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Author Archives: kayewer

• All Others Pay Cash

  Posted at 1:45 am by kayewer, on August 25, 2019

  It happened in WalMart just now: I had to wait at self-checkout because I was paying with cash. It seems the machines were either not processing bills or dispensing change, so they could only take credit cards. This was happening in five or six kiosks out of the eight in use.

  The strange thing about the event was that even the shoppers with an item valued at less than ten dollars used a credit card. We’re nickel and diming on debt.

  It reminds me of my favorite go-to guilty pleasure show with a message: Garfield and Friends. An episode in Season Four called “Cash and Carry” (https://www.thetvdb.com/series/garfield-and-friends/episodes/226340) featured the world’s favorite lasagna chomping feline wrecking a wastebasket, which his hapless human Jon Arbuckle must replace at the wastebasket store in the mall. Of course, this was back in 1991 when malls and specialty shops (which carry only wastebaskets?) were still relevant. Since Jon was disturbed by his credit card debt and had cut up all his charge cards, he tried to buy the new wastebasket with cash. This leads to the clerk wondering what the green paper stuff is, and Jon is taken downtown by the cops and subjected to the typical interrogation scene, complete with overhead hot light and Dragnet inspired dialogue. He got the purchase, but had to promise not to try to pull such a stunt again (at least until the next time Garfield did his Ricky Ricardo impression on the wastebasket bongos).

  Sweden is apparently going all plastic now, with cash hardly anywhere to be seen. How this is an improvement I can’t begin to figure. When you have cash, once your wallet is empty, it’s gone and your spending is over; with plastic you don’t see how much you’ve spent until the bill comes. That is how millions of people wind up declaring bankruptcy for money spent on food they ate and then flushed down the toilet 18 months ago.

  I didn’t mind breaking out the ten dollar bill so much, but the dime really broke the bank. Change is a bothersome thing, unless you collect it and go to the coin counter for something in return.  Still I believe cash matters. It’s keeps spending honest, it’s tangible, and when new it smells kind of nice blending with your leather wallet.

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• Point and Wait Don’t Shoot!

  Posted at 1:31 am by kayewer, on August 18, 2019

  I’ve been having camera trouble, and as I’ve struggled through trying to fix what is happening, I realized that having a camera is sort of like having a gun, except for (obviously) the bullets and killing part.

  DSLR (meaning Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras are not quite an easy alternative to film cameras because of all the buttons and programming involved. Somehow I managed to get my camera out of simple mode and into nothing works mode, and my instruction manual got lost. It probably ran screaming because it knew, from the look of me, that I was a newbie and likely to never get through the booklet, let alone program the darned thing. It might have been right.

  Two things I did realize are that the camera is stuck on timer mode, and it has no flash. No flash means I have a hot shoe. Not a Prado heel, but a gizmo on which one can mount a separate flash. Until I get a flash, if I’m indoors with my camera, I am in the dark. And I need a new instruction manual.

  Wait, you say, you have the Internet, so go online and read the manual. Did you ever try to look like a photographer while toting an instruction manual around on a laptop? And what if the action I need to photograph happens while I’m trying to read the manual to figure out how to set up my camera to take the darned shot?

  This is part of where a camera is like a gun. You need to get it out, load it, pull back the hammer and then aim and pull the trigger. The bad guy usually comes with all that done already. Fortunately you may have an advantage if you are in the dark and the bad guy doesn’t know where he’s going.

  Just don’t fire off your separate flash which you’ve mounted on your hot shoe. In such a case, have the bad guy take your Prado heels and call your insurance company in the morning.

  Camera, you’re fired, because you can’t fire.

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• Even More Random Thoughts

  Posted at 1:43 am by kayewer, on August 11, 2019

  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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• The Pizza Question, Part Whatever

  Posted at 1:46 am by kayewer, on August 4, 2019

  We like puzzles, and to be puzzled. Or if we are easily ticked off and/or prone to self-induced blood pressure spikes, we like to argue until our faces turn plum about answering puzzles. A math question is the latest conversation spiker, following on the heels of the “what color is the dress” debate and the “laurel or yanny” sound bite.

