Tag Fun

Seasonal affective disorder

Michael 5 Comments

It was a sad weekend. Sad because it was time to put Rosemary to bed. Sadder because this year’s unusual weather patterns left us with an autumn devoid of autumnal hues and the annual romp through the country lanes with the top down trying to catch a falling leaf or two.

Last year’s fall foliage was positively neon, a culmination of ever more brilliant colors year over year for the past five or six years. This year…bleh. I blame it on little orange men. They’ve screwed up everything else in the world that was good.

But back to nature. It was not a good year all the way around for topless driving. The spring was too wet, the summer too hot, and the fall was too dull. A dull fall is the worsts way to end convertible season.

There’s only one thing that can be done. Not end the year yet.

It’s been more than several years since I had the opportunity to run a snowflake rally through the Christmas lights, as comforting, if not quite as comfortable, as a leafy lope through the mountains. As much as there is something indescribable in driving along the mountain roads nearing the same heights as the tree tops themselves as they give up their colorful leaves, it is even more difficult to describe the feeling of driving along inside a snow globe. Both or either must be experienced.

Of course, the problem is there is no guarantee that the holliday lights season will overlap the falling fluffy flakes season. Fortunately, with a couple quick connectors it will be no problem to wake Rosemary and prepare her for a quick midwinter excursion if the opportunity arises.

I suppose you will just have to stay tuned for updates as the seasons change. Wish me luck.

Band-Aids and Coffee

Michael 17 Comments

I visited my daughter yesterday and she greeted me with a small bandage around a finger and a series of them of the larger variety up her right arm.

“My! What happened to you?

“Just a regular morning. Seems my life being held together with Ban-Aids and coffee.”

Coffee is her pick me up and her sedative, her elixir of life. For as long as I remember, she’s always liked coffee. I was like that too. I never didn’t not like coffee. Coffee, tea, chocolate. Anything with caffeine although I don’t overly indulge. I can’t say that I have known anyone else who immediately took to the black gold of beverages. (I also immediately took to that other liquid black gold, Guinness, even though beer in general is not among my list of favorite beverages. Guinness has a sweetness to me, but that’s a story for a different post.)

Most “adult” beverages take some getting used to. Some people never get used to them. Or to some of them. The clear ones, tequila, vodka, and gin, take most people by the greatest degree of surprise at first sip. They’re clear. Like water. They should have no taste. But they do. And somehow people get used to them.

It’s not only beverages that hold this acquired taste phenomenon. The cheese family has many examples of food that objectively tastes bad. Stop and think about it. Most cheeses smell bad, rely on mold or fermentation to achieve their heady flavor, and many come with a slimy, sticky, or crumbly texture if they aren’t held together by a waxy coating. Not the sort of list one might write up when developing a yummy confection from scratch.

Did you ever try to eat a peeled kiwi by hand? Impossible. It’s like trying to corral a sardine.

Speaking of sardines, the fish family is another with seemingly endless reasons not to like. Slimy, smelly, bones that magically appear after cooking.

then there are bizarre organ meats. Liver, tripe, brains. Ecch.

Mind you, I like all this stuff. And add to that olives, squid, eel, even cilantro.

But no liver or brains. And no gin.

What I Did Last Week

Michael 10 Comments

What a week. I’ve been so busy I barely noticed the tangerine tyrant threatening to drop 82nd airborne troops into Portland Oregon, the Notsoproudboys, aka immigration enforcement not-officers-and-gentlemen rappelling out of attack helicopters to storm an apartment building in America’s heartland, or Speaker Whatshisname sending the RINOs home then complaining that the Democrats don’t want to meet. All that good stuff all in one week.  Barely seems like it was just a week ago that I was concerned if there was intelligent life on this side of the planet.

Instead, I finally got around to doing some Christmas shopping. I know. I’m just so late this year. Usually by the back-to-school sale days I’m down to just needing stocking stuffers. Where did I go wrong?

Now I have rush through the remains of the list so I can get back on track and start shopping for next year’s May and June anniversaries and birthdays. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to find something June-worthy in December? That clearly should have been August activity.

