Took The Day Off

Last week, when my boss asked me what my schedule looked like for this week, I decided to take today off. Every so often I just need to take a day to allow myself to accomplish nothing. I have a good job but I've seen people in my profession go crazy. Since I already view myself as an off the beaten path kind of guy, I find days like this one allow me to regroup and gain some perspective so that I don't lose sight of all that comes from that beaten path. So far my day has gone well and I'm enjoying my free time very much.

That's a pretty fantastic feeling when you consider that part of my day was spent at the Connecticut Department Of Motor Vehicles. I fret to even bring this up but....I mind as well. Now, if you were to take a look at my last entry, you can see that I was in a bit of a bumbling way. In one day, I lost an iPhone and came to the realization it was necessary to replace all of my tires. If only there was a way to somehow jump into that blog entry. If somehow I could just climb into those words on my laptop screen and appear on the chair facing myself in the coffee shop area of the Stamford Borders. If only I had the ability to somehow tell myself as I was writing that entry that after I finished blogging, my destiny was to walk across the street to the People's Bank ATM, take out some money, go and grab my car from Town Fair Tire and somewhere in the time frame, I was going to lose my wallet.

I know right? When did I turn into such an F-ing idiot? I'm kind of past it now though. That night though....WOO HOO!, was I in a not so fantastic place. When I called Kristine to tell her what had happened and that I was on my way home, I decided to cancel the dinner/movie night we were going to have with our neighbor's the Lynch's. 2 seconds later, I called her back and told her I was reversing my cancellation, which I'm glad I did. An evening with our friends, their children, the pizzas, Shrek The Third, and a large rum and coke turned out to be exactly the kind of recreation time I needed to feel better about myself.

So today, I went down to Norwalk DMV with my birth certificate and Passport (Thank You Kristine) and 30 bucks and spent about 20 minutes or so getting a duplicate license. It turned out to be worthwhile as I needed to change my address on the license and I didn't know you could do this at dmv, but for the first time in years, I am now a registered voter.

Now I'm sitting in the Fairfield Public Library. I sometimes like hanging around in public libraries as I like being surrounded by all the books, the aura that comes from the people and their search for knowledge, and especially the silence. That said, there are exception to those rules. If you should be at the Norwalk Public Library after school hours, you run the risk of catching some rowdy high school kids. It seems as though a number of them are unaware of the whole silence in the library thing.

I'm also at the library because I'm sooooo into audiobooks right now. I figured I would get back into them when we moved to Fairfield because of the hour and a half I was adding to my daily commute but it took about 3 months to get back on the audiobook bandwagon. Now I'm just gangbusters about literacy.

Since the end of October, I had listened to 6 audiobooks. They are World Without End by Ken Follet, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, The Choice by Nicholas Sparks, The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold, Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, and Playing For Pizza by John Grisham. I'm not going to review the books but I can tell you that World Without End, Splendid Suns and Almost Moon are really great books that are well written and interesting to listen to. If you're going on a trip that will have you on the road for 48 hours, then grab World Without End. It's an easy joke but I'll take it. That book is soooo long it should have been called Book Without End.

The Choice was my first snag. A lot of the book, especially the beginning has a lot of description and not very much dialogue. This person's thinking this and that person's thinking that. Every English/Writing teacher I've ever had has told me and the class to write dialog in place of telling the reader what the characters are thinking and feeling. Usually, one or two students will argue that they are not good at writing dialog and they don't feel dialog is as necessary as the teacher makes it out to be. To all those teacher, I suggest they use The Choice as an example to make their point. Much of The Choice annoyed me to the point that I sped up the narrator.

Many people don't know this but if you purchase an audiobook using either iTunes or Audible.com and you play the book on an iPod, the iPod has a setting that allows you to play the book at Normal, Slower, or Faster. You might think that speeding up the book would make the narrator sound as if he had just inhaled helium, but the audiobook sound pretty much the same, only with the words coming at your around twice the speed.

I didn't mean to review The Choice but I guess that's what I've done so I'll finish it off. I found the first half of The Choice to be often annoying and yet, it held my interest. Part of what held my interest was that the author, Nicholas Sparks, has written several other best selling books and when I had purchased The Choice, it had already been on The New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks. If this guy's a successful writer and I may want to be a writer someday, then I felt it was important to pay attention in spite of the fact that I was unable to understand why The Choice was the success that it was.

Then Came The TWIST!!! That's right folks, there's a twist. I mean there is I suppose unless you've read about the twist in someone else's review. Then you won't be surprised. But BAM!!!...You're reading along. You think there's a choice to be made and the whole thing seems predictable and your just like, "C'mon! Make the choice already. We get it. We know." And then BAM!!! Oh. I guess I had absolutely no idea what this book was about. And then the book becomes somewhat relevant to all our lives in that one of the characters has to make a choice that any of us in a long term relationship might have to make. I uhhh...I guess The Choice is a good book. Still though, I think it could've used a little more dialog.

The Steve Martin book was very enjoyable. I'm a big fan of stand up comedians and I've always been bummed that I missed out on seeing Steve perform. I was thrilled to take the journey with him from childhood to his early days of stand up to his great successes and then to his standup burnout. Thank you very much Mr. Martin for putting it all out there. I enjoyed your book very much.

It's a little after 3 now and I should be on my way. Thanx for reading.
Dave

What A Day

Setting: Borders Book Store in Stamford. Drinking a Oreo Cookie Javakula, listening to yesterday’s Opie and Anthony show on my new iPhone. Across the street at Town Fair Tire is my year old Audi S4 waiting in line to have all four tires replaced. It’s almost 4 o’clock the day before Thanksgiving and I’ve got about 2 hours to kill.

