Category: Humor

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Guess I’m getting a tad old

My brother took an extended lay-over on his way to Mexico.
It was good seeing him and as always I count myself lucky to have someone like him in my life.
I picked him up from the airport on Wednesday in the rain.
The only crappy thing was a guy who was 1) an asshole 2) obviously having a bad day. I was making the approach to the terminal doing about 10 miles an hour and looking at the terminal curbside for a place to park.
Yeah I was a bit distracted and in the rain my visibility was reduced. Not meant as excuses just statement of facts.
I was, as I said driving pretty slowly (Actually the posted speed limit for once!) I’d looked ahead of me saw nothing and then out of the corner of my eye I see movement. Fuck! I think. Where did he come from? This guy was in the crosswalk and I’d have sworn that there hadn’t been anybody in that crosswalk just a second before. I must have missed him, before I can apologize… He’s hitting the side of my car with his bag.
Ya know, I made a mistake. But that is no reason to fucking damage the car.
I’ve never understood that attitude.
Yes, pedestrians have the right of way in California. But pedestrians can see something as large as a car far more easily than a driver in a car can see them. I’ve been on the other side. I’ve had close calls in crosswalks. On a bright sunny day when I make eye contact with a driver there is no excuse, on a foggy, rainy day or at twilight, you know it’s easy for me to stop and chalk it up to the driver not seeing me.
But I wouldn’t hit someones car, especially on rain slicked roads where if the driver panics and slams on their brakes there is a potential for the car to fishtale, spin, or slide dangerously.
All I can say is, dude… I hope you weren’t going to New York. That attitude of yours will get you hit by a car or get your knees broken by someone with a worse attitude than yours and a lot of pride in their car.
I’ve often thought that California should change it’s pedestrian laws to be consistent with the rest of the country.
Since we have so many foreign drivers and transplants from other states. You really can’t count on anyone to stop anymore. I guess the only advantage is that if you’re hit in a crosswalk the law and insurance is on your side, that would probably be true anyway. Of course that’s predicated on the person that hit you actually stopping. All too often now the driver splits.
On the next circuit around the airport I see my Brother at the curb. It was perfect timing. I pop the trunk, he drops his bag in and we’re on the way out to the freeway.
We had a great visit.
He’s so much like me in many ways and at the same time he’s very different. I enjoy spending time with him.
He pointed out that it’s my turn to come visit him and he’s right. I’ve never been to Minnesota, of course I question if this is the time of year to be visiting Minnesota the fall has got to be pretty on the other hand I can’t afford to get snowed in.
My brother was here for a day and a half.
The day we spent together was fun we took the day slow and checked out the Air Museum in Chino. I’d never been there and I’ll definitely go back. They’ve got a nice operation there.
I was impressed that my brother knew the model of dang near every plane in the collection on sight.
It was also surprising to me how the physical sizes of the planes was not what I expected. I’ve been around Cessnas, and private business jets but had only seen pictures of a lot of the planes in this collection.
Most of the pictures I’m familiar with give no sense of scale.

The WWII fighters were larger than I expected and that some bombers were smaller than I expected. There was a V1 Buzz Bomb on display. It was surprisingly small. At first I thought it was a mockup but it wasn’t, it had been lovingly restored just like all the other Aircraft in the collection.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of time but it was worth the visit even with a limited time. We got there later than we intended… My fault! Got a little lost, in part because the GPS in the car had no idea the street the museum is on existed. My phone on the other hand took us right to the front door… I paid $200 for a software update in the car, why????

