I’m Not Sure What This is Going to be About Yet

I just received notice that I have been writing, (and, yes, I still refuse to call it “blogging”) on WordPress for five years.  During that time I have written 283 stories which were viewed 65,171 times by 17,738 vistors.  The only prodigious thing about those numbers is, visitors usually viewed more than one story when they visited.  In fact, 3.7 stories per visit on average.  That makes me feel good.  You have to assume people read some of the gunk I posted on here without being directed to it by an email that they were sent when the story was posted, or maybe even searched for something and got captivated by some of the other stories.  

Like every “blogger” on WordPress, I check my stats all the time.  I always hope for those days when hundreds of browsers discover me and I become the next “big thing.”  The latter hasn’t happened yet, and I’ve only had a handful of days in five years where the traffic on my site tallied in the triple digits.  Okay, maybe only two or three days in five years.  Okay, only one particular day, September 25, 2012.  On that day, there were 181 views of a story entitled, “How to Back Up a Boat Trailer- Conclusion.”   However, there was only one visitor to part one.  So how could that be?  Shouldn’t, logically, they be reading part one and then on to the conclusion?

Well, further investigation will show that almost every “hit” on the site was from search engines looking for an image.  The lead pitcure on the story was this:

 

I thought that was damn funny, and fit in with the story consummately, but that’s not what they were searching.  One-hundred seventy-eight viewers searched “Monster Truck,”  and this is what they found, full-size from the original story:  

So, I think it is safe, extremely safe, to assume that none of those 178 people bothered to read the story at all.  It was at once demoralizing and disheartening.  Or was it disparaging and dispirited.  Maybe it was dampening and crushing.  Or even humbling and humiliating.  How about you just choose one, because, as an old college professor once told me, “If you use an ‘and’ between two descriptive words, it just means you haven’t decided which one to use.”  (I played that back word for word from my mental tape recorder.  Maybe it’s a CD player now.  Probably more like a digital file.)

In the first year of “What The Fluffy” the site received 14,549 hits.  As I’ve stated before, I don’t consider this an impressive number.  I mention it only to point out that in the four years since, I have averaged 12,656 hits per year.  In my defense, I didn’t write 173 stories like I did the first year.  Things got in the way.  But it seems I have a small following that still reads some of the blather I put up here, so it keeps me at it.  And I thank all of you, even those I have offended, of whom, hopefully, not much.

The other inconsistency with this blog is that it never seems to stay on course.  On my “Who is O. Leonard” page, I state the blogs purpose:

“My simple purpose for this blog is to force myself to write something every day and, in turn,  maybe entertain a little or tell you something you didn’t know.  A daily dose of bitching, complaining, historical facts, current events, and plain ol’ opinions.  Nothing is sacred.  I find as I get older, my opinions make perfectly good sense.  Most of the time I can’t believe everyone else doesn’t agree with me.  And let’s face it, after Monday and Tuesday, even the calendar says WTF.”

Having read that again, I guess the “course” hasn’t slideslipped all that much.  It has tended to be more autobiographical of late than it started out, but….wait….click on those digital playbacks and I hear another recording that says you should write about what you know.  Since what “I know” is aptly limited, you get stuck with more of the life experiences than maybe you would like.

Finally, (Yes, we’re coming to the end of this post.) you might say that five years isn’t that long.  It could be argued that you’re right, but I say that it’s about the same length of time, on average, of every job I’ve had.  I’ve had some for slightly longer and some for slightly less, but, on average, I stayed with each job, in a 40+ year “career,” five years.  Doing the math, I’ve had six major jobs:  A customer service rep, a retail store assistant manager, a bill collector, a town clerk, a customer service rep again, and a billing clerk.  

Doesn’t sound like a wildly successful career, not a lot of material to draw from, but you’d be wrong.  Well, maybe not about it being a wildly successful career. WTF.

Right now I am in “early retirement.”  What that means is I’ve reached the age of 62, no one will hire me, I have a lot of free time on my hands, and the “free” part means I don’t get paid for it.  Other than a monthly Social Security check, which doesn’t quite pay for anything, and doesn’t get deposited until the third Wednesday of every month, for as long as the government feels like sending it.   Here’s hoping they want to do that for a while.  

 

I’ll Have to Survive the Shock First

By this time tomorrow I’ll be trying to figure out how to spend $1.5 billion dollars.  That’s right; I’m going to be winning the Powerball tonight.  I’ve already decided I’m not going to claim the money right away.  I’m going to wait a few days and see if I survive the shock.  I take the cash option so I will only see about a $930 million, and then after sharing it with the Feds and the State of New Mexico I’ll only have a few hundred million, but I think it will be enough. 

What I don’t understand is why if I get all five numbers but not the Powerball I only get a million.  It doesn’t sound right to me.  Why should “second” prize be so much less than the top prize?  Shouldn’t it be like $20 million or something?  Only 25 people got all five numbers in the last drawing on Saturday.  I mean, the odds of getting five numbers are pretty out there.  And, no, my math isn’t wrong because three of the winners got $2 million because they paid the extra $1 for the Power Play which doubles your grand prize win and can be as much as 10X the amount of lesser wins.

What I also noticed in the Wednesday drawing is that no one from New Mexico was in that group of 25.  There were 18,315,365 winners on Saturday, January 9^th.  That’s a lot of people.  Of course most of those got four numbers or less and the amount you win for getting 3 numbers and the Powerball, for example, is $100.  If you get one number and the Powerball you win $4.  I’ve won that prize four times now.  At least I can claim to be a lottery winner.

