ll beg. I’ll listen. I may even whimper if it might help.

It Was What We All Needed

In this hustle-bustle world where we all find ourselves these days we don’t often get the opportunity to lift someone’s spirits and “Make their day.” I recently had that opportunity.

We were down in Texas for most of January and February – right in the middle of the winter storms that wreaked havoc in most of the state. Where we were in the Corpus Christi area did not escape the troubles. We were without power for several days and had water pipes burst that had us all seeking shelter in a local church that miraculously still had power.

As the week progressed everyone in town was feeling the stress. No power and, even if you had water, it was under a “Boil Order” to make it potable. Fortunately, there was one large supermarket in town that was open and trying to service all 5000 souls. I was sent to the supermarket several times to try to find water and food.

Not surprisingly the store was crowded. Everyone I saw looked haggard and worn down. The aisles were jammed and there were many empty shelves waiting for trucks to arrive from San Antonio to resupply the store.

At one point I was at the end of a crowded aisle in the Meat Department. Shopping carts were tied up in a gridlock as people were looking for anything they could take home. Moving in any direction was almost impossible. Caught in the middle of this traffic jam was a woman with her cart completely stuck and unable to move.

One look at her and I could see that she was on the edge of a complete breakdown. The stresses of the pandemic and lockdown and now with the power outage and freezing temperatures it all had pushed her to the brink. She was physically trapped, surrounded by other desperate people. She was on the verge of tears. Looking around she yelled out, “I want to back up. That’s all. Please let me back up.”

She was starting to panic.

People could see what I did and began to give her some leeway. She started to back up with her cart and get some room to move.

For a reason I still can’t understand, as she backed up, I began to make “Beeping” noises like a truck moving in reverse. The woman stopped and looked at me. I hadn’t meant to upset her or anything it was just a spur of the moment bit of silliness. I just shrugged and she smiled. Then she laughed out loud and began beeping as she continued to back up her cart. When she got her cart free of the gridlock she looked back at me again, laughed, and started moving down the “Bread Aisle.”

Thirty seconds earlier she had looked as if the world was crushing her and now she was laughing with a smile on her face.

I was feeling stressed myself, but our little beeping interaction lightened my heart as well as hers. Could there be something as out of place as two strangers making beeping noises in the middle of a crowded supermarket?

A moment of laughter surrounded by all that chaos.

It may have been a rough time for all of us but those few moments made our day

Old Dog … New Tricks

JUST BECAUSE I’m retired doesn’t mean that my brain is sitting on a shelf in a dusty glass jar labeled “Abnormal.” Far from it! I am always looking to add new skills – new arrows in my quiver if you will.

It has been almost eight months since some pesky virus I’ve been reading about began throwing monkey wrenches into everyone’s daily lives.

This stop at the Malfunction Junction in our lives has given me the opportunity to discover and master a new skill. It may be that a new avenue could be opening up before me because this Old Dog has learned a New Trick.

The reality is that we are all doing less out in the world and are relying on having the world shipped to us. We are getting groceries, clothing, books, cosmetics, medications, and some things that are none of your business, delivered right to our front door. Everything comes securely shipped in sturdy cardboard boxes.

I love unpacking all of our deliveries. It’s almost like Christmas Morning without the electric trains and the pine needles. I take the scissors and neatly cut the sealing tape, open up the flaps, and lift out our goodies. After that I set the empty cardboard boxes to the side, out of the way.

Aha!

It was on a day like that when the handsome young UPS guy stopped by our house so often that we considered adoption that we were faced with a pile of empty boxes. I spent a couple hours struggling with those boxes to get them crammed into our recycling bin. That was not a good solution to the growing population of boxes that were filling up the downstairs bathroom. They were coming in faster than I could get them out. This problem was going to require some thought.

I sat in the kitchen with a large box. There was not enough room for the both of us. One of us had to go. Finally, I saw the solution in front of me. I began to tear the blasted box to pieces. I was stronger

than the box and in less than a minute I had that humungous container reduced to a neat little stack of cardboard pieces no bigger than the crock pot. I was deliriously happy. I knew how Einstein must have felt when he realized the “E” did, in fact, equal “MC².”

