Checklist

Pre-Trip Planning Checklist:

# Haircut

# Clean out, fumigate, and organize tackle box.( I can’t keep putting this off...)

# By whatever means possible, bring body weight down below critical 190 level, before the three week calorie-fest to come.

# Purchase new running shoes. The old ones now have over 1500 miles on them. Much running to do in Maine to keep body weight under the Mendoza line by the time I return to RVA. Have debate with myself over whether or not to buy Nike shoes. Should I boycott the Kaepernick thing, or contribute to Nike’s bottom line considering the not insignificant position of their stock in my retirement portfolio?

# Go to Hope Thrift to search for quirky novels from the book section.

# Spend inordinate amount of time showering Lucy with love and affection to assuage guilt of decision to leave her at home. She already can sense our betrayal...

# Craft clever and thoughtful away message for office phone, striking the perfect balance between contrition, embarrassment, and gratitude for having taken two three week vacations in one summer.

# Make sure that all life-sustaining prescriptions are filled.

# Finish up all outstanding paperwork at work, prepare assistant for inevitable mistakes I will have left behind, reminding her of proper protocol for fixing them while I’m away...you can call, but I can’t promise I’ll answer. Remember to buy her a bag full of Maine gifts to present to her upon my return since I’m pretty sure she’s gonna be pretty pissed at me by then.

What’s Next?

You never know how a year is going to turn out when it starts. You can plan all kinds of things, but then stuff happens. 2018 has been an out of nowhere type of year where it’s been one thing after another. So, if you can tolerate it, let me catalogue the weirdness for you...

January...dishwasher blows up, flooding our kitchen, resulting in a week and a half stay in a hotel while our entire downstairs got ripped up and replaced. $

February...hole in wall caused by furniture movers takes two weeks and two different contractors to repair. One of our dearest friends in all the world becomes horribly ill and nearly dies, spending most of the month in the hospital clinging to life. Washing machine dies. $

March...Pam’s sister and mother have back to back surgeries. Pam has her credit card info stolen and some dude tries to buy a computer with it while we are in Myrtle Beach trying to get away from all of the tumult. We learn that Patrick and Sarah’s wedding is going to be a lot more expensive than we thought. $$$

April... I turned 60 and, as if on cue, begin having age-related difficulties...which are not only troubling, but also...$$

May...preparations for son’s nuptials heats up. Stress and strain begins to build. $$$$

June...wedding a fabulous success. Relief palpable.

July...back in the fall of 2017, flush with cash and optimism, and before I knew what a dumpster fire 2018 would turn out to be, I made the decision to book TWO three week vacations in Maine. Deposits were made, reservations confirmed. The July trip was a triumph. The upcoming September-October Trip feels excessive in light of...

August...upon our return from three weeks in Maine, our upstairs air conditioning unit rudely expired, along with our water heater...$$$$$

Although the amount of money I have spent this year on both the unexpected and the excessive is staggering, the silver lining is that business has been brisk, and has...so far...kept up with the deluge.

Nonetheless, despite the foolishness of it, I have not cancelled my second Maine vacation. We leave in one week to once again escape the madness of 2018. This will be our home for another three weeks. We will entertain a few friends for part of that time, and for all three weeks I won’t be thinking about how much any of it cost. I will live in the moment at this place...

It won’t be until the drive home when I’ll start worrying about which appliance will blow up when we walk in the door.

Would The Last Person Leaving America Please Turn Out The Lights?

Thirty years ago, this guy and his sorry excuse for a beard showed up in front of the Senate Judiciary committee for his confirmation hearings to become a Supreme Court Judge. Before the hearings were over, his last name had officially become a...verb.

According to Webster’s, to BORK someone is to...“to attack or defeat (a nominee or candidate for public office) unfairly through an organized campaign of harsh public criticism or vilification.” Ever since then, Supreme Court confirmations have become high drama passion plays. If the nominee is from a Republican President, the Code Pink ladies can be counted on to show up for their fifteen minutes of theatrics, warning us all about the large scale slaughter of women about to befall the republic. If the nominee is from a Democrat president, we can count on the NRA to predict the wholesale seizure of guns from law abiding citizens which is just around the corner. Each senator on the committee tries to outdo the other with empassioned speeches, masquerading as questions. When the nominee is a conservative and the proceedings get out of control, Democrats call the chaotic dissent, the highest form of patriotism. When the nominee is a liberal, the chaos is nothing less than high treason! For someone like me who is so easily embarrassed by government, it is about as bad as it gets.

