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The Cable Guy

The other day, I had the pleasure of having “the cable guy” at my house for the span of the entire day. We decided to finally switch cable companies, overcoming a long span of inertia, by the fact that we were being gouged by our previous TV/internet provider for years. But when our cable bill started competing with our grocery budget, when it started coming in right under the mortgage payment, I could no longer sit idly by, letting our money fly out of the window, at high internet speeds.

Frankly, I look at TV/internet providers, the same way that I view politicians: just a big pot of mess and evil, to greater and lesser degrees. So when the new provider told me that “the cable guy” would be at my house for an hour to an hour and a half, tops, I already blocked off the whole morning, on my calendar. Ever the optimist, I didn’t plan on blocking off my entire day to allowing a small, angry, sweaty man race all over my house and attic, swearing under his breath, digging up my yard, only to hand me the channel changer to one of my TVs, to have us both realize, that we could no longer turn the TV off. So the break that I was getting in a cheaper cable bill, would now be made up in our electricity bill.

During the new cable set-up day, I texted friends complaints throughout the day. We came up with a brilliant plan to light a fire under future cable guys’ butts. We decided that whenever you are having cable/internet/phone service (or any of the like) set up, you should invite over your most annoying, know-it-all, relative or neighbor. We all know the guy (sorry, but it IS usually a guy) who I’m talking about. He’s the guy who knows more about, and how to do everybody’s jobs, than they do. He is the guy standing behind “the cable guy” holding a coffee cup, filled with high octane coffee, barking out tips and suggestions and platitudes on how to get the job done right. My friends and I figured that would at least shave off a few hours from the job, as long as things didn’t escalate to murder, hence involving police and ambulance workers.

Reality is though, I won’t be having a cable guy out to our house any time soon. I will complain to friends and neighbors about outages and prices and the ridiculousness of having 879 TV channels, of which, only about three of those channels interest me. Then, decades down the road, I will finally get fed up with, “Sorry, but you just don’t qualify for any of our fantastic discounts as this point in time.” (once they get you hooked in with inertia and fear of a day spent with an angry “cable guy”, discounts no longer apply – ever.) I will call a new provider. They will tell me the change will take only a few minutes (this is decades down the road, remember). At this juncture, I will invite “that guy” over to make sure that “the cable guy” stays in his allotted time frame, for rigging and wiring my media to the price gouging setting. I have a plan in place.

The Good Guys

Happy Father’s Day!

Here’s to all of the good guys out there and there is a lot more of them out there, then the media wants to portray. Here’s to all of the good guys who are devoted to their families, who love their wives and provide for their kids. Here’s to all of the good guys who make sure that their families are safe, protected and warm. Here’s to all of the good guys who lovingly keep up their homes and always offer a helping hand to their friends and neighbors. Here’s to all of the good guys who serve our communities, our countries, and our God. Here’s to all of the good guys who attend yet another little sluggers game that their child or grandchild is playing in, versus playing another round of golf. Here’s to all of the good guys who have devoted their lives to a bigger cause (their families, their purposeful work, their duties and responsibilities) than just their own personal wants and needs. Here’s to all of the good guys out there! There are a ton of you! I am married to one. We see you all every day. We don’t say thank you. We take you for granted until one jerk messes up and then we lump you in with the “jerks.” But I know that there are a lot more good guys out there than there are jerks. Good guys just quietly, graciously, go about doing their thing – being strong, silent, devoted men without crying out for attention or gratitude. Good guys don’t finish last. Good guys last. Good guys are solid. They last through turmoil, upheaval, all of the highs and lows of life, and they do this all stably, with strong, firm chins and a vision for the future. Here’s to all of the good guys! We see you. We appreciate you and everything that you do for us.

It’s Time

Lately I have noticed that I am a little obsessed with time. I feel like I am always buying more clocks. I own dozens of watches. For my husband’s last birthday, I bought him not one watch, but actually two watches. I recently purchased a nice little desk clock for our spare bedroom and I am pondering buying another, exact same one, for the little alcove desk right outside of that bedroom. On my desk right now, I have two clocks. One works and the other is just an antique clock that looks pretty. I am also currently wearing a watch and both our home phone and my cell phone are in an arm’s reach, with the first thing showing on their faces, of course, is the time of day.

