Please, please, no need to dress up just for this

Two blog posts in one week?!  Preposterous!!  And yet it's happening before your very eyes...

A nice suit can only do so much to make you look good,
especially when you have no hands and a knob for a head

This week at work I had occasion to dress up a little bit more than usual, wearing a suit one day and wearing a sport coat the next day.  If you're a working professional, you probably know what that means, and if you're an HR professional, you definitely know what that means.  If you're an HR professional and you don't know what that means, you are merely posing as an HR professional as part of some clever ruse, and I wish you the best of luck in your chosen subterfuge.  Typically a suit is not part of my day-to-day attire, as a jacket seems a bit overboard for my role.  As a result, I have not accumulated many suits over the years.  In fact, I own one suit, which I have had since partway through my undergraduate years.  There have been enough occasions over the years that the suit has gotten plenty of wear, but there really haven't been enough occasions to warrant getting a second suit.  And certainly there is no reason to get a new suit if you aren't going to wear it regularly, as a suit represents a decent investment if you want to avoid the social stigma of wearing a "cheap suit."

A long flight will inevitably also involve some drive(l) time

You may as well pack it with krill

In just under one week now I'll be taking flight to cross the Atlantic en route to visiting Jen in Paris and getting into other mischief in the land of sheep and harps.  Much more on this later, to be sure, but for now the business at hand is packing and making other final preparations for the trip (or more accurately, blogging about packing and making final preparations for the trip).  When packing for such a venture, it is important to pack light.  The weight of your luggage is not important because it is difficult to carry around heavy luggage on your person, but rather because you want your stuff to have the best chance at being retained when they jettison luggage midway over the Atlantic to reduce weight in the aircraft and thus save on fuel.  Airlines have to be profitable like any other business, and cost-saving measures such as this are regarded as commonplace.  What, you thought there was just a "mix-up" with your luggage and that it's sitting at some other airport now?  Silly traveler!

The luggage-jettison idea was submitted via a standard corporate "idea drop box" in 1979 by a gal named Rosalind Grenbodine, and was so quickly adopted by all major airlines that nobody could actually remember which company implemented it first.  Rosalind would have obviously been able to speak to this question, but she was a rather unpopular employee within her organization (nobody likes the coworker who always has the good ideas), and company administration either purposefully or inadvertently approved a suggestion, also submitted via the idea drop box, to award Rosalind a guest seat on the first flight that would practice the luggage jettison, with the underlying intent (and outcome) of also jettisoning Rosalind.

For best results, read while sitting outside in the evening

Have you hosta?

Tonight's post is brought to you from the front porch of the house, where I'm sitting out in the cool of the evening with a light rain coming down on the multitude of hostas planted alongside our house.  Some of the hostas have pointy leaves, some have rounder leaves, and some have leaves with a whitish border around the green interior.  Being shade-loving plants, the hostas are really "in their element" on the side of the house, where they get a limited amount of sun but a full dose of any rain that falls, as they are now.  I pronounce the word "hosta" with the h-sound, much like I pronounce the word "huge" with the h-sound.  Some folks like to pronounce the word "huge" like "yuge," leaving off the h.  I expect these same people pronounce the word "hosta" like "ahsta."  Although I am definitely not a proponent of leaving off the h-sound in any word, I would take it as a compliment if someone came by the house and said "Boy, those are some yuge ahstas you 'ave there!"

As I was discussing with Jen recently, sitting out on the porch is one of the simple pleasures in life.  Porches are for bare feet, and cups of coffee or tea, perhaps a book, and watching critters when the opportunity arises.  Much like the hostas on the side of the house, I feel like I'm in my element on the porch.  It's a place to read, write, and think, not to mention go about in bare feet, drink coffee, and watch critters.  I feel I excel at doing all of these things.