Being There

Being there for a friend.

I think we've all heard that saying before.  For my close friends, I try to always 'be there' for them.   Hell, that's what I primarily want to do WITH them.  I don't necessarily want to go on a vacation or eat at a fancy restaurant or perform some hobby with them... I just want to 'be there'.

While that's true for my close friends (all three of them), it's not nearly as true for others in my life.  Take my co-workers... I'd hardly consider them friends.  That's not supposed to be a slight in any way... I just don't have a personal relationship with them.  We work closely together and discuss personal things in our lives, but if I stopped working with them, I'd probably stop communicating with them.  We don't even 'hang out' outside of work.

Well... that had to stop.  At the very least in this one particular circumstance.  Without getting into specific details, a co-workers wife left him.  He went to work and when he came home she had packed up four of his five kids, all of their stuff (I mean ALL... she took the damned oven!) and left.  No note, no text.  Just gone.

This happened while I was on vacation, and I heard about it from another co-worker.  I couldn't imagine the pain and confusion that such a situation would leave my co-worker friend in.  I knew he had a wife and kids... but that's about the extent I knew of his wife.   So when I learned about it, my first impression was to give him a call.  I was working in the south clinic while he was working out in 4 block.

Support the Troops

I can't imagine this post will make me popular, but it's something that's been floating around my head, and I want to get it out before I say something inappropriate at an inappropriate time.

I'm sick and tired of 'Thanking Our Troops'.  Or blessing them, or worshiping them.... anything really beyond 'Supporting Our Troops'.  But then again I do that through paying taxes and voting in politicians who say they are going to support them (or voting out those who don't support them).

I have a lot of respect for anybody that joins our military service.  It's a vital service for our country, and it's a job that I don't believe I could personally do.  But that same sentiment is true for teachers (I'd go stark raving mad trying to teach a room full of young children).  The same is true for policemen.  The same is true for garbage men.  The same can be said for any number of jobs.

I have a lot of family history in the military.  My grandfather trained pilots and flew bombers during World War II.  My father served in a submarine during the Vietnam conflict.  Two cousins fought in the first Iraq war.  Several other cousins, uncles, aunts, and various relations served in the military.  I love them all, and respect them for making that choice.

April/May music & my iPod journey

After a couple really good months of getting new (or at least 'new to my collection') music, April and May were mostly a big bust.

I've only downloaded three songs since my last music post and none of them are real winners.  The last one I just added a few days ago and is likely going to be a spring fling... loved and then forgotten by the time summer rolls around.

Since I don't have much to share, I'm also going to talk about iPods, speakers, and music while traveling.

First up is the iPod.  I decided upon this title graphic because I purchased another iPod this past week.   I believe a quick history is in order to understand where I'm coming from and why I continue to pay Apple so much money for music and technology.  I started using MP3s as my main music system (overtaking tapes and CDs) sometime around 1996.  I was already heavily invested in my computer and the more time I spent at it, the more I liked having my music available there.  For the longest time I used WinAmp as my music player of choice.  It was... limiting.  When I started playing with MP3s it was easily the best option out there (I think there were two other choices), but when 2003 rolled around it was getting a little long in the tooth.  It just didn't have the options I wanted.

Looking Forward

I always like having something to look forward to.  Getting together with friends, football games, trips, milestones at work... just something to make me look up from day to day life and gaze at the horizon.

While at school, this was easy.  There was always a goal to move toward.  The next test.  The next clinical.  The end of a particular class or semester.  The next semester.  And of course the grand daddy of goals... graduation.

I think it's my desire to plan.  What am I going to do for this next phase?  What am I going to do after this particular phase?  It's nice to have something off in the distance that I can plan for, but can't fully prepare for at that moment.

If I give it a moment of deeper thought, I may consider that this is a coping mechanism.  It's a way for me to look at something and focus on it instead of focusing on the present.  Now that can be good and bad at the same time.  Good, because who doesn't like to be prepared.  Who doesn't like to walk into a situation and be ready for what's going to happen?  Bad, because when the present changes it can be very upsetting.  I mean come on, I made all these plans and now they're all crap.  And bad because when there isn't anything to really look forward to I can tend to start tilting at windmills... looking forward and planning for something that doesn't require planning or worse... making plans just to disrupt the ever present now.

A Caitlyn Story

So while driving home I got into Caitlyn's headspace a bit.

Now before I get into this, some of this post will be a bit.... TMI.  I'm going to talk about masturbation a bit.  It won't be graphic, but if that's not something you want to read about then by all means, skip this post.

OK... so driving for 16 hours between Texas and Michigan gave me plenty of time to let my thoughts wander.  I thought about family, my future, work, future jobs, relationship.... a whole mess of things.  I didn't really make any headway or come upon any new conclusions so I won't go into those.  But I did come up with a story idea.

