Old House Obsession

Sitting before my 34 inch curved HP monitor day in and day out, I am delivered of the banquet of information that is the World Wide Web, a means for providing me with myriad options for entertainment and obsession. That these pursuits get in the way of actual work is likely not something I am alone in facing, but the things that grab my attention are indeed odd.

Here are some examples of online content that I could spend all day with:

• Videos of big cats interacting with humans. The fact that these monsters act very much like my little Hazel on my bed never ceases to amaze me. I completely understand that they can in fact, bite the head off their human playmate at any time, but so far, I haven’t been exposed to such horror.

• Interspecies friendship in the animal kingdom. Dogs and cats. Dogs and goats. Cats and horses. Bears and tigers. You name it—if they “don’t go together”, but for some reason they go together, I’m hooked.

• Videos of fully-grown male gorillas playing with baby gorillas. Gets me every time.

• People dancing. I would kill to be able to dance like Tom Hiddleston.

• Cooking videos. They’ve got to be short and sweet, three minutes or less, but I get a TON of cooking ideas from watching videos.

• Videos of fitness gurus teaching me how to stretch and open my hips. I was born with bum hips (I couldn’t sit Indian style as a kid) and have had both replaced, so when I come across YET ANOTHER sensei telling me how to open them, I take notice.

Lately though, I’ve been a little obsessed with online sites/aggregators that deliver unto me real estate listings of old fixer-uppers all around the country. Let’s get a few things straight. I am not handy, and I would never buy a fixer-upper. Next, I have no intention of moving from the luxe digs the Lovely Catherine offers up.

No, I’m not in the market. But I look at these listings anyway. I love seeing what is available around the country. I see a property in a place I’ve never heard of. I then Google that place and see where it is. How remote is it? What is nearby? What is the weather like there? For some reason, I shy away from places where it doesn’t snow, even though I live in a place where it doesn’t snow and I find myself liking cold weather less and less as I get older. I imagine myself living there, in my little cabin in the cold nether-regions of some generally rectangular state, driving a four-wheel drive vehicle and burning wood to stay warm.

I get it. Those of you who know me are probably laughing your asses off by now. “McGrath living in a wood-heated, fixer-upper driving a truck? No way.” And you’d be right. That doesn’t mean thinking about it isn’t a good way to waste a little time.

Christmas Begins

When this posts on Monday 6 November at 0500 hrs. Eastern (I don’t know if it is EST or EDT, but 0500 in Easton MD) we will be 6 days into the Traditional American Christmas Season. Yes, that’s right. The Christmas Season begins on November 1st. All of you “starting Christmas too early takes away from Thanksgiving” nabobs need to pipe down. Thanksgiving is part of the Traditional American Christmas Season. In fact, Thanksgiving is the keystone event of the November portion of the Christmas Season, an essential signpost on the way to the Big Day.

Those of you with whom I am “Friends” on Facebook know that I post badly played Christmas carols beginning on November 1st, and that process has begun in earnest. Here’s a link to one of them so you can see how lucky my Facebook friends are. Between 1 November and 25 December, I will be out of town for 25 days between business travel, family obligation, and a little dash off to warm weather for Thanksgiving. So I won’t get to record as many this year as usual. I pretty much brought this bad scheduling upon myself, but the fact that I have my office already decorated for Christmas means that on the days I am here, it is a place of joy.

I have little time for the Christmas haters. They wrap themselves in self-righteous, “I’m here to protect the spirit of Christmas” patois, yet spend the first month of the Christmas season practicing its opposite. No thanks.

In case you needed the backstory on how America came to begin its Traditional Christmas Season on November 1:

Death of Bobby Knight

As a serious college basketball fan for forty-two years now (I consider the start of my fandom to be the 1981 Men’s NCAA tournament, where Virginia made it to the Final 4 and I was just starting to have an interest in going there), the name Bobby Knight has passed before my eyes many a time. That’s right. Bobby. At some point he decided he wanted to be called “Bob”, but I had already come to know his as “Bobby” and that is how I will always remember him.

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead, and I generally consider that to be a good policy. Because of this bias, this will be a short section, as my thoughts about Knight are not positive.

Bobby Knight falls into the same category for me as Hyman Rickover and Steve Jobs—geniuses with amazing success whose personal behavior was abhorrent, and as a society, we are far better off that their approach to their jobs is not the norm. Roy Williams won as many NCAA tournaments as Knight and he is a gentleman. The Navy’s nuclear enterprise continues to be the envy of the world in its approach to safety and performance with no one leading it across the past five decades who was anything like Rickover. And while I am sure Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were hard driving and demanding bosses, there are nowhere near as many legendary stories of their inhumanity as there are of Jobs.

I am unable to separate the man from the legend in any of these cases.

Etc.

Baloo and Zuzu on a foggy morning walk