Random blatherings

Nothing much in particular to write about today, so it's just going to be a bunch of random thoughts on, well, nothing in particular. Kind of sounding a bit Seinfeld-ish, but oh, well, some days you don't have a lot to say about any one particular thing, but a lot of little thoughts that are banging around inside of you that you just want to say something about. So I'll start out with this: Global Warming. My co-workers are convinced that it's a bunch of bunk and that Earth Day is also just another excuse to have one's say on the environment. I think a lot of folks are of this general mindset, that they just want to go on driving their extra-large, gas guzzling SUV's and everyone else be damned. Well, when we're paying $4+ a gallon for gas and are facing food shortages (which we already are due to climate change), then I dare them to say that nothing's going on. I guess some people just think it's another liberal scheme to get people riled up over something....I dunno. I did find out that Al Gore's house is hardly eco-friendly and has a far larger carbon footprint than the average home. He really ought to walk the walk, sell his mansion and build a completely earth friendly home to increase his credibility where environmentalism is concerned. Weirdly enough, Dubya's ranchette in Texas was actually built to be very eco-friendly - go figure. And yet this is the same guy who refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocols. I don't understand - the guy believes in living in a home designed to be environmentally sensitive and yet he doesn't preach what he practices. What a bizarre situation.

Employee Absenteeism: I know, I know, it's spring, the weather's nice and all that, but why is it that people seem to find any excuse to either leave work early or not show up at all? They take off sick or on vacation at every opportunity and leave the rest of us holding the ball, or the workload, as the case may be. And it doesn't help that baseball season has begun, so I have to wonder just how much of the "blue flu" is going around the office these days? I'd love to be spending my days lazily out enjoying the nice sunny weather, but the fact is that I have to work like the rest of the world. I can wait until summer, when I hope that I can get the vacation that I request each year in July and August. It's getting tougher and tougher to get the time off that one wants anymore because of what feels like perpetual staff shortages. Our department seems to have become a veritable revolving door. People hired in don't stay long anymore - they seem to come for a brief stint and then move on to something else. There are only a few of us who are anywhere near long-term employees and many of us will be retiring in the coming years, and frankly, who's going to replace us? Will they be able to find people who want to stay more than a year or so? Time will tell, I guess.

WAITING FOR LILACS

It being spring, the one thing I wait for the most is the blossoming of the lilacs. I have a small and hardy lilac bush in my driveway that has suffered wind and vehicle damage and yet keeps coming back strong each year. It's not a very big bush and is overshadowed by a craggy old Bartlett pear tree that is in dire need of pruning. Still, I wait eagerly for it to bloom just so I can smell the fragrant scent of the lilac blossoms. There is also a lovely path on the KSU campus on The Commons that is lined with lilac bushes that I love to walk along each spring, just to smell the flowers. Lilac blossoms don't last very long, sadly, two weeks, a month at most, and when they are gone, you have to wait an entire year for them to come back again. We used to have some lovely lilac bushes right underneath our kitchen window at the home I grew up in, but my brother chopped them down for some reason and I miss their scent wafting into the kitchen on spring mornings. I well remember one of the traditions that we used to observe as children called May Day (May 1st), where we used to make little colored construction paper cones and fill them with flowers and leave them on people's doors, and sometimes, we'd pluck big bushy lilac blossoms along with daffodils, tulips and roses from our own gardens and wildflowers from the woods near our home. The scent was intoxicating and I loved having all those flowers around our house in the spring time. I miss that a great deal and where I live now, there is nowhere to plant flowers. Even if I did have someplace to put them, they'd get crushed by all the beer cans and bottles that inevitably end up in my yard and by the side of our front porch from all the parties at our house and around our neighborhood. I long for a home with a yard and a place to put in a nice garden, but real estate, whether rental or otherwise, is ridiculously expensive these days, even with housing prices falling like bricks. It's the price you pay for living in a college town, sadly.