Monday, November 30, 2015

the NFL should put Monday Night Football out of its misery

It's time for Monday Night Football to go. While it served a purpose for many decades, its time has come to pass. MNF is like an over the hill Brett Favre trying to make it to the Super Bowl one last time: one part embarrassing, one part sad.

Monday Night football was once the only place to ease your football cravings after Sunday's games.
MNF was the only game in town, a weekly larger-than-life event which helped turned football into what it is today. Back then, with most television viewers only having three basic networks, MNF was a dominant force, even if, for a while, it would finish around No. 18 in the rankings and lose its time slot to sitcoms such as One Day at a Time.
Snoozer games Once upon a time, MNF got the best games. Usually starting with the Super Bowl match up from the previous years and working its way through divisional rivalries and potential play-off match ups. Now they get third-rate games. Obviously the games are set based on the schedule and last year's results but the 2-7 Baltimore versus the 2-8 Browns*? Come on. They don't even show that game in the sports bars in Hell.

 * I suppose they could each have three wins when they actually met on November 30th.

 Too late Even if it is an exciting shootout or dramatic nail biter, the games start so late that most of the show demographic cannot really stay up late to watch the end, especially on those double header season openers.

Sunday and Thursday night Schedule spread out too far Before Thursday Night Football, the most advantage a team would have was having a bye week before their Monday night appearance. Now it is theoretically possible that, in order to meet the required schedule of two against your division, etc. a team will play Thursday night, have a bye and then appear on MNF (thus having a longer span between games) against a team that played the previous Thursday (thus having a much shorter span between games).

 Other First World concerns Nothing like having to wait until the end of the MNF so that you can officially be declared the winner of your fantasy football pool, because you never know, that kicker might have scored a couple of touchdowns on blown plays. Worse yet, you don't get to do any tweaking to your line up until Tuesday, which only gives you essentially three days until TNF. (I know this is a really weak point but I'm throwing it in here anyway). In conclusions, I think we need to move football back to a weekend only thing with the weekend beginning on Thursday night. Leave Monday for sitcoms, reality shows and documentaries like God intended.

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Sunday, November 29, 2015

First Day of Advent

Other than Moose and Squirrel's baptism a couple months ago, and the occasional wedding, I haven't gone to church in quite a while.  The reason isn't logical or anything but it is what it is.  I stopped going when I discovered that certain Catholics I thought were friends could treat me like crap and our mutual friends barely batted an eyelash let alone declared neutrality but my trespasses were met with a much more disproportionate level of ire. 

If anyone missed the subtle nuances of that, it's as if I hit their bumper parallel parking and our mutual friends wants me arrested but the other person totals my car in a hit & run and almost killed me and those same mutual friends are like "I don't want to get involved.

Still, among my favorite masses are the ones that fall on Advent.  There's just something about a countdown to the Winter Solstice and the day with the least amount of daylight that somehow seems downright spiritual. 

Make a vow when Solstice comes:
To find the Light in everyone

 I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Looking ahead on posts

My goal for this blog was 10 posts a month for 2015.  At the rate I'm going I'm gonna need to write 20 more posts to hit that by Dec 31st.  Not unachievable but given how it's taken me until now to publish 100 posts, there is a better chance I'll fall just short.  Which is fine.

The goal was just a target not a destination.  I'm mostly trying to decide what to do with this space, given that I have more rewards and viability at the commercial space.  This one is good for more private, personal thinky-thoughts and happenings in my life but the challenge is finding time to write here, there and deal with my day job too.  I have almost a dozen drafted posts that I cannot publish for various reasons at the moment but if I did, I would easily hit the target and 2015 would win the most posts published award.

Just before putting away the deck furniture


Honestly, with as little free time as I have these days I would rather use it writing that Great America Novel or some shorter stories to get my author on.   Any semblance of energy usually gets spent by days end so I need to do my writing in the am. 


Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Cleaning out my closet of past ghosts

Last summer I had the opportunity to bring a carload of boxes from my mom's house to mine. I wrote up a post about what was in those boxes on the ChicagoNow blog.  This past summer I was able to go through it a little more thoroughly and I whittled down the boxes to a more manageable size.

I feel I did a pretty good job of clearing the clutter on this second pass. This stuff followed me around because it was significant twenty years ago but has little relevance now.  I suppose if I had done this exercise in 2008 when I was first on Facebook,  I might have used some of these notes to look up people.  But I have no desire to really do so today. 

