New Shoes in the Rain

Happy Thursday to all.  Or, as I've been calling it, short-work-week Tuesday. This is my second consecutive three-day work week, which is great in some ways but challenging in others, namely in the area of scheduling appointments and such.  Now that I'm just about to get back to normal I'll have another week off after Father's Day! Those of you who have been visiting this space regularly will remember that in a past professional life, I used to travel by air.  A lot.  Like in three weeks out of five each month. And I frequently documented my experiences here, because, well, who else was I going to tell about interesting things that happened? So my air travel is much less frequent these days.  For my current job I've traveled by air a total of three times--once for orientation, and two more times for meetings.  But leisure air travel has become much less common for me, largely because I don't rack up frequent flier miles that can (allegedly) pay for ...

Good Wednesday morning to all.  And, yes, I almost wrote "Tuesday" there, given my general confusion about what day it is. I love a long weekend, but, wow, do we all pay for those when we have them!  On top of that, I'm going to take a few days off work starting Friday, so I expect to continue to be a little off my game for a few days! Unless you've been without access to news, you know that comedian and television actress Roseanne Barr learned yesterday that, yes, bad jokes and satirical comments that go too far can and do have consequences.  I won't replay the blow-by-blow timeline of it here, but since her revived television show is aired on ABC, a network owned by the family-friendly Walt Disney Company, the final result was, in my mind, inevitable. Supposedly since making the comments on Twitter that started all of this, Barr apologized in what appeared to be a "you'd better get online to issue an apology" apology that seemed somewhat insi...

Happy Friday, friends.  Or, for most of us, Happy-Friday-Before-A-Monday-Holiday!  Hope you have the opportunity to enjoy the long weekend! Had an interesting experience this week--I went to a barber shop. This statement requires some clarification. For the past fifteen or so years, I've worn my hair in a crew cut.  It decided to grow in a couple of different directions at the point when I started this, so this has been the norm for me for at least that long. At about the same time, I was ready to try something different as far as who would cut my hair.  Up until that point I had used traditional barber shops, but, as most of us know, the type of barber shops that I knew from childhood forward are becoming a thing of the past.  My last experience with shops of this type was several years ago, as I tired of the stylist-of-the-week mode that most of the "haircut" places I visited seemed to employ. So I found a barber.  At that time he told me he was...

Happy Monday, friends.  If ever there was an oxymoron, that's it! Recently I've been thinking about some of the funny and surprisingly profound things that one or another of my grandchildren has said to me over the years.  There's a lot there, and I've always said that I should "write this down."  So this will have to do.  These are in no particular order, by the way. Bear in mind I have five grandchildren, but the fifth is only five and a half months old! I took granddaughter #1 (along with her dad) to the movies once, to see "Toy Story 3."  If you're familiar with these movies you know that the ending is very emotional, even for grown-ups.  Toward the end I leaned over and squeezed my granddaughter and told her "don't grow up, sweetie!"  She turned, looked right into my eyes and said, "But I have to, Poppy.  I have to."  That was several years ago, and she's now twelve, soon to be 13. Recently she texted her mo...

Good Thursday to everyone.  Returned home from a business trip last night to find that it was warmer here than in Atlanta, where I was for two-plus days. Do you ever think, as I do, about what you would say to people if you encountered them in the right circumstances?  And I don't necessarily mean people that we already know, but, rather, strangers that we've had some sort of interaction with. For instance, I got off my homebound flight last night tired from the day's activities and the cramped conditions of a completely full flight.  When I returned to my car in the parking garage, I immediately saw that a car had parked less than six inches from my driver's side door.  So, tired as I was, I had to enter my car from the PASSENGER side, climb over the center console and finally put myself into the driver's seat. What would I say to the offending driver?  Here are some of the things that flashed through my mind: "Are you blind?" "Could you not...

Good Monday morning, my friends.  Hope you were able to celebrate yesterday with the moms in your life! My wife and I spent a fair amount of time getting our yard in shape yesterday.  Last fall we determined that we needed a bit of a makeover in our back yard, since some of the plants we had put into our planting beds over the past few years were either overgrown or unhealthy.  So at that time and into the early winter I went about clearing out some of the old stuff.  Pulled an azalea plant that had never flourished (I'll come back to the subject of azaleas shortly), yanked a sickly holly bush from the ground with one hand, and chopped eight juniper bushes down to ground level, planning to remove them when we had a plan for replacement. Fast forward to two months ago, and we examined the remaining three azaleas, which were originally quite pretty adjacent to our living room window that looks out onto the back yard.  They were also a bit spotty.  Sadly, ...

Good morning, friends.  Hard to believe that we're into May 2018.  Won't be long before we're at the Memorial Day weekend! This morning I want to touch on an important subject--honesty.  Do we do a good enough job of expecting it from ourselves?  From each other?  Do we assume that people are generally honest, or the exact opposite? As with so many things, I've always felt that things like this start at the top.  Many times throughout my working life I've been associated with a company that announced it was either buying another entity or was being bought by one.  And in almost every case, the powers that be preach the oldest lie around:  it's "business as usual," so make sure that our customers know that. It's that until it isn't.  As I write this I've mentally counted backwards and have come up with probably ten examples where this happened.  Me losing my job almost always followed this pronouncement, whether immediately or over ...