Hanging out in bars

I was leafing through the catalog of a community college last week and the thought occurred to me that one course that they didn't have was one on the art of hanging out in bars. I have been researching the subject and have come up with the outline of a ten week course on the subject.

Week 1: Choosing a bar

This week we will talk about the fundamentals in choosing a bar. Location (on the way home from work is ideal). Prices (Low enough to be affordable and high enough to keep out the rif raff.)

Type of beer available. Type of food available. Specials. Attractiveness of the staff and clientele.

Week 2: Having chosen a bar, this week will examine the rudiments of becoming a regular in a bar. Where to sit. What to order. How to find out the bartender's names.

Week 3: Buy backs and bar ettiquette. When to buy someone a beer. When someone should buy you a beer. Tipping. How to determine when you are not wanted at a bar. The art of getting into a football pool. Darts and billiards dos and don'ts.

Week 4: Surprisingly, women are often found in bars. When you can approach them. How to talk to them. When to avoid them.

Week 5: The rudiments of computers and automobile mechanics. Bar talk is not all sports. A good bar patron can discuss computer problems, cell phone features, fuel pumps, and drive shafts.

Week 6: The fundamentals of construction. A bar patron should be able to know how to use terms like drywall, sheet rock, as well as general terms used in plumbing, electrical work and boilers. These topics come up in most bars and you should be able to join in the conversation.

Week 7: Travel and casinos. A good bar patron has been to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, racinos and Indian casinos. Florida also comes up a lot in most bars. You should go to these places and spend a few dollars.

Week 8: Legal aspects of drinking, driving, and smoking will be discussed.

Week 9: Commenting on the game. This week we will discuss ways to keep up to date on the controversies and strategies in sports. We will discuss when it is appropriate and not appropriate to comment on a game.

Week 10: For the final week we will go to a couple of bars and test our theories.

Changing toner

In the working world, toner is one of those items that separate the sheep from the goats. Sheep complain about the printer or the copying machine when the pages are too light or they get an error message about toner. Goats get the job of replacing the toner.

"Oh *%^()&%!!" your boss or co-worker exclaims. I'm out of toner! Oh I wish somebody would do something."

The goat walks into the office, a smile on his face. He has just finished his sandwich and has five minutes left on his lunch hour. "&%*(&#&%" he says to himself. "Oh You want me to change the toner". If he is lucky there is extra toner in the supply cabinet. If he is unlucky there is no toner in house. Then he has to make phone calls, perhaps fill out an order request.

"But what am I supposed to do in the meantime?" he is asked.

"&*&^%%& why did you wait until we are out" the goat says if the employee is not above him on the food chain. If the complainer is higher than him on the food chain the goat is pleasant and reassures the complainer that it won't be long until we have our toner.

Five days later, two minutes before the end of the workday on Friday afternoon, the toner arrives. The goat can't wait until Monday because he is at a meeting all day so he stays late to put toner in the machine.

There is an art to installing toner. Too light a touch and the thing won't go in right. Too heavy a touch and the thing will get bent. Then there is the matter of recycling the toner. Sometimes the unscrupulous goat will pocket the old toner to get a discount at Staples.

Ever since I have collected a W2 form I have put toner of one type or another in a machine. I have put toner in photocopy machines, microfilm machines, computer printers and scanners. I always end up with black on my hands, my shirt, my tie, my trousers. Luckily if you act quickly you can get most of the toner off.

Toner installed, now is the test run. Some machines insist on doing a printer allignment check. Finally you get a decent copy and you can go home. Perhaps to a nice dinner of curried lamb.

Yemen and the rule of three

The schoolteacher gets a request from a student for a special favor. She grudgingly says yes. She gets a second request from a different student. She says yes again. The third student asks for something. Now the teacher gives a firm no.

The supervisor gets a request from an employee to have Valentine's day off. The answer is yes. The second employee asks to have the same day off. The supervisor grudgingly says yes. The third employee has to work Valentine's day, even if his wife is having her liver removed.

