Jury duty

Boy, the contact with the unwashed masses makes me deadly tired.  Why is it so large a proportion of the population is fat?  And I do mean fat?  Not just the 198 I am living with now, but, not, I hope, for long, but an extra century rolling about.  How do they get around corners without falling over?

Anyway, I didn't get picked for jury duty.  I guess that means I'm good for a while.  Maybe Airplane Repo helped.  And I got a part of a day off.  That's extra good.  Back at work now trying to have fun.  Getting my calls up to date, reading a bit.  I have really been keeping up lately.  Becoming effortless.  Can't wait for my last year - I think it might be good.  And then that big tank of water comes off my head and I get a nice long drink.

Talking to a legislator today was fun.  Would I like to be a consultant?  Sure, to a publishing firm for megabucks.

Money

I feel like a man dying of thirst, who is forced to carry a huge tank of water on his head and who is forbidden to drink any of the water. 

Enjoying David Warren, (Essays in Idleness) as always, and Bruce Charlton, a "usually enjoy".

Lots of intelligent people out there on the web.  Maybe it's my choice of reading, but it does seem that the men who strike me as intelligent are invariably religious.  They have interesting, quirky things to say about religion.  It is too bad that religious discourse is dying out in everyday life, but it certainly seems to be alive on certain parts of the Web.

Just happened to think what an apt analogy the "Web" is.  We are all either spiders, laying in wait for prey, putting out feeler threads and hoping someone will come along and pull them, or prey caught and sparkling with spider filaments, hanging geometrically, wrapped up and waiting to be eaten.

Cooler and cooler

A front came through today to usher us into November, almost.  41 tomorrow at S-ville!  David got a deer!  It truly is  fall.  I love it.  One more summer going into a cubicle every day.

Nothing on tv tonight but Duck Dynasty.  Bit of a oe-trick pony.

Rain brings cool

70 degrees this morning going to work at 6:30 and at 5PM coming home.  Sticking with the low carb diet this week, anyway.

Trying some abuela añejo.  From Panama.

Do I dare to smoke a pipe?  Will I ever become ripe?

I do love old movies, like The Lady Vanishes.

Gout day

I  do not like being out sick on Mondays.  Monday always passes by as in a dream.  So it's easily endured.  Thursday is the day I would prefer to take off, if I had a choice.  Already having Friday taken care of, am I getting greedy?  Perhaps.  But these ten-hour days are not that much longer, to me, than the eight-hour days I used to start at 6:30 anyway, so I could get a good parking place.  That will be the best thing about being retired.  I can avoid the crowds.

Football and writing

Found a much better way of watching football.  It's so annoying to root for one team and find them falling behind for stupid reasons.  So I'm now on the side of the offense, only.  I root for the side with the ball.  After all, I only like to see offensive plays, good runs, long passes, loong field goals.  No more agida at the score.

Slaw Dogs

I know.  That sounds like a violent Western movie by Somebody PickenPacker.

Drining brandy and watching the Clemson FSU game  Flambé!

Relaxing with Youtube

Watching Edith Piaf videos on Youtube.  Frustrated because Netflix is not working.  We will make it work, sooner or later.  Splendid chef's salad for lunch.

Got a tire for the wife's golf cart.  Now to put it on!

Could be the last warm day.  Or at least the last hot one.

Allocating resources

No TV last night either. Saw "A Fistful of Dollars" last night. Can't beat Eastwood. Didn't know, though, that he had 8 children by 6 different women all the while he was having a long-time affair with Sandra Locke.  Only married twice.

So he's not the hero I thought.  Not mine, anyway.  No more than Van Gogh or Picasso.

My resources are my attention and my energy.  Same thing, really.  Haven't got unlimited supplies of either.  That's why it's so ennuyant to be forced to pay attention to things that don't matter, couldn't possibly matter.

Now chess is something I need to pay more attention to.  And those little logic puzzles.

Back to work

Overslept almost exactly one hour today.  Meant I discovered a new way to cook sausage - in the oven with the bacon.  What?  You don't cook bacon in the oven?  Oh, yes, much the easiest way, if you get the timing and the temperature right.

Contacts

Chatting at lunch with some serious powers in property tax.  How could it be different if I was scmoozing with writers and historians instead?  Of course, I would probably have some serious disagreements with whatever historian might show up.  Even Nassim Taleb, who sees himself as economist, trader, philosopher, statistician, historian, linguist and whatever else you've got going.

Horseshoes

Haven't played horseshoes for, probably, thirty years.  Chris and David were into it, so I tried it, too, out in the back forty.

It's tricky.  You have to able to replicate the same movement easily.  The stakes are forty feet apart.  That's farther than I thought.  I can barely see that far!  But I did hit the stake couple of times.  Dilemma:  spin or flip?  Learned a lot.

Peeling eggs

Thank goodness for the internet.  I now know how to peel an egg easily and quickly.  Just google it.

Watching Le Million (1931)  Good for my French.  Musical about a lost lottery ticket. Weird.  

Thinking about buying a book about scarcity and how it affects one's psychology.  Find it on Amazon. I love it.  With all these modern tools, one doesn't need to cite anything completely any more.

Canadian and hot wings

Good weekend coming up with my darling.  Hunting season coming up means the deer are slated for triage and political examination.  Just think how few could escape Stalin's show trials!

Heinz 57 sauce and Sriracha

Great discovery: Heinz 57 and sriracha go very well together, in appropriate proportions.  To taste.  The hotness and savory flavors combine well.  Good on beans.

Government still shut down.  What if they shut down the government and nobody cared?  People could spend their time doing useful things, like trying different combinations of hot sauce and steak sauce.

Mencken

"Nine men out of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if there were no women in the world, once they had grown accustomed to the quiet."

H. L. Mencken In Defense of Women.  #32, The Woman Voter

Mencken is on Gutenberg!  But not all of him.  Now who needs the rest of the "manosphere"?

Rain on the highway in the morning

Heavy rain today.  Hoping it would stay under 80 degrees, but no luck.  Not too bad, though.  Monday Night Football should be more relaxed now that I've got my writing and my blogging done.  Sorting through pictures for the website.  Might be much better.  Need some more travel photos!  Now that I'm looking forward to a reasonable monthly income again, I'm ready to travel!!

Have to get the low carb regimen up to speed again.  I did find Bakenets pork rinds to be edible though.  But only that brand.  Sherry suggested that.

Electronic nightmares

Website worries, telephone tension, Netflix nonsense.  Every electronic thing we have is sub-optimal and takes far too much time and effort to salvage.  Bring back the quill pen!  I used to use a steel nib and inkpot at St. George's.  Perfectly functional, once you learn to avoid blotting your copybook.

Lots of personal insights.  I have realized I'm not any good at things that require constant attention to fine detail.  Or, I'm not great at detail.  I can do it, but I'm far better at big thinking, connecting ideas.

Football with the girls away

One of the great pleasures of life is to watch football when your wife is out shopping with her girlfriends.  You know she won't be back any time soon.  I got my writing done early.  

Georgia plays at 3:30 against Tennessee, always a good one.

Sam's club

God is on the side of the big packages.  And Sam's has BIG packages!  It's so good for having more than you really need.  The Albany Sam's, though, does not have a liquor store.  No good!  Back at the library I got ost but found a favorite Agatha Christie.