Confession Time

Yes I have a confession to make.  I used to make blog entries at least once, sometimes twice a week.  I used to be constantly smiling, happy, positive, full of life and looking forward to each and every day with a gleam in my eye and a song in my heart.  But I have not been myself for quite some time now and I think it is time I let you all know why. 

As I was standing in the shower yesterday morning half-asleep and letting the water rain down on me for the first time in 72 hours, I got to thinking about how much I have changed.  First of all…my personal hygiene has gone to hell.  Did I brush my teeth this morning?  Who knows.  Deodorant?  Maybe.  Shaved?  Certainly not today.  Weekends are the worst…I have no incentive to bathe, change my clothes, look in the mirror, and I usually just forget about that stuff or blow it off.  Have you ever gone days without showering and your hair is so oily that the water just repels off it, like a duck?  You try to introduce shampoo to your hair, but it’s so greasy that it just soaks up the shampoo and then it’s gone…where did the shampoo go?  So you have to rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat until you have your hair back again.

Sleep?  Fahgettaboudit.  I do not sleep more than an hour or two at a time.  My eyes are red and bloodshot with heavy black bags beneath them.  When I do manage to get to sleep I often times dream about getting to sleep.  I literally dream that I am going to bed and sleeping.  Time is either absurdly fast (I will hit the snooze button, fall back asleep and seemingly a quarter of a second later it is going off again…and on a larger scale the days/weeks all fly by as they blend into one big blob) or time is painfully slow as I stare at the clock waiting for daylight to come and put an end to the misery that is nighttime.  I am perpetually sick, with the winter’s cold never really leaving my body as I sneeze and cough my way through the days.

I do not seem to care about work (it’s just there…something I have to do), or TV (I have dozens and dozens of hours of my shows piled up in the DVR that I cannot imagine ever getting to), or sports (I have not attended a live sporting event or sat down and watched an entire game on TV in eons), or the internet (I checked my email last night…286 unread emails…hopelessly behind), or reading (I have a stack of unread magazines about 2 feet high and I cannot remember the last book I read), or even sex (just too tired to even go there).  Food is something I do to stay alive rather than enjoy as I usually cram most of my microwave/box/can meals in my mouth in seconds without thinking or barely chewing.  This unhealthy eating combined with the lack of exercise has led to my weight getting too high.

My friends do not really know me anymore as I have become a recluse.  I stay in my house for days on end without hardly ever leaving except to go to the grocery store or to work.  I do not go to concerts or out to the bars or the movies or hardly any social events.  Golfing with the boys is nothing but a fond memory.  I just emailed my softball coach to let him know I am going to skip playing this year.  My social life has been reduced to pulling open my junk drawer and staring at all of the old concert ticket stubs from days gone by.

The house is a disaster, with stuff strewn everywhere to trip over.  The layers of dust on the mantle and book shelves and any flat surface in the house are growing thicker every day.  The pile of dirty laundry has taken over the entire walk-in closet as I am down to my last pair of socks.  The kitchen floor has become a delicatessen for enthusiastic ants scooping up old food that has gathered under the table or has been kicked over to the perimeter of the room.  Stains from hastily cleaned piles of vomit on the carpet are scattered throughout the house.  Old syringes lay on the dresser, crusted over with various liquids that profess to offer relief and good times.

And maybe worst of all I have become grouchy and negative.  Let’s take the god-forsaken month of February for example.  This cold, dark, bleak, terrible month of February in the past has had one redeeming feature:  it is shorter than the rest.  28 days.  Get through these 4 weeks and then we can move on to happy, hopeful, life-giving March.  Today should be the last day of February right?  But nooo, not this year!  It’s frigging leap year!  As I stare out the window with tired, blank, unfeeling eyes at the snowfall piling up on my car I yearn for a new day.  But I do not want that day to be February 29^th.  I just want to be able to get off this rollercoaster I am on, get my life back to normal and…really…just get a good night’s sleep for a change.

Okay, here it is.  I am just going to come out and say it: 

“Hi.  My name is Sneaky Sweets, and I have...a 6 month old son and a 2 year old daughter.”

Air mishap #5

Okay, here’s one more installment in my run of flying adventures that had the potential for disaster.  At the time I was still a student back in the early 1990’s and flying with my instructor Blaine.  On a nice sunny afternoon we took off from Madison, WI and headed out for a small airport about a half-hour west of there to work on touch-and-goes.  (It was the same little airport where I emergency-landed with my buddy Chris to locate the missing/burning cigarette butt in my 9/2/11 blog entry). 

It is a single-runway no-tower airport, so again—when you enter it’s airspace you are required to announce your intentions, location, and all of your turns on the assigned frequency for that airport so that all of the pilots in the area will know where each other are and avoid any ‘mishaps’.  Well we flew into the airspace, noted the wind was out of the north, and we announced our intention to do touch-and-goes landing into the wind on runway 35. 

