Political Thoughts

I dictated a few thoughts about the presidential campaign during my morning and evening commutes. You don't have to agree. I will still like you. Well, most of you.

When I listen to the antics of the Obama campaign it makes me wonder if he is running for president or running for rock star. He's trying to reach a younger audience but everything he's doing is more rock star than presidential candidate. Getting a stadium venue to get more people and having them all text message using their own cell phones is supposed to get him “in” with the young folks.

Volunteering your cell phone number to anyone is a big gamble. I was shocked at why people would give up their cell phone number. And then I heard them announce that they would send text messages to these people over their cell phones and they wanted them to forward those messages to everyone in their calling list! Don't waste my airtime on a political advertisement. Don't forward messages to my cell phone. My cell phone number is sacred. Unlike my house phone, everybody doesn't have the number which means I don't have to constantly hang up on telemarketers. A political text message from Obama, or anybody else, is nothing more than a telemarketing call. I hate telemarketers.

The Obama campaign tries to portray Obama as youthful. Obama is no more youthful than I am. He doesn't listen to the same music; watch the same movies, read the same books or magazines as these kids he's trying to fool. His hands will be just as tied as anyone else by Congress and world situations that he will have to deal with and promises to these young people will quickly fade into campaign history.

Other world leaders want mature leaders with experience. They want someone who's been around the block who can deal with international issues.

One of my main concerns with the Democrats is that our country was strong because of our conservativeness and our fear of Godlessness. The liberalism of the Democrat's free and easy thinking scares me; I think it's tearing apart our country.

It would be wonderful to have world peace and human rights for all. If you understand some of the cultures creating chaos in the world today, their only aim is to make sure everyone in the world acts and thinks like them. I know that as Americans we want everyone in the world to receive the benefits of a democracy. But we don’t force it on anyone.

And now they've done it! The Republicans have announced a woman vice presidential candidate. That's got to be a shocker to the Democrats. And this woman didn't enter politics with the sole aim to run for president, as people like the Clintons and Obama. She was in city government prior to two very successful years as a governor. It will be very interesting what all those Hillary supporters do with a woman in the mix. And she's young too; forty four I think. I think it's a good move by the Republicans.

Battle Damage

I hate the morning commute. Cars just simply cannot stay in their own lane, travel the speed limit, keep a safe distance, and get where they need to go safely. People have to dart in and out as they to try get one extra car length. And nobody seems concerned enough about the other people on the road to make sure their loads are securely tied down.

This morning I was driving along at sixty five or seventy miles an hour, keeping a safe distance from the car in front of me when all of a sudden, three cars to the right I see an object coming out from under the car and spinning end over end through the air before hitting my windshield on the right side. BOOM. It had to be a strut or a shock absorber; something of that size and shape. It put at least a two inch hole in my windshield, spraying glass shards all over me and over the inside of the car.

I didn't have time to react and be scared, it was over so quickly and the damage was already done so I just continued driving to work. If it would have hit the center of the windshield I probably would have had a disastrous accident.

It's going to cost me a couple hundred dollars to repair the windshield, which isn't that bad compared to what it would have cost me if it would have hit the center and caused a me to be in a major accident. It is possible that I wouldn't even be writing this to you today.

I can't wait until the Frontrunner commuter rail comes to town so I can drive my car down to the train station in the morning, get on the train, sleep or read on the way to work, get back on the train after work and get home cheaper, safer, and greener than if I drove. Oh, and I wouldn’t have any objects flying at me while doing 70 mph.

The funny thing is that the people around me on the interstate were probably oblivious to it. I wonder if it struck any of the cars behind me. I should've looked back. I might have seen a major accident occur as people dodged right and left to avoid the flying object.

I wonder how many others on the highway this morning were lucky enough to experience what I did.

Why Can't I Figure This Out?

What is discipline and why are some people very disciplined while others, like me, can't seem to get a grasp on it. Don’t get me wrong, I am not undisciplined in all aspects of my life. There are areas in my life where I have a lot of discipline. There are some areas where I can rise up to the occasion, take the challenge, give it my all, whatever cliché you want to apply. There are a few areas where I just don't know how to get disciplined. Of course, I'm talking about weight loss.