I’m not sure if I have always been so time conscious or if this is a sign of aging. Time is precious. Time is so easily wasted. Time is of the essence . . . . tick tock. tick tock. tick tock.

I understand the theory that time isn’t real, in the sense that we understand it. Technically, we are always in the present moment. We are always in the Now. Still, I think it is good that we came up with a unit to measure our present, precious moments, if for nothing else, than to truly understand the fleeting nature of our lives.

Fried Egg Friday

Hello friends and readers!!! Happy Friday!! Happy Favorite Things Friday!!! On Fridays, we keep it light and crispy here at Adulting – Second Half. On Fridays, I list three “favorites” – things, songs, TV shows, books, etc. These favorite things make my material world all the better! Please check out previous Friday posts for other favorites and please, please share you favorites, as well. Because like Madonna says, “We are living in a material world . . . . ” Here goes – today’s favorites:

HBO’s Chernobyl – Amazing TV series! Captivating, awful, excruciating, yet hopeful. The acting in this series is absolutely exquisite. This production came in right under Game of Thrones as one of HBO’s best productions, in my mind. It is definitely worth some of your weekend to start to watch this show and ponder its magnanimity.

Should I Answer? App – I have been on the pointless “no-call list” (HA!) for a long time, but now my cell phone seems like it is THE hot number for anyone selling anything, to call. I want to kiss this app’s feet. So many pointless, ridiculous, aggravating calls have been blocked since I downloaded it. I have proof from the list of blocked calls that it keeps every day. Numbers that are known to be telemarketer/spoof dialers have angry red faces on them, and they cannot get through. Love it!

“Things Are As Big As You Make Them” – This was the best piece of advice I received as a young mother, by another young mother, when we were embroiled in neighborhood drama that was probably rooted in the lack of sleep and the lack of solitude, young mothers get, when they are raising their children. I never forgot this piece of advice and it has helped me, many, many times, keep things in perspective. Now, some things actually do need to be made BIG (to make a point), but most things do not. This little mantra is an excellent reminder of this.

Let’s end Friday, with these “wise” thoughts:

“For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn’t quite that simple. The fried egg isn’t properly a fried egg until it’s been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn’t do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It’s all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Noise Cancellation

Before I left for my getaway, I was having trouble sleeping at night. This is not because I am worried about anything or because I am in any pain. It all had to do with a horrible, loud, annoying noise that kept me tossing and turning and seriously thinking about purchasing ear plugs or a white noise machine or a straight jacket. This loud noise wasn’t anything man made. It was coming from a creature of Mother Nature.

Our backyard butts up to a small lake and behind the lake is a relatively untouched nature preserve. Normally I love living like Snow White. The diverse nature we observe here is truly stunning and fascinating. We get rafters of turkeys (that is the correct term for a group of turkeys, btw) walking through our backyard all of the time. We get all sorts of birds – herons, eagles, hawks, ducks and woodpeckers. We see deer, rabbits, armadillos, possums, raccoons and alligators, on a frequent basis. Normally, these lovely critters act just as fun eye candy and we have a mutual respect for our respective places as creatures on this beautiful Earth. We all keep a healthy distance from each other and we live in happy symbiosis.

Mating season can get quite loud here, though. I thought mating season would be over by now, but for a few days before I left on my getaway, there was a very insistent, loud, demanding, horny as hell creature who just wouldn’t shut up. Whoever, whatever it was, sounded like he was right outside of our bedroom window. My frustrated, exhausted husband got up once, in the middle of the night, looking to see if it were squirrels or alligators or a new species of bird whose call we hadn’t heard before, sitting right outside of our window, insistently calling out for a mate. I got up to help him, but we just couldn’t find the sneaky source. We rustled in the bushes, our fears of finding something dangerous, with sharp, gnash-y teeth, being abated by our desperate need for sleep. We turned on all of our spotlights, so bright, you would have thought we were a prison, looking desperately for a fugitive prisoner. The noisemaker continued through all of this fuss, mocking us, as he carried on with his insistent screeches and howls.

