So it goes...

Some places are better than others with customer service. It seems in this day and age that you have fundamentally three levels of service. Overly friendly, generally great service. Meh-I'm-just-making-a-buck-for-a-living service Dreadful, awful never-shopping-here-again service. Today I had the misfortune of a number three experience. It was the local Office Depot, where I had placed an order for bookmarks, a placard and some color copies. The service was bad when I placed the order - the clerk had to ask me twice for the flash drive with the files on it because he never saved them to the computer's hard drive.  This was followed up the next day by a phone call saying he needed one of the files on the flash drive and could I email it to him? But he left no email address on the voice mail, of course. I emailed the file back and yesterday later I got an email telling me my order was done. So today I went to pick it up.  And...they couldn't find the or...

As I mentioned in the last post we are in the dog days of winter. It's not March yet, but it's sure not January either. Thank goodness for that. Maybe it's just me, but these long winter nights are causing me to shift things around a bit. I'm a man of routine, but sometimes I get sick of the sameness and shake things up with some change. I think I got all of the winter hate out of me last post, so here are a few things I've found that have helped me through this winter season. I've gone back to writing in longhand and it's bringing forth good things. Thinking back to many of my first days of writing Dirty Shirt , I wrote most of my stories in a notebook and then transcribed them to the computer later. That fell away to where I was doing it all on my laptop. Well, in a fit of staring at a blank screen with nary a thought in my head for too long one night, I thought I needed a change. I picked up my pen and started scrawling words and before I knew it the ...

It was a fairly average weekend. At the same time, I'm learning to appreciate average in ways I've never known before. Friday night I had the house to myself for about 3 hours. Ben had a sleepover and Donna and Sarah had to work. It was a chance for me to write a bit, surf the web, listen to the stereo at my own level and just be alone. I'm one of those people who's very comfortable being alone and tends to want to do too much when it happens. This time I allowed myself to do just enough. It was great. While the alone time was good, it was nice to greet the girls when they got home too. We just had pizza and hung out. I learned there's peace in being alone, and peace in being together with family. Saturday morning was filled with the usual busyness. Cutting the grass, cleaning the house, walking the dog. In the afternoon we  all went down to the east side of Milwaukee for Ian' Pizza  for a kind of belated birthday lunch for Sarah. I had a slice of Mac n C...