It is the rule of three. The third person to ask to borrow money will always get turned down. The third problem in your house will always be deferred. The third son has to pay for his own college education.

Hence the problem with Yemen. We sent troops to Afghanistan. We sent troops to Iraq. America is overextended now and Yemen will be ignored. We have no more money and no more troops to deal with any more problems. It's the rule of three.

Vegetable identification

One of my favorite activities is going to the supermercado. Back in the fifties men were not permitted in such places. It was a place for your wife and sister to go while you, if unmarried, were supposed to be confined to dinner at the diner while receiving dinner invitations from the lucky women you had in your life. Then it became acceptable for men to shop for food and even cook.

I love going to such places and it always is the high spot of my Saturday morning. Checking my own groceries is a special pleasure. Still my regular supermercado is entirely dependent on the old fashioned check-out lines.

An experienced shopper, I have learned over the years how to guess the shortest line. I have also discovered that if you put your food in a basket, you can give the impression that you have under twelve items when in reality you do not.

If I was to train staff at the check out line, however, I would add a class in vegetable identification. If I buy any vegetable beyond carrots I always have to tell the checker what the item is. Fennel or anise they never know. Yesterday I had to tell the (what should I call her? girl seems natural but is sexist, lady is cute but also sexist, woman seems so sterile) female individual at the cash register that I had a turnip.

"Is that a white turnip?", she queried.

"Yes" (I looked at the turnip and it was white. I also figured white turnip sounded plain enough to be cheaper than something with a more exotic name) "It is a white turnip."

I guess training emphasizes the intricacies of the cash register and management assumes that women are taught by their mothers the difference between a white onion and a Spanish one. Apparently not true.

I also notice that the workers at the checkout lane always use more bags than I do when I bag groceries myself. Perhaps she is trying to save time. Enough about the supermarket already.

2009

A good synopses of this year, finance wise can be found here. It was the end of the housing bubble but now we are either in a stock bubble or this is a great time to invest in the market. Heard of lots of people I know losing their jobs in the past 16 months, but over the holidays I heard about an out of work individual who found a job. At any rate, this is the year that most people stopped maxing out their credit cards and credit lines. It was also the year when twenty somethings gave up the dream of having their own pad and have to contend themselves to living at home, eating Mom's cooking and getting up when the family decides it's the appropriate time. I didn't run away from home til I was 25.

I have a few bests. Not many. My favorite movie this year was Sunshine Cleaning. My favorite new TV show is Being Erica, a Canadian dramady (on the Soap Channel on Saturdays). I now read sodium contents on food at the supermercado and allocate my liquor scientifically (well sort of). I avoid potato chips. I eat oat meal. I live a healthy lifestyle without being crotchety about it. Someone told me that anyway. She doesn't know what I'm like in the morning.

Hope you all still have your jobs, your relatives, your credit, your cars and your driver's licenses. Happy new year.

Gruesome Christmas tree chopping stories

Like many college English majors, I have an unpublished novel on my hard drive. Here, we visit Colorado of the eighties and attempt to chop down a Christmas tree:

One of the great pleasures of life is having breakfast in an all night diner at four o'clock in the morning with good friends. The night changes to day. You get to watch truckers and delivery men come in with full loads and empty stomachs. The harsh cold fluorescent light of reality finishes off an evening of rock music, drugs, skinny dipping and unrequited love. It's four a.m. and you're ordering eggs with friends. Waylon Jennings is on the jukebox. The sun will be out soon and with it all of the expectations of the evening. You're drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and being your old grouchy selves.
So it came to pass that I was eating breakfast with Nancy and Gail at Mary and Lou's Cafe. Nancy invited me out to Jamestown to help chop down Christmas trees with them and the youngin's. I said I'd go.

