The Wasting of My Time

As I get older I do find myself thinking about time.  Not wishfully, mind you, or even wistfully, as other's seem to do.  There are those who lament about not having enough time, how they might been able to do more if only the hours hadn't started to run out.  This is not me.  Now, I'm not old, middle-aged to be sure, but neither frail nor feeble.  If continue taking care of myself and everything keeps ticking the way it's supposed to, I figure I'll probably squeeze another 35 years out of my life.  With medicine advancing the way it is, that number might actually be higher, which, as long as I have my facilities, wouldn't be bad.  Nary a day goes by without my seeing some octogenarian seeming to be much younger then their biological age.  That's how I want to be.  I've already told my friends if I end up turning into a professional invalid they have my blessing to put me, and the world, out of my misery.

What I do seem to be doing more and more is tracking the length of time it takes to accomplish a task.  For example, when I got Gert I worried that her puppy feet might have a problem with my staircase, so I put down a runner.  Now that she's 4.5 years old and Lilly is almost a year old, I decided the carpeting was no longer necessary.  It took between 15 and 20 minutes to do the job.  Once again you can see my staircase.  It's beautiful.  My house is 109 years old and the staircase is painted white with ivy stenciling on either side.  That 15 to 20 minutes was completely worthwhile.  However, what I'm disliking more and more is spending my time on things that have little or no worth.

These things tend to be those I am obliged to do, like losing 1 hour and 45 minutes of my time while I waited to have the Pa State Inspection performed on a new car.  Having to stand in line at Self Check-Out is another one.  In fact, here lately standing in line has become one of the biggest wastes of my time.  It happened at the movie theater when I went to see Maleficent because they only had one ticket register open.  It happened at K-Mart on Wednesday morning.  If you start adding up all of those minutes you waste waiting it's rather amazing.  I did something to my lower back a few weeks ago and decided to go to see my Dr. about it.  I waited for 12 minutes before they took me back to wait in an examination room for another 15 minutes.  In other words, I actually saw my personal care physician 27 minutes after my set appointment time.  In that half hour I could have taken the dogs for a walk.  I could have made some notes on a future blog, spent some time with Rosetta Stone working on my German, or even mowed my front yard.  Do you think they cared about wasting my time?  Hell no.   

    

Beef-aroni Blowout

I like to cook and there are several foods I'm very good at preparing, according to a number of people.  One of those is my pasta sauce, which is very vegetable chunky.  I never puree.  I believe that if you like your pasta al dente, then your sauce should have a bit of bite as well.  As a result I never buy anything which is jarred, canned, or frozen, most especially the pre-cooked pasta dishes.  Let me be more specific.  If "Boyardee" is in the name, I treat the product the same as if it were a Bio-hazard.  In other words, I avoid it like the plague.  Others eat these products though, most likely, I suspect, those with childish palates.

The foods were originated by Ettoire Boiardi back in the mid-twenties.  Supposedly, the name was changed to Boyardee so people would pronounce it correctly.  this may be, but let's be honest, back in 1928 Boyardee both looked and sounded a lot less Italian then Boiardi.  I hope that back then it also had more nutritional value then it does today.  Let's be honest, what sits on supermarket shelves today is just a lot of bad, bad, bad calories.  You want to scare the crap out of yourself?  Check out the expiration dates and see how long that pasta has been noodling away in that tomato goo.  You can buy a can today and let it sit in your cupboard until 2016.  Would you really want to eat something which has been sitting in a can for that long?

And the deal of the day is?

Now, let me be honest, when I was a young child my Mom did serve me Chef Boyardee for lunch, most often it was Spagheti-O's.  Even back then I could tell the sauce was bland.  Every body else's Mom was serving up Beef-aroni, but all I ever got was Spagheti-O's, and some sort of ravioli stuffed with phony, pureed meat. I don't remember when, but at some point my Mom wised up and realized that meals needed to consist of more then fat calories dosed heavily with sodium.  You would think in today's world with nutritional values labels on everything parents would buy smarter for their kids.  They don't.  I stopped by my local Giant Supermarket today and the Boyardee section is one of their specials.  Wow, they have more quantities available on an endcap.  It's cheap way to fill a little belly.  That's all it is.  Just think, for the current going rate you could have one helatious Beef-aroni Blowout.