Joy of the Holiday Season

So four nights before Christmas I had a three hour “experience” driving to Newark Airport to pick up Prince Charming, aka my son.  Since they opened the enhanced Terminal A, the few times I’ve still flown out of old terminal C, it’s been nothing but a cakewalk.  Nobody is there.  It’s as if you now have a personal terminal with concierge service allowing you to come and go as you please – how civilized.  Alas, when they moved all of the workers from C to A and its Christmas time and there is an ungodly overload of humanity flying in, they don’t have the workers to man Terminal C.  When you drive into the airport complex you enter a lit up wonderland, but not the good kind.  You quickly start wishing you had taken that third blood pressure pill.  The roadway approaching terminal C is like the wild wild west.  The closest analogy I can think of is that it’s like being in a slow-mo version of a demolition derby with no rules.  It was every man, woman and child for themselves. What makes this endeavor a multifaceted challenge is that trying to get your luggage is like being in medieval times where the workers have lost the gift of speech and nothing requiring electricity is operational.  After an hour of sitting in this chaos I started thinking, “Ya know, junior might have really enjoyed a cross country bus trip - definitely next year.”  

What made the nightmare trip to the airport excruciatingly more enjoyable was that the week before, I blew up every nerve ending in my back when I thought I was 22 years old, again.  We had ordered a new bed, as the existing torture device we owned for over ten years had imploded.  The trench I was trying to sleep in had a crevasse as deep as the Grand Canyon.  We ordered this new bed online (actually my wife did) and it came in multiple shipments, each weighing three tons.  So we hired a burly Taskrabbit person to put it together and assist with the heavy lifting.  My wife asked me, “Do you think we need two rabbits?”  I, being a painfully cheap moron said, “Nah, I can help the guy.”  Remember, in my delusional state I’m “22” and it only gets better.  Because they charge you extra to move the furniture up and down steps, I decided I could move the new stuff up the stairs by myself...saving pennies in comparison to the expensive back brace I now need to buy.  (A really sad part of this story is that I almost got a hernia getting the boxes off my driveway into the house.  I’m not sure what part of my brain blocked that memory out and allowed me to think that dragging said boxes upstairs was a viable option.) 

As I spiraled into full on dementia, I also thought I could move the old king size mattress downstairs by myself.  My thinking was, I’ll be going down stairs, how hard would it be?  Somewhere deep in my gray matter I was picturing this mattress walking itself down the stairs, opening the front door and parking itself on the curb.  Then I woke up and found out it weighs 9 tons.  It was as if it was soaking wet, which might have been the case.  But that’s another issue I’ll be following up on at the urologist’s office next week - I’m hoping he does hernias too.  Needless to say I could barely stand up the old bed mattress let alone move it.  Then Mr. Rabbit and I proceeded to bringing it down the stairs. I was like a rag doll being dragged behind.  I also found out the hard way that our beautiful wood head and footboards...well they may have looked like wood, but they had to be made out of lead.  I figure once I get this body cast off, I’ll be ready to try driving again, once I re-learn how to walk.   Hoping for a kinder, gentler New Year.  

Anesthesia Gate

The latest health scare to hit the headlines did not originate in China.  It came from Corporate America, more specifically, the insurance industry in these United States of America.  Whether it’s an account of insurance companies not on track to make their quarterly numbers, so they decide to deny all insurance claims no matter what; or the latest: Anesthesia-gate.  

It seems one of the largest health insurers in New Jersey recently came out with a plan to limit the amount of anesthesia that could be administered during medical procedures…like brain surgery.  Seems the executives at the insurance company thought their cost accountants had a better handle on medical requirements in the operating room when compared to the insights of trained healthcare professionals.  They’re taking a cue from professional baseball where in an attempt to speed up the game, they reduced the time a pitcher has between throws to home plate.  The idea was that the time saved would provide for longer commercials, because that’s what we need.   

The plan our insurance providers envisioned was that jumbo-sized hourglasses would be installed in each operating room.  There would be a one hour glass for tonsils to be removed, a two hour unit for a knee replacement, four hours for a heart transplant, and a five hour mega-glass for brain surgery.  Before operating, each patient would have the option of being given either a bullet or wooden hanger to bite down on in the unlikely event that the surgeon could not finish in time.  This new process would also make for good theater.  Picture the surgeon, sweating bullets as the sands of time begin to run out.  He’s forced to take shortcuts (stiches become a nice to have) as he tries to win at a do or die game of beat the clock.  I’m sure Dateline will be calling.