I had forgotten about this annoyance when I was on my trip. I kept remarking about how well I had slept on my trip, attributing it to the mattress pads or the hotel pillows, not realizing that it was really the serene silence that I had been missing, that was helping me get such sound sleep. As I eagerly turned in last night, excited to be in my own surroundings, in my own familiar bed, as I shut my eyes, ready for sweet, dreamy slumber, my noisy, aggravating nemesis starting his siren song AGAIN. UGH! I had completely forgotten about this pest, on my sweet escape. Last night I got spotty sleep at best.

This morning, as I was grumpily making up our bed, the noise started up again. This was unusual. It had been mostly a night thing . . . a nightmare, for sure. Once again, it sounded like it was coming from our window sliders. In desperation, I got my phone’s flashlight and I looked all over the window, trying to follow the sound. I finally found my nemesis. He wasn’t large. He wasn’t scary. He wasn’t feathered and he didn’t have sharp teeth. He was actually kind of cute and innocent. He reminded me of Kermit . . . Kermit the frog. I set him free. I set us both free, I hope. Tonight will tell if he decides to come back. . . . I guess it isn’t easy being green.

Light Write

This is travel day, friends. So I am going to call it a “light write” day, so that I don’t miss my flight. I feel very lulled, refreshed, revitalized, yet relaxed. I like how I feel right now. I like my energy. I hope that I can carry my good vibe into my home life and keep it there for a while. If I like me and how I feel right now, I suppose that my family and friends will appreciate a more chill me, as well. I am filled with peace and gratitude.

Whatever you wanna be, just, at the end of the day, if you’re being a good person, which is not hard to be, and you’re putting positive energy into the world, and you’re appreciative and loving to the people around you that care about you and everybody in general, then it’ll work out. Gnash

Big Little Lies Part Deux

I absolutely love to read. I figured that I have hours of uninterrupted read time on this getaway, if I want it, so I snagged a book yesterday . . . . a book, it turns out that I have already read. Ugh. Is this part of aging?

I have been wanting to watch the series Big Little Lies for a while now, but I was still finishing out some other shows that my husband and I had been watching, first. My husband seemed to have a lukewarm response to the idea that this should be our next series to watch. He is not a big fan of Meryl Streep. (I am.) So, when I saw the Big Little Lies book with Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon and Zoe Kravitz on the cover, I thought to myself, “Cha-ching!” I usually like books better than the movie or show versions that are based on the books, anyway. I thought to myself that I’ll just luxuriate and read to my heart’s content, with no interruptions, like kids or dogs wondering what is for dinner, or the doorbell ringing, reminding me of yet another package from Amazon to unpack and put away. Wonderful!

About 20 pages in, it dawned on me that I had already read the book. I turned to the copyright page. It said that Big Little Lies was published in 2014. That was only five years ago. My memory is getting that bad that I couldn’t remember that I had read a book that I read probably less than five years ago! Oh my.

I am going to continue to read the book. Obviously, I have forgotten a lot about it, although I vaguely remember the ending. I know who the guilty party is . . . . don’t worry, no spoilers. I even think that I still want to watch the show. By the time we get around to watching the series based on the book, I may have even forgotten that I have read the book . . . . twice. I suppose the big little lie that I am telling myself is that if I turn this all into a big joke and others can laugh along with it and relate to it, this aging thing won’t scare me . . . at all. Big little lie.

Boo

So, yesterday I stayed in one of those huge, old, rambly, Victorian historic register-type places. The minute I walked into the lobby I felt like I had entered the epitome of a haunted house. I kept waiting to step on to one of the cars of the Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride. My imagination started running rampant and my now free-roaming imagination was ravenous. So I fed it. I talked to hotel employees about “the house ghosts” which of course, there were many. I talked to one employee, the ancient elevator operator, who had worked at the hotel for 39 years, and while he was talking ghost stories, I kept questioning to myself whether perhaps, he was actually one of them.

