I Don't Want To Get Stepped On

Would giants appear to move quickly or slowly?  Discuss  

How can this possibly be relevant to anything?  

It's not, but it's something that has gone through my mind every now and again.  Especially when I see people running away from giants. 

Does that happen often? 

In movies and TV, yes.  

So, here's the thing.  You see it all the time.  Some movie or TV show, usually a cartoon, you see our hero running away from a giant.  The giant is huge and powerful, yes.  But, they're always remarkably slow.  You don't think about it, but it makes sense that moving something that huge would require a lot of effort, and wouldn't happen very quickly.  So, when our hero darts nimbly to the side and runs through the giants legs, making the giant look silly, you don't give it a second thought.  

However...

Picture yourself as an ant.  Now, look up at a human.  They would appear to be an impossibly large giant, hundreds of feet tall (to scale), with nearly unlimited power.  But, would they be moving slowly?  

If I want to step on an ant, there's roughly nothing that ant can do about it.  If I was a cartoon giant, the little ant would just run to the side as my foot was falling towards him, being able to escape by just reacting more quickly than I could due to my extreme size.  But, I'm not a cartoon giant, and my foot would seem to be moving impossibly fast to an ant, crushing the poor little guy with extreme prejudice before he can blink an eye.  Do ants have eyelids?  Probably not.  You get the idea.  

So, which is it?  And if there were real giants, would you be able to escape?  

Fortunately, you'll have plenty of time to think these things over, as I'm going to be away on business next week, so you're not going to see any updates here.  I know you're all sad, but I'll have an entire week's worth of stories, random thoughts, oxford commas, and witty observations to share with you when I get back.  Until then, please enjoy Youtube or something.  

Jeremy Is In The Office will be Out Of The Office starting Friday, May 27th, returning on monday, June 6th with all new adventures.  Everyone enjoy your Memorial Day and we'll see you when we get back from Europe. 

Nothing Else Makes Sense

I have a ghost that eats lug nuts

Well, for it to eat lug nuts, it would have to have corporeal form, so it couldn't, by definition, be a ghost.  More of a zombie, or vampire, or some other form of undead.  

Uhmmm...yeah.  So, "ghost" is easier to type, so we're going with that.  

I have a ghost that eats lug nuts.   

So, not long ago, I got new tires for my car.  They're awesome...you know...as tires go.  Strictly speaking, they're round, they have tread, and they fit my car...which is about as much as I really need.  When I was at the place which, for strictly Blag purposes, we'll call "Flamerock" getting them installed, the manager came to inform me that I was missing two lug nuts on my right front wheel.  This is strange.  A mere three weeks earlier, I had swapped out my snow tires for the regular ones, a process which involves removing and replacing all of the lug nuts on every wheel, so I was 100% certain that there were none missing at the time.  Three weeks later, and two of them are gone...from the same wheel.  Strange, but whatever.  I paid "Flamerock" an inordinate amount of money for two new lug nuts and went on my way.  

Now, I told you that story so that I can tell you this story.  

Last summer, the brakes on my car started making awful-sounding noises.  Since the brakes are one of the systems on my car that I really need to not fail while driving, I took the car into the garage to have these noises looked into.  An inordinate amount of money later, I drive away with lots of new brake components, freshly machined front rotors, an oxford comma, and blissful braking silence.  Fast forward to last week.  

Last week, the brakes on my car started making awful-sounding noises.  Since the brakes are still a system on my car that I really need to not fail while driving, and a system that I had invested an inordinate amount of money in less than 9 months prior, I took the car right back to the same garage.  I was all set to have an angry showdown over shoddy workmanship, poor decision making, or substandard components.  The noises, at least, were centered entirely on a single wheel, so that would at least narrow down the search for any issues.  The manager told me that they would look into it, and sent me on my way. 

Later in the day, I get a call from the manager, telling me that they had traced the problem down to two missing lug nuts from the right front wheel.  They replaced the lug nuts for an inordinate fee and the car rode in blissful braking silence once again.  They also charged me an inordinate fee for brake diagnostics, since they did have to do a road test and examine the entire system...can't really argue over that.  

So, in the span of a month and a half, I have lost four count-em four lug nuts from the right front wheel of my car.  This doesn't happen.  Lug nuts don't just fall off of a wheel for no good reason.  Either the wheel stud is faulty (It's not...the garage inspected those as well) causing the lug nuts to slip off, somebody is stealing them for all the reasons you steal two lug nuts off of somebody's car for, or the most logical explanation, I have a ghost.  Since my car spends over 90% of its lifetime in the parking lot at work or locked up in my garage, I can only conclude that it's the ghost. 

Need More Holidays. Get On That, Feds

Long weekends are never as long as you think  

Strictly speaking, it was precisely 72 hours long.  Or is that too literal an interpretation?

Too literal.  So, here's a brief outline of how things have been going on Jeremy Land.  I've been working like crazy...and that's about it.  Lots of meetings, projects, people, businesses to deal with, not enough hours in the workday to pull it off.  Then, other people decide they don't want to do their jobs, so I get saddled with that, too.  To to it all off, I'm going to be away on business next week, so I won't even get Memorial Day off this year.  So, for my first official holiday, I'll be working.  

So, I made my own unofficial holiday last Friday.  

I realized that the weather was actually going to be nice for a change of pace, that none of my meetings scheduled for Friday was super critically important, and that I wanted a day off.  So, I decided, "ehh, screw the whole thing," and took the day off.  I woke up at my own good time (quite frankly, it was like 40 minutes later than usual...pretty sad), had a leisurely breakfast, did just a little work around the house, went for a nice bike ride, grilled a steak, then played some video games.  All in all, it was a solid day of not working.  

All that having been said, it's already monday again, and here I am, back at work.  At work, sitting through an entire morning's worth of meetings, learning that nobody's working on another project that's now going to get dumped on me, with my car in the shop again.  Basically, monday sucks.  

How can it be that my Friday of Leisure was a mere two days ago?  When I decided to have a three-day weekend, I had anticipated that it would be significantly longer that in ended up being.  Of course, it was three days, but I wanted it to feel like an eternity.  It totally did not.