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.

Been awhile since the last post. Good thing blogging is like riding a bike.

Trying to get this post in before it gets too late tonight, as tomorrow will be another fairly early morning.  Tomorrow will start with a bike ride, as I ran this morning and I'm alternating run-bike-run-bike right now. Hopefully there will be more to share on the reason for this training regime later, but for now we'll just leave it that biking has become part of the regular routine.  Biking is significantly less jarring (that is, less difficult) to get up and do in the morning, so you could say that tomorrow is an "easy" day.  Some may say that if it's an "easy" day then I must not be trying hard enough.  To those people I say "If you're pushing hard every day then you must be on steroids."  To this they would respond "We're not on steroids."  To that I say "Yes you are, because I injected you when you weren't looking."

Obviously 'roiding

The bike I'm riding is actually the same bike that I had when I was a kid - a Huffy Mountain Storm.  It's black and green, with white spots that presumably represent a mountain storm (of snow).  This was my first 10-speed bike, and remains the only 10-speed bike I've ever owned (and no, I haven't dallied with more or less speeds - why go looking for something else when you have a 10?).  The MS has had some time in the garage, no doubt, but after getting it out recently and having it tuned up at a bike shop, it's back in good shape.  Both Nate and I had the same bikes as kids, as they were given to us as Christmas gifts by our parents.  If memory serves me, Dad was pretty excited to give us the bikes because it was a gift that he had always wanted as a kid, so retaining the bike over the years comes from more than just a desire not to spend money on something new.

Click to add title

A neatly stacked, perfectly organized hell

Today in lieu of my usual walk to work in the morning I hopped in my car and traveled over highwayed hill and dale to that mythical, far-off place....actually, make that "foulest of abominations"....the Easton Town Center.  If you aren't familiar with Easton, let me tell you about it.  There are fountains and trees and decorations, all of which sound lovely on paper.  But their true purpose is dark and sinister, for they are merely intended to distract you from the fact that you are slowly forfeiting your soul.  You see, Easton is a giant outdoor mall ('outdoor' in the sense that all the stores have outside entrances), full of evil the likes of which this world has never see...er....sees in every major city.  There are strollers, and piped music, and Pottery Barn.  Let me reiterate that as you walk through Easton and observe all these things, your soul is slowly leaving your earthly form.  This is why the models in the Abercrombie & Fitch store windows look so forlorn.

Fortunately, my time at Easton was actually to be spent in the giant Hilton there and not in the mall area.  Being in the Hilton is kind of like losing your soul in its own way, but you at least get a continental breakfast.  My trip to the Hilton was made necessary by a conference I was attending for work, put on by a (rich) legal firm, so the continental breakfast promised to be especially grand.  And by grand I mean "tastes really good," because the focus of legal firms hosting continental breakfasts is getting potential clients to like them, not to make the potential clients healthy.  Fresh fruit?  Maybe a fresh fruit pastry.  Whole wheat toast?  Fah!  I will swipe that away with one fell swoop of my bear claw.  Bacon?!  How dare you bring that before....oh wait, bacon is okay.