WWLS(HODC"S")D?

When the stress of the office gets to be too much for me, I like to take a moment and ask myself, what would Les Stroud, host of Discovery Channel’s “Survivorman” do?

· Seek Shelter – In an office environment, you may not always know which direction danger will come from. That’s why it is important to create a secure shelter. An abandoned conference room may seem ideal, but they often have no windows and only a single entrance, which means if you were attacked, you would be trapped. A better idea is to pull some crappy artwork off the wall and use it as a cube roof. This way you are protected from the elements, but can escape over the back wall if you need to.

· Make clothing – to survive the torrential BS of an office environment, the proper clothing is essential, and the most important clothing of all, is your footwear. Fortunately, the office is full of useful materials. A laptop case and a roll of packing tape will make a serviceable pair of waterproof boots.

· Forage – At first glance, the office environment may seem totally inhospitable to life. Look closer though, and you’ll find you can survive here, if you know what to look for. Food sources can vary greatly by season. In winter, conference rooms can be a good source for catering leftovers. The rest of the year however, you’re better off looking for wild edibles. “Lucky Bamboo” grows wild here, and the tender shoots are not only packed with nutrients, but delicious as well. Roses are also good to eat, but watch out for thorns. Filing cabinets, especially those of the female office drone, are also a good resource. Then there is the cafeteria. Many a would-be survivor has been tempted to just buy food, or steal it from a break room refrigerator, but in reality, that is the worst thing you could do. Breakrooms and cafeterias are major gathering spots for office predators. I was on a survival retreat at Geico with a young man who tried to buy a hot pocket. We never saw him again. Avoid cafeterias and breakrooms if you want to live.

· Find Water – Humans can live for weeks without food, but only a couple of days without water. Since cafeterias and breakrooms are not an option, and bathrooms are just as bad, that leaves digging. Luckily, most office buildings maintain potted plants or even trees. You’ll want to avoid any surface water in these containers – it is undoubtedly tainted with fertilizer, discarded gum, and layer upon layer of quiet despair and crushed dreams. Instead, dig down a few inches and save the water that collects.

· Build a Fire – Although the climate of the office environment means a fire is usually not necessary for warmth, it can have a big psychological impact and give you the boost you need to keep going. In a survival situation, that could be the difference between life and death. I’ve found office supply rooms to be the best source of tinder. Binders, legal pads and even toner make it much easier to get the fire going. Use paper clips and a laptop battery as an ignition source. In offices that meet national fire safety codes, building a fire can also be an effective way to gather water, just be sure you have a secure shelter first (see above).

· Play Harmonica – Another psychological boost, and it may keep some predators away too.

· Signal for Rescue – The most important thing when signaling a rescue party is to be prepared. Keep a stack of damp procedural binders on hand to throw on the fire to create a smoke signal, or polish the semi-reflective surface of a blackberry or other cell phone and use it to get a search and rescue team’s attention. If all else fails, send an email to me and I’ll come pick you up.

Sundogs

You know it's cold outside when you see this:

I think god shows us this stuff just to help us tolerate living in a place that get's down to -25 F.

Important

Not that anyone reads this, but if you are, and you happen to be a veteran, thanks man.

Does anything not suck anymore?

My daughter asked me that question shortly after turning thirteen (and acquiring the commensurate level of teen angst the age implies). We were just sitting there watching a show about submerged freshwater caves, so the question caught me a little off guard. I stumbled through it as best I could with a quasi-reassuring “No, of course not, there’s plenty of things that don’t suck.” or something like that. I don’t think she bought it, and when I thought more about it later, neither did I. Admittedly I have a habit of what my wife calls “nostalgizing” the past and remembering everything as one great big happy, and maybe I was just in a negative mood, what with the caves and all (damn caves!) but as I sat there thinking about it, as far as the world outside my own little family bubble was concerned, everything just seemed to, well, suck. I don’t want to get into specifics too much because then I start with the unending “When I was a kid…” litany which nobody really wants to hear. It's just depressing to see my kids growing up in a world so different than the one I had. Hmm.. I bet my parents would say that too now that I think of it.

Submitted for Your Consideration:

Proof that John McCain is Gene Simmons' Biological Father!