As healthcare challenges continue, a family member and I recently needed to make two visits to the Emergency Room (ER) within a week.  During the second visit, we waited for over ten hours to be admitted. To be fair, they do an excellent job of setting patient expectations.  In every room and hallway is a placard listing how long it takes to get results from blood work, EKG, or CT Scans.  One of the downsides of having the hospital app on your phone is that you get the results of the tests before a doctor does.  This can be problematic when the AI software interpreting your EKG results says you’ve had two infarctions…heart attacks! Finally one of the doctors assured us, that the AI software has an obsession with heart attacks and to disregard its suggestions.  We gladly complied.  

A day or two after being admitted, we were told that the ER can handle admitting a maximum of 60 people a day.  These days, routinely, they have 120 people waiting to be admitted and quite often they have spikes of 190.  This environment is not like TV’s Grey’s Anatomy, or Chicago Med where if they have eight people in the ER, everyone starts whining and throwing temper tantrums.  In this real world, there are infirmed people lined up in chairs in multiple rooms, down hallways and for the really sick, lying on gurneys up and down hallways. It’s a large facility, but it needs to be twice as big.  And once all of my grousing is done, it needs to be said that these under pressure healthcare professionals all keep an upbeat and civil attitude.  They do an amazing job with a near impossible situation.

And to brighten your day, a quick tale about our first visit to the ER:  After six hours of tests and waiting to see a doctor, they determined diverticulitis was the culprit.  For those not familiar with diverticulitis, imagine have kidney stones up and down the 27 miles of your intestinal tract.  It’s fun like that.  But while we were waiting in the bowels of the ER with the horde of other tortured souls, some thing or somebody walked by and the smell went off the Richter scale bad.  My wife turned to me with a look of horrific pain and disbelief.  For a split second I thought I saw an accusatory look on her face and I thought to myself, “Really, I’m flattered but only an evil mutant with a super power could produce that.”  Then everyone in the hallway started vigorously denying responsibility.  It was like someone was cleaning out the clogged toilets at Taco Bell, put the aftermath in a fishnet stocking and was whirling it in the air as they slowly walked by…and then sat down next to you.  I naturally had to make some choice comments and my wife started laughing to the point where she thought her appendix had burst.  This was the first of many occasions that I was asked to leave.

Final note: after the CEO of United Healthcare was assassinated, the killer leaving bullet shells with the word “Deny” written on them, the Insurance company referenced earlier in this column quickly made a management type decision to rescind their plan to cut back on anesthesia. 

My New Car with a Video Game Console

Outside of being lit on fire, there are few things I enjoy less than purchasing a new car.  Having said that, when faced with a lit match, I have three requirements when purchasing an automobile.  First, it needs to be reliable.  Someone could give me a rocket ship of a Lamborghini, but if I’m constantly bringing it in for repairs, it’s a non-starter.  

Second, the vehicle needs to get decent mileage and or a refueling time of less than 10 minutes.  I’m sorry, but I don’t plan well and dovetailing nicely with that characteristic, I have no patience.  People tell me I’m a joy to be with.  

Lastly, and this requirement trumps the first two: I’m extremely vain; I have to be able to look at the vehicle and not get violently ill.   If it makes me sick to look at a car, it wouldn’t matter if it ran on air like a flying carpet; I can’t pull the purchase trigger. Now add to these three requirements, I need a car that can fit into a small garage slot…for the purpose of thwarting the hooligans who run the transcontinental car theft ring.  One might say I need a mini car.

