On Many Subjects

First, I am going to add this to DigitalJon's Great Idea list.

Is there someone you are angry with? Just have a fight with your boy friend or girl friend? Someone you want to vanish? How about this idea.

Go to your computer.
Create a file with that person's name, for example, "Kay Four."
Then drag the file to the Recycle Bin
You will get a dialog box that asks, "Do you really want to delete Kay Four?"*
You click yes AND you feel instantly better because you just got rid of the object of your anger.

Please note that I used my name as an example and it was not meant to give anyone a good idea! For my part, I would use, Ex-Hubby!

I had to get a car because my #2 son wasn't going to let me borrow his car forever. That kind of behavior wears thin very quickly.

At any rate, a friend of my son's had a car he was willing to sell, so I bought it. And it promptly quit working. Now, I admit that the car is older (a 1994) but after less than a week, I was stranded at the dry-cleaners. I called #2 to rescue me and he arrived, looking so official in his Air Force uniform and proceeded to get my car running so I could take it to the autoparts store.

Then, we bought the alternator and he told me he would change it out for me. OK.

Now, to fix this car, he had to acquire a number of tools he didn't own, so off the store where you buy that kind of thing for tool shopping. He loved it.

He bought sockets, wrenches, a crow bar and a bendy-tool that makes your socket bend in odd directions to reach those hard to reach bolts. Two days, he shopped until he bought enough tools to make an Indy 500 Pit Crew happy. Then, he changed the alternator, getting his hands totally greasy and having his new tools spread around him like he was a child in a play pen and he had all of his favorite toys within reach.

For that's what it was... his favorite new toys.

#2 announced that he wants a tool box for Christmas and he will paint a note on the top that says, "#2 ONLY." Guy's tool.

He took the old alternator off the car and put the new one on and never once got to use his new bendy-tool. So, he invented a reason to use it.

#2: I am going to have to go through this entire engine until I find something to take off with my new bendy-tool.
Me: It has to be a guy-thing.
#2: It's like when a woman buys a new blouse. She has to wear it really soon. It is necessary.
Me: Ok. Just don't take apart something you can't fix.
#2: What? I'm a guy! I can fix cars. This is totally a guy thing. You have to be able to work on cars or you can't be a real guy.
Me: Which has saved me from having to know anything about it. Fixing cars is something I never wanted to know how to do. So, they invented guys and guys fix cars. As long as there are guys on this planet, I won't have to know how to fix a car. I just have to know how to ask for help.
#2: Oh, look! I can use my bendy-tool to tighten the thing-a-ma-bob.
Me: I'm so happy for you!
#2: I need to call Clover. Look! I fixed my mom's car!
Me: You feel all manly and stuff and that's why you have to call your woman?
#2: Yeah! You know. Strut around a little bit. Show off.
Me: Kinda like a peacock showing off his feathers for the ladies.
#2: Exactly.
Me: Except human peacocks don't have beautiful feathers. They have greasy hands and a bendy-tool.
#2: Whatever works.

According to the Maps and the Civil War, Virginia is a southern state.

So why was one of my neighbors ranting so badly against Southern people? The man wouldn't shut up. He kept on and on, making a fool of himself and doing a very bad southern accent. You see, I am from the SOUTH and I know what a southern accent should sound like.

The carpetbagger was all, "Ah thank ah'm gonna git my gun and go shoot a possum fer dinner and then Maw kin cook 'er up fer me." AND "Ah thank ah'm gonna throw another beer can in the back of mah pick-up truck."

As I have said, I am from the south and I have NEVER used the above mentioned phrases in conversation to anybody.

I have nothing against Yankees. My Dad is a Yankee, born and raised in Up-State New York. I still have a bunch of cousins up there and an aunt or two. Yankees are cool.

Except for my neighbor who thought no one in the area was a southerner... just every native Virginian. I asked him where he was born. "I was born in Richmond," he announced proudly.

So, I told him, in my finest southern accent, "If you were born in Richmond, you are a possum shooting southerner, too."

"Not!"

Well spoken, Pete.

"Look it up on your computer, Einstein. Virginia is a Southern State," I told him.

He gave me a look like I was the freaking moron.

Small wonder I have such a hard time finding a date.

I wrote about my terrible apartment in my last entry.

How about this?

Since I have a new job, I am not here very often, so that gives me less time to despise it.

