What the...?

On the way in to work this morning I came across a car parked where it had no business with the four-way flashers flashing away while the driver was inside a fast food restaurant ordering breakfast.  The mere fact that her “flashers are on” apparently makes it OK to inconvenience everyone else so that she didn’t have to walk the extra ten feet that being legally parked would have caused her to do.  Why do people feel so entitled to do these things?  What makes this person better than everyone else that she can make it tougher for everyone driving through the parking lot just so that she can be lazy and park right in front of the door where there are clearly no parking signs, and where it makes anyone coming around the building have to swerve completely over out of the lane of travel to avoid hitting her car.  I don’t get it, and what’s more, it irritates the Dickens out of me.

Other things that annoy me:

·         The person in the grocery store check-out line who stands there for ten minutes watching the clerk ring up his / her $250 grocery bill and only when the clerk finishes and reveals the bill does this person even attempt to locate their checkbook.  So now here you stand for another five minutes while they complete the check and be certain to enter it in their transaction register before handing it over to the clerk.  What was he / she doing for the past ten minutes when the check could have been filled in leaving only the amount blank.  Again, this is a person around which the world revolves and we’re all just scenery in the background.

·         Along those lines, people who send their kid back to an aisle to get one more thing they forgot, holding up everyone behind them.  Like the person this morning – guess it’s all about them.

·         People who lay on their horn a millisecond after the light turns green.

·         Total and complete ignorance – if you don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t talk.

·         Along those lines, people who try to put on airs and show that they can speak with a certain eloquence only to show their true intelligence when they sue words in the wrong context or use the wrong word altogether. There is a county commissioner in my home town that the people who elected him deserve.  Not too long ago during an open meeting of the Board he was making reference to the US Constitution and stated that all people have certain ineligible rights.  He didn’t just misspeak, he honestly thought that the constitution guaranteed ineligible rights opposed to unalienable rights. 

·         Red lights that stay red when nothing is coming the other way.

These are just a few things that get my blood boiling and my dandruff up.  What irks you?

Dickens

All You Need Is...

McCartney and Lennon once wrote, "All you need is love..."  So it got to me thinking as we go into the new year, what is it that is all that I need?  A number of years ago I saw an article in my local paper about people who were downsizing their homes, living in prefab, 400 square foot homes that, from the outside, looked like nothing more than a kids play house, but these were fully functional, but small houses.  It made me contemplate the practicality of that for a while.  That’s when I first started thinking about what it is that I really need?

I took a brief vacation by myself back in May and hung out at a friend’s house in the NC mountains.  Every day I got up and went fishing, wading in streams, or standing on the banks of a nearby lake, and I thought then, this is all I really need.  The only thing missing was my wife, and of course my kids for occasional visits, but when I got down to the very basics, I needed very little.  I needed shelter, food – I didn’t cook anything elaborate, rather I ate sandwiches and heated some soup – and a fishing pole and some water in which to fish.  Throw in a book or two and the company of my wife, and I’ll be set for life.  So I ask, what do you need?

Dickens

Miscellaneous Musings

This is my first attempt at a blog and I intend to use it simply as an outlet to write, rant, rave, complain, compliment, praise, or express whatever may be on my mind at any given time.  I hope that I may find some followers out there, and I welcome feedback on my posts.  I don’t really know what to expect or where this blog may go – I suspect it may follow the path of the wind and scatter my thoughts, or perhaps just show how scattered my thoughts already are!  So with that in mind, I hope that anyone out there who happens across this page may find it enlightening at times, or that it invokes opinions from others, or maybe just that it provides some entertainment or a place to find that others sometimes think crazy thoughts as well.  So here goes:

A day after Christmas and I am amazed at how fast the days seem to sweep by anymore.  I remember being a kid and thinking that Christmas would never get here.  The excitement, the anticipation made the wait almost unbearable.  I would find myself counting down the days, and sometimes even the hours until Christmas Eve, the most magical night of all the nights of the year.  But now that I’m much older, the Christmas season, which I still love, seems to be a blur.  We, or at least I, seem to have so much going on in my life, that I rarely have the time to just sit back and enjoy the season.  Oh, I don’t wish it away and I still love Christmas and look upon it as the most wonderful time of the year, to borrow a phrase, but I don’t seem to have the time to enjoy it the way that I used to, or the way that I want to.  I know that many will say that I’ve lost sight of what it’s all about, and to an extent I’ll agree, but the mere fact that my life has become much more complicated than I ever imagined that it could be, and I would suspect there are a lot of others out there who feel the same way, causes me to seem to be always on the move, always having something important that has to be done, leaving me little time to just enjoy.  I long for that carefree attitude I had as a child when my biggest concern at Christmas time was whether I was going to get the Redskins toboggan or the felt Redskins jacket with the gold vinyl sleeves.  Everything else was just stuff that got in the way.  Gosh, I miss that kid!