The good news is, I have Halloween candy on this week’s shopping list.

Okay, maybe that was just a bit hyperbolic, but I really am behind the holiday shopping curve, and I know why. I’m not a “let’s go out with a big holiday shopping list on Black Friday and see how much we get in one day” shopper. I tend to pick things up all through the year as I see them and see that those things would be perfect for someone. I’ll squirrel them away, then during the week before Christmas I’ll scour the house trying to remember I hid it all. Which is still better than just starting to shop then like half of all the other men in America. Mind you now, I’ll likely still go out and shop during that week, but I’ll be calmer than the rest of the shopping crowd because I won’t have to go out and buy.

So that’s why I missed so much of last week’s news. I was out shopping. And I didn’t shop for any televisions or radios so, there’s that too.

Another thing I did was get out the ‘thank you for joining and here are some directions’ letters to the ARC team for Bad Impressions. (Those of you who did send emails expressing interest, if you didn’t get an email from me over the weekend check your spam folders. Anyone still interested in joining, there are a couple spaces left. Get back to me this week. Details and a request form are on the new website, www.michaelrossmedia.com, something else I did last week.)

Okay all, have a good week. I have a few more people to serendipitously come across things for.

Hear ye, hear ye!

Michael 7 Comments

At the end of August, I promised you an announcement “sometime in September.” It’s September. Sit back and allow me to announce.

The announcement is there will be an announcement next week. That announcement will be the cover reveal for my first piece of fiction, Bad Impressions, the first in the series following Marc and Aimee as they investigate the disappearances, and sometimes over appearances, of “art, sculptures, precious gems, and the types of doodads that the rich and famous tend to collect.” And what would a good investigation be without a murder or two.

But not to have an announcement-less announcement post I am also announcing the formation of my ARC reader team, the Advance Review Copy reader team for Bad Impressions. Technically the pre-announcement for that as the official invitations won’t go out until next Monday when the new website and social sites go live. But you, dear bloggers, get first crack at submitting your desire if you have a desire of joining. Spaces are limited so if you desire, I suggest you act on that soon.

Here is how the ARC program works. I will send you a free e-book copy of Bad Impressions in exchange for an honest review on Goodreads. Details including dates and method of submitting your reviews will be sent by email to those chosen for the ARC team.

Some details about Bad Impressions. The book is a cozy mystery with some overlap with romantic comedy. Think of Marc and Aimee as the twenty-first century equivalent of Nick and Nora Charles. Or so they think.

Date to know:

  • October 5: “Official” ARC Invitations released.
  • October 6: Cover reveal, website,and social media sites go live. Subscriptions to newsletter opens.
  • October 20: Pre-order period open for ebook, paperback, and hard cover
  • November 3: Bad Impressions released to all major distributors!

Care for a taste:

       They, those who are learned enough in this world to qualify as ‘they,’ say it should be a goal of every investigator that a murder is solved within 48 hours. I take exception to that. I don’t want to get ahead of things here, but I am an investigator of sorts, and I never strove (hmm, I never have striven?) . . . I have never challenged myself to solve a murder within 24 hours. That I am not an investigator of murders may have something to do with that. I am, as I said, an investigator of sorts, and without giving too much away this early in the telling, the sort I was investigating was the sudden appearance of too many originals. Originals as in paintings that is. Impressionist paintings to be as specific as I can be, again, without giving too much away.

What can you do now?

So yes, if that’s just the first paragraph you want to read more and you can want until November! If you want your free ebook version of Bad Impressions impressions in exchange for an honest review, send your name and email address to my personal email, mrossrph@msn.com and I’ll see you are sent an invitation to join the ARC team.

Discouraging error by silence

Michael 5 Comments

 

Just like last Monday, I had fifth century Pope St. Celestine I, founder of the papal diplomatic service and speaking of the words, “We are deservedly to blame if we encourage error by silence,” in mind as I prepared today’s post. I intended to follow the good pontiff’s advice and call out some of the more egregious errors of the week but there were just sooooooooo many!

