Tag: Life

  • ODDS and ENDS: Stressful, Blue to White, and I Gotta Run

    ODDS and ENDS: Stressful, Blue to White, and I Gotta Run

    (I will sing, sing my song…)

    Man in blue tracksuit frantically running out of the Sakura Heights apartment building door.
    Word Press’ AI creates some awful images, huh?

    You know the one thing in my life that I had no idea would be stressful; Planning a kid’s birthday party. I thought planning our wedding was bad. I had no idea that birthday parties for 10 ten year old girls causes me to lose sleep at night. I wake up in a cold sweat scared that I have forgotten some detail. My stomach churns at the idea a kid will come to the party and not have a good time, or will be excluded for whatever stupid reason, and then it is my responsibility to make sure EVERYONE HAS A GOOD TIME! Seriously, there should be a list for new parents of all the shit that will stress you out that you have no idea on God-s Green Earth are stressful. Making memories here…

    So, it seems my default colors right now is white and blue. I say all of this because as I start to “Spring Clean” and de-clutter my closet, I’m tossing shirts which are old, and have holes in them. What I am left with is an amazing spectrum of blue to white, all in an Oxford style. I have written a couple of times, how in my middle age period, I have taken on a Classic American/Oxford/New England/Ivy League look. It feels comfortable, defined, and at the same time casual on me. The draw back here is that I seem to have boxed myself in color wise. I do have some Nantucket Red pants, but really, I seem to have dropped the ball on having a splash of color in my life.

    Ah… It’s almost 11am, and I need to run to the grocery store. It’s a busy day and I have a lot to do.

  • Planning Home Projects

    General Update – The car got fixed, you know, from yesterday. It was the engine thermostat that needed to be replaced. Cost over $1,200 to get it fixed. But the car is back, and all is well in the Universe.

    The other thing that happened yesterday was that the air conditioner that we ordered arrived a day early. See, this winter, we got rid of the a/c unit that was in the kid’s room – it was over six years old, and had seen better days. The plan here is to move the unit in the livingroom (6,000 btu) into the kids room, and replace it with a larger and more powerful (8,000 btu) unit. 6k btu might be overkill in the kid’s room, but it just wasn’t cutting it in the livingroom. (Also, the end of March is a great time to buy an a/c as they are all on sale, to move out last year’s inventory for the new in prep for Summer.) BUT, before all of this installing can happen in both rooms, we need to repaint the windows and trim, so everything will be matching, and the apartment looks a little more unified.

    I say all of this because, as I was hauling the unbelievable heavy a/c unit up three flights of stairs, I was excited for all of the home improvement projects we have. You know of the a/c and window project. Then there is redoing our “mudroom” area by the front door, and replacing the livingroom ceiling fan. There is the touchup painting in our bedroom, and hopefully coming up with a better closet situation. The biggest project of them all is working on the kid’s room. It reflects the interests of an eight-year-old, and not the aspirations of a soon to be teenager. Not sure how to accomplish that, nor what budget for it will be, but I know that it’s important to the kid, so it’s important to me.

    I say all of this because what it really means is that we are coming out of Winter. We can open the windows again, and let the breeze blow through. There is a wonderful peace and tranquility that comes from this time of year. It is fleeting though. Soon, it will be too hot and steamy in the City, and the windows will close up and the a/c’s will roar on. If it’s a good year, we’ll have a comfortable Spring until early June. If it’s a bad year, we’ll be locking up in May.

  • Check Engine Light: The Beginning of the End

    I don’t mind owning a car, and I’m okay with owning a car in the City, but if I had my choice, I would not own a car. I do enjoy how the car allows me to feel free in the sense that I can leave NYC whenever I want, and I would be lying if having a car hasn’t made some tasks/chores a whole lot easier.

    My problem is that I feel like a car is a ticking time bomb, and at any moment, it is going to blow up in my face. What that means is that a car is just a machine, and the more you use a machine, the likelihood of it breaking down increases, and it will break down. That’s just a fact. So, to me, owning a car is just a waiting game until that breakdown happens. Doesn’t matter how well one can take care of the car; it will break down.

