Stress and focus
By john | May 16, 2008
So it’s been a busy week; after my day trip to NYC last week I came back with a pile of stuff to do, which I’ve been plugging away at. Then of course Teddy got sick (stress!) and the house is a mess and I’m still sad about Frak and and and… you get the picture.
So by last night, I basically had turned myself into a horrifying bundle of shot nerves. It would be interesting if there were hidden cameras in the house; I suspect there would be lots of footage of me working very inefficiently, pacing, drumming my fingers, drinking too much coffee, and so on.
So there I was this morning, revising and revising a pilot marketing program document for a client, getting comments back from a colleague that made me think, “How the hell did I miss that?” Thank goodness for eagle-eyed colleagues (Hi Maureen!). And I was just stuck in this cycle of being stressed and out and overwhelmed. And… I had an appointment for a massage.
I almost cancelled it, feeling like I didn’t have time, but it was too late, and off I went. That was a good thing. Lying there on the massage table with spacey music playing and my body going “crack! crack!” under the capable attention of the masseur, I just felt all this anxiety draining out of me. My mind tends to wander off into some alternate world when I am getting a massage, and so I was lying there thinking about… well, not much. Pets. Swimming. Streets in DC. Nothing in particular.
But at some point, I do remember thinking, “When this is done I will go home, and do the things I need to do, and everything will be fine.”
And it was. I went home. Teddy leaped out of the crate, thrilled at the miracle of me returning, and then smelled the massage oil on me and got curious. I made a light lunch and sat on the deck, reviewing my latest draft of that document while he ran around the yard. I sat down at the computer, made the changes, let the client know when it would be coming, and… wow, everything’s under control.
If massages were cheaper I’d get one every week.
I realize this isn’t a great insight - stress makes you feel like crap and unable to do things - but sometimes one needs to be reminded of these things.
And now I’m going to go walk my dog.
Topics: my life | 1 Comment »
Teddy likes the Rabbit
By john | May 15, 2008
Mobile post sent by bythebayou using Utterz. Replies.
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Suburban moment
By john | May 15, 2008
I’m at a Starbucks in the burbs in between two errands. I’m surrounded by incredibly white teenagers who are all wearing prominently branded clothing, and they’re all talking about who the best kid to buy pot from is, and what happened to Courtney on spring break in Cabo. I had kind of forgotten how they travel in packs; there’s about fourteen of them clustered around two Frappucinos. Oy.
Topics: my life | 2 Comments »
Power failures
By john | May 15, 2008
Late Monday afternoon, the power went out on my block for a couple of hours. These things happen, of course; fortunately, it was daylight and not too hot out. I discovered something, though; my uninterruptible power supply has a nifty feature: when it’s operating off of battery power, it beeps. Repeatedly. I can’t figure out how to make it stop. So while it’s nice that the computer doesn’t crash horribly and I still have connectivity and my wifi network, the beep-beep… beep-beep… beep-beep… is not amusing.
The other thing about power failures here: this is an old house, with a tiny detached garage. I have an electric garage door opener, which is very nice; press the button and in you go! Except that because it’s an old, tiny garage, there is no door other than the garage door. So if there’s no power, you cannot get in or out of it. Well, you could get out; you could find the cord on the opener in the darkness and yank on it to disengage the opener. If you’re outside, though, your car is trapped inside.
After that happened, I borrowed the neighbor’s car to go over to MWK’s (Teddy was under the weather so I didn’t think having him walk 8 blocks in the mugginess was a great idea) but thought, “I’m just disengaging the opener; this hassle is not worth it.” What if it happened when I really needed to go somewhere? But I didn’t.
So at 3:30 this morning, when I woke with a start and noticed that the UPS was beeping, it was pitch black out (the lights on the garage were out, etc.), and there was no noise from the fan (I turn the HVAC to recirculating air all night to give me some white noise while I sleep), my first thought was, “Oh shit.” Today is Teddy’s doggie day care day; he’s back up to speed, I have a ton of work to do, he needs to run around like a crazy puppy, and… the car was trapped.
After trying to sleep for another hour, I got up, lit a bunch of candles, and made coffee with my french press on the stove (thank goodness I have gas). As the coffee was brewing, everything turned back on - so I went straight outside to open the garage and disengage the opener.