The new job is going great. The only downside is, I leave my apartment at 7:45 in the morning and I don't get home until around 7 in the evening.

That means I have been neglecting my blog, and my cat.

She isn't happy about this new situation and she is stressed, again. The fur fell off her face and her tummy. My poor kitty!

I promise, more exciting entries to come.

On days like today when I could be working, but I find myself daydreaming and wondering about really important universal issues, like, Can a Borg assimilate a Cylon, I get really great ideas.

This one is classic:

Wait until a coworker goes to a meeting or out to lunch, quickly slide into his or seat, open their Outlook and send a message to that person from that person:

Note to Self--Self, you are an idiot.

By the time they get back to their desk, you will be safely tucked behind your desk and your culpability will never be in question and your coworker will spend the rest of the day trying to remember when they sent that message and why.

You can actually schedule an email to be sent to you at some date in the future at FutureMe.org. If you want to send yourself a birthday greeting, a Christmas wish, or a reminder, you can do it at FutureMe. I use it all the time. I love getting email from me.

Every Friday night, is SciFi Friday on the SciFi channel. This is normally where you will find me on Fridays, sitting in front of the TV, munching on pizza. This ritual has made me realize several universal truths about our... um... well... universe.

Also, because no blog is a REAL blog unless you periodically add lists, this is my list of THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM THE SCIFI CHANNEL:

1) Bad guys have terrible aim and are unable to hit any good guy they are shooting at, regardless of the weapon used.

2) All aliens crave human flesh, even though they have never before dined on human, they show up on our planet, break out the best china and flatware, and prepare for a feast.

3) No matter where you go in the universe, you will land on a planet with gravity that is exactly equal to Earth's gravity.

4) No matter where you go in this galaxy, you will find advanced civilizations who speak English better than Mavis Beacon. Unless they have been extinct for several million years, then their writing will be so easy to learn that anyone who has attended primary school for more than two years can decipher it.

5) A rugged space cowboy's gut feelings are far more reliable than knowledge from the most brilliant scientists on this planet.

6) Flying alien space crafts is so intuitive that anyone can learn to do while just studying the controls for about eight minutes... four if you are a certified pilot.

7) Alien weapons are so intuitive that anyone who picks one up will be able to use it immediately and with great accuracy.

8) All alien princesses wear very little clothing regardless of the weather and all alien princesses are extremely beautiful... by Earth standards...except they have hairstyles that were popular in 1969.

9) If you have a couple of dumb space ship repair guys with you, they will die and you will be safe.

10) All clones eat human flesh, whether human, animal or alien.

11) All ghosts can walk through walls unless they are chasing you, then they have to take the long way around.

12) All super-sized alligators, crocodiles, and snakes crave human flesh and they got to their super-size by eating humans, but no one notices until you show up. Also, the scientists who have been looking for the creature for years can't find it until you show up and show them exactly where it is. And if you are a scientist who has been looking for the creature, you will be eaten, but your gorgeous lab assistant will fall in love with the handsome stranger and survive.

13) All robot side kicks must have a sense of humor.

14) Time travel really works, but the only ones allowed to use it are people who want to go back in time to screw up the timeline and change the future.

15) Even though most alien civilizations are far more advanced than us, we will be able to defeat them because basically most alien civilizations that are far more advanced than us are really stupid.

16) Sound DOES travel through the vacuum of space.

What have you learned from the SciFi Channel?

There are so many diet crazes out there that work for a while, but then you go off the diet and you gain back the weight you lost plus ten pounds. Sorry, I don't know the pound to kilo conversion. To give you a visual, if you are short and slender and female ten pounds amounts to approxiamately 10% of your body weight.

I think I will call my new DIET Craze FOOD. That's right. The FOOD diet.

So what is considered food? I can tell you what is NOT food. Anything with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) should be avoided all the time because although substances with HFCS may be edible, do not fool yourself into thinking it is really food. HFCS is in just about everything. Read the ingredients and you'll find it right along with a whole bunch of non-pronouncable chemicals. What's up with that? I want FOOD, not Chemicals. But this HFCS is in Ketsup, Breakfast Cereal, every sip of Coke.

So, in this diet-oriented society, I propose the FOOD diet. That means you eat NOTHING with HFCS. You eat FOOD.