One of the new baffling car design flaws that I wanted to avoid started being implemented about two years ago.  They replaced the time honored and very logical PRNDL gearshift layout.  For over 50 years, at the top has always been Park, then Reverse, then Neutral, followed by Drive and then Low, the slow cousin to Drive.  I had the misfortune of encountering the new layout while renting a car in Florida…like I needed any more driving challenges.  The new layout is:  RND, with a P located in a rural hamlet outside of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.   It’s like the car designers were bored out of their minds, went out for a liquid lunch, came back to work and decided to break things.   With this new design, when you pull into a busy mall parking space and throw the gearshift up to the top, you erroneously think you’re in park.  Then you take your foot off the break and find out, holy crap, you’re actually in reverse.  At this point of horrific disbelief, you’re backing up over baby carriages and senior citizens as they try to get their walkers out of 2nd gear.  Seriously, it’s dangerous.   That design decision is akin to saying, we’re changing the color schema on traffic lights, and we’re not going to tell anyone.  Green still means go and yellow still means slow down, or speed up to avoid red depending on your political affiliation.  But to stop, we decided to make that color…invisible.  If you really want to stop, you’re going to have to work for it.  We replaced the blaring red light with a minuscule, inch square black light that 98% of the population will never see – Safe Travels!

So I do my homework reviewing the Consumer Reports CAR issue and find a vehicle that when it first came out years ago, people were burning through their warranty mileage due to the number of trips they were making to the repair shop.  But now, this vehicle has the number one rating for reliability.   And when I got to the picture of this particular car, I had no problem keeping my lunch down.   

I decided to head to a local dealership and get a first hand look at this vehicle.  One thing I forgot was that the car I was looking at in the magazine was the old car model.  What’s on the lot are the new models, and it’s been completely redesigned - Rut-Roh!  But it’s too late; I’m already under the ether.  

The new model looks up to snuff and my intestinal fortitude is intact.  It has tons of features that I’ll never use, except its 30 airbags.  You could drive this car off a cliff into the Grand Canyon, and bounce your way down to the Colorado River with nary a scratch.  The car actually performs well and has decent pickup.  But here’s the problem: You need a degree from MIT to be able to operate the car.  For starters, you’re required to have an iPhone to be able to run this computer, I mean car.  (You’ll have a new reason to keep iOS updated.)  And instead of a reasonably sized square management/entertainment screen, there is a two foot circular disc mounted off the center of the dashboard.  I’m sorry, but I’m a square guy, and now that I’ve just said that… There are more options per screen than a DJ has working the console at a rave.  

And if you don’t like a particular screen, just swipe left or right, or up or down.  There are an infinite number of screens with an infinite number of options of things you can do per screen.  Can you spell DISTRACTED.  

They also have their own emergency phone home capability.  The only problem is there are seven different ways to access it.  I’m pretty sure if I find myself upside down in a ditch and I need to execute this function, I won’t be able to remember one of the seven.  That’s if I can fight my way through the mountain of airbags.  It seems that the car designers with their wealth of driving and technical knowledge, didn’t have a good handle on what might work best for people.  Instead, they decided to let the user pick and choose among a plethora of options.  The net effect is that it now takes five touches to accomplish something where as in my old car it only took two.   As much as I appreciate the army of airbags, these car companies need to remember, for now, we’re actively driving these vehicles, not playing a video game.  I’m told this is progress.

And the best, on the ride home from the dealership I was finally able to maneuver to a screen, without driving into a tree, and play some Beatles music.  I get home, pull into my claustrophobic garage space, and then had to go into the house and get my wife, the technologist of the family.  I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the radio. As fate would have it, the radio “off” function is one of three items on the car that is not controlled by the circular screen of death.  It actually has a mechanical button you push in.  Hallelujah, I’m sold! 

Abraham, Where Art Thou!?!

At times, I’m completely baffled at the thoughts and actions of people within our great nation.  In particular I’m referring to the “sheeple” mentality that many of us have where we continue to support political people who have continually proven themselves to be heinous criminals, delinquent in some way, or just plain perverted.   

Generally speaking, we are judged by the company we keep.  If you hung out with Al Capone in the late 1920s, there’d be a decent chance you were viewed as a thug or criminal.  Modern day, we have Jeffery Epstein, who was arrested and or convicted of sex trafficking of minors and procuring a child for prostitution.  He easily gets classified as a very rich despicable sub human.  Who would keep his company?  Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were good friends of his - like they hung out together for years.  And the Donald doubled down when he was asked about Epstein’s long time madam who got 20 years for sex trafficking, saying, “Yeah, I wish her well.”  I can only imagine that they must have had a special relationship.   A rational person generally judges people and situations by “The Test of Time.”  These two deviants hung out with “Jeffery the Horrible” across multiple years.  And you didn’t know what was going on?  This defense goes in the category of “Yes, I smoked pot, but I never inhaled.”  It’s just not believable.  Stick your head in the sand if you want, but when you look in the mirror, you can’t lie to yourself.  How does it feel to say, “I’m supporting a pedophile?”  Kind of harsh, right?

