don’t panic

Lots on my mind today. Here is my post from earlier today.

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In this digital age, you would think that someplace as complex and organized as a major grocery chain, could keep two-liter bottles of Coke and Pepsi on the shelves. Come on, if 7-11 can pull it off, then so can they.

Doesn’t this stuff get tracked in realtime? I would think that the whole process would be automated, from the store inventory, to the loading of trucks according to sales trends, to the warehouse stocking. I could see occasional outages due to abnormal spikes, such as SuperBowl Sunday or something, but I can’t seem to get Caffeine-free Diet Pepsi about 80% of the time I go to Vons. It has a space on the shelf, but that space is nearly always empty! What gives? Don’t they _believe_ what the computer’s are telling them? People can’t REALLY be drinking that much of that stuff, right?

We are. Press the key. Fix the damn problem.

Gaaah!

BONUS UPDATE –

I went to CostCo to bulk up on a few depleted items from our recent cold infestation (tissues, TP, etc…) and I noticed that they are back to carrying the dumbass 6 lb. BOXES of cream cheese. I’ve explained this before, but this has got to be the stupidest possible container to hold our favorite bagel spread, since right inside the cardboard box is a tough plastic bag surrounding the product. Once you puncture the bag, you have no way to then close it back up again with anything close to an airtight seal, which means that unless you eat five bagels a day, you are going to end up throwing half of the stuff in the trash! Besides, have you ever tried to get cream cheese out of a sixteen inch long plastic bag? Yuck! There are many possible solutions, such as cutting the square turd of cheese into pieces which go into smaller, sealable ziplock bags, but WHY NOT SIMPLY SELL THE STUFF IN A TUB!

Sure sure, I know that CostCo caters to businesses, but let’s get real here. Take a look around you next time you’re in there. Try to decide how many people are there stocking up for their business, as compared to the number who are say, housewives making their weekly food run. Besides, this is CREAM CHEESE! Unless your business is selling bagels, just how much of the stuff do you need at one time? And yes, they do carry an equivalent amount in little tear-and-squeeze packages, but those are even more of a pain in the ass than the boxes.

And then I went to try and get the chicken nuggets that my daughter eats. It seems that CostCo has decided to stop carrying those as well. Now all they sell are some disgusting dinosaur-shaped chicken things that cost twice as much and come in… you guessed it. A BOX.

Maybe I should start shopping at WalMart.

I really need to add a links section.

No walks for a while. The whole family is sicker than a pack of dogs (Where did that phrase come from anyway? “Sick as a dog..?”). We’ve gone through an entire platoon-sized package of CostCo facial tissue trying to divert the rivers of snot, and our neighbors must hate us completely by now with all the hacking and nose blowing at all hours. God bless the makers of Nyquil and TheraFlu. Where would we be without you?

A coworker at my wife’s company recently wrote this (at nearly 1 AM no less… heavy think time) about what it is to be a Christian. Good reading. Good questions. It got me thinking about that as well.

Whenever I run into weird socialotheologcal kinds of questions like this, I always try to see how the same question would fit into the church at the time of Christ. It’s sort of a WWJD, role-play history game.

So what WAS the “church” in the time of Christ, or rather, right after? It was composed of a bunch of guys and gals who were very much like we are today. They had jobs, homes, children, problems, taxes, sex, entertainment, and a whole host of questions about life and what it meant to them and their (wow) _new_ faith. I had a hard time finding any references to whether or not they “went” to “church”. They _were_ the church, so if a few of them got together as a group to do, well, anything… then they were technically in church.

This made me think about how we view “church” today. In my world, as I was raised, “church” was a place you went to on a certain day of the week. What you did for the rest of the week was mostly unimportant, so long as you showed up and sat in a chair in front of a guy who lectured you for an hour and made you feel like crap because you weren’t out “spreading the good news.” At predictable intervals, you also “celebrated” other more pious rituals, such as communion or even baptism.

And then there were the other “non-church related” events such as picnics and BBQ’s and movie night’s. And they always listed them that way, “non-church related.” But in Christ’s day, wasn’t a local BBQ was a much as church meeting as any other time? The whole concept of a “pastor” seems to have come in much later, and for reasons I’m not too clear about. Maybe it was the fact that only a small percentage of the population could read, so you had the local geek do the storytelling for a large mass of folks that wouldn’t have been privy to those scrolls and letters otherwise. Because everyone is busy just surviving (sounds familiar to me) they all decide to get together at regular intervals so that they can schedule the time when the most people are available. Boom! Sunday morning church is born, and football becomes the game of the antichrist.

