This is something I probably should have learned years ago, but as it happens, just recently came to me as an epiphany:

When it comes to certain people, and especially certain organizations, it absolutely does not pay to double- or triple-check on work to be delivered. Because the fact is, the task at hand is going to be screwed up no matter how many times you cajole a confirmation to the contrary. Therefore, you just set yourself up for frustration, stemming from a false sense of preparedness.

Is that abstract enough? It’ll have to be. The details have been stripped to avoid pointless complications. Let’s just say that I’m not going to expend energy for no reason other than to say that I covered the bases solely for my own sake. From there, the consequences will unfold as they will.

Based on my modest attempt at retail therapy this weekend, I’ve concluded that there’s no treatment to be found for me at the cash register.

Because I’m already experiencing buyer’s remorse. Which wouldn’t be a big deal, except that the purchases are too minor for me to care about them to any regretful extent:

I bought an umbrella and a wallet. The umbrella eventually will be lost; the wallet, hopefully not (at least not while it’s full of my cash and cards). Both necessary items. It’s just that I’m now looking them over, and wondering if they were worth the 50 bucks, and hour of my shopping time, they cost.

Ultimately, not a major problem. But noted that I need to do a better job of gaining gratification out of my conspicuous consumption.

I spent the past weekend in Florida, for an informal college reunion with a few of my old dormmates. It turned out to be a nicely-timed getaway for me, following a couple of weeks of a particularly hectic schedule that had left me drained. And along with the sun and sand, getting to see some members of the old gang again for the first time in nearly twenty(!) years was a good thing.

I suppose a standard part of these re-gatherings is discovering how little most people really change. Everyone has “grown up”, in the sense of being on-track with families, careers, and such. But the remarkable thing is that, as we all push toward 40, we’ve all retained most of the instantly-recognizable traits that we had when we were living together back in school. For the most part, we picked up right where we left off, despite the years in between.

That leads to my favorite moment of the weekend, courtesy of my old college pal Woody. The best compliment I received was when he said he was glad to see me again, because he had missed my “negative humor”. By which he means my usual dry, sardonic wit. I know he meant it, too, because every time I said something to him, he ended up laughing hysterically.

I’m glad I could lend the biting comedy to this overdue get-together. Like I said, some things really never do change.

Or, mortality at play:

Fellow Traveler: She’s kinda cute, right?

Me: Nice legs. Definitely attractive, in a… [struggling] …young kinda way.

Fellow Traveler: What does that mean?

Me: Means I’m getting old.

It also means that they’re getting younger all the time…

In the space of 20 minutes of walk-around time this afternoon, my feet led me to two distinctly different ground-level encounters:

- As I first set out, a quick glance down to my shoes yielded my find of a shiny 25-cent piece, about which I duly tweeted.

- As I was heading back along almost the same paved terrain, a slippery-ish step made me look back — where I saw a squished bird that I had just re-trampled. (Unlike the quarter, I let this found object lie where it lay.)

Quite the swing in underfoot discoveries. If it portends the way this week will go for me, I’d better buckle up for a wild ride. (And no, the Twitter/bird parallel is not lost on me; hopefully my tweeting didn’t karmically trigger a dead-bird theme.)

Just like that, it seems I’m a free agent. In more than one sense, and simultaneously, all in the space of a couple of hours.

Can’t remember the last time this rapid-fire phenomenon happened to me. That’s probably why I’m less distraught, and more relieved. At least for the moment — in which I’ll live, for the immediate future.

Mental note for next winter: Stock up on plastic utensils.

Or invest in less ice cream. Or in more common sense. Anything to avoid a repeat of last night’s dining debacle: Tearing off a thin chunk of my lower lip when I used a metal spoon to eat dessert (that whole tongue-on-frozen-pole effect). Along with the pain — the sensation of which is still tingling today — the sight of my blood mingling with raspberry-chocolate chip was something I could have done without.

I’m sure it’s happened before. But I can’t remember the last time Valentine’s Day was immediately followed by Presidents’ Day.

It’s a weird confluence of holiday sentiment. One day you’re feeling all romantic, the next day — I dunno, Constitutional? Very disorienting. Good thing I’ve got a day off to figure that all out.

I was flipping through my wallet today and noticed that my Mensa member card was looking pretty ragged. So ragged, in fact, that you can clearly see that the name on it has been smudged away beyond recognition.

That, and the fact that I haven’t paid membership dues in years, has prompted me to discard this card. Yes, it’s a genius move, clearing out that extra space in my billfold. But I’m not one to brag on brilliance.

As water mains burst with regularity on LA streets, a counter-intuitive culprit for the breakdowns emerges:

But some experts said a prime suspect should be the city’s recent decision to allow sprinklers to run only on Mondays and Thursdays. They say that if more water flows through the system on those two days when people water their lawns and then pressure suddenly changes on other days, it could put added stress on already aging pipes.

So attempts at conservation in the drought-ridden Southland result in, probably, as much water gushing out of the underground. What’s that about water finding its own level? It’s taking place on a municipal level in Los Angeles.