FOOD is that stuff that is whole and has no nutritional information printed on the side. So if what you are getting ready to eat doesn't have a nutritional information label on the side, you are eating FOOD or you are in a foreign country. Geographically speaking, if your feet are in the US and what you are eating has no nutritional label, you are more than likely eating FOOD.

Another way to tell if your food is FOOD, is this: Did it come from the edges of the super market? You know, the place where they put dairy products, eggs, milk, fresh fruits and vegetables, meat and freshly baked bread. If it did, then your food is likely FOOD.

Along the aisles is where you find all the items with HFCS in it. Not everything, of course, but your chances of finding something without HFCS in it is about the same as looking down and finding a winning lottery ticket at your feet.

So, there it is: My new FOOD diet. AND, I won't charge you a thing for this diet. There is no club to join, no weekly weigh-ins, no books or pamplets to buy.

Just eat FOOD.

I have recently changed my major at the university I attend. (That's right. For those of you who don't know, K4 is a college kid. Well not really a kid any longer, but I still go to college. Note to students outside the US: College and University are interchangeable words.) I was studying Organization and Management Leadership, which was fun and really cool, but the whole program was aimed at my working in a large corporate structure and not working alone... self employed... a virtual assistant.

This class I am currently working through is Personal Leadership and required that I take several self-assessement tests and participate in a 360 degree feedback program, in which I am rated by coworkers and supervisors and by people who work under me. I am like, "Um, Dr. University Professor, I don't have anyone to lead. How am I supposed to do this class?" He told me to find other areas in my life that I am considered a leader and to use those as my examples of leadership.

Alrighty, then. I didn't find any areas where I can be considered a leader.

What happened is I turned into a fiction writer, creating a fanciful world for all the papers and essays I am required to write in which I am a better leader than... oh, the greatest leader you can think of. For me, Indira Ghandi, Madeline Albright, Thomas Jefferson, and Donald Trump flash through my head when I think of a great leader. Your list is likely very different.

So, I called the university to whine about my state of being, because the amount of money I am spending to be a fiction writer is ludicrous. The counselor agreed.

I changed from the Capella University School of Business to the Capella University School of Education with a new course of study: Post Secondary and Adult Education, which means I can grow up and be a college professor.

Now, I may actually learn something other than simply honing my fiction writing skills.

Maybe I can publish all those papers I have written in an anthology titled, "The Greatest Educational Hoax Ever Perpetrated By a University Student in the 21st Century While Pursuing Higher Education."

Too pretentious?

Ok. How about "Lies I Told My Instructors?" Yes. I think that will work nicely.

Yep, that's right. The Divine Miss M's current preferred mode of transportation is self-locomotion. She is officially a toddler and toddles about everywhere, much quicker than I can get to her to stop her from pulling something down that should never be down.

Whew! For four hours last evening, between the times her parents dropped her off and the time I put her to bed, it was non-stop bedlam. I rescued (in no particular order) several DVDs, a porcelain doll, books of various sizes, the telephone, a box of envelopes, head phones for the computer, my Bluetooth headset for my cell phone, another box of envelopes, the paper for my printer, more books, the cat, a magazine, my brief case, a three pound hand weight, the DVR remote, the cat's water bowl, the cat's food bowl, a computer speaker, a notebook, a pencil, a pen, a Sharpie Marker, a five dollar bill, my cell phone, the mouse, my keyboard (at least four times), my computer chair, sofa pillows, toilet paper, a pair of sneakers, a rosemary plant, the newspaper, and external hard drive and the front door.

I am certain I forgot a few things.

I thought my apartment was pretty well baby-proof, but Miss M showed just how wrong a person can be.

It is amazing, however, to hold that little girl and give her a bottle of milk before she settles in for the night and to feel such overwhelming and intense love that it nearly takes my breath away. And when I went to bed only an hour later, I watched her sleep for the longest time, marveling at the tiny little person that is at the same time, delightful, wonderful, aggravating, exhausting, precocious, and exhilarating. The ball of energy slept soundly, holding her blanket close to her chest, her pacifier tucked safely between her lips as she suckled in her sleep. Such an innocent and alarmingly sweet person! How can we keep her in this state of innocence for the rest of her life, I wonder? Perhaps we aren't supposed to. I only know that I am eagerly awaiting the days and years to come as she grows into an adorable young lady.