Thursday, February 29, 2024

Random Ramblings Maybe Even A Rant

 


MMMKAY I got to thinking of things I could blog about and one of my thoughts was about recent changes to my life due to decluttering and several months of a change in how I approach the various things that I collect. When someone collects stuff they do it for many reasons. When it gets out of hand it turns into hoarding or the maintenance of a hoard if the accumulation has stopped. Rarely does the accumlation stop.

Many people get attached emotionally to the collection or some of the idividual items which makes it that much harder to declutter the mess. That was me yep. Also emotions of how the stuff was acquired can contribute. For me it has been a lot of emotional attachment combined with a lifetime of collecting the stuff. Sometimes with the intent of "sometime selling it because it is worth a lot". The problem is you never give up on the stuff and keep it anyway. You procrastinate on finding a selling venue, or place too high a value on it. 

I saw the collections more as "libraries" for whatever media they were. I still see my music collection and videos in that way a library. There is so much I could never listen to, watch or read each and every item in the collection, thus the library label. You have a bunch of stuff you like and would like to experience sometime, even if you never end up experienceing most of it. It is there for you whenever you want. Many people have switched to streaming services and the cloud to store stuff, but the streaming services periodically get rid of stuff or make upgrades to the latest version of something so you can't access the original or in some cases what you want at all becuase they dumped it.

During my decluttering, which I am still in process, I don't think I will ever be totally clutter free, one of the emotional attachment things I cut loose was 90% of my comicbook collection. It went along with a large dinning room table that was much too large for my apartment, 4 chairs, lots of electronic equipment, and a small entertainment center on wheels, boxes and boxes of VHS tapes mostly home recorded off the air tapes, but some pre-recorded commerical product tapes, boxes of magazines, a pole lamp that was shorting out a couple of verticle cubbie organizers storage units, a very nice footlocker the size of a small steamer trunk. No room for the stuff. I used one of those junk hauling companies that will attempt to donate or recycle stuff before they go to the dump. So I feel a little relief about that. I hated having to "dump" a lot of stuff, and still did a lot of dumping before the junk hauling company came. I was in a panic mode to prep for an inspection that if I had failed they could have kicked me to the curb (due to the clutter). I wasn't sure if I could get the "junk" hauled away before the inspection, but I was able to. My cluttering was never any nasty moldy food, or animal feces (or human), just lots of clutter in boxes with very little organization at all. There were "areas" of stuff where I knew mostly what was there but not much specifically.

My attitude of "stuff" in the last couple of years has been "It is 'just' stuff". No reason to be attached to it. It doesn't make it much easier though there is still the emoitional attachment thing, and the logic games of why to keep stuff. You can't take it with you. Mortality is also a factor for all of this. I'm single no kids. The youngest of 4 siblings (1 deceased) . I do have 2 nephews now in their 30s, one by blood the other by marriage. Neither one seems to be interested in the stuff I have been into, so they would probably just trash the stuff anyway. Right now though I don't have a will so living in Maryland all my stuff would be in the hands of the state and they usually dump stuff anyway.

 

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Happy Blogivversay To ME!

 


HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY!

Today is the 18th Blogiversary for this here blog "Kirk's Knook".I don't remember what my first few goals for this blog were, but I'm sure I steered away from those early on, or abandoned them for being too lofty. 

Now a days my only goal is to post at least one post per month. I have said a few times before about my yearly self appointed goals for my blogs. Sometimes I wish I was more enthusiastic about blogging and more prolific in my post writing, but it is what it is and I yam what I yam.

As is my tradition I am timing this post to be published at the same time of day that my very first post on this blog was.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Mondegreen Fun: In The GoldenTwilight Zone Earring

 Time for another round of "Mondegreen Fun" AKA "Misheard Lyrics". This one is from a song that was released in 1982 by the band Golden Earring, they are most notably known for their song "Radar Love". The song I had misheard the lyrics from is "Twilight Zone" from their album "Cut". 



The real lyrics are: 
"Soon, you will come to know
When the bullet hits the bone."

However, for many many years I heard the last line as "When the bullet hits the phone." Occasionally I would think that it was "Foam".

Monday, January 01, 2024

State O' The Blog: 2023 Recap

STATE O' THE BLOG
2023 Edition




This year my "State O' The Blog" year in review post is pretty much on time. It was a typical bare bones posting year... sort of.

Here are the monthlies from 2023:

January: 2
February: 1
March: 1
April: 1
May: 1
June: 1
July: 1
August: 1
September: 1
October: 1
November: 1
December: 2

TOTAL: 14
Monthly Average: 1.17

Now lets look at how the 2023 blogging matches up with past years:

2006 - 32
2007 - 43
2008 - 36
2009 - 34
2010 - 18
2011 - 20
2012 - 38
2013 - 93
2014 - 57
2015 - 24
2016 - 29
2017 - 16
2018 - 18
2019 - 12
2020 - 17
2021 - 33
2022 - 14
2023 - 14
Yearly Average: 30.44 

Another RED year yippie.

As for my trading card blogs CaptKirk42's Trading Card Blog and Curly W Cards I missed posting in November for them. In years past I would have been very upset with myself for missing a month, but now I really don't care. If I stopped blogging completely I just wouldn't care any more.