Names can hurt

A new restaurant is coming to town and they posted a contest on the local newspaper to give it a name. Here are my thoughts on the entries so far:

Suggested Name: Makes me think:
63 Central - Sounds like a gas station
Athena’s Cuisine - Issa Bund-t?
Awaken - No comment (My wife submitted this one)
Bent International - It's a joke right?
Boju - I had a cat named Boju once. He disappeared. Mystery solved I guess.
Bolo Grille - Hip. I like it. (I did this one) I've since learned this is the name of Bobby Flay's restaurant in New York. I guess I knew that already. Doh!!
Bravo on Broadway - No encore here.
Broadview Grille - A lump of dog poo called, it wants its imagination back.
Broadway Bistro - How about Broadway kiss my ass.
Broadway Horizon - Bad association witha local day care. Uh uh.
Charlie Jordan’s - And he is…?
CityScape - Great, if you drive a batmobile.
Downtown - I guess you could always go here when you're alone and life is making you lonely.
Duexes - I can't even say this word.
Fresh Creations - Might get sued by Mentos.
Granite - Might as well call it Marble, or Drywall, or Stucco (ooh I like that one)
Grata - Sophisticated, worldly, yet grateful. I like it.
Gus’ - You're going to make your staff say this every time they answer the phone? You sir are evil.
Haute - Paris submitted this one.
Incredible Edibles - Lame lame lame lame lame. This is what you call your baked goods booth, not your restaurant.
International Crossroads - Go home Mr. 7 syllables.
Malloy’s - Bob Malloy? He owes me $20!
Med City Bar & Grille - Because hospitals make me hungry.
Mystique - Weird scaly blue chick from x-men. I would never order the fish.
Native - Native what? Native dumbass?
Nosh - Oy.
Passport - To what? Paradise? Great Savings? Salmonella?
Radcliffy’s - I will pay not to have it named this.
Razzies on Broadway - Tuesday is free nipple tassel night.
Restaurant Avant Guarde - If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
Romeo’s - I will bring you your fettuccini and then make passionate love to you atop it!
Silvers - Hi ho.
The Bacchus on Broadway (means God of Wine) - Bacchus - god of weenies.
The Downtown Crown - Can you add "clown" to that somewhere?
The Overlook - Overlooking half your order. Great.
Twist of Taste - Sounds painful
Vinny’s International Twist - I don't want Vinny twisting anywhere near my food.
Windows on Broadway - Like MS Windows. Expensive, slow, and annoying.

Culture Shock

Until a few years ago, I’d never had an office job. It was always warehouse jobs, or service industry jobs like movie projectionist or casino/hotel bellboy (no wait, bellMan!!), and I was a lab assistant for a few years too. Since landing my current job as a hospital computer guy, I’ve had a bit of culture shock adapting to this kind of environment. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far, and how I’ve adapted to it.

• I have a desk. Never had one before. What do you put in and on a desk? I mean it’s huge – just a vast expanse of Formica and beige steel. And there were a lot of empty drawers. Is it supposed to be all business like a buzz cut, or a business/fun mix like a mullet? Here’s what I ended up with after a few years (notice the plant – it’s not real – the real one died shortly after entering this work environment, as did my spirit):

Here is what I aspire to:

• There are some good people here, and there are some really freaking obnoxious people here too. For the latter, I’ve found it is best career-wise for me to bitch-slap them in my mind as opposed to physically. Some strategies I have used include ignoring them, passing gas as I walk past their cube (A.K.A: crop-dusting. There is some collateral damage with this one, but fortunately for me, most of my obnoxious people tend to sit in clusters), and my favorite: biting down hard on a Mike-N-Ike’s when they come to talk to me, pretending it is a cyanide capsule. I’ve also used one of those compressed air keyboard cleaner cans to pretend I was “Spraying for bitches”. It does help control a severe bitch infestation. All of these people are guys, so please don’t think I’m dropping the B bomb in ~that~ way, it’s just the best word to describe them.

• It’s quiet. Too quiet. I’m used to forklifts nearly running over me, or slot machines clanging, or lab instruments beeping, anything but the serene calm of the office. All I hear now is the occasional soft click of a keyboard, laser printers warming up, or a cell phone in someone’s purse playing some crappy e-jazz ringtone as their kid chain-calls them 15 times in a row while they’re hitting the vending machine in the breakroom. I put a big fan on my desk, and headphones in my ears whenever I can. I recently saw a guy who took it to a whole new level by wearing his headphones everywhere in the building, even when going to the bathroom or getting his mail, or in meetings before they start. He does not have to interact with anyone here unless he wants to. I bet their not even plugged into anything. He is a magnificent bastard.

