“One of these days I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter to all the good friends I’ve known, and I’m gonna try and thank them all for the good times together though so apart we’ve grown.” (Full disclaimer: I didn’t write that– Neil Young did.) So to all my friends, casual acquaintances, and complete strangers who just randomly happened across my website, I give you my (hopefully not too) long letter.
“Goodbye 145276, hello 140513” After driving the same UPS truck for the past 13 years, I got to work one day and found a different truck parked in my spot. I approached my center manager who explained how he took 145276 to a farm upstate where she can relax and briefly enjoy the fresh air before being violently crushed in an industrial hydraulic press and unceremoniously dumped into a nearby scrapyard. My mathematically inclined readers might notice that 145276>140513. Yes– somehow I managed to receive an even older truck.
“Panama: A man clap trap cabana nap” is a world famous palindrome AND accurate title for our spring break festivities. While I’m sure some alert readers and every half sentient AI bot out there will proudly proclaim “That’s not the same backwards and forwards!” I counter with “prove it isn’t a palindrome in some strange language such as binary or Bostonian!”
We choose Panama for a vacation for two main reasons. Number one: I’m turning into an old man who really likes to only book direct airline flights from Denver International Airport. Number two: I was filing my taxes through Turbo Tax last year and it specifically asked me if I was the owner of any previously undeclared Panamanian bank accounts. The answer was “No,” but it got me thinking that I should at least look into the idea a bit.
Our flight landed at the lovely time of 4:56am local time. We got through customs in five minutes as we didn’t check in any luggage and at 5:08am we were trying to find the metro station. The only person we could find in the area was a lone taxi driver who flat out denied any existence of a metro station and kept showing us videos of a monkey island he could drive us to. Despite his best efforts we located the metro station, completely avoided Monkey Island, and made it to our hotel safely.
I don’t like to brag, but our Airbnb was located on the 62nd floor. (Honestly, I didn’t even know we would be that high up until we got there.) On the first night in the room I stood out on the balcony and pointed to the “medium old” part of town and said we should walk over there in the morning. The problem is that when you are so high off the ground things don’t look nearly as far away as at ground level. (Incidentally, this applies equally well for regular people, flat Earthers, and Halo enthusiasts.) This led to an excess of sunburn, crankiness, whining, and hunger by the evening. And it wasn’t just me this time. Aside from this slight hiccup, the trip was a success as I got to torment my offspring by starting off every conversation with the local population with the cat joke. Seriously, they REALLY hate when I do that.
Nothing brings a family together like a good ole fashioned elaborate fake holiday ruse. My brother-in-law and his family came to visit us in June and we wanted to stage a surprise birthday party for his daughter at the end of their stay. We were so afraid she would catch on to our plan we felt the best, no, truly ONLY, option was to spend the entire week talking about our plans for “Mountain Time Zone Appreciation Day.” Being from Michagan, they had absolutely no way of realizing this was a completely made up holiday. We kept sprinkling in details of the holiday all throughout the week to keep everyone unaware of our true intentions. In the end, to be honest, they didn’t really care too much one way or the other.
In Community news, (“Six seasons and a movie!”) the movie is stuck in a holding pattern worse than at Newark airport during the annual Sopranos convention. But in my own special tribute to the show I found the creepiest image of the human being mascot from the show on the internet, printed it out, and quietly slid it into Isabel’s mellophone case while nobody was looking. While that may seem beyond completely random, the sophomores in the band were tasked with wearing predominantly white outfits that day and it seemed like the most logical outfit to achieve this goal. (NOTE TO READERS: I add stuff like this so when I’m crazy old I can look back and remember the fun times when I was more than just a head in a jar on a forgotten shelf in the basement of my ungrateful great great half son in law. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GET THAT SPIDER OFF MY JAR! THAT’S ALL I’M ASKING FOR!)
This summer I was looking through our automobile stable and decided it was time to add another stallion to the mix. OK, ok, maybe a Nissan Leaf isn’t really a “stallion” of the car world. Let me think of a more appropriate analogy here. I’ve got one– this summer I was in the market to add a solid third-string car to our roster when I got wind of a veteran left outfielder with perhaps a few decent years left released on waivers due to an over-hyped prospect coming up from the farm team. Now the world of electric vehicles in Colorado is, well, unique. A few years ago we test drove a Nissan Leaf for two hours and the dealership didn’t even call me back. Due to reasons beyond my understanding, the situation completely reversed and Nissan began a policy of basically giving away Leafs to the first 500 people who came in to check out their newly built dealership in Fort Collins. This is a solid vehicle– over 700,000 have been sold since 2010. No, it isn’t perfect, but it gets me to work and really all I need to do is plug it every couple of weeks to fill the battery with electrons, positrons, or tachyons. (AUTOMOTIVE DISCLAIMER: adding the incorrect type of subatomic particle to your electric vehicle can cause decreased acceleration and possible destruction of the space-time continuum.)
I’m going to wrap things up with an original, insightful, and possibly true nugget of wisdom I shared with a young woman on my route who was getting married in September. I told her that a new marriage is 85% having a roommate, 10% having a financial partner, and 5% enjoying “other” activities. I really believe she took it to heart more than my other advice which was to be married in their own shallow graves like Dwight and Angela from “The Office.”