How come?

How come some certain things can work in some certain ways to make certain people mad as hell? Let's begin with the recharger cable for the IPad. Every single time I have tried to plug the charger into the pad, the connector is upside-down. One hundred times out of one hundred. I look at the connector and make an educated guess as to which way it goes and every single time I'm wrong! This should be a fifty-fifty split. I suspect that the plug-in port on the IPad deliberately twists itself so the plug won't fit. I suspect that Steve Jobs set it up that way just for laughs.

And it's not just electronics! I have a seriously looking leather apron, given to me by my wonderful wife, that's meant to protect my old and frail body from chunks of wood flying off the lathe. When I put this neck to knee shield on, I need to clip a strap behind my back. The clip only works one way. I never, ever, get it right on the first try! I attempt to fool the connector by twisting the strap behind my back. Wrong! Next time, I don't twist the connector. Wrong! Every single time I put on that apron it takes two tries to get it right!

My plan is this: tomorrow I will attempt to plug my IPad charger into my leather apron. What's to lose?

Life is a stadium

Sometimes an idea storms into your brain and expands, adding its own details and forming a picture that's precise, right down to the background music. Sometimes that process takes only seconds. It happened to me just yesterday, while I was chatting on the phone with my cousin. The topic was this world, and where we fit into it as we age; it's a discussion that we've had many times before.

This time I successfully summed it up in a single sentence: "Life is like a stadium: you begin as a player on the field, then work your up the bleachers as you age until, eventually, you fall off the top row and land on your head in the parking lot."

If I try really hard I can still remember the days when I sat right on the sidelines. I even recall a few times when I was called on to take to the field. Slowly, steadily, I moved from the front row to the nosebleed seats, where even the beer sellers don't venture. At this point, I can still see what's going on way down there, but not easily and not particularly accurately. I watch the players racing round and round, I hear the hollers of the fans below, but I can't really grasp the point of the game. My mind decides to pay less attention to the fray on the field and more to the shape of clouds overhead because clouds change and the game stays pretty much the same.

I'm not at the top row yet and I can't look down to the parking lot where I'll someday be headed, but with each move upward I feel a little less connected to all the stuff the younger ones in the better seats find incredibly important: the latest TV shows, sports of every stripe, political comedy, Facebook. From my position high up I discover that I can tune out the cheers, lean back, and watch the clouds go by. As long as I don't lean back too far...

Hurdles

Sixty-six years into this life and I'm still trying to figure it out. What makes a day good, what makes a day bad? I think I may have a clue, at least for my own journey down this road.


I need hurdles to leap. Not real hurdles, for heaven's sake. That would spell "emergency room" shortly after the starting gun. I'm talking about self-imposed challenges, tasks that are at least daunting but preferably impossible. Give me a high hurdle of some kind and if I clear it, the day's bound to be a great one.


Today's hurdle, self imposed, was to personalize one of my little turned special stuff boxes for a friend who has invited us to her Christmas Eve smorgasbord for approximately the last thirty-six years. I've made boxes for our granddaughters, with their initials inlaid into the tops in slivers of pewter. I could have done the same thing with Tracy's special stuff box, but no, I decided that the box lid needed to be special.


Our friend Tracy is an artist, and we're fortunate to have several of her paintings on our walls. She signs her works with her initials, and I decided that the initials, in her own script, needed to be on the lid of her special stuff box.


Hmmm. How to put her signature on the box lid?  Simple. Take a close-up photo of the initials on one of her works, upload it to my PC, blow it up, print it, paste the print on the engraving machine, cut the grooves on the box lid, fit teeny strips of pewter into the grooves, sand the lid flat and finish the whole thing with lacquer.  


Yes, I blew a few hours jumping this hurdle but when it was done I felt like the day was a definite winner. A high hurdle cleared and a fitting gift for a good friend. I shall sleep well tonight.  

Click here

You know what I worry about whenever there's nothing better to do? I worry about all those times that I have clicked the little box that says "I accept" when I'm downloading stuff off the net. Once or twice I've looked quickly at the pages of close-spaced legalize mumbo-jumbo and idly wondered what it all meant, but I'm way too busy to actually read what I'm digitally signing. Who does?

So at certain quiet times I start to imagine what might happen if some of those "accepts" come home to roost. What if the software peddlers put a clause in there that says something like "by accepting this contract user agrees to come over to my house and sweep the garage every other Monday"? Or "Upon giving your digital signature you have added Wimblewalk.com to your will as primary beneficiary". Or maybe even "Checking OK gives us the right to use your name, picture, SSN, and backyard barbecue whenever and however we wish, forever".

This could cause problems. I am very fond of my backyard barbecue. I even have a special name for it. I'll tell you the name if you promise not to laugh. If you agree not to laugh, click here [ ] and scroll down.




"The Grill Of My Dreams"

And be here next Monday to sweep the garage. You agreed.

