Tossing and turning over nothing?

Dear Blog Reader:

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am doing fine. The world is rushing pell mell through the most wonderful time of the year. The lovely Miss Beverly and I got into our one horse open sleigh and traveled to friends and family last weekend, on Christmas we loaded the visiting brood and went to grandma’s house.  We noticed that many of you did also. Traveling down the highways and byways, we noticed many of you were double parked in the barn lots and driveways of your families. That time honored practice of extended family Christmas. The last week celebrators were the lucky ones. I always loved the Sunday before extended family Christmas. It meant that there would be present opening before the 25^th. To not have to wait until Christmas, always felt like a little bit of cheating. Alas, it did not happen very often with the Sharritts. It appears that my ancestors were big rule followers. There were almost never any circumstances that would allow the premature opening of Christmas presents. In fact one year we had to wait until after the new year to celebrate and open the presents that technically should have been opened at least a week earlier. Oh the humanity.

I must say that I have a confession to make. All is not well in the paradise of Sharritt marital bliss. That’s correct. There are times when the lovely Miss Beverly is wrong. There is a bit of controversy here. I am afraid that the lovely Miss Beverly has fallen into the grasp of the big MATTRESS hoax. Millions of dollars have been spent by this power hungry lobby to convince us that our mattresses are trying to kill us. They are trying to convince us that our dead skin cells are sloughing off and falling into gravitational forces of our mattress. As the mattress grows and grows ever denser, it is a wonder that our floors can support these deadly bricks of dead human skin cells. Consequently,  after eight years it is out with the old and in with the new.

I don’t see why the public should be forced to endure this hoax when big MATTRESS refused to employ the basic manufacturing principle of planned obsolescence. Light bulbs could last a thousand years, but by utilizing planned obsolescence the light bulb manufacturers sell us a new one every 12 months or so. Cars don’t have to wear out every six years. I have never seen a WWII tank sitting in an outdoor museum  all rusted out. No 4 inches of hardened steel would solve our car replacement problems. However, big AUTO and big CAR LOAN colluded and decided that they would make cars that would last about six years. Just in time to pay off the old car loan, save a small down payment and indenture you once again to the finance company.

Big MATTRESS did not learn this lesson. They kept making mattresses better and better; using space age materials, and stainless steel coils. Then one day they realized that no one was replacing their mattresses. There was no need. My 20 year old mattress is nearly as firm today as it was the day that we bought it. In the bad old days before quality mattress production processes. The mattress would break down in the middle under the bulkier parts of our bodies. By the end of our long winter’s nap we would have completed what was warmly referred to as a Hoosier Yoga party. By laying on our sides, we would complete the supine crescent pose (remember to roll over and stretch the other way). Lay on your back and you would be doing the inverted downward dog. Roll over and finish with the cobra. For those married couples, after a few years of marital bliss they would find themselves doing the sinking to the middle stay on your side pose unable to keep from rolling down the steeply sloped mattress sides into the middle of the bed.

In the morning, after you managed to finally straighten up, you would find that you had completed a rigorous yoga work out for free. Now with these new and improved mattress making processes, we find that our range of motion continues to diminish over time as we lie fully supported on our ever firm mattresses. To compensate, we buy gym memberships every January, go to two yoga classes, get discouraged and revert back to our inflexible life styles for the remain 51 weeks of the year.

So as big MATTRESS made better and better products, we stopped buying new mattresses every 8 years. Something had to be done. The American mattress industry was about to implode. Desperate times call for desperate measures. So big MATTRESS and big YOGA got together and invented the eight year guideline. Of course it is bogus.

Think about the science. Go ahead and remove the peel off that banana in the kitchen; throw it out on the side walk in the middle of summer and look to see if you can find it in a couple of days. Like all organic matter, the banana peel and your skin cells break down. They go poof and become a shell of their former selves. Besides most of them do not slough off in bed. Most of them let go of their tenuous hold on your sorry carcass in the shower. You get all suds up and they slip off into the water park ride of your plumbing. I suppose the next big exfoliator would be your cloths. That sweatshirt and jeans probably coax several more millions of cells every day from your furry hide, leaving very few to get out of Dodge in your bed. Even at that, they have to get through the pajamas and sheets before sinking into the mattress to molder into compost.

I hear you saying “but Roger, logic is no proof. Of course we need to replace our mattresses every eight years. Why would they threaten us with penalty of law for removing the tags that have the manufacturing date printed plainly upon it?” Why indeed? Why would big MATTRESS convince big GOVERNMENT to make it illegal to remove a tag from our mattresses when what goes on in the bedroom is no one’s business? If logic does not convince you, let’s try experience. If billions of skin cell were sloughing off in your bed nightly and making compost, wouldn’t families who routinely ate poppy seed covered bagels in bed and had bed wetting children visit them in the night wake up in poppy fields some morning? It does not happen, not even on Facebook or YouTube.

