T'is the Season to be Jolly! Next Year We are Sending Money!


by John T Jones, Ph.D. - Date: 2006-12-02 - Word Count: 784 Share This!

Most of you who diligently read the musings of Taylor Jones, the hack writer (me), probably haven't noticed that I haven't been writing lately. The reason is not that I've ran out of ideas-I always have a million of the critters-it is because that writing gives me a pain in the neck.

I thought about getting a laptop. Then I could sit in front of the TV watching one of our five Spanish language channels and pound out articles by the hundreds without hurting my poor neck which is already tired of lugging around 10 pounds of slow-moving neurons incased in a bone shell.

Another reason that I slowed down was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. I decided to get into the top 20 writers, those with the most articles at www.ezinearticles.com, which I easily did. Then I found that didn't really mean much to me and therefore the drive to write and write and write faded away. So did my top 20 rating.

Well actually I was hurt. I though that the editors at www.ezinearticles.com would send me little attaboy notes saying things like: Congratulations! You are one of our top twenty writers!

I did get a note when an article was rejected because of self-aggrandizement which is against www.ezinearticles.com's policy. When I reminded the editor that I was not really running for President of the United States, but that I was just trying to be funny, the article was accepted.

Must have been a new editor. So much for humor!

So I haven't been writing much lately.

Besides, I DO HAVE A LIFE!

Why, for Christmas I had to take a full year of VCR tapes of the birds of South Jersey, edit them, and transfer them to DVD. I spent 1994 diligently filming the birds and I wanted the rest of the birders in my family to have an edited copy on DVD as a Christmas gift.

The bird project did not go smoothly. I first put my video on DVD-R. Then I decided in order to edit in the best fashion to put the tapes on DVD-RAM. When I went to copy them on my computer it said, "WHAT IS THIS CRAP YOU WANT ME TO COPY!" Then I found that I could actually edit the DVD-R disks. So I put the video on DVD-R again but with better editing.

In other words, I spent two days three times to finally get the video on the right disk so that my computer would allow me to make copies for my children.

Another Christmas gift idea was to take thirty years of 35mm slides and make them into a sideshow with my granddaughter singing opera in the background. I soon found that copying 35mm slides was not a high efficiency process with my scanner. I got the number of slides down to 600 and shipped them off to California along with my granddaughter's CD and a CD from my friend, Al, who lives in Ocean City, NJ.

Al sings songs like The New Jersey Devil. I figured that Al would give a break to the opera.

Well, my wife and I set out for Wal-mart on the best shopping day of the year which is the day before Thanksgiving.

I wrote an article on this that subject last year. I explained that on the day before Thanksgiving the stores are fully stocked with new merchandise and part-time t'is the season to be jolly employees who have not yet learned to be rude and defensive. It's a shoppers paradise.

Where is everybody else the day before Thanksgiving?

They are either at home cooking or are shopping in the food stores. They don't do their Christmas shopping until the day after Thanksgiving which is, as everybody knows, the worst shopping day of the year. I think it is called Black Friday.

It took my wife and I some time to wrap the gifts going out of state. These were packed in boxes. I used my hand truck to get my boxes to the car and from the car into the postoffice where Maribel, the clerk, stamped and labeled and added postage to eight large cartons.

That's when I found that I had the wrong address on one box. My youngest son had moved. That package I took home and relabeled it and took it back to my friend Maribel. She took my money and handed me a stack of tracking forms. She asked if I could use a computer.

The cost of mailing the stuff was about one-fourth of the cost of the gifts or about one-tenth the National Debt.

That is why, next year for shore, we are sending money.

Well, I've got go get out of here. I'm getting a sore neck.

Merry Christmas!

copyright©2006 John Taylor Jones, Ph.D.


Related Tags: christmas shopping, birds, best, birders, slide show, slides, 35mm slides, dvd-r, dvd-ram, wal-mart

John T. Jones, Ph.D. (tjbooks@hotmail.com, a retired VP of R&D for Lenox China, is author of detective & western novels, nonfiction (business, scientific, engineering, humor), poetry, etc. Former editor of Ceramic Industry Magazine. He is Executive Representative of IWS sellers of Tyler Hicks wealth-success books and kits. He also sells TopFlight flagpoles. He calls himself "Taylor Jones, the hack writer."

More info: http://www.tjbooks.com

Business web site: http://www.aaaflagpoles.com

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