Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 261

Sick and tired…

I complain alot about Uncle Sam’s half-assed approach to managing his people… and God knows I’m not going to withdraw any of those previous statements. They all have the convenient aspect of being statements of fact rather than simple opinion. The one thing, though, that I won’t fault Uncle on is his policy on sick leave. We rack up 104 hours of sick leave every year and the unused balance rolls over from year to year assuming you don’t use all 13 days earned. Not a bad deal compared to some of the paid-time-off schemes out there.

The only reason I bring it up is I’m not burning up the second day in a row sitting here on the couch alternately burning up and shivering. It’s good times. Really. I’ve heard a few times yesterday that men are babies when it comes to dealing with the average case of “sick.” Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. I tend to go with the latter. I’m still keeping up with feeding and watering the manager, taking care of the three S’s every morning, and making my own trips to the drug store. I’ve even managed to feed myself for the last 36 hours – which has been pretty easy since the only flavor I can really taste is salty. I even think I’m managing it with a minimum amount of complaint.

Maybe the deciding element for “being a baby” has to do with not feeling the compulsion to go sit ant my desk while I’m hacking and wheezing all over everything. I know some people do, but I just can’t see any up side to it. If I’m going to spend the day hacking up weird neon colored snot, burnging through two boxes of tissues in 24 hours, and generally feeling sick and tired, I’d rather do that in the privacy of my own home than have ten people listening in on my progress. If that makes me a baby, well, fine… but I’d go more with responsible adult.

Now if anyone needs me, I’ll be watching House reruns and trying to diagnose myself.

Particularly lame…

Mondays are bad enough without assistance. It’s the day of the week when you have to do the most moderation of the standard weekend attitude of doing what you want, when you want. That one has always given me trouble, even under the best of circumstances. When it comes to feeling like I had a big plate of jagged glass for dinner, it’s safe to assume that rules out this being one of those “best circumstance” kind of days. Mostly that translates into feeling pretty surly… or maybe just more surly than usual. That would really depend on your perspective, but that’s not the point.

The point is I’ve spent the last thirteen hours trying to figure out what to swallow that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to rip open my throat from the inside. So far the losers in this contest have been coffee, a turkey sandwich, pretzels, water, and spaghetti. Plus, I’ve spent the last eight hours feeling like I need to sneeze. Eight hours. It would be ok if there were an actual sneeze to go with that feeling – you know at least some momentary feeling of relief or that something is getting accomplished, but no, that’s clearly out of the question.

So instead of doing anything more productive than heating up leftovers and blogging, here I sit, sipping hot tea with lemon and honey (the only thing I’ve found so far that doesn’t hurt to swallow) and feeling like I need to sneeze. Even for a Monday night, this one feels particularly lame. If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here nursing a sore throat and not sneezing.

September blahs…

It seems that late september back in ’07 was the tip of the iceberg in my ongoing mission of living a better life through the liberal use of the medical arts and sciences. Join me, won’t you, as memory lane leads everywhere from a Memphis emergency room with a presumed heart attack to a run down office in a rough part of town where they do drug screening for Uncle Sam. Maybe it isn’t the most exciting topic I’ve ever nailed to the door around here, but I think it’s pretty damned funny… especially in hindsight.

We’ll be making our way into October next week, so enjoy what’s left of September 2007 now. And don’t forget to comment if you’ve ever had a heart attack that turned out to be just a really bad case of gas. Happy Sunday!

Skipping today…

As many of you have noticed based on the number of posts that showed up on Facebook, today is my birthday… the 35th of its name. Sigh. Let’s not get into that.

Instead of a new rant, feel free to browse around my thoughts on this occasion in 2012, 2010, 2007… I think they should pretty well cover everything from gratitude to denial. In case you’re wondering why there was no Official Birthday Post in 2011, I seem to recall being busy that day driving back to Maryland from Tennessee so the best I would have been able to manage after falling out of the truck would have been maniacally mashing my fingers against the keys before falling asleep sitting up. As for 2009, I have no idea what happened there… and 2008, yeah, that one is still in the archive. I’m sure it’s a barn burner, but we’ll get to it in time.

I hope you’ll forgive the obvious laziness of this post, but after all, it’s my birthday and I’ll do what I want.

Memorandum for the record…

According to the procedures established by Uncle Sam to furlough his civilian personnel, I am entitled to make a written or verbal response and request reconsideration of the decision. As you can see, I opted for the written response.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Short weeks feel the longest. Why is it that a four day week feels at least twice as long as its standard five day counterpart? I’m sure there’s some deep psychoanalytical reason for it, but regardless it’s just stupid. Stupid and wrong. They say time flies when you’re having fun. Clearly “they” are full of shit and it flies when you’re just barely keeping your head above water too.

2. Furlough Fridays. Look, if you’re going to start letting me stay home on Fridays, how about not waiting for six weeks to kick off the new schedule. I’m more or less resolved that it’s the new reality, but there’s really no reason at this point not to dive in to the three day weekends right away. I mean that seems like the least echelons higher than reality could to to ease our transition to part time employees.

3. The birthday thing. I generally try to be a good sport because, well, it seems to be expected, but really I’d be just as happy if the whole birthday thing would pass as discreetly as possible. Some people want to celebrate for a week or the whole month. When the time comes, I’ll open a good bottle of wine, salute my good fortune at having managed not to drop dead for another 365 days, and get on with whatever else it was I planned on doing Saturday evening. Chances are I’ll pass the night either with my nose stuck in a good book or trying to write a half-assed one.