After we left the Museum we went to a winery. He’d never done wine tasting and even though we were a bit rushed there we had some fun.
The wine tasting started a night of drinking.
My Brother will tell you that I was the instigator… Not true!
We started at the Wrightwood Inn, one of my preferred places to sit and have a drink.
Then we went to The Yodeler and had a couple of burgers. I’d had enough JD that I decided to have coke with my meal. He had a big bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale. Then we went back to the Inn and had a few more drinks.
The thing I like about drinking in town is that I can walk home if I have too much. Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary.
5AM comes quick the morning after…
He had a 10AM flight out of LAX. add a two hour drive from here to get him to the airport. Since he’s on an international flight they recommend that the traveler arrive at the airport 2 hours prior to departure which means that he needed to be at LAX by about 8AM. We left the house slightly after 6AM. My Bro was trashed….
I’m not sure if he was hung over but he was definitely hurting…
Hey, what are big brothers supposed to do? Isn’t this a normal thing? Aren’t you supposed to put your brother on a plane to Mexico with a strong desire to yak all over the place?
He slept off & on while I dealt with traffic, and was feeling better by the time we actually got to the airport.
Now I have to figure out how I’m going to mess him up when I put him on the plane for home in a month.
I didn’t want to let him know that I was hurting too. I did alright getting to and from the airport, but when I got home I crashed. It felt like I’d been hit by a truck.
I’m doing better this morning, but I have no desire to do anything except maybe go for a bicycle ride.
Even that is questionable…
I guess I’m getting too old for long nights of hard drinking.

I’m not quite as antique as this plane. 
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I’ve got a bad case of Phone-itus

A couple of weeks ago my cell phone just blanked out. No rhyme or reason, it was working fine one moment and bang the next it was completely useless.

Oh it did manage to annoy the hell out of me be telling me it was receiving messages and phone calls but wouldn’t let me actually see the messages or answer the calls or in fact control it at all.

I pulled the battery, I pulled the sim card, I rebooted it, nothing worked. The next day finds me in my local cell phone store. They confirmed that yep the phone wasn’t working right. So we start the process where the phone insurance sends me a new phone and we’re good.

While I’m there I see this beautiful new smartphone. Wow! nifty display, cameras front and back, 4G THE WORKS! (Yeah I’m a techno whore! SO What?) I’m drooling and I’m thinking hey maybe I should just upgrade to this beautiful baby and keep the phone the insurance is going to send me as a backup.

Mind you we’re talking about a 400.00 upgrade here.

The internal justification was all that more reasonable when I was told that I wouldn’t have a working phone for at least 4 days in large part thanks to a Google mapping mistake.

A lot of  companies  are using Google to verify shipping addresses. In my case, Google has my address in the wrong city. This has on more than one occasion  prevented products from being sent to my house.

This time the insurance / cell phone company couldn’t verify the address and categorically refused to send the replacement phone. This means that I’m going to have the phone sent to the other halfs workplace, because after all the house that I’ve lived in for 20 years is suddenly non-existent! Google says so, it must be true!

The whole time, the little voice is saying “Dude, you gotta have a phone… This one is freakin beautiful and you KNOW you’ll be happier with it than your old phone.”

I’m weakening in my resolve to do the right thing, and frankly PISSED off that Google has refused to correct the mistake that is now impacting my life on a fairly regular basis.

After a lot of back & forth in my head, I’ve finally beaten the fuck out of that little “Angelic guy on my shoulder” and decided to go for it.

The new phone, and an assortment of accessories is sitting on the counter. The clerk is scanning the bar codes and the total isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I’m starting to get excited “Oh boy a new top of the line phone… goodie, goodie”, it’s like Christmas.

Shut up, I know it sounds insane. You should see me with a new car…

Just sayin…

The clerk asks me for the sim card out of my messed up phone. I pop the back off, pull the battery, pull the sim and hand it to her.  Because I’ve now got pieces of phone filling both hands I pop the battery back in the phone, and snap the back cover in place. After all I want to caress, hold, and watch the new phone as it powers up.

“Oh goodie, goodie, almost there. New phone! this is gonna be so cool!”

Out of the corner of my eye I see a light that I shouldn’t see. I try to ignore it, then I hear a start up tone and bigger than shit my “broken” phone is powering up normally. It’s sitting in my hand with a bright crisp clear display asking where the hell the sim card is.

