John Burkholder

This year has been very short sighted. But one thing has come from it that I didn’t expect. I have long hair. Not long for me hair...long hair. I have not had a haircut since the year started. It has forced me to consider if I should get a hair cut. It is not like I am walking around the office trying to present myself in professional apparel. I am lounging around in jeans and a sweater every single day.  Wait...you wear a sweater in the summer you say? Yes. My wife loves to keep the temperature in the apartment cold enough that we can store ice cream in the bedroom. So I wear a sweater all the time.  My hair has grown well below the collar. Having been in the Air Force, certain things stuck with me even after I left it.. gig lines, pant lengths, and hair cut. The gig line is an imaginary line the runs down your button down short along your belt and the front fold in your pants. This line should always be straight and the belt edge should fall on the line. Pant lengths should have a sl

I hope everyone (the one who reads this) had a great holiday. This year I was thrilled to give. My wife had a memorable Christmas in a very long time. This year Avery and I started working on it in early November. When I gift, I tend to have themes. In previous years, those themes have been wrapped around many book titles. For example, when we first moved to Chicago, I bought her a bunch of books by Chicago authors about Chicago. One year, she had a series of other persons views books like the Reluctant Fundamentalist...she says that book changed her life.  This year however, books could not be a thing. First, space is an issue. Second, Andi is getting all of her books through Audible. But I did buy her one book...The Book of Etiquette by Lady Troubridge. I purchased it used as it was listed as a hardback in need of repair. Since Andi repairs books for the Field Museum, I thought this may be a fun start for her. The book was her first gift.  The second gift was the main gift to kick of

 My wife is the shopper in this 1950s style relationship. She procures the food, goods, furniture...basically everything for the house. There was one point in our marriage she looked at me and said “you need something of your own in the house. Something I will look at and remember you for.”  I have a few things that are mine, but for the most part, my memories are about experiences and not stuff.  Back to my story...she does the shopping but there have been a few times that I pointed out she shops the hard way. When we lived In Virginia, our apartment was directly across the street from a new strip mall with a Harris Teeter. Harris Teeter is a neighborhood grocery. In that area, there is Giant, Harris Teeter, and huge everything grocery stores like Wegmans. Wegmans is about 20 minutes from where we lived.  The wife wanted to buy a mince meat pie for her grandmother and had to meet up with her cousins for pre-Thanksgiving coffee. Because it was the day before Thanksgiving, the Wegmans s

My wife and I recently had discussions about starting a business called the Soda Counter and Emporium here in Chicago. It specializes in sodas from across the US and internationally. You want Moxie from Maine or Cheerwine from North Carolina? Yep...we have it. Anyway, this took her on a tangent and she bought me a gift... a Mr. Root Beer kit . I have never made soda, beer, wine or any drink myself except tea and coffee. So the idea of making my own soft drink has a huge appeal. Root Beer is one of those drinks that everyone loves. Root Beer is even a featured drink in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  Quark: I want you to try something for me. Take a sip of this. Garak: What is it? Quark: A human drink. It's called root beer. Garak: I don't know.      { Garak scowls/snears } Quark: Come on. Aren't you just a little bit curious?      { Garak sighs, and cautiously drinks... } Quark: What do you think? Garak: It's vile. Quark: I know. It's so bubbly and cloy

 Some 15 years ago, my commute to the office was considerably different than most. At the time I lived in a Chicago suburb called Plainfield. Every morning I would drag myself to my car, force myself into the drivers seat, and drive to the train station in Joliet to take my commuter train downtown. There are a few previous blog entries about the train (nicknamed the Pickled Liver) and the people who were repeat offenders on said train. The train ride was one of the two highlights to my commute.  Once arriving downtown, I would walk through Union Station to the ferry which would lazily move down the river toward Michigan Avenue where I disembarked. I climbed the stairs, crossed the river, and walked into my office building in Illinois Center. Every evening, I reverse the entire course. As you can probably imagine, during the winter the boat was left out of the process. But when the boats ran, it was fantastic.  Today my commute during COVID is much more of a walk 15 steps to the living

