Other than my birthday, and the weekend of the Daytona 500 (and the two Talladega races and the Southern 500 and the Bristol Night Race and…well, you get the point), this is my favourite weekend of the year. It’s great that there is a day to celebrate people like me.
For all of us who celebrate, Happy MuthaFuuuu…. Oh wait, that’s not this weekend! (Come on, admit it, you’re thinking that for me, every day is MUTHAH’S Day!)
I’m KIDDING!!! In reality, I hope that everyone takes the chance to celebrate or remember their mothers this Sunday. Happy Mother’s Day to my own Mom and my sister, Cathy, who is the mother of my nephew, Jack (who somehow went from a tyke to a young man about to graduate high school OVER NIGHT!!!!) and to all the mothers out there.
It’s been a pretty quiet week but I did learn one thing: Never underestimate the power of disconnecting for a few hours. Last Wednesday, I felt like I was on the verge of having vertigo symptoms again. I chalked it up to maybe being under too much stress of the job hunt. I also wondered if I wasn’t stressing out over trying to get motivated to get to work on my To Do list, which seems to always get longer and never shorter.
Rather than just power through and end up in worse physical shape. I decided to take Thursday off. (I would have and probably could have done it on Friday but I wanted to make sure I got ready for Saturday – more on that later).
I can’t say I totally disconnected for the entire day because I checked my email about once every hour or so. I also accompanied my Mom into Ingersoll to help her get groceries. However, I stayed off social media for almost the entire “work day” and spent the remainder on the day on the couch, watching Red Dwarf.
I’ve been PVRing Spin City and been watching the odd episode or two during the work day. I considered making that my “binge watch” today but figured I wanted to watch something that didn’t have commercials. I had bought the entire series of Red Dwarf a few years ago and decided to get back into watching it. (I’m dying to know what happens to the crew, especially in the last seasons.) I watched the last couple of episodes of Season 5, the entire sixth season and about half of Season 7 today.
I remember not liking the later seasons (Seasons Four and Five) as much as the first season or two. However, as the series moves along, it must have found its form again. I’m really enjoying the tales being told by Lister, Rimmer, the Cat, Kryten and Kochanski. Speaking of her, Chloe Annett who played Kochanski in Season 7 and 8, was born exactly two years after me, so she is what I like to call a “Seven-Two-Fiver.”
Besides wanting to talk in a British accent and using the term “smeg” in casual conversation, it was really nice to not have to worry about checking the job boards or being tempted to just doom scroll, hoping (in vain) to find something of interest. In a way, it was like checking out of what passes for reality in this day and age. I feel a lot better now than I was on Wednesday afternoon.
I find that in the afternoons, my energy level really dips. It’s not so bad when I’m at work and feel obligated to keep going but when I’m at home, I find it is too easy to put off any major projects, etc.
Hmm…maybe I should work through lunch on tasks, and then from 2-3:30 or so sit down and watch TV. Maybe I would be more productive that way.
Believe it or not, I still maintain this is a holdover from working so many 5 p.m. – midnight (which is to say 12:30-12:45 a.m. by the time we got out of there) shifts at Blockbuster back in the 1990s. I would come home with all the adrenaline of trying to get the store closed down and the figures balanced and would stay up for about another hour, hanging out on the Internet (which was SOOOOOO much more interesting back in the 1990s.) I used to sleep from 1 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. every day I worked that shift and I don’t think my system ever recovered. It probably hasn’t helped that I tend to nap in the afternoon on weekends.
On Saturday from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., I am heading over to Ingersoll to the Public Library to join other members of the Heroes of Zorra Project represent at Oxford Local History Day. I have created some videos for previous events, so I have compiled them and will be using the compilation to highlight the men and women of Zorra Township who have served in Canada’s military. I know there are a couple of presentations being made so if anyone from Oxford County or the surrounding area wants to learn more about the history in their backyard or around the corner, stop on by.
Speaking of local “history,” although from about an hour west of Ingersoll, my Mom has been watching this show on HGTV called “The Emily Michelle Project.” While the host, (the titular character of Emily Michelle) says she works out of Strathroy, my Mom would tell me that there were shots of my home town of Glencoe, usually of the water tower. Last night, I was upstairs, talking to my Mom and sure enough, it started showing scenes of the grand metropolis known as Downtown Glencoe. She may have a store in Strathroy but from the looks of things, she lives and/or has a workshop in the old Dairy Bar in Glencoe. Not sure what the real story is but it was pretty cool to see Glencoe on TV. “Hey, that’s where Kurns had their store. That’s where the Why Not Shop was. We used to live down that street!”
As most of you probably already know, media mogul Ted Turner passed away earlier this week. While I couldn’t give a rat’s @$$ about the pseudo-“journalism” outlet known as CNN, I was surprised to remember just how many areas Turner touched that I do care about. He helped give NASCAR another platform with NASCAR on TNT during the 90s and 2000s, and Cartoon Network and World Championship Wrestling (more on the latter later) sponsored cars during the same period.
Turner helped to bring Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels to the screen in 1993 as Gettysburg. I’m not saying my family and I single-handedly made Turner his fortune but we definitely contributed a few bucks due to the number of VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray copies of the film. It was my Dad’s all-time favourite movie and certainly one of mine as well. Fun fact: Turner played Waller T. Patton, the great-uncle of General George S. Patton in Gettysburg and the prequel Gods & Generals.
No blog entry from me regarding Ted Turner would be complete without referencing his involvement in professional wrestling. His purchase of Jim Crockett Promotions (subsequently rebranded as World Championship Wrestling) in 1988 changed the course of professional wrestling. With Turner at the helm, WCW was set to challenge Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) for wrestling supremacy and sparked what would eventually become the Monday Night Wars.
As anyone who knows me (which should be everyone reading this) would attest, I could probably still write several thousand words on what went wrong with WCW (trying to recreate the WWF roster but having too many that had bigger egos than work rates, deviating too much from an organization that, it could be argued, had some of the best wrestling in North America) but Turner helped WCW become a much bigger mainstream entity than Crockett could have ever dreamed.
NASCAR. Civil War. Wrestling. Heck, while he and I would certainly have been on opposite sides of the 1992 World Series, I would have liked to have met Ted Turner. I’d like to think he and my Dad might have lunch some day in the Pearly Gates Cafeteria and talk about their mutual interests as well.
All right. That is another blog for another week. As always, if you read something that you wish to comment or converse on, please drop me a message on Facebook Messenger, and I will check in again next week.
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