Usually, I have no problem with planned obsolescence in consumer products, since our economy hinges upon the concept.

Until it cramps my convenience with a one-two punch. Both my electric razor and my dustbuster died this week, the victims of finitely-engineered rechargeable batteries that are, of course, non-replaceable. Actually, they both still work — but only if you recharge them after, maybe, two uses.

I’m not sure which demise I should be more pissed about. I bought them at about the same time, some two years ago, so it sorta makes sense that they’d conk out simultaneously. But it also doesn’t, because they weren’t used at anywhere near the same frequency: I used the razor almost daily, while the dustbuster got a workout only once per week. In both cases, I figured I would go at least another couple of years before battery-burnout, so I’m definitely feeling ripped off.

The dustbuster is easily replaceable. The razor? I can get another one, but for some reason, there’s a shortage of options on the wet/dry models like this one, that I very much prefer. I don’t know why more guys don’t use a cordless shaver in the shower, but judging from the selection I have to look through every few (now couple of?) years, I appear to be in the minority. And it’s not like I can take my time and go without a new stubble-trimmer indefinitely — my face is too conditioned to go back to blades (without a bloody mess resulting).

Just another couple of household appliances to blow cash on, as per the Disposable Society plan. I suppose there are worse dilemmas in life.

I had an uncharacteristically restless night of sleep last night. I couldn’t account for it, since I’d managed to avoid the typical desperation that colors most Saturday nights. But instead of the usual zonk-out as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was tossing and turning, and actually woke up at least once — practically unheard of.

Today at lunchtime, I called up my cousin Adrianna, who I hadn’t spoken with for a couple of weeks. She gave me some surprise news: Late last night, without warning, she fell seriously ill and ended up rushing to the hospital for emergency surgery. Luckily, the best-case scenario prevailed, in that it was routine surgery without complications, and she was discharged back home today for about a week’s worth of rest and recovery.

Can’t say I ever believed in extrasensory perception. Rationally, I can accept that my night of moderate unease, and Adrianna’s night of extreme (to say the least) unease, were completely coincidental.

Beyond the rational? I dunno. The corker, for me: While I can’t really put a label on whatever it was that wouldn’t let me sleep — was it anxiety, dread, nervousness, or some other emotion? — at one point during the night I did manage to crystallize my thoughts. For some reason, I fixated on the idea that my cousin Billy — Adrianna’s brother — had experienced some bodily harm. It was completely out of left field, as I haven’t talked to Billy in a long while either, and had no reason to think that anything had happened to him. If not for what I’d found out the next day, I doubt I’d even have remembered that notion.

Turns out my instincts were onto something, but had targeted the wrong cousin. Given that misfire, I guess I remain a psychic skeptic.

A prime piece of downtown Chicago is on the auction block: The 2.7-million-square-foot old U.S. Post Office building, which is intertwined with the city’s infrastructure a little too intimately.

A peculiarity of the building is that it was built using air rights over railroad tracks that terminate several blocks to the north, at Union Station, and so it has no basement. In addition, the Congress Expressway literally passes through the structure. The two-story-high tunnel carries six lanes of traffic.

Too bad they can’t build exit ramps leading directly into this architectural behemoth. Easy access, even if there’s no place to go to once you’re there.

Since this is my personal blog, ego compels me to announce my… (wait, lemme do the math…) …that would be my 38th birthday today.

A birthday falling on hump-day Wednesday isn’t conducive to wanton celebration. So today will be fairly run-of-the-mill: Working, keeping my eye out for b-day freebies around Manhattan (aside from today’s rather nice weather), and concluding with a nice dinner. Further action is deferred until the weekend.

Unfortunately, today also marks the first day that the dreaded increased Metropolitan Transportation Authority fares take effect, applying to the Long Island and Metro North rail roads. (The rest of the MTA — subways, buses and ferries — get the jack by end of June.)

Nothing to do with me, folks, so I’m not apologizing for the more expensive train ticket. But in a show of sympathy on my part, all my commuter friends and acquaintances are allowed to accordingly downsize the dollar value of their birthday gifts to me

Today is my name day.

What’s a “name day”, you say? Good question. At root, it’s a like a birthday, except that instead of celebrating your age, you’re celebrating your first name — or really, the Christian saint of whom you’re a namesake. Therefore, it’s a locked-in date that you “share” with other people that share your name; if you happen to have a non-traditional name that doesn’t match with a saint, then you’re out of luck. It’s apparently not uncommon throughout Europe, although I’m familiar with only the Greek (Orthodox) version.

And truthfully, I’m not even all that familiar with that. I never remember when mine is, nor anyone else’s for that matter. If my mother hadn’t reminded me earlier this week, I certainly would have overlooked it again this year. It means something to her, and the fact that my brother and I don’t care for the custom is one more thing that we argue about with her.

Not that the two of us are the only ones who whiff on this. I mentioned it to a cousin who shares today’s name day with me, and she was also unaware. Obviously, it’s a generational thing, along with a cultural one — obviously it’s never caught on in the US, primarily because of the lack of saints among Protestants. I wonder just how celebrated the name day is in Greece and other European countries; I’ve never gotten the sense that it was as big a deal as a birthday, although I’m sure that varies across regions.

