Gwool's Open Salon Blog

Th-th-th-that's All Folks!

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 22:01:42 -0500

Bugs is in the public domain

Thank you and good bye.

Those who care can PM, and I will tell you where I am.

WTF: It's Snow People! Lose the 24/7 News Coverage!

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:01:13 -0500

I am sorry, but can the news cycle cover something other than snowstorms? Sweet Jesus. We live in New England, OK? It comes with the territory. This isn’t the Carolinas where a couple inches grinds things to a halt, and the helicopters can get footage worthy of America’s Funniest Home Videos of southern drivers sliding into parked cars on the street like the end game scenes from drunken car chases.

The recently retired local police chief had a discussion with me shortly before a first snowfall of a couple inches years ago. He told me he was ordering in all available officers. Being the head of the finance committee at the time, I looked at him like he was crazy.

He, of course, looked at me like I was the crazy person and simply said, “Gwool think. I will have six month’s worth of new drivers on the road racing to get to school. What do you think is going to happen? The brick parsonage on the corner gets hit every year. Every year.”

He was right. I was wrong. (And I know a kid who nailed the parsonage going to school.) Wasn’t the first time that was the case with Al, and it wasn’t the last. Great man, and a great cop.

But this was different. This storm had schools cancelling 24 hours before it hit, and some have delayed schools two hours tomorrow morning. No first time drivers out on the streets, if their parents have any brains.

As a little safety tip, let me impart this one on you, dear reader. If you have young drivers, get them out in an unplowed parking lot and let them slide around and skid. Teach them.

My mother did it with me around 1 a.m. in the morning. One of her better parenting moves, although the screening process was not terribly exhausting, but you have to give the old girl credit where credit is due.

It was a positive take away, retailored to my personal predilictions.

In my instance, I happen to live on a lake that has an oval for ice car races. I took my boys out one night under the influence and had them racing my F-150 around the oval in two wheel drive skidding it into snow banks and having a grand old time. I let them do it THEIR way the first few times and fail miserably while I laughed. I then asked if they would do it my way and taught them.

Even the cop who put on the blues and thought he had an excuse to go into the station and get warm gave us a hall pass when I gave him the explanation. Didn’t even make us stop the training exercise before he left … or make me walk a line.

None of my boys has gone off the road as a result of weather.

Snapping tie rods after running over mail boxes? Well, that’s another story entirely.

But back to the point. SNOWSTORMS ARE NOT NEW NEWS IN NEW ENGLAND. Here you have a story of a four generation tradition, as my grandfather allowed my mother to drive his Model A grocery delivery trucks on the lake to learn, and to get his drunken French Canadian buddies back from their ice holes when they needed to go to the bathroom … when she was 12.

We know what to do. During the storm I worked from home like many others. I

Reviewed three different research documents firing emails, IMs, and PowerPoint documents into the ether.
Sat in on a vendor product announcement conducted by a company based in MA who had all execs working from home with the internet feed a little slow because all sorts of other people were working from home.
Had a conference call with six people kicking off a 12 week project.
Did some internet research.
Looked after my daughter.

My daughter did what she should do at the age of 12. She slept until 1 pm, went out and played in the snow building forts and having snowball fights, and then flaked out in her papasan chair sipping hot chocolate and IMing friends on Facebook.

During this time I could hear the Townhouse complex snow blower blasting away and the maintenance pickup truck doing the plowing. I giggled, thinking about the poor Jamaican guy on the business end of the snow blower figuring he was wishing he was back in Jamaica smoking a blunt with his toes in the hot white sand.

After dinner and after the storm subsided, I did what I always love doing. I went shopping with one of my children. No one goes out after a storm blows over. It’s great. Only thing close is timing Home Depot runs for the nights the staff does inventory. They flock to you. Only risk there happens to be needing something in an aisle roped off while these poor schmucks use lift trucks to count product. But if you work it right, they’ll jump the fence and go get it for you.

Tonight I had Wal-Mart floor people flocking around me like lounge lizards hovering around the tipsy girl at closing time. From there I went to Staples and had two tech support folks collaboratively advising me on what $29.00 laptop pillow to buy and on what $14.00 photo paper would work best with my laser printer. On a normal night I would not have been able to get their attention even if I lit my hair on fire and said I had a bomb wrapped around my stomach.

So done with a traditional “spoil your daughter day” expedition, I got daughter home and to bed and sought to flick mindlessly through the cable channels.

And all I got were breathless news promos about the storm. It’s done. Move on, people! Come up with some real news. If it were 100 degrees in New England this time of year, I just might be curious as to why. But snow? In New England? In January?

Come on.

Next up will be wonderment at the cold snap the Nor’easter weather pattern generates 9 times out of 10.

