Becoming a cranky old man

I've been feeling a lot older this year. I used to fight my age and stay up as late as possible Friday and Saturday night, shop at American Eagle, and eat chicken fingers 5 days a week. I still eat chicken fingers 5 days a week, but I find I'm more rested if I go to bed about the same time all week long, and I don't like shopping with 14-year-olds for shirts. I think it's important I'm away of my "getting older" and that I consciously shape the kind of old man I'm becoming. I don't want to be the grumpy old guy who's always yelling at kids (which is anyone younger than him), walking to get the paper in his underwear, always frowning, and muttering curse words from 60 years ago.

This is why I'm concerned about my new habit of walking away from people when they're talking about something stupid. This isn't something I used to do. I would stand there politely and listen to whatever they were going on about. I'd give some non-verbals that it was time to end their talk, but if they didn't I'd usually just stand there and think about something interesting until they stopped.

I recently had a liberating experience.

I was returning my snowboard to the Big Sky rental office and after chatting with the rental guy for a few minutes, started to walk out. As I turned he said something, "If you pronounce c-r-e-e-k 'crick' then what does c-r-i-c-k spell?" After I turned around I realized he wasn't talking to me directly, just posing a question for anyone within earshot. Feeling obligated to not walk away from someone talking to me I stood there for a second trying to figure out what he was even talking about. Before I knew it a very know-it-all guy was in front of him reciting what must have been the introduction to an informative speech on the difference between cricks and creeks, going so far as to list specific widths, in metric, that constitutes a crick and creek. I found this guy to be really annoying. And then it hit me! I don't have to stand here!! I don't know any of these people, I don't care about his speech, and I'll never see any of them again. While this guy was only in section IIa of his talk, I silently (but in plain sight) turned around and walked out the door.

FREEEEEE!!!!

Oh how great it was. Why should I have to stand and listen to some jerk? I don't. And now I don't.

But I'm afraid I'm doing it too much, or too easily. I don't want to be the bitter old man who scoffs and walks away when you say something he doesn't like. So I guess I'll just have to be conscious of it. Look out jerks of the world, I'm not going to humor you any more!

Academy Awards too early in the year?

Nominations for the Academy Awards (Oscars) were announced last night. Having worked at a movie theater in my high school years and being an avid movie-goer, I was kind of sad to realize I hadn't seen a lot of the movies up for nomination. I plan on watching them, just not till they're released on DVD (or bluray).

Hence the problem. There's been a shift in recent years to rent movies instead of seeing them in theaters. Netflix lead the charge and blockbuster is helping with their mail-order rentals. Why pay $8.50 a ticket and $10 for popcorn and a drink when you can get a movie from netflix for roughly $1 per movie, make popcorn for $0.30 and drink a pop for $.050.. and watch the movie when it's convenient. It's still fun to go to the movies for some things, like seeing an action movie on the big screen or dressing up like harry potter (if that's your thing). But I think the general feeling is, "I'll just wait till it's on DVD" for most movies these days.

That brings me back to the Academy Awards. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (13 nominations), Slumdog Millionaire (10 nominations), Milk (8 nominations), Doubt (5 nominations), Frost/Nixon (5 nominations) and others with fewer nominations are all in movie purgatory between the silver screen and the home screen. I wonder if the Academy Awards will ever move the award show to a later date to accommodate the home viewers?

Ma'ma always said

Laundry has always plagued man. And by man I mean men. Clean just isn't in our genes and I'm going to forgo any "dirty jeans" puns. Too easy, not my style. What IS my style is being in a perpetual state of doing laundry. I don't mind putting dirty clothes in the basket but once they're clean it takes me about 10 days to fold the clean clothes and hang things up. I iron once a year in the fall. When shirts get wrinkled I put them in a cluster in the top left corner of my closet and don't wear them until the annual ironing day - which happens to coincide with "I don't have any work clothes that aren't in the closet cluster" day. I wish I never had to wash clothes. Unless they're visually dirty or smelly, clothes should be fair game. Febreeze came along and eliminated half the reason to wash clothes in the first place, and I don't spend a lot of time rolling in the dirt.

