Category: Personal

Ace of Spaces thinks people who are sick should stay the hell home.  I tend to agree, but I’m being a hypocrite today saying that.  I feel like dirt, yet I’m still at work.  Granted, no way in hell I’d come to work with the flu, but I shouldn’t really even come in with a cold, and risk making other people sick and miserable.

The problem is, I am a hoarder.   Company policy is that we get six days of sick time a year, but we get to deposit unused time into a “sick bank”.  Given that a cold will last up to a week, I can’t really afford to take the time off and still have anything left over should I get the flu, and the flu is particularly bad this year.  My instinct is to hoard sick days for a serious illness, rather than the sniffly coughy kinds of illness.

Wise companies will encourage or force sick employees to stay home, so as not to contaminate a company’s entire labor pool, but most HR people, who make these policies, tend to enjoy putting the cart before the horse.  If you create policies that discourage people from taking sick days, you can’t be surprised when people show up sick, and the plague spreads through the company like wildfire.  I think for most HR types, it’s more of a priority to prevent employees from treating sick time like vacation.  Good employees won’t do that (at least not much), but human resources departments will seldom want to blame bad hiring and bad performance management practices, which are hard to fix, when you can appear to fix the problem with a few simple policy changes.  Giving the appearance of action is a pretty fundamental drive for lazy people who want to look good for others who won’t bother to look all that closely.

Bitter and I hadn’t much to do today.  I’m feeling lousy because of the cold I brought back from the camping trip.  We watched the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.  It’s a great movie, until you realize that you can’t get that damned song Pennsylvania Polka out of your head.  Yes, yes, click the link!  Get it stuck in your head too, and sing along:

Strike up the music the band has begun
The Pennsylvania Polka
Pick out your partner and join in the fun
The Pennsylvania Polka
It started in Scranton. It’s now number one
It’s bound to entertain ya
Everybody has a mania to do the polka from Pennsylvania

While they’re dancing
Everybody’s cares are quickly gone
Sweet romancing
This goes on and on until the dawn.
They’re so carefree
Gay with laughter, happy as can be
They stop to have a beer
Then the crowd begins to cheer
They kiss and then they start to dance again.

Sing along now. You’ll hate me for weeks for this. But misery loves company.

The good thing about today is that both Bitter and I have off from work, so we get an extra day.   The bad news is, even if I didn’t have off from work today, I’d probably be taking off sick anyway, because the cold I came down with while camping made me toss and turn all night, so I feel like crud this morning.

Winter camping in Luzerne & Sullivan County, up in northern Pennsylvania, went well.  Didn’t freeze to death, despite temperatures in the teens.  Overheard at the small roadside restaurant we stopped at this morning: two guys were talking about guns and hunting, with another couple at the table next to us talking about how much Hillary Clinton sucks.  One town had a sign up as you entered town announcing the local sportsman’s club clay shoot the following week.  Yep, we’re not in Philly anymore Toto, and it’s nice.

Bitter and I will be doing our annual (well, I guess this makes two years in a row, so we can call it that) winter camping expedition in Northern Pennsylvania.  I’m told there’s eight inches of snow up there, and rising.  Sounds like a good time to me!

Needless to say, won’t be much posting over that time period.

Bitter won’t be around until very late tonight, so I am off the hook for this year, pretty much.  I am told we’ll be celebrating tonight at Silhouette by painting all the animals pink, which should make things interesting with the red dot sight on my pistol.

Dr. Helen tells us why women like expensive gifts:

I never understood the whole concept of a woman wanting jewelry from a man, especially diamonds, until I read the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. In the book, two evolutionary psychologists explain why people do what they do. Why are diamonds a girl’s best friend? The authors conclude that women have to discriminate between “dads” and “cads” among male suitors. In order to find the guy that will stay with her and help her with children, she looks for two qualities: “the ability to acquire and accumulate resources, and the willingness to invest them in her and her children.”

