Lucky Gym

Dear WordPress Friends,

Wow!  I never would have guessed that the gym was such a great place to meet women.  The other day I was at the gym lifting weights, on the chest press machine.  I was pushing a gentlemanly 35 pounds, grunting in a manly way, with my pecs rippling underneath my shirt.  I admit that I was looking hot and masculine in my cool weightlifting t-shirt, shorty shorts, stylish black cotton socks, and Birkenstock Boyz® workout shoes.  I guess I was reeking with a sexy sweat and testosterone musk smell, because a woman walked by and briefly stopped to look at me.  Of course she would.  I was looking damn good!  I thought nothing more of it and continued with my lifting.  But then, get this, the same woman comes wandering back by again!  And stopped again to give me the twice over.  She.  Wanted.  Me.  You could just see it in her eyes.  I’m going back tomorrow and camp out on that chest press machine.  She’s bound to come by.  I want to show off my skills, along with my hot outfit and manly body.  She’ll be drooling over me in no time.  I think I’m gonna get laid!

GnuKid

Sexy, right?

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Irrationally Siblingated

Got a phone call from Daughter Person this afternoon.  A care package I’d sent had arrived and she wanted to thank me.  Took the opportunity to catch up a bit (why, yes, I should have been busily working instead of yakking…why do you ask?).

One topic of conversation was the Boy Child.  She’s felt a bit left out of his life because he’s not good at keeping in touch and, complicating that, he’s been dating lately.  I may have said too much when I informed her that he’d left on vacation – – –

GnuKid:  Well, I know he left this morning.

Daughter Person:  WHAT?  He went on vacation?  Where did he go?

GK:  Jamaica.  Hey, I just got the itinerary from him last night*.

DP:  WHAT?  I’m his only sibling and he didn’t tell me he was going out of country.

GK <barely stifling my laughter>:  Well, I’m his only father and he only gave me the itinerary last night.

DP <mildly incensed>:  And he left this morning?  Is he going there with anyone?

GK <starting to feel a bit sheepish at revealing apparent Boy Child secrets)>:  Well, yes…he’s going with his girlfriend.

DP:  WHAT?**  Oh, she’s just not right for him.

GK:  What do you mean?

DP:  Well, I’ve only seen one picture of her.  She just doesn’t look to be his type.  I mean, look…she’s blonde!

GK:  I’ve only seen one picture of her and I think she’s an attractive lady and he looks very happy in the picture.

DP:  And her name…c’mon…Stacy?  Just not ‘him’***.

GK <laughing openly now t her irrationality>:  What should her name be?  Gertrude?  Stella?  Jessica?  Amy?

DP:  I don’t know…it’s just not right.

GK:  So, he should base his dating choices subject to your approval.

DP:  Well, yeah!

GK:  <laughing so I can’t talk>

Daughter Person saw the futility in further conversation on this with me and quickly changed the subject.

Trying to decide now whether or not to forewarn Boy Child.

…a storm is a’coming from South Africa…

<Chortle>

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*Which is technically true.  Now, he had told me the last time we talked on the phone that a vacation was in the works.  Apparently he didn’t even let her know he was thinking of going.  Oops.

**Now I’m starting to worry that DP’s hearing is going bad

***Okay, to be fair, Boy Child has favored darker haired women…and enjoyed hanging out with Asian young  ladies in High School.  This Scandinavian blond is a departure from his norm.

Job Assignments

I’m in a gopher farm.  That’s the one where there are lots of cubicles and, if there’s any kind of commotion, people’s heads pop up over the walls like gophers peeking out of their holes. 

yeah, we really look like that

I didn’t want to be in this room in the first place.  But when I was directed by the boss to go there (“…so you can be closer to the people you’ll be working with…”*), I only had a few cubicles to choose from.  The one right next to the front door of the room…or the one right outside the boss’s office.

I chose the one by the front door for a couple reasons.  First, it made for a quick escape whenever it was time to go home or go to lunch.  Second, I actually had a window!  But the bigger reason was the boss himself.  At the time, we had a boss who was an avid proponent of the L.O.S.T. method of handing out jobs.

L.O.S.T. – Line Of Sight Tasking

In other words, when the boss had a job to hand out, his tendency was to give it to the first person he sees when he walks out the door.  I HAD to have the office most removed from his sight.

Well, since moving in, the boss has moved on**.  The new boss?  A milquetoast.  Rarely in the office and quiet as a mouse when she is.  She’s handed off the job assignment task to her deputy dawg.  He does not use L.O.S.T. to assign jobs.  He uses the “You’re next on my list” method.  No matter that I may be uniquely qualified to do the next or last job on his list.  No matter that my other assignments are butt-ugly and take lots of my time to do already.  It’s my turn to get a job, so I get it.  <heavy sigh>

But there’s partially*** good news.  I changed my office recently.  We’ve had quite the turnover of people, so a couple offices opened up.  I now have a quiet office, relatively out of view of the boss types (not that they don’t track me down still).