In some cases you’d like to look the other way, especially if it’s a Robin Hood-esque type of offense.  Like dropping off the expensive leftovers from a White House feast at a local DC soup kitchen.  But unfortunately this is not the situation.  Case in point New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez collecting gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz and wads of cash sown into his clothing, all from his special friends in Egypt.  The current mayor of New York City also seems to be battling this affliction as it seems he has a less than holy relationship with folks in Turkey.

Then there are the politicians who can’t seem to keep their marriage vows.  There was a time when the media gave cheating politicians a hall pass.  That ended when Gary Hart, the Democratic front running candidate for the 1988 presidency stuck it in their faces…too many times.  This shift in attitude spelt doom for Ted Kennedy as well.  These days to qualify as a political candidate, it almost seems like you need to have multiple documented indiscretions on record along with acts of perversion.    In the perversion only category we have the ex-North Carolina Lieutenant Governor, who is still on the ballot for Governor.  Seems he likes to leave comments about his heinous political stances on porn websites.  At a minimum, one has to question his decision making process.  Al Franken, former SNL comedian and later a senator from Minnesota for ten years, was sited for sexual misconduct during an overseas USO show in the early 2000s.  To his credit, he apologized and resigned from the Senate.

Then we have the “Time to Get out of Town” politician category.  In 2021, in the midst of one of the worst icy winter storms to ever hit Texas, Ted Cruz tried to slip away unnoticed and fly to Cancun…while millions of his constituents froze in the dark.  Unfortunately for Ted, someone with a social media account saw him on the plane.   Ted was good enough to show up in Uvalde after the shooting stopped and 19 children were killed.  Of course once the press left he went back to supporting the gun lobby.

And finally we have the interesting case of George Santos, if that’s really his name.  George was finally expelled from Congress in August of 2024 just weeks before he was to go on trial for Fraud and Aggravated Identity Theft.  (There were a lot of juicy details about his criminal activities that will make a great Hallmark movie some day.)  But why with all of the clear evidence about his criminal activities was he allowed to stay in office as long as he did?  One can only wonder about his special relationships   

Sorry, no more comments about Donald Trump, his continuous actions speak for themselves.  That and I’m not allowed to take up multiple terabytes on BlogSpot.  But seriously, this is a bipartisan sickness that needs to be addressed before we achieve some sanity.

I understand that politicians working together can be difficult.  I get the notion of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”  But it should not include stashing gold bars in your coat pockets while said scratching is going on.   The list of less than charming characters either in political office or seeking office is astounding.  It feels like 98% of politicians give the rest a bad name.  Where are the Abraham Lincolns of the world?  Is it really that tough to find candidates with integrity?   We need someone who believes in Truth, Justice and the American Way!  Alas, Superman was an illegal alien too.

Cracking the Code on Streaming Services

Whatever happened to the notion of streaming content services with no commercials?  What I mean is, the deal we had with these new streaming services was: You pay extra for viewing our content and you get the pleasure of not having to bite off your fingernails waiting for commercials to end.   You need to go to the bathroom, no problem, just hit the pause button.  How civilized!  Sirius radio which is now in every car manufactured offered the same basic deal:  You pay us a ridiculous amount of money for content you’ll never listen to, or care to listen to and we won’t make you sit through commercials. 

But then something happened.  The rug got pulled out from underneath us.  Actually, a couple of rugs were pulled. As it turns out if you add up the cost of all these content providers you’ll be paying a ginormous king’s ransom every month.  MIT is working on the algorithm to determine if we can save $7 a month by giving up cable and going with streaming services over the internet.  They estimate having a prototype ready by 2026, it’s a tough nut to crack.  Recently, I heard there’s a new service called, “Sling.”  It promises very inexpensive content, but you have to watch it with one eye closed, otherwise you pay double.  And do we really want to use a service called Sling?  It just sounds like an illegal app only found on the Dark Web.  In the era of big brother is always watching, I’m sure the FBI is waiting for me to download the app so they can put me in the slammer for Slinging.  I’ve given up. They win on this front.  It’s just too painful to try to figure out and I can’t listen to the litany of pros and cons any more.  