While I was doing that, one of my neighbors was strolling up the street - she’s the one who checks everything out and keeps an eye on the goings-on on the block. You really want to have a neighbor like that in a city neighborhood. Well, we chatted a bit, and she said that somebody on the street called when this happened Monday and was told it was a planned outage.
Power failures happen, but planned outage? Wouldn’t it be nice to tell people if power is going to be off for a while? Even the screwed up DC water authority used to be able to manage that when they were doing work on my block there. Planned outage means you can plan around it. Well, I guess the power company can; we lowly customers can just suffer, I suppose.
My garage apartment neighbor, a Californian who has never loved Houston (nor hated it) commented, “It’s just life here in the third world.” Overstating things, but I know what she means; it reminds me of my days in Boston’s Fenway, where all the wiring was incredibly old and brownouts and crackly phones when it rained (remember phones with wires?) were just part of life.
The fan is whirring, the coffee pot is chugging along, and it looks like it’ll be a normal day after all. And I will be getting used to hopping out of the car and opening the garage door myself. (Like I did for my entire childhood, when electric garage door openers were some kind of wacky luxury item that normal people like us didn’t buy).
There should be some way to rig up the garage door so it can be disengaged from the outside. Maybe some kind of cord that runs out a corner of the garage, so you can tank it from outside? It’s not like the bottom of the door makes a tight seal with the pavement. Well, whatever - I’d just park outside & use the garage for storage, except for the killer tree in the neighbor’s yard that occasionally drops a branch into my driveway.
This was not the mellow waking up experience I’d had in mind for today.
Topics: my life | 5 Comments »
Another reason to back up frequently
By john | May 14, 2008
In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.
The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as “crazy rasberry ants” — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and “rasberry” after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.
There is an upside, however:
The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.
Watch out, Pearland, they’ve been spotted there.
Topics: houston, texas | No Comments »
Outdoor appliances
By john | May 13, 2008
I just love this little scene on my neighbor’s back porch:
Texas chic? Lesbian chic? Oh, who can tell? Sadly the fridge is not plugged in, so this is a temporary storage solution, not a quick access to beer solution. But I think it’s fun!
Topics: amusing | 1 Comment »
News notes
By john | May 13, 2008
OMG, he was young once… but already an asshole.
Speaking of the news, the fact that this is considered an effective way to market online news is just depressing. “Hi, we have no actual curiosity about the world, just a vague sense that we ought to know some stuff.”
Topics: amusing, idiots, media watch | No Comments »
Gurgly puppy
By john | May 12, 2008
A sick dog is the saddest thing in the world, because he just looks at you and you can almost imagine him thinking, “I feel yucky, why?” But you can’t explain anything, can you? Teddy woke me up in the pre-dawn hours on Sunday because he needed to throw up, which is not the most unsual thing in the world for a dog who likes to get his nose into everything. I didn’t feed him - figured I’d let his tummy rest a bit - and he threw up some more. Plus there were gurgles coming out of him that sounded like an incipient volcano eruption.
Obviously he ate something that did not agree with him; my hunch is that is was a chunk of a raw bone. Raw bones are great treats for a dog - we buy these organic ones that they sell frozen at kennels and such - but I have learned that there is one configuration that works well (it’s a little round slice with marrow and a tiny bit of meat on it) and others that do not work so well because, well, he can get pieces off and swallow them. That is what he had on Friday night.
I suspect that because a piece of it, um, well, came out the other end, and I thought, “That can’t have felt good.”
Anyway this continued all day yesterday - no interest in food, drank a little water, mostly slept and looked unhappy - followed by more dramatic gurgling last night. This morning he was still uninterested in food, so I took him to the vet; my fear, of course, is that there was something stuck in him somewhere doing this, which can become a serious emergency pretty fast. The vet has a nifty new imaging center (they’ve just expanded) so they took an x-ray and there was nothing to see - other than, according to the vet, obvious signs that his gut is a bit gassy. (We, um, observed that yesterday and not just with noises.)
Poor Teddy. We came home from the vet with special highly-digestible food which we’ll try tonight, pills to suppress nausea/vomiting and diarrhea, and a lighter wallet. (You can see how they are paying for that nifty new stuff at the vet!)
Teddy’s been snoozing, mostly. He seems a bit less miserable than yesterday. I’m glad we went and ruled out something being stuck inside him - that’s nothing minor - and judging by how he reacted to me having my lunch, the anti-nausea shot they gave him while we were there has had an effect. So now he’s just resting and on the mend.