    I have been very good with our car. I get the oil changed regularly, go in for a yearly tune up, replace the tires, clean it often and not to brag, I have gotten a little handy with doing some basic maintenance on the car myself. I am proud of my ability to make sure that this car runs well, and hopefully for a very long time.

    But that ticking is never far from the back of my head.

    And on Friday, the “Check Engine” light came on.

    Tick Tick Tick…

    I didn’t fart around, and immediately schedule to have to car checked out today, Monday morning. Driving the car over to the shop, I couldn’t hear anything wrong with the engine; no gurgles, hiccups, chokes, coughs, or anything. She was purring like she always has. Even when I dropped the car off and the tech was asking me questions, he seemed a bit surprised that I hadn’t heard or felt anything. “Let’s check it out to be safe,” he said.

    Maybe, hopefully, the light means nothing. My dad had a Volkswagen Rabbit who’s check engine light came on, and when he took it in, they couldn’t find anything, but the light wouldn’t shut off. So, my dad just put a piece of electrical tape over the light; problem solved.

    I could get that lucky, too, right? Just a bug, no big deal.

    Tick Tick Tick…

  • Earworm Wednesday: It’s That Song From That Cartoon!

    I will admit that “Me and My Arrow” by Harry Nilsson re-entered my life this week due to a Spotify generated playlist, not from my own music knowledge. And if you don’t know, this song is part of a cartoon that Nilsson created and wrote in 1970 called The Point! I remember seeing it on cable, sometime in the 80’s, and what stuck with me about the show was the wise man, or dude, who tells the hero that, “not having a point, is a point.” That little piece of philosophical logic has stuck with me my whole life.

    As to the song, “Me and My Arrow,” when I heard it this week, it struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I had to look it up, and I think where I truly remember it from is an episode of The Simpsons that used it. But when I read it was from the cartoon The Point!, then it all came back to me. Just a little gem of my childhood. And I had no idea that the great Harry Nilsson was responsible for it all.

    Oh, and what just stuck in my head is the whole thing. I’ve been humming it all week.

  • Where Did That Come From? Aliens?

    I got a little tiny cut on the knuckle of my left ring finger, right above my wedding ring. It is a tiny little cut, barely there, but there enough to let me know that there is a tiny little cut on that finger. The perplexing part of this injury is that I have no idea how I received it. I just know that when I was walking home from parking the car this morning, I felt it on my hand.

    I didn’t come in contact with anything sharp as I completed the task of moving the car. Yet I know that I didn’t have it when I left the apartment, or at least I know that I wasn’t being annoyed by a tiny cut when I left home.

    This isn’t the first time of late that I have discovered some sort of injury on my body that I have no idea where it came from. Most of the time, I chock it up to playing around with the kid. I had a small bruise on my arm once that was a total mystery. A little scrap on my knee I discovered over the winter – when I had been wearing pants every day.

    Am I getting to the age when I forget things, or becoming so numb that I just don’t notice when something hits me?

    Even though this situation is nothing like the example I am about to give, but what this reminds me of is people being abducted by aliens, and the weird cut and bumps they discover after their encounters. Maybe that’s what’s happening to me?

    Or, what if I am being abducted by aliens, and I’m losing time in all, but what if the aliens are really clumsy with people? Like they have trouble keeping humans walking in a straight line, and the people walk into doors or walls? Or the aliens drop instruments on people. Not all the time, but accidents are known to happen, right?

    And then, what if these aliens got written warnings and bad performance reviews, and they lost their jobs abducting and probing people because of their sloppy work ethic?

    Then there is some alien sitting in a bar back on his home planet, getting drunk and bitching to his friend how his boss was a total dick, and he was set up to fail because his boss never offered any help or guidance, even when he asked for it. Then that alien goes on to tell his friend that his boss is totally screwed now because he was the one that kept the whole abducting and probing operation working, and it’s going to take them months to get everything back on track because that alien was the one who knew how everything worked.

    But then the alien’s friend tells him that the abducting/probing job wasn’t that great of a job anyway. They order another round, and talk about starting their own abducting/probing company if only they could get the money together.

    Or maybe I cut my finger on a sharp key on my key chain when I reached into my pocket.

    Maybe.