R: 18 of 26

Today’s installment of the Random Alphabet of SRH is the letter R. The 18 th letter of the English alphabet is a very useful letter. It is used very extensively within the English language. In fact I used it 8 times in the thirty-four words of the above three sentences and four (now five) times in this sentence alone. It is truly an indispensable letter of our modern language.

R: Big R, Little r, Rosy Robin Ross. Rosy’s going riding on her red rhinoceros.

One would think that with the Letter R being soooooo darn useful that I could come up with some word that starts with R to help illustrate to you, the anonymous reader, a better sense of who I am. The truth is that I am not that bright and I am having trouble thinking of an R-word. So, I am going to open a dictionary to the “R’s” and pick a word at random. From the Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary published waaaay back in 1988.

regardant \ri·‘gärd·ənt\ adj {MF, prp. of regarder} (1500) : looking backward over the shoulder – used of a heraldic animal

Heraldic?!? Heraldic? Okay, maybe I need to look in a more recent dictionary before the next word chosen is “rampant”. One the has the word Internet in it. The best I could find is a dictionary from 1999, The Randomhouse Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (yes, Internet is in it).

rhe·tor·ical (ri tôr’i kél, -tor’-), adj. 1. used for mere effect. 2. marked by or tending to use bombast. 3. of, concerned with, or being rhetoric [1470—80; L (us) (Gk rhētorikós) + -AL] – rhe·tor’i·cal·ly, adv.

Yeah, I think that one will work. That one will work quite nicely. For today R is for Rhetorical. Tomorrow…. A different story

Now after I read the definition (the official definition, not the one that I had in my head from contextual clues left strewn about in the English language) of rhetorical it came to mind that most of this blog is all about the rhetorical. I typically do not write about anything of import on this here blogarooney. This blog is an exercise in writing for me. I use this platform to blather on about various nothings and very rarely touch upon anything profound or meaningful. I also tend toward the bombast, but, really, when one can tend toward bombast, shouldn’t one?

There are enough blogs out there that attempt to be more political, spiritual, or controversial than I do, and some are really really good ones at it. I do not have the time or the energy necessary to do the research necessary to appropriately write a political blog. I am not nearly spiritual or religious enough to have an uplifting spiritual blog. And without blogging about current events or politics or religion, controversy is typically minimized. I can live with that.

I like my blog to be a refuge from the politics and religion of the real world. I like to use this space for a little homespun inanity and from time to time, I want to inform the public at large about the comings and goings of Little Man and our trials and tribulations associated with his existence. These trials and tribulations take the form of asthma, food allergies, pre-school, childcare, vampire bears (I am telling you, "You, dear reader, should fear these fearsome beasts."), Yetis, etc…

So, basically, this blog is full of bombastic statements and unanswerable questions regarding nothing. There could be worse things. There could be worse things indeed.

To recap:
Still juggling those last 2 tasks
Kinda…
Little Man and I are watching a soccer game tonight for his bed-time ritual
I am really looking forward to it
He does not know about it yet
Left-overs for dinner
Although we do not have any left-overs for adults
There is a good bit of Orange Rice in the fridge, but if I go near that, there is a good chance I could lose a hand
And I need my hands
The both of them
"Strewn" is not used nearly enough in everyday language
Neither is "Yard Gnome"
The yard gnomes were strewn across the lawn like so many discarded fish.
I feel better now
My heart goes out to ZingerZapper
She knows why
Sending positive thoughts your way, Chicka
The only two off-line dictionaries I could find were 19 and 8 years old, respectively
That is just plain pitiful
Have a great weekend everyone

K: 11 of 26

Ah, the 5 th installment of the Random Alphabet of SRH’s Blog is the 11 th letter of the English alphabet, K. K is one of those letters that harkens back to the proto-Phoenician alphabets. It is one of those letters in the west that has been part of our societies as long as there has been the idea of letters. So without further ado, I give you the Letter K.

K: Big K, Little k, Kitten. Kangaroo. Kick a kettle. Kite and a king’s kerchoo.

Oh, blessed K. I actually had to pick between 2 possibilities for K. At first I was thinking Kent State University because that was such a growing period of my life. I blossomed at Kent, well, err, ummm… as much as rugged manly men blossom, that is. My college experience was a really good experience. I absolutely loved it. I really became who I am today because of my growth as an individual in college. All of you can blame my time at Kent State for who I am.

But I chose another word that begins with the venerable K, actually a pair of words. A pair of words that helped define me as a person long before college started to mold and shape me. So for me, for now and for always, K stands for Krispy Kreme.