Anyway. Nothing in the way of commemoration for this day, other than this online note. I am heading up to Broadway later tonight to catch a show, and while that’s purely coincidental, I guess I can consider it my name-day dividend.

Of late, I can’t seem to win when it comes to setting appointments, particularly with groups of three or more. Consider:

When the date is pegged several days or even weeks in advance, enough people inevitably pull out almost at the last minute and thus wreck the gathering. Yet paradoxically, when a call goes out for a true short-notice get-together (that night or in the following 1-2 days), nobody can commit to that either. For the past couple of months, this has been consistent in both my personal and professional spheres.

I guess there’s an ideal in-between time that would work for everyone involved? Not too far out into the future that something else will arise to take precedence, yet not so immediate as to not be able to squeeze into hectic schedules.

I’m thinking maybe a 6-day window might be the magic number. I’ll have to experiment.

So I’m gearing into my morning routine: Open the fridge. Grab the OJ. Give the container a vigorous shake-shake-shake…

…And the top flips open, resulting in a splatter of orange-juiciness on the refrigerator door, inner shelves, kitchen floor, and — oh by the way — me.

A liquid vitamin C shower is no way to kick off the day. (I am exaggerating — my hand got the worst of it, and was easily rinsed off; but still.)

My first impulse was to assign blame for this debacle to Tropicana and the much-panned juice-packaging redesign that, under public pressure, it’s now abandoning. The blue flip-top spout on the plastic jug that I bought hadn’t been the target of any protests, but it was new-fangled to me, so I figured it had to be faulty. Plus, I didn’t even want the damned oversized jug in the first place — I bought it only because the special calcium-infused variety wasn’t available in a regular size.

Then, I thought a little more about it. And I remembered that I had made a midnight fridge raid the night before, wherein I took a quick swig of the orange stuff. So it’s quite possible that I hadn’t properly closed the spout, and thus had set myself up for sabotage.

Overall, a pretty frustrating morning. I think I’m going to go back to popping Vitamin C tablets instead.

The bowl in which I toss my quarters, dimes and nickels wasn’t exactly overflowing, but I decided to dispose of it anyway. So I hunted down the nearest Coinstar machine (actually not all that near, but whatever) and dumped the change down the chute. Final add-up: $53.25.

I had in mind beforehand to convert whatever was in the bowl into iTunes Store credit, just so I wouldn’t have to think about dropping money everytime I bought a song. The thing is, I don’t spend much money on it — maybe three or four bucks a month. I guess I didn’t figure all that coinage would add up to so much. I briefly considered converting to an Amazon gift certificate instead, but I decided to stick with my original choice.

So, now I’ve got an iTunes account credit for the above amount, plus what I already had stored in there from a previous giftcard redemption. Grand total: $73.86.

Given my current rate of consumption, that should last me, what, a couple of years? At least I’ll never lack for digital tracks. (Actually, I’m planning on buying that iPhone/iPod Software Update 2.0 upgrade when it comes out next month, so that will knock $9.99 off my stash.)

There’s no sense in denying it — I feel like crud, and have since the start of this week.

It’s hard to pinpoint what it is. My back is screwed up, the result of some ill-advised activity over the weekend; but as unpleasant as that is, it doesn’t explain a more widespread achy-ness I’m experiencing. I’d blame the wicked weather conditions we’ve been experiencing, with oven-like temperatures until Tuesday followed by a pretty abrupt cool-down. I’m sure it didn’t help.

All this is making it hard to sit still and focus for any length of time, which means working has been challenging and sporadic. Given how much I’ve got on my plate this week, that’s not good news. I’m hoping I revive sometime during the course of tonight, so I can at least punch out a productive Friday.

I’m here at JFK Airport, just waiting to board my flight to Tampa. I’ll be vacationing for the next few days in the ol’ Bay area, with my chief goal being no loftier than achieving copious sunburn.

But, despite being bored out of my mind just sitting here (and blogging via the terminal’s wi-fi, natch), I’m not so sure I need to leave for the Sunshine State. In fact, with the new Department of Transportation compensation rules that mandate double the fare price repayment for bumped flights (up to a maximum of $800), I’m almost hoping to get knocked off this trip.

Almost.

I suppose some downtime trumps the eight hundred bones. I’ve had to delay this vacation once already, so I’m way overdue for a recharge. But the cash compensation would be nice.

I will, of course, not be taking a vacation from blogging. I’ve even got my notebook computer with me — a decision I’m somewhat regretting as I lug it around. Too late to do anything about it now.

If you’re thinking about visiting Europe, now’s the time to start planning: The open skies agreement, set to go into effect on March 30, will eliminate archaic locked-in carrier/country route agreements, leading to more direct-destination flights from the States and, eventually, lower fares.

Of course, the way the dollar keeps tanking versus the euro, it’ll wind up being a wash once you deplane and start spending money. But every little bit helps, I suppose.