All My Heroes Are Leaving

File Mar 18, 7 05 58 PMGetting old is not fun as is, but having to watch all your Heroes you worshiped or followed or cared about start passing away makes it even more difficult.  Of course watching family, aunts and uncles, maybe a parent leave this mortal coil is certainly devastating but second is watching your heroes pass.  Today we lost a guitar Hero for many guitarist, Chuck Berry has passed on.

I can remember being a child and watching my mom on the piano, or my cousins and their band, play Johnny B. Goode.  That’s what we did on a Saturday night in Louisiana and you were dirt poor farmers.  The family got together and jammed.  Chuck Berry tunes, Jerry Lee Lewis tunes, that’s what I remember and that is where I got the music bug.

My favorite Chuck Berry album is London Chuck Berry Sessions.  One side live, he was opening for Pink Floyd believe or not, and one side studio.  The live side showed what a great performer and crowd pleaser Chuck was.  Here Chuck was, in London, playing in front of Pink Floyd fans and he won them over.  Reelin’ and a Rockin’, My Ding-a-ling and of course finishing up with Johnny B. Goode were all powerful and enthusiastic.  I can pretty much sing/talk the whole My ding-a-ling song, that’s how much I listened to that album.  The studio side is great too, containing five great boogie woogie and blues numbers.  Just a great album.

Rest in Peace Chuck Berry.

Posted in Music | 1 Comment

Life is like a….

6DE6DBA4-651A-42A3-897A-F22060029D99-324-0000001A4B49DBBAYou were going to assume i was going to say box of chocolates?  No.  I heard an aptly defined analogy for Life tonight at a business dinner.  Life is like a roll of toilet paper.  When you get a new roll there is plenty of paper, it unrolls slowly and there are no worries.

Over the course of unraveling the roll you deal with a lot of shit (that one I threw in…seemed appropriate) much like life.  As you get closer to the end of the roll it seems to unravel faster and faster and you start to worry about running out of paper leaving you stuck with a dirty ass.

I think the analogy fits perfectly.  I’d have to say that my toilet paper roll is about 3/4 gone and it does seem to be unrolling faster than I’d like.  I’ve certainly dealt with plenty of shit over the years and will continue to do so.

I wonder if I could get some t-shirts made and sell them with the slogan – “Life is like a roll of toilet paper”?  I’m going to hit up my Zazzle account and try that.  Link to be posted soon.

Posted in Philosophical | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Spring Forward

spring-forwardI hate to Spring Forward.  I like the extra sunlight after work but man is it hard to get up for work that first Monday after changing the clocks.  This morning was tough.  If we can’t get rid of daylight savings here in my state I propose we should move the clock changing to 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning.  That way we have Sunday to get acclimated to the new time.  Or better yet we start changing the clock on Wednesday in 15 minute increments so by the time we get to Sunday it’s one hour forward and the physical and mental impact is minimal.

Every year the time change feels like jet lag from a trip to the east coast (I live in the central time zone) to attend an 8:00 a.m. meeting.  Ever have one of those business trips?  Those suck.  The night before the meeting you wake up every 30 minutes to check the clock, worried you’re going to miss the meeting cause its with the CEO or some V.P.  You go into work and start chugging coffee like gatorade after a 5K run.  I say 5K because I don’t think I’d want to walk much less run more than that.

Anyway, I’ve sprung forward and by Friday I should be acclimated.  Like right now it’s 11:45 p.m. but my body thinks old time and it’s only 10:45.

Posted in Philosophical | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Nice bookend to the weekend

IMG_7626Sunday is usually pretty dead as far as planned activities.  Today though was a day for family.  I started the day with breakfast with the wife and our 2 year old grandson.  He is entertaining though a bit headstrong when he gets an idea in his head.  About mid morning my oldest, and father of said grandson, texted asking if I wanted to go see the movie Logan.  Sure why not.

Logan is the latest Marvel movie so of course I’m going to like it regardless but the story was compelling.  I won’t give away the movie ending but the characters are based in the Marvel Universe even though the story is not.  It’s completely out of sync with the MU.  But it was good.  NOT a kid movie.  Language and blood, lots of blood.

After the movie we had plans for the 3 sons and wives/girlfriends to come over and cook steak and chicken on the grill to celebrate the oldest’s 27th birthday.  All 3 sons were present, we were missing only one girlfriend and one step-grandson.  It was enjoyable grilling for them and watching them interact.  They rarely spend time talking with each other, I want them to stay close and be able to text and talk to each other.  Something I don’t do with my own 3 brothers.

The day wound down with catching up on recorded TV shows with the wife.  And now off to read some of my book – Horizon by Tabitha Lord.

Posted in family | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WordPress eh?

I miss blogging.  I was blogging when blogging was unknown (May 2000) and us bloggers were a small community that followed each other and gave comments to each other.  Hell I’m still friends with a number of bloggers on Facebook and Twitter when we all made the leap to mainstream social media.  But I miss it.  Sharing my thoughts and opinions with a few followers and reading their thoughts and opinions was something I looked forward to daily.  Reading about peoples lives as they evolved from single to married to families and such.  I blogged religiously.  I had my own domain and the name evolved from “Bits and Feces” to just “Ozone Ferd”.  I wish I still had all those postings.  That was 10 years, I think, of journaling with pictures and thoughts. I nuked it all and shut it down.  A shame.    *sigh*

So I found this WordPress app sitting in my purchased list on the iTunes store.  I downloaded the app to my iPad and here we are.  Let’s see where this takes me.  Its a new dawn and this is my Bits of Feces.

