A Gentleman's Domain

One sunny afternoon on County Road 232...

 

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Actually this is the ventilation system for a huge milking shed.   I suppose I should have guessed that, what with all those cows and all.

Prioities!

The cat lover in me totally agrees!

There's harsh, and then there's harsh!

Paws for thought....

This is the picture on the packet of cat treats that our three felines enjoy  so much.  I have to say, I find that image vaguely disturbing!

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Smugness!

Concerning the inclement weather that has swept across much of the USA in recent days, I cannot help feeling a bit smug.  This satellite photo shows the sheer size of the storm, but you'll notice Florida, down in the bottom right, clear and unaffected.  Pass me another tee-shirt, m'dear; I'm off for a stroll in the sunshine!

Inked!

Colour me irritated. I was in sales for years and years, and rightly or wrongly I feel that that should immunize me against most of the marketing ploys that fool ordinary people. I know a pitch when I hear one; I recognize an alternative close when one is casually lobbed at me; I know how to give a closed answer to an open question, and vice versa. I never believed that old saw that salesmen are the easiest people to sell to. And yet…

In the olden days, when Gillette invented the safety razor, they sold them at a very low price. Almost every man could afford one. They sold like hotcakes (actually, I have always wondered why cakes have to be hot to sell well. I have bought a number of cakes over the years and as far as I can remember, they were all cold). Why, people wondered, were Gillette selling their new patented safety razors at such a give-away price. Well the answer of course was that once you had the razor, you needed periodically to buy blades for it, and that was where Gillette made a killing.

These days most of us use disposable razors, so the tactic of giving away the razors in order to sell the blades no longer applies – or at least, not to the art of scraping off the face fungus. But it exists elsewhere, and I have recently fallen victim to it. It was not completely unexpected. We all know, I think, that you can buy an inkjet printer for your computer at a fairly reasonable cost. Unless you want a top of the line model with all kinds of bells and whistles that most of us don’t really need, you can pick one up for a price that will leave you with some quite healthy change out of a hundred dollars. Where the printer people make their money is from the ink cartridges. My late father bought a very good printer some years ago, only to discover that new colour ink cartridges would cost him about 75% of cost of the printer. Needless to say, he determined only to print in black and white, which is probably what most of us do, most of the time. I hardly ever print in colour.

Anyway, my old printer died the death a few months ago so off I went down to Best Buy one warm and sunny Saturday afternoon to get a new one. Naturally, the model I had become used to was by them obsolete and no longer offered for sale, so I took a long look at the various models on offer and bought what seemed like a good printer/scanner/fax for a price just north of sixty dollars. I was actually rather pleased with myself. Included with the printer was a set of ink cartridges; a black one of course, and three colour ones. Now previously I had been used to having just one colour cartridge in my printer, but this one required separate cartridges of cyan, magenta and yellow ink. Ok, I thought, I won’t be using them more than once in a blue moon, so that doesn’t really matter. I go the box home, opened it, set up the printer on my desk, and did a couple of test prints.

It was then that I read in the book of instructions that even if you set your printer to print in black only, a small amount of coloured ink will be used in each printing. I have no idea why that should be, other than to make you use up ink. Sure enough, every time I printed something, with preferences set to “black only”, I could see from the animated chart that popped up each time that the ink levels of the three coloured cartridges was slowly dropping. I won’t mention the brand name, in order to protect the guilty but they had set it so that
Even
Printing
Seldom
Or
Never in colour, you had no alternative but to use ink from the three colour cartridges.  

I told myself that it didn’t matter, because when the colour ones ran out, I wouldn’t bother to replace them. That would show them! In fact, they showed me. One evening, halfway through printing a run of a dozen pages, the machine stopped and showed me a graphic of the cyan cartridge with a big red X across it and a warning that it was now completely empty. And – now here is the fiendish bit – the printer wouldn’t operate at all until I replaced it with a full one. Bastards!

Naturally this was late at night, so I couldn’t go anywhere to get a new one just then. Next day I took the empty cartridge to our local Walgreens, where they have a cartridge refilling service but of course my brand of ink cartridge was the one brand Walgreens didn’t service. So, I had to buy new ones. Three new ones in fact – I replaced the cyan, and I am at least ready for the imminent demise of the current magenta and yellow ones.

To be honest, the actual printer is pretty good, and the scanner is excellent (I expect the fax part of it is good too, but I have never used it). I’m just annoyed with the company for this marketing ploy, and even more annoyed with myself for falling for it. I say again: Bastards! Bastards and mug!
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Silly, silly man!

Gentlemen who decide to do a Full Monty for their  wives or lovers, should make sure they have checked every detail.  This is only 50 seconds and worth watching to the end!

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Electrickery?

Here’s something interesting.  Well, maybe.   We got a thingy in the mail from our local utility company. I knew the bill wasn’t  due yet, so I when I saw the envelope I assumes they were trying to sell us something, or disseminate utility company propaganda or some such.  In fact it was a so-called “Home Energy Report” and it compared out use of electricity to that of our neighbours, which they define as “up to 100 occupied apartments or condos”  and average of 0.00 miles from us.  There are quite a lot to chose from in a radius of 0.50 miles, for example, but 0.00 miles seems pretty close.  Anyway, UI suppose they know what they are talking about.

Or do they?  I was all ready to look at their chart and be alarmed at our apparent profligate use of  “electrickery” as Catweazel used to call it (don’t worry if you don’t know who that is – I just put that in for my sister),  when I noticed something.  This is what they sent.