So what should this mean to me?

My life is just as busy as anybody else’s, and the weekly reading thing works better than nothing, right? Right?… Oh, damn.

Now the bible DOES say that we should come together as Christians. It doesn’t specify a building with uncomfortable chairs, just that we should see each other now and again as a group. Hmmm. It sounds to me like the BBQ qualifies. I’m sure that there must be something in there about discussing the word of God and edifying each other, but does it say that we should discuss ONLY the word of God? Hmmm. So, my current financial difficulties are an okay topic of discussion? How about that new movie that’s out? Yes? Cool.

I think what I’m seeing here is that “church” is us, not a place, nor a time. And that as a Christian (I’ll work on what that exactly means later…), I should meet with other Christians and… do something. That’s about it. We should “congregate.” When doesn’t matter. Where doesn’t matter. What we do there doesn’t matter, so long as we think about who we are and what it means to be what we are, together.

And then I saw this article on CNN’s site about Martha Stewart. it seems her daughter Alexis thinks it’s “horrible” that her mom is going to jail.

“She’s disappointed over feeling like her life was wasted. Everything she did is ignored over something … trivial, that maybe didn’t happen,” Alexis Stewart said.

Trivial? How is it that when the person committing the crime is an educationally impoverished minority, we say “throw the book at ‘em!” But when white-bread American housewife lies, cheats and conspires, we think it’s somehow unjust and “horrible.”

Is it tragic? Maybe. But no less so than than any other corporate big-shot who gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar. We all hate the Enron execs, but Martha pulling a fast one is okay?

Is it justice? Damn right! Sorry, but I was sick of that woman making millions off of telling me how disgusting my kitchen was BEFORE she got nabbed. Now that a color scheme seems to have been picked for her (penitentiary red), I couldn’t be more giddy.

Today’s Walk: 2.83 miles.

My walk took me to Vons today. Had to pick up a few goods. When you have to carry things back with you, you’re a lot more careful about what you buy. Sure, getting two, gallon containers of milk is radically cheaper than one, but have you ever tried to carry two gallons of milk in those environmentally nasty plastic bags almost a mile an a half? It’s not that far, but it doesn’t have to be. You’d get home with your elbows feeling like they were about to invert, and your fingers would be numb from where the plastic “handles” of the bags have nearly cut off your digits at the joints. No thanks. Still, it was interesting that my walk today was almost exactly the same distance as my walk yesterday, even though the two routes were completely different. Today I took the more direct “street route.” I don’t usually go that way because it’s so noisy. In a car, you can close your window against the noise, but walking, even with music playing in my ears, it’s about the same as cruising down the freeway in a convertible.

There’s this house I passed on the way that was built about two years ago. Actually, it took almost a year and a half to build it, and then it sat nearly finished for another whole year before someone picked it up. Renee and I swung by when we noticed the realtors sign out in front, just to grab one of those “take one” color printouts highlighting various amenities and giving an asking price. It was something around $400,000… a year ago. Housing prices have gone up A LOT in SoCal since then, and we were astounded at the time. This was a DINKY little house, literally a street’s width away from the trolley tracks. The trolley isn’t that loud, but it hits it’s horn just as it passes this house as it approaches the town’s main streets and a pair of crossing gates which are a block away. The trolleys run at fifteen minute intervals each way, and are not in sync. This means that you’d be getting the rumble and horn alert about once every seven or eight minutes. Yikes!

I suppose that you could get used to that. I got used to F14 Tomcats flying over my head at all hours when I grew up near Miramar Naval Air Station. Before those boys could even think about being “Top Gun,” they had to learn how to land on an aircraft carrier, and so they did “touch and go” loops that took them right over my parent’s house… over and over and over. You think a train is loud? Try catching the backside of a slightly off-course fighter jet.

Anyway, it surprised us to see this domicile near the tracks selling AT ALL, let alone for so much. Even if you happened to be deaf, the freight trains they let use the tracks at three in the morning are heavy enough to rumble my wife and I awake, and we live two blocks and an embankment away. They also have brakes that are shrill enough to loosen your fillings.

What good is the American Dream if you have to indenture your life away for a place that nobody really wants anyway?

