It's time to get out your Moon Cakes and celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.
From what I've read, the Mid-Autumn Festival is the second most important festival in China after Chinese New Year. This festival means family reunion and harmony and is celebrated when the moon is full.
Chinese people believe a full moon is a symbol of reunion, harmony, and happiness.
Someone is turning a profit with this holiday... those beautiful cakes are priced sky high!
The moon followed me home last night. Very bright and lots of spots where it peeked through the clouds. I stopped to shoot a few pictures but my cellphone camera is very limited especially for distant night images. Obviously the focus and contrast are lacking, but you get the idea of proportion. By 11pm the moon was overhead and lit up the entire sky.
1) say "I'll call you back later"
2) press the red button once
3) rest your cellphone on the passengers seat.
It cannot get much easier than that.
Today, I was behind someone leaving a parking lot and I'm waiting and waiting. No cars were on the main crossroad. Getting ready to blow my horn the car started started out going left. I also made a left and was behind the car again. Slow ride, but the driver hit the brakes as though they wanted to make a full stop. No other cars around... none. I got in the next lane and as I passed the other driver, I could see they had a cellphone pressed against their face. Ahhh... that explained it.
Yesterday was the first day of Autumn and tomorrow will be the Harvest Moon. Pumpkins have arrived at the grocery stores. Halloween is just around the corner...
Home Depot is offering free delivery on all online purchases of holiday decor.
I could hire the reaper to trim my lawn !!
I wanted to buy a new lawn mower last year. This is not the first time I've purchased a mower and knew what I didn't want. So, I checked online and found several.
But... which one to buy?
For the most part, reading the product reviews to see what others (who bought the model I'm most interested in) have found reviews at both ends of the scale.
The first said "bad product, don't buy it"
The next one said "great product, buy it"
The third said "bad product, don't buy it"
The fourth one said "great product, buy it"
One reviewer didn't like the sales help so he poo-pooed the lawn mower based on that experience. I can't use such skewed information. I prefer to buy locally and inspect the merchandise. Mail order for some items is not a good idea. I'm finding product reviews are really worthless.
The mower I bought works great. No complaints as for it's price range it does what I need to get done. No frills... cut grass. I entered my own product review and gave it a positive score!
Too busy this week to cut my own lawn, I paid the neighbor to do it. He likes that mower too!
what's his name? My dad could forget your name as quickly as you introduce yourself, but he would remember your face, the place, the car you drove and what you were wearing.
I take after my dad.
Stuck in sales, I'm meeting customers, designers, contractors all the time. I write their names on a tablet. Any thing I can do to remember helps. For example: "Hello Michele, is that one L or two?" It seems to work for me. Repeat their name on the greeting, write it down and make lots of notes!
Little by little I've been downsizing to buy a condo or move into a rented apartment close to my job and rent out my house to offset the expenses.
The problem is, I have too many unused 'things'. You know... things that women call JUNK. Office equipment, tools, old computer parts, software, gadgets, etc. Technology changes and some of these things are obsolete. Actually, some aren't and that's the problem. Obsolescence is often a marketing tool or a state of mind. Many people have simple needs and don't require the very latest technology to run a business or make their lifestyle complete. That's like the decision of buying a $2,000 quad-core computer simply because you need it for e-mail. If the salesman at the computer store told you it was necessary, he should be executed by a firing squad in the morning.
When you run a business, you have to keep records. This I have. OK, so maybe I don't need 20 years of records sitting in my storage shed in my back yard, but I don't want to spend a day sorting through boxes of old things deciding what to throw out.
I do have years and years of hand drawings for furniture I designed... some of my life is on those drawings and I would like to select the nicest ones and scan them for my portfolio/archive.
I've been looking for 2 other things somewhere in storage that I did while in High-School. One got me an award when submitted to the county art show for all the schools in the area. It was a pencil sketch of Eric Clapton, guitarist of the Cream. The other was an ink & watercolor psychedelic rendering of a man with a big puffy (Afro) hairstyle... something you would find on logo for the Broadway show HAIR. I was proud of some of my art work, these were my favorites. I know they are somewhere in a box of junque waiting for me to reclaim them.
My daughter offered to help me rid my shed of junk. Unfortunately she doesn't know the difference between junk and junque. So, I cannot trust her as she could mistakenly slip some junque in a garbage bag with junk and I'll never see it again.
Thanks for reading my blog!
Some people cannot work without music and some people cannot work with it. I get that, but I'm paid to do a job and music in the workplace is often a distraction. They recently installed speakers in the showroom and pipe music there... smooth jazz. When customers ask you to repeat yourself, it's too loud. I had them turn the volume down, but I think it's pre-programmed and comes back up a short time later.
Most of the people in my office listen to music on their computers. The rule established by the IT guru was streaming services (Pandora or iHeart) only as YouTube with video demands too much bandwidth, affecting the overall company network. People don't like rules and many actually watch videos when they should be working.