  The puzzle reads as follows:  8 ÷ 2(2+ 2) = ?

  Depending on when you learned math, you might come up with two different answers. I had new math, so I would take the entire series of numbers apart and then give up. When I had new math and tried to tough it out, I spent my Christmas break catching up with 20 pages of homework I couldn’t complete because I was stuck. My mother, a math whiz in her day, approached the teacher, who admitted she had to consult her guidebook to help explain the solutions. So much for enriching young minds.

  Anyway, one school (pardon the pun) of thought is that one performs the function within the parentheses first, so we would be multiplying 4 by the solution to 8 divided by 2. Since the solution to the division is 4, the final answer is 16.

  But wait! If you learned to do multiplication first, you would multiply the 2 outside the parentheses by the solution 4 within the parentheses, making the final formula 8 divided by 8, which equals 1.

  It’s the great pizza topping debate all over again, only if the wrong solution is reached in a math problem, it could spell disaster if you’re building or creating something in which accuracy is key.

  I even learned about some new acronyms (or at least new to me), called PEMDAS and BODMAS. PEMDAS stands for Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. BODMAS stands for Brackets and Exponents, with the next two functions from PEMDAS reversed. These are guidelines for determining in what order to do a math function, and even they don’t agree.

  We already have two of everything else that isn’t a Noah’s Ark animal, so why not two ways to mess up math? And worse, we have two more things to argue about.

  We should be taking measures to stop polarizing ourselves instead. And we shouldn’t fight over differences which don’t directly affect the balance of our lives. If a math problem has two solutions, it is actually two problems, from what I can see.

  But don’t count on that.

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• Most August Dread

  Posted at 1:52 am by kayewer, on July 28, 2019

  August is coming, and it’s a dull month in terms of holidays, but not so for activity. Folks start to come back from vacation, the college campuses start to fill up (some primary and high schools even start early), trees start to turn duller shades of green and the realities of regular life begin to sink in.

  Summer will be over soon, but for some of us nothing has changed.

  Police and fire squads, medical staff, stores and restaurants, and even the lifeguards at the shore where you’ve been on vacation, have all been hard at work. Vacations in the summer mean that fewer persons are on staff everyplace. Of course, then we all come home and spread the first colds of the season around, and we still have staff shortages everywhere. The difference is that everybody is home from vacation so spots may still get filled when somebody is out sick.

  Caregivers and private services still operate all summer long. Nobody fills in for them.

  Once Labor Day weekend comes, those same staffers who have had little to no time off will be preparing for grouchy people who return from summer vacation and find they need stuff, and nobody wants to wait for it.

  Maybe the problem is that we’ve all gone 20 years or more without being reminded, as in kindergarten, to wait our turn.

  Traffic will change from being overcrowded to being over-impatient. The good movies will come out in time for Oscar® night in 2020, and new television series will start, with new seasons of old favorites coming back.

  I live for September when Jeopardy returns.

  Clothing will also start to change over to decent coverage. Every year I am amazed at some of the hootchie momma outfits I’ve seen in public places, not the mention the workplace. Once we start cooling down, people start covering up.

  But I’m ahead of myself: we’re talking August and the dog days of summer.

  Funny that phrase, because dogs hate the extreme heat. In July we had a few heat waves, which are defined by three or more consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees. Otherwise known as a scorcher.

  Every year I get the urge to crack an egg onto the pavement to see if it will cook. We just had a 100 degree day, and it was too darned hot to go out to try to cook an egg on the pavement. It probably would’ve exploded had I put it on the car’s roof.

  August was named after Augustus, who was the adopted son of Julius Caesar and turned the hot mess that was the infamous assassination of his adopt-a-pop into a campaign that strengthened the Roman Empire.

  They also vacationed on the sand, I’m sure, but didn’t have to come back by September.