Oh, Krispy Kreme, how I love thee…

I have a special place in my heart reserved for doughnuts in general. Doughnuts are the perfect stand alone confectionary food. They are hand held, and easily portable. They have been deep fried (always a flavory bonus). There is typically a nice wide variety to choose from. They are, in essence, perfect. But even perfection has degrees. The highest of which, in doughnutdom is the pinnacle known as Krispy Kreme. For Krispy Kremes, or the Double K, are light and airy, yet sweet and flavorful.

I salivate at the thought of this sign. At it’s sight I have to use massive amounts of will power to stay away from the drive through.

Some people think that Double K’s are too sweet and that they shouldn’t be truly considered to be doughnuts because the meat of the doughnut itself is not cakey or a full blown yeast doughnut. Some people are idiots… plain and simple, idiots. They are simpletons and dullards, if you will. Simpletons and dullards.

I used to partake of the Double K more than people who worked there. Whilst I was in High School, my Boy Scout troop used Krispy Kreme as one of their fundraising schemes. It was REQUIRED that each boy sell 10 dozen doughnuts either every month or every other month. A door to door salesman I am not, so my family always ended up buying at least 8 of the 10 dozen. The fam would freeze 6 of the 8 to 10 dozen, and the other 2 to 4 dozen would be ravenously consumed within 48 hours of purchase. Those 6 dozen frozen delicacies would then be eaten as an afternoon snack until the next fundraising event. As and FYI: Double K’s heat up rather nicely in the microwave. The microwave brings them back to glisteningly wonderful life.

I will wrap up this Ode to Krispy Kreme with some random Double K facts about SRH.

The most Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts I have eaten in one continuous sitting is 24. Yep a full 2 dozen. The first 18 were easy, but the last 6 were purely consumed via will power. I was going to finish 2 dozen, Dammit!

Favorite Double K equals…I have two to choose from.

Firstly is their glazed. That is the everyday/every minute doughnut. When these are “Hot Now,” they are like eating flavored air. I can eat 8 without blinking. I have to conscientiously watch myself if someone has brought Double K’s for a meeting at work. By the time other people might have thought about picking up one, I could easily be on my fourth.

Secondly is there vanilla creme filled doughnut. This one is for special occasions, like when I want to enter into a sugar coma. Capt. McArmypants’s favorite doughnut from the Double K is the chocolate iced creme filled doughnut. Growing up, the Double K’s in ‘Bama would also run those bad boys through the waterfall of glaze. Oh, that’ll hurt the pancreas. Sugar shocked Ohio just puts on the chocolate icing ONLY ON THE TOP HALF OF THE DOUGHNUT!!! What is up with that?

Krispy Kreme doughnuts are made using milk and eggs. Little Man has not yet had the pleasure of partaking in the goodness that is Double K. I hope he grows out of those allergies, just so he and I can have some doughnuts together. Since the birth of Little Man and our recognition of his allergies, my Krispy Kreme consumption has curtailed severely.

I miss them, but I love Little Man more.

To recap:
Innovation requires buy in from people allowed to make decisions
I have too many irons in the fire right now
It takes asbestos gloves and a heat shield to get them out of the fire
I have neither of those 2 objects
I am only getting burned
Enough of this jibber jabber
I have work to get back to
Have a great weekend everyone

F: 6 of 26

Today I asked Wifey to give me the random letter to use for the fourth installment of the Randomized Alphabet of SRH. She gave me the sixth letter of the English alphabet, F. Honestly, other than the kick off of A, she has supplied me with the randomness that is the Non-linear Alphabetic posts of SRH.

F: Big F, little f, F...f...F Four fluffy feathers on a Fiffer-feffer-feff.

The letter F is a tough one. But it thinking on it has caused me to alter the idea of my Randomly Assigned Alphabet of SRH to the Alphabetic Haphazard Jumble of SRH’s Blog. Therefore, F is for Headaches as shown through Fluffy, the pine marten in my skull.
Hello Fluffy!

Usually I only flash up Fluffy’s picture when I am experiencing severe head pain. Oddly, that is not today. I am a bit surprised that I don’t have a blinding headache at the moment since there was such a significant weather shift in the past 2 days. That usually triggers the old noggin pain.

Headaches have been a part of my life for a long long time. On the under 12 soccer team for which I played, my nickname was “headache.” I can only assume it was because I missed a number of practices due to cranial acheage. Surely, it wasn’t because I was a pain in the coach’s ass. No, that couldn’t be it at all, definitely the missed practices due to nonspecific head pain.

As it is, I have started seeing the warning signs of my migraine headaches much earlier. So luckily, I have been able to mitigate them before they become full blown immobilizing headaches of doom. I cannot say that I get migraines often, but I definitely get them more than rarely. Therefore most of the headaches I suffer from are not migrainal, just average everyday run of the mill headaches. Most of the non-migraintorial headaches tend to be sinus headaches. Fluffy, the pine marten in my skull, is usually associated with the sinus pressure in my cranial area wanting to escape but having no where to go. It is much like an unfortunate woodland creature clawing its way out of a tiny enclosure.