It truly is too difficult to narrow them down to a chosen few. Do we skip the top cur and go with the Vice-dingaling-in-chief having a river level raised so he can go rafting on his sixth vacation of the year?

Maybe we should think hard about this when the orange menace and the red menace get together and say the Ukraine will have to give up some land without asking the Ukraine. Sort of like when the wannabe king-in-chief says for 60 years people have been wanting a proper ball room at the White House so he will build one that is 3 times bigger than the current ballroom and cover it in gold. The manchild has a thing about gold and getting other people to pay for it.

Let’s consider how the Department of Injustice is opening an investigation against the people who prosecuted, and won, the case against sphinctermouth when he was a regular citizen. This follows the pattern of “retribution” it has sought since the swearing in ceremony (the one it refused to place its hand on the Bible for) in January. And yes, I said sphinctermouth. Watch a video of it talking. If you can ignore the orange makeup and the accordion playing pantomime, and concentrate on his lips (like it does when watching its press secretary talk) you will see that classic sphincter movement.

CarrotFace continues his purge of FBI agents who had worked on the January 6 investigations. This was only days after Homeland Security released plans to lower the minimum age of masked avengers, errr wannabe secret police to 18 and raised the maximum age to unlimited. Perhaps the lure of full student loans reimbursement didn’t bring in the number of new recruits they were hoping for. But then you have to have gone to school to have incurred student debt.

Now we come to the two most egregious happenings. In the running for top disgusting distraction, was the plan to destroy two satellites orbiting the earth measuring carbon dioxide release and other climate altering effects. Not just taking them offline, but destroying $750million dollars of state-of-the-art climate monitoring equipment.

But perhaps the single most egregious occurrence of the week was discovering the Library of Congress had restored parts of the Constitution to the official online version of the U.S. Constitution. Why? Because sometime in the dark of history, not to mention the dark  of the night, a couple key sections of Article I were removed. Those parts included the right to habeas corpus that protects people from detention without just cause, the foreign emuluments clause addressing gifts to government employees (like prez), and several references to Congressional powers.

Don’t encourage errors by silence. Open your mouth and call your representatives. They may be beyond help but they’ll at least let you talk. Remind them that they likely will be out of a job by next year, if not voted out by the people, forced out by the kakistocracy. You can try your senator too but they are all just too far gone. Both parties have become dead ducks.

There is good news though. I will post some Thursday.

Never can say goodbye

Michael 11 Comments

Yesterday was the 56th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. We can land a man on the moon but we still can’t come up with a good way to end a text message. It’s also the 58th anniversary of the first Special Olympics. And still after all this time I can’t come up with a good way to work that into a referene on the absence of a good way to end a text message. Then again on the other hand, we’v had text messages for 41 years old and I still can’t come up with a good way to end a text message. I think I have a texting dysfunction.(Technically texting is 33 years old. It was invented in 1984 but not first used until 1992. I guess they had a hard time coming up with a good way to say hello.)

Having been born and raised in the telephone era, the transition to short messaging systems has been long and difficult. All these abbreviations and pictures with no punctuation. Anarchy I tell you!

To be very frank, I’m still not comfortable with the habit of just jumping into the conversation. No “Hello, how are you?” “Are you busy?” “Hey, s’up!” How do people think it’s appropriate to start off a conversation with “on my way,” or “be there soon,” or worst of all, “omw.” But having gotten beyond that I still can’t just stop. It’s like just getting out of— hmmm, its like sending a card that just says happy birthday and not signing it because the recipient should be able to figure it who it’s from by checking the postmark.

Closing a phone call is easy. “Bye,” Bye.” And you’re done. Messages seldom end that cutly and dryly. Oh, someone might get a “but” in but usually it’s as abrupt as it started and I’m not sure if they’re done so I poo back on and say something to see if they’re still there.  And so on and so on and son on.

You may need shaking your head and quietly chuckling over this, but I know it’s a problem, a real problem, and others experience it too. I know because I got into a text message conversation yesterday afternoon with another who couldn’t say goodbye and we finally got around to “hanging up” around 9:30 last night. It’s a good thing we don’t have to pay for those things individually anymore.

