Latest Posts

A few years ago my office IT department traded out my old standing computer and replaced it with a laptop. It’s been really great—among other things I can take it to meetings and actually get things done which doesn’t always happen in meetings, but that’s another story. And, I said to my boss, on nice days I could take it outside and sit in the grass and work.

She sighed. “Please don’t.”

She had a point: there’s still a lot to be said for the collaborative nature of the cubicled space we call “the office”, including the ability of coworkers to find me and ask me questions I may even be able to answer. That personal connection, being able to interact face to face and not just through whatever they’re calling video chatting now, is valuable. It’s why my position keeps me mostly bound to a desk in a specific place and so I can only stare out the window—although first I have to get up and cross the room because my cubicle doesn’t have windows, only Windows—and envy the people who are using parking spaces as makeshift offices.

Admittedly no one’s doing that in my area yet, but it’s an idea that’s caught on in San Francisco and now spread to France, and how it skipped over North America entirely is beyond me, although it may be that what those two places have in common is that office space is very expensive and parking spaces are cheap and people are really good at working out workarounds. Some are using free wifi provided by businesses—which makes perfect sense to me. Even though when I take a break from work and go outside I’m getting away from screens I know a few good places to stand if I want to borrow a free signal so I can look up something I really need to know at the moment, like the scientific name for the golden jellyfish found in a lake in Palau. Don’t judge me—I need obscure facts like the Mastigias papua needs algae.

Anyway using parking spaces as office spaces is a great idea; as some of the people who are doing it acknowledge it gives them easy access to delivery services, transportation—why leave the office to catch a bus when one’s going to stop right next to you?—and it creates a sense of community.

Of course I have a feeling someone’s going to want to use a parking space to, you know, park their car, and that’s probably going to lead to the connection of someone’s fist to someone else’s face.

It was twenty years ago today…well, not today, really, but never pass up a chance to quote The Beatles, even though it’s now been much more than twenty years since Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play, and even when that album was released those uniforms looked like they must have been from before World War I and probably from when Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major General really was modern, but maybe Sgt. Pepper had long since retired, having been unable to get a promotion, and organized a band as a hobby.
Anyway it was in 1999 that my wife and I bought a new blue Honda CR-V. Technically the color was listed as “twilight obsidian blue sparkle sepulchral radiant crepuscular welkin” because car makers name car colors by throwing a thesaurus into a blender. We got the car at the same time we got a new dog, a Dalmatian puppy named Baxter, who was the perfect dog at the perfect time. My wife had gotten her first three Dalmatians before we even met–and in a convoluted way it was because she had Dalmatians that we met. By 1999 we’d been married a few years and were down to one dog who was as sweet as ever but also partly blind and deaf. Baxter, a funny little puppy with one blue eye and one brown eye, was just old enough to be up and bumbling around with the rest of his litter when we went to see him and, if you know dogs, you know how this sometimes happens: he chose us. Between that first visit and the day we took him home we went to look for a new car, and we were supposed to get a green–let’s leave the other adjectives out–Honda but instead ended up with a blue one.
We lost Baxter much too soon to cancer. The Honda, on the other hand, just kept going. Eventually my wife bought a van to drive to dog shows, both for size and just the convenience of having a single vehicle that would be dedicated to canine transport, and the CR-V became my go-to vehicle for going after I finally got around to getting a license, but that’s another story. For years there was a picture of Baxter in the right rear window that I only took out when the sun caused it to fade. One day I was stopped at a red light and a guy standing on the corner yelled something at me. I rolled down the window which is usually a bad idea when someone on a street corner is yelling at you, especially when he bears a strong resemblance to Howard Morris, but I’m an outgoing kind of guy and I thought maybe he had something important, or at least interesting, to say.
“You have Dalmatians?” he yelled.
“Yes.”
I was in the lane closest to the corner which, in retrospect, makes rolling the window down, even partially, an even worse idea, but he leaned over so he didn’t have to yell as loud.
“I had a Dalmatian when I was a kid. Best dog ever. They’re wonderful, aren’t they?”
Yes, I agreed. Then the light changed. I waved at him and said, “Thank you!”
He waved back and yelled, “You have a good day now!”
I had trouble focusing on the road. There was something in my eye.
Anyway when the fuel line on the CR-V went my wife and I independently concluded it was time for a new car. It had been twenty years, after all, and I’ve heard at least three stories that end with “So I had to get a new car” that started with “First I tried replacing the fuel line.”
Because the original worked so well, and in fact it was exactly twenty years to the day that we walked back into the same dealership, we decided to go with the CR-V, although a much more recent model that, in spite of the name, resembles the old one in much the same way a Dalmatian resembles Howard Morris, but it seems to be a good car and hopefully will last as well as the old one.
One thing the new car has in common with the old one: it’s the same shade of blue.

April is National Poetry Month. In past years I’ve seen Poetry In Motion poems on Nashville buses, since Nashville is one of many cities that participates in the program. This year, though, I haven’t seen any. Most of the overhead advertising space is taken up with promoting the new buses and how many improvements they’ve made. They also still advertise the Music City Transit Tracker app although they’re no longer updating it which meant all it was doing was taking up space on my phone until I deleted it, but that’s another story.

Since my employer pays me to ride the bus—at least as long as it’s to and from work—I don’t get bus tickets, and maybe that’s why I haven’t seen the local Poetry In Motion poems. One day I happened to find this on the seat before I sat down:

That reminded me of the time I was walking to work one spring morning and a coworker came up to me holding a brown paper bag. She held it open under my nose. It was full of what looked like a bunch of weeds somebody had pulled out of their yard, probably because it was a bunch of weeds somebody had pulled out of their yard.

“Can you believe my neighbor was throwing these away?” she asked.

Yeah, I could.

“Pokeweed leaves!” she shouted. “I’m gonna make poke sallet!”

Truly one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.