Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

So I”m pretty well settled in at TNIJ now. I got the “toss you into the deep end” treatment, which I think is a good thing.
 
And, as loyal readers of The Wisdom know, one of the big benefits of TNIJ is 25-cent Cokes (comparable beverages at TWMBIC are 65 cents).
 
For some reason, it seems, the Coke Gods are smiling upon me. In the machine closest to my desk, every time I drop a quarter in to get me a Diet Coke, the machine spits out two cans. That”s right - 12.5-cent Cokes.
 
I was in there one day with a guy who works on my team and watched him get a Fanta Orange. One quarter = one can. Then I dropped my quarter in … and got the bonus DC. Maybe the company is trying to promote low-cal sodas by offering up the bonus diets.
 
Who knows?

I got this email from a fellow ex-TWMBIC employee after he”d been told I”d packed up for greener pastures:

In my final days at TWMBIC, I got some “I hate to see you go” comments, some “Wow, this seems like a great opportunity” chatter and some “Well, I guess you needed to make a move” stuff (from people who thought I”d only been unhappy since the boneheads in charge destroyed our business group about a month ago).

But nobody captured the proper mood (”Glad to see you left …”) or seemingly picked up so well on the squandering of my talent as this guy - and he left the company a year or so ago.

So thanks, fellow ex-TWMBICer. It”s nice to be appreciated as being underappreciated.

I”d put a hold on our mail while we were down on the coast, with a request to deliver all the stuff today when we got back.

So I just went out and wrestled the stack of very important correspondence out of the mailbox. It included:

• 16 credit card offers
• 9 sale circulars
• 7 pieces of actual mail
• 5 magazines
• 3 catalogs
• 2 of those newsprint “coupon” things I never read
• 1 check from TWMBIC for the 90 hours of vacation time they owed me

Obviously, the check was the best of the bunch. But 16 credit card offers in 7 mail-delivery days? I guess when you check the mail every day, you don”t notice how many offers you get.

I figure the postal service delivers mail something like 310 days a year, which would mean at this rate I get 708 credit card offers a year. If each of those offers threw out a $5,000 credit limit, that”s $3.5 million worth of credit I could get my hands on in a year.

Hmm. Maybe the wife and I shouldn”t pin those hopes on the lottery. We could gather up the credit cards and charge our way to prosperity.

Here, in case you were wondering, is what the BBD looks like when he”s suffering from explosive bowel syndrome:

And this - believe it or not - is what he looks like when he”s starting to feel better:

We call this pose “The Alligator.

Cranking up the laptop to upload the latest batch of beach photos (look for a piece on our swank new digital camera later), I got a Windows notification that a wireless connection was available, so I”m coming at you courtesy of “sanpebble”.

Not that I really have much to say. We went over to Apalachicola today and enjoyed a damn fine lunch at Boss Oyster, which came recommended from my ex-cube neighbor C-Note. They make baked oysters (no, we didn”t go raw) about 25 different ways and serve up this sweet little fritters of cream corn. No, we”re not sure how they manage to fry blobs of cream corn.

The BBD”s explosive bowel syndrome has gone away, although now he”s sick on the can of peanuts he and the Little Black Dog broke into while we were out watching the sunset.

The adventure continues …

Our planned trip to the raw bar in Indian Pass tonight is on hold, thanks to a bad case of explosive diarrhea being suffered by the Big Brown Dog. It seems he”s swallowing too much sea water while playing fetch in the surf. It”s hard to keep him out of the water, though, considering this is all he does when we try to get him to just hang out on the deck:

Of course, the last time the wife and I ate raw oysters, we developed symptoms not unlike what the BBD is suffering now, so maybe skipping the raw bar isn”t such a bad thing.