I spent two years losing ninety pounds and felt great when I did. I got up every day and looked good in my clothes. My body didn’t require any medications or a CPAP machine to sleep at night. And then in eight short months, I seem to have forgotten everything I learned and gained most of it back.

Every morning I wake up saying this is the day. This is the day that I'm going to get back on track and eat right, exercise, drink lots of water. But by evening I'm complaining to myself about the progress that I didn't make, about that sweet treat that I ate, or that large breakfast or lunch or dinner I snarfed down. I'm complaining about being exhausted, I'm complaining about tight fitting shirts and pants that won't stay on, but I still don’t get started.

As far as exercise is concerned, it is not like I don't have the time to exercise, I have plenty of time to go out for a walk-I just don't do it A big part of our success in losing weight was to be able to walk every day. It was a good activity for Marj and me to do together. I love to walk if I'm somewhere where I can take my camera to take pictures or a place where I can see interesting people or things. I don't necessarily like walking around the track in the basement of the recreation center or walking around the buildings at work, but if I can get out and walk several miles cross country or throughout a new city a love it.

I also know that I have to get back to drinking water. I don't know what it is about water but I don't really enjoy drinking it. I do like a glass of water if it is just the right temperature and served in a glass. It's just a habit for me to open a bottle or can of Diet Coke and gulp it down. I need to get back to my regimen of drinking lots of water during the day and only one or two Diet Cokes a day. This isn't going to be easy, but the health effects are going to be fantastic. I know how good I felt and how good I looked when I lost all that weight.

What I think I need to do is take a picture of me when I had lost all the weight, one where I'm smiling and having a good time. Then make a list of things I need to do: drink water, limit Diet Coke intake, no snacks, exercise, sensible meals, and post both of them on my hotel room wall somewhere prominent. Then I need to force myself to read the list every day and actually follow it. Now that sounds like a good plan. Can I do it?

When I decide to do something I do it, how am I going to get myself to do this?

Customer Service? What's That?

My rant today is about customer service in America today (or the lack thereof).

Yesterday, my daughter experienced a blowout on the freeway and needed to get some new tires on her car. She had purchased Wal-Mart tires in the past, and was pleased with them, so I went with her to Wal-Mart to get some tires. What a disappointment!

After fighting traffic in rush hour to get there, we stood at the tire and service center counter and waited for twenty minutes before getting a clerk to help us. Then we waited with the clerk behind the counter while he waited for someone in the garage to come and do something with the register so he could give us our tire quote. So we stood there, alongside the clerk, looking out into the glass of the garage and watched what seemed like a shop full of cars with only one lone mechanic doing lubes, oil changes, tires, and other jobs. We waited patiently. To be fair, the clerk behind the counter was nice, but not helpful. He was finally able to get the register open and printed out the quote for us.

The tire price was good, until you added the cost of road hazard insurance, the cost of rotating the tires, mounting, and balancing, and a new stem; now the advertised great price is up fifteen or twenty dollars a tire. But that was not bad enough. When the clerk turned to me and handed me the printed quotation he said we had to go the mechanic to write it up.

So we walked out into the garage area to the mechanic juggling four different tasks with paperwork in one hand, a pen in his mouth, and the door swung wide open on a car waiting in line for him to pull forward for an oil change. This didn’t look too promising.

He immediately told us, “I can't get to you for at least an hour and a half. If you want to wait an hour and a half, then I can help you.” With this little speech, I gathered up our quote, turned to my daughter, and said, let's go somewhere else. The clerk, who gave us the quote, quietly apologized and told us the location of a couple of tire stores nearby.

How can companies make it with this type of customer service? Actually, their LACK of customer service. Wal-Mart lost my tire sale and I'm sure several other tire sales, lube jobs, and oil changes yesterday due to a lack of mechanics and sales personnel. I’m afraid that customer service is shortly going to vanish from our vocabulary. I know it has from many of the places we choose to do business with.