Fluffy has transcended from being a one time throw-away image illustrating the pain in my head, to being an on-going theme of the blog with it’s own label.

To recap:
F is for Headache
Deal with it
Little Man got $5 in an Easter card yesterday
He immediately used the card as a tunnel on his train table
And decided that he was going to use the $5 at “the train show”
I believe he spent his $5 at a local train store today for a Sante Fe hopper carI think Wifey had to chip in
Then she bought a swing set for him
I need to disassemble said swing set
And then assemble it again
Not looking forward to that
Little Man ate a boat load of ravioli last night
"A boat load," I say, "A boat load."
Have a great weekend everyone

L: 12 of 26

It is that time of week again. the time of week where I wax eloquent about a random letter of the Alphabet and its tenuous relationship with me. Today’s letter is the 12 letter of the English alphabet, the letter L. So dear readers, today I give you the 3 rd installment of the every increasingly more Random Alphabet of SRH.

L: Big L, Little l, Little Lolla lop, left leg, lazy lion, licks a lolli-pop

I thought long and hard about what L-word actually meant something to me, and frankly, I came up with nothing. Then I realized I was hungry. Then I realized that I am typically hungry when I write these posts. Then I realized that I typically write the posts before my lunch and finish them after lunch. So without further ado, in the SRH Randomized Alphabet L stands for Lunch.

Lunch is a time of day that is near and dear to my heart. Much to Wifey’s consternation, I have really gotten out of the habit of eating breakfast. Therefore, lunch is the first meal of the day for me. By the time lunch has rolled around, I am quite famished. Lunch is truly the break to my fast.

Lunch is also a time that is fairly difficult for me. See, I love going out to eat for lunch. I absolutely love it. LOVE it. I dig eating out at lunch because I did not have to prepare in any way shape or form that meal. I know I have mentioned most of this before, and even recently, but not for the official SRH’s Wacky Random Alphabetic Soup. There are 2 main issues that I have concerning lunch. The first is very general, and the second is more work related.

I have a need for warmth in my meals (aside from the random breakfast excursions of cold cereal). Meals are just food if there is not thermal heat associated with them. Cold cut sandwiches do not hack it for me. They just don’t. I know there are a boatload of you out there who are willing to tell me about the “best” cold deli sandwich ever. I am sure it is made with the most delectable thin sliced meats and cheeses with gourmet sauces. That might be the case, but I can make a Jim Dandy Fine deli sandwich, I just have to make sure that I have some kind of hot vegetable or pasta with the cold deli sandwich in question. It is just how I roll, deal with it.

Now there are times when I have a cold lunch. These times are few and far between and usually associated with me not paying for the meal. Lunch work sessions where the project has purchased the ubiquitously bland “box lunches” are such an instance. It is not my preference, but I do like the food for free. Somehow my pride has not gotten in the way of that issue just yet.

The other issue I have with lunch, is no matter how much I love or hate my job, it is just nice to get the heck out of the building for a little bit in the middle of the day. That is why I have found a group of folk that I will typically lunch with from the company. It is an integral part of my business day to pick up stakes and leave the business building. It just makes the stress levels go down. The conversations at lunch typically head to the gutter to places where mortals fear for their very souls. It is nice.

The barrier issue here is that lunches out are quite expensive over time. I just don’t make the kind of money necessary to go out for lunch 5 days a week and expect to have creature comforts at home. Truly, I do not make the kind of money necessary to eat out all the time and still have digital cable. So far, push has not come to shove, but when it does, the lunches will be done.

To recap:
Coming up with words for each of the letters is hard
And I have only done 3, as of yet
Tomorrow I will be eating in again
Little Man talks in his sleep
Quite enjoyable babble as well
Wifey’s tumor is hurting today
And she didn’t get lunch at a lunch meeting
She is quite unhappy about that
I have work to do that I am neglecting
So I have to get back to it
As soon as I am finished with this post
Yep, right after I hit the “publish” button
Shortly after this post hits the ‘Net, I will be working diligently
That is what I have to look forward to
Work that I am neglecting
Ooh, I cannot wait
I guess I should get it over with
Have a great weekend everybody

T: 20 of 26

Ah, the second of my on-going 26 part series on the Alphabet of SRH. So in the ever increasingly out of order alphabetic jumble, I bring you the letter T.

T: Big T, Little t, what begins with T
Ten tired turtles in a tuttle-tuttle tree

Oh, venerable “T.” The history of T is long and varied. T is one of those letters that seems to have always been. There is a proto-semetic version of it and a Phoenician version as well. This letter has been around for a long long time. The longevity of the letter and its storied history sadly culminate with the letter representing the word “topology” for little old me.