 I made dinner tonight. Andi and Avery both suddenly like my old school macaroni and cheese. It is not a hard recipe, elbow macaroni, butter, milk, a jar of old English cheese, and 4 oz of Velveeta. The key is to put it in the oven after it is made for a almost brown crust.  I digress. I made fried chicken tonight. Stop, let me clarify, I tried to make a nice tender golden brown fried chicken tonight in the air fryer. It didn’t work. I ended up with a cooked piece of meat with a mostly white crust around it. As in, the air fryer doesn’t really fry anything. It is more like a hair dryer on high in a very contained space. This was the last time I will use it for anything besides small batch of fries. The oven actually does fries better too. I had high hopes for the newfangled contraption. But it, like the instantpot is a waste of time.  The instantpot makes an OK chili. But my slow cooker makes a better chili. In fact, every time we try to use the damn thing is takes all of the flavor it

Throughout my life I have always “gone for a...” bike ride, walk, or drive. It went so far that the kids didn’t want to go on bike rides or walks, and both of the wives have had to place parameters for a drive. I often ended up doing these things by myself. Even now, I go for a ride to attempt to clear my head and listen to my own music.  This year changes everything. The bike rides stopped many years ago. I don’t even own a bike anymore and my divvy bike membership I let go because I wasn’t using it enough. My walks continued, but I don’t have that as an easy option any longer now that everything is locked down and masks are more for my safety than anything.  Then there are drives. I still take drives although they are shorter than before. Trying to stay in the car to avoid contact with people does nothing but stiffen my joints and shrink my already minuscule buttocks. That relief of getting away from my current environment to balance out my need for trees, or need for people, has def

It is getting to me. I needed time to actually think about it, but I think I finally figured it out.  I have been working in technology for over 35 years. It all started with the Air Force as a Telephone and Data Circuitry Specialist. From there it has mutated from technology to technology, network cabling to SNA server to Exchange server to SharePoint. I have always had a goal... to be the best I can be in my field.  Now I am a manager. Even though I am still learning what that means in its entirety, I have lost the one thing that has kept me going for decades...motivation. I have nothing left to prove.  One of the hidden personality quirks for me has always been to prove to my birth parents that they missed out of a pretty fantastic, successful person. Well, it has been 4 years since I found my birthmothers side of the family and 3.5 years since I found the birthfathers side. I have nothing to prove to either of them. They are both dead. Their children all know who I am now and they

Growing up in a small town in central Illinois, it was flat, corn or beans, and the only pretty part of it all was a park called Weldon Springs. My sophomore year spent in Arizona, opened my eyes about how to live somewhere and see beauty wherever you are. The part of the town where I lived was at the bottom of a knoll and had a gorgeous view of the Superstition Mountains. After moving back to Clinton, I noticed different things within town that made it beautiful. That was the start of my photography hobby.  After graduating, I joined the Air Force. I was in Texas, Maine, New York, and all during that time, traveling and living, I saw the beauty of the view.  There is a British TV show called An Idiot Abroad. In one of the shows, the “idiot” made an extremely insightful observation. While visiting Petra in Jordan, he was sitting in a small cave hovel across from the entrance to Petra. He said, “I would rather live in this small cave looking at that beautiful entrance than live inside P

 Depression is something I have long battled over the years. 2020 has been adding a special something to the amount of depression everyone is dealing with. My normal depression has teamed up with quarantine depression...and now, as the daylight shortens, my seasonal depression will add that little extra to it that I am finding impossible to fight. Allergies aren’t helping either. I have been taking my allergy medicine in the morning and evening as my doctor prescribed, but this year seems to be especially brutal. COVID, flu season, allergies, the stack of depressions...I am coming to my wits end.  I check in with the doctor using telemedicine, but I feel like the normal checking for symptoms, blood work up, and listening to lungs is now not necessary? I get it. This pandemic is nothing to blow off. But how many people sick from other things are being affected because COVID has taken over the medical community? Why is it there are so many selfish people willing to risk the lives of othe

I woke up this morning with a different, interesting thread running through my head. I woke up thinking about window washers and how they dangle a thousand feet in the air just to clean the windows of a skyscraper. Sears Tower (never Willis) has 16,100 bronze tinted windows. Each year, the windows are cleaned by people repelling the outside of the building either on dangling ropes or electric scaffolding.  Here is how that train of thought derailed... why can’t drones clean the windows. It seems to me, a fleet of drones could make short work of the job if programmed properly. But how do the drones handle the weight of the wash material? Water is not lightweight and introducing chemicals seems to be counter productive to my environmental focus.  But if you replaced the glass with self cleaning glass, that would make it so you never need drones to clean the glass. By using self cleaning glass, there isn’t water waste, it doesn’t do harm to the environment and it reduces harmful radiation