I passed a couple of cops looking official around what had to be the most pretentious vehicle I have ever seen. I mean, what’s the point of a Hummer with lowered racing wheels? You know the kind I mean. The spoked ones that look like they have flat tires, but they are actually designed that way (for speed… in a Hummer?). This thing also had the “free floating” hub caps that rotate independently from your tires, and chrome chain link border license plates.

I can appreciate the functionality of the Hummer itself, or at least the original ones used in the war, but these new versions look like they were made specifically for the guy who walks into the truck dealership, finds the biggest gas guzzler he can find and states, “got anything bigger?” So what that you can shove in a few dozen more bags of groceries. You could get just as much practical cargo space out of a 1972 Chevy Stationwagon, with nearly twice the gas milage and at a tenth of the price. Whatever. It was a toy. You certainly wouldn’t take such a gleaming black and chrome vehicle out to the mud flats for a little off-road fun… not at $50,000 for the bare-bones economy version.

Gas is $2.15 a gallon. It would cost you almost seventy bucks just to fill the tank on that puppy. Most of us in SoCal have a pretty steep commute and have to get gas once a week (the Hummer website doesn’t even list gas milage). That’s something like $280 a month just for gas!

Makes me feel pretty good about walking to the store.

Today’s Walk: 2.82 miles.

I’ve started walking in the morning lately. I really need it, physically, mentally, spiritually. And it’s doing me wonders, but not entirely in the ways I was expecting.

Sure, it’s great exercise. I come back home feeling like I just worked out, which in my area of town isn’t far from the truth. It’s not San Francisco, but there are a lot of abrupt hills, especially in the residential mazes. They are the kind of hills that you hit with an old car and say, “okay, everybody lean forward…” Short, but obviously there because the homes were built in a time before they figured it was just easier to level out all the hills and valleys rather than build on their slopes. Your calves burn on the upswing, and your shins heat up on the way down. Like I said, good exercise.

And the view isn’t too bad either. It’s not that you can see very far, because, like most SoCal hill-top residential neighborhoods, you are surrounded by lots more hills. But this is an OLD neighborhood. I’m talking 1900 old. That’s pretty ancient for the West coast. A lot of the houses I pass are actual historical landmarks, with plaques and everything. And they’re the kind of victorian-era homes that just make you want to cry for joy they are so beautiful. Homes built today are ugly. Sorry, but they are. Developers want only to maximize profits by stuffing in as many as they can per acre (usually by keeping them as much like boxes as possible), and leaving off decorations and woodwork in favor of the much more easy to apply “Mediterranean” style stucco. They don’t even bother with things like window ledges anymore. It’s like someone built the house and then realized that they forgot to put in windows so they just cut out a few holes and slap in a window pane. Whalla!

No, these houses are carefully tended, living creatures. At least mostly so. And they literally drip with history. If you pay attention, you can feel it as you pass. Sometimes it comes as the scent of Jasmine flowing out from the side and back gardens. Other times it’s in the walls that run along the sides of the property near the sidewalk. Back when the house was built, they actually took the time to build a wall (that matches all the other houses on the street) so as to make room for the sidewalk, which would otherwise have been buried under the slope of the front yard. Forget flat, that wasn’t the point. The wall is so worn at the top stone by rivers of small children, that it’s noticeably thinner and smoother on the street side. You can look at the house and see the tiny details of time that accumulate like sediment at the bottom of the ocean. A carefully fixed lamp post; fence boards with so much white paint that they have rounded edges, and the odd rectangular depression where a second story window should have been. You realize that this used to be a doorway, leading into some part of the house that was torn down and forgotten.

And there are emotions lingering there. In some houses you pass, you feel only loneliness. In others, an earthy joy (these are usually the ones with well-tended gardens). In still others there is sadness, and even anger. The emotions speak of countless birthday parties and Christmas celebrations; of homecomings and painful separations. It’s the lives of the people that have dwelled there, and these old homes have somehow managed to soak in those souls to saturation. Houses simply don’t do that anymore. Maybe because we rarely put in the kind of love for a creation, a work of our very hands, that we used to when we built our castles. Now, we fear the outside so much that we lock ourselves within our three bedroom jails, complete with bars on the doors and windows. And we pay someone else to cut our grass, because we just don’t have the time. Or we don’t have grass at all. We do away with the “yard” altogether; exchanging it for “quality time” half hour trips to the local cultivated park so that we don’t feel as guilty that our kids are watching so much TV.

I want a home so badly that it hurts. I don’t want a big house, just something with a bit of earth, maybe a touch of history, and a desire to soak in my life.