An Arizona Cheesehead's Thoughts

I rarely wear what I call "real" shoes. I usually pick one favorite pair of sandals then wear them out by wearing them every single day. Literally. I once actually wore a hole in the sole of one of my sandals and only discovered it when I investigated why the asphalt was so hot on my foot. Recently, I acquired a pair of Rocket Dog canvas shoes. I used to live in those back in the day but they don't make them like they used to. This new pair is cool but just a little loose so I wear shorty socks with them.  As I was sitting down one morning to put on my Rocket Dogs and shorty socks, I remembered this bit from the late, great, All In The Family, because I was putting them on sock, shoe, sock, shoe and it felt off. Yes, I'm old.  Yes, weird stuff often comes to my mind. Much as I hate to agree with Archie Bunker, sock, sock, shoe, shoe just feels right.

Several years ago, Sugar Daddy said to me, "You post so many pictures on Facebook, you should get on Instagram. I think you'd really like it." At the time, I was a heavy Facebook user, still active on Twitter and barely finding time to post to this blog so I decided to forgo another potential online obsession. Fast forward a while and a friend of mine suggested (and I take her suggestions as commands) that I join her in doing the Photo A Day  activity started by Fat Mum Slim  (FMS), an Australian blogger. The short story is that FMS gives you a theme for each day along with its designated hashtags and you post a picture of your interpretation of the theme with said hashtags. While my friend bailed on the exercise early on, I stuck to it for the month and posted all of my entries to Facebook and continued for intermittent months until April of this year when I decided to commit back to it for the long haul. A few of my Facebook friends had started contributing as well ...

I get a lot of direct marketing pieces from people trying to sell their software, hardware, network equipment, security programs, etc. It comes with the territory of working in I.T. and getting on just one mailing list. I have to give credit to one guy for something catchy, though. He sent me two seed kits along with a request to meet and followed up with an email the day after I got the package. Too bad for him he was selling HR Management software because I have no interest/responsibility for that. However, I will make anything into a competition if I can so I challenged one of my colleagues to a see growing contest. Neither of us are good plant people so it was an even matchup. We agreed to start on a Monday and by the time I got to my seeds after my many meetings, hers had been growing for hours. I told her I would cry foul if her seeds sprouted ahead of mine. After one week - a clear winner emerged. The starting kit. Initial "planting" which involved...

We had our corporate golf tournament, SmartScramble, a few Fridays ago and there's an annual competition among the departments to create gift baskets for the event's silent auction. The department with the basket garnering the highest bid wins something. Pizza party, I think. I don't know because we hadn't done anything until this year. It takes a ringleader and this hasn't been my jam so one of my colleagues stepped up and solicited a team to donate items. Of course, we had to pick a theme for the basket, too. How do you narrow down the entire nerd/geek world into one themed basket? Well, you send a gazillion emails back and forth, talk about it at several meetings and present arguments over cube walls until someone makes an executive decision. My colleague finally did just that. Thank the gods. Marvel, it was! That's a lot of cool stuff! We all hit up Amazon and selected items. After even more discussion, and mocking our colleague for suggesting DC...

Our company started a department challenge this year. The challenges are wellness based and they bought a really ugly trophy to be passed around to the winners. The idea is to add something to represent your department to the trophy if you win it. Yes, it's supposed to be ugly. The first month, the challenge was to send a daily #healthyselfie. I went with the easy ones of me drinking water, unpacking my organic fruits and veggies, weighing in for our "Maintain, Don't Gain" competition and one controversial entry - drinking a glass of red wine. Red wine is healthy, people! While the wine picture got accepted, the acceptance came with a long missive on the dangers of consuming too much alcohol. Whatevs, way to be killjoys. Despite trying to motivate our team, we didn't get enough pictures to win in January and February was not much better. That month's challenge was "Stretch". You were supposed to stretch every day then record it on ou...