And don’t get me started on the airlines that raised their prices twenty-five dollars for a piece of baggage, then fifty dollars, and to add insult to injury (nice cliché) a three dollar fee for a skycap (expecting you to be happy to add a tip to that because they don’t pay the skycap anything). United Airlines has just announced that at Dulles International, if you are going overseas there's no free food, drinks, or snacks on your flight. However, if you want something during the exhausting flight overseas, they will be happy to sell it to you.

Just one more.

I was shocked when I asked my wife to go next door to her work to the Comcast office and ask them about something on our bill. She told me she would have to go to the drive up window while it was open, or do it by telephone, because if she went inside their office it would cost almost four dollars to ask a question of a customer service representative. Has Comcast forgotten what the word customer service means? What the hell are they doing with the money we are paying them for our service?

I give up. It is time to fight back. I will find companies who want my business and want to serve me for my hard earned American Dollars.

Basal Cell Carcinoma

Basal Cell Carcinoma, that's what has been growing on my arm until the doctor cut it out last week. Cancer, he called it this morning when he told me, but then added some doctors don't call it cancer. In fact, he said, and the nurse quite reassuringly agreed, “If you're going to have cancer… this is the best kind of cancer you can have!” Do we have a choice?

No matter what the doctor said it still scares me. Seeing others with cancer has always scared me. Even though, today we see many people live a long time after being treated for cancer, it's still a demon, a dark scary demon to me.

I have friends and family of friends who have battled serious types of cancer (not skin cancer) and some have won the battle while others have fought valiantly but still had to leave us. Thinking about their fights and knowing how devastating it can be, even with the doctor reassuring me that this type of cancer is “nothing to worry about,” I still had that feeling in the pit of my stomach; that “what if” that happens when people anticipate life being turned over or the possibility of a life being abruptly ended. I needed more information.

When I arrived at work, I sat down at my desk and immediately typed basal cell carcinoma into my search engine. There it was, an entry from Wikipedia explaining what it was. It was comforting to read the information written by volunteer authors and see pictures of what to expect. But the best part was reading the entry declaring what the doctor had told me, it is usually, and almost always, not fatal. A second opinion is always a comforting thing.

When I asked the nurse how you get basal cell carcinoma, she said you usually get it from exposure to the sun. But I didn't really spend that much time in the sun, with the exception of this year and I’ve had the sore for at least two years. I do have a new habit, as of this morning, SUNSCREEN when I’m outside. Funny how we can become instant advocates of things that we never paid any attention to in the past; life does that to us

I know that there are so many websites and support organizations for cancer and there are so many people that are working so hard to get rid of all kinds of cancer I take my hat off to them. I think that maybe it’s time for me to join the fight in some way.

For today, I’m just happy to be able to say I’m OK.

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Modern Technology - Does It Work?

Everyone knows I have my electronic gadgets. If you know me at all you've seen me listening to music and podcasts, or watching movies on my Zune. You have probably seen me pecking away at my laptop keyboard or have endured waiting for me while I took picture after picture with my digital cameras. You may have seen me reading a book on my Sony Reader or checking my schedule on my Palm TX. You know how much I like my electronic gadgets. Some call them my toys.

Since I started this blog, I’ve found that the hardest part of being a blogger is sitting down to write each day. I take notes all day about my reactions to life or incidents that occur during the day. When I get back to my room, a lot of times, I just don't sit down to write those notes up as a blog entry. I get caught up in a movie, reading, playing a rousing game of solitaire or any distraction to keep me from having to expose myself to my readers.

The last notes I remember taking were those I jotted down on a first-class flight across the United States to Baltimore, MD. I remember taking notes religiously, on a barf bag, as I gazed out the window at the beautiful patterns and colors created by agricultural endeavors on the ground. I captured, in words, the music lulling me to sleep in my very comfortable first class seat. I can’t remember all the notes I took on that flight since that barf bag sat in my room on the table for the whole three and a half weeks I was in Baltimore and today is incinerated or buried in some land fill. I never did write it up.