According to this, we are positively extravagant with electricity.  July and August, the air-conditioning I suppose.  Yes, on the basis if this, we should cut down…  But wait!!  We also, it seems, used quite a lot from December to January.  Look how the graph slopes upwards.  That’s strange, considering that from 12 December to 5 January we weren’t here.  We were in England and there was no one in the house except our three cats.  The only power used were a couple of lights on time switches, the central heating ready to kick in if the temperature fell below 65° and the refrigerator stayed on.  That was it.  We had a pet sitter visit to feed the cats and empty their litter tray while we were gone, but I doubt that she did more than switch on a few lights for 15 minutes while she visited.  No one used the really heavy users of electricity – dishwasher, washing machine, toaster, electric kettle, microwave – while we were gone, and I am sure we didn’t have neighbours breaking into our place to make use my wife’s hair dryer.  So, what’s occurring, GRU?  Is this a genuine report, or just a lot of porkie pies (Don’t worry if you don’t understand that last sentence either.  I used that term because it’s the Brit in me!)?
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One Wednesday afternoon, 20 minutes after my second cup of tea....

Well now, here’s a little mystery that maybe someone can solve for me.  We went away for six days. Very nice. We drove up to South Carolina to visit my MIL.  We were away for five nights.  Not a very long time, you’ll agree I’m sure.  So why, I am wondering, was there a huge disparity between the amount of luggage that I took to see me through those five days and what my wife took.  I managed to get everything I needed to wear, plus a pair of flip flops, my camera and my sponge bag, into one small bag that normally I use as a carry-on when I travel by air.  I am a great believer in traveling light.  

My wife, on the other hand, needed four bags.  I have absolutely no idea why.  It’s not as though we had to change our clothes several times a day.  I remonstrated with her when we left home and I saw all her bags lined up on the bedroom floor, but I was informed, with a touch of asperity, that I simply did not understand.  Probably I don’t.  I don’t even understand what it is that I don’t understand.

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And something that came as a bit of a surprise.  For some people it is even sad, but because I am so far removed from the people involved, it is merely interesting.  In the mid-1990s I worked for a big firm of worldwide management consultants.  Their head office was in Florida; I was in charge of marketing in the London office, though I did visit the Florida office.  In fact that was my very first visit to Florida, little suspecting that one day I’d end up living there.  The CEO, who had started the firm from nothing twenty years before and was now a millionaire several times over, was in his early sixties, had a very hands on approach, sported a young blonde wife and usually wore a toupee that fooled no one.  I met him briefly only once, but I saw him many times in training videos and pictures of him , often with is wife, were plastered all over the company’s publicity material.  I have to say I did not enjoy the job, and when they decided to close several offices  across Europe and to run European operations from their office in Dublin, I was not sad at all. 

Cut to a few months ago.  I had never given that  company a second thought since the day I received my final pay cheque from them, but for some reason the name came to mind and I wondered if they were still in existence, so I used good old Google to see what I could find.  What I did find was a bit of a shock.  Apparently, everything in the garden had not been lovely.  The company did still exist, in a rather truncated form,  but some years ago had gone bankrupt.  The CEO was dead.  A few months before I Googled, his wife had divorced him and had been awarded a very generous, maybe even unfairly generous, settlement.  Unfair or not, it had prompted this man to go sit in his gazebo late one night, phone a local radio station to rant and complain about the inequities of Florida divorce laws and (I’m not sure if he was still on the phone or not) to blow his brains out.

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The other day, my wife and I were talking about various websites and she used a very descriptive term for sites that grab you and keep you reading them for hours – rabbit holes.  Maybe it’s a long established expression to describe sites like that, but it was the first time I had heard it.  I knew just what she meant.  There are some sites where  I have spent many hours of my life reading, clicking, reading more, for hours on end.  In particular, I can think of  YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDB, Etiquette Hell.  Do you have any rabbit holes?  If so, what are they?
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An A - Z thing

I was sent one of those A - Z thingies.  I have taken a rather free-handed attitude to answering it!

A - Age: 21

B - Bed size: Sort of rectangular, with sheets and blankets and things.

C - Chore you hate: de-knelging the upper flunes

D - Dog's name: I don't have a dog

E - Essential start your day item: coffee

F - Favorite color: blue

G - Gold or Silver: Gold, I suppose. I don't own much of either.

H - Height: 6' 2"

I - Instruments you play: Clarinet, ukulele

J - Job title: Dilettante, poseur

K - Kid(s): Emma

L - Living arrangements: Apartment

M - Mom's name:

N - Nicknames: My wife has one for me. If I told you what it is I'd have to kill you. My school nicknames are lost in the mists of time

O - Overnight hospital stay other than birth: Only one, when I was 5. Suspected appendicitis. False alarm.

P - Pet Peeve(s): People talking on mobile phones whilst driving, texting even worse. (I copied this from Taru as I completely agree with her) plus talking on mobile while sitting on a bus. Also why the heck they need to talk so loud then? I don't want to know about their personal things...

Q - Quote from a movie: He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty  boy!

R - Right or left handed: Right

S - Siblings: Sarah

T - Time you wake up: Variable. This morning it was 7.00am

U - Underwear: What about it?

V - Vegetable you dislike: Almost all of them

W - Workout style: Walking, swimming

X - X-rays you've had: Dental, chest, left knee

Y - Yesterday's best moment: Dr Who

Z - Zoo favorite:

I'm not going to tag anyone.  Have a go if you like!