  So on we go further into the back half of another odd year–and I mean that both ways–wondering what lies ahead. I’m sure that normalcy will come once Labor Day is ended, for then we’ll be finished with that holiday-less month, and back to taking another day off. Except for the firefighters, doctors, police, firemen. . . .

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• Heat On

  Posted at 1:37 am by kayewer, on July 21, 2019

  Hell is cooler than we are now. A heat wave has come, and people are heated emotionally as well. Makes me think of how impatient people become when extreme conditions cause chaos in our lives, and I feel compelled to provide the following reality check.

  We humans tend to habitually ignore the little things until they become big things. We don’t go to the dentist until our teeth hurt, or we ignore the check engine light on our dashboards until the car dies in the middle of the state ludicrous speed highway on Saturday night.

  When this happens, instead of realizing the error of our ways and acting contrite, many people lash out and blame everybody and everything else. If it didn’t require actually taking a day off from work (which we love to do beyond everything else), to get in our car (when it’s running) and, gosh gee, drive all the way to the dentist’s office twice a year, and then sit down in a chair and have our teeth x-rayed and cleaned, our teeth would never have a problem, right?

  Have you ever noticed that any car trip you don’t like, regardless of the mileage required, becomes an “all the way” trip of inconvenience? If the dentist has an office yards away from your favorite bar, it’s still an “all the way” trip.

  When your car goes months without scheduled maintenance, which requires a trip all the way to a service facility and an hour or two of your time in a waiting room (which you spend gazing at your cell phone on social media), it has the gaul to break down when the heat climbs and it refuses to squeeze an extra drop of fluid from the tank you allowed to empty.

  So that requires driving all the way to that very service facility you ignored for months, only now the wait will take several hours, and the bill will be a bit more of a strain for the wallet you just emptied at the bar next door to the dentist you haven’t been to.

  We Americans are well known for not taking time off to take care of ourselves, much less our stuff. We would rather grouse or pass off problems than get to the bottom of them. It’s all a part of our lackadaisical attitude about life as a whole. It’s killing us.

  I propose we take two months with not much going on in them–April and August–and make them Care Months. Get yourself looked at in April, and get your car looked at in August. That way you have paid attention to both at least once this year. Once you do yourself and your car, take another day in April or August for the family’s health, or the air conditioning.

  Don’t wait for these things (or yourself) to break down. By then, especially in weather conditions like these, you won’t like what happens when you join the throng calling for help. There are only so many tow trucks to get your car to a service center, and once they’re all out for everybody ahead of you, you will have to wait. And when the dentist has a room full of people with tooth problems, you will be enduring some pain for awhile before you are seen in that comfy chair where the joys of painkillers await.

  A little prevention may not end the heat, but it might curb some of the grumpiness that goes with it, because when your teeth are in good shape and your car runs, you smile.

   

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• Timeless Fashion

  Posted at 3:04 am by kayewer, on July 14, 2019

  I received a compliment from a store associate yesterday on the top I was wearing. It’s  a yellow cotton blend shirt with embroidered dots throughout. I thanked her and revealed that I’ve had it for over 20 years. I bought it at the former Strawbridge & Clothier before it was shut down and turned into Macy’s back in the 1990s. You wouldn’t know it by how well it’s worn over the years. I wear it every summer, and it washes beautifully.

  The demise of the department store is a sad one, as is the demise of quality clothing. At the time I bought the top, it also came in blue, and I’ve always regretted not purchasing it, but old faithful yellow is still serving me well (and reminding me that I’m not becoming too fat as I age).

  The only other reminder of Strawbridge’s I own is a teddy bear created by Gund to celebrate the store’s centennial. I named it Ozzy, short for Ozymandias and based on the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley: it serves as a reminder of how things change, and how grateful we should be to have sturdy reminders of what once was.

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• Baby Turkeys

  Posted at 1:35 am by kayewer, on July 7, 2019

  Some animals never show themselves in public, or at least they wait until everybody is asleep to come out, such as raccoons and possums. Though I often see wild turkeys during the day, I never see their young, and my guess is that they tend to stay hidden.

