Monday, March 28, 2011

The real problem

I've cut way back on my drinking, and you should never blog sober.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

It's OK Now - I'm Here

As I age, I get more philosophical. I believe this is something called "wisdom." I never really played that much Dungeons and Dragons, but with all this Wisdom, I think I should be learning some spells presently. After all these years gaining wisdom, you know what I've figured out?

The biggest inconvenience of being married is having a wife.

Especially if, like me, you have a wife who considers you some kind of superhero Mr. Fix-it. And a wife who is completely unfazed about volunteering you to help all kinds of other wives' husbands.

--

On an unrelated note, today I held my first clinic on how to build a Pinewood Derby racer for three other boys in MaxieC's Tiger Cub pack. Now, you might be asking yourself:
You: "Self, now why would CherkyB being holding a clinic on how to make a Pinewood Derby Racer? He's never made one before. He's gotten through the first two steps of the 8 or 9 required to make a racer, and he's never even read the direction book all the way to the end. It seems odd."
Now, the fact that you are sitting there asking yourself that (and slowly forming the words with your mouth as you think) is a pretty good indication that you are not my wife. No, when my wife attends a pack function and hears the other moms kvetching about how their husbands don't know how to make a pinewood derby car and may, in fact, not even own any tools, well, her thought go more like this:
The Mrs. "Self, my husband is very busy, but being that he is some kind of a god, he always has time to help out others, even on things he doesn't know anything about. He's a sooper-genius, and he can figure it out. I'll just volunteer him, and then I'll paint him into a corner so that he can't back out of the task without looking like a total ass. That's worked for 25 years. If he really didn't like it, he would have left me by now."

The Mrs. [to others]: "My husband can teach your husbands what to do tomorrow. I'll ask him what time when he gets home tonight, and I'll email it to you."
Later.
The Mrs.: "Remember how when you opened the pinewood derby box, you didn't know what to do cuz it was just a block of wood?"

Me, CherkyB: "Yeah."

The Mrs.: "Well, a lot of the other dads are having the same problem. I told them they could come over tomorrow morning, and you could teach them. You think about 9am?"

Me, CherkyB: "...Uhhhh...What?"

The Mrs.: "Should they all come over at 9 o'clock in the morning tomorrow?"

Me, CherkyB: "I'm not even out of bed at 9:00 on a Saturday. What's going on? Who's coming over?"

The Mrs. "OK, I'll tell the 10:00."

Me, CherkyB: "10:00 for what?"

The Mrs.: "For some of the other scouts to come over for you to show them how to build pinewood derby cars."

Me, CherkyB: "But I don't know how to build a pinewood derby car. I just bought a book at Michaels, and I'm following the instructions. Can't they just buy the same book?"

The Mrs.: "A lot of them don't even have tools."

Me, CherkyB: "Yeah, but I don't even know what I'm doing. And I'm supposed to spend all day helping MaxieC and HannahC work on their cars."

The Mrs.: "I already told them you'd do it. I suppose I could sent them an email saying that you don't want to help and you don't care about their kids and the pack cuz you're just too busy to help at all. But they'll think you're a dick."

Me, CherkyB: "[sigh]"

The Mrs.: "I could tell them how I forgot how busy you are. But their wives were so counting on your help. They'll be kind of upset with me, but that's OK because I don't really need any more friends, so if nobody in the cub scout pack likes me, I'll still be OK. It'll just make going to pack meetings a lot more uncomfortable."

Me, CherkyB: "OK . 10 o'clock."
We spent about 4 hours this morning getting them to the point where they could paint the racers and attach the wheels on their own. We cut, sanded, and added ballast to the bodies, and we polished the wheels and axles. It was a zoo. Four 7-yr-old boys running around getting into everything other than making their derby cars. But one of the dads bought us pizza and another ran out to Sportsmans Warehouse to load up on Pepper Jigs when we ran out.

--

My new holster came last week (finally - almost 5 weeks). It's fan-f-ing-tastic. Here's a picture of it:


Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Helen Keller

A few moments ago, I was thinking this exact phrase to myself:
"It's OK to drown olives, cuz they can't cry for help."
I'm not going to try to explain to you all the events that chained together to end up in that one particular thought. You're reasonably bright, so you'll eventually make something up that your mind is comfortable with and latch onto it with the zeal of a religious fervor.



But it did get me to wondering.

Enough about you, though.

I'm still battling with the cable company who steadfastly refuses to try to diagnose the problem with my bandwidth, though it's getting harder and harder to find a tech support person who is willing to try to pin the problem on my modem (well, their modem that they supply with the service). The fact that I can always get the advertised bandwidth to their local server, but that the bandwidth I get to any other server in the country varies by time of day and tops out at half of the advertised BW at prime time, but is perfect from 1am to 9am is awfully suspicious of an upstream problem in the line feeding their local server. Only the dumbest of tech support people could possibly deny that. Instead, I'm getting, "we'll monitor the situation and call you back," and on the callback all they ever say is, "we can't find anything wrong with your modem."

Of course not. We've already eliminated my modem from contention.

The guy today really thought he was on to something. Maybe, he posited, I was using a VPN. I swear they don't read the tickets at all.

They are all very seriously polite, though. And they speak English perfectly. This isn't some off-shore support operation.

--

My foot still hurts. My Dr. Scholls custom-fit orthodics inserts have managed now to also make my shins hurt. Possibly my foot hurts slightly less, so maybe we've accomplished lowering the peak magnitude of the pain by spreading it out over a wider area. I'm not convinced that's an improvement, though.

This is perhaps just what it's like to get older. My dad is double my age. At the rate I'm declining, I can't imagine I'll make it that long. I try to convince myself that I'm just approaching death asymptotically, and that once I make it around the knee of the curve, it'll be a smooth, long glide down until life becomes a rounding error and, poof, it's gone.

But I have a hard time believing myself given that I just make stuff up.

I should probably exercise more.

--

Max and Hannah have lost TV privileges for the rest of the week. I don't really know why, as it happened while I was at work. When I asked The Mrs., she said something to the effect of, "they're a couple of spoiled little shits who never do what they're told," though I've cleaned that up a bit given this is a family blog and all. The end result of this is that MaxieC has become a lot more annoying, given how bored he is.

I have to make paper airplanes with him now.