DAMN!!!! I MEAN DAMN!!!

The “Angelic guy on my shoulder jumps up and says I told you so!”, The “Devil guy is stomping around screaming fuck, fuck!, fuckity, fuck!” The techno whore in me is whining in a most un-masculine fashion “But I waaaaannntttt it!”

I look at the clerk, Hoping that she’s gonna pull an I dream of Jeanie blink and my old phone will be dead again. She doesn’t.

Ever so reluctantly I tell her that we have to cancel the deal.

I can’t justify it anymore, I’ve got a working phone in my hands, that unconsciously I’m trying to strangle… Nope, the paper thin justification is gone. I can’t do it. It’s a chunk of change that I don’t need to be spending right now.

The clerk hands me back the sim card. I put it back in my old phone hoping against all reason that the damn thing doesn’t power up again. Nope, there’s the start-up tone, and the display is working right… Well SHIT!

I leave the store bummed, annoyed and feeling like a kid that got socks instead of a new bike for his birthday.

I had to do the adult thing. I know it was the right thing. Doesn’t make it any easier….

I will say this… the Next time my phone screws up… It’s outta here! And the latest new beautiful smart phone is going to be in my greedy techno whore hands!

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On with the business of living…

Hope everyone had a nice 3 day weekend.

(Note: when I started this post I was pissed off… By the time I got to the end I was chuckling because this is so often typical of my life.)

I’m now on furlough instead of actually being layed off.

Here is a snippet of an email exchange with one of my co-workers. In re-reading it, I note that I’m pretty pissed off and it comes through loud and clear. I’d actually tried to tone it down a bit. Sheesh if this is toned down I wish I’d saved the original draft! I’d have made my Marine friends proud with the colorful use of swearing!

Furlough instead of layoffs is almost as bad as just continuing along the layoff course that they had chosen. This is FAR more stressful since YET AGAIN the company has thrown everyone into a state of uncertainty. I’m actually FAR MORE PISSED about this than anything else. I mean I’m supposed to hang out waiting for the 20th? Ooooo there may be an immediate start date but no one has a clue when? We ALL know we cant run our lives like this… Why does the company think they can run a business like this?

I’m angry because it appears that the company may well be simply maneuvering so that that can screw people out of their severance pay. I never did buy that BS line that billing  no-work burned the employees severance.

I suspect that they may have found out they didn’t have a leg to stand on and all the sudden they’re looking at $$$ and have decided that they don’t want to cough up the bucks.

The real problem is the none of the retained employees will ever trust the management again. If those employees are smart they’ll go ahead and keep looking for something else. Either in another division or a completely different company. Most probably a competitor.

I don’t believe for a New York Minute that there is any project, or last minute save. I think that the 20th will come and go and then we’ll have the furloughs extended another 30 days then we’ll be out of work.

Everything they have done over the past 60 -90 days seems shadier and shadier with each change in direction.  I firmly believe that something else is going on and that the company is not playing above board or dare I say it? Ethically?

 I took the furlough because it extended my effective health care benefits. I figure the longer I can go without having to pay the outrageous COBRA rates the better…

I’ve just finished the process of filling out the unemployment forms online.

I anticipated that this process would be an extremely annoying process, something akin to having an old railroad tie shoved unceremoniously up my ass…  So I put it off until today.

I  didn’t want to go into the weekend in a sour mood because of the stupidity of dealing with bureaucratic crap.

Turns out… I made a good call!

The forms read like RAP. Did ya, ba dom ding, Diiid ya, ba dom ding ba dom ding Did ya, Did ya, Did ya. I pretty much HATE RAP!  This form did a pretty good job of sending me off the deep end. Of course this was AFTER me spending 2 weeks trying to actually call Employment Development to find out if I was even eligible due to the furlough. The Employment Development Department is apparently so busy that they can’t even answer their phones.

I figured what the hell? I’ll fill out their forms online and then we’ll have a negotiation when one of their people CALLS me.

