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Window Shopping

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Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, national poster child for the campaign to end social promotion and a fixture at Wendell Willkie High School.

Hey Mr. C.,

I know the economy is (supposedly) picking up and people in my age group have better employment prospects now compared to just a few years ago, when the likelihood of finding work after graduation was pretty much zero.

Now they say if you study the right kind of thing you have a good chance of getting hired if your training lines up with all the jobs they say are coming – jobs that have real specific requirements.

In fact Mr. Boozenporn organized a job fair just before the Christmas Break where we had a chance to go to the gym during our study hall hour and talk to experts in a bunch of different fields about what we need to do to get ready.

There were people there from the medical fields to talk about being nurses and doctor’s assistants. There were technology people there to talk about being all different kinds of engineers.

And there was even one who said we could get work right out of high school as long as we were willing to change bedpans and take care of old people, a super-needy and traditionally grumpy group that is growing every single day.

Nobody wanted to talk to that guy.

I took a walk around but didn’t see anything interesting, mostly because I was still holding out for my dream job – being a NASA mission specialist on the International Space Station, in charge of looking out the window.

Seriously – being in space is awesome (I think) but everybody we send up there has a hundred different jobs to do so nobody gets to just look at stuff.

I was super-ready to take that job, but then I got a big disappointment. Somebody already has it!.

Still, I think this is pretty amazing, and when you consider that the universe is vast, there’s lots more to see. Notice he only spent a little bit of time looking out the windows on the other (non-Earth) side!

Now that we know it can be a “thing”, maybe there will be other openings for Space Lookout Observation Boy. My mom says I was born to be a S.L.O.B.!

Your hopeful pal,
Bubby

What can you see out your favorite window?

44 thoughts on “Window Shopping”

  1. Isn’t Buddy about 46, 47 years old? Is that the age group he’s referencing when he mentions people his age having an easier time finding a job these days?

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  4. the window I look out when I am toldto look out my favorite window is a bit like clydes webcam in glacier. mine is at the top of the road at the celestine lake campsite in jasper national park in alberta canada just a notch above Banff. I was there when I was 16 for the irst time and have only been back a few times since but it is the place I return to as my spot for meditation and the place where all is right with the world when I am there. I was able to look it up on google earth a few years ago but it will take a bit of work to find it today. I will try.

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  5. Good morning. If I limit myself to the views from the windows in the house where I live I would pick the one with a view of the bird feeder as the one with the best view. If I can choose windows other than those where I live, I would pick views from the windows of restaurants over looking Lake Superior. I particularly like sitting in the Gun Flint Bar in Grand Marais and looking out at the sights in the harbor.

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  6. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Many windows, many views in the world!

    I love looking out my dining room window–I have experienced so many wildlife surprises out of this window because Lou feeds birds in the back yard: indigo bunting, scarlett tananger, pileated woodpecker, a redtail hawk, Baltimore oriole.

    When we moved into our house in December, 1998, we knew the windows required replacing. They were in terrible condition and probably a cheap type bought in mass when this housing development was thrown together in the early 1970’s. We took our time replacing these despite the need. This delay gave us a startling view one day, when I was peeping out at the bird feeder. I leaned on the window and the entire thing, frame and all, fell out, toppling two stories into the back yard.

    We then replaced it.

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  7. Like Jacque, our windows need work and I am procrastinating.

    My neighborhood is slowly transitioning as is life. Am I sticking around here long enough to enjoy the new or refurbished windows long enough to justify the expense?

    For now, I really enjoy the view out the back kitchen window into my unkempt back yard. Squirrels and birds abound and entertain. The occasional hawk shows up and then all goes quiet. The delinquents enjoy chasing around back there too, but are not the hunters Our Fair Twixie was, at least not yet. I’m good with that.

    When I first bought the house and had a nine-month-old asleep on a blanket out there, that yard was known as The Estate (we also had The Grounds and The Back 40- pretty good for a 40 foot lot in a blue collar neighborhood). Reclaiming that personal sense of wealth is high on my list for 2015.

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    1. I love the idea of reclaiming a personal sense of wealth. The idea that we once felt content and happy with much less is a clear indication of how much we now take for granted.

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  8. Where I am now there’s no view unless I get up and go to the end of the row of cubes, where I get one of the nicer views of Nicollet Avenue. At home I can see the neighbor’s oak tree (and the side of their house) in one direction and the backyard and garage of the duplex on the other side; my roommate gets the view of the street, along with the loud cars and yelling neighbors. The most interesting view I can remember at the moment was at the Shedd Aquarium–a window that went below the water level of Lake Michigan. Since I don’t swim, I hadn’t seen underwater in real life before, just on nature shows. It was choppy so there was nothing swimming by–I’m assuming there’s life that close to shore in Chicago, which I may be wrong about, remembering the color of the river–but it was still pretty cool.

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  9. We had a window at our Lake Superior cabin that looked down a path and out over Bark Bay. It was a lovely window on the natural world, although we saw such human things as the blocky little fishing boats that roamed the bay setting and pulling nets. Some of them cleaned fish right on the boat, and those were closely followed by undulating flocks of gulls crying excitedly and diving into the waves to grab morsels.

