Planting

 This coworker of mine lives in a co-op, and they removed her fence, said she couldn't have it. So we've been working on a solution for quite some time.

She bought these giant plastic vases from Builders Square. We started out putting bricks in the bottom to keep them in place while we thought out how to fill them. 

We looked at a few places, but money was tight, so suburban lawn and garden wasn't for her. We ended up getting some plants at builders square. 

These are big vases, and when she's pinching pennies, she has some strange ideas. Filling up the whole thing with potting soil cost too much, she thought about wood chips, but passed on that too. 

Eventually she got some evergreen things, and made me pack half the vase with styrofoam kernels from the U-Haul store. I didn't know U-Haul had a store until today, I just discovered she had giant bags of Styrofoam.

Anyway, packed in the styrofoam, covered it with some kind of black plastic that lets water through, then packed in the plant and miracle grow potting soil.  Did this for four vases.

Our last vase actually contained a fake plant. We packed that one with wood chips, I'm certain of it, but she doesn't remember that.

A heavy rain hit a few weeks later, and we had three pots full of waterlogged mud with worms in it. The plants all died,  and I ended up dumping slop water for hours. 

She wanted me to try again this year. This time I used a knife to poke holes in the bottom before filling them.

The fake plant vase still contained gallons of rain water and rotting wood chips. When I went to poke holes in the vases, I made a surprising discovery: The pots have a small patch on either side of the base, one a knife can go through with little or no effort.

When I cut open the patch on the pot containing the fake plant, all those gallons of stagnant water came gushing out.

The big lesson: Giant outdoor plant vases need to have a hole in the bottom somewhere, and often it's built into the design, if you just search for it.

Internet

 What people don't understand about any internet service provider is that nobody cares how much or how little you use the service. It's not like water or electricity where you have a finite supply to measure. They only charge you for having it switched on. To them, if the signal is going to the box adjacent to your house, it's on. In fact, unless someone reports an outage in the area, it's on. And they're not required to give money back when it happens. It's not like electricity where you get charged less for not using it.

This is good and bad. If you have your wifi plugged in for months, but can never use it due to the computer being broken, an Ethernet cable being kinked up, or you being in a coma, you will still have internet going to your house, and still owe money for having it on.

No one is big-brothering your usage. They don't have time to see what you do or don't do online, anymore than the water company would stand around watching what goes into your sewer. 

The one exception is premium content, because you pushed, or accidentally pushed a button that said "give me this expensive movie". Other than that, they don't have time to care.

Midlife crisis

 I think the midlife crisis is the point in which a person starts to revert to a baby from a teenager.

When you are born, you wear diapers, then you become a child, eventually go to highschool and become an adult a few years later.

When you hit your midlife crisis, it starts going back. You act like a teen for awhile, then dementia hits and you're like a little kid mentally. After awhile you poop on yourself.

And the clock starts bending backwards somewhere around 40.

Word choice

 In high school, my English teacher gave us an assignment: How would I improve the school? Or maybe it was write about how you'd like to have someone improve the school. I don't remember.

At the time, this guy named Brett was constantly throwing stuff at me, and I was mad, so I wrote that killing him would improve it.

The paper I wrote had some funny stuff at the bottom, about sending Brett into space and being made to watch cheesy movies like Mystery Science Theater 3000, but Brett only heard the "kill Brett" part, and after the teacher read it to her whole class, Brett came by in my art class and beat the crap out of me. I also got taken to the principal's office, and my parents got called in.

The moral of the story is: Don't write about killing anyone you know, even as a joke. You don't know how someone will take it...Or if a teacher that you aren't fond of is going to betray you to the student body.

Also, a person who makes funny jokes about people you don't like, but also does mean things like throwing objects at your head may not actually be your friend. Not everyone is like your dad. 

Oh, and thank goodness for pot. Like, for example, if you say that you want two guys dead on a letter, and you put the wrong last name for one of them. If Ed hadn't been high on pot at the time, I would have gotten beat up by more than one person.

Gambling

 Although I enjoy gambling video games (with fake money), I have a moral objection to gambling in real life.

Imagine if you and your fellow human being both approach the same game with the expectation of winning money, but the money comes from your pockets. If both of you put down $200, the results are either one of you walking away with $400 , and the other with nothing, or someone ending up with less money than they started. Both of you are not going to win. If this were not the case, you would simply share the money so that each possess the same amount of money.

Someone had plans to take the wife out to dinner, or pay a bill with that money, and then you win, and poof, there goes their plan.

You are exploiting another person's hope. A slot machine, for example, contains money from several people who hoped to win big, but failed to do so. Some are desperate to win, thinking it will solve their problems. For some, like the addicts, it's their only hope. When you hit the jackpot, are you not taking what belongs to them? A person must think less of the game's previous victims, to take that money without guilt.

To win, someone else always must be left in the cold. All those games revolving around crushed hope. I don't know how I could accept that without guilt. And the greatest guilt of all belongs to The House.

My internal censor

 I am beginning to think that if I want to say something to a person, but am afraid to say it, I should let it sit awhile and think about it before pressing send. Sometimes it's actually a bad idea.

Right now, I want to message this girl and tell her that she's the only one I ever danced with. But if say it the wrong way, she'll probably get creeped out and not want to talk to me again.

Seems innocent, right? But I asked another girl about which guy fathered her children.  It seems it wasn't who I thought, and we're not quite the type of friends I thought we were. Guess that's okay, I just don't like making things awkward, and I have a gift for making it awkward.

Mental photo albums

 I wrote a story where a character gets questioned about emotional stamp collecting. If you don't know what that is, look it up, it's in every psychological journal, though it's probably fallen into disuse because nobody cashes Green Stamps to buy a sewing machine anymore.

Anyway, it got me thinking about what I was treasuring in my heart. Some people fill their memory albums full of hurt or hate, or how others have wronged them. I have to be careful to not keep that sort of stamp collection.

Some people have albums that are basically playboy in some fashion or another. That is another thing I must avoid.

I know a woman who treasures her maladies. I hope I never do that, but there but by the grace of God go I.

How can I keep a good mental scrapbook? That is the difficult question.

Reconnecting

 As I work on editing books of my grandpa's letters from 1944-1945, the radio kept playing New Day by Danny Gokey. That song has a lyric about not living in the past. Very ironic.

But I realize it's more than just my grandpa's letters. I've too often tried to connect with people from my past, in hopes that I'll find love.

It never works out. Every time I try to connect with someone like that, our friendship always turns out to be crappy, and I regret meeting up with them. 

There's a reason why they stay in the past, and why more people don't reach out to me. If they didn't give me the time of day back then, and didn't speak to me for ten years, it's likely the stupid jerk was never my friend, and will never be my friend.

I do not reconnect with people. I mess up old friendships, misinterpret old friendships, and incorrectly assume that they think more of me than they actually do.

Those people in church camp AND high school that were cold and emotionally distant and phony to me back then are still empty to me today. That's their natural state, and time hasn't changed how they won't give me the time of day.

What's important is finding friends now, where I am now. Because those old people who forgot about me a long time ago do not care about me.

 Sometimes buried in the past is better.