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Author Archives: kayewer

• Find the Sandcastle Kings

  Posted at 2:23 am by kayewer, on January 4, 2015

  In January 1985, the Navy stationed me on the island of Guam. One of my first experiences there (besides exhaustion due to the time shift) was to tour the island and become familiar with its sights and culture. I found these fellows on the beach building a sand castle, and they posed for a picture. Of course this was the age before social media, and we were total strangers and never saw each other again, but I believe that the world is really smaller than we might think, so for the 30th anniversary of this experience, I’m posting this photo and hope that somebody will recognize himself or somebody in the photo and let the world know where they are now.
  So here is the photo. I’m also posting on Facebook with some of this information in English and (hopefully) Japanese. Let the search begin.

  

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• 2014 We Hardly Need You

  Posted at 3:08 am by kayewer, on December 28, 2014

  Another year is in the can. I’ve been looking back at my posts the past year to see what idiocy I’ve been publicizing, and I guess I’m no better or worse than the next guy.

  I started the year talking about snow, and we had more than our share to start with. That sucked. So did online games (difficult Windows8) and movie trailers for just about anything with a hint of action in it. I brought up the murderous activity of cyber bullying, dressing decently even if you’re going to Wal-Mart, jeans at work every day and trying to work with tech support.

  In 2014 I got a new clock radio, a new television, a new cable box (thanks to Brutus the Cable Guy, who did what Cletus the Cable Guy did not do: replace the #@! box) and a new DVD player, so it appears that my entire electronic family died at about the same time, and none could live without the others. I also got a battery-operated clock because the new-fangled cable boxes apparently don’t have clocks.

  And yes, I did manage to write a bit. A group for which I read actually liked a quick chapter intro I rolled off in record time one afternoon simply because I wanted to get it written down and I had twenty minutes to spare. Since then I have expanded it and hope to have a full chapter completed soon.

  A friend gave me a needle felting kit for Christmas, so I can devote time to my felting in 2015 as well as my crocheting.

  2014 introduced my mother and me to the Chapman Stick (a musical instrument). We also spent over 80 hours without any television when it went on the fritz. The dry sink in the kitchen hit me in the eye, and I injured my shoulder somehow and was in pain for nearly two weeks: fortunately the doctor says it’s just a mishap related to a type of bone spur and it shouldn’t happen again.

  Here’s hoping that 2015 does not start out like it did last year, because I don’t want to have to write about snow again any time soon.

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• Merry, Merry? Quite Contrary!

  Posted at 4:03 am by kayewer, on December 21, 2014

  We wish people Merry Christmas, but we know it’s not that way for everybody. Still, we try to make one day in the calendar seem better than the others, and we set aside time for humanitarian good deeds and such, but the world will go through the same tumultuous 24 hours on Christmas Day as any other.

  Births and deaths go through the same paces. People will get into mishaps at home and on the road. Stores will run out of milk and bread (especially those that don’t close on Christmas). And people do go to work on the holiday. I happen to work at a 24-hour operation, so somebody will bring food in to the workers (and they get overtime). I have the day off, but the day after is Friday, so I’ll have double the work (and don’t mention what has to be done on January 2).

  Hospitals and police departments and 24-hour operators deal with some horrendous stuff on holidays: no wonder they eat, drink and smoke too much on average.

  Some people will still have the same problems on Christmas that they had the day before, and on the day after Christmas, some seasonal employees will find they have been fired.

  We close out another year of 365 days with much the same situations in place as the year before. It may not be merry, but you can predict that some things never change. All we can do is try to make a few bad situations better. Wish somebody a peaceful holiday: sometimes that trumps merry.

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• It’s About Time

  Posted at 2:24 am by kayewer, on December 15, 2014

  Life is full of exercises in bad timing. My company decided to institute a new timekeeping software program now. There is no time like the present, the old saying goes, and there is never a good time to get people used to new software, but it’s the end of the year and we have two holidays coming up. Just when everybody is on the same page with a routine, the rules change.

  The timekeeping gods are dancing a jig now.

  Also, the decision was made to start using the new software at the start of a new pay period, which for us starts on a Saturday. This means that, for the majority of us who do not work Saturday or Sunday, we will start right in with a new way to account for our daily hours first thing Monday morning. I’m anticipating lots of spilled coffee and four-letter words shouted at the height of desperation.

  Either that, or a manager will come around and tell us that the software crashed the system over the weekend.