I think the reason that I got into this story was simply due to me being horny.  Yeah.. I had just visited with a family for four days which means I didn't masturbate at all.  I just find the idea of wanking it in someone else's shower kinda off putting.  Add in the day's driving down and I was now about six days without an orgasm.  For comparison's sake, I normally masturbate once a day.  That has held steady before I found Caitlyn, all throughout Caitlyn's time, and after I lost Caitlyn.  Hell... it's been that way since high school.

So needless to say, the urge struck me when I had plenty of time on my hands and nothing to do but watch the road.  When I get this way, I'll often just think of 'sexy scenes'.  Sometimes they'll be part of a narrative.  Sometimes I'll have a part in this scene (mostly now a days as the man, but sometimes still as the woman), and other times I'll just enjoy imagining a man and a woman having sex or being part of a scene.

Road Funding II

So I wrote about our stupid ass legislature and how they were shirking their responsibility about a month ago.

A quick recap;  our road are crap.  Our roads need repair.  The legislature's only way to do so was by a complex shell game that included raising the state's sales tax by 1% and sending it out for a statewide vote.

Well the vote was the day before I went on vacation... and it failed by a 4 to 1 ratio.

I heard all kinds of arguments as to why someone wasn't going to vote for it.   But the worst one has to be this:

"I'm not going to vote for it because this is the wrong way to fix the roads.  If we vote this down the legislature will have to try again and do it right this time.  Voting no will teach them a lesson."

I'm fairly good at arguing a point.  I can often change people's minds to my way of thinking... but I couldn't change a single mind.  And this wasn't just a purely partisan problem.  Both the democrats and republicans were all for it.  They brought out unions and business leagues, former democrat and republican governors, the current republican governor and the recent democrat senator (who served for like 25 years).

VayCay Recap

I got back from my vacation yesterday.  If I had to sum it up in one word I would have to go with; Good.

Not great.  Not awesome.  Not amazing.  Just plain old Good.

Really the vacation was two vacations in one.  The first (and last) was driving.  I drove down to visit my friends in Texas.  As the door to door driving is just a touch over sixteen hours, I broke it up into two days.  Driving there and back is one part of the vacation.  The other part was the actual visit with my friends.

Lemme talk about the driving fist.  I already mentioned that I was going to get the car detailed... and OH MY GOD does Ginger look good when she's cleaned professionally.  I get her washed at the local car wash once every week or so.  More or less on my day off from work I'll consider the weather for the next few days... if it's going to rain a lot I'll hold off.  If it's going to be sunny, then I'd just prefer to get the car cleaned.  But that's the exterior and that's just a big machine doing it's job.  Sure it has wax, but it's not hand applied in layers.  And there's no clean like a clay bar clean.   I don't do it personally because... well... I don't want to.  I want the clean car but not all that effort, especially as it would be a weekly thing.

Driving Vacation

So tomorrow I leave on vacation.  Last year I got to experience my first paid vacation in almost 10 years.  Not only did I get a vacation, I got several.  A trip to the Windy City, two flights to Tex-Ass, and a staycation over Thanksgiving weekend.  I had another vacation earlier this year back to Chicago.

So getting time off isn't anything new.  It's something that went from Amazing, to wonderful, to great, to just another part of the job.

So at face value, this shouldn't be anything worthy of writing about.  I should mention it (I have a couple times) in a post but it's nothing that should occupy my mind in a way that makes me write it out.

But this vacation is different for several reasons.  First... it's by FAR the longest stretch I've taken off.  I try to plan my vacations around my weekends off.  I mean that just makes sense' start with the only two days off I have in a row and by taking two days off I've grown it organically into a four day vacation.  I believe my two trips to Tex-Ass and my Thanksgiving extended weekend were both a total of five days off.  The other trips were all three or four days off.

This time I'm taking six days off.  When my weekend and other regular days off are added in I'm getting a total of 10 days away from work!!!

Googlfi my phone service!

This post is more or less just a way to get my mind around this concept.  I heard about 'Project Fi' on a podcast while driving home last night.  Project Fi (or Google Fi as many car calling it) is a cellular service from Google.

First thought;  YAY!

I love Google.  I love their products, I love their philosophy.  I love that most of their projects aren't designed to own the market and are instead set up to push the market in directions they think the industry (industries) should go.

For example, they don't want to push out cable internet providers by making Google Fiber... instead they just want to demonstrate that somebody can provide fairly inexpensive fiber based internet with amazingly fast speeds.  If Google Fiber was available near me, I'd sign up for it in a hearbeat.

So in a nutshell, what's Project Fi?  It's a cell service that primarily uses WiFi for everything.  The phone will actively search out a strong WiFi signal that it can use and if it's providing a stronger connection and/or faster speed than the cellular signal available will switch over to it.  It will use the WiFi signal for data of course, but it will also use it for voice and texts.  The data over a WiFi network would be encrypted (using a VPN) system so it would be just as 'secure' as a cellular connection.

But better than that is what it does if there isn't a WiFi signal.   It will then search out for the strongest/fastest cellular signal between both Sprint and T-Mobile's systems!