The Old Routine

Whether it's the three Ss, Your morning cup of Joe, or cleaning your refrigerator of all available beer and pruning your roses during the Super Bowl, even the most unpredictable of us have routines. I like to have a shot or two before a social occasion especially when it is a one year old's birthday party, not so much for my social anxiety disorder, but to help me communicate better with the infant focus there at the party. Habits that we perform habitually all of the time regularly are routines unlike vices that hmmmm yes we do them habitually as well, butt here is argument that some habits are actually vices and vice versa... Hoooey?

When I had a job, Saturday = cleaning day for my wife as I was out of the house working, Sunday = cook-out, Monday, while everyone else went off to work I slept off the mountain of ribs and bottle of tequila(remember, I worked on Saturday) Tuesday, I liked to call in sick, to shop for more ribs, beer and tequila work a few days and so on ~ my routine.

Vice or habit:
1. People watch..... Repeated trips to the beach wearing shades a gold chain and a white plum smuggler.
2. Coffee............................................................. $5 bucks a pop twice a day to the tune of $100 a week.
3. Getting your ears waxed  .................    Just do it! The azalea bush growing there scares little children.
4. Walking the dog    ...................................................................     Some people know what this means.
5. Gardening ......................................................................................... When does it become ridiculous?
6. Video Games Interactive TV and internet ........................................................... You know this one.
7. Philippine massage....................................................................................................
8. Psychotherapy ............................ Therapy for psychos? Who would have thought? How Progressive.
9. Tanning salons................................. For that leathery all over body. Kinda of gives me Chicken skin.
10. Reading Smoothstar...................................... I don't start my day without it. Vice, Routine, or habit?

What do you really need?

When traveling off to Afghanistan, Beirut, Burma, Croatia, Somalia, and places I have been employed in my extra curricular endeavors, I am often amazed to see the proliferation of stuff... Rococo, tchotchkes, shiny useless bobble heads, everything from taxidermy aardvarks and armadillos, Bamboo Back scratchers and bright beautiful beads beads to zebra saddles made in Zanzibar. These for the most part are things you do not need unless of course you are friends with Hayden Panettiere  and would like to saddle up her zebra. The really good stuff is rare but cheap copies are being mass produced in China as I write this. You name it, they are making it in China.

Many years ago while undercover posing as aluminum siding salesman, Al Kaida, and secretly looking for the remains of Ben Laden after a daisy cutter run in the mountains outside of Kabul, I looked inside of a cave that was in a terrible state of disarray. There scattered all over the cave floor I saw all variety of junk. There was a vintage Kalashiakov model 47 with wooden stocks, an index finger hanging off the trigger. I pocketed the finger to have rubber copies made for novelties and tossed the place. There was a George Bush Bobble head doll, a slinky, and sitting next to a claymore anti-personnel mine was a little rubber Pokey doll... Made in China.

Multitasking

Of all of the catchy buzz words that get bandied about "Multitasking" takes the prize for saying a complicated thing in an ununderstandable(mutipurpose compound word for illustraiveistic reasonabilities) manner. Ah, but multitasking, something that your mother always had to do, is in vogue.

   The mmwait,gearupforitbecauseit'sallgoingtohitallatoncemmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmore you do, the more you get done, unless you get overwhelmed and burn the casserole and leave the peroxide in your hair too long and the garden hose if floating away all of the myriad of pricey hybrid iris, gladiola, tulip and clammitia bulbs you just planted early this morning in the nice loose expensive loamy soil you bought down at the garden center for twenty bucks a cubic foot but at least the baby is quiet, but you can't find your keys because you were talking on your cellphone when you pushed the garage door opener button and drove in, got out of your car and the baby was crying so you jingled the shiny keys and the baby stopped crying snatching the keys out of your hand.