4. Bulldog checkups. Winston’s yearly physical and vaccinations are coming up tomorrow afternoon. The only good thing is that if you’re willing to take one of the last appointments of the day on Friday, I can get the vaccinations at half price. Inconvenient? Yes, absolutely… but when you’ve spent five years keeping up with bulldog related vet bills, you learn to take your savings where you can since it’s pretty inevitable they’ll discover something new and interesting that’ll need treated while we’re there.

Why we blog…

I got an email this afternoon from “a new media agency headquartered in the UK” wondering if I was “interested in selling advertising space on jeffreytharp.com.” The sender promises that advertisements would be unobtrusive and that they can pay an annual upfront payment for the advertising space. While the email does track back to an IP address in Uxbridge, England it’s safe to say that it qualifies as one of those sounds too good opportunities.

The truth is, I’m not blogging for advertisers. I’m not blogging to sell banners or to generate click-throughs or even to climb in the Technorati ratings. Mostly I’m blogging because I think I can turn a pretty phrase now and then and it seems that people are kind enough to humor me by reading it on a regular basis. If I happen to sell a few of my own wears in the process, so much the better – but this blog isn’t now and never will be written for the sake of generating a few pennies of advertising revenue. The complete lack of a coherent campaign for selling my own book should pretty much tell you where advertising falls on my list of priorities.

I think everyone that blogs harbors some kind of secret dream of being the next breakaway hit… and while it would be incredible to be on the receiving end of millions of hits a day, if I get there through the merits of the written word, that’s awesome. If it take shilling for some advertising company, well, I’ll keep my day job (at least 4 days a week) and enjoy the 20-30 people who check in around here on a regular basis.

Sometimes you can’t be too cynical…

(c) University of Florida

Government work tends to be one of those odd environments where up is down, good is evil, and logic is nonsense. It feels, at times, like a none-too-subtle combination of Groundhog Day and Dante’s Inferno. Maybe that’s an exaggeration… but only a little. I can say that with a degree of certainty because that’s the kind of day it’s been today.

At just after 11:00 this morning I was handed my formal notice that the United States Government plans to furlough me one day a week beginning on July 8th. Exactly 148 minutes later I received an email congratulating me on ten years of service to the government and notifying me that I’d be getting a certificate at the next office awards ceremony. You’d have to work pretty hard at sending two more discordant messages to your employees. Timing, as they say, is everything… even when it comes to giving with one hand and taking away with the other. I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not in a rush to agree to parading across the stage, smiling for the photo op, and pretending that I give a good goddamn about another certificate in my three ring binder.

I’m sure at some point in the distant past, a nice suitable for framing certificate was a fine motivational tool… but unless I can barter that certificate for goods and services, under the circumstances, I think you can understand why I don’t think it’s worth the paper it’s printed on. I’m going to improvise, adapt, and overcome… but don’t expect that I’ll be thanking anyone for the opportunity.

And people wonder why I’m cynical about almost everything.

Kosovo, MD…

I’ve had the opportunity twice in the last few days to drive through East Baltimore. Usually I try to keep it to the interstates and give the city a wide berth, but sometimes getting right down in it is unavoidable. Since I was there, I couldn’t help but look around a bit… and what I saw was night and day. On one hand, Johns Hopkins seems to be in a constant state of construction, buying up the rotting and decayed properties around it and expanding in every direction. Fifty years from now, they may have single handedly cleaned up that section of the city. That might well be the hospital’s greatest contribution to the state.

N. Patterson Park Ave, 1700 blk – (C) Charm City Vacancy

On the other hand, the drive into Druid Hill Park and the Maryland Zoo is a bit like taking a tour of Kosovo circa 1999. With what looked like bombed out and burned down houses and buildings outnumbering active residences and businesses on nearly every block, well, one wonders if it would’t be better to draw some lessons from Detroit and move in with bulldozers, level the ground, and start again. I generally ignore local Baltimore politics because it tends to be so ridiculous, but it seems that what we were seeing yesterday is the working definition of a failed city. Surely there’s a better approach to managing a state’s largest urban area than letting it collapse under its own weight. It’s a stark reminder of what happens when people stop caring about their surroundings and when local government throws up its hands and opts to hope for the best instead of actually doing anything.

There are some truly incredible examples of late Victorian architecture hiding in plain site down there, but they’ve been well and truly overwhelmed by the decay around them. Most are likely too far gone to do anything more than salvage the bits and pieces in advance of the wrecking ball. It’s a shame, really. Baltimore use to be one of America’s great cities. Now, once you’re outside the designated tourist zones or the neighborhoods that have tenaciously hung on or the ones that have been revived, it looks more like a war zone than a first world city.

Archival quality…

It’s Sunday again and I know everyone has been eagerly awaiting their taste of what live was like way back in 2007. I’m happy to present for your perusal, five new (old) posts – the first five from September 2007. From what I can piece together there was alot of travel work work going on during the first half of the month – so interesting that apparently I forgot that September 11th was a thing. Fortunately the drudgery of business travel didn’t keep me from finding something wrong with the neighbors and being sure to tell the whole world about it. Overall, I think it’s a good cross section of the day-to-day mundane thoughts and the more epic ranting that you’ve all come to know and love over the last seven years of blogging.

Without further delay, enjoy your taste of September 2007.