Hey guys I'm back

[Heddi]

I ended up not taking a nap
thinking about taking one today after work, though.

i'll let you know how those plans shake out.

[trotsky]

1. ...

[masmdu]

2. Thanks for keeping us up to date...

I really hope you get the chance to take a nap.

[Heddi]

3. thanks.

I have some things to do after work that may interfere. I still have to get chlorine for the pool, and I have a coupon for a free pizza that expires tomorrow, but it's eat-in only so I may have to get that. I don't know if I'm going to get that today or tomorrow. I'm not sure if I feel like it today or tomorrow.

I have a lot of choices to make, between whether to get the chlorine, whether to get the pizza, and whether to get the nap. Life is all about making decisions. Even not making a choice is a choice in an of itself.

[Voltaire2]

4. Thanks for the update.

Our thoughts and prayers and vibes and farts were with you.

[Heddi]

5. Well as it turned out, I worked an hour and a half over today

As many of you know, and even fewer of you care, I work from home. As a nurse. It's a very rare job for a nurse to be able to work from home but I'm one of the few that can do it and I do it well. So working overtime just means that I don't get to walk the 8 feet from one of the 3 spare bedrooms to the living room but I'm not really complaining. I was able to complete some things I had been meaning to do for a while but can't get to during the 8-hour salaried work-day that I typically work.

For those of you that don't know, being salaried means that I don't get paid over-time for working over. It's not even considered working "over" because there are plenty of times when i can leave 'early.' That's what being salaried means. You can leave "early" but you also stay "late." I see it as all coming out in the wash.

I'm explaining this to you all like you're a bunch of lead-chip eating dunderheads because you probably all are. I'm actually amazed that the majority of you can find the time from staring at your smart phones and doing whatever self-entitled millennials do to actually get off of your bums and get jobs, like the rest of us hard-working middle aged folks. See, when I was your age I actually had a job that made me do things with my hands. My actual hands. I not only babysat when I was 8 but even earlier than that I worked on the weekends at over the summers at my mom's job, doing filing and odd jobs. I never sat on my duff and expected the world to hand me anything, not that this generation would understand that.

So now maybe you greedy people can understand why I've been so tired lately. Because I have singularly been propping up this economy, single-handedly, for the past 30-odd years. And not a single thank you.


because it's going to be needed by the members of the perpetually outraged

[LostOne4Ever]

6. Well if that doesn't work out for you then you could yell at some clouds

Or maybe give us a small dissertation on why flip phone are superior to iPhones or something?

[Act_of_Reparation]

7. You sound like one of those indecisive millennials.

Too busy playing frogger on your smart phones to take a nap. Back in my day we didn't have smart phones or the internet or dee-vee-dees. If we wanted to listen to hippidy hop music we needed wait four decades for it to be invented and then go to a record shop to pay for it and there wasn't no listening to it on the way home because we didn't have record players in cars then.

Back when I worked at NASA I told my friend Cubby O'Hulahee -- who everyone just called Grimes for short -- that we should design some sort of high tech ketchup bottle for the Apollo missions. "Grimes," I said, "how in the blue blazes is Gus Grissom gonna eat his steak and potatoes without ketchup?" Everyone knew how much Grisson liked his steak and potatoes and I'd already invented him a tiny grill he could take up in space with him so he wouldn't have to eat that freeze dried crap. Turns out some punk ass kid named George Foreman stole my idea and made a bunch of money off it. More fool me, I guess.

Anyway, Grimes -- who everyone just called Grimey for short -- was a tall guy, mind you, and he needed to wear hearing aids just so he could make out what short people were saying. Now Grimey -- whose name was actually Cubby O'Hulahee (can't remember if I already said that) -- forgot to change the batteries in his hearing aids, which back then we called ear-lengtheners (the hearing aids, not the batteries). So when I said, "We need to make a ketchup bottle for Gus", he thought I said "We feed a Chechen dottle on a bus". Now, not many people know what dottle is. It's the sticky residue burned tobacco leaves behind in in your pipe. And a pipe is what we used to smoke things from. No high tech bongs for us, thank you very much. So Grimes says to me, "I don't care what you do on your own time, Al, but if you're hanging out with the Ruskies you really ought to keep it yourself." And he says this because back in our day we didn't have namby-pamby terrorists trying to kill us. We had Russians, and Russians were scary because they had nuclear bombs that could incinerate an entire city in the blink of an eye. And kids these days are scared of a bunch of clowns cutting peoples' heads off with butter knives and posting color-corrected and professionally edited recordings of the proceedings online where anyone interested in subjecting themselves to PTSD can find them. What a bunch of wimps, I say. People were tougher back in my day.

Did you know when I was a kid food was so scarce my mom used to feed us rocks? It's true. She made a terrific gneiss soup. Her spaghetti and granite balls left something to be desired, but it was better than nothing so we didn't complain. People were tougher back then. We didn't complain about anything. All young people do today is complain, complain, complain, complain. What a bunch of complainers. Why can't they be like me. I don't complain about anything.

Wait.

Who are you again?

[Heddi]

8. I'd award you the internet

but some punk ass british communist already gave them away a few years ago

oh and I know you're full of shit because you can't burn charcoal briquettes in space, einstain.

[Act_of_Reparation]

9. Back in my day, we would have killed for the luxury of charcoal briquettes.

You young people and your modern conveniences...

When I was a lad and wanted something warm to eat, I had to work for it with the sweat of my brow. We had to cook our food with the only thing we had that would burn: ducks.

Yes, that's right. Ducks. It used to take six ducks to cook a single chicken wing. You know what it's like to chase a duck down, young lady? Of course you don't.

[Lordquinton]

10. Who do you think you are I am!

[Act_of_Reparation]

11. I say this as a white guy...

...but screaming a self-aggrandizing screed at a bowling game is probably the whitest thing a man could possibly do.

[Voltaire2]

12. you said "balls".

[Act_of_Reparation]

13. We've got the biggest of them all.