   You do it all by rote, push the garage door opener, don't even need to think about it, lock the car,  lock the unlocked kitchen door after you walk in with an armload of perishable groceries, put the casserole in get on the gloves and put the step one of your hair color in, load the washer, feed the cat, You did the early morning chores in your garden but you left the garden hose on dropped off the baby at infant care went to work for nine hours running errands during lunch picking up the dry cleaning locked the baby in the car with the keys in her hand locked yourself out of the house when the door from the kitchen to the garage slammed behind you. You smell the burning casserole or is that your hair?  You're locked in your garage because the button for the overhead door is inside. Your husband will be home soon but you can't call him because your cell phone is on the kitchen table. You just want to cry, right?

Has multitasking ever had the effect that the more you tried to do at the same time the less you got done... Well?

The Recession that didn’t have to be.

We have 9% unemployment.

That means 91% of the people still have jobs.

Most of them are making the same amount as they always did.

The recession is caused by the 9% unemployed not buying anything but also by a large degree of the 91% stopped buying also. These 91% hear recession and they act like sheep and think they also need to stop spending.

Maybe their 401K’s took a hit, but the best thing they could do for that is to start spending again.  If I was the President I would encourage these people to simply start spending again.

If they did, the Great Recession would be over.

They could end it today.

Bachelor tips

     Maximize your health, good looks and comfort and minimize the time spent cleaning your house, doing your laundry, doing the dishes and washing your truck.

House cleaning 101

     First, hack off a huge piece of time by simply dropping your standards. You don’t need the daily routine of Beaver Cleavers’ mom at all if you don’t have anyone come visit you. So get rid of your friends or just don’t invite them over. Of course some will invite themselves but a good trick is get rid of all of your chairs except for the one for yourself. They will soon get tired of standing around and leave and not come back. Your chair should have wheels on it so you can roll it around to wherever you feel like sitting.

     You need to keep your kitchen fairly clean on a regular basis or you will get mold and bugs and disease and this will interfere with your good health. I have found the best way to keep up with the dirty dishes is to throw them all away except for one of each thing.

This way you are never confronted with a sink full of dirty dishes. Doing the dishes with only one plate and one fork and one knife is a snap.

     Next, keep your toilet clean about once a week. Simply pour in about a quart of bleach and swirl this all around with the toilet brush inside and out. Next fill up cups of hot water and splash it directly on the toilet. Then mop the floor. You’re done for the week.

     Next, laundry. Do all your socks and underwear at once. Buy all matching socks so you don’t have to sort them. When they come out of the washer dump them on a flat wire shelf so they will dry. When they are dry, grab them all up together and toss them into wherever you keep that sort of stuff. No need to separate and match anything, no need to hang each individual item on a clothes line or waste money with a dryer.

     Finally, once or twice a year get the push broom, a flat shovel and a big trash can out of the garage and sweep out your house. Of course you know, carpets have no place in a professional bachelors house.

     Don’t forget to wash the truck once a week. Walk around it and spray water on it, starting at the top and working your way down to the wheels. If it takes more than 3 minutes you are doing it wrong.

     Next, reward yourself with a 12 pack of beer, drink it all and then take a nap.

Institute of Beleza

The lifestyle blogger known to me as the duck in my younger days and now the man we all look to for style and diversity, who has brought us everything from marital advice to recipes is winging his way to some secluded island or mobbed beach resort to apply generous slobberings of sun-block on his all too white skin then bask in the sun in that far away place. Beleza.

What is Beleza? Beauty, elegance, satisfaction, tranquility, delicious. On one of my first trips here to Rio I was language challenged, Yeah, I didn't study my little book or listen to the tapes. I knew the basics and figured nobody would want to yak with me anyway, stupid Americano. Hey, I was wrong. Brasillians love Americanos, Gringos... and our culture and carry on at length about Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, George Bush, and Jack Daniels. When the locals hit the buzz words like Kim Kardashian, not understanding anything but, I responded with "BELEZA!" and soon had an unusual banter with many whom I encountered at various get togethers. Institutes of Beleza are springing up all over Brasil. I pass them as I Drive toward the far flung beaches. Learn to appreciate the good life.

So these two Texans are talking:
"Y R M all just sittin there?"
"M R ducks."
"No M arnt."
"C M wangs?"
"O... M R ducks."