Before I was offered a private office, my workspace was in 'the corral' with 15 people. The distractions were constant. The woman in the cubicle next to me has a subwoofer under her desk and I could hear it thumping throughout the day. My theory is she plays it loud enough so no one can hear her fart. I've got no proof... it's only a theory.
I don't offer opinion for the women in the service department who have music playing so loud people have to talk over the music to be heard. It's not a professional atmosphere when you have to repeat yourself to a customer because your 'background' music is louder than you.
Saturday... I've got some errands this morning and I'll be at the office in the afternoon. Only me catching up on some obligations. It's amazing how much more work I get done without distractions.
I was around 7 years old when my family moved from New York to Miami. Life here was pretty simple. My neighborhood was a place where you didn't always lock your door as friends would call your name as they entered your house... much like a brother or sister.
Two houses down, lived Junior... he was a chubby likable kid, maybe a year or two younger than me. If you remember the breakfast cereal commercials where the older boys were afraid to eat it... they got "Mikie" to try it.... "Yeah, let Mikie try it" Well, Junior was the the "Mikie" in my neighborhood. He had no fear of the unknown... We could convince him to eat just about anything. Milk and Tabasco sauce? No problem.
We would line up our toy solders on the table and pay Junior 5¢ to snort pepper and 'sneeze' the solders off the table! He was that kinda kid... if you could think of something stupid, Junior would try it.
We couldn't figure out why Junior was so chubby. His older sister and parents were of normal proportions yet he was overweight.
Now, further down the block lived Tom. He was my older brothers age. When all of us got together, my brother and Tom (by age) were the leaders. Tom was a baseball player and very athletic.
Tom's house was slightly larger than the other houses on my street and his parents added a utility/laundry room to the back of their house. They cut a rectangular hole in the dividing wall between the main house and the utility room and fitted a 'box' used as a giant hamper, in which they could put dirty clothes and 'flip' the box to the other room. It was a really great idea... otherwise, you would have to carry the laundry outside the back door and and walk around to the utility room.
One night, Tom's family, got in the car and drove away. Junior saw this and went around the back of their house. He entered the utility room, climbed into the hamper and 'flipped' himself into the main house. Junior headed to the kitchen... He had fixed himself a late night snack on Tom's parents dining room table.
Just then, headlights appeared in the front window and someone quickly walked to the door and opened it. It was Tom's mother... apparently she had forgotten something and they drove back home to get it. Well who was more shocked... Junior or Tom's Mother when she found him stuffing himself at the table?
As the story goes, Junior's parents found out and he was punished. This led to the confession that Junior was daring enough to sneak into their house at night (while they were sleeping) to raid the refrigerator. That ended the mystery Tom's mother had, as to the 'constant' disappearance of food from the refrigerator. Tom and his father were both very slender and she never suspected it was someone coming in the house.
It was uncle Jason's 93rd birthday and we all gathered around a cake to celebrate. He got out of the hospital just last week as his Emphysema was getting the best of him. If you know uncle, he's a real trooper and insisted to be released against doctors orders so he wouldn't miss his birthday party... at his age, it's a pretty significant day.
About 30 of us gathered around a nice size cake at the family get-together and we used 9 big candles to represent each decade and 3 smaller candles for the other years.
Uncle Jason wheezed a bit, actually he wheezed a lot, but he was able to blow out all the candles by the 5th (or was it 6th) try!
Cough, cough... Okay... who wants cake ??
I usually leave my office between 7:30 and 8pm (read: diner time) and have to travel a few main roads to get to the highway. This puts me past a mall and several plazas with restaurants on both sides of the roadway. That's the time I roll down the windows and inhale the smell of cooked food, especially from a few steakhouses along the way! I actually enjoy waiting at a red light for the aroma of cooked food.
Just past the half-way point puts me in Hollywood and a really large plaza with several restaurants on the perimeter road alongside the Interstate and again... it's time to roll down the window and catch the smell of grilled steak wafting over the highway...
They have TGI Friday's, Red Lobster, Miller's Ale House, Dave & Busters next to each other and the smell is awesome!
The best part of all this is smelling cooked food has no calories...
On a similar thought, more than a decade ago I read where a company patented a scent simulator device that could create different aromas. Typically they were fragrances but also had some 'earthy' smells like freshly cut grass and the smell of the air after a rain. Not sure if it was an invention that went nowhere as many patented inventions other than a prototype or two never find a way to the consumer market.
Thanks for reading my blog!
I was formulating a blog the other day and wrote on a 'sticky note' the speed or length of different roads in life and not necessarily ones you drive cars on.
Always it seems the good ones take longer.
In health it's a long road to recovery.
Hard road to achieve a goal of a good education.
The uphill road to financial success.
Inversely... it's a highway to Hell.
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