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I was standing in the self checkout line at the local supermarket, chocolate cake in one hand, paper towels in the other. The two purchases aren’t necessarily related!

Before me the usual rag tag assortment of people who can’t cope with the self checkout process. Why they subject themselves and, more importantly, me, to the experience is something I couldn’t say but I *have* seen some of the same folk struggling with the concept before.

But heck, this ain’t rocket science. What’s so hard about reading a three word instruction then pushing the correct button? Followed by swiping things through one at a time and putting them on the scales?

I will admit that the supermarket checkout *does* throw a spanner in the works by expecting some kind of personal identifier, either a loyalty card or a phone number. I refuse to play that game except to the extent of getting the ‘discounted’ price attached to the identifier. I find that punching in a random phone number works just fine and doubtless there are people who will, next week, sit down to their thanksgiving turkey with not the faintest inkling that my purchases helped them accumulate the loyalty points required to snag a free one!

So anyway, I was standing in the line half an hour ago watching yet another assortment of people trying to cope with a process simple enough that I reckon a particularly dull chimp could master it within seconds when it occurred to me that they really need an intelligence test to gain access to the shorter line. And then it occurred to me that in fact the entire process itself *was* the intelligence test; all that is lacking is the reward or revenge at the end of the process.

What I think is needed is a system reminiscent of the system at customs and immigration; the machine weighs the subject by a variety of criteria; how many times did they have to request a restart because they pushed the wrong button? How many seconds elapsed between scanning one item and the next? At the end they get a tag to follow the green arrow or the red one.

Green leads to the car park. And red leads to a small padded room with an automatic lead dispenser! Some people are just *too* stupid to live!!!

Or whoever it was who went through the Wdevs database and deleted the spam I wrote about the other day.  I’d just resigned myself to another hour or two of click, click, confirm, click to clean out the latest round of spam but, lo and behold, it was gone!

Thank you!

As if it isn’t bad enough copping 160 spam emails now they’ve spammed my Wdevs[^] blog. 160 spams in an email inbox are relatively easy to delete; not so when it’s on .text.

Nope, I’m not complaining about Wdevs - they put up with my posting, which is more than I would! Nonetheless, this ain’t doing my RSI any good *cue soppy music on violins*

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Well actually it was yesterday but who’s counting? Apart, that is, from a thousand harried election officials being hounded by anxious almost made its?

Australia is the only other country where I’ve voted and attendance there at a polling booth on the day is mandatory on pain of a 50 buck fine. That being the case there’s nothing all that remarkable about having actually voted in Australia; one assumes that everyone has.

Not so here in the US. With a voter turnout of only 40% it’s a toss up whether someone has bothered or not. So, at least here in Arizona (I can’t speak for anywhere else in the country) they hand you a little sticker saying ‘I voted today’. It nonplussed me for a moment but then I stuck it on my forehead and wore it all day at the office.

Laughs all round! Well, what did they expect when I became a citizen? That I’d not bother voting?

An interesting exercise. A combination of the familiar with an interleaving of the utterly strange! No surprise seeing candidates for House and Senate. Not even much of a surprise seeing candidates for Governor (a rather different office here than in Australia). But further down candidates for School Board? Approval for the continuation of judgeships?  What a disappointment there was no candidate for The Office of Dog Catcher!

Ok, I’m being a little facetious. I’m just not used to the voting process being quite so granular. I’m sure familiarity will breed complacence.

Fortunately the ballots here are real paper and you mark your choice using a pen. No risk of illegitimate chads a few months hence. No touch screen computers either. I still have my suspicions about the machine one feeds ones ballot into which apparently counts it on the spot. Call me old fashioned but I really don’t like the idea of computerising something as important as voting. I’d be a whole lot happier if they were counted by hand with a bunch of rival scrutineers agreeing that this ballot really was for so and so.

But I reserve the real shocker for last. It came as quite the surprise a couple of weeks ago when my wife received her sample ballot to see that it had a map printed on the front pointing the way to the polling place. ‘Yes, that’s right’, she said, when I asked, ‘you can only vote there.’  I was incredulous. ‘You mean that I can only vote there and nowhere else? That’s the only place on the whole planet where I can vote?’  Apparently it’s so.

Hmmm. Much to get used to! I’m sure I’ll cope.

