ARCHIVES - 1996 to FOREVER

Slept all night last night, but it was hard getting up this morning. I never sleep very well when I'm on call, have to check the phone and pager every time I wake up. Paranoid. For those of you who are curious, para- is a prefix meaning near, and noid is grecian (or maybe Breooklynese) for nerd.

I'm definitely in the throes of sleep deprivation, I can tell 'cause that joke is really bad, but I laughed anyway. What, you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes? What a silly idea! Somebody's gotta do it, after all....

Work was OK, I was the runner today but it wasn't really busy. We're short a tech in the mornings this week, but the FT tech is back.

And when I got home, there were guys digging the footings for the shop! Yep, they were! They only got about half-way done, though.

And the foreman is trying to sell me a riding mower, and it's cheap enough that I might just buy it. I had Andy, who is a mower/small engine expert, come over and take a look at it. He says that it's OK, but the price is too high, I should offer the guy a hundred less and arrive at seventy-five less than he's asking.

I had never thought about a rider mower before, but I would be a lot more likely to mow if it wasn't such hard physical work. Besides, it's kinda fun driving the thing around.

So maybe the guy'll come down, and if he doesn't, well, that's OK too, I can do without it.

I'm making some changes on the archive pages, there'll be a nav box at the bottom, in addition to the one on the upper left. My readers have spoken, and I have responded.

22:15:
Just got off the phone with JD, we had a nice long talk. Made me think about relationships... with women.

Almost all men are clueless when it comes to relationships. The young ones need to be told what to do every step of the way, and no assumptions should be made about their cluefullness. If a young man does the right thing in a relationship without being told, rest assured, it's a fluke. If it should happen again within, say, the next year, that's simply another fluke. If it happens on a regular basis, the guy's getting clues from another woman, either his mother or sister or his significant others' best friend.

We stumble and we fall, regularly doing faceplants in the hard concrete. With gravel, which we have to pick out of our lacerated skin with tweezers. Nothing's nastier than concrete with gravel. And then we have to go around with our faces looking like pizza.

As we age, two things happen. Firstly, we learn from our mistakes. Not very quickly, and not very well, but we do learn. But most importantly, the women that we love become accustomed to our clumsiness, and more forgiving.

And if they don't, we are forced to find other women, and then we start all over again.

These guys that always say the right things? They've read some books on saying right things, it's not innate. And the authors of those books? They're based on the authors' failures in the area, not their expertise in figgering things out beforehand. When their lady kicks them out of the house, they think, "I shoulda done *this* and said *that*! Yeah. Gotta write that down!"

And dammit, speaking of writing stuff down, when I was talking to JD I said something really clever... and now I can't remember what it was. And I'd fully planned on putting it down here right after I said it. Failures of memory haunt these pages, they do.

Dentists' appointment in the morning, 07:00. Gonna get a filling in one of my lower front teeth, the gum has receded past the root, so he's just gonna protect the root. No needles, no drilling, just the filling. Piece of cake. Dammit, pretend that I didn't say that!