Sunday, December 31, 2023

Happy New Year: Hello 2024 Goodbye 2023

GOODBYE 2023 HELLO 2024

2023 was a year... well a year that WAS. It is time for a new year and in 2024 we in the United States of America have the "honor" of voting for a "new" POTUS. Fun fun fun.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Life Interupts Blogging.


 So yeah. I had somethings to do from around Thanksgiving until forever. It didn't leave me with time to work on my blogs. Basically my personal montly quota of 1 post per month suffered a huge set back. In the past I have thought about hanging things up completely. I don't think I'll do that, but my not so frequent blogging will continue to be not so frequent. It might have long periods of non-activity from now on. Blogging definitely doesn't mean as much to me as it once did and hasn't for many months maybe even a few years. As with many other facits of life things that meant a whole heck of a lot to me just a few years or even in some cases a few months ago, now I can shrug my shoulders at and say "Ehh Whatever".

EEK soon it will be time for my yearly "year in review" and such.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

November Update.


November, November, November let me count the ways. UM NO. So looking back on this month from the end of the month point of view was there anything majorly significant this month? No, not in the grand scheme of things whatever that is. I did sell a DVD - Season 5 of the Television Show "Castle" on Ebay.  Unfortunately I lost out on shipping the package was over 1 pound. I charged $5.00 shipping and real shipping was $8.55. It was my 3rd sold item on Ebay for this year. Right now there are 68 items listed. "And there was Much Rejoicing"

Not sure if I'll add anything to this or not. Got some things on my plate.

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Blogging Rant And Work Moves Around


 Of my 3 blogs this one is sometimes the most difficult to come up with posts for as it is the most personal and I don't want some stuff made public. The draft posts that I do have in the draft queue for this blog still require more effort than I am willing to do, or rather take more time to complete than I usually allow myself. A good portion of them are reviews that I still need to actually start the writing of the review. Several of them will require re-watching, or rereading, or re-listening to whatever it was I wanted to review. Sometimes I wonder why I bother even writing a rant about my inaction. Well in some ways it gives me something that I can post about. So there is that.

Meanwhile at work our office is in the process of vacating one of the floors of the building we are in. We are currently on 3 floors, 2 of which we occupy the entire floor and 1 (the one I am on) our offices are maybe 1/4 of the floor. One of the full floors we are exiting from with most of the people moved. We have til the end of the year to exit completely when the lease runs. After that we will be only on 2 floors one the full floor and the other one at about the 1/4.

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Name Game: Didn't Even Try

I've made many of these posts on variations of my name and the misspellings I have seen. We all have had our name misspelled at the very least once. If you haven't then you are extremely lucky. Anyway a month or so ago (almost 2) on one of my visits to Chick-Fil-A and their standard asking you for your name for your order. I thought things were sort of normal. The cashier asked my name I gave it to him and he even asked to spell it. Then I saw what was on the receipt and it was not my name spelled correctly. It was a note to the order preps to give the cashier the order for him to give it to me.

Chick-Fil-A receipt

That is right instead of my name which I spelled out for him "K-I-R-K" he put in "G-I-V-E-2-J-E-F-R-Y". Hmm I wonder if he spelled his name right? Does he use one "F" or two?
Chick-Fil-A order sticker for bag

As you can see on the sticker for the order's bag they even have a line to identify the customer by a brief description of what they are wearing, under the line that tells them if the order is dine-in, take out, or a delivery service like DoorDash or Uber Eats. I could have been wearing a green long sleeved t-shirt, or green long sleeved sweater, but I wasn't.

Monday, August 28, 2023

We Didn't Start The Fire Updated


This post is not about the tragic fires in Maui, Hawaii it is about the update cover of a popular song from the late 1980s. One of Billy Joel's popular chart toppers "We Didn't Start the Fire" was released in 1989. The song is just a well-organized and mostly chronological list of newsworthy events and pop culture from Joel's first 40 years of life 1949-1989 set to a catchy rhythm. He was 40 when he wrote it. The song became a popular teaching tool for history classes. Well now in 2023 some 34 years later an updated cover version has been recorded by the band Fall Out Boy. I heard part of the new version on the radio and thought it was OK. Not great but I can accept it a bit. I have since watched a YouTube video of it. The update picks up from 1989 to 2023, however the events listed are just randomly placed not in chronological order. The band has made a statement that they intentionally listed things out of order because of the way the world is currently in a state of chaos. It also concentrates more on pop culture than just historic events.

Unlike some recent amateur "updates" this official recording does not have a liberal bias against a certain Ex-President that the amateur versions have. Those seem to be intentionally biased and tend to be recorded by Never Trump Activists for the sole reason of spewing their hate for Trump. There was one version that just covers events from 2020. The only reference to Trump that I could hear/see in the Fall Out Boy cover is the lyric "Trump gets impeached twice". Many of their pop culture references you seem to have to be of a certain age to get or be a part of the later video game generations.

I really like Joel's original version and when it plays on the radio, I will listen to it all the way through even if I found it in the last few seconds of the song. The update slash cover I am unsure about. I think it is cool that there is finally a semi-decent update, even if it is a few years too early for a full 40 year chunk of history. Due to its randomness and the fact that I am not a huge Fall Out Boy fan I wouldn't say I fully like it. I like it some, but I would not go out of my way to listen to it over and over. I might listen to it if I hear it start and then I might not.

Here is a YouTube video of The Fall Out Boy version with some images of what they are singing. There doesn't seem to be an official video at this time if there will ever be one.