life according to dave

miscellany

Wed, 2 Sep 2009 19:29:26 -0700

So, no particular theme here. Just a few random things that have come up over the past week or two that I thought were interesting/amusing. First up: credit card craziness.

You know, there was a time when I was excited to get a credit card of my own. And then, to find out that my credit card had a limit of $500. Wow! Now that was big. Eventually, after proving my creditworthiness by using my card and paying off the balance, that limit might rise up to a thousand bucks, or maybe two thousand. Well, flash forward a few decades. Now those credit card companies have started really jacking up those limits, and they are reaching amounts I never thought possible. I mean, I’m good, but I’m not this good. Check out my latest e-mail from one of my credit cards:

What the? Thirty thousand dollars? What in the world am I going to charge for thirty grand? Jiminy crickets. You could buy any number of cars for that amount. While I’d like to think that this ridiculous credit limit is a testament to my amazing ability to handle money, I believe it’s really just another example of how pathetic our whole credit card system has become. Give people easy access to money, let them spend it, then charge them awful interest rates so that it takes them forever to pay it off (or as some people do, just declared bankruptcy). I can tell you this much ... as soon as I pay off the small remaining balance on this card (fortunately at a really, really low interest due to a well-timed balance transfer), this card is cancelled. And good riddance.

So, speaking of pets - well, dogs, actually, here’s what seems to be the latest in patient relations for canines. I received this in the mail yesterday, even though it wasn’t for me. It’s for Milkdud. Check it out. E-birthday cards. And if you click on the link, you can watch an animated card just for Milky. Now, is that cool, or what? By the way, think of Milkdud on September 6th ... that’s his actual birth date. He’ll be 13 ... that’s 91 in human years. Wow. He’s still pretty chipper considering.

Finally, and still from the world of pets, come two pieces of mail we received recently the old fashioned way: snail mail. A week or two back, we go to the mail box, open it up, take out the mail, and find these two cards:

Look at that. Each is addressed to our silly old dogs (care of us, of course). And, on top of that, Norman shows up as a Schnauzer and Milky shows up as a Poodle, which while not technically correct, is close enough to still be funny. Makes me wonder what veterinarians will think of next.

can it be true?

Wed, 2 Sep 2009 19:00:32 -0700

While Phil Connors considered all people to be morons, today I’m going to apply Phil’s insightful aphorism to a subset of the general public: teenagers. What reminded me of Phil’s wisdom, and why did it apply only to those 18 and younger? It happend to be this recent article in the local newspaper

observations at the gym - part deux

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:53:10 -0700

Imagine you’re watching the game show Jeopardy.

Alex: You’re pick, Dave.
Dave: At The Gym for $800, Alex
Alex: And the answer is:

Yes I’m a bitch, yes I’m a bitch, yes I’m a B-I-T-C-H
Yes I’m a bitch, yes I’m a bitch, you say anything you wish
Yes I’m a bitch, yes I’m a bitch, yes I’m a B-I-T-C-H
Yes I’m a bitch, yes I’m a bitch, yes it always rhymes with WITCH

<Bing>

Alex: Yes, Dave.
Dave: What is the most inane song ever?
Alex: Can you be more specific?
Dave: What is the most inane song ever played at the gym while I’ve been trying to workout?
Alex: Right!

Back to the real world.

I kid you not, the song mentioned above blared loudly through the gym at 7:30am this morning, a song obviously intended to spur me on to my best and most energetic workout ever. Not by inspiration, however, but by the sheer magnitude of the irritation that grew within me as I pedaled my exercise bicycle faster and faster in a vain attemp to escape the large speaker cabinet located above and just to my left. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, when the song ended, it was followed by yet another in the usual long string of rapid-fire, disco beating, head numbing techno-pop that presumably has been scientifically shown to annoy people to better health. At least I didn’t have to listen to “bitch” this and “bitch” that anymore.

Back to the realm of Jeopardy ...

Dave: At The Gym for $1000, Alex.
Alex: And the answer is:

Roger Moore

<Bing>

Alex: Dave.
Dave: Which actor played the worst James Bond, in the cheesiest Bond films ever, from 1973 to 1985?
Alex: Yes!

