The Unspoken Commandment(s)

It was the solstice.  Not that the day had any special meaning to me, but I do remember that my facebook feed was alive with well wishes and celebrations of the longest day of the year.  That was the day I got the letter.  

It arrived in a powder blue envelope, smelling of old books, fresh currency, and rose water.  Perhaps it was all in my mind, but it felt heavier than a normal first class envelope.  (Later, I would tell myself it was the weight of the expected guilt associated with it.)  The return address was somewhere in New York, handwritten in beautiful, near calligraphy.  And not some font that’s supposed to fool a person into thinking it was hand prepared.  I mean, you could make out the pen strokes on the letters.  

2:00 AM Christmas Carol Parody

I'm finishing up my first on call rotation, and at least I can say that the building is still standing.  Thankfully,  I got a 45 minute or so nap in this afternoon since the calls started in for Monday in India a little after midnight.

It's late, and I'm awake enough to not be able to fall right back to sleep, but loopy enough to come up with either works of creative genius, or outright drivel.  I put pen to literal paper in an attempt to find out which I would get.  I came up with a rework of the Christmas carol, the 12 days of Christmas.  Now, I know that there were only 7 days in my rotation, but it was 2:00 AM and I wasn't going for literal.

The 12 days of On Call.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to give you just the final verse, so you get all the goodness is on concentrated package.

On the 12th day of On Call, the cell phone gave to me:
12 weeks till next time,
11 different passwords,
10 Punjabi accents,
9 midnight phone calls,
8 crashing servers,
7 locked accounts,
6 kinds of malware
5 search donkeys,
4 windows bluescreens,
3 adobe updates,
2 printers jamming,
and a user who can't get logged in.

I want to sing this around the office Christmas party this year.  Wanna bet how many verses it will take before I don't get any more eggnog?

(Just be glad I didn't choose this one to have an audio companion.  I can't sing for shit.)

Good Gravy, and Good Night.

For those of you who follow my unintentional kitchen antics, here's another for your scrapbooks.

A Short PSA

I don't have it in me for a post of any respectable length today, but I did want to share this.  You know how I've always said that it's not the form, it's the function when it comes to being comfortable in your own skin?  I wanted to put my money where my mouth is.

Suicide by Credit

Credit just may bury me yet.  I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.  I don’t think it would be unfair to say that if it hasn't derailed my life, it is pretty darn close.  Now before you think I’m one bill collector’s call away from grabbing my torch and pitchfork and storming Visa’s headquarters, let me clarify.  By credit, I don’t only mean money.  I mean anything of the “pay for it later” variety.

Dearest Deffenbaugh - A Letter

I have two motivations for writing this.  First, it occurs to me that the fine people who collect my trash on Tuesday mornings must occasionally scratch their head about what they find.  Second, I've talked about publishing a short anthology of both fiction and non-fiction. I wanted to let you, dear readers, know that I haven't given up writing.  I've been busy trying to come up with content for you.  Here's a taste of what I mean to include:

To my caring friends and neighbors at the City Sanitation Department,