John Burkholder

 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...

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...

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...

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...

 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 live...

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 ...

There are occasions where that one emotion I keep tied down works it way to the edge of my personality without any reason...anger. I really hate this emotion. It makes absolutely no sense to me and yet, here I am...angry. What do I have to be angry about? I have a loving family, I have a job that is great, I live in a city that has everything. But at times I want to scream at the top of my lungs, throw something out the window of the skyscraper, or just get in a car and drive to some small insignificant town in the middle of nowhere and disappear. Before you get the wrong impression, not kill myself, never that... just disappear metaphorically. The idea of just blinking from any traceable media like the web, work, or the city sometimes appeals to me...in the short term. I could never really disconnect. I thrive on information, learning, knowledge and witty banter. But today, I am angry and I should be sent to the corner. Maybe I just need a vacation...or a car. This has been my r...