During the filling out of the forms I found out that my company had fucked us all in Oh, so subtle ways.

The Employment Development department asks this…

Provide your employment history for the past 18 months, including your very last employer. If you worked for a temporary agency, a labor contractor, an agent for actors, or an employer where wages are reported under a corporate name, your wages may have been reported under that employer name. You may want to refer to your check stub(s) or W-2(s) to obtain the name of your employer.

Note: Failure to report all your employers, periods of employment and wages correctly may result in your benefits being delayed or denied.


Employer Name     Beginning             Ending                   Wages       How were you Paid?
                           (mm/dd/yyyy)     (mm/dd/yyyy)           Earned ($)

I read the question to mean, Put your employer name for the last 18 months. Well I’ve had the same employer since 2007 so the beginning date is 2007 and the ending date is 2011, pretty easy right???

But then the Wages question becomes inclusive of the whole beginning / ending period.

This leads me to try to come up with total YTD earnings for the past 5 year period. Which then leads me to discoveries about the lack of information and difficulty in obtaining it from my company.

First, they went “Green” so they have us all sign up for direct deposit. Then they tell us that the will not be sending paycheck statements any more and that we’ll have to look at our statements online.

Then they take the ability for us to look at our paycheck statements from our own computers at home away. Initially, we could print the statements in PDF format to a file so that we could keep offline copies for our records from our home computers. About a year ago the brilliant IT people did away with the PDF option, leaving only XPS.

Now the only way to see or get a copy of your paystub is by being connected directly to the company network and OH yeah it’s against the company policy for you to attach personal storage devices to your work computer so you have to store the image of the paystub as XPS, then email it to yourself, and it has to be zipped and encrypted.

The XPS format is great if you’re a windows user. But if you’re a Linux or Mac user… OH Well… you’re screwed because you’re different! You chose not to drink the Microsoft Kool Aid, your problem not ours. (I’ve since found viewers for Linux and Mac. and I know a couple of little tricks that have gotten me past this problem.)

The above is frustrating… But the kicker is when you finally work through all this other shit and  look at your paystubs.  The magic works, the page is viewable and you find that most don’t  have YTD information. In fact only one year in the past 5 actually has the YTD data.

Ya just want to throttle someone. GRRRRRRRR!

I ended up pulling what tax records I have (lost all the records in a fire in 2008) and having to call the accountant for other records. For the rest of the information, I had to open each and every paystub and manually add the information that I needed.

All of which just fed my frustration…

At one point, in my efforts to answer this single question (EDD wouldn’t let you move on if it was blank) I had 3 computers up and running and more total computing horsepower at my fingertips than was used to send men to the moon.

Don’t ask.. it just worked out that way.

If you ever had any doubt that I’m a QA person…

All you need to know is that this kind of thing happens to me all the time. The absolutely simplest thing turns into a raging furball.

It’s as if I just notice stuff others don’t.

Or else the Gremlins of our high technology world seem to really enjoy messing with me…

Maybe I need to make a Gremlin repellant and then retire to a tropical island.

Me, the Ocean, a nice hut, and no freakin technology…  Except the boat would sink with me on it, in sight of the island…

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Well it looks like…

The car is fixed (Fingers Crossed)

My working out is paying off

Things aren’t as difficult to pick up and move. Bicycles, weights for patio umbrellas, tables (moved for cleaning).

But the best evidence is from my masseur.

Ya know he sees peoples bodies all day every day. He commented that I was bulking up since the last time he saw me (about 1 month ago). It was really nice of him to notice and comment on it.

Hes one of three masseurs in the LA area that has SERIOUS upper body strength.  I like him because like the other two he doesn’t fuck around with that stupid draping and just gets down to business.

It’s not like he hasn’t seen other folks junk or anything. Truth to tell I prefer my masseur to be naked right along with me. I hate the feel of fabric moving on my skin while I’m being massaged. It’s annoying and drags me back from where ever I’ve escaped to when I’m not screaming like a little girl.

