"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
Rolling through the weeks like a juggernaut whose forward momentum cannot be slowed or stopped we reach the place where the so-called rubber meets the road.
It is time to make decisions in a few areas about what direction the path forward takes. Been saying this in multiple ways for years now but there will be movement from discussing possibilities.
Now it turns to action and the consequences of those moves will play out as they will. Can’t straddle the fence forever, enough is enough.
I think I have received about a half dozen warnings via email over the past week or so.
They are all tied into the blog and tell me that certain plug-ins aren’t active anymore and if I don’t make adjustments I won’t be able to track information or take advantage of XYZ.
I get tired of being warned because the language in said warnings chaps my hide. Could be that I am irked about other things and thin-skinned now or that their marketing language is weak.
A softer message would probably go over better with me. I see value in being notified that some changes are impacting the functionality of the blog.
But I also recognize some of those changes are intentional so sending me email after email declaration of the sky falling isn’t useful.
Reminds me of a couple of people who wrote me to ask me to update links on posts that are more than 10 years old.
Something about the manner in which I was approached ruffled my feathers so I took the posts down.
Maybe it is just me.
Maybe I am getting cranky and ornery in my old age or maybe it is something else.
Don’t you just love decisive stances where we take a position of maybe.
I have been cleaning up broken parts and pieces of the blog but that is not the reason I haven’t updated the way I said I was going to.
And yeah, I know I keep talking about it and talk is cheap.
Those things are all true and there is no doubt that action is the only thing I will accept as having merit or should I say proof of my intentions.
Anyhoo, I came across Troubled Waters? What Troubles Does Water Have? and realized it is 17 years since my paternal grandfather died.
That is shocking and yet not at all because when I think about it there is no doubt that much time has passed.
Except I have to think about it because it never feels that long ago until I start to actively consider what is different between then and now.
It is a different world now in almost every important and measurable way. Though if I talked to grandpa I think he would tell me he went through the same things, even though the changes might be different.
He saw political upheaval, big changes in the country and the world. He buried parents, saw his kids grow up and watched jobs that were once important disappear and new ones evolve.
Are the changes more profound or just different.
I lean towards just different but I would have liked to have discussed it with him. Guess I’ll have to just consider the options and what I think he might have said,
My dad would have said it doesn’t matter because I do what I do regardless of what anyone says, 😉
There is a group of us who gather together to catch up on recent events in our personal and professional lives.
We laugh about some of the common changes that aging has bestowed upon us and compare notes as to who has had the most surgeries or is taking the most pills.
I lose both of those by quite a bit which makes me happy because it means my health is doing better than just holding up.
Conversation floats into some stories about college and a couple of fraternity events at which point some ask whatever happened to so and so.
One of the guys who went to high school and college asks about my high school girlfriend.
“You sort of dated on and off in college didn’t you?”
“It fizzled out by the middle of our junior year. She said if we kept dating we’d get married and I told her I wouldn’t marry her.”
He says he guessed that mostly ended it and I shrug my shoulders.
“Whatever happened to her?”
“She got married three or four times. First husband hated me. We had lots of friends in common so I used to bump into them.
He got drunk at a wedding and mouthed off. I wasn’t particularly nice with my response. Made some crack about her bedroom habits that set him off. Probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I was 25 and had a couple of drinks in me too.
Anyway, she is a grandmother now which I guess means he is a grandfather. So clearly they are quite old.”
The guys laugh and someone says “Aren’t you older than she is?”
“Yeah, but younger than him.”
The thing is most of us have at least one friend now who is a grandparent or about to become one so the old comment is relative.
The really funny thing about it is the guys who are still married and have kids have begun hearing bits and pieces from their wives about what kind of grandmothers they want to be.
Some who planned on downsizing are no longer sure if they are going to do it because there is this idea of having a house that is big enough for everyone to come home.
When they ask me for my thoughts I shrug my shoulders again.
“Do you remember what my dad said about being a grandfather? If he had known it was that much fun he would skipped being a dad.
I sort of suspect I’ll be a little like that but it is not happening any time soon and I am ok. Told the kids to live a little bit before they settle because it will change things.
And if I have learned anything, it is not to expect that kids will come to my house just because I want them to. There are always a minimum of two families, so I’ll wait and see what life looks like.
One day I’ll have an answer.
****
That is a common refrain for me, “one day.”
It is how I am living, one day at a time.
Got lots of things going on and some big potential changes that make it harder to plan out too far, so it is easier to just break it up into pieces.
Live one day at a time and see where it leads.
Kind of relaxing if you ask me, takes much of the pressure off and that is a good thing.
Someone called me an angry gorilla and I laughed because something about how they said it was funny.
That didn’t do much for helping them to feel less frustrated and less angry with me. It wasn’t as effective at infuriating someone as saying “relax” or “calm down, you’re hysterical” but it certainly didn’t make them smile.
Nor did watching me fight not to begin roaring like someone let their tuchus tuba toot through the sermon.
It was one of those moments where if they hadn’t said anything I probably would have been fine, but something about their expression and tone just made me lose it.
And then because I am guilty of being someone who presses buttons I said “April comes roaring in” and then shouted safe like I was the home plate umpire.
That didn’t make things any better but it made me laugh harder and proved once again I can be my own best audience.
I blame it on being involved in far too much serious and stressful discussions.
Sometimes you have to get a little silliness into your life and so I did.
It is five minutes after midnight and I just barely avoided breaking my neck over crap the family left in places you can only see with night vision or if the lights or on.
It more than pleases me to say I avoided both minor and major injuries to be here with you because that kind of crap doesn’t just go away.
The big injuries can leave lasting effects but so can the small ones that come with the little nagging things that stick around for far longer than you would like them to.
So color me grateful for having dodged that particular bullet especially as I discovered this evening that a certain noodle product from Costco hates me.
It was an unexpected and unpleasant discovery especially as I had no reason to consider this item to be something my wacky digestive system wouldn’t like.
Color me less than pleased but not with a real pen, marker or paint.
Don’t think I did a particularly good job with that photo quote above but it works for now and provides an opportunity for me to answer the unspoken call to action in it.
I dare.
I am taking action to encourage fortune to favor me but I won’t write out precisely what I am doing here because I am mildly superstitious and there are boundaries in blogging.
You don’t need to know everything and given that updates here have been a little sporadic I might save material so that I can resume something more consistent.
I’ll also share that I am nervous about some of this, but mostly in a good way. If it goes as I hope it could be pretty darn good.
And if not, well I am not going to put much energy into that because I don’t want to borrow trouble or jinx myself.
Sometimes you just need to run and expect life to unfold as it should.
Told Steiner the minor that very thing tonight and laughed because I called him Steiner the minor and he made a face.
He is not a minor anymore, hasn’t been for a long while and neither is his little sister.
He told me I am old and that is why I forgot that he isn’t a minor. I disagreed with his assessment of my age, I don’t feel old and can confirm there are many far older.
But I concede I am not the young guy at the office anymore and haven’t been for a long time.
Not quite ready to retire, but far closer to that than to the beginning of my career. Now I listen to the guys who talk about shlepping their kids to soccer or ballet and smile at fond memories.
