coffee and taxes

Laura and I stopped into a Starbucks this morning to grab a couple HoChos before heading in to work. This particular establishment is right at the Industrial exit off of I-80 on the east side of the causeway in West Sacramento, so you might expect a lot of transient traffic. I wouldn't say that the place was crazy busy, not by any stretch, but there were plenty of people moving in and out of the place, both on foot and via the drive through, trying to get their morning injection of wake-me-up juice. It all kind of looked like people flocking to church to do their daily confession.

I know that people buying coffee products is not a strange thing in any sense of the act. The crazy thing to me was the manner in which everyone ordered their beverages; how crisp, well practiced, and odd their orders were. "Half-cap triple shot no-whip non-foam venti with room." WTF? Again, nothing about what I'm saying is new; plenty of comedians and feature films have poked fun at the skitzo variety of coffee options that exist these days. I'm merely making an observation. Like the guy in what looked like weight-lifter or pajama pants, bald head, denim jacket, leg twitching as his previous buzz wears off, ordering his coffe. Outside of Starbucks, I would probably peg this dude as someone I don't want to mess with. But here, listening to his rediculous requirements for bending and twisting the flavor of a damn coffee bean, I just had to laugh at the whole thing. What makes us happy? What gets us through the day? Why am I spending money on hot choclate at Starbucks when I could probably make a better one at home in just about the same amount of time, and probably for less money? That's it! I'm now officially on a search for a good hot choclate product which I can make at home.

Funniest part of it all (at least to me) was a guy who pulled up along the curb in a large mobile crane. Yes, the kind with cables and a hook, and that lifts heavy things into the air. He quickly u-turned it in the court outside the establishment, and left it running as he ran inside for his coffee product. I guess it's not that weird, just seemed funny to me. No stranger than someone driving a bus through a Caffino drive-thru to get an orange juice, anyway.

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Ok, one last bit for today's entry. I jumped onto California's Franchise Tax Board web site just a few moments ago to check something out regarding my own taxes, and one of the first links they have right now is to a page (see it here) that lists the top 250 individuals or corporations who currently owe more than $100,000 in back taxes. Three years ago I screwed up my witholdings and had to pay a big sum of money to make up the difference, but that sum of money PALES in comparison with some of these people. Why do I use the word "pale"? Because the number one dude owes almost $10 million in back taxes. Again I say, WTF?

no a/c at home

Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.

Any the air conditioner at my brand new house doesn't work. So that's nice. Turns out that the 2nd floor can get up to 83 degrees F when the day's heat has risen into the high 90's. Good times. I need to invent a HEPA-window screen so that I can open a couple windows and let in some cool(er) outside air without the threat of Laura's pesky allergies driving her crazy.

Walks and Bees

I went for a walk today. I've gotten into the habit of doing this fairly regularly at work, where I put on tennis shoes and break outside to get some (more-or-less) fresh air, to break up my work-clogged thoughts, and to de-smoosh my butt after confining it to a chair in front of my computer for all of the morning work hours. It was warm out there! It feels like summer is coming on already, and it's only April! But the birds seemed to enjoy the heat, they were singing and chriping and going all crazy hanging out up in the olive and oak trees.

The coolest thing I've seen yet on these walks was a hoard (gaggle? bunch? tons?) of bees swarming around what appeard to be their nest inside one of these nearby olive trees. I didn't know what it was as I approached, and I honestly thought somebody's fan or small jet engine was working away, cooling off a nearby building (you know, 'cause a jet engine would be used to cool a building). Turns out it was the flock (swarm? oodle?) of bees doing their bee thing, flying all around in their air traffic patterns waiting for their turn to drop off whatever goods they had back in the nest. Trust me, it was crazy, and impressive.

Buzz!

Not Worldly

I need to rededicate part of the effort my brain expends every day on work, worrying about work, and worrying about how my work's paycheck can pay for bills towards more worldly items like getting to know people better, partying, learing about what really goes on around me, and not being blind to the way people act and the things they say. I've got illusions that I could be a writer of interesting things, but then I go and read other people's blogs, or catch part of the Daily Show, or listen to a guest on NPR, and I see just how smart and insightful so many other people really are, and just how plain and empty I am. Now that's not a dig against myself (suprisingly), so much as it is an eye opening experience of the gap between who I am and who I want to be. I want to contribute something good and meaningful to the world. And I want it to be more than just having ferried people around in a bus for a couple years or designed some cool mechanical shit. What's missing here? How do I build a bridge to get from this side of the river of life over to that other bank where stuff is happening?

Workwise Overwhelmed

I...am overwhelmed. I am often overwhelmed, and in such ciccumstances tend to stop responding via speech. Right now it's work that is overwhelming me with responsibility and very important, complicated tasks, but it's happened before that personal events have overwhelmed me, to the extent that I don't know how to respond, can't provide worthwhile support, and am a pretty much useless person. And so as an alternative to actually dealing with the problem, I tend to start making lists of all the things that I know I have to do, or I think about food, or I check email. I don't know whether I'm just not equipped to deal with difficult things, or if I am just dumb. Either way, it's frustrating, and painful because I let others down.

My engineering mind tries to go into "solution" mode, and I begin to look for ways to fix things. Often times the truth is that there is no fix, or better yet, that one has to work harder to find the brightness inside of a problem. When a problem is not mechanical, I have to find another way to get through it, and that's where I struggle.

I'm not looking for anyone to tell me what's right, in fact I know that I need to find the answer for myself, but it's difficult to find that answer when the full functionality of my brain is generally dedicated to finding the solution to said engineering problems, or worrying about the costs of things, or something else that, really, in life, just shouldn't matter as much as I let it.

...and on things go...

Back to Blogging

I don't know how long this will last, or how exciting it will be, but I'll give it a go again.

Hi, I'm back and posting. I'll try to keep it interesting. For starters, I am happy to say that I did not loose my job last week. My employer had to "right-size" (by the way, I freaking hate that term) because the "economy has caught up to us". There is a lot I could go into here, but this is not the place, and frankly, I'm not a manager and I didn't have to make the difficult decisions that our management had to make. Suffice it to say that after about a week of being scared about the potential of loosing my job (along with everyone else with whom I work), it was finally made clear who was staying and who was going.

I feel pretty crappy for the people who lost thier jobs, and it scares me into a reality of how thinly I might be holding on to this one, but at the same time I'm very glad to still be here and to still have a paycheck. So yes, I can make the payment on the house that I just moved into three days before it was confirmed that I will be keeping my job.

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In other news, finally having a house after half a life of living in apartments is super-duper-sweet. There are already a thousand projects that the wife and I would like to do, but the need to work (thankfully I still have the job) sucks up most all the available time. This concept is nothing new to anyone reading this blog. One of the laws of the human part of the universe is that there will never be enough time to do all the things you want to do. Unless of course you don't care about doing "things", in which case there is time to waste just like sprinklers watering a lawn on a rainy day. We have a first class dirt back yard, like a blank canvas ready to be painted. All we have to do is agree on how to fill it in, AND then fill it in.

After almost a year of living with family and generally having several people to come home to and hang out with, it's strange now for the wife and I to be the only people home in a comparatively large house. It's got nothing to do with the two of us having to actually talk to each other (man, what a drag!), it's just that suddenly there isn't anyone else around! This can only mean that we have to start hosting parties. Now only if we had a back yard for people to appreciate.....