The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for May 2008

Birthday Gifts

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Excuse for me sounding childish, but I received virtually no birthday gifts this year. It surprised me. What surprised me even more was that the lack of gifts bothered me. I wouldn’t have guessed that it would, but it did.

Got a gift card for Barnes & Noble from some family members. I appreciate that. I love books and will most definitely make use of the card. The funny thing is that I can’t figure out what I want to buy. It is not something that happens to me. I can always find a book or two that interests me.

But for some reason I can’t quite make up my mind as to what to get. I have a bunch that I am considering, just not sure what.

For a while I played around with the idea of buying a CD, but in the iTunes era I rarely find an entire CD that I want. It is much easier and far more economical to buy the few tracks that I truly like.

I need to find a chunk of time to go wander the aisles and see what catches my fancy. Perhaps the MLBF Chronicles.

Tis But a Flesh Wound

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The Rebbitzen’s Husband tipped me off to this one:

“PROVO, Utah (AP) — A newspaper photographer got a little too close to the action at the state high school track championships — and was speared through the leg by a javelin.

Ryan McGeeney of the Standard-Examiner was spared serious injury Saturday, and even managed to snap a photo of his speared leg while others tended to him.

“If I didn’t, it would probably be my editor’s first question when I got back,” McGeeney said.

The 33-year-old McGeeney, an ex-Marine who spent six months in Afghanistan, was taking pictures of the discus event and apparently wandered into off-limits area set aside for the javelin.

Striking just below the knee, the javelin tip went through the skin and emerged on the other side of his leg.

“It wasn’t real painful. … I was very lucky in that it didn’t hit any blood vessels, nerves, ligaments or tendons,” McGeeney said.”

Best of line of the article goes to the coach who said:

“One of the first things that came to my mind was, ‘Good thing we brought a second javelin,”‘ Miles’ coach, Richard Vance, said Monday.

Can you feel the love.

Notes For June- Fragments of Fiction

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As I bang out the pieces to the latest editions of Fragments of Fiction I have made a habit of sharing some of my notes with you. Not sure if anyone besides myself appreciates it, but I think that at some point in time it might be of interest.

June sat down and brushed her long dark hair and tried to relax. She lived a very busy life and had precious few moments to herself. Alone in front of the mirror she wondered how life had come to be like this. She prided herself on her practicality and had always considered herself to be someone who could bloom wherever she was planted.

It just hadn’t ever occurred to her that one day she’d find herself in this particular situation. Decisive and goal oriented she had relied upon her old standard, research, research, research, make a list and then execute the plan.

This time she found that she couldn’t rely upon her old standbys. Relationships don’t always lend themselves to a plan and emotions make it hard to make decisions. She found that irritating and a bit endearing. Johnny had always had a way of upsetting her world.

It was part of what she loved about him and part of what drove her crazy. He was very good at figuring out what to do and what to say. Sometimes that had served him well and sometimes it made his life more difficult as she had come to be more disappointed when he did the wrong thing.

She just expected more of him. She loved that it felt like he could read her mind, or at least she had.

Lately she had felt disconnected and out of sorts. It was disconcerting and upsetting. She wanted to let him in and to feel close, but she just couldn’t make herself do it. At times she found herself doing things to push him away. Again, she didn’t mean to.

It made her frustrated and angry that he wouldn’t just leave. She was confused to begin with and it confused her more that he didn’t respond as she expected. But Johnny never did exactly what she thought.

She pushed and he pulled. She yelled and he spoke softly, most of the time. Sometimes he pushed back.

More and more often she found herself worried that she was a disappointment and that one day he would just disappear. He told her frequently not to worry and said that he would be there.

Johnny figured that June’s malaise was just one of those things and that given time she’d work through it.

Does America Waste Food

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The N.Y. Times reports:

As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

The study didn’t account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at the end of the day?

A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.