Make me happy

Michael 11 Comments

I think I might have figured out why that sad pack of humanity in Washington DC are all so unhappy all the time. They have no happy place. They have places where others can be miserable which allows them to be seem grander, and they think that makes them happy, but it doesn’t. They have places where they can openly insult, harass, and persecute others, and they can feel superior thinking that makes them happy, but it doesn’t.  The have places where they are expected to lie, cheat, and steal resulting in the collection of more wealth than one person can spend thinking that makes them happy, but it doesn’t. No, none of that does. None of that makes for a happy place.

A happy place is that placed where you can smile and although others may not understand, you smile so big that they will smile along with you. There are three things necessary for something to make you happy. It has to be pleasing or contented. It has to be satisfying. You have to be confident that what is pleasing to you isn’t harming anyone else.

And if you want to move from happiness to ecstasy, encourage someone else to be happy. No, don’t just encourage them, help them to find their happy place and to be happy.

Last week in ROAMcare’s Flashback Friday post we discussed happy places. I’ve written something similar in days gone by. Regarding happy places, the things that stop you in your tracks and bring a smile to your face, that these are not the pillars of happiness, the really big life changing events that come to mind when you think life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness type happiness, but are the little things that are part of getting us from one hour to the next, the things that turn drudgery into something faintly tolerable. They are the things and places that barely register to the rest of the world yet bring you profound happiness.      

There is a destination in Pittsburgh that personifies happiness. Called an artistic wonderland, Randyland, founding in 1995 by Randy Gilson and Mac McDermott, is a massive, unique outdoor art installation that captures the fun in everyday, reused, and upcycled material. It grew from Gilson’s pre-Randyland days when he engaged in “guerilla gardening,” turning vacant lots into explosions of color and life.

Randyland is a happy place, one of those unusual spots that, although not for everyone, is for everyone, and is where you can’t not find something to smile about and leave happier from. It is unabashedly one of those quirky places that nobody was ever going to say couldn’t be done. And it doesn’t hurt anybody. 

Find your happy place. You can do it. And others around you will be happier for it too.

 

 

All Gung Ho, err Gang Ho!

Michael 11 Comments

I was going through some articles I’ve saved and and ran across one from the Pittsburgh Magazine website from this May. The headline intrigued. Enough so that I saved the article to my reading list but not so intrigued that I actually read it. The headline in question…

… From Running Clubs to Naked Bowling, Pittsburghers Find Ways to Combat Loneliness.

I used to bowl a lot and I recall feeling naked if I wasn’t wearing an official bowling shirt, but I don’t think that was where this article was going. Curiosity finally overcame inertia and I decided to take a look at the words that came after those first dozen.

It was after the mention of the city’s Flood Club (which every city with three rivers running through its downtown should have) I came across this:

“We need gangs,” the novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said. Decades of research suggest he was right: In any given year, positive social connections can slash our chance of dying by roughly 50%. Without them, our risk of heart disease, depression and other ailments spike — health effects that Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation’s former surgeon general, compares to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

“So yes,” said Vonnegut, “I tell people to formulate a little gang. And, you know, you love each other.”

Naked bowling, the 1936 St. Patricks Day flood, and now gangs. I want to say one of these things is not like the other but really, none of these things is like anything else. I was intrigued-er.

The article went on to say many of the same things we’ve said in our ROAMcare Uplift posts, only like how a professional would write them. People need people. And it went on to detail several third spaces where people needing people gather. Exercise clubs, activity clubs, sports clubs, even a naked bowling league.

The author talked about people needing and finding their people “in gangs of music lovers, movie lovers and lovers of Non-Boring Books. They’re craft-beer lovers and Sick of Drinking Millennials, Nerdy Ladies and Explorer Chicks, Toastmasters and introverts.” Wait. Toastmasters.