Like, I imagine, a lot of people, we have a change jar. Few things are worse than clanking around the house like some rusty old ghost so we’ve both got into the habit of emptying the loose shrapnel out of our pockets as soon as we get home.

On the other hand I’ve become quite fond of snacking on Cheetos at the office so I’m putting change in the jar with one hand and taking it out with the other. It’s become quite the ritual when I get home to peer into the jar and say ‘oooh’ if I spy silver.  Sonya’s said more than twice that she’ll never get to Europe at this rate; as often as she piles the odd dollar of silver into the jar I nick it for snacking.

I can’t help noticing this week that the jar is stubbornly bereft of silver. I think she’s taking that Europe trip to heart!

Many years ago my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I thought for a moment and replied ‘I wanna watch’. So they let me!

*boom boom*

Yeah, an old joke. I must have been telling it at (in)appropriate moments for at least thirty years so it should come as no surprise whatsoever that when, the other night, we were talking about Christmas over dinner, I trotted it out. Andrew mulled it a moment and then let out a half embarassed laugh along with a sheepish grin. Sonya, however, looked at me and said, in a voice of incredulity, ‘Really???’.

We went house hunting today. To be honest, we’re not sure we can afford to be in the housing market just yet but you’ve got to at least throw some numbers around. It seems that it’s rather easier to do it here in the US than it was back in Australia; the last time I refinanced my house there they did the arithmetic, concluded that as I had a mere 19 years until legal retirement age that they couldn’t manage a mortgage (in blocks of 5 years) longer than 15 years. Seems it’s against some law or other here to discriminate on the basis of age. Score one for the US!

And we’re both sick of living in a two up, two down and two in the middle condo. I can’t fart without everyone in the place knowing about it! I swore black and blue about twenty years ago (when I last lived in a flat, apartment, condo, call it what you will) that I’d never live in one again. Houses only for this little black duck. And now look at me!

Toss in the fact that until a couple of months ago I was required to mail an AR11 change of address form to an obscure address in London, Kentucky, if my permanent address changed, which requirement has now gone away and we have no good reasons not to go looking! Not, I hasten to add, that the US is crawling with secret police checking on the whereabouts of every alien, legal or not. Nonetheless, there’s always the nagging doubt that some important piece of immigrant related mail will fail to arrive if I dare to move residence and suddenly I’ll find myself out of status. No such doubt any more. Being a citizen has its advantages!

So we set off house hunting. Pretty easy to do - the buggers just sit there on their blocks of land! *boom boom*. Sonya wants to stay within the Horizon High School district though I have to say that given the quality of output that I’ve seen they don’t overmuch impress me. But what do I know?

Thus to a funnish afternoon of driving aimlessly around looking for little signs stuck on street corners pointing toward an ‘open house’.

It’s all done very differently to the way I was used to in Melbourne. There every house for sale is open each weekend until sold but you only have a half hour window when it’s open. Thus the need for planning. Grab the Weekend Age property guide, turn to the suburb of interest and map out four hours of driving. Gotta get to that address by 1:15 because the agent moves on to the next house at 1:30.

Not so here. The agent arrives, opens, and sits for four hours. And then, apparently, that house won’t be available for casual inspection for another month! *shrug* That’s the way they do things here so one goes with the flow.

We went through this exercise just after I arrived here four years ago and I got into the habit of pointing out that the master bathroom was larger than my bedroom back in Melbourne. Not much of an exaggeration. Of course, first house we went into I *just* had to say that! Laugh from Sonya. I can still make her laugh!

But there was one house we looked at (way out of our price range) where the master bedroom really was larger than our entire condo. The bed looked like an afterthought in that sea of carpet!

We did find a couple of houses we liked so I imagine it’s time to talk to the lenders. Of course, the way Sonya said that word I thought she said ‘time to talk to the Linda’s’ and I found myself wondering why on earth we had to talk to a Linda I hadn’t met and just exactly what she had to do with what we could or could not afford!

I haven’t died. I’m just going through one of those periods where one hasn’t all that much to say. Well, I could write about some of the antics Andrew’s been up to lately but that way lies the possibility of my blog turning into a ‘Chronicles of Andrew’ and really, he’s the one who should be writing that blog.

I’m told that posting about a blog hiatus is one of the better ways of ensuring a hundred blogworthy things will happen; let’s see shall we?

Found at my desk yesterday morning. It’s easy to see the high esteem and respect with which my fellow workers (Kathy in this case) regard me!

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