If you want to know a bit more about me check out my About page.

Posted in blogging | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Nookie

I bought a Nook. Actually bought two. On sale this week, the HD+ with 32 Gb is $179. Couldn’t pass that up. I’ve officially quit using my ipad except for this one magazine subscription that I paid for annually up front. No way to cancel it until next year renewal. I’m liking the nook. It does exactly what I need, no more no less. My ipad was filled with apps that I never used. The nook, I’m finding, is a great reader, great social media reader, and with ability to use google apps from the Playstore, I’m all set. One surprise, it came with a Microsoft office lite version for reading documents but with $15 I can get the full blown version. I think I’m going to take that offer.

Why switch from ipad you may ask? I have an ipad 1. Bought it way back in 2009. So you can imagine how slow it is and apps were starting crash regularly. And i just couldn’t bring myself to spending another $750 or so just to read books and magazines and comic books. So the nook is perfect. And the wife got one too.

Posted in Product | Tagged | Leave a comment

Baseball Season Has Started

Spent the afternoon at a baseball park watching the Patriots play a double header.  6-2 win in the first game and a 6-6 tie the second.  Cody got to close out the second game pitching.  Unfortunately he came in with bases loaded and score 6-1.  He gave a few hits that unfortunately tied the game but in the 6th inning he shut then down.  Vintage Cody.  His hitting was excellent though.  He had a two run double.

All I can say is thank goodness for summer baseball.  High school baseball was very difficult to watch.  The caliber of play was little league level.


We’ll be at a ballpark every weekend from now until mid august.  We’ll make a trip to Atlanta at the end of june and then another trip to ft Meyers Florida at the end of July.  

Posted in family | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Iron Man 3…

I know this movie is making money hand over fist but I’ve also heard that comic book aficionados don’t particularly care for it.  I’m a comic book geek and I thought it was OK but disappointing.

I can see why a lot of true blue comic book geeks would not like it.  It’s blasphemy what they did to the Mandarin.  Just blasphemy.  That is not the Mandarin from the comic books.  Certainly no the Arch-foe that is prominent in the comics.  They were able to weave in Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.) though A.I.M. isn’t A.I.M. without MODOK leading the bee keepers right? (wink wink).  And they threw in extremis which is pretty recent Iron Man stuff.  I’ll have to go back and reread the issues with extremis to see just how close to the story they stayed.  Maya was definitely the Dr. that came up with the stuff and she did sleep with Stark.  But then who doesn’t.  Iron Patriot is not Iron Patriot without Norman Osbourne, Nuff said.  So it seems like they pulled story lines and characters from different years and created a mashup Iron Man story that rambled.

So as a comic book geek I gotta give it an average 3 star movie.  It’s got some excitement but the villain is disappointing.  The Mandarin is just…. ugh.  Disappointing.  Go see it though.  It’s entertaining if you aren’t aware of the Iron Man history.

Posted in Life in General | Leave a comment

Loss of Identity

I misplaced my wallet and now its considered lost.  I know where I saw it last so its in this house somewhere.  But for the life of me I can’t find it.

Panic was my first emotional stage.  Then frustration.  Anger was in there at one point with blame arrows being shot about. I swear its the dog getting back at me for not walking him.  I checked the backyard and under all the furniture just in case.

I’m now in the acceptance phase and spent most of yesterday morning closing accounts. That leaves the dreaded visit to the DMV this morning to get a drivers license replacement *shudder*  I expect to find the wallet once all accounts are closed and DMV has been visited.  That’s ozone ferd.

Posted in Life in General | Leave a comment

Start Me UP

I’ve got to ask myself, am I’m really wanting to get back into blogging?

I was blogging before blogging was cool (2004 or 2005, I forget). Had my own website (www.ozoneferd.com). It’s gone, closed down, but for 5 or 6 years I had a nice little journal of my life. Unfortunately I deleted all that history and information along with the blog. I regret that. I’ve started a blog here on blogger at least twice before, deleted them. After a month I quit. Just wasn’t like before when all my friends blogged and we shared information and music and all kinds of things. It was a community. Facebook was the death of blogging in my opinion. By the way I was on Facebook before Facebook was cool, back when Facebook was more like LinkedIn is today. And I had a MySpace account too, though I never really got into the MySpace thing all that much.

So “Ozone Ferd”, what the hell does that mean? In high school it was a nickname bestowed on me by my best friend based on our proclivity to partake in substances that rendered our judgement impaired. These days it’s an easy userid for all the various places I need to provide a userid because no one would ever use it. I’m sure if you google ozoneferd you’ll find a number of sites, flickr, soundcloud, etc. It’s also become a way of life, a mantra. Something unexpected happens to me – that’s ozone ferd.

So there you go, first posting in blog Mark 4.0. I think this is about the 4th time. Oh wait, I did have a tumblr account once too. Maybe this is Ozone Ferd blog Mark 5.0. Anyway will see how long this one last.

Posted in blogging | Tagged | Leave a comment