I’m a bit late, but it just came to my attention that it is Turn TV Off Week, April 25 - May 1.

I encourage any of you who are interested to try a TV-free world for an hour, a day, or even the rest of the week. Read a book, go for a walk, enjoy a hobby or visit with friends/family. The possibilities are truly endless.

How much more would/could you get done?! You might be surprised to find out.
The world is out there, don’t make it wait for you any longer!!

My maternal parental unit is scheduled to arrive in the big D today. She is leaving Montana to visit our Springtime Texas. I’m really looking forward to her visit.

Now when I woke up this morning, stark naked, A/C blowing full blast and still feeling a little bit toasty, I have to admit it did take me a bit by surprise to receive her phone call warning me that she just may be delayed or postponed on her arrival due to …..SNOW.

Gosh, the bluebonnets are looking better all the time!

My friend Squeek made an interesting observation. He noticed that the new Pope, Benedict XVI, looks an awful lot like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.

If anyone begins to notice the PopeMobile™ morphing into anything DeathStar-esque, let me know, ‘cause I’ll be joining the rebellion for sure.

So if we can all get together and agree to change time twice a year, where do I go to request MORE hours in the day. I can’t seem to fit all the wonderful things I have/want to do lately.

[Can you say ‘tired’?]

I love words. Apparently I love them so much that I collect them with over-zealous greed.

I spent some time this weekend going through my old files, re-organizing and discarding much of what I had been lugging around for years. I still had returned check stubs from 10 years ago and bill statements from the late 90’s. But I also have scraps of paper with jokes, songs, stories or poems that I’ve written since about the age of 8. I still have notes from my high school Shakespeare class and almost every essay or paper I’ve ever written from 9th grade clear through graduate school. (Of course at one point I thought I might end up as a college professor and these missives would come in handy…don’t say it, I know it’s still crazy.)

I also have many letters, cards and even some emails that friends have sent me over the years. Sometimes it’s fun to dig into them and take that trip down memory lane.

As many of you know, ‘rangutan and I have been friends for about 15 years. Now one would think/hope that two people would grow and change in that amount of time. NOT US! As anyone who has ever consumed libations with us can attest, we are prone to lengthy, sometime heated, debates. Most frequently we devolve into completely inane exchanges.

As evidence I provide to you this exchange we had about 7 years ago.

[R] Did you know your last name is a comparative adjective?

[H] Yes, and as such it expresses a greater degree of the quality of turbulence and lawlessness than what is expressed in the merely positive ‘wild’.

It is the ‘greatness’ that is most accurately descriptive of my nature.

[R] There’s a strange consequence to adjectives. The context in which they are used is most important to their meaning. Consider the adjective ‘wild’. When applied to a person it means someone extremely crazy. To say a person is ‘wilder’ requests an interrogatory such as ‘compared to what, or whom’. One cannot, or should not use the term ‘wild’ in an attempt to define the meaning of ‘wilder’ in the context of describing a person. Since it is impossible for a person to be described as ‘wilder’ than a ‘wild’ person means ‘wild’ is the extent of the range of meaning for the word. Therefore, we must conclude that either ‘wilder’ doesn’t exist or is unnecessary.

But I’m glad she does and she isn’t.

[H] If ‘wild’ were the extent of the range of the meaning of the word, then the English language would have no use for the ‘comparative adjective’. When the collective unconscious of a community of individuals agrees on what is ‘merely wild’ then again as a collective whole it is understood that when one describes someone or something as ‘wilder’ the word expresses a greater degree of the quality of what is collectively understood as ‘merely wild’. Hence, we see the comparative aspect. So it is not actually using ‘wild’ to define ‘wilder’, it is comparing the degree of the quality of the essence of one word to the other, both falling back on the primary definitions, i.e., the quality of lawlessness, turbulence, or craziness. (One is ‘more crazy’ than the collectively agreed upon ‘merely crazy’ person.) Therefore, ‘wilder’ not only exits due to the limitlessness of the human imagination and consciousness, but it is also supremely necessary for the continuous ‘pushing’ of common boundaries, i.e., to always go one greater than what is commonly accepted, yet never going so far as to say ‘wildest’, whereupon one would limit the growth of humanity as a whole by suggesting a maximum.

Nominally, I represent a catalyst for the ever-expanding universe!

Ever humble,
- hauself

I got a cool and yet freaky surprise today. One of my dear friends from high school found my blog and contacted me. For quite some time my blog has been ‘anonymous’ but due to an ‘oversight’ on one of my fellow blogger’s part, my real name recently became associated with my site, and could be found from a simple google search. (Hell, I’m the number 1 site on google, even without adding the quotes to my name.)

Now I am ELATED that my friend found me (I lost her email a few years ago and had no way to contact her) but since I discovered the name/site connection a little over a month ago I have been trying to get my name ‘de-listed’ and return to a state of semi-anonymity.