No, it wasn’t bad enough that I had to endure the “bitch” song at 7:30am. Nope. On the television directly in front of me was the James Bond film, “A View To A Kill”. I’m a Bond fan, but I don’t think I ever really watched any of the Roger Moore era Bond films very closely. At least not until this morning. That’s when I discovered, despite others claims to the contrary, that Roger Moore clearly sucks the worst (or would that be the best?) at playing Jame Bond, 007. Bad acting, crappy screenplay, awful special effects ... I truly don’t think there is one redeeming thing about this movie that I can recall. Let me think a moment. Nope. Not a thing.

Well, despite the two irritating elements of this morning’s time at the gym, I can say that I still managed to get a sweat going, and I feel good. In the end, that’s all that really matters. Here’s to hoping for improved music and, hopefully, no James Bond, tomorrow morning.

observations at the gym - part I

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:52:09 -0700

Now that Debbie and I have been hitting the gym most every day, and sometimes twice a day, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to notice what’s going on around me. While you’re sitting/standing/running and you’re tired of watching TV, and closing your eyes and attempting to go to your own personal happy place doesn’t help the time pass any faster either, there’s plenty to look at in a gym. Maybe not that much to smell (ummm, perhaps there’s too much to smell), but plenty of interesting and entertaining things to see. So here, in no particular order, are just a few observations at the local gym.

First, what about old guys who shuffle in with their gym bags, disappear into the locker room, and reappear wearing baggy, knee length shorts with dark dress socks pulled up as high as possible. Yes, that’s right. I’ve seen it. These guys (ok, well I’ve only seen one guy do this, but he’s consistent) crack me up, because, all ready to work out, they step on the treadmill and walk for 5 minutes at the blazing speed of 2 miles per hour. Then they really go crazy. They head off to the various weight machines, load them up with 10 pounds, and proceed to pump that iron until they look really, really bored. Then, off to the locker room, a quick change, and they exit. Total elapsed time: fifteen minutes. I tell myself that as silly as it seems, the fact that they are even at the gym is better than nothing. Right? Right.

Another favorite: those who read while working out. There’s this one particular middle-aged guy (hmm ... I just realized that I’ve hit the number of years required to be called “middle-aged” ... bleah) who dutifully shows up at the gym almost every time we’re there. He changes into the requisite workout clothes, then, carrying his book, heads to a piece of aerobic equipment. Once there, he proceeds to plop his book up in front of him, then expend a ton of energy, burning massive calories ... reading. Yup. Everything he does is in slow motion while his eyes are trained on what must be an incredibly engrossing novel. I’m sure it must be possible to burn a lot of calories moving ones eyes back and forth down a page. Then, when he moves to another piece of equipment, well there goes another bunch of calories. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that after months of watching this guy “workout”, he’s as heavy, or heavier, then he was on the first day I saw him.

I could keep going, but for now I’ll end with another favorite: shirts that are too tight. You know the type: short, stout, and suffering from a massive case of “short man syndrome”. These guys strut around the gym, shoulders back, wearing body hugging, sleeveless shirts. When they’re not throwing around free weights, grunting and groaning, and dropping the equipment so hard that it makes your ears bleed, they’re walking around looking at themselves in the mirrors (though they try real hard not to be noticed) to see if their muscles are bulging in just the right way. Of course, they find it necessary to pace back and forth in front of the ladies, who dutifully endure the torture of aerobic exercise on the different machines designed to make you huff and puff your way to a skinnier body ... a truly captive audience.

Since I’m talking about men with minds focused solely on their muscles, here’s a funny story that I heard from a personal trainer. They told me that there is a certain subset (and I’ll bet it’s large) of weight guys who come in every Friday evening and spend their time working their biceps. Certain exercises can really pump up the bicep quickly and make it look good, so they hit the gym, get their biceps in shape for scoping out the girls, then head out for a Friday night at the bar (or wherever people with no interests deeper than muscles congregate) to hook up with the opposite sex to form meaningful relationships.

