New Shoes in the Rain

Good Monday morning, campers!  It was a beautiful weekend here in central Kentucky. The great weather began around Thursday and was spectacular all the way through to today.  Fall is indeed here, with just a little cool in the air.  Gonna be cooler still later in the week, they tell me. Today's post is so titled because I spent a couple of hours on my roof yesterday.  No, I haven't gone completely around the bend, I just needed to finish a project I started last weekend.  I don't like to paint, which I think I have adequately documented here previously, but I can do it and do a decent job of it.  Home ownership these past 25+ years has made me develop at least tolerable skills in this area (and others, of course), and I'm not about to spent $1000 for someone to do what I can do passably myself. So this painting project was the exterior trim.  Didn't need to paint the garage or entry doors, I had done those in the last couple of years.  No, we'...

Good morning, all.  A slight detour from my normal slice-of-life diatribes.  This morning my treatise concerns villains from movies and books. Why are we fascinated with villains?  Is it because we secretly wish that we could act that way, with no real consequences?  Or is it because we know that most, if not all, of the time, the good guys win out in the end of a movie or book? I don't know, but I find many "bad guys" from movies to be most interesting, possibly the MOST interesting character in a given work.  Without further introduction, and in no particular order, here are some of the villains I've found compelling in various movies and other sources: Sir Laurence Olivier enjoyed a long and distinguished career in acting on stage and screen, but may be known best to people in my demographic for playing the Nazi war criminal Christian Szell in the '70's thriller "Marathon Man."  The plot is somewhat difficult to explain quickly, but in it Du...

It's a rainy Tuesday afternoon here in central Kentucky today.  Hope the weather is a little more agreeable wherever you're reading this. Working my first all-office day for some time.  Somehow I thought this would be more common when I moved into yet another work-from-home position, but given staffing changes, ever-changing client expectations and, well, an endless pile of things to be done, it has not happened much.  Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend! Yesterday I was in the hills of eastern Kentucky for a meeting in Martin.  This is a small community in Floyd County, for those keeping score, but I have client locations based there.  It's a pretty drive from Lexington to Martin and yesterday was no exception, as there are many wooded areas along the hills en route to that part of the state and many of the trees have begun to blaze into fall colors Ironically, my wife and I spent most of three days in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in ...

Greetings, all.  Rainy Tuesday morning here in central Kentucky, but we appear to have escaped the more severe weather that has struck areas south of here thus far.  But we're under a significant chance of rain for the next several days, so not out of the woods yet. The cavalry has arrived in my job, as I now have three new folks who have received their initial training and are somewhat prepared to go out and do their new jobs.  This is great news for me, as I've been wearing a lot of hats over the past couple of months, just to keep things moving in a positive direction. Playoff baseball continues to be fascinating.  In the American League this year, we have no Yankees or Red Sox or Rangers, none of the usual players.  The Baltimore Orioles, who have not played in a World Series since 1983, will face off against the Kansas City Royals, who've not done so since 1985 (if you're interested, both of them won the last times they went to the Series) for the right...