Well, yesterday I actually learned something new. I saw something I had never seen before. I was on a treadmill at the gym...you know, running in place, getting nowhere ( how deliciously ironic ). The hearings were on the screens in front of me with captions at the bottom. It was later in the afternoon, so I had missed the pink ladies and the temper tantrums from the morning sessions. I was watching The Senators making their opening statements. The camera would alternate between the preening Lindsey Graham and the solemn stone face of the nominee. After a while, it got really boring watching his blank expression so I started checking out the various people behind the nominee in the first row of the gallery. The only person of interest was a reasonably attractive woman just off the nominee’s left shoulder. I didn’t know who she was. She looked too young to be his wife and too old to be his daughter. And that was about all the thought I gave her...until this morning.

According to the left, I learn that this woman’s name is Zina Bash, and not only is she insufferably smug, but she spent the entirety of her time on camera signaling to America that Brett Kavanaugh is the approved candidate of White Nationalists. How do they know this? Because she was flashing what everyone in America knows is the white power hand sign.

I consider myself a reasonably informed citizen. I mean, I don’t watch C-Span 24 hours a day, but I read a lot more than the average bear and try to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Well, this was a new one on me. Apparently, the universal sign for A-Ok ...

..has somehow been transformed into some sort of secret handshake of the Neo-Nazi movement. Only, if you spend two minutes researching the thing, you discover that the Anti-Defamation League says it’s a hoax perpetrated by the notorious website 4chan. But, why let the facts get in the way of a great story? If you look carefully at this photograph, the position of her right hand as it rests on her left forearm looks awfully suspicious...

Ladies and gentlemen, it has come to this in my country. 

Here’s my interpretation of this new hand sign...

Actually, the reach of the white power movement might be so much worse than I thought...

Sunday Morning Puns

One day, the monks at the monastery decided they needed to raise money.

Friar Tuck decided to start a florist's shop. It was a success! All the villagers nearby loved to buy flowers from the men of God.

All except one, that is.

The local florist! He was getting run out of business by the monks. He went to the Friar and asked him to close their shop, but they refused.

A week later, he went back again, and begged the Friar to close down the shop - he was going bankrupt, and his family was hungry!

Again, they refused.

Another week still, the florists's mother went to the monastery and nagged them to close down to save her poor old son.

And yet again, they refused.

The local florist was fed up with the monks, and spent the last of his money to hire Hugh McTagart, the roughest thug in town, and well know for doing anything for money.

Hugh went to Friar Tuck, and told him that if he didn't close their florist shop, he'd have to 'persuade' them. Initially, Tuck refused-- but when McTagart began to smash up the shop and threaten the pacifist monks, he caved in and closed the shop.

Just goes to show you; Hugh, and only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

What kind of exercise do lazy people do?

....diddly-squats

I hear that Apple is working on building an electric car, but they’re having trouble...installing windows.

Newspaper headline about a tightrope walker who walked across the Han river in Korea...

Skywalker Crosses Han Solo 

Pragmatism. Are There Any Limits?

Pragmatism. It’s a word I hear a lot these days whenever the subject of Donald Trump comes up. It’s like a get-out-of-jail free card for my evangelical friends seeking cover for their support of a President who seems completely at odds with, well...Christianity. Webster’s defines a pragmatist as someone who is more concerned with the practical rather than the idealistic. In other words, pragmatism is centered around what works, what is utilitarian, not philosophical. In their telling, Trump was far superior to Hillary Clinton, and despite his clear character flaws, they are holding their noses while enjoying a booming economy and a more conservative Supreme Court.

Ok.

So, just so I’m clear...from now on in American politics, it no longer matters what kind of moral values politicians have, it doesn’t matter anymore how reprobate a politician’s private life has been...as long as they deliver the goods, meaning, they serve up your preferred governing philosophy, either conservative or liberal. All that matters now is...what works. Interesting.