New Job? Let’s Do The Time Warp Again …

Mon, 3 Jan 2011 12:01:04 -0500

Rip Van Winkle Coming in Off the Bench
(Source: http://englishfor1a.blogspot.com/2008/04/rip-van-winkle.html)

Ronald Reagan ran the country the last time I started a job at a company I did not own. April 1986. The day before I managed to step off a beam in my attic, put my foot through a ceiling, and badly turn my ankle such that I showed up in my pinstripe suit with one black wingtip and an untied sneaker adorning my feet.

And therein lies but the first of the adjustments that has me feeling a little like Rip Van Winkle.

To Wit:

Wardrobe

What the hell do I wear?

Wardrobe decisions revolved around tie selection before. On went the black suit, black wing tips, and starched, white shirt. After that all that had to be decided was the tie. Red power ties held court, with a few yellow ones thrown in for good measure. I liked red, but also had an affinity for gray colored ones as well. Children, at the time, used to spit up on them, causing me great angst when having to jettison a silk necktie with baby formula stains.

Now? Dress pants and blazer? Tie or no tie? Jeans and open collared shirt? Dress pants and open collared shirt? Dress loafers? Casual loafers? You don’t want to be one level below office par, but you don’t want to be two levels above office par, either.

Time/Electronics

In 1986 there were no such things as cell phones, facebook, or twitter. Now you get to work 24/7 and have to watch what your write in your private life lest a client catch wind of it or a boss see something inopportune uttered about them ... however indirectly.

In the old days, you wandered the hall with red penned content to find the analysts. Now you IM the guy in the next office rather than get up to communicate.

Likewise, if you were speaking with someone, you had their undivided attention. Now their wireless PC has them checking email and monitoring other things while you try to talk to them.

Environment

Anita Hill had yet to enter the gender interactions lexicon back in 1986. I remember well those discussions in 1991 as I had many female staffers and male peers who had admonished me for having a staff so heavily laden with women given these men felt it made for bad office politics. The hearings did enable a lot of frank discussions and was eye opening. Practically a generation removed, it will be interesting to observe carefully in hopes of refraining from chewing on my insole inadvertently.

Age

In 1986 I was the up and comer who had a hard time being taken seriously by clients given a lack of “gray hair.” Now I will have a hard time getting peers and reports to take me seriously because I do have gray hair… and have to wear glasses.

And in technology, the utilization waves slosh back and forth across operating units. Wait long enough, they turn back, akin to wide lapels or narrow lapels on suits or hem lines on dresses and skirts. New names for old concepts.

Lunch

Back then I can and did eat anything. Now I have the metabolism of a cadaver and have to watch what I put into my mouth to forestall the inevitable transformation into a cadaver. Yogurt and fruit will be the order of the day rather than pizzas, subs, and bags of potato chips.

Maturity

I still lack it, believing in the credo that it is never too late to have a second childhood. Much more comfortable in my own skin now as opposed to 26 years ago, I imagine it will be far easier to handle what comes my way.

And with that, time to tee up one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite musicals…and dive into the PowerPoint decks I must red pen before officially starting on the job.

You gotta love Susan Sarandon ...

WTF? Emergency Preparedness Recipes Guy Style

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:12:31 -0500

When I read the open call notification before clicking on it, I immediately went back to my time managing two households in an ice storm that knocked power from one for 13 days and the other for 14 days. At the time I was also a selectman in a community that was the epicenter for the storm, and was therefore in daily conference calls with the Governor’s office while hearing from angry citizens.

That was the easy part. The hard part was also dealing with an ex wife whom I had recently left while trying to maintain that home from afar. That’s like a marine veterinarian cutting himself shaving and then trying to hop into the shark tank to give them some inoculations.

It might be for their own good, it might be your job, but Sweet Jesus what a price to pay.

So reading the open call turned my mind to things like generators rather than casseroles. How to wire pig tails to panel boxes so you can fire up a generator, turn off the main power feed, and run your basic household requirements such as refrigerators and heaters in the dead of winter. I thought of the need to fill bath tubs if you have well water. I thought of the need to have PCs and video game consoles if you have self absorbed teenagers.

I turned to the cycling of generator use to cut down on gas and keep pipes from freezing.

Food was not on my list.

So I had to think back on what “meals” I had during the 14 day period of walking through the Winter War Zone that was my internal and external life but two short years ago in the middle of an ice storm when such preparedness was critical.

I got nothing.

There was no guy equivalent of Martha Stewart dancing in my head when you were still concerned with tree limbs falling and potentially killing you as you tried clearing the debris around homes and in the roads to be able to navigate around the communities. To this day when I hear a branch crack, I immediately tense my body, look up, and get ready to run or dive. I suspect it will always stay with me.