So unless you are one of those people who never showers and sleeps on the mattress without a stitch of clothing on, you have nothing to worry about. If you are one of those people, the age of your mattress is the least of your quality of life issues.

I know what you’re thinking. Aren’t you just whining and complaining too much? Stop the drama Roger. Go out and buy a new mattress? What are you afraid of? I’ll tell you what I am afraid. The lovely Miss Beverly has her heart set on a memory foam mattress and it frightens me. You know Memory Foam is that space age material that lets you sink down into it; compressing the little air space between its polymer fibers. The compressions leaves your entire body fully supported. It is kinda like Hans Solo in horizontal carbonite. The “great” thing is that memory foam remembers and retains your shape should you have to get up in the middle of the night for relief. If you don’t know what I’m talking about don’t worry you’ll be fifty soon enough. This allows you to come back to bed and fall back to sleep in the same warm and comfy position you left a few minutes earlier. How sweet is that?

It’s terrifying. What happens if you choose wrong on the first night and sleep in the wrong position? What happens if you read too long in bed and the foam mistakenly remembers that you sleep on your back? Am I to torture the lovely Miss Beverly with my snoring til death do us part? That’s what I do when I sleep on my back. Sometimes I like to sleep on my right side; sometimes on my left. Am I never allowed to change my mind in my memory foam mold? I am not a camera tucked in to a foam filled briefcase with snug compartments cut out for my ears, nose, or chin. Memory foam scares me.

Don’t worry. It will work itself out. I will overcome my fears. The lovely Miss Beverly and I will work out our differences and reach a compromise. I will stop losing sleep and settle down for our long winter’s nap.

Take care.

Roger

Do you see what I see?

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. In the words of National Public Radio, “All things considered,” I’m doing fine. We are in the clutches of Christmas mania; making trips to son’s and daughter’s houses, making plans to go to our annual visit with friends at Arni’s in Lebanon, making some 600 pieces of homemade caramels for work friends and nieces and nephews that are in college. Thankfully, we have found a neighborhood girl who will wrap caramels for cash. We continue to scour ebay for a functioning salt water taffy wrapping machine cheap. Actually, the task of finding a mechanical solution has fallen to me. I never understand why the lovely Miss Beverly doesn’t share my love of gadgetry. It doesn’t have to be “labor saving.” It just has to be a gadget and I am in.

You would think that some gap toothed carny would have “found” one as the carnival was leaving town. They could simply carry the pile of mechanical wizardry back to the trailer park and sell it on ebay.  No luck so far. Alas, we have had to continue to look for people who will take jobs that Sharritts won’t do. That task has fallen to the lovely Miss Beverly. She has always been better at connecting. Connections are what is needed when looking for candy wrappers. It is not that we are too good to wrap them, or that we don’t care for our loved ones and coworkers enough to sacrifice this little bit of time in thinking about gifts of confectionary perfection.  We just find it mind numbingly boring. Sure I will poison my friends with high fructose corn syrup, refined sugar, butter, and heavy whipping cream (or as I like to say all of the good things in life) but I don’t like being bored while doing it.

While Savana has been standing at the kitchen counter lovingly wrapping caramels for people she doesn’t know, the lovely Miss Beverly and I have had huge chunks of free time. We have used that free time very productively. We went to visit Ben in Bloomington on Saturday and went Christmas light watching on Friday evening.

I love Christmas lights. Actually, I love to look at Christmas lights. I am very ambivalent about putting out Christmas lights. However, I loath taking them down. First off, why take them down on the first of January? We are still in the grips of the winter darkness. Sure the days will be getting longer but by the 25^th, we will still be 45 days from driving home with some daylight. Leave up your lights people. Secondly, I am too lazy to take down Christmas lights. Sure social conventions pressure us to take them down. But why? Really, what does it hurt to leave up your Christmas lights and outdoor decorations up year around? I suppose the bright sunlight of summer would fade all of you Santa suits to pink the first year. Let’s just say that Santa is wearing pink in solidarity with the NFL and breast cancer awareness. Also, I suppose that it would be a pain trimming around the base of all of those santas. But isn’t that why weed eaters and Roundup were made? I would use the weed eater solution. The grass splatters all over the santas would work as a sunscreen. This would help them retain their red tint longer. I challenge everyone to leave up their Christmas lights and outdoor decorations year around. I promise not to ridicule you or make disparaging remarks about your ancestry, Cletus.