Had I continued in mathematics I would have done the bulk of my research and studies in the branch referred to as Geometric Topology. Here is where I get all “mathy,” as Wifey likes to put it. Topology is the study of geometric properties which are dependant only upon the relative positions of the components such as adjacency, containment, connectivity, etc…, and not on any measurable component such as height, width, angular deformation, etc… Topology is kind of the intersection of set theory and geometry. It is pretty much a hybrid area in mathematics. The people who dwell there are often not the stuffed shirt pocket protector mathematicians that one typically thinks of. I am not saying that these few souls are cool or even non-geeky, I am saying that they are usually drunk.

The problem with being a topologist is that there are not many jobs out there looking for people who can determine if two spaces are homeomorphic or topologically equivalent (most spaces you can think of are, by the way… even that one… that one too. Those spaces are not homeomorphic, well done Peefer*).

My junior year in college, I decided that mathematics was not the long-term future for me. It was around that time that I took a cartography course and found a “new” career path. Mathematics as a career died for me when I failed the first part of a 2 part class in my senior year (mainly due to a particular professor’s teaching style and our particular brand of personality conflict). Those 2 classes were the only hitches to graduating, so I started the series again in my “super-senior” year, this time with the prof who actually wrote the text book, and aced the both of them.

I have not taken a math course since, and have subsequently lost most of the knowledge that I had crammed in my noggin that dealt with convex hulls, non-Euclidean geometries, metrizable spaces, Poincaré groups, etc… Right now, I recognize those words as things that have to do with topology, but I could not tell you what. At one time in my life, for a very brief instant, I was intelligent.

To recap:
I think I might be off the alarm duty in the mornings
This morning, I messed it up again
This time I accidentally set the clock ahead 1 hour
Little Man was up at 6 am instead of 7 am
Hijinx did not ensue
One of these days I will re-study one of the topo books that I have on my desk
It will probably bring me one step closer to ruling the world
Have a great weekend everyone

*Just playing the odds here. There may be some others of you that could come up with 2 spaces that are not homeomorphic, but my bet is that Peefer came up with it first.

A: 1 of 26

Here we go with the alphabet of SRH. This is going to be a 26 part series wherein I give, you the fine readers of Under Construction a glimpse into me, SRH, by blathering on for a while about a letter.

A: Big A, Little A, what begins with A? Aunt Annie’s Alligator, A… a… a…

The most significant thing about me that I can think of that has to do with the letter “A” is the fact that I spent the majority of my childhood in Alabama. I was born in Oklahoma, but the fam moved to Alabama when I was 3, I think. My dad was in the Air Force and got stationed at Gunter Air Station in Mongomery, Alabama. If I remember correctly we moved there on my 3 rd birthday. My only real strong memory of that time was when this kid bit my nose when I slid down the slide he was climbing up.

A couple of years later, Dad retired from the Air Force (not his choice, in fact, no male in my family has ever switched jobs by choice, they have either been fired/let-go/permanently laid off or stayed until they retired ) and took a job in Birmingham. While I was able to get out of Montgomery, I was still stuck in Alabama. I stayed in Birmingham from age 5-ish til I was 18, when I fled to an out-of-state-state college. While stuck in that horrid state I was lucky enough to actually go to a high school with some college prep classes, so I was not too far behind when I got to college. Even though that school (much like most schools in ‘Bama) had an insane drop-out rate. My freshman class was something like 600-650 students in size and my graduating class had 365. You do the math. People who transferred out should be cancelled out by the people who transferred in, so a good chunk of the loss was just that, loss.

It has been almost 15 years since I spent the majority of a year in that state, and, honestly (because if I cannot be honest on my blog, where can I be honest?), I am quite happy to not go back there anytime soon. Since marrying the Wifey almost 10 years ago, I think I have been back “home” 4 times. I don’t miss it at all. Beyond the overt and covert racism that exists down there, there is an accompanying religious fatalism that infests the state as well. It is an overwhelming sense of “If that’s how God wants it to be.” For an extreme instance, there are some people down there who won’t go into a tornado shelter because, “If the Lord is calling me back to the flock, then who am I to say ‘no?’”

This fatalism gives the general populace the righteous power to do nothing. That, my friends, is why I do not like Alabama (aside from the un-educated boobery and rampant –isms within that "culture").

To recap:
Only 25 more letters to go
Still deciding if I should go alphabetically or follow whimsy
If I follow whimsy “Q” will whimsically be last
Looks like it will be orange rice for dinner
Little Man deserves it
40°F shift last night
16.67°C shift last night
But the temp only went from 294.26K to 277.59K
There is a good chance my sinuses will hurt me for that shift tomorrow
Only time will tell
Have a great weekend, everyone