Those mothers are not called "widow makers" for nothing.

I mean, when a 10 foot tree limb with a diameter the size of your upper thigh crashes next to you while you have a chain saw running so you don’t know it til the wind blows as it misses being a direct hit on your skull by less than six inches, you stop the chain saw and go inside to change your underwear. You’re not thinking of what can go with your fava beans and nice Chianti.

So while this is right up the alley of One_Irritating_Mother and IamSurlierThanABullMooseButWithoutTheSenseOfHumor to go toe-to-toe in their Bette Davis/Joan Crawford imitation from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I am all out of prizes that relate to food recipes from some smarmy Midwestern Gingham Living Magazine that would make Laura Ingalls puke on the set of Little House in the case of the former, nor do I have some heart-attack-in-cans concoction from the 1970s in the case of the latter.

I cannot even tell you what I ate during those two weeks. I was more concerned with freezing pipes, irate citizens, sufficiently fueled generators for elderly neighbors, and the continued secrecy of the community where I was a selectman that I did not live there anymore.

But here’s a few recollections:

Cans, and I don’t mean the film festival in France, either.

I ate Dinty Moore Beef Stew. I ate baked beans. I ate soup. I ate Chef Boy Ardee Ravioli. I ate undrained tuna so I could choke it down and fill myself up with a mercury/protein burst for long lasting energy. I think I might have even eaten some canned vegetables.

Key there, of course is power. The typical generator cannot take the draw of an oven, but it can handle a burner or a microwave fairly well if you keep the tunes down on your stereo. Thank heavens for iPods.
Freezer Food was Fair Game … and Fairly Gamey

The stuff was thawing, anyway, so I had to chow it down. I think I ate some Raspberries picked during the Good Bush Administration. (For you bomb tossing lefties who give no quarter, that would be HW Bush, to you.)

The freezer was an odd archeological dig of various major parties at the lake house. Four year old pig roast remnants tested and tossed in the garbage. Specific types of breads bought by specific, regular guests at the home likely from different New Years or Labor Day extravaganzas.

It wasn’t as bad as Elaine Benis in Seinfeld woofing down a piece of wedding cake from the Duke of Windor’s Wedding bought at Auction by neurotic boss J. Peterman, but you get the idea. Some of the stuff got left outside for the animals and was turned away. You know it’s tough when a family of skunks turns down your food offerings.
Trail Mix

That stuff is the WD40 or Duct Tape of food stuffs. It’s good for any time of the day. Fruit, nuts, and chocolate. What’s not to like? Protein, good carbs, and desert all in a fist. Been living on that stuff for 2 ½ years.
Cheese

Once again, you got your protein. Likewise it’ll keep you slowly regular, which is a good thing when water is at a premium, as it were.
Spam

I couldn’t fucking do it. I’d sooner eat one of IAmSurlyasShit’s 1970s Hazmat recipes while Agnes Moorehead as Endora gave me an erotic massage with ashes falling on me from the butt hanging out her mouth while singing Raffi tunes to me than choke down a piece of spam.

No Open Call submission, I am sure, is complete without a recipe card, so here’s mine.

Gwool’s Emergency Preparedness Pot Luck Casserole:

Recognize Power has gone out.
Flick enough switches to no effect to get it through your thick head.
Open door of abode and look outside.
Figure out you’re fucked.
Close door.
Scream.
Open Refrigerator.
Make mental checklist of what will spoil first and eat in order of expected shelf life.
Open Freezer.
Make same mental checklist.
Find phone book.
Hope you have an old fashioned phone not needing electricity.
Determine what restaurants have back up power at the least. Prioritize by those that can also deliver.
Dine as needed in sphincter tightening leisure while constantly running the mental checklists of what you have to do to forestall any further property damage to you and to those close to you.
Meditate after meal to calm oneself and digest the indigestible by chanting softly “Fuck off, Surly… Fuck off, Surly.”
Repeat as necessary until the power comes back on.

In loving memory of that ruddy, quick witted survivalist who would surely still be alive today had he not likely prepared one of those 1970s chemical fests plugged as nostalgia by that dietary Kevorkian, IamSurlyasShit .... although, had he had to run a chainsaw with a branch landing near him by surprise, he just might have cut off his schlossen.

Ba-dump-BUMP!

Source: WWW2.tbo.com

The Gift of Anonymous Gift Giving At Christmas

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:12:18 -0500

The husband had been speaking to his wife in a foreign language I guessed was from a Slavic country. He had a Nerf weapon in his hand and an animated look on his face. After the discussion, he put it back somewhat sorrowfully.