What about leaving your indoor lights up year round? I do not care. What people do in the privacy of their own home with their Christmas lights is up to them. I do remember a house in Lafayette that left a Christmas tree lit in a window that overlooked a busy street for years. Every two years the local paper would call them up and ask why they didn’t take their tree down. The story started that they had a relative that went off to war and was supposed to be discharged and home for Christmas. The relative died in battle so they left the tree up in honor of his sacrifice. Later the story changed to just being curmudgeons who did not want to take their tree down. This micro fame does point to a bit of discrimination between indoor and outdoor decoration laziness. Leave your lights up indoors and you get a bit of your 15 minutes of fame every couple of years. Leave them up outside and let’s face it you’re hilljack trash.

I love to go drive around looking at Christmas lights. What a blessing it is to have $2.40 gas again. I can afford to drive around with the lovely Miss Beverly for a couple of hours on a Friday evening watching as festive Hoosiers blast billions of photons into the dark Indiana evening. As we were driving around Southern Madison County, I commented that what we really need is an app for this. It wouldn’t be that hard to develop. Just go out and get a book “App development for Dummies” perhaps. Give up writing the blog for a couple of weeks (see last week’s blog), spend countless hours reading and debugging woefully inadequate code,  and out of frustration pay the kid next door $500 and you have yourself a Christmas light tracking app. You wouldn’t believe my disappointment when I found that my million dollar idea already had an app for that.

Of course, I downloaded it. I downloaded it immediately. I couldn’t download it fast enough. I was set. With sweaty palms, I swiped to open the app on Saturday morning. You would not believe my disappointment. I live in a Christmas light dead zone. According to the app, there is nary a Christmas light display in all of Madison County. How could this be? I had thought that I had witnessed numerous displays worthy of mention. There were the battling displays in Ingalls. It looks like neighbors had been going around to garage sales for years buying up the plastic figures. They had rows and rows of santas, toy soldiers, candy canes and rain dear. They were lined up facing each other across the street. Those phalanx of iconic plastic figures reminded me of a giant red rover game. Red Rover Red Rover, we send Jolly Santa over.

The winter festival of lights in Fortville does not exist. The 45 minutes that was spent in Summer Lake did not happen. I just thought that I saw house after house lit up. You can imagine the disappointment that I felt with that discovery. I had the impression that the concentration of Christmas lights in the 200 acres of Summer Lake which is surrounded by inky dark farm land on all sides would be bright enough to be seen by the space station.

Thankfully, I am a doer and not a stewer. After a few minutes of outrage at the slight given to the Christmas light outdoor decoration mecca that is Southern Madison County, an idea came to me. We have our marching orders between now and Christmas. The lovely Miss Beverly and I will be taking our iPads and marking our maps with all of the lights of Madison County. We will not be known as a Christmas spirit dead zone.

Because everybody knows that the lookers are the yen to the decorator’s yang.

Take care.
Roger.

I've Said What 200 Times?

Dear Blog Reader:

I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my hand doing better than I have done in a few months. It also finds me at the start of our 200^th blog together. I am perseverant. You are easily amused. I appreciate both.

On average, it takes two to three hours to put down what is on my mind. People ask me (I’m delusional. Actually, I ask myself) “how could you have better spent that four to six hundred hours over the past 4 plus years?” Sure I could have spent it finding the cure for cancer or even more significantly, discovered the mysteries of teleportation (or teletransportation depending if you are a tomato or tomato person. (It never works in print.)) It is true that I have long wanted to discover the secrets of teleportation. I have seen this dark art’s usefulness since the early days of Star Trek. (Yes, I was there for the original.) I want teleportation all for myself. I would never fly or drive again. I would move all of the gold out of fort knox to my back bedroom. If I ever developed cancer, I would find a way to teleport myself from here to there and leave the cancer here; effectively curing cancer and discovering the secret of teleportation; a two-fer so to speak. I would do all of these things and find ways to spend the remaining 50 hours keeping it out of the hands of the N oncompliant S entinals of A merica.

Actually, both of those noble pursuits would take too much effort. I may start for a day or two. Then, I would figure out that I would have to relearn calculus which I did not learn very well the first time and give up. Without the blog, I would have ended up looking at pictures of cats in ridiculous outfits on Facebook. They would be looking back into the camera with eyes that seem to be saying “Shoot me now. Please.” I know that this is true. It is what I do now. Come on, I surely have had more than 600 hours of useful free time in the past four years, and I wasted every one of those precious hours looking at those stupid forlorn cats.

The first paragraph of this post testifies to doing better than I have done in several months. I would write about it but I have a hard and fast rule that there are parts of my life that I do not write about. I know that you think I am simply teasing. However, I am not. I am amazed at stories of people who post things on their wall or Facebook status and are flabbergasted that there are ramifications. They write the school food sucks and are surprised when they find a loogie in the mystery meat the next day. Come on dude; use your brain. You are not the first person who couldn’t go around saying whatever was on their mind.