As I sat by the pool, I lapped up all of the internet stories about the ghosts that inhabit this particular abode. There were pictures of ghost chasers sitting in the dark in trepidation, their eyes glowing green, as they waited for lights to flicker, or for glasses to mysteriously fall to the floor and break. There were tragic love stories that make ghost stories all of the more intriguing and beguiling. Several rooms in the hotel are booked way in advance of Halloween – the rooms that are known to have a particularly large amount of ghostly sightings. I giggled and glee-d over all of these fun stories as I watched families splash each other and everyone bustling all around, enjoying summer fun.

This was all fun and games during the light of day. But hadn’t I forgotten something? I am the world’s worst scared-y cat. I am as jumpy as a cricket. What the hell was I thinking feeding my mind with all of that gobbly-goop when I needed to get a good night’s sleep? In the middle of the night, I woke up, my heart pounding because I thought I heard the sounds of strange wind chimes. I started going through my memory files to see if any of the ghosts announced their presence with wind chimes. The idea that the sound was just exactly what it was, wind chimes, seemed sinister-ly impossible, in my fear-frozen mind. I started the count-down, praying for time to move quickly and to get me to the light of morning.

Today, I am headed to a more modern abode. Unless it was built on an ancient burial ground, I don’t figure it to be a ghost hunter’s paradise. One thing is for certain, I won’t be doing any research of that possibility, on the internet. I have learned my lesson and a major point of this trip is to get good rest.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. - Stephen King

Getaway

I’m headed out early this morning. I am going on a short “getaway.” I was chatting with girlfriends about it, a couple of days ago. I like my destination. I haven’t been there since I was a kid, and I always like to explore new places. However, mostly, I am excited to get out of my element. I’m excited to step out of my own life and to get out of my own routine for a few days. I want to escape for a little bit. “That’s why they are called ‘getaways’,” my wise friend said.

Sometimes I feel guilty about admitting that I want to “get away” from my daily life to other people, and sometimes, I feel guilty admitting that fact, even to myself. It makes it sound like my life is bad and full of drudgery and that just isn’t the truth. All in all, I have a very fine, blessed life. In fact, many times when I am on a getaway, I find myself appreciating my life at home, all of the more. Often times, towards the end of a getaway, I start pining away for home. I see a family laughing together or someone walking their frisky dog and I want to be home with my kids and my pets.

Still, right now, I can’t wait to only have to think about what I am going to eat, at whatever time I want to eat. I like the idea of sleeping in (or not) to whatever time floats my boat, on any particular day. I like the idea of exploring shops, and museums and parks that are unfamiliar and intriguing to me, and not having to try to compromise with a large group of people with diverse interests and moods, as to where to go to next or what to do next. I like the idea of not having to stop whatever I am doing to let the dogs out, once again.

Truth be told, I need this refresher. It is good for me and it is good for my family. Sometimes a getaway is really just about getting-a-way-back-to-yourself. In that way, you have more of yourself to give, when you get back home.

Rainy Lullaby

It’s a rainy summer morning. I feel so grateful. We have needed some rain. It has been blazing hot and I have been moving around like a slug that is seared on to the ground. Rain is like everything else, not truly appreciated, until it has been absent for a while. This morning I am appreciating the rain. I am noticing its lovely steady sound, it’s pleasant, clean scent and the lovely droplets it is leaving on my thankful plants. I live in an area of the country where people come to vacation and they dread the idea of it raining when they are here. I have known that feeling, so I always feel a little bad when we get a stretch of rainy days, but this morning I don’t feel bad at all. I feel quenched. I feel saturated. I feel dewy. I feel refreshed. I feel cozy.

My husband just walked into the room, aggravated that he won’t be able to do his regular morning bike ride. My daughter is grumbling about her cancelled tennis lesson. I feel a little bad for them, but not too bad. I feel quenched. I feel saturated. I feel dewy. I feel refreshed. I feel cozy.

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. - Langston Hughes