Powerball is played in 47 states lotteries.  Last October they changed the game to pick five numbers from 1-69 and one Powerball number from 1-26.  The intent was to increase the size of the jackpots, and that seems to be the case, but it also increased the odds of winning.   Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are now 1 in 292,201,338.  

So should you play your own numbers, or let the computer pick them for you?  According to the Powerball website FAQs, 70-80% of purchases are computer picks, or “quick” picks.  In relation to that, 70-80% of the winning tickets are quick picks.  That’s interesting.  I play my own numbers, but I have some quick picks for tonight’s drawing.  I’m playing the odds.

And the lottery sends you a W2-G form because the IRS will take a withholding amount out of your big win immediately.  Obviously at the highest tax rate, so you’ll have the rest of the year to make all those charitable contributions and other deductions so you can get a refund.  Right.

Anyway, I’m going to think positively until the drawing tonight and then I’ll make whatever plans are necessary.  I’m thinking I’ll need to hire an accountant, investment counselor, and lawyer, buy an island in the South Pacific, and get off the grid as soon as possible.  If I win $930 million everybody is going to want a piece of me.  But I’ll have to survive the shock first.

Creepy Creamer and Plastic Butter

Get this.  I just got paid for a copywriting job.  Okay it was only fifty bucks, but I got PAID for writing something.  Actually, I didn’t write it, I just made the copy readable, but still, I got PAID.  Now I’m torn between framing the check because this is the first time I’ve been paid for a writing job, or cashing the check, hoping it won’t bounce, because I need the money.  Or I could wait until tomorrow to see if I’m going to win the $1.4 billion PowerBall.  Yeah, I’m going to make a copy of the check, frame that, and deposit the check at the credit union.

On to other discourse.  Over Christmas dinner, discussion emerged about “plastic butter.”  When asked to bring some butter to the table for the dinner rolls, I brought the ususal “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” churn style, to the table.

“Don’t you have any real butter,” I was asked.

“Does anyone know what “real” butter even tastes like?” is my routine response.  Of course in order to name something “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” you would have to know what real butter tasted like, right?

I can’t really say that I do.  I remember that it comes in sticks, thus the phrase “a stick of butter,” and not in plastic tubs, but that’s probably the extent of my knowledge.  My father always had a stick of butter with saltine crackers at dinner when I was growing up, but he had to be in a real good mood to place a slice of real butter on the saltine and hand it to you.  It was an event that was as rare as an unassisted triple play in major league baseball. (It’s so rare because it requires one defensive player to personally take out all three players himself.  It has actually happened once every 9.5 years since 1869.)  And before plastic tubs were the vogue, margarine came in sticks too, but my mother called it “Oleo,” because it was known as “oleomargarine” back in the day.  Fact in our house was the butter was for the wage earner and the oleo was for the rest of us because the oleo was considerably, and still is, cheaper than butter.  Not to mention that my father was smart enough to know that butter was, well, real butter.

Margarine as we know it was invented in France around 1853.  It’s basically a fat emulsion and it was white, not yellow.  They used to package it with a yellow dye you could mix with it because people didn’t like the idea that it looked like lard.  What you got was a light yellow, sometimes a dark yellow and even striped oleo.  In 1955 they removed the artificial coloring laws and they were able to mix the stuff up to be yellow when you bought it.  Then television advertising led to the war to see whose magarine tasted the most like butter, when by that time few probably knew what real butter tasted like anymore.

We use “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” and “Country Crock” sort of interchangably in our house.  Here’s the listed ingredients for “Country Crock”, also churn style:  Purified Water, Soybean Oil, Palm Kernel and Palm Oil, Salt, Lecithin (Soy), Vinegar, Natural Flavors, Vitamin A, Palmitate, Beta Carotene (Color), Vitamin D3.  Here’s the listed ingredients for real butter that we also have in the fridge: Sweet Cream and Salt.  You decide.  Is the “Crock” plastic butter or not?

This same person in my immediate family has an aversion to what she calls “Creepy Creamer.”  In almost all cases this is a concoction of fat, oils and “natural flavors” that is made to taste like real cream.  They may add a few vitamins in there to make it appear healthier, but it’s clearly not.  There is no real cream in it.   They even have “non-dairy” creamers that don’t even need refrigeration.  I don’t even want to know what’s in that.

The point of the discussion, as it ensued over Christmas dinner, is that all this plastic butter and creepy creamer and other processed foods that are made to taste like something they clearly are not, could be one of the major contributors to our declining health in this country.  It could be responsible for the increase in Diabetes, and allergies, and Cancers, and immunity.  WTF.  This was Christmas dinner.  Why were we discussing this?  I spread plastic butter on my dinner roll and tried to change the subject.

Tonight is President Obama’s last State of the Union Address.  Yes, I’m happy, and no I don’t intend to listen to it, although it’s supposed to be unlike any other.  He will probably address the audience at some point as “My Fellow Americans.”  John F. Kennedy coined the phrase actually, but it wasn’t used until Lyndon Johnson said it in a State of the Union Address.  I can still hear that Texas drawl.

And one other thing you probably didn’t know, and just as probably, don’t care, is that it wasn’t called the State of Union Address until 1947.  Prior to that it was just the Annual Address.