Complexities

The simple life has disappeared, slipped out the side door when nobody was watching. There is now absolutely nothing that we can accomplish in fewer than fourteen steps. A case in point: our stereo system is tied to our wifi and plays music stored on several computers. One of the speakers is in the back yard, under the windmill, next to the helipad. (Okay, it's not actually a helipad, it's just a round patio that looks like a helipad.) The stereo is controlled by one of the pcs or by the I-pod. The problem: the helipad, and the tree house, are at the edge of our wifi coverage. That means we must go all the way to the house to change a playlist! Unacceptable, totally.

Research on the web told me that there was a simple (hah) solution to the problem. All I needed to do was re-purpose (wonderful term!) an old router and use it to extend the range of our household network. I happened to have an old router (who doesn't?), so I decided to give it a whirl.

In only four hours I managed to find the password for the old router, reconfigure it, hook it into the system, and introduce it to our backyard laptop and my I-pod. As I completed step sixteen of the process, the webpage I was following disappeared into cyberspace; it was kind of like sliding into home plate in the sixteenth inning to win the game.

Lucky for me that I had a whole morning free with nothing else to do but fiddle with passwords and wires. Lucky for me that most mornings are free. I got through the re-purposing without actually smashing anything and now, I am happy to report, I'm sitting up in the treehouse writing this post. But somewhere, in the back of my mind, a little voice is whispering, "Four hours?".

Road age

Oh yes, there was a time when I would not easily forgive the fellow who cut me off or tailed my gate. It never led to fisticuffs but words exchanged were heated. The wife and kids would make themselves as small as possible, waiting for the storm to subside, while I used my horn, my lights, my loudest voice and my longest finger to explain to that poor fellow exactly what he'd gone and done wrong.

The over-reaction was one more trait I can trace right back to my old man; he drove mad, worked mad, watched TV mad, and often got very mad at being so mad. Some of that rubbed off on me. But then, somewhere along the way, I began to question the sense of getting angry at every stupid driver. Several things helped me change my ways. I realized that if I had gotten my behavior from my father, I was possibly passing it on to my kids. Duh. Then there was that incident right here in town where someone had expressed his displeasure with another driver's style and the other driver replied with "bang, bang, bang". And finally, somewhere between middle age and here, I admitted to myself that I was -- infrequently and totally accidentally -- a stupid driver!

I put away the loud voice and the longest finger and took on a new identity, replacing rage with age, and the wisdom that accompanies it. I looked back another generation to find a gentler role model, and found a good one: my father's father. He'd been feisty in his youth but turned the corner when his hair turned gray and became wise and patient and peaceful. Why not, I thought, be like him.

So now I drive the same routes but in a different way. I give people all the space they need to cut corners in front of me, I slow down responsibly when the guy behind comes dangerously close to my back bumper, I wait quietly for the guy ahead of me to realize that the light's turned green, and whenever somebody does something truly stupid I strain my brain and remember that time when I did exactly the same stupid thing.

Wish I'd wised up sooner.

PPE

Schools of Engineering, may I have a word with you? I have worked diligently, for these last sixty years or so, as an unpaid and largely unappreciated consumer product tester. I've seen, closely and personally, the work that your graduates have done. And I have reached a conclusion that I need to share with you. The bottom third of each and every one of your classes should have diplomas that read "PPE", for Pretty Poor Engineer. They are the ones who end up designing can openers, vacuum cleaners, clock radios and cardboard boxes, while the top two-thirds of the class goes on to engineer jet planes and Corvettes. And those bottom thirders are the ones responsible for all the stuff that almost works.

My father had a unique method of dealing with consumer products that did not, for one reason or another, meet his professional standards. A brook ran alongside and below our house. When some gadget drew his ire, he'd walk outside and throw it into the brook, accompanied by some strong but fitting language. Problem solved. Us kids found the darnedest collection of stuff in that brook, from flashlights to can openers. I inherited my high standards from the king of high standards and I carry on the cause, even though I currently lack a brook.

So let me tell you why this particular gripe is on my mind today. I am, as you might suspect from the photo above, a rower. Rowing becomes difficult here in the winter since the lake freezes over, so I move my workout to my man cave in the basement, where I keep my rowing machine. It's a generally good machine and I've put quite a few miles on it; resistance is provided by a tank of actual water with a rotating paddle wheel inside. I queue up a Netflix streaming moving and put in a hard half-hour on the rig every other day through the winter.

A few days ago, while simultaneously engaged in viewing a shoot-em-up movie and in a quest to beat my best ever record for imaginary miles rowed in thirty minutes, I suddenly found myself doing a back flip off the seat of the rowing machine and onto the basement floor. Umph. As I struggled to my feet I noticed that I was still holding the handlebars that simulate oar handles -- but they where no longer fastened to the strap that makes the paddle wheel go round. The strap had looped through a slot in the handlebars -- a slot cut in steel and left sharp on its edges. Sharp steel slot, meet nylon strap -- no contest.

This had to be the work of a PPE! A rowing machine that cost the better part of a grand falling apart and putting my very valuable head in grave danger because some "engineer" missed the class where they taught that rock breaks scissors and steel cuts nylon! Boy, if I had a brook...