I suppose that honor would go to Jesus. Yes, that Hispanic man who lived in the Middle East 2000 years ago. Isn’t it obvious that God said no posting anything about the “Kingdom of God” on Facebible? Seems pretty obvious to me. So what did we get? We got parables. “He who has ears let him hear.” The next thing you know you have mustard seeds, lost coins, lost sheep and seeds on the hard ground, but no dishing on the Kingdom of Heaven.

So in the manner of all great story tellers, here is a parable. There once was a dedicated Christmas pageant director named Marge down at the local church. Every year, she got the children to stand in straight rows, make cherubic hand gestures, sing their songs, and dress in homemade angel wings, and sheep costumes, all the while looking adoringly at the manger with the stars of the show, Mary and Joseph (who am I kidding only Mary, Jo is an extra) singing a couple of verses solo. Marge worked very hard. She had call outs right after Halloween. She knew that the kids would still be on their sugar high from the Halloween candy that first Sunday but there were only so many Sundays and Christmas Eve was only 54 days away.

This year she chose Cindy McDermit to be Mary. Cindy was a precocious fifth grader. Her ascendancy to the role of Mary was, like a good Calvinist, pre-destined. She had steadily moved up through the ranks the previous 4 years. She had been the lead sheep her first year; bleating “let us go see the King.” Her second year she was Harold the Hark Angel singing Gloooooooooooo oria. Her third year she nearly stole the show giving baby Jesus his present of Gold. Last year, Cindy would have been Mary but the preacher’s daughter had never been Mary and it was her last chance; politics. Cindy readily agreed to be the little drummer boy and people commented that the rumpapumpums had never been crisper.

It was Cindy’s year and this was going to be the greatest Christmas pageant ever. In fact, the director used this year to order new music and arrangements for the pageant. In an effort to modernize things, there would even be angel tweeting; #haroldtheharkangelsays “get down to Bethlehem you smelly shepherds.” It was time. It was big, and with Cindy in the lead it wasn’t that big of a risk.

However, even at this young age, Cindy was a very busy person. She was in the school play. She started basketball right after soccer. She was running all the time. As a result, there wasn’t time to completely learn the lines by the Sunday before Thanksgiving. That’s okay there was Thanksgiving vacation. The kids could come in Friday, and Saturday for a little extra practice. However, Cindy’s family was out of town. There would be no extra practice. The calendar turned. The Christmas Eve deadline neared. The lines weren’t perfect yet and the pageant director started to lose sleep. She spoke words of encouragement to the kids. Things were going to be fine. She told the kids and herself. She lost more sleep. She just needed Cindy to have one good practice and lock those lines down.

That practice was scheduled from 1 to 4 on the Sunday before Christmas. The first two hours would be with Cindy and the other leads. The last 2 hours a dress rehearsal for the big night in three days on Christmas Eve. Then it happened. Cindy’s mom called at 9:00 on Sunday morning to say that Cindy wouldn’t be able to make it to practice she was very sick. Hopefully, she would be well enough on Monday or Tuesday to come to another practice but there was no way today.

At that moment, a wave of peace came over the pageant director. The pageant was going to fail. There was nothing that could be done to help Cindy learn her lines. Suddenly, there were no plans to shift, no shortcuts to find, no false encouragement to give. The new and improved pageant was too much to bite off. However, the die had been cast and with no ability to change the outcome, Marge was able to accept it and let the peace of that acceptance come over her. She slept like a baby once again.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the theme of these 200 posts. I jokingly said Assassin Deer and flannel sheets. The lovely Miss Beverly is also a common theme. Actually there have been two Rogers saying what this past four years. One Roger likes to pull the pin on verbal hand grenades and offer his opinions about how ridiculous he finds situations and people. These rants have grown fewer and farther between. While fun and cathartic, expressing strident opinions doesn’t do much. They are like street lamps on a very dark and lonely road. They attract like opinioned people search for company, but they change no minds and bring about some frustration because the individuals in the group can’t understand why the world isn’t different when everyone they know are just like them.

The other Roger has found overtime that he has a knack at letting people explore three needs in their lives; who are they, who they are becoming, and the tribe to which they belong? The posts,that have struck the greatest chord with you, have described situations of who I am at that moment, provided a small glimpse of who I am becoming, and a fuzzy picture of the tribe. Don’t think that it is an open book or a very clear picture. As I said, there is a policy about not writing about some things and some people, and I often don’t see the pictures of what I can write about clearly enough to describe it. They are just glimpses, stitched together in a chain 200 links long; some strong, some very weak. In the end, I find myself sleeping better.

Take care.

Roger