Yesterday, I lost my iPhone. As a sign of how far I’ve progressed in life, I’m now capable of randomly losing toys that cost upwards of $600. My, how far I’ve come.

What’s weird is how I know someone else now enjoys the company of my old iPhone. It was around lunch time yesterday that I realized I didn’t know where my phone was. I assumed I might have left it in my car. Every time I called the iPhone throughout the day, my calls went straight to voicemail. Since my car was parked in the basement of the parking garage, I was hopeful the phone was there as I know I can’t get reception when I park my car in the basement. Still, when I did a thorough search of the car, I was unable to find the iPhone.

So I get home and walk across the street to the Lynch’s to get my wife’s phone. Karen was having some sort of jewelry party and my wife was in attendance. I planned on getting her phone and calling my phone in the hopes of hearing it ring in the car. When I told Kristine that I hadn’t seen the phone since before lunch she said, “But you responded to my text about the paint brushes”.

Sure enough, according to Kristine’s iPhone, she sent me a text a little after 5pm asking if I needed her to pick me up some paint brushes. Just after 6pm, she received a text from my iPhone saying “no”. I spent the next half hour trying to call and text my iPhone in the hopes of getting it back. My calls continued to go straight to voicemail and my text’s went unanswered. Unable to reach my phone’s new owner, I called AT&T and thru their automated system, I deactivated the iPhone.

Before I made the call, I did a little research and found out some things about what happens when an AT&T phone is reported lost or stolen. First, while the phone aspect of the iPhone stops working, every other aspect including the web browsing and the iPod functions will continue to work. For those of you who don’t know, when you buy an iPhone, nothing about it works until you set up a phone account with AT&T. That means unless you pony up for a two contract with AT&T, the iPhone serves no purpose. However, since I’ve already activated my phone, whoever has it will have full use of the iPhone sans the phone. THAT IS,...

...unless he or she signs up an AT&T account. If I understand correctly, the person who has my phone has the option of using the phone if he or she wants to sign up for a 2 year contract. Although AT&T will be well aware where my lost/sort of stolen (I guess technically, it’s not a stolen phone but there’s a person out there who has my $600 phone who knows who I am and knows I want it back.) phone is the moment the iPhone gets activated for phone service, AT&T won’t do anything about it. AT&T won’t tell me my phone has appeared on the grid, nor will they notify the authorities. Oh well.

I just had a thought. Let’s say I’m a trusting idiotic sort who parks his car in a parking lot, leaves the car unlocked and the keys in the ignition. Now, I’ve done a stupid thing but unless I’m mistaken, if someone gets into my car and drives away with it, then they’ve stolen my car. Just thinking out loud.

So here’s the thing. I probably would be more bent out of shape about the iPhone if it weren’t for the fact that on my way home from the Stamford Apple Store, having purchased my new iPhone, my driver’s side front tire went flat on the Merrit Parkway.

If you’ve never been on the Merrit, the Parkway is a very woodsy 2 lane highway with no street lights and not a lot of shoulder room. It’s been years since I’ve changed a flat tire and today’s vehicles are slightly more complicated than the piss yellow ’85 Chevette I drove in high school. The tires of today have things like keys and things that need to be pealed off. I cannot stress this enough. Thank God I befriended Tim Lynch my senior year of high school and Thank God we now live across the street from each other.

I called the Lynch’s home to let my wife know I’d be running a little later that I thought. I also called the Lynch’s home because I had Kristine’s iPhone which I almost hadn’t taken with me but decided to just in case of an emergency. Phew! Well, I got Karen and Karen told Tim and 15 minutes later, Tim showed up with flashlights and a great attitude.

Tim is a wealth of information when it comes to cars and he explained to me that it’s a good idea to have at least a little tread on your tires when driving on roads. A little tread is a little more that what I had on my tires and thus, the front driver’s tire had simply given up after I had hit a small bump in the left lane on the Merrit Parkway.

One of the more interesting aspects of the ordeal was the presence of a state police officer who parked in the right lane to protect us from oncoming cars as we replaced the tire. When I think of the trouble Tim and I used to get into as younger people...well, generally we were keeping an eye out for the cops because seeing police officers would mean there was a problem.

However it seems that when an officer of the law sees two thirtysomething guys, one driving an Audi and the other driving a Prius, fixing a tire on the side of the Merrit Parkway at 10:30 at night...Well, then a police officer is your best friend. Before he showed up, I thought I might not make it home. There’s no streetlights on the Merrit and the cars were coming very close even though we were 2 cars with our lights on and our hazard lights blinking. It’s one of the few times in my life I’ve felt the reassuring security I’ve heard a police officer can provide. The officer never left his car and when we were done, I gave the policeman a thankful saluting wave. Over his PA, he said, “No problem gentlemen,” and pulled away after Tim and I had safely driven off the shoulder and onto the highway.

So that was my yesterday. I should wander back to check on my car. My super thanx go out to my buddy Tim as well as the Connecticut police officers who patrol our roads and keep us safe. You are all very awesome.

Also congratulations to the winner of the Find Dave’s Dropped iPhone and Keep It Contest. I will be able to go on without it and well...I guess if it’s something you need to make your life a little better, then I guess I’ve done some good in your life. Instead of harboring bitterness, I’m going to chalk this up to some Karma Credit and hope that it brings you all the joy that it bought me.

Until next time.
Dave