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  1. tonyb

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    It’s long been my habit to sleep in my birthday suit, but I do have a couple pairs of pajamas — not for sleeping, but for wearing around the house on those days when I don’t expect to leave, such as when we’re snowed- in.
  2. tonyb

    Your Most Disturbing Realizations

    I suppose that part of it might be poor personnel management, and that a larger part might be the personnel themselves apparently happy to have their heads up their hindquarters, but whatever’s to blame, I find myself positively gobsmacked by people’s failure to see just why the hell we’re...
  3. tonyb

    Your Most Disturbing Realizations

    I recall a then-elderly woman (long since deceased) telling me 30-plus years ago that each year goes by a little faster than the one before it. “Dammit, Emily, you’re just depressing me,” I said, jokingly. My sense of how not-elderly I am now is stronger than my sense of being young was then...
  4. tonyb

    Vintage neon signs

    What more does the modern motorist need?
  5. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    One of Dr. Seuss’s finer if lesser-known works is titled “You’re Only Old Once! A Book for Obsolete Children.” I recall its appearance at a regular Tuesday night dinner gathering shortly after the book’s release, back in 1980-something. It had me in stitches.
  7. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    And I misspelled “McLuhan.” Even the editor needs an editor.
  8. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    My habit, back when I hacked for a living, was to run off hard copies and scribble changes with pen on paper over lunch. When I was a proofreader for hire I insisted on working off completed, laid-out pages, the full tabloid sheets. I just saw more that way. And because I worked cheap I figured...
  9. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    Yup, you get aboard that train or you get run over by it. Still, though, I maintain that as a learning tool, especially in the early grades, pencil and paper is a superior technology. I would rather avoid getting all MacLuhan-y on yer asses, but I do believe he was on to something in that we...
  10. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    ^^^^^ So I take it you post here on a laptop? Or a desktop? My iPhone does 90-plus percent of whatever I might otherwise do on the iMac. We also have a pair of Microsoft Surface tablets with detachable keyboards. The missus uses hers quite a bit, much more than I use mine. But for some stuff I...
  11. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    Much as I might dread getting that middle-of-the-night call informing of some awful event, I’d rather know than not know. The dewy-eyed bride has her phone set not to notify her of anything between 2200 and 0600 hours. She figures whatever the matter might be, it can wait ’til morning. If a...
  13. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    I’d guess that I let at least half the calls to my iPhone go unanswered. If I don’t recognize the number, chances are it’s from a solicitor or a political campaign or a polling company or ... And if it’s from someone I wish to speak with, well, I trust that person will leave a message.
  14. tonyb

    wood heat/Coal heat

    And the hillbilly family living in the house — the oldest house in the neighborhood — across from ours in the early 1970s heated their place with a wood- and coal-burning furnace. The child of the house, a kid a year or two younger than me, was on the short side of average but was plenty muscled...
  15. tonyb

    wood heat/Coal heat

    For nearly 20 years I heated a small house a stone’s throw from downtown Seattle primarily with a Jotul woodstove, a green enamel version. I had electric baseboard heaters as well, but that little woodstove could blast you right out of that house on the coldest day of the year with wood procured...
  16. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    I have a perfectly functioning Western Electric 302 — a 1940s-vintage example, as best I can tell — for which I paid $1.79 at a Goodwill store going on 50 years ago. It still has the Goodwill price tag affixed to its baseplate. Also got a WE 2500, a touch-tone desk phone, which one might argue...
  17. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    I have a working phone hanging on the kitchen wall but it’s not really a landline. It’s part of the “bundle” we pay Comcast waaaay too much for every month. I have the ringer turned off, and I don’t give out the number, so the only calls we receive are calls we have no interest in answering. I...
  19. tonyb

    You know you are getting old when:

    ^^^^^ it was a good 25 years or more ago that I first witnessed a kid baffled by a rotary dial telephone — the one hanging on the wall of my brother’s kitchen, which the kid in question, a friend of my then 11-year-old niece, was invited to use to call home to ask permission to stay for dinner.
  20. tonyb

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    ^^^^ Are you suggesting reality TV isn’t spontaneous?
  21. tonyb

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    Forced laughter. There’s a fellow on a “reality” home rehab show on the DIY Network whose laugh sounds as phony as, well, a TV reality show.
  22. tonyb

    Your Most Disturbing Realizations

    My brother eventually married the girl he met in high school, after cohabitating for better than a decade. They figured they’d make it official before the baby made her appearance. They’re both gone now — a massive heart attack, in his case, at age 53; ovarian cancer in hers, at 62. Ovarian...
  23. tonyb

    Your Most Disturbing Realizations

    Had I married much earlier than I did it would have all but certainly ended in divorce. I’ll credit myself for sensing that, though, and for sparing myself and those might-have-been spouses all the attendant hassle and heartache. The lovely missus and I are currently witnessing a relative pay...

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