“Too young for such stuff?” I laughed, having spied the cheaper, pink doll kits and the lot that filled their cart.

The husband forced a smile, said nothing to me, and went back to talking to his wife in the foreign language.

The mother, too, was somber, dressed in an older pink and black plaid coat with a fake fur collar. The father was in a black leather jacket, faded jeans, and inexpensive, bulky black tie shoes.

I’d found the target.

It had been a rather miserable experience shopping in the mall for me. I could not get into it, as there's no intimate other to do it for.

Gift giving is big. A family pattern picked up from my father. The restraint on purchasing personal items when I was a child started in September, as Christmas was Dad’s shop-a-palooza. Afflicted with heart disease from the time I was 2, shopping was what my father and I did together. Indeed, after my father’s doctor told him to start walking, he would do it not out in the open roads, but on the traditional Main Street where our grandfather had been a fixture as Mayor and a local florist. I still recall the death march through every store at Christmastime where we were all known on a first name basis and the store clerks could tell us what had recently been purchased by other relatives to assist us in the process.

So I thought of my father and grandfather as I was having trouble getting excited about picking up gifts. I have always loved it, and it has always been a problem. Surprise gifts that at times would not be opened for a day or two by some until asked again by me to do so. Gifts rejected as too extravagant. Gifts handed over with the recipient grinning and groaning, “Do I have to open it now? In front of you?”

Giving or codependence? What is the issue here? Where’s the line? Is this a problem for me?

So all that swirling through my head simply had me leave the mall rather listless and unexcited.

So I decided to hit the local Toys R Us to snap out of it. I had always loved shopping for my three boys when they were young, and usually went once with their mother and then once alone to pick up more stuff.

The mall crawl in traffic unfortunately gave me time to reframe that into a downer. It was the only real time of year when budgeting contention switched sides in the toxic parenting game. I was then the one too extravagant as I would happily load up the cart with cheap crap that would add fuel to the Christmas fire as the three boys aimed matching nerve guns, disc guns, or potato guns at one another in over stimulated frenzies.

Or parachute Army men or plastic snow ball launchers would get tossed in the air outside as a respite inside from the din level.

Inside or outside, it mattered not. It was cheap party favor crap that added to the day and then was soon broken or misplaced.

It would be fun until such time as I brought the stuff home and caught hell for it, ruining the fun of it all. This mood worsened by triggering a horrific bike buying episode at this same store blogged about here, in January of this year.

So I was going into the scene of what had been many a miserable end of parental bickering and arguing around the holidays that had started out hopeful but ten minutes or so prior. And I was going in to try to recapture the fun of Christmas by picking up a gift for a hoot of a 3 year-old boy whose father just recently found out a growth he had removed was in fact a melanoma.

It was one tall order I gave myself to snap out of that funk as I walked dejectedly from the car to the store, stopping once and almost turning around and saying to hell with it.

Going in, though, I thought of a trip at Christmas with my then quite elderly grandfather to a fruit center to pick up the makings for his traditional fruit cup. At that point he taught me the lesson of random, anonymous giving blogged over two years ago here.

So going in, I had this on my mind and was looking for a target. Meeting the husband and wife in the Nerf Gun aisle triggered the decision to act on the impulse, and I bought a Toys R Us gift card after confirming it could be used immediately and would not be traceable back to me.

I then went back through the store to find them. They were over in another aisle now, with the wife carefully checking the cart and agonizing over what she was putting into the cart. No expensive Wii games; just the basic kid stuff and quite obviously trying to keep the acquisitions equitable.

The father was standing there rather forlornly looking from afar at the process his wife was undertaking. Watching the sacrifices in real time his wife had to make for their children given the limited funds.

I stopped near them and observed again. Eyed them a little to make sure my gut instinct was correct.

I took a step over to the husband and said as gently and as softly as possible, “You guys trying to get this all done on a tight budget?”

His head sagged as his body heaved, as if to scream “YES!”

His eyes said it all again when he looked up at me.

Before he had to face the humiliation of verbalizing any of this, I simply said somewhat apologetically “Here, it’s a gift card.”

His mouth opened as he gasped and his eyes went wide.

I quickly pulled my hand back from the card leaving it in the husband’s, looked away to maintain my composure, and slapped his shoulder quickly while adding “Merry Christmas.”

I strode quickly and deliberately away with my CAT Dozer under my arm and went back to the same clerk. I reconfirmed the couple could not trace the card back to me to find out my name, paid for my single toy with a huge smile on my face, and got the hell out of there before they could get a good look at me.

I walked to the car whistling "It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas", smiling, and with tears in my eyes utterly resolved to do this every year from now on.

For the first time all year, I am actually looking forward to putting on some Christmas music.

And here's Bing doing it proud ...