So today, after thinking about doing it for some time, I picked up my newest gadget: a Sony IC voice recorder with software that transcribes your voice to text on the laptop. Am I getting lazy or what? My thoughts are that I have no trouble keeping a running commentary in my head during the day about what I see and hear around me. So, if I just take those thoughts and dictate them into a voice recorder, I can transcribe them each evening and have the beginning of the blog. From there I just have to clean up the text (if you’ve seen the results of inexpensive voice recognition software you’ll know what I mean) and add additional thoughts.

In fact, it works quite well I think. I used it for this blog. What do you think?

Baltimore Aquarium

Marj and I made an early morning visit to the Baltimore Aquarium. Their web site said that showing up on a Saturday in August without tickets purchased in advance from the web site was not a good idea. With this in mind, we made sure we were there at 9 am when they opened and since we were not going to the dolphin show we were able to get in.

This was my third aquarium this year. I think the Atlanta Aquarium was my favorite because of the Beluga whales, but watching the dolphins play underwater in Baltimore was a real treat. The sharks were magnificent too.

My major disappointment was in my camera work. I just couldn't get the lighting to play fare and so I got a lot of fuzzy pictures. Do you know how hard it is to take pictures of fast moving fish through dirty plexiglass?

Here are pictures of a few of the ones I was able to catch in my viewfinder.

Home Again, Home Again

Home safely. It sure makes it nice to travel first class.

You'd think with 8 round trips this year, I'd be a pro at getting through security. Well, today I reached into my computer case before I entered security and found not just one, but two of my knives inside. My luggage was already on its way so I couldn't just slip it into my suitcase.

So, the nice TSA guy helped me to place each of them into a special shipping package you can purchase ($10 each) and place them into the package drop where they can only be removed by the shipper. I felt much better that I didn't have to throw away my expensive knives.

As I reached the end of the concourse and sat down with my CPAP, computer, and another bag I noticed the TSA guy briskly coming up behind me waving my $20 bill. It seems that he didn't know that you are supposed to put the money IN the package with the knives.

Hopefully, when I call the shipper on Monday I can give them my credit card information and once again be reunited with my two knives. DOH

Play Ball!

A highlight of the trip has been visits to two MLB ballparks to see the Orioles play the Reds and the Nationals play the Angels. Both home teams have been taking up space at the bottom of their divisions so I expected to see them get routed by the visitors.

The Angels are leading the league and the parent club of the Orem Owlz which is our home town rookie league team. The birds took it to them. It was a fun game even though the Angels lost. The Orioles hadn't won a Sunday game since April and were on something like a five game losing streak. Was it me? Did I jinks the Angels or just bring luck to the Orioles?

The Reds have as bad a record as the Nationals. I didn't know prior to the game that Griffey Jr. had left the Reds, but the game ended up being a very fun game. Marj was there with me and we watched the Nationals come back from behind and easily beat the Reds.

Orioles Park at Camden Yards is a beautiful ball park. The only two things questionable about it are that my wife says a woman designed it and the street that sits outside center field (to capture home run balls) is named Eutaw street. Eutaw? It's spelled Utah birdlanders.

Nationals Park is new. It doesn't have the overall effect that Camdan Yards has on me. It has a kind of utilitarian design. It works, but isn't impressive. By the way, if a vendor outside the gates tells you that you can take that 24 oz. Diet Coke she sold you into the park with you, don't believe her. You'll just cry as you toss it into the trash can at the gate.

I had a blast. Being able to go to three MLB games this year has been a treat. Here are some photos of Nationals Park.

Monumental Day

On Saturday afternoon we took the DC Metro from Baltimore into the Mall. Eventually, we were going to go to the Nationals/Reds game at Nationals Park.

The day was overcast and did not lend itself to photography very well. These photos are the best I could do. We didn't make it closer to the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials because we got caught in the middle of a deluge with nowhere to go to hide. We were soaked by the time we got to the ballgame.