It didn’t take me very long to get into a destructive groove and those boxes were disappearing faster than taxis in a thunderstorm. I was disassembling the boxes like a tornado going through a trailer park. That Recycling bin in the back yard was taking all I could give it with room to spare.

I am living proof that “Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks.”

I can already roll over, heel, stay, and sit up and beg. Now I can add “Knows how to destroy cardboard boxes.”

It may not be much, but it’s better than nothing.

Isn’t it?

Are You Being Served?

 

HERE WE GO AGAIN. We are now in the throes of the Christmas Shopping Season. The online vendors are doing business at an astounding level and Shopping Malls are hanging on by a slender thread.

The Retail World is changing…Again.

For thousands of years the individual merchant did business one customer at a time, one sale at a time. The customer went to the merchant’s shop to find what they needed. Then in the late 19^th Century we saw (Well, not me personally) the rise of the Department Store.

Searching For High Quality Trash

 

HOW SOON AFTER GETTING UP IS IT ALLOWABLE TO TAKE A NAP? I think I may be pushing it a bit, but I got up at 7:30 this morning. It is now 11:10 AM and I’m seriously considering a little nappy-poo. I know that sounds nasty but…I don’t care.

It is now 3:37 PM.

It was a good little nap. I agree with you. A four and a half nap does border on a coma, but I felt it was also somewhat medicinal. Take a pill or two; lay down for just a minute…BOOM! Its late afternoon. I had plans. So much for them.

It is time to go on to Plan B. Get up, put on pants, and go buy a couple of souvenir T shirts. It’s obligatory in Florida. There is probably a law on the books here, “Don’t buy a cheap T shirt and we feed you to the gators.” People disappear all the time down here. They vanish forever or just show up at the Mayo Clinic. “I was standing in the buffet line when, all of a sudden, I blacked out and woke up in Minnesota.”

I’m going out to hunt for cheap T Shirts. Wish me luck.

One Stop Holiday Shopping

 

I LIKE TO EAT. I DO IT EVERY DAY. There are times when I do it too often and too much. My most dangerous times are the Holidays. I don’t mean just Christmas and Thanksgiving – those are holidays that have become celebrations of Gluttony. I’m talking about other holidays. I can do some serious eating during the festivities around Groundhog Day and the Commemoration of the Founding of the National League.

I don’t need much of an excuse.

One of the things that I really like (and in some cases dislike) are those special dishes that are only ever prepared for a specific holiday. I like Turkey and dressing in November. I do not like it in July. In July I like Hotdogs and Bratwursts. I do not want them at Christmas. I do not enjoy that quivering jellied mass of cranberry sauce (Which is not a sauce!) at Thanksgiving. It is an abomination and should be dropped into the depths of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean.

I Don’t Need It. The Chickens Don’t Need It

TODAY IS OUR LAST FULL DAY FOOTLOOSE IN IRELAND. Tomorrow we turn in the car and spend the night in a hotel near the Dublin airport. On Sunday morning we climb into the big silver bird and fly back across the ocean. It is also the day when the Christmas shopping madness begins. I don’t think the two are really connected, but you never know. At just the time all of those online bargains appear I am quickly closing in on flat broke, busted, disgusted. My wallet can’t be trusted.

It’s a good thing I had no plans on buying anything more costly than a cheeseburger. No fries.

I am getting inundated with the ads, online and on TV, for all of those wonderful things I have no intention of buying. Sure, I’d like a big and fancy new computer, but I don’t need one. My computer is working just fine and does what I ask it to do. It has been doing so for close to ten years now and as long as it does my simple chores I will not tinker with my financial status quo.

Everyone Say “Cheese”

SOMETIMES IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ORDINARY DAY there can be a moment that makes all of the nonsense fade into the background. I had one of those moments yesterday- in the middle of the Dollar Store of all places.

It is a scientific fact that one of universal tasks of men worldwide is to go out and pick up that one item that got left off the shopping list during the trip to the supermarket. Yesterday that straggler was Parmesan Cheese. You know, that stuff that is called cheese, but that I think is really just flavored pencil shavings.

