My Wild and Crazy Week

Once a year, Ellen goes to New York for a book festival for almost a week, like this last week typically leaving Sunday morning and returning Thursday evening.

I will note in passing that when Ellen goes to New York, she takes the bus; when I go, I take the train. One wonders what conclusions can be drawn from this (Gender differences? Political differences? Attitude toward spending money differences?)

Anyway, during that week I am ON MY OWN. Able to do WHATEVER I WANT. Free to do it WHENEVER I FEEL LIKE IT.  Of course, except when I have to go to work, or work on my classes I teach, or this last Sunday except when I am with my younger daughter, Tamar, watching the last two episodes of Game of Thrones for the season.

Did I mention that Tamar was selected by the Bethesda Young AFCEAN chapter as the Industry Young AFCEAN of the year last night? Pretty special.

Back to me, I did go to two Nationals baseball games, one Tuesday night and one Thursday daytime. Since Ellen was in New York I needed dates for each game.

Tuesday night my date was Ed Meagher, who was a career Government employee before he retired working in the IT field much of it at the Veterans Administration. Ed will be appearing in an ad for President Obama relating to Veterans. Thursday daytime my date was Richard Henry, a fellow President George W Bush appointee. As you can imagine the conversations were different Tuesday and Thursday, I will talk a little bit about those two conversations in a few days.

By the way, Ellen mentioned that while in New York City, she went to a book signing by Dan Rather. The relevance to me is that many years ago I went to work for a company called PC Telemart which was started by the guy who invented the phrase “The Paperless Office”. This was going to be the company I worked for where I would get to share in the ownership and makes tons of  money.

One week before I started at PC Telemart, I got a call from one of my future employees, Robin Rather, who called in tears to tell me that the owner was being verbally abusive and telling me how much she looked forward to me starting. I subsequently learned that the owner would do things like throw chairs at employees who irritated him. I spent the last few months at PC Telemart answering calls from angry stock holders.

So Ellen told Dan Rather about the fact that Robin worked for me years ago and he asked her to write this down and give it to him so he could pass it on to Robin.

Back to my wild and crazy bachelor week, so what else could I do? As I have noted to my friends, I wasn’t so great at being a wild and crazy person before I got married so it turns out that after over 30 years of marriage, I haven’t gotten any better at it.

Finally, in a moment of weakness, I threw away all caution as well as my new found respect for avoiding carbohydrates and dropped by the Harris Teeter near my house, went boldly to the hot bar and took an inappropriate amount of the cooked Macaroni and Cheese. Hopefully Ellen isn’t reading this entry, or at least didn’t get to this point. If she hasn’t no one should mention it to her. My theory is that anything I eat that she does not find out about out has no calories and no carbohydrates; this is my own personal Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal as applied to diet and one of the few principals I am determined to continue to follow.

On a side note, I read where Disney is going to support the healthy food goals of Michelle Obama by decreasing their junk food advertising. Does that mean the unlimited Fried Chicken and Macaroni and Cheese at the Hoop-de-Doo at Fort Wilderness will be curtailed? Yikes. Better get back there fast.

Anyway, that was about it for wild and crazy activities during my wild and crazy week.

I did find out earlier this week that my wonderful other daughter, Miriam, will come down to visit on Father’s Day so all four of us will spend the day together, and watch the Nationals crush the Yankees that afternoon. Far better even than eating Macaroni and Cheese by myself.