Good Things Friday – Loading the Truck Edition

There’s a guy in a rented Bobcat
At the Aurora train station
Loading chunks of asphalt and concrete into a dump truck
It’s masterful
Jockeying the scoop under the pile to maximize the load
Carefully positioning it high over the truck bed
Followed by the drop and the quick flick to empty
Sometimes I wish for a job like that
Where at the end of the day I could say
I built this or
I moved that or
I loaded the truck
It’s date night
Me and Jim are going to dinner then IronMan 2
I can’t wait
Which after almost 20 years is pretty fucking cool
I know I say it a lot
Perhaps to the point of being irritating
But it is pretty fucking cool
Speaking of irritating
I finally got to drive myself to the train station today
After a long week of being shuttled by Jim because of car repairs
This made me extremely crabby
The good thing is
I realized my moods are directly related to
How often I work out
How much alone time I have
How much I have to rely on others
For anything
This is something to really think about as I get older
Celebrated Mr. You Know Who’s 50th birthday in Lake Geneva last weekend
Realized that all of my favorite bar moments involve Mr. YKW
“And the whore will have a Jack & Coke”
“You call your wife a whore?”
“Hell no, she’s not my wife”
AND
“Thank God you’re here, before you arrived the best looking broad in the joint was the one armed junkie whore sleeping on the bar”
We went to a special beer dinner with Mr. & Mrs. You Know Who and friends
Wednesday night
Sponsored by Leinenkugl
It was a fabulous gourmet meal that paired different beers with awesome crazy fun foods
We’re going to do it again next month for sure
There’s a car wash a block from our office
Fancy-schmancy cars in and out all day
Walking to lunch, someone was backing out post-wash
And I needed to wait on the sidewalk
For this small delay I got an amazingly open delightful grin
From an old gray-haired dude in a spanking new Mercedes
It was totally unexpected and made me smile right back
One of those fantastic, unplanned moments you share with a stranger
That stays with you
For days
I finally finally finally hired someone to do our web site
It’s what we do (build web sites for companies)
But I can never get our guys to do it for me
Which is good because we’re busy and profitable
But our web site really sucks ass
Which kills me
But not for too much longer
We got a new comforter set for our bed
It is awesome and soft and comfy
Plus it’s huge – I sleep better because now I’m not fighting for covers
If someone would invent a comforter to prevent snoring we’d be all set
The diner-type joint called Yolk at Wells & Chicago in River North
It’ll put you in a good mood no matter what
I bought a 2-terabyte drive on Amazon last night
To begin storing all the movies and TV shows I’m ripping
It’s such a fun project
Another fun project: Unsubscribing
In the past month I’ve unsubscribed from at least 50
Bullshit industry newsletters, email alerts and daily news bulletins
The ones I never read are gone
Which makes me more likely to read the ones that are truly valuable
“How many mee-nutes?”
That was the wrinkly old Italian dude waiting with me for the #11 bus yesterday
He saw me checking the schedule on my phone
It was cute how he smiled and asked
Then looking up and around, he said
“Chicago…is beautiful, yes?”
“Yes, it is. Are you visiting here?” I ask
“No, I live here 27 years. Beautiful,” he says
Yes it is
I wonder
How to make my job feel more like loading the truck
Simple
More meaningful
Because I realize it’s on me to do that
Every day it’s on me to look up and around
To find the beautiful
In what’s old and familiar
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I am listening to: World Exploded into Love - B. Schneider
I am reading: Nothing
And I am: Loading the truck