  In addition, we can’t sign in until we receive our logins and passwords. Usually new logins are complex URLs which take up two lines of type on your computer screen. Passwords are born as a string of unintelligible garble which you must change into something you won’t forget the minute after you devise it. Having gone through family names and birth dates and names of pets from 1965 who were alive ten household moves ago, most password reminders now ask us for ten characters for a new password. Even a birthdate only contains eight. And what if you gave your kids and pets names of only five letters?

  You might try stringing together four-letter word patterns with an exclamation point at the end for your “special character.”

  I often have to dig deep for passwords, because my life is dull and missing exciting things I could use for passwords. That must be why the most common passwords are 1234 and such. Who has the time to figure out a new password before you’re one minute late clocking into the new time clock system?

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• The Gifts That Ain’t Giving

  Posted at 2:51 am by kayewer, on December 7, 2014

  Every year there is a list of what to (or what not to) give for the holidays. Those lists are too general to matter, but overall I think there are some common sense points to consider before you break the rules.

  This year it’s recommended* that you not give candles or anything with a particular scent, because those tend to not match a person’s taste and more likely to be re-gifted, unless you actually know that the person wears that scent or likes the aroma of pine in a flaming pillar. There is also the issue of allergies to contend with: there’s nothing like opening a gift and going into hacking or sneezing fits which effectively put an end to the present opening for the day. I followed this one.

  Also, don’t give men leather goods, because if a steer can wear his hide for years, your man isn’t likely to plow through another wallet after only a few months. Besides, the softer that thing gets against his bony buttock, the less likely it is to annoy his backbone from having to sit crooked all his life. I pity men, so I give pens (they go in the breast pocket).

  Calendars are also considered a no-no, along with picture frames and holiday decorations. Again with the personal preference thing. Your photo frame may clash with the complete set your friend spent months putting together to make their picture wall in the great room worthy of a magazine cover photo shoot. Besides, those generic photos inside are creepy.

  Finally, don’t give a hat and scarf/glove set. These kinds of items are best designed for one to buy for themselves. Or, if you must, avoid the pompoms and funny color schemes, or don’t expect to see them walk around one day in your gift items. They’re more likely to go to the donation bin.

  So I broke some of these rules, and I’m not ashamed to tell you that I have. Folks are going to see some of the forbidden items when the present swaps go on in a week or so. I did take the time to pick things with particular individuals in mind, and it is the thought that counts. That is the true key to gift shopping: consider the person, along with your wallet.

  *http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/01/pf/bad-holiday-gift-ideas/

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• Police, Puh-leeze!

  Posted at 3:20 am by kayewer, on November 30, 2014

  We don’t appreciate people in law enforcement enough, and it seems that Ferguson, MO, demonstrates that all too well. Police officers are somewhat like the parental figures in grown-up society, and we are known to treat them with that same degree of grudging tolerance, with occasional outbursts of outright hatred because they try to keep us in line. We know that we need police officers, but when they do their job, we cringe. The people in Ferguson are shown and heard on news media in acts of civil disobedience and justifying it because an officer shot a suspect who died of his wounds. I’m including a link to an article which, I think, describes the incident in the most neutral and thorough terms from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html?_r=0

  It seems that police officers are often treated like domestic workers: they clean up messes nobody else wants to handle, and they’re looked down upon for doing that job. Really, think about the last time you greeted and asked after the well-being of your workplace’s domestic staff, who clean your break room’s gunky sinks and wipe poo and other indescribable fluids off your toilet seats. Don’t you usually just “leave them to their job” and ignore them unless the sink still looks a bit grimy? Now ask yourself when you ever greeted a police officer and thanked him or her for going into filthy crack houses to stay the hand of a tanked-up addict holding a weapon from hurting his wife and kids, or standing in a row of ten or so officers against 50 riled up citizens who want to burn down the town’s beloved businesses?

  These folks do a tough job that no average person would or could do. They train to run into the line of fire, stand between two sides in a domestic abuse standoff, negotiate in dangerous situations and take matters to task when they get out of hand. They run themselves ragged guarding our civility and trying to keep the peace, but the only time we remember them is when they pull us over for speeding and we cuss them for giving us a ticket. We don’t mind the misbehavior, just getting caught.

  And even though Ferguson seems to want it to be so, the race card doesn’t even figure into what happens when an officer makes an arrest: the officer is wrong, even when it’s Satan himself getting handcuffed, because somebody always jumps in and plays the joker card of police brutality. Maybe we need robotic law enforcement like in Robocop to calm things down.