The one thing I put my foot down on is undergarments. I won't wear t-shirts or underwear twice. Underwear is really what determines when I need to do laundry. I used to have many weeks worth of underwear, but underwear is sneaky, if you take your eye off it for one second it'll make a move. I was packing for a trip a few weeks ago and I found out I only have 6 pairs of boxers left. I think I used to have 10 or 15 others but for the life of me I don't know where they went.

One time in college I came up with an amazing prank - once a week I was going to steal a pair of my friend' underwear. This was a long prank mind you, but imagine a month or two down the road when suddenly he realizes he's down to only a few pairs of underwear... what do you do? You can't go around accusing people of stealing your underwear and there's no good way to casually ask if someone has seen it around. It would have been funny but after 3 or 4 weeks I forgot about it. The last day of school I was packing up and found the loot. Whoops. So I went to his room and hid it under the futon mattress when he wasn't looking. Years later I told him about it and he yelled, "THAT'S HOW THEY GOT THERE!" I like confusing people, so in a sense the prank won.

Anyway, back to my lowly 6 pairs, I guess it's possible someone stole 10 or 15 pairs of my underwear, but I don't think anyone's that weird. I have a feeling I'm really good at throwing away old boxers but really bad at buying new ones. Let that go on for 4 or 5 years and suddenly you have 6. That means I've been doing laundry every 6 days. If you recall I said it takes me 10 days to fold my clean clothes, hence perpetual laundry.

Also, since I'm doing laundry every 6 days I don't have enough clothes to justify separating clothes by color, weight, size, style, ethnicity, etc. I separate into two groups, clean and dirty. Dirty clothes go in the wash, clean clothes stay. I know this breaks all the rules but honestly, those rules are outdated. If we can experiment with stem cells and crash robots into mars surely detergent and washing machines are smart enough to wash whites and colors together.

The other day I diligently separated the clean clothes from the dirty and put 6 days worth in the laundry. Our washing machine has a couple dials but as far as I know they don't do anything. I put my clothes in, dropped "about that much" detergent in, and pressed the "clean my clothes" button which is labeled something else for marketing purposes. A couple days later I came to get my clothes out of the dryer and I noticed everything looked more like Easter than when I had last seen them. I checked those dials on the washer but there wasn't anything about Easter so it clearly wasn't anything I did. I dug into the clean clothes a little more and found one of my new t-shirts. Apparently it has it's first wash. It's a pretty nice color, imagine royal blue combined with turquoise and then splashed with florescent pastels. The shirt looks bright as ever! Unfortunately, my socks and white t-shirt joined the bright blue party as well. It's actually not a bad color, and I'm going to stick it out. It's news to me that no one fixed the whole color bleed washing problem. I guess science was more concerned with crashing billion dollar robots into mars :( Live and learn, live and learn.

Winter

I posted this years ago on my MYSPACE blog, those were the days. I love Calvin and Hobbes, it's worth re-posting. Enjoy the laugh! Sorry some of the text is really small... I blame blogger for only allowing pictures to be 400 px wide.

The Original Snow Goon must be making his OWN Snow Goons. I'll bet he's making an army! In a few days, he could build a hundred snow goons! If each of THEM built a ANOTHER hundred, and then THOSE all built a hundred MORE, why... that would be pretty cool, if they weren't out to kill me.

I'm looking for something that can deliver a 50-pound payload of snow
on a small feminine target. Can you suggest something? Hello...?

--- Calvin

Calvin: This is going to be the biggest snowman ever built! People will come from miles to see our gigantic snowman!
Hobbes: This won't go any more. It's too big to push.
Calvin: OK, leave it here.
Hobbes: I'm exhausted!
Calvin: Well we can't stop now! We need nine more of these!
Hobbes: NINE MORE?!
Calvin: Sure! This is just one of his toes!

