Earlier this evening I was shoveling snow off the sidewalk, when I heard something I thought at first was a car’s open-door alarm.  I wondered who would be sitting in their car with the door open in this weather, when I realized the sound as that of an old-fashioned telephone.  Who would have their window open in this weather that I could hear their phone so clearly.  Then I recognized that it was my cell phone ringing, and that recently I had changed the ring tone for my father’s number to the old-fashioned bell sound, and that furthermore my father was calling back because I had let him a message earlier, wishing him happy birthday.

Technology almost caused me to miss a call from my father on his birthday.  What future innovation will prove to be the one to which I will not be able to fully adapt?

Dog crap and dead leaves bear one important similarity: their color.  From which follows: legal jeopardy.  To whit: when my dog craps in the piles of leaves you leave on the sidewalk, it makes it difficult to fulfil my obligation to society.  Also: it is dark early these days and my cell phone doesn’t help differentiate poop from dead vegetable matter.  Indeed: poop is heavier than dead leaf and I am not fishing about in a pile of cold damp leaves in the dark to find this poop.  In conclusion: clear your sidewalk of the years worth of leaves that have drifted there, and I will be able to pick up after my dogs as I am both obliged and happy to.

The weather forecast claims it is going to get as cold as 13 degrees Monday night. Do numbers get that low? Last time I was exposed to such frigid temperatures was a visit to New Jersey a couple of years ago. But then the East Coast has that Olde Worlde weather of famine and Retreat from Moscow-style blizzardry. Out here it’s meant to be more moderate.

If it’s going to get that cold one hopes it will at least snow. It’s good for the dogs. Unfortunately this town shuts down if snow actually falls and sticks to the ground. The bus I take to work goes over Mt. Tabor, so when it snows it takes an alternate route to avoid the steep streets. Last time this occurred I trudged to the alternate stop, only to be befuddled by the bus driver’s reluctance to let me on the bus. “I don’t pick people up from this stop,” he said, “I’m on a snow route.” “That just means you’re supposed to pick up passengers at stops on a different street from usual,” I said. “What’s the point in having a snow route if you don’t pick up people who go out to the alternate stop?” Maybe he thought he was meant to just drive around with an empty bus all day until he was cleared to be back to the regular route.

Today I am wearing my Timex watch. I could take a picture, upload it to my computer and post it here, but why bother when one can nab a pic from the inters that somewhat approximates what it is I wish you to see? So viddy this:

Mine doesn’t have the luminescent hands or the lume dots around the chapter ring.  Mine also has a new Timex flex metal band.  Other than that it’s pretty much a match.  I bought mine because I wanted to get a simple mechanical watch, and looking in eBay found mine, for less than $40.  Besides the classic look of the watch, the information that it was made in 1969, the same year I was made, was a draw (the watch in the picture above is from 1968).  Normally I like date windows on my watches (and I like that such features on a watch face are called “complications”) but this one probably benefits from its simplicity.

I could be a watch enthusiast if I had the money.  I find the design of some very compelling.  That said, I don’t feel any compulsion to collect and hoard watches for their own sake and learn everything about them.  They’re not that interesting, and it’s more particular styles rather than brands or eras that interest me.  However, I do sometimes lurk in watch enthusiast fora.  Here is one for Timex.

Next up: my vintage underpants.

Today I took a vacation day from work.  I raked leaves and wrassled electricity.  Most fulfilling, however, was getting takeout from Esparza’s Tex-Mex restaurant for our lunch.  A day with buffalo tacos is like a day back when men shot large beasts with long guns while riding other large beasts.

In the recent past I have joined a couple of social networking sites, one at the invitation of my sister, the other at the urging of my wife.  I’ve found it surprising how easy and pressure-free it is to reconnect with old friends.  Some of them have gone on to impressive things, including one who is a post-doctoral fellowship in things evolutionary.  Which reminds me of a bus trip years ago.  There is a high school at the end of this particular line, so on my way to work I am sometimes afflicted with high schoolers.  This one incident began when a girl was chattering on about how much she liked her biology class, and how interesting evolutionary theory was.  Her boy companion interrupted with a sneering, “Well, it’s only Darwin’s theory, you know”.  She immediately back-tracked and disavowed believing any of it at all.  I wanted to smack the boy for thinking that he’d made some trenchant point, but which only demonstrated his own ignorance of the whole subject.  But I felt it wasn’t my quarrel, and was probably too tired to say anything.  What stuck with me since was my hope that the girl, sooner rather than later, would realise that just because some stupid boy disagrees with you doesn’t make him right.

I have just finished putting up our Christmas lights.  All two of them:

Jesus wept

Seems like some of the information released here could have been announced at this time. I’m sure essentially being called a liar (“I don’t understand how you can say you feel comfortable with your capital position, and yet you say you can’t give us any idea what the number is,” he said. “At this point, it’s impossible to say those two things.”) didn’t go over well and I wonder who got fired because of that. It’s not very interesting beyond such speculation, but sticks in my mind because our investor relations team had a look of half-shock, half-terror when talking about the infamous Hartford earnings release call.

It turns out that the cubicle neighbor whose perfume gags me on occasion is not insensitively over-applying it and ignoring its effect on her co-workers. Rather, the body odor of the guy who waters the plants on our floor provokes her into a defensive spraying of the scent. She apologized to me if she’d overdone it just now, but I know that against Outsiders collateral olfactory damage is to be expected.