Now it should be noted that Bitter is much cooler than your average girlfriend, but that is not to say that she’s immune from female evolutionary programming!  So I guess Bitter’s primitive human female brain is telling her “He better be willing to buy guns for the kids.”  “No problem!” says I.

Bitter and I went on a tour of the home of my favorite founding father, James Madison.   Montpelier is currently undergoing a reconstruction to restore it back to its original state after having been dramatically altered by the DuPont family, who owned it for most of the 20th century.

Most of the house is under construction as it’s being restored.  It’s actually a pretty interesting process to see in progress.  Most of the rooms are stripped down to wood lathing, most of which they say is original, and held in place by nails from Thomas Jefferson’s nailery that operated at Monticello.  Interesting to think that lathing likely hasn’t been seen by people since Madison’s time, and won’t be seen again for generations once the reconstruction is finished.

I stood in Madison’s study, which is one of the completed rooms, where it’s quite likely he might have drafted some early versions of the second amendment, and yes, I was legally carrying my Glock.  It’s quite a relief to me that none of the founding father president’s estates, except for John Adams’ are zones where the second amendment does not apply.  We visited Madison’s grave site, and despite our best efforts, we did not hear the sounds of any spinning, but it was rather windy.

I’m looking forward to returning there in the future, when the reconstruction is complete, and the home is restored to its former glory.

Sorry for the lack of posting.  Busy busy night.  Had to leave work at 3:30.  Woke up this morning with a sore back.  Today while working on some computer equipment, I bent down to pick something up and ended up with the knot from hell in my back.  It was bad enough I couldn’t really stand to sit.  I went home and got a hot pack on it, popped some ibuprofen, and I could function again.  Went to Pistol People to pick up Bitter’s present.  Came home, wrapped it, then went to Silhouette.  Got the chicken pin.  Shot lousy on rifle because my back is still kind of stiff.  Switched to pistol.  Got a 17 animals out of 40 tonight, which sucks compared to the guys who have been doing this for years, but hey, the animals are about the size of a 3×5 card cut into various animal shapes as 25 yards.  My groups with pistol at that distance are about six inches across, so I’ll take 17.  My goal is to be able to consistently break 20 with pistol.   To do that, I need to work on my trigger pull big time.

The Year You Were Born

Gerald Ford becomes president of the USHank Aaron hits his 715th home run to beat Babe Ruth’s record Impeachment hearings are opened against President Nixon by the House Judiciary Committee President Nixon resigns President Gerald Ford issues an unconditional pardon to ex-President Nixon for all federal crimes Muhammad Ali knocks out George Foreman in the eighth round to regain the heavyweight crown in Zaire Heiress Patty Hearst is kidnapped by and eventually joins the Symbionese Liberation Army Dungeons & Dragons officially released People magazine is published for the first time Kate Moss, Alyson Hannigan, Penelope Cruz, Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ryan Seacrest are born Oakland Athletics win the World Series Miami Dolphins win Superbowl VIII Philadelphia Flyers win the Stanley Cup Blazing Saddles is the top grossing film All the President’s Men by Bernstein and Woodward is published “Killing Me Softly With His Song” wins Grammy for song of the year

What Happened the Year You Were Born?

I’m not going to put the year, since it’s depressing.  But hey, at least I’m not as old as SayUncle.

I have occasional problems with RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury).  This one I get from my habit of sleeping with my left arm under the pillow and over my head.  I quite often wake up with a numb arm, or a numb pinky and ring fingers.  Then to add insult to injury, I spend all day resting my elbow on my armrests.

The end result is entrapment of the ulnar nerve at the elbow (cubital tunnel), causing my fingers to tingle a bit if I flex my elbow a bit too much, or bump the funny bone even slightly.  In a sitting position with arms extended or slightly bent, I’m fine, but I can feel the fingers tingling if I work the elbow too much.

For the next few days, I’ll have to splint my arm at night so I can’t end up in that position, and lay off overusing and abusing my elbow at work.  When I was younger, I used to get away with all this, but it seems getting old sucks.