Fidel Castro’s Cuba featured a drastic increase in the literacy rate for that island nation. In addition, everyone was given free health care. Are my evangelical/conservative friends ok with Castro? 

Mussolini, by all accounts, was the first and last Italian leader to make the trains run on time. We cool with Mussolini?

Adolf Hitler put the German people back to work, transforming the Weimar Republic’s moribund economy, and restored the pride of the German people. Are we to celebrate Hitler’s pragmatism?

Let me be clear...I am not suggesting that our President is on a par with these three tyrants. I am simply asking if there is a limit to pragmatism? Are we as Christians prepared to except any level of lying, any illegality, any sordid personal behavior, as long as we get a conservative Supreme Court judge? If the answer is yes, then, what happens when the lying, criminal, amoral President...is a Democrat? On what grounds will any conservative or any Christian be able to criticize him or her? 

Therapy Jokes

The results of yesterday’s blog are in and they remind me of the old advice given to first year law students...When interrogating a witness on the stand, never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to.

Here I was thinking that I would use the power of this blog to sway public opinion in my favor in a private disagreement I was having with my wife. I would take advantage of my powers of persuasion, my reader’s natural affection for Lucy, and the overall wild popularity of dogs in general. When the overwhelming support of my position came pouring in via the comment section, I was planning on saying something like...Huh, wow...it seems like an awful lot of people think we should take Lucy to Maine...

Instead, my argument was unanimously rejected...not only online, but two guys at my office poked their heads in my office yesterday to say...Leave Lucy at home, moron. My defeat was so complete, so humiliating, that I spent much of last night searching the Internet for more horrible Dad Jokes to cheer myself up. If the reader is rolling their eyes right now, all I can say is...you should have thought of the possible consequences when you sided with Pam and threw me under the bus!!

Why can’t you take inventory in Afghanistan?

Because of the Tally Ban.

Why should you never trust a train?

Because they have loco motives.

Everyone should learn sign language.

It’s pretty handy.

What do you do with a dead chemist?

You barium.

Advertising slogan for an auto-body shop...

We come highly wreck-a-mended.

What do you call an owl who does magic tricks?

Hoooooodini.

Big Decision

This blog made a ghastly error recently by allowing National Dog Day to go by without comment. It was this past Sunday, August 26. What could I possibly have been thinking?

You all know of my love of dogs, in particular  Golden retrievers, and specifically...Miss Lucy...

   

You also know that of all of our Goldens, Lucy has been and remains the most...er, unique. She is a bundle of energy, athleticism, and beauty with more nervous ticks than a guy with Tourette’s after three cups of coffee. Therein lies a dilemma. Because she is so high maintenance and such a drama queen, my wife and I are at odds over whether or not to take her to Maine with us in two weeks. I am in favor of it. Pam is not. A decision must be made soon. Here are the entirely valid arguments Pam makes for her position:

1. When you have a dog with you for three weeks, it limits what kind of side trips you can take since you can’t leave Lucy in a strange house (or any house really) for longer than about five hours.

2. Although Lucy loves the lake and delights in swimming and retrieving all sorts of things, she cannot be trusted to not take off into the deep woods or a neighbor’s cabin on a whim...unleashed dogs being a huge no-no in our rental agreement. 

3. It’s one thing when Lucy gets freaked out during a thunder storm and pees on a rug here at home...another thing entirely when she does it in an expensive rental home.

4. Despite the fact that Lucy is an awesome traveler, more well behaved, in fact, than I am on long trips...traveling with her makes finding a hotel mid-trip much more difficult. There aren’t as many dog friendly hotels as you might think.

5. Leaving her alone in a strange house for even short trips into town makes Pam nervous. What if there’s a loud sound and she goes crazy? What if she starts barking and disturbing others?

All of these are valid arguments.

My counter arguments are mostly emotional.

1. I miss her too much if we are apart for three weeks.

2. SHE LOVES THE LAKE...

  

3. She’s a great snuggle buddy...

So, as you can see, my wife has the better argument. What shall we do? I welcome your input.