Snow, Snow! High and Low! Wherever we go! Let it blow! To and fro! H-DE-HO! Snow! Snow! Snow!

Calvin: It snowed last night! Turn on the radio! Maybe they closed school. Maybe the school buses froze up! Maybe the principal can't get out of his driveway!
Mum: Get dressed, Calvin. It only snowed an inch.
Calvin: Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.

"Snowgoons on the horizon... Hobbes, load the CALVINATOR!"

I should be doing my homework now. But the way I look at it, playing in the snow is a lot more important. Out here I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life.
Such as?
Procrastination and rationalization.

Calvin: Dad, if you threw a snowball at someone, but deliberately missed, would that be "bad"?
Dad: Well, I suppose that would be provoking, so yes, it would be a little bad.
Calvin: As bad as if you'd hit the person?
Dad: No, not that bad, but worse than if you hadn't thrown it at all.
Calvin: Suppose you just grazed the person. How bad would that be? Say maybe you knocked off his hat and his glasses or something.
Dad: That would mean instant death.

ANY dumb kid can build a snowman, but it takes a genius like me to create ART.

Note to Google maps

The 35W bridge is fixed.

Stats

Conclusions:
-Touching large body of water (gulf of Mexico doesn't count, it's not American) makes you blue
-States with the prefix "south" (even if they're in the north) are red
-States that used to have an underground railroad (not a subway) are red
-States that have a subway (not an underground railroad) are blue
-States that held the RNC and DNC (they paid more attention) are blue
-States just south of RNC and DNC states are blue too (it trickled down)
-States with the prefix "new" (sorry Old Mexico and Old Hampshire) are blue

Re: Christmas this year

Santa's Workshop,
P.O. Box 56099
The North Pole

October 27, 2008

Dear Parent:

You're receiving this letter because our records show you have one or more children on our "nice" list. We haven't had to write a letter like this in quite some time - and believe me when I say it gives me no cheer - but it's important that you and your children's perceived expectations match the reality of what will happen Christmas morning.

As you're surely aware the US economy has been rough lately. A small portion of The North Pole (TNP on the NYSE) is publicly held and has dropped by 50% since August. While stock is only a small portion of the totally TNP economy, we are very dependent on Greenland the Nunavut territory of Canada's economies. Shipping, climate change, and the cost of plastics have increased costs. Surprisingly, even the relatively small price jump in clear tape has caused massive overhead. Imagine how much tape it takes to wrap 378M presents. Along with rising costs, roughly 86M Chinese children have stopped celebrating Ta Chiu and instead will be celebrating a western Christmas this year. While nothing makes us happier than new children believing in Santa, a 20% increase in demand has put huge strains on Santa's workshop.

We don't mention all this to scare you - Christmas has never been canceled and it never will be. We do, however, mention it so you can be aware of a few things:

1) Your child may receive fewer presents Christmas morning. Last year some children received one gift and some received two or three. This year every child will receive at least one gift but some who received two or three will find one less under the tree. This was not an easy decision to come to, but it's important that every child receives at least one gift.

2) The "naughty" list has increased by 3%. We have always been pretty liberal in adding naughty kids to the nice list. This year will be different. Truly naughty kids will find a lump of coal under their tree. If one or more of your children are on the naughty list you will receive a separate letter with more information. Remember: He sees you when you're sleeping. So be good for goodness sake.

3) When preparing a Christmas list please steer your children away from plastic based toys. This is not a hard rule but a courtesy. Plastic toys cost far more to produce so you'll be doing us a favor. Wooden toys would be much better. Also, last year there was a confusion and we accidentally made 140,000 extra basketballs, asking for a basketball would be good. Basketballs can also be used to make Kangaroo dolls if anyone is interested in that.

Again this is not to scare you but just to make you aware of these changes ahead of time so Christmas morning isn't a surprise or let down. This will also help you prepare your Christmas list accordingly. Our hope is to still have a joyful and thankful Christmas morning despite these hard times, but we need your help.

Ho Ho Ho,

Santa

RTRNR