But what I can tell you is that these services have broken their contract with the United States of America!  And what I mean is, let’s say you’re listening to Joel (Osteen) on Sirius.  He’s pontificating about some of David’s missteps, post slaying of Goliath.  Then all of a sudden you get a commercial for Fixed Term Life Insurance, brought to you by, “Who Did It and Ran.”  But wait a minute; I’m paying a lot of shekels for Sirius.  I’m not supposed to be getting commercials.  Obviously I didn’t read the deceptively fine print of the contract as my atomic microscope was in the shop for repairs.  The Hulu streaming service has also lost its moral compass.  Recently, without warning they began injecting commercials into their content.  And not only are they force-feeding commercials into their programing, but the commercials are odiously long and frequent.  They’re doubling down.  It's like they’re saying, “In your face, we don’t give a…hoot!”  (Good choice of four letter word, right?)  My wife spent about three hours online scouring every corner of the Internet universe looking for an explanation of what happened.  It seems in a distant dark region of the Web, out by Pluto, she found that Hulu is thinking of offering a new more expensive service with no commercials – what a surprise! Unfortunately you need a law degree to understand the verbiage of the new and improved contract, if you can find it.  The unredacted version is not available.

I think we can all see where this is going.  Over the last couple of years Wikipedia, my “goto” for online information began asking for donations to keep their business afloat.  Facebook has recently been making comments along the lines of…and I’m paraphrasing, “If you don’t give us access to all of your Personal Information (PI) and your contact lists, we’re going to need to start charging you for Facebook.  What’s next, are we going to need to write Al Gore a check every time we use the Internet? 

Happily, there is a rainbow at the end of this story.   But we all have to stick together, no division.  Remember, we are the United States of America! My hope is that these media organizations that enable our online world and the content in it do start charging the public directly for their services.  Here’s why…warning you may get dizzy trying to follow my fuzzy math.

Let’s say for an average family of four, we were charged:

• Five cents for every e-mail & text message we send or receive.  Figure 200 a day per person, that’s ~ $15,000 a year for the household.  

• Social Media - $2 a post, two posts a day.  Three platforms ~ $17,500 a year.  

• AI Tools - $500 a profile.  Run of the mill requests of the AI engine $10.  Want a term paper - $500.  Want a term paper that’ll get you into Stanford - $5,000.  (Your kid gets caught and you go to jail for helping, value to you: priceless) My wild guess at the annual cost for AI: $25,000.  And if you don’t pay, they’ll just create a new identity of you and it’ll pay.  How much are you loving AI now?

• Other services like Wikipedia, gaming, or the weather service etc:  To make the math easy ~ $10,000.  

• Internet access & a plentiful bundle of content we’ll never watch: ~ $12,500.

Conservatively, we come to a total of 80,000 after tax dollars a year to continue using these services that rot our minds and cause our kids to need an abundance of psychotherapy.  The simple math tells us this can’t go on.  In the words of John Lennon: Imagine!   

Imagine if we all came together and said, “No more!”  Kids would go outside and get exercise as a way of occupying their minds and bodies.  And to replace the adrenaline rush they need, maybe they try skydiving.  Or turn to artistic endeavors and create. Maybe we listen to music or try a really crazy idea…turn a couple of pages and read a book.  (Hopefully something inappropriate as determined by someone’s inappropriate rules.)  In the end, we work harder for what we want and become healthier - if the parachute opens.  And we stay out of jail by not helping our kids cheat their way into a good college.

Air Travel Gods looked the other way on July 19th

As if air travel wasn’t challenging enough, some of us, including those on the 2,000 USA flights that were cancelled on July 19th were treated to a rude awakening.  As much as Artificial Intelligence is simultaneously going to destroy us and enable us to reach new heights, it couldn’t save any of us on July 19th.