It was getting close to dinner time and the guests would be arriving soon and there is no way we can serve a big pot of spaghetti, sauce, and garlic bread without that plastic container of pencil shavings…er…Parmesan Cheese. That was my call to saddle up.

Don’t Be A Smarty…Unless You’re A Television

ON THE WHOLE I DON’T MIND GOING SHOPPING. I actually like tooling around the supermarket looking at all the things I don’t want. I have a lower level of “like” when it comes to shopping for clothes. Doing that is just a necessary pain in the tookus.

Even farther down on the Krafty Scale of Shopping is going out looking for things about which I am awash in ignorance.

To Have That Certain Glow

DANGER! DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

Break out the Hazmat suits and I hope you’ve already had kids because…well, you know.

But your complexion is lovely.

Some days the world throws me a curveball and all I want to do is crawl back into bed, assume the fetal position, and turn the electric blanket up to nine.

It takes a lot to make my eyes go “Bugaboo!” but yesterday I was stopped in my tracks by the fine folks from UPS. Who would think such a thing was possible?

My wife, the lovely and perpetually nifty, Dawn, buys her cosmetics online (Ever since our local Macy’s Store went belly up). Her cosmetics line of choice is Clinique. Be advised: When they start spelling things in French you can be sure that they are inflating the prices by about 40%.

No Thanks For The Memory

YANJAA!

Some assembly required.

Say what?

Yanjaa is my new hero. Yanjaa is a young lady born in Mongolia (isn’t everybody?), raised in Kenya (but of course), educated in Sweden (the next logical step), and now living in Texas (Y’all).

Her full name is Yanjaa Wintersoul and I don’t believe that either. Not any more than I believe that her hair is naturally that lovely magenta color.

Why is she my new hero? Because Yanjaa, using her extraordinary talents has memorized the entire IKEA catalog.

Why? I don’t know. It’s the “How” that I find most amazing.

Aaron’s Lego-cy

 

TODAY I AM GOING TO ASK YOU TO DO SOMETHING – to act in the real world in the memory of a young man named Aaron.

Aaron was born with congenital heart disease and spent much of his life in the hospital. He had a heart transplant when he was fifteen. That gave him a few good years, but when he was nineteen his body suddenly rejected his new heart and he passed away.

I Think I Remember…

PASSWORDS – LOVE ‘EM, HATE ‘EM, CAN’T REMEMBER THEM. All I can do is forget them.

The discussion this morning at my Play Group (St. Arbucks morning coffee) was all about computer passwords and all of our problems with them. One of the Usual Suspects who shows up every morning for coffee and pointless conversation was wrapped up in mind numbing problems remembering his computer passwords. The ones he could recall were no longer in use and it was bringing his life to a screeching halt.

I tried to help. He’ll get over it and resume speaking to me eventually.

It’s A Calling

 

I SPENT A HEALTHY PORTION OF YESTERDAY AFTERNOON being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of the Best Buy Electronics store.

I bought a new phone and now I am completely out of touch with the rest of the world and poorer by a few million dollars.

It really wasn’t in my plans for the day to be going phone shopping, but my old phone had other ideas. When I say my “Old Phone” I’m not just casually tossing around words. My phone that I had comfortably tucked in my little belt holster was a Samsung 4. That was a “New Phone” back sometime in the Carter Administration or thereabouts. I had that phone a loooong time and it was starting to show its age.

Clean – Up In Aisle Seven!

IT USED TO BE THAT EVERY TOWN HAD A “FIVE AND DIME” STORE. Well, inflation took care of that. Now we have “Dollar Stores” which vainly attempt to be what Woolworth’s and the others used to be. Until the Dollar General puts in a lunch counter I will not accept them as the worthy heirs.

While there may be a number of Dollar Stores in every town, village and wide spot in the road in the country they are little more than Garage Sales with a neon sign. Much of their merchandise carries labels that I do not recognize – and that does not induce confidence in me. Sorry, but I don’t like “gummi bears” anyway.