You'll do better in life than we ever will for reasons we are too young to grasp right now.
In particular, I have no desire to interact with anyone I went to grade school or junior high.  Sure, I'm Facebook friends with some of the people from the old neighborhood, but only the handful that were decent and nice to me.  Those other people were collectively not very nice to me.  It might have been culture (I'm white, they were Hispanic), it might have been economic (I was poor, they were poorer), it might have just been that I was a nerdy odd-ball and they were presumable cool or at least mainstream. 


Whatever it was, I could not care less if most of them are dead right now. 

Looking through the autograph book the recurring theme seems to be hey you are a smart but goofy kid who even the teachers don't like enough to protect you from us. 


Still I did see some things today that I didn't notice back then.  Though inappropriate, I probably invited more of the abuse than I realized.  Something I definitely have to watch out for to protect Moose & Squirrel better than anyone ever tried to protect me.


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Monday, November 23, 2015

A neighborly thing to do

On Friday I racked up some leaves around the house and in the alley. I realized that source of all the leaves that end up in my garage com from this pile.


So I just went ahead and bagged them for him



Didn't take long at all.  Of course the next day my work was covered in snow but so what.

Monday, November 16, 2015

Downtown Kathmandu today

I'm downtown today for some personal business so while I have some time to kill I thought I test the mobile blocker app. 




It's hard to type from an iPhone so I'm using the voice feature I suspect going to go back and edit this a lot but I'm the type posting from the app to see how good the quality is

Update:  unfortunately it posts the photo in Actual Size which bleeds outside the margins of the post. 

Thursday, November 12, 2015

the iPad adds 5 pounds


Not unexpectedly, my weight has increased this year.  Less running, more eating not-the-healthiest
foods and partaking of adult beverages at my age equals weight increase.  At a high point the scale read 219 lbs.  I've managed to get back to around 210 with a small resurgence of my running.  Now that we are about six weeks away from winter, I don't expect to lose any more weight because it seems the body is designed to store fat for winter.

I haven't done as much posting here as I'd like.  I work from home on Fridays and that is when I do the bulk of my writing.  However over the summer, my mom has been hanging around and it is hard for me to concentrate and be creative when she is watching TV 10 feet away.  She often hangs out until 9 or 10 which burns my morning and then I have other things to do like my day job.

Speaking of which, my day job is going away.  We got the news the last week of June at the office that we had been expecting for some time now.   My company TopFive has discovered that it is an accounting firm, not an IT firm and as such, it has decided to explore Outsourcing the IT department.  We are of course using the current buzz word "Managed Services" but it is really the same thing.

I don't really want to work for a law firm again but if I have to, knowing what I know about the expectations, I would demand top dollar.   In early September I basically talked my way out of a potential job because my salary requirements are too high.

I saw a job I was interested in several weeks ago and was going to tweak my resume to match it.  Before I got a chance, the listing was removed.  So then I mind-fucked myself by apply for a few jobs before tweaking my resume at all, so I probably screwed the pooch on those as well.

Every 8 years or so, I go through a Sheldon Crisis. In 1999, I lost my job, broke my toe, and was mugged within a two week period of what was already a shitty year.  In 2007, I was on the hot seat at the No-Name Software Company and had to get out as quickly as possible for my own sanity.  I suppose 2009 was a mini-Sheldon Crisis when Fiance 1.0 moved out while I was in St Louis, though the 2nd half of that year ended well.









Friday, November 6, 2015

Friday Photo: Entitled Neighbor of the Week

This neighbor is not exactly endearing himself to the tenants of our block.  he spent last summer
building his garage in his spare time.  He worked on it here and there in the evenings presumably when he got home from his paying day job.  Which means instead of everyone suffering through the noise of pounding hammers and blocked alleyways for a short, consecutive set of days he spread the annoyance throughout the summer.  There is nothing like trying to enjoy a glass of wine on your deck while someone pounds a hammer 100 yards away.

i cannot fathom why he needs to place his van in this position.  Technically he's not blocking the alley but it does require a little careful manevering if you have a larger vehicle.  I suppose he could be loading and unloading or even by having the van act as a door it makes it harder from someone to snatch and grab.  He's only 50 yards away from the cross street which has plenty of parking so why not put the van there while working on the garage?

I think I'm only bitching because many a time last summer his van was out much further and did block the alley.  And also the noise pollution.