I'm not sure who said "Don't sweat the small stuff." I know some Phd wrote a book or two about it. Usually, I can't do a thing about the big stuff and wasting my time and energy sweating about the big stuff gets me nothing except indigestion. My wife handles all the big stuff, anyway.
It's the small stuff that keeps my interest. I wonder where our daily newspaper gets its rubber bands. When my paper is 'rubber-banded' in one, it is always dirty. Do they buy them that way from a used rubber-band place or are they using so much ink that just putting one on gets it all dirty? I personally like the ones the Post Office uses. They are wider, thicker and almost always new and clean. I use them around the house for all sorts of things. I put the newspaper ones in the trash container before I even get back in the house.
I have never figured out why anyone would enjoy using toilet tissue mounted with the leading sheet under the roll. It makes no sense at all. When the leading sheet is over the top, it is easy to get at. No groping around under the roll, usually mounted in an awkward, hard to reach spot, anyway.
When I'm out at someone else's home or at a restaurant, I feel compelled to correct any roll that is improperly mounted. It is just something that would nag at me the entire time I am there if I didn't do that. I do not tell other people [oops] about that little quirk.
I also find myself often taking a paper towel and wiping down the sink splashes in restaurant and airport restrooms. I just do not understand how some people can be so thoughtless of others.
I always wonder of the bread they put on my table at a restaurant includes the bread someone else didn't eat.
I wonder about doctors who make me sit for an hour and a half in the waiting room with sick people ever had to do that themselves.
I read the obituaries every day. I'm Ok if most of the people listed are older than me, but I have a bad day when most are younger. I have come to realize that at my age, I have more descendants now than I have friends. They're going faster than I like. My wife said, "Ed, stop worrying about this. Just slow down, you will last longer. And Ed, be nicer to the kids. They will probably be choosing our rest home."
It annoys me that the streetlights on Ramon Road are the most unsynchronized lights in California. I am convinced that they are designed to force stop me at every single intersection, even when there is no cross traffic. There must be a hidden device on my car that some sadistic traffic controller has placed there, just hoping I drive on Ramon.
I think he sits there, watching me pull off Highway 10 on his traffic computer and then with cackling joy, pops the red light button at every light I approach.
I have yet to figure out how a golf ball that I hit straight down the fairway can suddenly pick up speed and veer off at a sharp angle, usually ending up hitting a roof of a house where the occupant is standing in the yard. Never a vacant house, where I can quietly sneak by.
I have tried to trick the ball and compensate by aiming at a house, but then it goes exactly where I aimed it. It is demonic.
Sometimes, a little article on an off page in the newspaper stays with me for days. I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating over it. Here are two that had me awake at 3 AM this morning.
Just the other day, I read that the California Governor, in a cost savings effort, was planning on releasing another 6,000 inmates from the state prisons.
In another article, cleverly hidden in a different section of the paper, it was announced that the state will stop its parole monitoring of low-level offenders after their release. This is being done, in order to reduce the number of parolees returning to prison for violating their parole, because if they aren't monitoring the parolees, the state will not know if they are violating the terms of their parole.
Does anyone but me, most of the legitimate citizens of Desert Hot Springs and most of the owners of convenience stores throughout the state feel like these are really, really bad ideas?