The Play’s The Thing Wherein I’ll Catch The Conscience Of The King

SOMETIMES I AM MY OWN SANTA CLAUS! I hadn’t planned on it. It just happened as a byproduct of finally doing something I should have done ages ago.

My desk usually looks like Dresden after World War Two. Calling it a pile of rubble is generous. It had reached the point where I didn’t know what was stacked up there. Anyway – the other day I was looking for a small pocket knife that I know had been on my desk at some time in the past. I was rooting around when I saw something that was held together with a rubber band. It looked like a bundle of plastic cards. I gave up on the knife. It will work its way to the surface at some point, but the plastic cards had my attention for the moment.

Throwback Thursday From Feb. 2015 – “But Wait! There’s More!”

Throwback Thursday From Feb. 2015 – “But Wait! There’s More!”

IS IT ALMOST CHRISTMAS AGAIN?”

It must be because our mailbox is crammed with catalogs every day. Catalogs from places we’ve never heard of are arriving at a dizzying pace and almost all of them go straight into the recycle bin.

Where Can I Get Some 3000 Year Old Pants?

 

MY BACK IS UP AGAINST THE WALL. It is the Christmas Season and everyone will be in a cheerful mood and dressed for the occasion. You know – family and all that. I am being given subtle signals that I will need to dress more like a mature man. A man who isn’t still dressing like he did in 1969.

And I hate going out shopping for clothing. Going into a store and having to deal with some clerk who asks me the one question I really hate to answer: “What is your size?”

I’m Not Good At Shopping

BLACK FRIDAY HAS PASSED and the Christmas Shopping Season has begun for most people. I try to hold off until December. I don’t like to do all of that while I’m still dealing with the effects of all that turkey.

“SUI” – Shopping Under the Influence SUI – it also sounds like somebody is calling the hogs. Disturbingly appropriate.

Like gazillions of other people I have started doing most of my Christmas shopping online. It’s easy. It’s economical – no driving all over town. And I can do while sitting there in my underwear. That is something I would never do while at the Mall – again. (Just kidding there)

Throwback Thursday from Nov. 2014 – The Morning After The Day Before

Throwback Thursday 

The Morning After The Day Before

A lot of people are calling today “Black Friday,” a piece of accounting slang indicating that today is the day when their sales ledgers go from Red Ink to Black Ink. Many retail concerns realize the majority of their sales for the year in the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. What a way to live.

For me today is “The Morning After the Day Before.” It really doesn’t have a color. Everything is shrouded in an L-Tryptophan cloud. Rather than go battle the hordes of shoppers at The Mall I am spending this day fighting the urge to go back to bed or to catch a nap standing up as I wait for my coffee.

If I were to go shopping I’m sure that I would come home with – stuff. I don’t need any more stuff. My wife doesn’t need any more stuff. We really don’t need half of the stuff we have right now.

I’m just glad that I don’t have a “Bed, Bath And Beyond” store nearby. Whenever I go into that store I become enraptured by all of the “Beyond” stuff. It is like finding myself trapped inside every Infomercial extant on TV. I see piles of microwave cooking gizmos and various adhesives (in a selection of colors) that would enable me to drill holes in my boat without fear. But I don’t have a boat.

In a way it all takes me back and makes me feel young again. Strolling through a “Bed, Bath And Beyond” is like preparing to furnish a college dorm room with a wide range of stuff prohibited by the school in addition to things your mother insists that you actually need.

No, today is the day when I sit quietly in a stupor and let other people move the economy forward. I’m just not capable of being a cog in the commercial engine – tomorrow maybe, but not today. Today I am content to be little more than organic matter in size 10 shoes. I can and will respond to basic stimuli, but little more. Cogent thought and critical thinking will have to wait until the fog lifts. My wife has confirmed that I am quasi-capable of forming simple sentences aloud, but she doesn’t think I’ll be going much beyond that until Sunday. It sounds like today may be the perfect day for me to ensconce myself in ‘The Rip Van Winkle Memorial Chair’ and stumble through Netflix. Oh, look! Six thousand movies I’ve never heard of.

I’ll get back to you tomorrow.