  Not all youngsters can hold their own in the wild, even with both parents standing watch. Each year, Canada geese at our office complex lose youngsters to foxes and other predators.d It’s part of nature’s plan.

  By the time the geese reach that gawky adolescent stage, however, even the foxes are so turned off by their gangly looks that predatory season comes to an abrupt end.

  Well, this week I saw a female turkey crossing the road with two youngsters, so I decided to look up a photo, since I couldn’t shoot a picture and drive. Here it is, along with some other turkey photos:

  https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Wild_Turkey/media-browser/65616051

  Of course, the crazy thing about turkeys is their tendency to nest in trees.  When I pulled up the photo of the youngster on a branch, I laughed. We’re used to seeing them on the ground pecking away, or on a plate being pecked at by hungry Thanksgiving hordes (let me qualify that: the adult birds, not the youngsters). Turkeys are just not regular nature subject matter. I don’t think programs like PBS’ acclaimed Nova would do a show devoted to the turkey. I welcome you to prove me wrong.

  There may be some readers out there who scoff, because they’re used to seeing turkeys doing things the average person would consider unusual. Hey, I get out much, but just not where there are turkeys in trees.

  So I crossed seeing young turkeys off my bucket list. I still have petting a bison on there. I stand a good chance of doing that, since they don’t escape into trees.

   

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• Incendiary

  Posted at 10:50 pm by kayewer, on June 29, 2019

  My town is selling fireworks this week from a tent in the shopping center, which is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. July 4 is the big fireworks day, but it’s also a day dreaded by fire departments, law enforcement and emergency rooms nationwide because of the problems they create.

  Of course I come from the late baby boomer generation, and we swung incense sticks and sparklers around on Independence Day with reasonable care because our parents said that if we burned something they would kill us. And we believed them. We were the take-a-hammer-to-blaster-caps generation, and helicopter parenting was not the emotionally charged war zone it is today in the liberal age, and we came out okay.

  But then the world began to get dumber, and responsible fireworks handling (along with responsible parenting and adult common sense) was replaced by excessive caution and bans. At my age now, I see why this is not a bad idea, because the average American is so blase’ about handling cigarettes (which are pretty much miniature lit torches) that they don’t seem phased by an object set aflame and holding explosives with the potential to prematurely go off, maim and kill.

  Leave it to the pros? That’s for the pros to say to ruin everybody’s fun, people say.

  Every year our pros set up in the high school athletic field for the yearly ritual. They check winds and clearances, follow all the rules and do everything to ensure public safety. Usually debris from the fireworks falls away from anything important, and they’ve cooled off by the time they hit the ground, but once in a while a car gets pelted, or things land on lawns. And of course, every year some animals get the fur scared off them by so much booming and banging, that lost pet recovery runs into the next week.

  Funny thing is that I usually find it too hot, muggy or buggy to watch the fireworks outdoors, so I watch the New York display on TV. Not to insult my beloved town, but without children to enjoy it with, the thrill of being out there is gone. But I salute the pros who go out there to make the holiday fun and safe, and I wish everybody a safe time.

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• Bonehead

  Posted at 3:10 am by kayewer, on June 23, 2019

  Our skulls are growing new bones! It’s true. A new bony protrusion has appeared on x rays of skulls, and the guess was that it was happening mostly in teens, as reported in a Scientific Reports article by some Australian researchers. The possible cause? Tilting our heads down too much when looking at our devices.

  Looking down used to be a cultural sign of submission, because one did not look others in the eye if they were of a lower class or being subjugated in some other way. Now we look down chronically as we watch cat videos or text our every move to our friends.

  This is nothing to panic about, however. The growths show up in people of all ages, including the elderly, and with our bones regenerating periodically, teens with growth spurts are bound to have bone spurs here and there. I had one in my shoulder which incapacitated me for a while until anti-inflammatories and a cortisone shot killed the problem. It’s not a big deal.

  What is a big deal is how much we look down, when we should ideally be looking up at everybody and everything. And yes, keep drinking your milk.

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