After enduring a double issue for over two months, the new Reader’s Digest arrived in my mailbox this week. It arrived too early, and now I will have plowed through its articles well in advance of the next issue. I don’t like double issues; although the staff at the magazine may get some much-deserved time off, the extra content that is supposed to get you through double the time between issues is rarely good enough for me. As a subscriber to Entertainment Weekly, I’ve seen my share of double issues, and I think they should be limited to two per year. Unless something happens that is really too big to not expand the coverage, and then just add some darned pages, and don’t make us wait double the time for the next update.
While I was trying not to bury my nose in the magazines, I took out a weekend subscription to the New York Times for their magazine, book review and such. I think I’m the only person on my block who gets newspaper delivery these days. It scares me to think that part of the reason our world is going to heck in a handcart is that nobody is actually paying attention to the news.
And sandwiched between all the paper that I’m not supposed to be reading because it’s all online, I was volundrafted to help with a project at the office. I wouldn’t mind so much, except that all our extra projects tend to have staffing problems, because we work in a place where our customers can’t wait for us to do anything extra. It would be like keeping the doors to WalMart shut while the staff had a webinar in the common area, keeping potential paying customers out.
As I was sweating through my good office clothes hauling things up and down three stories with the help of the mailroom (and she worked dollies wearing a dress, no less), I saw that our dress code had deteriorated to beach sandals. I feel okay complaining about this only because I wear stockings with my sandals, as I hate street crud between my toes.
When I headed home in traffic (and there were four lanes filled with vehicles stretching across I-95 seemingly into Bucks County), I wondered what it would be like to designate just one lane for people who were not going on vacation and merely headed home.
In my head all week was an annoying mindworm from the Santander Bank ads, “Break My Stride” by (originally) Matthew Wilder. Of course, the ad features a cute piggy bank which came to life in a previous and rather touching commercial, but darned if that song doesn’t get stuck like a scratched record in my brain, even if it is a cover version.
The only other thing that stood out in my mind was the problem of a “dead zone” while driving with my Sirius XM radio. Just a short one, running a few tenths of a mile, but it’s noticeable. And don’t you know: the song goes dead right at the good part. Sure, it is a satellite transmission, so tunnels and bridges and overpasses may interfere, but what I’m dealing with are some well placed trees along the road. Guess they don’t like Sinatra.
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