• Sense of accomplishment. I have none. It used to be that after a day working in the warehouse, I could say wow, look at all that freight I unloaded today, or at the casino it was wow, I moved a lot of luggage today, or at the lab, wow, look at all those samples I processed today. Now I’ve been working on one project for four months and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Every day I have to fix something that broke when I fixed something else. At least with the warehouse when you fix something, it stays fixed. I’ve dealt with this by finding other goals to accomplish at work, such as getting my boss to use the word “cumquat”, or seeing how many times in a day I can get one of the afore mentioned bitches to deliver a document to me that I “accidentally” printed on their printer.

• Natural light. Warehouses are windowless dank concrete pits, as are laboratories and to a lesser extent, casinos. As such, I have rarely been exposed to natural light during my workday. I was looking forward to rejoining the top-side world with this new desk job as I now have a long row of honest-to-god windows close by. And I would have had plenty of natural light, if the lady next to me didn’t have severe light sensitivity and demand all the shades be pulled at the mere suggestion of partly sunny skies. Oh well. Baby steps I guess.

• Time off and working from home. People around here actually leave if they need to. Say they have a doctor’s appointment – no problem, they just get up and leave when they need to. They can always make it up from home later if they want to. This is unheard of in any of my previous jobs. Getting off work required one form of amputation or another, and you can’t exactly unload 20 roadway trucks from home unless you want to get arrested. I had to work with colds, flues, sprained ankles, hangovers, ear infections, headaches, toothaches, you name it. The idea that I can leave if I’m just “not feeling well” is foreign, but I can certainly get used to it!

There’s tons more (I didn’t even mention the weirdo guys who talk to you while you pee at the urinal, or worse yet, whistle or sing?! WTF?), but this is getting long and I really should get back to work. Don’t get me wrong, although this is a different sort of job for me, I do appreciate having a nice, clean, well lit and dry environment in which to sit on my butt for 9 hours a day, and I make more than I ever did before. It just takes a lot of getting used to.

Feeling Contained

     This has been the longest winter ever and most people in these parts are starting to wonder why on Earth they’re living here in the first place. There’s an end in sight however as we’re supposed to hit 70 today! All I want to do now is get my garden going. This is the first year I’ve taken anything more than a haphazard approach to my garden. Previously I would throw whatever I felt like in there and if it didn’t like where I planted it or how much I watered it, too bad – it was worth a shot. Not this time. Since January I’ve been obsessively reading everything I can get my hands on about container gardening. By far the best book I’ve found is called “Bountiful Container” (actually my wife found it, but I have since claimed it as my own).  This book was perfect for me and explains everything you need to know like what plants to put together in one container to get something to harvest at any time of the year. I’ve also been pouring over heirloom seed catalogs. Most gardeners already know about all this stuff, but I had no idea. Most of the varieties these companies offer I’ve never even heard of. I didn’t know carrots could be purple, or watermelons could be orange, or the inside of a tomato could look like fire. I love the idea of starting with organic seed, and watching it develop into food I know beyond any doubt is safe for my family. I also love the names: Dragon, Moonglow, Bright Lights, Flame.

 

    I’ve got a few flats of seeds started already out in the garage, with a heat pad underneath them and a grow light overhead. I’m expecting a visit from the DEA any day now. I read our last frost in southeast Minnesota is right around May 15^th. After that it is full speed ahead. Oh and as for the backyard project, I’ve had a few contractors out to get bids on pouring some concrete. It’s running right around $4 per square foot. I’m not sure how it will affect the price to have it stamped or colored. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, here’s stuff I love at the moment:

 

Heirloom seed companies:

www.seedsavers.org  - awesome source for really old and hard to find cultivars. I’ve ordered from them several times and they’re great. Everything I’ve planted so far has sprouted no problem.

http://www.territorialseed.com/ - Huge variety of seeds and tools. Territorial also sells Columnar Apple Trees. Thought you didn’t have enough room? Think again!

http://rareseeds.com/ - I like Baker Creek. I want to order one of everything from these people.

 

Reading Material:

Bountiful Container – Everything you need to know to grow a perfectly respectable vegetable and fruit garden, anywhere you want. (thanks Tau – you were right!)

 

 

 

My Third Post (Part 2)

That night I laid in bed dreaming up a plan. Our back yard is somewhat awkwardly shaped, much longer than it is wide, and that has always ended up tanking any ideas I ever had for the space. As I entered that stage just before REM sleep, you know, where you still can think, but not move, ideas started forming and clicking into place in a way they never did before. I had a plan. By now it was three AM – three hours before I had to get up for work. Who cares, I have a plan! I wrote it out and woke up my wife to share in the moment. She was less than excited, but to be fair she was far more understanding then I would have been under those circumstances.

