I am the Turtle

The other day I mentioned in a post that I had to hang some curtains. I have been talking about it for weeks. Every day I passed by my youngest daughters bedroom I would glance at her window and mumble that I had to hang some new shades. Well...I finally broke down and bought some venetian blinds about a week ago. I really want to put up some wood blinds to match the rest of the house but hey...I'm saving for a liver so the venetian blinds will have to do for now.

It took me about a week to break through my period of procrastination before I set to the task, and for me that is really fast. It's kind of like comparing dial-up to DSL. I mean I finally sent out a box of books I started collecting for a friend of mine this past summer for Christmas. She finally got them the day after her birthday which was the first day of spring. That was last Saturday. That is like 9 months after I started up her little care package. I. Am. Turtle. Slow.

Anyhow, I was very pleased with myself for not taking 3 months to do this. Well today I came home and I passed by the youngest daughters bedroom to glance at my achievement and I found this.

Needless to say I was a bit flummoxed. Where were my blinds? My nice pretty antique white blinds? Surveying the room I could tell that they were not present. I figured this meant that there was a story (and a good one at that to be sure), but I didn't ask about it because of what I might hear. When I walked into my bedroom I found this lying on my bed,

And this. I'm pretty sure they didn't look like this this morning.

After thinking about it for a moment, I suddenly remembered that I had never finished hanging these blinds. Lois and I had to run to the doctors and I didn't have time to finish adding this piece.

This is the little doo-hickey thingy that mounts in the center of the blinds to give it support so that when you pull down on the cords to raise and lower them they won't fall.

I specifically remember telling myself that I had to remind the girls not to mess with the shades until I was done fastening that last piece. Oops.

RanDoM piCtuReS

Bird Tree

Do you twitter?

Do you pay attention to what's around you?

Do you take time to look at the sky?

Baby Steps

Old Age

Accident waiting to happen.

Oh no I won't...

Birds Nest

Bird nest

A Man for All Seasons...and episodes

I watch way too much T.V.
I don't have a very big problem with that.
I enjoy it.
What I don't enjoy is watching everything go down the tube (so to speak). Remember when a season used to be a season? You could watch a series and pretty much count on it being on from week to week. Nowadays a season is a matrimony of seasons. A show will run for a few episodes and then it will go off air while another show runs its season for two weeks and then another show follows it. And then that first show will come back on to run for two more weeks and then disappear again. And those shows they air in between are not good shows. They are new "reality T.V." shows like Survivor: Dancing with an American Idol. Or, the Biggest Top Chef Loser. And of course, The Amazing Celebrity Race. Who thought this up? Did the networks all get together one day and somebody said, "I know, let's run a season within a season within another season".
And what is it about introducing a new T.V. series; running it for three episodes and then flushing it down the toilet? Why do they do that? I was watching that show, thank you very much. And oh yeah...didn't you just throw a whole bunch of money down the drain producing those three episodes?
And then there's content. I know...I know...if you don't like it then don't watch it. But is it really necessary for me to block 185 channels because at some point during prime time one of my daughters will be flipping through stations to watch something, only to find Charlie Sheen making yet another reference to his manhood or the plethora of women he has no respect for? I mean, at least when I'm watching CSI I can tell my youngest to cover her eyes because the blood is coming. But I'm not here to write about that. We all know what to expect when we turn on the tube. What I want to know is: What has happened to all the writers?
I thought that when the writers went on strike it was because they thought they were being underpaid. I thought that that money would in turn provide new material. Like inspiration, suspenseful drama and gut wrenching laughter.
And I was really hoping that they'd stop with the Law and Order stuff. It had a pretty good run in the day but, did we really need to have a dozen different shows? How many of them can they make anyways? I bet at any given hour on any given day on any given cable network, you can watch Law and Order. Let's see what the writers did this year.
Medium.
After five seasons Allison still appears to be the butt of the joke. Her boss Devalos still wags his finger at her and says, "No Allison, you're absolutely wrong!"
And Detective Scanlon will blatantly come out and call her a liar. It seems like after five seasons, with nearly every case solved because of her dream-like intuition, that her co-workers would come to respect her judgment and take her word at face value. But in every episode the writers still manage to pull off a swing vote of making her look like a crazy idiot that nobody will listen to until the end of the show when she solves the case and then it's all, "Way to go Allison. Great job. I guess you're not that big of an idiot after all. Our bad."
And what about Joe? Can he be more snotty? Selfish? Disrespectful? Unsupportive? Why would the writers do that to her? She already has to deal with her coworkers who treat her like garbage. I say after five years...lighten up. And put the damn phone on her side of the bed. She's the one getting all the phone calls in the middle of the night.

24
Seven seasons and Jack Bauer still rocks. But...
Can they at least give him some new lines? And the screaming. Always with the screaming. "Chloe, there's no Time!"
Isn't there, Jack? Isn't there?
And speaking of Mrs. O'Brian...Is she ever going to turn that frown upside down? She was mad at the world seven years ago, is she still mad at the world now?

LOST

Now these writers are just sitting there having races. Every episode leaves you more confused than the other. I love it. But then, that's the way I roll. I will be sad to see it go. Bon voyage you wackos.

BONES

Seally, Sully, whatever your name is...Get a room. Oh wait! That might ruin the dynamic. I have to say I like everybody in this show except for Bones. Why didn't they give her a heart or soul? Let's work on this, fellows.

DeSPeRatE hOUsEwiVeS

Five years in the future? Really? Okay.

I guess in a way everyone who had a job as a writer during the writers' strike dodged a bullet. If the writers had not reached some sort of resolve before the economy started going all crazy, then I'd probably still be sitting here watching reruns. And the network did manage to bring back Chuck. I'm happy about that.

<:)

What Was He Thinking?

I am pretty sure that it was Benjamin Franklin who first introduced the idea of daylight savings time. But it wasn’t until a hundred years later or so that some other nitwit decided it was a good idea.
I personally can’t stand it. The idea of changing the clocks around twice a year so that we can save energy is a brilliant concept but, I would kind of like to see the world in its natural state from time to time. I work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. so I usually go to work when it’s dark and for half a year I come home in the shadow of twilight.
I also have enough trouble with my internal clock that I don’t need someone else screwing around with it.
Like today. Last night I didn’t go to bed until 3 a.m.; so today when I woke up it was eleven o’clock. That means I will probably be equally confused tonight so that I won’t wake up until noon tomorrow. I am just happy that Sunday, Monday and Tuesday is my weekend so I have some time to adjust. My kids on the other hand don’t have that luxury. When they lose an hour of sleep it is never pleasant. It is not so bad in the fall when they gain an hour and they wake up all refreshed and are nice to be around, but spring time sucks. Nobody wins in the spring. The kids are ornery, the parents are mean and no matter what the time police have to say about saving energy it’s nothing but a big fat disruption. I’m guessing people who wake up an hour early or an hour later don’t wind up having a good day. I mean…nobody likes to lose sleep or wake up late for work.
The thing I hate the most about DST is setting all the clocks. T.V.s, Vcr’s and all the house clocks. Lois normally does the stove and the microwaves and I usually do all the recording devices right away. And when I say right away that usually means a few minutes before I have to record something. The house clocks are a little different. They get set whenever I get around to it. Like our kitchen clock requires getting on a barstool - I don’t usually change that until summer if it's springtime and don’t change it until winter if it is in the fall. So for half a year it's just wrong. One year I changed it about two month before it was time to switch it back.
I think Benjamin was a pretty wise man, but what was he thinking?