Not too long ago I was at a Toastmasters district level meeting. Over the course of this meeting (and just about any Toastmaster meeting beyond one’s home club), the question was asked “why do you continue being a Toastmaster?” I’ve heard many, many long-term Toastmasters answer that question and never have I heard one say, “so I can speak better,” or “so I can become a better leader,” even though those are both in our clubs’ missions.

The most common reason members hang around Toastmasters is because we meet, and associate with, and enjoy the company of others we’d never otherwise spend time with. My personal home club has members who are in finance, engineering, medical research, and restaurant management. They are self-employed, unemployed, semi-employed. They are from figuratively around the block and literally from around the world. There is a tutor, a screenwriter, an author, an investment broker, and one of me. And twice a month we get together and talk about everything but what we do.

We found what Vonnegut said we should look for. Our gang. A gang where we love each other and love being with each other for a half dozen hours a month. Gang ho!

 

 

Summertime in the city

Michael 5 Comments

Greetings buddy bloggers, blogging buddies, responsible readers, and children of all ages. I missed yesterday. The last two days have been whirlwind days for me with more than the usual appointments, commitments, and after dinner mints. But not to fear, I am alive a well. Wonders truly do never cease.

Over in the ROAMcare site, this weekly uplift took a swipe at bad behavior and defending oneself against it. Summer heat seems to bring out the worst in the worst of us. The best of us have to be on guard. Check it out.

The big news is ROAMcare’s Flashback Friday brings back an old favorite, here and there… in fact it is the most widely read Uplift post… Middle Seat Hump Syndrome. Flashback Friday is a ROAMcare subscriber “exclusive” but this is just too good not to share with everybody.  

The post was first published in June of 2021. We were just rounding the corner from the pandemic back to normal. If you can forgive the couple lines that address the Covid years, we think you will find a lot still right with the thoughts that gave rise to the Middle Seat Hump Syndrome.

And don’t forget, it’s National Donut Day. Make it an especially sticky one! 

It’s a sign

Michael 11 Comments

There is an account on Instagram, Ian the Sign Guy (ianthesignguy), who posts short videos of himself cleaning road signs in England. (He is also on YouTube.) There is no background music, you rarely see him. The videos are just his brush scrubbing away the filth that accumulates in roadside traffic signs. Here is an example. I think it’s one of the greatest things on the internet today. Sort of a new go at cat videos.

Do I want to explain that? Sure. Why not? There is nobody screaming at you. No UNHINGED USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS, or ridiculously obvious lies to wade through. It’s not an innocent looking post trying to get you to buy something, agree with something, or watch and re-watch over and over to find the hidden meaning. It’s just a guy scrubbing away the dirt and grime of your basic traffic control signage.

I don’t recall ever seeing signs here as filthy as he finds there. Some of his pre-cleaned signs are barely legible, yet they seem to be on some major roadways. I suppose we haven’t yet stripped the Department of Transportation’s personnel budget of the sign scrubbers. It’s quite satisfying to watch the dirt melt away, to see the brush go scrub scrub scrub over the sign surface, and to hear the faint drone of whatever equipment he uses to get the water flowing through the brush head. I could watch video after video and be quite content with it and nothing more. A cat video for the 2020’s.

We need more of these. Yes, it is an unexpected joy to have a random Muppets video show up in your feed, and a daily dose or three of old Peanuts cartoons will surely turn surfing snarls into smiles. But no, they aren’t the sign guy, a real-life person out to make his part of his country a little cleaner so his fellow motorists can tell where they are going or how fast they should be going while getting there. It’s a new twist on “love your neighbor.”

Or perhaps he is the new superhero. Not a Superman dumped on our planet to avoid complete annihilation on his. Not a Spider-Man or a Hulk who happened to be around the wrong radioactive insect or experiment. Not like Aquaman getting the best genes from a human father and an Atlantilean mother. More like Batman, just a normal guy who happens to be incredibly wealthy and has a cool costume. I don’t know if Ian is incredibly wealthy, but on the rare occasion you get to see his work clothes, they seem to be top shelf.

It’s worth it to spend a few minutes or hours watching Ian tirelessly make England’s Motorways Glow Again. And no stupid red hat either.