There was some federal land by the old abandoned tungsten mine in Jamestown. Technically it was off limits to all poachers, but the locals treated it as their own private tree farm, and during December, were known to discretely cart off an evergreen or two in the spirit of the season.
Me, Nancy, Gail, and the two kids drove from Denver one cold morning in Gail's truck to carry off Christmas plunder from Jamestown. When we got to Jamestown, we stopped at Nancy's father's house and he gave us some cutting instructions. We were told, for one thing, that if anybody asked us where we came by our trees, we were to say that they came from the old Hill place, and that Daddy had been carting off trees with permission from the Hill family for thirty years. We carried axes instead of the usual power saws, because Nancy said it would be more authentic and we'd keep the noise down.

There we were with axes on a hill full of evergreens. It was the two women, me and Nathaniel. The consensus was that Gabriel was to be left with Grandpa. I chopped down the first tree. Boy, it was a lot of work. I must have hit that damn tree with that dull ax twenty times before it came down. Then Gail and Nancy chopped down their trees. Male chauvinist as I am, I have to admit that they disposed of their tree more swiftly than I did with mine. And theirs was bigger.

Within half an hour of chopping and stumbling over the icy meadow, the tree cutting duty was finished, and we got to the fun part of dragging the two trees down the hill and tying them onto the roof of the truck. This was actually more work than the cutting down of the evergreens had been. Fortunately, Nancy had brought a bottle for walking and so we were all in fine spirits by the time we got back to Dan Woodson's abode.

He was baby-sitting his grandson, and he let us in. We listened to old Jamestown Christmas tree cutting stories and drank beer. I almost cried when he told us about how old Uncle Jake lost his thumb one year cutting down balsam pines. But then he was a professional poacher so he probably deserved what happened.

Nan-u had one more house she wanted to visit. It was getting dark as we drove past Tim Hardin's old house and got to the cabin of Nancy's old school chum. Deloris was living with her affable but perennially out of work husband Fred. They greeted us with beer, tequila, sandwiches, and their two year old nymphomaniac daughter Tiger. While the adults were recanting gruesome Christmas tree chopping stories, Gabriel and Tiger retired to the bedroom to play doctor. A few bhongs into the evening the two youngsters flamboyantly entered the living room in their birthday suits.
The two moms started yelling, "Put your clothes on right now before we whip your butts!" They made so much noise they almost woke up Nathaniel. It was great to watch a recreation of the Genesis scene. It really got me into the spirit of the season.

Soon, it was time to leave, that is if anyone had expectations of getting to work or school or day care on time the next day. So we departed the cold, wintry, mountain town of Jamestown. With the trees precariously tied to the roof of Gail's truck we all headed back to Denver, our jobs, and our urban lives. When we got to town, first we hoisted Nancy and Gail's tree up the stairs of their place and then we hoist my tree DOWN the stairs of my basement condo.

Wow! I had a Christmas tree! Now all I needed was decorations. Then I found the box with the old family stuff that my parents had given me. This, I knew, was the stuff that neither my parents nor my older brother wanted. Then there was the entourage of decorations I had bought at flea markets in Denver the past three years. The tree, needless to say, was premium grade, and genuine.

Snow people

There are two types of people when it snows. The brave snow people and the cowardly snow people. The brave snow people were out in their cars on Saturday, driving at 65 miles an hour and having a wonderful time. They had the roads to themselves and the stores full of bargains and no customers.

Most of us are cowardly snow people. We stayed in the house on Saturday and ventured out on Sunday to devote two hours getting our cars ready for Monday. Monday morning I was ready for bear, didn't even need to clean the windshield.

My condo development has a rule that usually works. You park in the unassigned parking space and the snow plows clean all the regular parking spaces and lanes. Unfortunately the trucks didn't finish the job until eight p.m. so I had to leave my car in the unassigned space. Because my neighbor never moved his car, my regular space was never done, or at least left a lot to be finished off before it was ready for my precious car.

Tonight I have shoveled my parking space but there is a two inch sheet of ice that I have salted and am hoping for the best. As for now I'm still in the unassigned parking spaces. The residents did a great job on that lot!