  Sure we could go on about how unfortunate it was that the dead man in the Ferguson case, Michael Brown, wound up being shot after an alleged robbery, or we could talk about karma, fate, the hand of God, misuse of power, Jean Valjean and Javert or any such story to make facts sound more palatable, but human free will is tough to deal with, and cops are human beings tasked with a great responsibility to try to balance that free will for the good of all. It is impossible for people not to misbehave, and it is impossible for officers of the law not to have outcomes like this on occasion. They try to avoid it, but it will happen. What we might want to do is remember that crime and justice are two parts of our existence that don’t always come out the way we want them to, and the best we can do is let police officers do what they must do and behave ourselves.

  And occasionally thank them for their service.

  And say hello and “How are you?” to your office domestic staff.

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• Devious DVD

  Posted at 3:36 am by kayewer, on November 23, 2014

  Will somebody please slow the progress of entertainment media so old geezers like me can catch up? My DVD player was running fine until a few weeks ago, when the TV died and I had to get Cletus the Cable Guy to come put up a new flat screen. He hooked up the DVD player and told me to hit a button on the remote to play a movie.

  Well, I didn’t get up the nerve to try playing a movie right away. I have a life when I’m not booking time to watch movies at home, after all. So finally I tried the little button, inserted a DVD and it worked. Great, I said; we’ll play the movie tomorrow afternoon.

  The following afternoon, I inserted the DVD, only to have it spat back out at me with the message “DVD Error.” I tried some other DVDs and got one or two to play, but most gave me the same message. Well, they were all fine DVDs yesterday, I said to myself, so I must have a problem with the player. The instruction manual (yes, I’m one of two people who can actually find the manual that comes with an appliance) suggested cleaning the DVD. I went to BestBuy®, who didn’t have a single DVD cleaner in stock. I went to a second BestBuy®, and the sales associate suggested I go to RadioShack®. Well, thank goodness some place still knows how to do business. They had two in stock, along with friendly sales associates.

  The cleaner apparently didn’t work. So the obvious message is that I should, as any average American would do, ditch the old player and buy a new one, or go with an extensive (or expensive) upgrade to turn my home into a multi-media palace of instant entertainment gratification with streaming video, ambient sound coming from every wall and a monthly bill the size of a car payment. I’ll rent my discs and keep the electric bill down, thank you.

  I guess I’ll go out and buy another player, which I assume will have to be Blu-Ray, another format doomed to go the way of all modern technology. The old machinery will wind up in a junk pile somewhere. Nobody repairs stuff anymore. There must be a Mount Everest of discarded appliances somewhere on this planet, tied together with old VHS tape.

  Modern technology sucks.

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• LIne Up

  Posted at 2:57 am by kayewer, on November 16, 2014

  We are used to lines, though we complain about them. The season for lines is coming fast, which means an increase in the pairs of sore feet and acts of impatience.

  Last weekend I was out and about and found myself near the new location of Carlo’s Bakery–the family pastry business run by TLC television celebrity Buddy Valastro–which just opened in Marlton, NJ. I pulled into the shopping center, hoping to drop in, but the line went out the door about 100 deep at 3:00 on a Sunday afternoon. Of course this was about 24 hours after the grand opening. What was I thinking? So I did the only logical thing I could do: on the way home, I stopped at the local fourth generation bakery with no line.

  Some people feel that, if a store has no lines, they’re not popular. Some folks in my office rag on me about my Windows® computer, and the fact that people are milling about the Apple® store by the dozens on a slow day, while customer associates at Windows® are drawing lots to see who will have the privilege of serving any walk-ins. I believe that sheep and cattle stand in line at the abattoir, so I’ll wait off to one side until they come get me.

  At the start of each month, the grocery stores are packed with lines of people who just got paid on the first day and are stocking up with food for the next 30 days (or 29 if it’s November). I have images of cellar freezers crammed with fish sticks and pizzas and racks of ribs or club-sized trays of chicken drumsticks. The carts are straining from the loads. What ever happened to the weekly grocery trip?

  Of course some lines have lessened, like at the movies or concerts, when all you have to do is log on and find out they’re electronically sold out as of two minutes ago.

  Other lines start too early and grow ridiculously huge, like the people who have already camped out outside stores like BestBuy® for Black Friday deals.

  On customer service phone lines, occasionally the wait with hold music is more torture than standing in a Black Friday queue at the cashier. If yours has only two recorded tunes with which you must wait for the next available representative (neither of which is identifiable), it can seem like you’ve camped out two weeks in advance at BestBuy®. Phone lines should have at least three recordings of hold music. And no country, please.