And I still long for a boss who actually knows how to assign jobs to the right people at the right time…and know when to tell their bosses, “No, we’re not doing that!”

A dream, I’m thinking…

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*<smirk> …like I’m actually going to work…

**He has found his “Peter Principle”, rising to a position where he is totally incompetent to accomplish the job.

***…and it will remain “partially” until I can retire!

Aquatic Irony

The ocean has a way of teaching us all Mother Nature is really in charge, not us.  We pitiful humans can have grandiose schemes of controlling and manipulating the oceans, but they always seems to win in the end.  Note especially the painfully long and arduous process of trying to cap the leaking well in the Gulf (graphically portrayed and ‘splained by Daisyfae here).

On my recent adventure to Costa Rica, there were a couple dive experiences that reminded me of this as well.

On one dive, I got to dive on a wreck of a fishing boat.  It wasn’t too deep…60 feet or so.  And the boat had been down there long enough that the ocean (and likely treasure hunting or salvaging scuba divers) had devoured all but the shell of the boat.  What struck me as ironic was that this boat, built and used for the sole purpose of dragging the fish from the sea, gasping, in order to feed the humans on shore…was now happily populated by schools of hundreds of fish.  What once was the bane of the fish, was now respite and cover for whole herds* of them!

Now owning the Captain's wheel house...

The ocean is winning...

Home sweet boat

The second event was when my deputy, adjacent, assistant, auxiliary dive buddy got caught in a wave surge underwater while taking pictures.  The surge drove her into the coral face where we were diving.  Not too roughly, actually.  But, unfortunately, right into a large sea urchin.

Looking something like this one...

She thought she’d been cut on the knee, as it hurt like a mother.  But, an examination underwater of the site revealed no blood (thus preventing her from being chum for the local sharks).  However, on return to the surface, when she removed her swim skin?  Here’s what she found…

Ewww....

Each blackened mark had a little spike embedded in it.  And it still hurt like the dickens (well, she said it did…I felt fine, thanks for asking [chortle]).  The next day, it looked like this – – –

Tattooed for life?

Still looked nasty, but feeling much better.  The following day, the black dots began to disappear.  No permanent scarring.

Great fun, still.  And will definitely be going again.

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*Yes, I know it’s ‘schools’…I just enjoy mixing my metaphors, phrases, and stuff like that.  You know, a penny saved is worth two in the bush.

Kismet on the 4th

Okay, technically it’s the 3rd of July and Independence Day is tomorrow.  But, I guess tonight celebrated the drunken throw down our founding fathers had the night before signing the Declaration of Independence (which could account for the illegible scribblings of most of the signatories of that document — John Hancock being the exception, but a known megalomaniac overachiever, despised by the rest of the Continental Congress*).

Anyway, back to it… Dear Friend and I wandered downtown for a festival where they shut down a few streets of the city and set up stages for music, plus allow the local fried, greasy, quasi- food vendors to kick up prices and ladle out cholesterol-laden delights.

Oh, and there was beer.  Lots and lots of beer.

We didn’t so much enjoy the crowds, but did wander from one beer stand to the next, stopping occasionally in between to eat something (for strength…to get us to that next beer, of course), to watch some talented young kids from our neck of the woods doing a clever juggling routine, and, of course, to loose with our dance to the music of some pretty damn good bands.  Salsa and free style being the dances of choice (mandated by the music, of course), we kicked it for upwards of an hour and a half of sheer fun.

The evening was to cap off with a fireworks display.  The majority of the crowd meandered out of the music tents towards the river, where the show would be.  Both Dear Friend and I, our legs weary and the car a long way off, decided to wander in that direction, all the while keeping an eye for the start of the show and hoping we could find some semblance of a good place to watch.

That’s when Kismet hit.

Away from the majority of the crowd and a third of the way back to the car, the fireworks show started – – – a few hundred yards away from us across an empty parking lot with the clearest of clear views.  Not the best show I’ve seen, but being so close and having such an unobstructed view made it all that much better.

The raucous cacophony of the bursts, so close to us, reverberated through our bodies.  Crackles, bangs, and deep, throaty booms of the big explosions.  We were close enough that we could smell the remnants of the gunpowder from those fireworks.  And the colors?  Beautiful.  A riot of reds, blues, greens, purples, and whites careened through the sky in waterfall patterns and explosions and even a series of a dozen smiley faces.

Picture found here

I glanced over at Dear Friend during the finale, which was amazingly loud, bright, and thrilling, to see her staring skyward like a little kid seeing her first show, her lips forming a silent “Wow!”.

Beer, Dance, Fireworks, Dear Friend…

Yeah…

Happy 4th!

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*yes, i made that up.  but so what?  it’s more fun this way.