I remember we mostly wandered around looking for an affordable hotel. Eventually settling on a place that had a pool. Then we spent most of our time wandering around small shops as they were the only thing that didn’t have an admission charge. I got to see the falls up close, and was surprised by how close they let you walk to it, and how unprotected it seemed. As young as I was, it’d been no problem for me to jump the short railing and be over the falls in seconds.

The second vacation was when I was a little older. We once again went back up to Erie. Something about the size of that lake seemed to appeal to my dad. It was sort of like going to the ocean for us, since we were so landlocked in our little farming community. There must have been a sort of freedom to that. But on this trip, we had family who kept a boat up there, so we went out on Erie. I remember that even though my ability to swim wasn’t strong, I didn’t really seem bothered with no longer being able to see shore. Dad on the other hand was somewhat terrified. It’s probably the only time I can remember sensing him being afraid of anything. Anyway, he didn’t really go out with us much more after that. Meanwhile I went back out many times on that trip, and went back up there several times in later years.

So thinking about it all lately, I’m realizing that I don’t really take vacations. Anymore, when I’ve taken time off, it’s been to go weddings of friends, where I’m usually cast in some role, or heading back to the Midwest to visit family and friends around some holiday. I don’t really seem to take vacations much anymore. I think the last time I took a full week off it was to be in a wedding, and the time before that was to help someone move across country. Otherwise I take off a friday here or there, or wait until the industry shuts down for a week. During these times I run into people from other nations who think I work too much, as they regale me with stories of the weeks and months they’ve been off work so far on whatever trip they’re on.

This gets me thinking. Capitalism, you know “the American Way of life”, has left us without a Democracy. We now live to work, or are unemployed. Vacation time is frowned upon. Healthcare is so expensive that many times it only takes one illness to bankrupt someone for the rest of their life. Taking off time to even address health concerns or spend time with your family, or enjoy life, is all frowned upon. So we get sicker and sicker, yet keep working up to the day we die.

I watched as my dad died. He had a perfect attendance record at the company he worked for. Had almost 25 years in, something that’s unheard of–and I’m not even sure possible–for people coming up today. He collapsed one day at work and was rushed to the hospital, where he died a week later. My grandpa was told he had to retire as he was becoming too old to insure as a worker. So he retired and spent a little while playing golf and taking care of his property. Seemed mostly in good health, except that most of his family had moved away, or were dead at this point. And so one day he sat down on the couch and died.

We’ve become a capitalist controlled society that no longer enjoys life. We live for the sole purpose of work. Our purpose is to make a couple citizens enough wealth to last a millennium. We are the modern slave. We are expected to be machines. And we are machines in a time when everything is disposable. If the machine is damaged, throw it away, when we used to try to fix broken machines.

I’m not sure how long this model will be sustainable.

I sort of thought that we’d had most of the demographic covered, that is, until I exited at my stop. There I saw an old queen with pink and white hair and a massive case of the shakes, pushing a grocery cart onto the train. He sat down next to Vic, so I stood outside until Vic saw me, just so I could give him a thumbs up and smile.

For some reason after that I felt good. I seemed to have a smile stuck on my face on the walk home. I guess I kept finding it funny. Oh well. Odd day.

I’m not sure if they’re connected, but there seems to be a lot of gun play in the graffiti this week. One is obviously against violence. The other is possibly embracing it, but doubtful.

The only solution at this point is for all parties now involved to stop playing the game. Unfortunately, one party will most likely refuse, because they’ve been playing the game for many more decades, pushing players away as they too realized that they were tired of being an unwilling participant of the game. Their actions, while in the past seemed to confuse me, now seem to be completely justified in the scope of recent events.

War mongers think that they must battle everyone in order to gain everything, but always tend to lose sight of everything they’ve lost in the process of trying to reach the goal. They claim that goal is peace, but how many times have we heard that justification for war? Peace can never be attained until the war mongers no longer want war. Until then, the rest of us have to either fight back, surrender, or remove ourselves from the war in some way. I don’t feel like surrendering as I don’t feel it will stop the war, so I’m trying to remove myself from it, in the hopes that the war monger turns their sites on another target.

So I was able to close the original ticket and the ticket for the first error with the ticket resolution system. But this caused an issue with a survey portion of the ticket system, which caused a new ticket to be generated. So now I’m something like five tickets deep into helpdesk, four of which have nothing to do with the original issue that crashed the Mac.

One-by-one I worked with helpdesk to resolve all of the tickets. And since the final ticket was to resolve the survey portion of the ticket system, and it’s now resolved, I got to go through and answer surveys for ALL of the tickets, finally getting to the last survey. The last survey was about the ticket to resolve the issue with the survey system. Our helpdesk is always quick to respond and very courteous, at least when I’ve dealt with them (I’ve heard horror stories from coworkers), so I always rate them very high in the surveys, but there is an additional comments box. So I added:

Having to submit a ticket regarding the errors received when trying to close the ticket regarding the errors received while closing the original valid ticket is a bit ridiculous. We’ve spent many more man hours trying to solve an issue with the helpdesk ticket system than was spent resolving the issue that caused the resulting trainwreck.

Perhaps the best part of this is when they call me from India, and they are even laughing at the ridiculousness of this.

For those that don’t understand the above image, it basically says that they raised a new trouble ticket to resolve an issue that was raised when trying to close the prior trouble ticket. So one issue now becomes two, for now. The last time this happened it raised at least three other trouble tickets when trying to resolve why they couldn’t close the first. What happened last week is the computer refused to reboot. It kept stalling on startup and leaving me with a blank blue screen that Jobites refuse to call a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) because it’d show similarity of Macs to PCs. Anyway, IT figured that they solved that issue last Friday so I had an email this morning asking me to close the ticket. Clicking the link, the system that handles trouble tickets couldn’t find the ticket and gave me an error. I sent that error message to the helpdesk who opened a new ticket (that you see above). Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy.

-EDIT TO ADD:

In testing items that were “fixed” by the prior ticket, I found that they weren’t finished and require additional help from IT, namely an IT admin password. SO, another trouble ticket has been raised to fix the issue of fixing the fixed issue. Or something like that.

Each area of town has its own art that is somewhat unique to that area. The art of a neighborhood can be sticking to a particular style, or even sticking to a particular theme. In Silver Lake, a lot of the artwork is around equality and rights. In Echo Park it seems to show happiness in the midst of hardship. And in East Hollywood, it’s littered with cartoons doing various things like dancing with balloons and enjoying life.

Like the odd Homer Simpson I posted awhile back, this may have been painted by the same artist. It seems to depict two possible scenarios. The first is that the Michelin Man is fighting with a tire. The second, that I see here, is they are sharing a joint. Considering the neighborhood, I’d almost lean towards a weed tie-in.

Regarding the Michelin Man on the right, I’m not sure what he’s doing to that tire. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

The rest of the country is bombarded by blizzard after blizzard. Los Angeles was the warmest we’d been in the past year. This.week we’re back down in the 30s and 40s at night. It’s no wonder our trees are just as confused.

I wonder what this is going to do to our growing season. California’s economy is already in a very bad place, I’m not sure we can handle a hit to our agricultural industry.