Well, there are a few of my personal gym observations. There are many more, but I’m sure someone out there must have their own entertaining gym anecdotes. Share if you’d like. Certainly, though, I’ll be back with more in the near future ...

reliving twenty years

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:38:54 -0700

Every so often, all of us face moments where “time”, or rather the passage of time, becomes painfully clear. These maudlin moments can evoke anything from smiles, laughs, frowns, or even tears. I think that regardless of the specific feelings we experience, each of these episodes, where we recognize the inexorable movement of time, in the end, are gratifying. Or perhaps a more accurate description might be that they are cathartic in some sense, allowing us to experience once more events from the past, where long forgotten emotions resurface to flood us with familiar memories gently mixed with pangs of loss. To me, nowhere are these types of recollections more vivid and more emotional than when they involve either your parents or your children. In this case, my sentimentality was trigged by a project I recently completed that involved my two sons, Jonathan and Jeremy.

The task was easy enough, involving simple but tedious repetitions of physical labor (fortunately, of the light variety). It was brainless and mechanical, and it spanned the course of several weeks. The end result, however, was a wonderful collection of pricesless and irreplaceable memories culled from almost two decades of life. What was the task? To transfer VHS and 8mm video tapes (dinosaur technology) to DVD (not quite the cutting edge, but close).

Over the years, hours of video tape representing roughly twenty years of real time had slowly filled a box marked “Family videos”. For the last several years, since Jeremy turned eighteen, a task I had given myself was to take the images captured on the video tapes (which I was afraid would soon begin to degrade, especially the older ones) and place them on the new, presumably longer lasting, medium of DVD. After many delays and false starts, I finally began and finished this project. What started out as this (imagine that box full of just the videos ... this is a picture of the process half way through):

Ended up as this:

Quite a difference, huh? I believe it was at this point that I stopped and pondered the stack of disks. I touched them, then slid my fingers along their edges, counting their number. Somewhere around 60, I stopped counting. Then, I realized that each disk contained about two hours of video. That meant that there were at least 120 hours of video in the container. One hundred and twenty hours of video snippets of life spanning 20 or so years. Pretty much every birthday and holiday and special event for each of the boys, from birth through the age of 18, lay somewhere in the stack of DVDs at which I looked. My eyes blinked with a sense of disbelief: 20 years ... 60 (or so) disks ... 120 plus hours ... That’s what life had been boiled down to, years worth of memories distilled to such a relatively small number of disks.

It seemed like so little media to represent such a large span of time. I soon realized, though, that despite our best efforts it is pretty much impossible to record every unique and memorable life event on video (or even by photograph). However, I discovered that the sacrifice of hauling out a video camera to at least record the significant events in our lives is well worth the effort after the fact, even if it’s not possible to catch every single moment. Nothing reminded me of this more than when, a couple of years ago, I made a Christmas video for Jonathan and Jeremy. It contained highlights of two Christmases, back when they were four & two and five & three (1987 and 1988). What struck me as I watched the video I had taken years ago wasn’t necesarily anything big, like showing exactly what Christmas tree we’d picked out or the decorations we’d used. Instead, it was simply the opportunity to see my two sons as little boys once again, to enjoy their silly expressions and their voices, still childlike and many years from puberty, jabbering away like kids do. And as I watched and took in these images from past, it dawned on me how easily I might have lost these precious moments that I’d just been able to relive. Without the video camera, those smiles, the laughter, the running around and bouncing off the furniture, and even Jeremy’s poor little chickenpox covered face from Christmas 1988, would have been lost forever, relegated to that imperfect and continually fading instrument known as human memory. How much better it is to slip a disk in the DVD player, press play, and transport oneself back in time. It makes all those hours of watching the boy’s lives through a camera viewfinder worth it.

Someday, presumably after I’ve retired and have lots of spare time on my hands, I hope to watch one of the best segments of my life - that time where God blessed me with, and entrusted me with, my two sons - in its entirety, from start to finish (just imagine, I could watch continuously for over five days if I chose to). It’s something I look forward to doing when I have the time, and I plan to bring Debbie along for the journey so she can enjoy that time of my life as well. She’s been blessed to have shared the last nine years or so with them, and I’d love for her to share in their earlier years as well.