So the question of my anonymity has been stirring in my mind all day. Does it REALLY matter? It is kinda cool that all of the folks from my life can find me if they are so inclined. For the most part I don’t care who reads this site and/or who knows it’s me. Most of my readers are friends anyway. (And I especially LOVE how many of my out-of-town friends I get to stay in-touch with due to this site. So a quick shout out to all of you…thanks for continuing to ‘stop by’ and contributing when you feel compelled.) But probably my biggest ‘fear’ (that is too strong a word) is that my mother finds it. She and I are very close, but we don’t share as openly as I feel I can in this format. I know I would not be able to communicate as freely if I knew she was in the audience. I am also a bit hesitant to have any of my co-workers find my blog, but even that would be a minor disturbance to my ‘open-ness’. Other than that I guess I really don’t mind.

So, anyway this friend of mine has lived in Japan for several years now. (I would LOVE to visit her sometime.) She is one of the people from my small hometown whom I have always connected with and admired. (I am so glad we are back in touch, my dear!!). Anyway, she informed me that her husband also has a blog. However there is a slight catch…it is in Japanese. So that puts me at a ‘slight’ disadvantage’ in keeping up with their comings and goings. However, using the same fabulous google technology that allowed her to find me, I can also ‘loosely’ translate her husband’s site. Now admittedly google does a very obviously poor job of translating, but I can kinda catch the jist of it all. (And the poor translation also adds an additional humor factor to it.)

When you come to think of it, we really do live in a very small, wonderful, easily connected world. All the more reason I say: Be gentle with one another folks, we really are all neighbors.

My office computer has been very temperamental today. For quite some time we have worked very well together, but I must say we really didn’t form any special bond (like I usually do with the computers in my life). Suddenly it occurred to me that up until now we were just sort of working side-by-side with no real ‘stated’ commitment. We both knew it could just be a temporary collaboration.

But now, now things have changed and perhaps my computer is just acting up in order to get my attention. I now realize that we will be spending A LOT of time together in the foreseeable future. So, the time has come. I need a name for my computer.

So far her ‘personality traits’ are:
She (yes my computer is female) is quiet most of the time and usually does what is required without any fuss. She is not nearly as demanding as some of the other computers (in terms of time and attention). She can get temperamental at times if I’m not paying her the right kind of consideration, but usually she is well adjusted. She knows just enough to get the job done, but she really doesn’t have any extra, special skill sets and sometimes she moves a little slow. She gets along really well with the other computers on the network. And she REALLY knows how to keep a secret.

“Pssst. She is also a bit on the older side. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

Any suggestions?!

I had to go to a business communicator’s luncheon today. You know, the typical marginally edible hotel food, with plenty of palm-pressing, networking and guest speakers, all on the company dollar with the pretense that hanging out and sharing ideas with your peers will enhance your skill set, but mostly it’s a good excuse to get out of the office.

I didn’t know what the topic was going to be until after I got there. I was surprised to find myself sitting in a room of corporate-types discussing how to best harness the communication potential in and strategically leverage this ‘new’ blogging phenomena. They discussed blogger-type profiles (apparently we are “a very social group, with our fingers on the pulse of all things cutting-edge in the technology/internet world, and we gladly fulfill the growing voyeuristic needs of the average American citizen”).

And in the same breath that they recognized the rogue, individualistic nature of this ‘beast’, they also wanted to tame and even control it, thereby missing one of the finer points of blogging (IMHO).

I kinda felt like a spy in their midst as I sat there quietly listening to them discuss a sub-culture of which I am a part.

Perhaps someday we’ll start to develop ‘blog-dar’ (like gay-dar) so we will be able to find one another in a crowd?

Over the weekend Glitterbug and I ran to the store to grab some groceries for dinner. As luck would have it, by the time we got in queue for check-out some of the computer systems crashed, so while many of the customers whined or complained, we just waited. Waiting right along with us was a well-dressed, good-humored man. In no time we all began chatting and he teased us about the ‘healthy nature’ of our grocery choices compared to his, and I talked with him about herb gardening in Texas. It was a fun easy-going conversation and it certainly helped to pass the time. Finally it was my turn to check-out and for some reason the machine would not recognize or accept my card (I know, Mercury IS in retrograde…tee hee), and I didn’t have enough cash on me to pay the total amount. After the initial rush of humiliation had passed, I ran out to the car to find another means of payment. By the time I returned the wonderful, friendly gentleman who was next-in-line informed me that it was already taken care of, and not to worry about it. I was floored, and just sort of stood there with a mixed look of gratitude and incredulity. He told me it was his ‘random act of kindness’ for the week. I thanked him profusely and just grinned my way out the door. (Strangely enough, my card worked just fine the very next time I tried to use it.)

TAG! I’m it! So now it’s my turn to ‘pay it forward’. I LOVE this GAME!

Isn’t life great?!

My Bro and I are very similar in many ways. We’ve always been pretty close. We played together a lot when we were kids and still hang out together when we can. (We’ve even been known to occasionally still wrestle.) We both talk fast, tend to be quick witted and have similar senses of humor. He and I are really the only true extroverts in the family and back in the day, when Fly and I were selling cars, people even used to ask us if we were twins. (NO, not identical twins, people…he and I ARE noticeably different genders. He got the great ass, but hey, he would have looked really silly with my rack! Anyway, I digress).

So, it was very funny and only mildly surprising to find out that currently we are dating girls who have the same birth DATE! (Not just birth DAY, mind you!) Don’t worry, we already checked to make sure we weren’t actually dating the SAME GIRL.

We are close…but not THAT close!