  When I’m waiting my turn, I often think about what I have accomplished so far in the day. It sometimes makes the delay less painful. If it’s the first thing I’ve done that day, I remind myself that I awoke in the morning, there was breakfast in the kitchen and my digestion is healthy. Then the person behind me bumps into me, and it’s back to reality.

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• Taking a Week Staycation

  Posted at 4:08 am by kayewer, on November 9, 2014

  My job lets me accrue time off every payday. The problem with me, like a large number of Americans, is that I don’t use it. Other countries get lots of time off and they don’t feel as if they have had enough: we keep our noses to the grindstone so long we don’t even have nasal cavities left.

  Once before I saved up a lot of time, when I was in the Navy. I had a whole month of time off on the books. They know you have to take it, but they don’t order you to go home and relax and not come back until your balance is down. Same thing in the civilian workplace.

  Until recently, accrual was the norm. Now they want you to keep only a maximum number of hours and, if you hit your cap, you earn no more until you take some off. This means either going home and relaxing or selling your time back at a 50 percent reduction. You know most folks, unless the bill collector is at the door, will take the time off.

  So I’ve used a bit of vacation lately, a day or week at a time. I don’t go anywhere. It can be nice to not try to cram housekeeping and shopping into two or three hours in the evening or wait until the weekend. I can stop staring at the chore list, because I have nine whole days to decide when I want to do things. I love food shopping when there are no lines and I can put paper in plastic at my own pace.

  Since I don’t go anywhere, I also don’t wind up needing another week of vacation to recover from the vacation. No suitcases to unpack and laundry to do, no bills that are going to pile up and bring the bill collector to the door.

  I do have a vacation bucket list I hope to get to before I get too old to enjoy going places. Home, however, can be just as nice as any pre-packaged tourist trap. Since I live close to Philadelphia, I could just play tourist and see the sights there if I want to.

  Have you ever worked in an office so near a shopping center or city shopping district you could hear your credit cards squealing with glee, but you couldn’t get there because your lunch was too short, or the rush hour traffic too messy to try to get there yourself? Go on vacation and hit that mall, honey. And just think: you don’t have to go back to cubicle hell after lunch.  You can eat lunch in the food court.

  But what am I posting this for? I’m on vacation. See you next time.

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• On the Calendar

  Posted at 12:40 am by kayewer, on November 2, 2014

  Charities start bombarding me with calendars (attached to demands for donations) in August. By October the malls have entire stores devoted to them. Calendars are our way of tracking time and making a statement with photos of things we love (or love to hate).

  Every year my mother and I have a calendar tradition going on. She picks a pocket version for herself: I hang on to one charity’s version for our wall, and then I collect the others and take them to work so my coworkers can adorn their cubicles with images of national parks, flowers, objects in nature which happen to look like hearts, endangered species, USO images from the past and drawings by hospitalized or health-compromised children. We all like to look at them, of course, but the free ones are just part of the calendar phenomenon.

  The calendar stores contain hundreds of the things. There are “page-a-day” versions with favorite cartoons, words of advice or even Sudoku puzzles or daily knitting patterns. Dr. Phil has a page-a-day based on his most recent book, and I bought one so I can get through 2015 with some well-grounded advice. I saw one devoted to a unique book called “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” I passed on that one.

  Every breed of dog has a calendar, but cats get shortchanged as it seems no one breed has a spotlight. I’d like to see a Manx calendar or a Birman calendar, thank you.

  Every television series and motion picture gets a calendar. “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” still have a strong showing, and discontinued cable shows like “True Blood” get a nod (even though, in my opinion, that show’s ending was horribly lame), and Hollywood icons still get money in their estate’s coffers with devotional monthly photo merchandise. No calendar store is complete without Elvis or Marilyn Monroe.

  The organizational calendars have a whole wall to themselves in which they are–yes–well organized. There are calendars for left-handed users and leathernecks, calendars for fans of ferrets and tree frogs, pop art and travel, teddy bears and teapots. This is the true wall mart, my friends.

  And for those of us who have lost our calendars, one page usually has September through December of the current year on it, possibly to make up for how early you are buying one.

  One of my favorite calendars for the past two years has finally gone out of production. I think I’ll stay with one of the ones I got in the mail, since I donated to get it. I may not have Grumpy Cat all year, but I can still stare at a grid of days and weeks and remain grounded in what we call time and place, with Dr. Phil on my desk to keep me company.

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