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Maybe it’s just one of those things that once you get stuck in your head, you can’t help but notice, kind of like how after you buy a new car you see your make of car everywhere, but lately I’m seeing a proliferation of giant clocks. I’m not talking about outside, like on the corner of a bank, I’m talking in people’s homes, kind of like art, but mostly just like a giant clock. I think I first noticed one on a home show, then on a TV show, then I saw one in Sam’s Club, and now it’s like I’m seeing them everywhere. I know, back in the day people would get some bad artwork for a wall, and maybe there isn’t any bad artwork left, although, I suppose, when you are decorating a house, and the couple has a disagreement on what should be on a wall, a giant clock is an easy compromise. It harkens back to a simpler day when people had clocks in their homes, whether grandfather clocks, that clock in the kitchen, a nice mantle clock, or even that clock blinking “12:00″ on the VCR. Functional, I suppose, in this day and age when it appears less people wear a watch and use their phone to see what time it is, or maybe it’s just because they are cheap. Okay, scratch that, they aren’t that cheap as I just looked and the least expensive one I could find, on a quick search for 30” wall clock, was $70.
We don’t have a giant clock on our wall, although we do have some spots that could probably fit one, but I wonder: Do you own, or know someone who owns, a giant clock?
That’s it for this one! I’m Andy!! L8R!!!
Now that pitchers and catchers have duly reported, as well as the rest of the players, it’s that time of year when, unless your basketball team is great, or you are a hockey nut, your sport’s thoughts are probably drifting to baseball, because, as James Earl Jones says in 
Sitting in front of the TV there was an add for Shen Yun at the Chicago Opera House, which I guess is also where the Lyric Opera happens in Chicago, and it occurred to me that one of the weird things on my bucket list is to go to an Opera. I don’t really know why. I guess part of it is that scene in “Pretty Woman” where Richard Gere explains to Julia Roberts that some people enjoy the opera, but for others, it becomes a part of their soul, or something like that. Also, back when I used to work in downtown Chicago, I would walk past the Chicago Opera House and sometimes the backstage doors would be open I would be fascinated by the stage props that I could see. Part of it also probably has to do with my enjoying a good musical, and although different, what the hell.
Fine, here’s my answer. Yes. I have a digital picture frame. It was a gift from my wife, one to help me get a boatload of concert pictures off of a cluttered wall, and two, because it was an awesome gift for someone like me who took boatloads of pictures that, like many folks, have them just in boxes or stored digitally for no one, not even me, to see. It’s a nice one, larger than most, from Kodak, and used to have a feature to connect to some Kodak website that you could store your pictures on, a site, of course, no longer supported. But the frame still lets you connect wirelessly to a computer, or use a media card to store pictures on, and will display them.
Maybe I need to get out more, or maybe I need to go to some more exciting places, but the other day I started to become fascinated with the “Near Me” feature on the App Store app on my iPhone. Supposedly it shows what some of the most popular apps are around you that people are downloading, and for them most part the people around me are really concerned about the news or how to get from here to there, although it also seems like my neighborhood has a lot of radio legend, 
When I was a young lad and my mom was showing me how to do laundry, there were many tips and tricks she instilled in me that I still perform to this day. Fine, I will admit that when it comes to emptying my pockets I’m not always the most diligent which has led to one or two washings of the few Washington’s and Lincoln’s, as well as the occasional pen and the loss of those annoying collar “stays” that somehow get sucked into the bowels of the dryer. I’m also not one to always “shake” out my clothes after the washer portion as opposed to just putting a giant ball of wet clothes in the dryer, as the “shaking” out leads to a quicker drying time and the less likelihood of hidden “wet” spots in the clothes when the dryer stops, and, I admit it, I’ve done my share of mixing lights and darks (took me a few minutes one day to realize why my yellow towel turned slightly pink, even though there was a dark, red towel in the mix), but the one tip I still try to keep up with to this day is zipping up all zippers before putting the clothes in the laundry. As I asked my mom why the one day, she simply said that it eliminates the chances of the zipper snagging your other clothes, thereby maybe tearing them, or leaving you with that snagged thread that can ruin your clothes should you now try to “break” it by being lazy and pulling on it, instead of taking the couple of minutes to get some scissors.