As are my nerves; I hate this stuff. I worry, and I’m sure he picks up on it, and it’s not good; I need to learn to chill out and just do the right things when something’s wrong. (I do those things, I just am a bundle of nerves when I’m doing them - especially this past week.) But I sometimes find it overwhelming to look down at this little animal who I love so completely and who depends on me to take care of him, and know that he’s not okay at the moment.
MWK came over for dinner last night helped a lot; aside from the moral support, he is Teddy’s favorite person in the universe so his arrival is a major event in the world from the pup viewpoint. Whee!
And while Teddy’s still out of it today, I’m enormously relieved and we are getting no sound effects from his stomach, so that’s all good.
Still… poor pup.
Topics: Teddy | 2 Comments »
Teddy rests
By john | May 11, 2008
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Our divine right to free parking
By john | May 11, 2008
Back in DC, the new baseball stadium has - surprise! - caused parking issues. And reflecting that peculiar American idea that one has the right to unlimited free storage of a large hunk of metal, even in a crowded city center, we are told that the problem is that laws are getting enforced:
They have scared away patrons of restaurants, put fear into Sunday worshipers and given indigestion to dinner party guests.
Not raucous and rowdy fans of the Washington Nationals baseball team. No, it’s the District’s hawk-eyed parking enforcement brigade, including city-owned tow trucks that prowl the streets during games.
The District’s aggressive enforcement of new parking rules in neighborhoods near Nationals Park drew criticism as well as praise last night at a community meeting sponsored by D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), whose district includes areas around the stadium.
…
Many said that the District was too vigilant, ticketing and towing cars that had no connection to baseball. Cars in violation receive a $30 ticket and a tow to the parking lot at the old D.C. General Hospital, Howland said.
“I actually had two employees quit because of parking tickets,” said Joyce N. Thomas, president and chief executive of the Center for Child Protection and Family Support, which aids abused children. The center is at 714 G St. SE, more than a mile from home plate.
OMG, you have to obey parking rules even if you’re not at a ball game? Shocking! And imagine, you might not be able to drive and park for free at the Center for Child Protection and Family Support, which is 2 blocks from the Eastern Market Metro stop? Horrifying! Next think you know, people who work downtown won’t get free parking anymore… oh, wait, never mind.
Business owners said last night that the rules are a burden to customers and employees.
Betsy Allman, who works for the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington and lives blocks from the ballpark, said a restaurant reported a 60 percent decline in dinner business on game nights. Others said that employees have had their cars ticketed and towed.
I can’t help but think that if a new attraction has opened in your neighborhood that brings thousands of people there, and your revenues have declined, you’re doing something very wrong. I’m sorry, but if your business is in a crowded urban area and you’re depending on free parking to succeed, you need to rethink your business model.
And of course God and race are involved:
Churchgoers also questioned the virtue of aggressive enforcement, which several said requires them to listen to sermons with an eye on their watches.
“Is it being done to squeeze out the African American churches in this community?” said Cheryl Kelley, a Maryland resident who is a member of Ebenezer United Methodist Church at Fourth and D streets SE.
Visitor passes exempting congregants from restrictions have been supplied to churches.
Yes, it’s all a big plot to drive churches away. Because really, why should residents (who pay actual taxes on their properties) be able to park? Having lived for years in Logan Circle, where churchgoers drive in from Maryland and double park for half the day - blocking residents in, blocking emergency vehicles, blocking wheelchair ramps, blocking crosswalks - I have little patience for this stupidity.
(Any attempt to enforce the law brought cries of racism; it’s a stupid little power play by the ministers of the churches, who apparently feel being godly means a free pass to break the law and be a lousy neighbor. Churches are usually pretty good neighbors, but within a year of living in Logan Circle I wished they’d all get turned into Starbucks.)
I guess it’s sort of comforting, though, to see that some things back in DC don’t change.
I wouldn’t want to live by the ballpark; I lived near Fenway Park in Boston for years and I know what a pain in the neck it can be to have that sort of attraction near your home. But guess what - you live in a city, one that’s well served by public transit. You’re not entitled to a free bit of a valuable commodity that’s shared by your neighbors, visitors, and businesses. Don’t like it? Pay for parking. Sell your car. Or don’t live there; there are plenty of people willing to make the tradeoff for a great location, and maybe it’s just not right for you.
Topics: DC, idiots | No Comments »