So after another attempt at flyfishing, we’re driving back to Salt Lake City airport from the northwest corner of Utah.  It’s about a three and a half hour drive.  But first, a quick painful flyfishing story: I have all new microscopic leader on the end of my fly line.  Naturally, someone else put it on as tying knots is not my thing.  Before we leave for the river, I masterfully attach a sumptuous fly (a massive black Mormon Cricket the size of Nevada) to the very tip of my line and use my handy dandy clipper to remove the excess line.  You see you need to remove the excess line because these are exceptionally intelligent fish - think brain food. If you leave excess line near your fly, the trout will have none of it.  No AI here, these fish learn the old-fashioned way, trial and error.  As we’re fishing and I’ve endured a commensurate amount of angst, it becomes clear that my fly is not as enticing as I thought it was.  Time to change the fly.  I come to realize I can’t find my clipper, I must have left it back at the cabin.  So I yank off my fly, again the old-fashioned way.  And with the assistance of Walgreen’s Foster Grants, I’m able to thread the microscopic tip of my line through a submicroscopic hole in my new tiny fly…that had to be constructed using an atomic microscope.  Okay, new knot has been tied and a minimal amount of four letter words have been disbursed.  I need to clip off the excess line stemming from my new knot.  Without my clippers I need to resort to using my teeth to remove the excess line…much like Huckleberry Finn would do.  As I attempt to chomp down on the excess line, I feel the point of my new fly hook piercing my lower lip.  Luckily there were no carnivores in sight.  {Note: We get back to the cabin that night, I take off my fly vest and find my clippers in a small top pocket of the vest.  Who said life is fair?;-}

On the way back to the airport we pass what had to be the port-a-potty capital of the world.  Being that I had just relinquished my own front yard garden variety port-a-potty during a 12 week kitchen renovation, I felt an earned appreciation for this sea of equipment on display for all to see.  Heated seats, huckleberry scenting, built in stereos, they had it all.  Add a microwave and you have a very tiny house.  It was about the time we were passing this amazing display of hi-tech equipment that the radio alerted us about a snafu in the technology that our global airline industry uses.  At first I was nonchalant about the news, thinking, “Oh too bad for them.”  Whoever them is.  Then my iPhone buzzed with an alert from my airline and I quickly realized I was one of them.  The message: Due to circumstances beyond our control, your flight will be delayed two hours.  I’ve learned over the years that a message like that means, we have no idea how long you’ll be camped out at the airport…make yourself comfortable.  

It seems that a security company named, Crowdstrike and Microsoft had a finger pointing contest trying to decide who was responsible for allowing a revision of new software to flummox the global airline industry.  And when it happened, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…and all the king’s AI bots, couldn’t get humpty back up and running again.  At least not right away.  For more years than I’d like to admit to, I worked in the technology field.  One of the scariest times was when we were forced to upgrade a customer’s code before it was fully baked.  Invariably, horrendously bad things would happen and the lashing received from my customer would leave permanent scares.  I remember during one such occasion we thought we caught the bug in the new code that had just crashed their world.  Upon suggesting we try it again, my customer looked me sternly in the eyes and said, “I’d rather be lit on fire than try that again.” 

Back at Salt Lake City Airport, an angry mob of potential flyers is waiting around our new gate.  The captain for our flight arrives and begins to address the mob, many of which have started lighting torches.  I liken the scene to an old Frankenstein movie where the townsfolk are surrounding the castle where the monster is hanging out.  The good doctor comes out trying to convince the crowd that has much as the monster has ripped off a couple of heads, he’s really a nice guy once you get to know him.   Actually the captain did a very nice job of clearly explaining the situation and that it wasn’t his fault, this time.  He went on to explain that we do have a plane and it does have fuel and he knows how to fly it to Newark, NJ.  People seemed to calm down and I was thinking of asking him if he’d like to run for President.   

It was a smooth flight home; we made up some time and land with no problems.  Spirits were high.  As we’re taxiing to the new, state of the art Terminal A, with it’s bazillion available gates, the head flight attendant gets on the PA system and asks that anyone who does not have a connecting flight to hold your horses and let those running to a connecting flight to pass.  All of these stressed out people are lined up in the aisle ready to bolt.  As we pull into our gate, we’re all cheering them on with words of encouragement.  You could smell the good karma wafting in the air.  Then, as luck would have it, someone lit a stink bomb and we waited 20 minutes for someone to connect the jetway to the plane and open the door.   And with that, pop goes the karma balloon!  

