Personal

I tried, I really tried. One of my sisters is an author. She says that she gives books 50 pages. If the book doesn’t hold her interest by then, she cuts her losses and abandons the book.

Her policy inoculated me from guilt at not finishing this book. If a professional word-person gives me permission not to read a book that I don’t want to read, I’m taking it.

This book was a free give-away from Amazon to Kindle owners. I didn’t waste any money on the book, but it sure cost me some time. I gave this book a lot more than 50 pages. My Kindle says that I was 80% through, before I finally put it down in confusion. I just couldn’t finish it. I tried, but then I started daydreaming about cutting my fingernails or ironing my shirts. It says something about a book when you make excuses not to read it. It says: “I don’t want to read this book.”

Cold tries to be an international thriller. But it fails to thrill. I take some of that back. In fact, it has a very gripping scene of revenge that was horrifyingly violent. But it didn’t come until the second or third chapter, which is not where you should put a scene that it supposed to grab the reader’s attention. The rest of the story is hard to follow. The characters are not sympathetic. Maybe it’s too British. Maybe I don’t understand English culture enough. Maybe I know too much about world politics to be wowed by jumping from one country to the other.

Maybe it’s me.

Or maybe it’s just a poorly-written book.

Either way, I’m not finishing it.

I am a sock nerd. Actually, I am a nerd in a lot of respects. My friends will remember the love note to my favorite pen, which, by the way, is still my favorite style of pen six years later. And now I’m writing about socks. There is no literary value to this post. There is no insight into human nature. There is no interesting story about my work. Just stop reading now. This will go downhill rapidly.

I used to deal with sock chaos. I wear black dress socks to work every day, so I, like many men my age, have a lot of black socks. When a pair wears out, we buy a new pair. So over time, we build up a collection of black socks. But although they are all black, calf-height black socks, they often aren’t all the same brand, so there are slight differences among them. So what? you ask. Black is black, right? Socks are socks, right?

Yes, a normal person would respond. However, I am not a normal person. Therefore I must answer with an emphatic: “No, you fool. Not all socks are the same!” You just can’t wear socks that aren’t exactly the same brand. I can’t explain it, it’s just that way. Every laundry day was a mess: pairing up socks, finding the correct mates, dealing with orphan socks, it was all just torture. This went on for far too long.

Stop reading. This is getting embarrassing.

Every few years, I purge my socks. I buy 10 pairs of new black socks, and throw out the ragtag collection that wastes so much of my time and attention. But soon a sock gets lost, another gets a hole, I replace some, and soon I’m left with the same mess that I was originally in. I seemed to be doomed to repeat this sock tragedy forever.

But then I discovered this sock:

Darn Tough look like normal dress socks, but they are just about indestructible. They’re comfortable. The spandex content keeps them from falling down. They’re long enough so that when I cross my legs, no one can see my ugly white legs sticking out. I could go on and on.

Seriously, stop reading. This doesn’t get any better.

I love these socks. My children received Darn Tough socks for Christmas last year. My younger son was skeptical at first, but now he’s a convert. he takes advantage of the fact that due to the wool content of the sock, they don’t have to be washed after every wear. TMI.

Sure, they’re more expensive than generic socks that I just to wear. But these are guaranteed for life. I own three pairs of these socks. One sock recently developed a tiny hole around the big toe, which my wife unfairly blamed my toenail for. I don’t know what she has against my toenails. There’s a history there, you don’t want to know about it. Anyway, I mailed the poor sock back to the company, and they sent me a brand-new pair.

I could go on about these socks, but I’ll close with one more tidbit: they’re made in the USA. So my sock obsession is a jobs program for US manufacturing. Is that pathetic sophistry enabling my mental disorder? Maybe. But I still highly recommend Darn Tough Socks!

..at least in East Lansing. Normally, I would say that this is a good thing. However, the recovery has bitten me in the butt.

We planned to sell our house and buy a condo. This was our big home leave project.  While still at post a few months ago, our agent told us that selling our house would be easy, but buying a condo would be hard. We laughed and thought how silly that statement was. How hard could it be to buy a condo? we asked.

We are so delightfully naïve.

First, we spend several days getting our house ready to sell. I’m proud to say that we have kept the house up very well over the years: we replaced the roof a few years ago. And we did it right. Many people take the shortcut of putting new tiles over the old ones. That works in the short run. But it also kicks the can down the road. The next time the roof has to be replaced, the job becomes twice as hard, because the next guy has to take down two layers of old tiles, not just one, plus replace any boards that have rotted away in the years that you didn’t look at them because you were too lazy to do the job right in the first place.

