It's Not....

"It's not the cough that carries you off.
It's the coffin they carry you off in."

That's one of my Mom & Dad's favorite funny sayings. That pretty much sums up my past two weeks. The flu left, but it didn't leave me alone. I'm into my 3rd week now living with the effects. Zinc lozenges help me tremendously when I have a cold, but I've tried so many types of medicines I've decided nothing really works for a cough, although I haven't tried Grandpa Twist's remedy. He had a honey/whiskey mix you take by a tablespoonful. No, it wasn't an excuse to drink whisky. You probably didn't get as much alchohol as in a dose of Nyquill. I've wondered about a honey, vinegar, lemon juice mix though.

What I'd really like to try is the sweat lodge cure. Get a good hot steam room with maybe some eucalyptus and menthol going on.

I'm open to suggestions.

Twist

Oh, Crud...

I was sitting in a worldwide satellite training meeting Saturday and enjoying the meeting when I started to notice the perfume fragrance coming from the lady in front of me. My favorite perfume is White Shoulders, and I'm pretty sure that's what she was wearing. My normal reaction to the smell of that perfume is a euphoric stupor. I get lost in the fragrance and lose my train of thought. This time there were a few other reactions I hadn't counted on such as watery eyes and congestion. I thought, hoped, that it was just an allergic reaction to a strong perfume, but as Sunday came and went, I realized I had caught the crud.

I can't complain much. I don't remember the last time I had a cold/flu, but the timing could have been better. Sunday morning my wife and I had a speaking assignment in Church in a nearby town. Fortunately the bulk of the systems didn't hit until later in the evening. Unfortunately, my youngest daughter was in a production of the 10 Virgins at Church. I was so sick by then I couldn't bring myself to go and expose other people.

Wednesday, I'll be travelling to Ft Worth for some important training for my work. As much as I'd rather not expose people at work, I really need to go to the training, so will go, handkerchiefs in hand, and hope for the best.

I did finally hear what is going on at work. One of our field personnel is leaving this month and I will go back to working in the field. I will work the entire eastern half of the Texas panhandle. It's a huge area and there is no way a single person can adequately do everything that needs to be done, but at least I will be getting large travel checks.

See you on the dusty trails, roads or whatever.

Twist

PS

I've been off work for two days with fever, chills, aches, sniffing and sneezing. After waiting two hours in the doctor's office today, the test results were positive for the flu. I'll be off work the rest of the week. Hmm, I've lost five pounds, I'll be off a full week of work.

I'm sure there's a downside to this somewhere.

Twist

Love and Hate

I still don't know anything more about my job, so, since I've been tagged by Nene, here's my list of 5 things I love and 5 things I hate.

Love
1 Swinging in a hammock in the shade on a summer day with or without company
2 Classic musical movies (does that make me sound gay?)
3 Laying on the floor by a heater vent
4 Baby animals
5 White Shoulders perfume on, what else, soft white shoulders

Hate
1 Tobacco smoke
2 Having my time wasted by someone else. (I do fine by myself, thank you very much.)
3 Having to do plumbing or auto repairs
4 Conflict, arguing, contention
5 Having a body that’s wearing out, with pieces parts that drop, crack, sag or just break down.

Did I mention surveys like this on either list?

Twist

Winds of Change

Right at 5pm last Friday, the manager sent an email to everyone in my office. Bear in mind that my manager does her job mainly from an office 120 miles away. The email basically said that our main field person will no longer be working in the field. She will, effective Monday, be working customer service backup and out of state accounts. Coincidentally, that happens to be my job, among other things.

Now I know I'm not getting fired. No one escorted me from the premises on Friday with my worldly belongings. But there were not enough field personel with the re-assigned coworker there before. I have to wonder now, though, whether or not they will be putting me back into the field for my last year of work.

I have mixed emotions about going back out into the field. My vehicle is not quite as depenable as I've had in the past. The area to work is massive. When I started at my job 24 years ago, we had approximately 20 people doing what two currently attempt to do. An advantage is that the travel checks get large for reimbursement on mileage. Field personnel get to be on their own quite a bit while they are out, but they are monitored quite closely by Big Brother. More downsides include occasional late night and weekend work, plus being the bad guy in collections up close and personal.

I reckon tomorrow will be an interesting and revealing day at work.

Gee, I sure love the weekends.

Twist.

Mello Yellow

I have been at the same government job for over 24 years now. Next year I will retire from this job, even though I will look for another to supplement my retirement income. My biggest complaint through the years is that management does not treat employees as well as customers. All measuring criteria is meant to find out just exactly what you must be doing wrong.

I was given a packet of observations of my work for the past 3 months and told to review and sign them, in preparation for a workload review. One of the observations decided that I must have wasted over 5 hours on the specified day of the observation. Now I get to work usually about 15 minutes early, I don't take regular breaks, I bounce from one desk to another wearing different hats as I work all over the office. Everyone from customers, to employees in ours and other divisions and management in both divisions come to me to ask me questions and get help. I don't surf the internet at work. I don't get more than a couple of personal phone calls in a week.

I was prepared to battle my manager over this negative review, but the closer I got to the meeting, the less important it seemed to make my point. We had the interview, I simply stated what I was doing, signed my papers and left the interview. The overall meeting was very positive. I actually trained my manager when she signed on with our agency several years ago. I don't know whether this will affect me at all one way or the other, but I decided that a year from now, I won't really care.

I'm off now for the weekend. My ulcer doesn't have anything more to worry about. I think I'll kick back and enjoy.

Twist

Honey Do's

I had passing thoughts of looking for a new hiking area around town, something not too far away, but still with that certain je ne se qua, the wild something in the city. I had also kicked around the idea of going to a shooting range or looking for a new geocache.

What I finally decided, was actually decided for me. Mrs Twist, son C_ and his fiancee' T_ all decided that this middle of January would be a good day for a garage sale. Mrs Twist also decided that a refrigerator that used to belong to T_'s mother should replace the one we had. I'm not sure what all the fuss was about to tell you the truth. Our old fridge has done fine for 24 years. I reckon it would keep on keeping it's cool for awhile yet, but there you have it.

T_ also decided that she needed new living room furniture and the we should get her old ones, that were in pretty decent shape. Needless to say, I spent most of the day today moving refrigerators in and out of place, trucks, the garage and then moving couches, shelves and miscellaneous odd pieces of domestic paraphenalia till the only thing that I can't move anymore is my back.

Reminds me of a famous short prayer, " Lord, bless ole Parley, he's shore tired."

If anyone needs me I'll most likely be right here in the easy chair.

Twist.

Traditions

Everyone, it seems, has their own holiday traditions. For some it starts the day after Thanksgiving with decorating or, in my case, shopping on Black Friday. But shopping aside, one of my favorite Christmas/New Years' traditions entails travelling 1200 miles from home to visit my in-laws.

Now that may not seem like a strange or different tradition, but once we get there, we like to drive 70 miles, then hike one more over rough terrain to get to the cave. The hike alone is a little rigorous, but add an eighty pound pack and it gets very interesting.

At the cave we setup camp just inside the mouth and cook dinner, shoot BB guns and explore the depts of the cave as time permits. We always have a wide array of lamps, candles, LED headlights and the like to see in the cave. This experience alone inspired one full chapter of my book. Shooting BB and pellet guns won't match what my family does in Utah, (wish I could be there with you to blast a few dozen Christmas ornaments.) but we get a great deal of satisfaction just the same.

Whatever your traditions for Christmas and New Years, I hope you all have good ones.

Twist