So maybe the taking off, tracking, and the landing of aircraft is not the area we should cut back on as if these peoples’ jobs are akin to those who flip burgers at McDonalds.  For the last year I’ve noticed that “no gate available” and “no people to man the jetway” are neck and neck delays.  And just because in preparation for one of my flights this year, where the pilot ran our plane into the jetway… this should not raise a red flag…especially if you have laser focus watching the bottom line.  In the not so distant future I can see the airline industry’s new motto will be, “Safety Second!”

Kitchen Magic

So we’ve had a small kitchen project (small in the sense that our kitchen is small) going on for 9 plus weeks and I’ve had enough.  My patience is now like a gift card.  Not sure how much is left on it, but we can give it a try.  As I professionally raise my voice to the contractor I feel like the Pope who was yelling at Michelangelo as he was working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Me/Pope: “When will you make an end of this!?!”  My contractor/Mich’s response: “It will be done, when it is done.”  

A combo convection oven / microware is part of our cadre of new appliances we now have.  This seems counterintuitive as it comes with metal grates.  And remembering as if it was yesterday, when I accidently left a baby fork in a microwave…sparks flying around as if it were a fourth of July fireworks show, I’m thinking how can this new combo be safe?   I’ll never use this.   Instead, in the dark of night I’ll go to Best Buy or PC Richards (where you can still potentially buy and take home a product) and purchase a toaster over and separately a microwave.  I can’t have them shipped to the house because if they show up on the doorstep, my wife will take it as a personal affront, return the items and send me to purgatory but yet again.  Seems her gift card is on empty these days too.

Also in the lineup is a new full oven.  It’s an interesting creature.  Raritan Valley Community College is going to be offering a class on how to communicate with it.  You need a master in computer science to navigate the various levels of the command panel.  It’s also quite vocal.  When you wake up the beast, it makes the sound from Star Trek when Captain Kirk and his landing crew would beam down to a planet below.  Only a lot louder.  If Kirk was trying to scare the crap out of the people waiting for the landing party, he could use our oven.  And when food is finished cooking it makes a very melodic ding noise.  It’s the same noise that European subways emit when they’re making stops.  I’m waiting for a British voice to say, “Mind the Gap.”  And the oven takes a while to cool down.  While it’s in this cool down mode, it sounds like a toilet that is stuck in flush mode.  I find myself continually getting up to check the bathroom.

We have a new electric cooktop.  We had an electric one before, but it was vintage 80s gear and was probably days away from burning our house down.  This new cooktop is a single piece of glass and it doesn’t matter where you place a pot or pan on it…it will heat that spot.  A little scary, right?   But to be clear, that scary cooktop magic will only happen if you’re using your new, read expensive pots and pans designed for such a cooktop.  If you try to use your existing pots and pans (like I would do) you won’t even be able to warm soup.  I will not be going near this appliance either.  It has “accident waiting to happen” written all over it.  We’re going to need to put a special paws off training class together for the cat…the same cat that clawed my face last month.  Hmmm, might need to put that class on the back burner ;-}

We found out the hard way that the old style circular shutoff water valves currently installed in our house are no longer used because they rust and leak.  We now have a number of leaks in our basement.  Luckily we have plenty of pots no longer in use.  I won’t be touching the new hi-powered dishwasher either.

And the piece of resistance: I’ve had an industrial size dumpster that takes up both sides of my driveway for over nine weeks.  And to contrast the dumpster, I also have a wonderfully odiferous port-a-potty planted up against my front garden…no pun intended.  Recently local neighborhood workers have been knocking on my door asking to use the port-a-potty.  (I kid you not)  I’m thinking of converting it into a pay port-a-potty and make a little cash on the side.  The neighbors are loving the view.  We’ve become the pariah of the neighborhood.  No threats yet, but with the constant dirty looks I get, they can’t be far off.  One neighbor suggested I paint the port-a-potty something bright and metallic.  He said, “It’ll make the port-a-potty…POP!”   I told him Thanks, but I’ll pass on a popping port-a-potty.