    Our first English setter initially hated the deer that ambled past the cabin window. Later, when we had bears eating from our birdfeeders, Spook decided that deer were okay after all, but he shook with resentment at the bears. We saw everything in the woods out that window: a lynx, lumbering porcupines, a wolf, ruffed grouse, skunks, several coyotes, weasels, eagles and too many foxes to count. I especially loved it when deer stopped to study our cabin at the end of day, for then the ears of the deer were lit from behind by the setting sun, causing them to glow red.

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  10. We replaced our windows this summer and it has made a big difference in the cosiness of our house. I like the bay window in the living room, especially since I stained and finished the window seat and upper parts all by myself. The view isn’t that great, just the house across the street, but the woodwork is pretty. The kitchen window overlooks the birdfeeders, and we all like watching the activity there. My office window overlooks the college football practice field. I have had that view for 15 years, and I am afraid that the sight of beautiful young men crashing into one another has lost its allure.

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  11. Our vet clinic is located in a little strip mall right on the river bluff. The deep silled windows in the exam rooms have bird-filled brush right in front of them.

    Not sure if that was planned or just a happy accident.

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        2. He got along ok with our calico, who was pretty much a loner.

          Dr. Fenske is very good too and overall, we have been very happy with them.

          They are right across the bridge in Lilydale.

          This reminds me, Princess Beatrice is overdue for shots and inspection
          Calling them now.

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  12. No amount of replacing windows has done anything to improve our view. If you enjoy looking at numerous junks cars fronted by the Virgin Mary in a bathtub cave, surrounded by two or three colorful elves and a sleeping Mexican, come to my house. For your added viewing pleasure there is also an assortment of dilapidated patio furniture. Towering above it all is a decaying silver maple which at the moment is visited daily by a pileated woodpecker.

    But there’s no denying that over the years that dining room window has framed many surprising scenes. Like the winter Tommy, the 40 year old, still living at home, son, decided it would be fun to build a snow fort.
    For a week of frantic shoveling and carrying snow from neighbors’ yards, he labored on his snow palace never giving any consideration to the fact that the site slopes gently toward their house. Once the thaw set in, the fort turned into a small pond that eventually turned their entire side yard into a huge mud puddle.

    That’s when Tommy got the brilliant idea to borrow a huge excavating machine from a friend. This was no small Bobcat, but a large piece of commercial equipment. We looked on in amazement as Tommy proceeded to churn their entire yard into an even deeper mud puddle, but now with a large piece of machinery mired in the middle. The machine remained stuck in the mud for days until the weather once again turned cold enough to freeze the mess at which point a tow truck extricated it.

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  13. I now spend most of my hours in a chair looking out what could be called a window but is actually the glass door between my little patio and my living room. Beyond the patio there is a coniferous glen planted to give a bit of privacy to those who are sporting about in the swimming pool. The fir trees around the pool are thick, so I see little else.

    Birds feed on stray seeds in the land just beyond my glass door. Most of them are quick and obscure in appearance. I see one bird over and over. Its identity is a mystery. I have purchased two books about western birds, and I’ve spent hours studying the bird with binoculars. But NO bird in my books looks like this one. The most common bird I see does not exist.

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        3. In my world, FLK stands for Funny Looking Kid, a moniker used when a client is odd and syndromey looking but you can’t put your finger on what is wrong.

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        1. Your descriptive powers have completely deserted you, Steve. “No white on them anywhere,” still leaves a lot to the imagination. What color do they have? What does the beak look like?

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        2. These are plump little ground feeders, with short seed-eating beaks. What makes them unlike anything in my books is that they are a sooty sort of dark brown all over: top, bottom, front, back, tail.

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  14. My son had an interesting through a window, or glass door, experience. On Christmas day they ran out of childrens tylenol for his 15 month old son at 6:15. He checked online and found a nearby XXXX (not going to say the name of the chain of grocery stores) open until 7. He got there at 6:40. When he walked to the door, the security guard locked the door in front of him. He explained why he was there. The guard said they locked the doors 20 minutes before closing. My son asked to speak, through the door, to the manager. The manager came; he explained. She said “too bad. We’re closed.”
    He found a drugstore ten minutes away. But the next day he ranted about XXXX on Twitter. His rant went viral in the San Diego area. That XXXX and that manager has a history of such behavior. XXX central management picked up on it and reached out to him. A man called to apologize. My son’s wife has two sisters who work at XXXX stores. One mentioned the incident at work to her manager. The manager said “That was your brother-in-law?” It had become a big deal for XXXX management. The sister-in-law’s manager explained it is a major violation of fire code to lock a door during business hours and since the posted business hours were until 7, they had a code violation.
    He has not heard if the fire department got involved. But a person, not a lawyer looking for business, responded to his tweet saying he had rock solid grounds for a suit because of much precedent.
    They will not sue, only in part because two sisters-in-law work there.
    The offending manager is supposed to have called by now to apologize but has not. One sister-in-law has told the management that they would accept credit for a few hundred dollars because money is tight for them at the moment. Management is agreeable to that.

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    1. tell me how to bitch online like that. I hate letting twirps get by with twit behavior but am not geeky enough to know how to bitch other than on the trial

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  15. Because we are a bit uphill from the last house between us and Sochaki Park, and because that house is closer to the street than ours, I can, from the upstairs west bedroom, look out and pretend said house is not there. It looks just like I live in the country and this is my view.// all those trees and squirrels and birds and the occasional deer are mine…

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