Plus we have a new water heater, a new refrigerator, new front-loading washing machine, we fixed the back-yard fence, and called the roto-rooter guy every year to clean out our storm sewer pipe (I hate you, Norwegian maple in my front yard. Not only do you drop helicopters all over the place in the spring, dump approximately seven million leaves on my yard in the fall, but your roots invade my sewer pipe. If you weren’t so pretty and provide such magnificent shade, you would have been firewood years ago).

The cleanup and “staging” of the house took several days. My study never looked so good:

Even the kids’ bedrooms look great. They are usually decorated in a style that can be described as “21st century chaos.” But they cleaned up great:

The real coup was the basement. We purged 20 years of accumulated crap stuff, and turned one room into an underground living room. This was 100% my wife’s work. She is a genius.

We thought that we were ready to make the big move.

Then we started looking at condos. What a shock.

Not only are there very few properties on the market, but the one or two that we like are priced too high. We’d be facing a mortgage payment that is almost the same as the one that we now have. What a shocking disappointment. We could easily sell our house, of course, but finding a condo to move into would be a huge challenge. We see that now. Our agent was right. We ate a lot of crow as we realized what a challenge it is to find a good condo in East Lansing.

Luckily for us, we aren’t desperate to move. We have the luxury of stepping back and waiting for a year or so to make the move. So, if we don’t find the right place, we can press the “pause” button on the plan to move.

On the plus side, I have a nice clean house to live in now, and without a stressful move on the horizon, I have some extra time to relax in my house and enjoy my home leave.

Rebel forces continue to intercept food aid.  American humanitarian resources are inadvertently supporting the insurgency. Authorities admit to being stymied in their effort to direct aid in accordance with administration policy. 

I have an e-ink Kindle with the “special offers” function turned on (which means that I was too cheap to pay $15 to turn it off). When the Kindle is off, it displays advertisements. Usually, the advertisements are for books.

Amazon is a retailer, which means that their marketing department is a crucial factor to their success. The company’s business model focuses on promoting products to consumers. They make money when I buy stuff from them, so it’s in their interest to promote products that I want to buy. They supposedly pay close attention to everything that I buy, and make recommendations for products that the company thinks I would also want to buy. Usually, they are spot on. But in the case of the book promotions on my Kindle, somebody is screwing up in a big way.

For some reason, the books that my Kindle promotes are books that I think would appeal mainly to a female audience. I don’t know why I get these recommendations. For some reason, my Kindle thinks that these books are something that I would want to buy.

This is a recent recommendation:

“A sexy suiter. An Irish castle. Her cynic’s heart doesn’t stand a chance.”

There is simply no way in hell that I would ever buy this book.

Or this one:

“When Ella falls ill, can her perfectionist husband and atypical son keep the family together?”

Ella, I’m sure you’re a nice gal, and I wish your tight-assed husband and special needs child all the luck in the world, but I don’t care whether your family stays together or not, and I’m not going to waste my time reading about your agonizing experience. Nothing personal.

This one is really special:

“These operatives aren’t afraid to put their lives on the line. Can they put their hearts on the line, too?”

The first sentence looked kind of interesting, but the second sentence just screams “girl book” to me.

This one bugs me on several levels, beginning with the grammatical.

“In a world at war, can three sisters find peace?”

The title of this book is really messed up. It’s like the joke about the camel is a horse that was designed by committee. I’m wishing you luck as I’m waving you goodbye? I don’t “wave” anyone goodbye. I “wave goodbye to” people, though. Is that what you meant? If so, then why didn’t you write it like that?!

As far as the topic of the book, the war aspect is appealing, and the juxtaposition of “war” and “peace” in the tag line is clever, but I really don’t give a rat’s ass if the sisters find peace or not. I have enough problems of my own, I don’t want to waste my time reading about other people’s problems. Especially imaginary people’s. Reading about the imaginary problems of  imaginary people just means “waste of time” to me. Not something that I want to spend my time reading.

I’m sure these are fine books, but they really don’t appeal to me, and I’m not sure why Amazon thinks that I’d be interested in them. I certainly won’t purchase them. Amazon, why do you think that I’m a woman?!