We announced ourselves on the radio with every step of the way and never got a response so we assumed we were the only plane in the airspace.  Sweet, we had the whole airport to ourselves.  So on our very first approach I am on final just a few feet over the ground and about to set her down when suddenly we both notice another plane heading right at us!  This moron is landing on the same runway but from the opposite direction and he’s bearing down on us fast!  Not only did he never bother to announce that he was in the airspace much less announce that he was landing, but he was landing with the wind on our runway.  He was just wrong on so many levels it was mind-boggling. 

I didn’t know if I should abort the landing and pull up, but we thought he might do the same thing so Blaine had me finish the landing and slam on the brakes while taking a hard left off the runway.  Just as we were sliding off into the grass next to the runway this idiot landed, rolled right past us and then took off again.  Blaine got on the radio and yelled at him, but no response so who knows if the guy even had his radio on or was turned in to the correct frequency.  My heart was racing and I was pissed.  I wanted to report him to the FAA but neither of us caught the tail# of his plane.  Lesson learned…eyes wide open at all times because even if you are going by the book and doing everything perfectly, you never know when some dumbass might ruin your whole day with a head-on collision.

The Dark Continent

As the administrator of this blog, not only can I see the # of hits the site gets (as can all of you…a quick check of the counter shows that we are up to 3,142 hits), but I can also track what countries the hits are coming from.  How or why anybody outside of my circle of friends and family sees and reads this blog is beyond me, but there have been hits from all over the world including almost every continent.  So far the good people of Antarctica are the only continent that have completely ignored ‘Sneaky Sweets’, but that’s okay…they are probably too busy hanging with penguins and trying to stay warm to read my blog.  Plus, contrary to my blog entry from 1/17/12 they probably feel strongly about warming up their cars for awhile before taking off, regardless of the year of the car.  So Antarctica withstanding, we have had hits from some pretty distant countries.  I can understand hits coming from Europe as maybe a friend of a friend might know someone there and told them about it…but Indonesia?  Check out the list of Sneaky nations so far:

United States

Russia

United Kingdom

France

Germany

Romania

Japan

Canada

Czech Republic

Latvia

China

Italy

Ireland

Peru

Indonesia

Costa Rica

South Korea

Columbia

Malaysia

Australia

Netherlands

Serbia

South Africa

Kenya

Note the last two…South Africa and Kenya??  I know very little about Africa, but in my limited mind it is separated into two sections:  1) South Africa…a place that we have always been lead to believe was evil.  I guess they are better now, but I think I might still be a little pissed at them and maybe do not completely trust them yet?  2) The rest of Africa…a wild place full of elephants and lions and monkeys.  I know from reading the magazine covers in the checkout line at my local Rainbow Foods that Angelina Jolie and Madonna have adopted a good chunk of the population and relocated them to various mansions throughout Europe.  And I know from being a good U2 fan that Bono is trying to save the rest.  But I fear that those they do not get to will be struggling with a lifetime of war, drought and famine.  Why in the world would anyone there be reading about Sneaky Sweets? 

The youngest of my two sisters Cindy is an African expert so maybe I should check with her.  Her husband Gus Savalas is extremely tough, cool and smart.  They travelled throughout Africa together and even got married there.  I am ashamed to admit, but as adults Cindy and I have not kept in contact with each other as much as we should.  I do know that Cindy is crazy smart, loves animals, is strong in every sense of the word, and she makes really good bread.  I am not really sure but I think she got her bachelors degree in ‘partying’ at the University of Wisconsin/Madison, her masters degree in horseback riding and hockey at a fancy Canadian college in Montreal, and her doctorate degree in African Politics at a fancy U.S. college like Yale or the University of America in Washington D.C.  Obviously I need to give Cindy a call and say hi, catch up, and stay in touch more.  I hope they know that I think about them often.

So here is what else I know about Africa.  I know from seeing the movie ‘Blood Diamond’ that the place is full of horrible diamond mines and we should never buy our diamonds from there.  I know from seeing the movie ‘Out Of Africa’ that it is a vast and beautiful place full of biplanes and steam locomotive trains.  I know from watching the ‘Weather Channel’ that Africa is guilty of annually spawning numerous hurricanes that jump off the west coast and scurry across the Atlantic, talking careful aim at our great eastern cities with intent to do grievous bodily harm.  And I know from watching ‘Man vs. Wild’ that the place is chock full of strange but tasty bugs that the star of the show ‘Bear Grylls’ likes to eat whenever he hangs out there.

So anyways, my completely naïve sense of Africa makes me wonder why anybody there has the time or the inclination to read my little blog.  If anybody from Africa could login to the site and email me your story about how you heard of ‘Sneaky Sweets’ I would be thrilled.  Or if you could leave a comment in the ‘comment box’ I would be honored.  And Cindy, I promise I will call soon.