GreatRidge Station

Last week, my Proverbs 31 wife and I went our for a meal. It was a celebration in honor of completing her coursework for her Masters’ Degree. After our meal, we got into the vehicle, and straight ahead in the glow of my headlights, we could see the license plate on the car parked across from us.

It read: [HRY*###].

I said, “Now there’s good a license plate: Hurry.” To which my loving wife responded: “Huh?”

“There, on that license plate. Hurry-number, number, number.”

“Oh, this is a glass half-full, glass half-empty thing. I don’t know how you see Hurry in that. I don’t get that at all: HRY. I see Hurray!”

“No way. I’d never get hurray out of that.”

“Well, I’d never get hurry.” At that point, she made some reference to my incorrectness, and then we laughed.

And so it goes. My wife is ever more cheerful and optimistic than I am. God wired us up very differently. And all of life is a personality test.

About a year ago, I wrote about the $500 pencils. I did not understand why anyone would consider such a purchase as either 1) necessary or 2) not the stupidest waste of money to be found.

Oh, wait. I may have found a competing product.

Years ago, my piano teacher once described a man so lazy that “His self winding watch ran down.” Not an easy thing, since such watches (even in those days), wound themselves with an occasional walk down the hallway or while handwriting.

Well, lo and behold, if that is too much work, we now have the Orbita Watchwinder, for only $295. Just so you know–this only winds self-winding watches–no stem-wound or quartz movements need apply.

The whole concept seems almost surreal to me. And that is proof-positive that I am not, and never will be, a member of the leisure class. I’ll take care of my own self-winding watches, thank you very much.

By the way. This is in no way meant to impugn the firm that sells these products. I’ve purchased a few items from World-Lux, and since they are an amazon partner, I can tell you that they appear to be an ethical company, and one that is easy to work with.

David Weinberger, in his recent book Everything Is Miscellaneous makes the point that we have a difficult time categorizing things in meaningful ways. That said, I’m fascinated with some of the category names that bloggers use to describe the miscellany of life.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but here goes.

• Christa Bannister (St. Paulite and best-selling author) uses “Blah, Blah, Blah.”
• Claytonius, the self-proclaimed “postmodern puritan,” uses “curiosities”
• Gideon Strauss, whose column is perhaps the most random, yet best structured that I read, uses “apophthegmata” (whatever that means).
• Mackster999 seems to dispense with labels all together. Mack, Mack, Mack, don’t make me get the blog gestapo after you.
• Modern Mechanix, a delightful site full of yesterdays technological dreams, uses “useless technology”–but I admit that this is not a completely fair evaluation.
• Yap Family in Vancouver, a site I enjoy, though I have no idea how I found it in the first place, uses “general”–probably in the sense of “non-specific” rather than as a military rank.
• Indexed, a startlingly original site that explains all of life on 3×5 cards, uses Uncategorized. Curiously, this is the only category name that is capitalized. That probably means something, but I don’t know what.

As for me, well I’ll be filing this under “Stuff & Detritus.”