Thursday Thought-The Ultimate Custodian

People rarely think about facility managers, or as we used to call them, custodians. I had the privilège to meet and work with a man who set the standard for the best of the best when it came to caring for the building that housed the TV station for which I worked.

Tom was a retired air traffic controller who played ice hockey. His brother worked at the station, so I think that’s how Tom got the custodian position. Now, Tom didn’t mop the floors or clean the bathrooms–we hired a cleaning service to perform those functions at night. But he took care of the building.

Tom arrived at work before anyone else (pre- 24-hour TV era). He went into every single office and checked the lights. Every single morning. A burned-out bulb was a personal affront to him. Once a week he flushed out the drains in the restroom floors to make sure they were clear.  We never ran out of toilet paper, paper towels, or soap. In the winter, he tooled around on his little tractor keep the driveways and parking clear of snow. In the summer, his little tractor converted to a lawn mower, and he kept the grounds immaculate.

His wife Bea was a sweetheart and always made the best ham loaf for our potlucks.

He eventually retired from the job, and although we had some great guys in the position afterward, no one ever reached Tom’s level.

I thought about him the other day when I was getting ready for my daughter’s wedding and pulled out the table cloth his wife made as a wedding gift for me.

MJ Monday-Music: Suzanne Teng

I don’t recall exactly how I discovered Suzanne Teng’s Enchanted Wind  CD on my library’s website.  I might have been searching for New Age music. The license for Enchanted Wind allowed me to download and keep the CD onto multiple devices. I was stunned. After listening to the CD, I told all my friends to download it, too.

I had never heard of a bass flute, much less a contrabass flute.  Beautiful instruments.

This CD is ethereal, and contains no pain. I can listen to it endlessly and not realize time has passed. The music has a way of coiling inside the listener until it become a part of you.

I should check out her other releases.

 

Book Review-Linda Howard: Kill and Tell

Image credit: tieury / 123RF Stock Photo

Kill and Tell by Linda Howard was a little difficult to get into. The first time I read the book I didn’t much care for the heroine–I thought she was unfeeling. She so unlike me, I had a difficult time relating. The hero, IMHO, was a jerk. Let’s just say the characters improved the second time I read the book, and continue to improve with each re-reading.

Why, you may ask, did I revisit the story?

  • Vietnam Vets
  • Political corruption light
  • Black Ops light
  • Family
  • New Orleans (even though most of the story takes place in Ohio)
  • Great first kiss/seduction scene

Of all of the above listed things, the last one was the clincher.  Picture a rainy, steamy, sultry New Orleans night, sitting on a balcony in the French Quarter, sipping red wine, eating cookies with white chocolate chunks, and listening to bluesy jazz being played in the distance. A perfect recipe.

Oh. My.

 

 

MJ Monday-Movies: The Women

My husband thought I would like The Women, a 1939 movie directed by George Cukor, who was known as a woman’s director. The film is based on a play by Clare Luce Booth and adapted for the silver screen by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin.  There are 130 speaking parts–none of them male. The cast is stellar: Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, and so on.

While the movie has only women in it, the story is all about men. That’s all the women talk about. All they think about. Their worlds revolve around the men in their lives. The movie is supposed to be a comedy, a satire of wealthy Manhattan-based women and their marriages. Maybe it was for its time.

Today, I thought it was sad. Pathetic. It also made me angry that the men could be forgiven everything, but if the women had done the same things, they would be ostracized. Again, for the time frame of the movie, this was acceptable.

On the positive side, if my husband hadn’t told me there were no men in the film, I might not have noticed. The actresses conversed directly to the camera as if it were the person to whom they were speaking. The dialogue was scripted in such a way that the viewer understood the male responses as if one had heard them.

Although I didn’t love the movie, watching it wasn’t a waste of time.

Thursday Thought-Self Help: Crucial Conversations

A success coach suggested I read  Crucial Conversation as a way of improving my verbal communication with various factions in my life.

So many people rave about the book. I couldn’t get past chapter three.

Sometimes I feel like there’s a secret society of people who can read books of this ilk and actually understand them. My brain isn’t wired to do that. I’m a smart woman, but I frequently have a problem with abstracts. So many self-help books deal in abstracts that I end up feeling not smart when I try to force myself to read them.

There are just certain kinds of things my brain refuses to deal with. Too bad when I try to explain this to some people, I’m not understood.

One specific “crucial conversation” that went no where.