Random Thoughts on the First Day of Autumn

I got a new IP desk phone at work. They spent an hour and a half explaining all the neat features. I’ll probably use at most four of them. Why do I suspect this is a plot to wring more productivity out of us? The damn thing is almost as smart as my cell phone.

Getting old sucks. It’s extremely unsettling when you begin to realize that you’re missing things and making mistakes that you never would have missed or made in the past. I also find it annoying that it’s quite likely that irritating new pain I’m feeling is never going away. I’m also a little disappointed that I seem to be getting more sensitive to mistakes and criticism. Things that I would have laughed off in the past now seem to bother me. I always thought as you got older you got thicker skin. I wonder if it’s because I suspect that my abilities are deteriorating?

Football is fun to watch. I’ve been an NFL fan since 1958 when I attended my first Giants game. I was never a big College Football fan but recently I’ve begun to appreciate it more. Maybe that’s because it’s pretty much evolved into almost a professional game.

My cable company keeps trying to get me to put my phone service on their cable along with my television and internet access. They keep telling me how it’s going to save me money. Last night my cable service went out. How would I have called the cable company to report the outage if my phone was on the same service? Don’t say my cell phone because cell phone access at my house is spotty. I remember once having to go to a pay phone to tell the phone company that my telephone was out. Find a working pay phone these days.

I find these lists that keep being published of companies or brand names that may soon disappear depressing. On lists I read today were Macy’s, Hertz, Old Navy and Dodge.

Working sucks. I guess the only thing worse is not working. I’d really like to retire but I don’t think I can afford it. I’d like to get the two kids still at home out on their own, sell my house and move into a nice condominium somewhere. I know selling the house is going to be painful. It’s going to be painful physically, emotionally and financially. Physically because I’ll have to clean out 25 years of accumulated stuff, emotionally because this was the house my children grew up in and financially because I will probably sell it for well under its value simply to get it over with.

Trying to lose weight isn’t so great either. I’m by no stretch of the imagination fat BUT according to the Body Mass Index (BMI) metric I’m slightly overweight. How much do I weigh? Good question. Somewhere between 199 and 204 appears to be the range. It varies by day of the week, time of day and the scale that I use. That’s a BMI between 26.3 and 26.9. Since 25.0 is the cutoff, it means I’m overweight. I’d have to get down to 189 lbs. to be normal. That would be a loss of 10 – 15 pounds. I’d have to be marooned on a desert island to manage that.

I keep hearing people talk about the good old days. What good old days? THESE are the good old days. I’m especially amused when people wax nostalgic about the 50’s or 60’s. I was there and looking back I realize that they sucked big time. We just didn’t know any better back then. The only thing good about them was that I was young. I wouldn’t mind being 20 again, but I don’t want it to be 1968 again.

I was wrong about Michael Crabtree. I though he would come to an agreement with the San Francisco 49ers. Apparently I was wrong and he’s still holding out despite being offered $20 million. All this because Heywood-Bey was drafted first and is getting more from the Oakland Raiders. I think this young man is getting terrible advice and is making a very big mistake.

It’s unfortunate that there probably isn’t a God. Having God exist would be nice. I’d like to know that ultimately justice will prevail, that there’s something after we kick the bucket, and that we’re more than a temporary accidental biological smudge in the cosmic scheme of things. Unfortunately, I doubt it.

If you detected a sliver of hope and doubt about God in the previous thought, you’ve got that right. However that doesn’t change my opinion of religion. If God does exist, he (she? it?) most likely thinks religion is as absurd as I think it is.