And believe me… I scream like a little girl… A LOT!

By nature I’m pretty tense. Add to that some of the stuff that’s been going on in my life over the past 3 months and a workout every other day… well The last time Mark said I was like concrete.

Not so much now… just heading off for a workout…  I’m sure I’ll be good and tense the next time I see one of the guys.

I’m fortunate that the masseurs I’ve found are the real deal.

It’s hit and miss out there. Some masseurs are only about the happy ending. They’ll lightly rub my back, then vigorously rub my cock. Don’t get me wrong, happy endings are great but I’m not paying for a massage to get the happy ending.

Ya know, my hands work just fine! If I come to you for a massage, I want a fucking massage and you better not think otherwise.

Off the massage table… well we’re two consenting adults… Ahem

When I go to my usual guys, by the time they’re done with me…  Believe me! My Junk, a happy ending, even a hard on is the FURTHEST thing from my mind.

It’s pretty fucking hard to be perceived as “Macho” when five minutes before you were screaming like a school girl and begging for the dude to lighten up.

I have wondered on more than one occasion, if my masseurs are secretly into some kind of BDSM.

If they are they must really get their jollies with me! But then again what does it say about me… that I keep going back?

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Daddy ME?

 

Perception is funny.

I don’t think of myself as anything other than just a guy.

Imagine my surprise when I was referred to as “That Hot Daddy” over there…

WTF? I’m no Daddy, I’m just a guy… Then I realized that perhaps Daddy is much like Bear. It’s an attitude as much as what you’re wearing or whether you have a dungeon.

I however never expected to be sexualized as a “Daddy” in a bar. Not that I mind, per se. I’m just a bit surprised.

I asked a friend about it. “Am I a Daddy?”

He reply was “Oh yeah…”

When I pressed for him to elaborate, he said, “You’re confident, you walk in places like you OWN them and you know your place in the world. You are obviously all about control. Couple that with your penchant for good leather boots and your complete LACK of costume in a bar where full Leather IS the uniform, and you come across as very strong and in charge. It’s appealing to a lot of folks. Since I know you are familiar with certain Kinky aspects of sex I think of you as a total Daddy.”

I’m stunned. My friend grins, “You didn’t know?” then busts up laughing.

Nope I didn’t know. More to the point, I was Clueless.

But I started thinking about my “Style” for want of a better term.

I do own a couple leather jackets, for warmth in the winter. I do not own any leather pants, shirts, vests, or caps.

I suppose I’m more about practicality than costume.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d enjoy owning some of these things, I simply refuse to pay top dollar for products that I think are of questionable quality. And lets face it a lot of this stuff is mass produced in India or China.

I would probably be more likely to make these purchases if I could find someone to custom fit me. I know that there are people around who do that sort of thing… but it’s not a high priority for me.

Buying this stuff isn’t high on my list of important things because I’ve always felt that stuff I own should be natural to who I am.

I will sometimes run across an item that “Feels right” when I do, I buy it. The “Rightness” is very important to me. That’s why I had one of my favorite leather Jackets cleaned and restored after the fire. The Jacket still has a little smoky smell, Thanks to a Doc Baileys treatment before the fire and good professional cleaners after, my jacket has real “Character” now. I never want to feel like I’m putting on a costume. I always want be comfortable and authentic in what I’m wearing and how I present who I am.

Being outfitted head to toe in leather attire isn’t going to change who I am.  Dressing the part isn’t going to make me any better in bed. Sure it may add to the fantasy. In point of fact unless I’m engaged in a scene where leather is a primary actor we’re going to be skin to skin anyway.

At that point the leather you’re concerned about will be the leather implements I’m going to use to take you to your personal edge. After all, isn’t that what you’re interested in anyway?

So I guess I’m a Daddy, I wish I’d noticed this transition. But apparently, part of my Daddyness is the fact that I’m unaware of it.

People need to  bring me up to speed more often…