Neanderpundit

But I’m not in the mood.

See, yesterday was one of those days.

It started out OK, I dropped the daughter off at school, which is always a good thing. I treasure the little time we spend together in the car, and it always brightens my day.

And of course everyone is a nimrod. Nobody can drive, I get behind a VW doing ten miles an hour on DRY PAVEMENT.

But I’m headed to the office so it’s not a big deal. See, Monday, my first day back from the show, I called to try to firm up some appointments, and nobody returned any calls, it turns out because everyone has the day off BUT ME.

No biggie, I think. I arrange with a co worker to get a little additional training on some other equipment, and she won’t be available until nine, so it will all work out.

Until about eight thirty when one of the appointments I tried to arrange Monday calls in a panic. Can I get there right now? right this very second? because all is lost and everyone is going to fucking DIE!! RIGHT!!!! NOW!!!!

So I run to the office to pick up some things I might need and I go to the customer to discover he needs a component reset (1 minute) and a light bulb replaced (5 minutes of wandering around in the crib finding a light bulb) but before that I have to be lectured for a half an hour standing out in the freezing cold because I didn’t take my badge off and hang my coat on the upper hook after soccer practice unless I have a younger brother who is going to be playing cricket before five PM. Or something. One way or another I had run afoul of some ludicrous rule and I was GOING! TO! BE! INFORMED! OF! THE! ERROR! OF! MY! WAYS!.

The overwhelming urge to just walk the fuck out of there was astounding, but I stayed. And once had fixed the HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problems that they had (In six minutes) I had to listen to another lecture about how they could not tolerate a piece of equipment that just seemed to need resetting at random, and I didn’t have the heart to RIP OFF HIS HEAD AND SHIT DOWN HS NECK WHILE EXPLAINING THAT WE USED THIS SUBSTANDARD PIECE OF SHIT AT HIS REQUEST AND OH BY THE WAY IF YOU HAD DONE WHAT WE TOLD YOU TO DO NONE OF THIS WOULD BE AN ISSUE.

So after hanging my coat on the lower hook, handing my permission slip to matron, and turning on the lavatory light in the second stall on the left I was allowed to leave (With another subsequent lecture on proper behavior in the freezing cold) not wanting to tell them to TAKE THEIR BADGE AND THEIR PROCEDURES AND SHOVE THEM UP THEIR ASS THANK YOU VERY MUCH BECAUSE IF I COULD CHOOSE I WOULD NEVER DARKEN THEIR DOOR AGAIN.

So I went home and cleared eight or more inches of snow off the driveway nearly giving my fingers frostbite in the process because of the yummy winds, and came inside to wait for the wife to come home, which she did after picking up the Oglet, and came in the office to tell me her car had the brake pedal go all the way to the floor and could I top off the fluid please?

Of course the fluid never goes away unless it has somewhere to go so based on the lateness of the hour I run out to get some fluid and discover the brake line is spraying fluid everywhere. I come in to check availability and drive to the Lansing store to pick up the part because they have one in stock to arrive at 8:55 and find the doors already locked and the staff closing down for the night. Of course I would have been there a half hour earlier if ANYONE IN NORTHWESTERN INDIANA OR NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS HAD ANY IDEA HOW TO FUCKING DRIVE. I’m sorry I cannot go into any more detail, my head will simply explode.

I have to say, the snowblower started. And the wife will drive the daughter’s car to work in the morning because thankfully we have another car to drive. And this all could have happened last week when I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. So I am thankful for all those things, but it did make for a difficult day.

Now I’m gonna go someplace and be surly. If you see me, stay back a dozen feet or so.

Even in a Focus, was a good deal of fun. Since the road was utterly new to me, Pascal did most of the driving, letting me take over when the risk of throwing us both off the mountain was mostly over. There were long stretches where it seemed like only a small soft shoulder stood between the two of us and several hundred yards of OH SHIIIIIIIIITTT!!. We did pass one group of emergency vehicles apparently recovering a vehicle, though the nature of the vehicle was lost. They didn’t seem in a big hurry, so I assume whatever happened had happened much earlier. There were no skidmarks. There was no cellphone reception. We stopped and had breakfast in a place with pictures on the wall of celebrities who had driven through, hot bikes, hot cars. Pascal will have to remind me of the name of the place, and hopefully he can re send me the map of the route. I hope to drive it again.

Have been my thing for a while, I know what I’m doing and setting and working them comes pretty naturally to me. Additionally, making it all happen and doing so on a budget- I’m all over it. So working with cheap people is a good deal of fun for me. They rent a house for the week, so five or eight people can sleep as cheaply as one- the price of a rental house for a week is about what two guys would pay for a night, and you have a house, a yard, often a pool and Jacuzzi, a garage, and in our case, this time, beds to sleep 15!

It saves you a wad of cash and you can do a bit of shopping and get food as well, which heightens the savings- but the crew I was with, well, they don’t drink coffee, only tea.

So each day I had to wait until I got out to the show to get some rich, rich caffeine into me. Since the time zone differed by a few hours by the time I got to the front of the line I was already in pain.

Drinking the coffee on the way to the booth, I could feel the caffeine pushing the headache back slowly, and eventually, I was coherent. up until then, I had to work very hard to be civil to my compatriots, who I love, because what was really going on was this:

But once the pain was gone I saw a lot of things. Incredibly there were a lot of things that were made in the US, and I will be featuring many of them here. Watch this space.

Oh, I didn’t take a lot of pictures preferring to use the individuals websites, and I didn’t want to take a chance on destroying my camera or losing it, so what pics I did take are cellphone, which are not too bad.