      So the plan – here it is. Pave off half that long, muddy yard in the area immediately behind the house, creating a patio about 35 feet wide and 30 feet long. Where the pavers meet the grass, add a chain link fence – this will make the “back 40” of the yard officially the Dog’s turf. Between the house and the attached garage goes a privacy trellis, otherwise I’ll always feel “on display” for the neighbor. Over the patio goes a pergola, under which will be the grill, the patio table I made two years ago, and maybe a couple of wood lounge chairs I’ve been considering building later in the year. A fire ring will go just outside the pergola, toward where the fence will be. The bulk of the patio however will be given to a water fountain I built last year with a small, above ground pond, surrounded by something I’m trying for the first time this year – a container based vegetable garden. Locating it near the house, I’ll be able to use rain barrels to capture water off the roof to use for the plants. I’d also like to add solar power to the top of the pergola someday, but that’s another project. I’ll see if I can get a scan of my late-night sketches of the project posted for part 3.

My Third Post (Part 1)

I’m really proud now because I’ve never made it to three before. So I said before this blog would be about my life and my kids and food. So as promised, here’s one about gardening! This could actually get really long, so I’m breaking it up into a few sections. Here in Minnesota we just ended something like a hundred days in a row of having a few inches of snow sitting around everywhere. There’s still some ice in the shadows here and there, and yes it did just snow a couple inches yesterday, but I have reason to believe spring is coming, and with that I’m getting a severe case of cabin fever. It’s bad. I would not call myself a hugely active outdoors type, but this is the time of year I get the motivation needed to do some actual work in the back yard, and man does it need it. Our dogs basically have eaten, scratched, mangled or dug up every square inch of our back yard. Last summer I built a wooden fence around the garden to keep them out, with a lattice gate. Finley, our bigger dog, ate it a few weeks ago. The gate is gone now, it’s splintered remains lay all over the yard. It mocks me as I stand there at night looking at it while waiting for the boys to “do their business”.  The weekend I gathered what little resolve I could and said to myself, this far, no farther! I slapped some plywood over the gaping hole and set about hatching a plan to not only bring this yard back to life, but make it better, faster, stronger, lighter… okay not lighter.

Google Street View can be scarey...

Okay I'm conflicted on this one. On the one hand, I think it is cool that I can see a place before I go there, especially since I sometimes have to travel for business, but on the other hand, do you really want that potential email saying, "hey, did you know google published a picture of your dog taking a dump on your front lawn?" I'm not sure that I do.

Of course that didn't stop me from spending a full hour looking up everywhere I've ever been. The hospital where I was born, places I went to school, held a job, vacationed... kinda sad really that it only took an hour.

So that leads me right back to the creepiness of it all. Isn't this kinda the worst thing you would want stalkers to have access to? It just seems like maybe you wouldn't want the guy who has been sending you chocolate Easter bunnies with the eyes bitten off to be able to virtually "case" your house from well beyond the 500 feet specified in the restraining order.

Is it just me?

So you want to be a blogger...

Okay so I've read blogs for years, many of which I highly respect, and I've even tried to start my own a couple of times. I started doing a cooking blog once, then a gardening blog, then a restaurant review blog, then a my-kids-are-great-but-they-drive-me-nuts blog. None of them made it to the first post. So here's my last shot at it. This ones just going to be about whatever the heck I feel like talking about. I'm sure I'll be the only one reading it (okay maybe my wife sometimes, maybe my sister too). So really this is more about me feeling like there's a place I can get my thoughts straight on "paper" and make sense of my life in some way.

So expect to see stuff like what I made for dinner last night, or what my kids are into right now, or some cool thing I just heard about, or something (or someone) who ticks me off, or what stupid/embarrassing thing I did on accident, or whatever else I happen to be doing or thinking at the time.

Oh yeah about the title for this blog, it's how I feel a lot. I often feel like I spend a lot of time nodding at people while they talk at me and then when it's my turn to talk I have nothing intelligent to say, so I try my best to fake it. I've made a career out of this. Okay I can do my job, and I do eventually pick up what people are laying down, but when struck with the unknown, this is just how I feel. Blogging, for an introvert like me, is one of those unknowns. What can I say - I'll try, and this time no faking.