Tag: Glasses

I needed new glasses anyway.

/ Matt Talley

Apparently, all our puppy needs to be happy is a soft bed, warm yummy food, some ear scratchin’, and a $300 pair of glasses to chew on. We left him in the kitchen after coming home for lunch with the baby gate closed, his bowls were full, and he had a room full of friendly toys. Instead of chewing on his rope or gnawing at one of his m-a-n-y bones, that little M0TH3R FVCK3R climbed up on the table, grabbed my glasses, and used them for teething ring. He crunched up the metal frames and turned them into a paperclip. A couple of days later, he broke out of the kennel that he had been banished to and tore up a library book that had been left on the floor by the couch. As desert, turned Laurel’s reading glasses into confetti. Two weeks later, Houdini slips his shackles again, cozies up to Laurel’s sunglasses and after removing each earpiece like he had opposable-thumbs and a screwdriver, he began an assault on my back-up pair of glasses. I caught his hairy little rump square in the act. The glasses survived, but only barely – the polycarbonate lenses look like they were put in the dryer for a nice long spin. We are now out $500+ and he now has a taste for all things optical. My fear is that it is a condition similar to that of lions or tigers that taste man-flesh; once that threshold is breached, they crave it. I have noticed him eyeing my new specs with great interest and I know he watches me as I take them off and put them on a high shelf for the night. He is waiting for me to slip, to leave them on an end table or nightstand so that he can satisfy this growing hunger, his consuming urge to both piss me off and partake in the forbidden fruit of LensCrafters.

Bang for my buck

/ Matt Talley

As I grow older I have really come to embrace the idea of quality over quantity in most aspects of my life, especially concerning things I spend my money on – be it food, bikes, pots & pans, furniture, etc… I have also started to notice that I have entirely too much crap! I have been on a mission to simplify my life and free myself of all the junk the swirls around me and it has become easier by focusing on quality and workmanship. There was a day when I would go with the cheapest version available, but one truly does get what one pays for in almost all things. Buying the cheap version is a false economy as it will only have to be replaced, sometimes very often, and in the end I would have been better just forking out the money for the better model in the first place. Case in point – IKEA furniture: you can buy it cheap, but you are going to buy the same bookshelves over and over, especially if you move a lot, have a clumsy roommate, or stack too many books on the shelves again and again. Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay up to three or four times as much for a solid wood model that will stand up to any abuse that you or your demonic children can throw at it? I have recently applied this principle to the items that I carry every day as they get the most use and abuse: shoes, clothes, kitchen knives, sporting goods, tools, and so on. A couple of recent epiphanies in this department are:

Watches: There was a time when I owned 5-6 watches of varying quality and would wear a different one when the occasion or my mood changed. Before I realized it I had $600 worth of cheap watches, none of which kept time very well and I was constantly replacing batteries. What makes more sense is to buy something like an Omega Seamaster as it keeps amazing time, is tougher than a coffin nail, looks great with a suit, in shorts, at home in the mountains, the beach, or at work.

Pens: Every aspiring manager/megalomaniac wants a gold tipped Mont Blanc Meiterstuck fountain pen with a bold nib – loaded with antique Burgandy ink. While I do believe that a good pen is necessary to complete any man’s accoutrements, I am of a mind that Mont Blanc is overkill. For most things, especially at work, I am a pencil man, but I do have a nice MF-nib steel LAMY fountain pen, loaded with cobalt blue Noodler’s pigmented ink. It is nice to use for signatures on legal documents, lists, writing letters, Christmas cards, love notes, etc… I am also a HUGE fan of the Fisher Bullet Space Pen in steel with the detachable clip with a fine point blue cartridge loaded in it. Just like it says in the marketing – the thing writes on anything and upside down. My LAMY is always in my pack or pocket or you will find me scribbling in a Moleskine with it

Pocket Knife: No man should ever leave the house (unless headed to the airport) without a pocket knife. There are 20 tasks a day that are made possible, better, or easier with a blade: opening mail, cutting a trace on a circuit board, trimming the odd stray thread, voiding a host of warrantees, eating fruit, cutting an article out of the paper, trimming nails, removing stickers, and on and on… A Victorinox Officers Model or Tinkerer are perfectly acceptable, though my current obsession is a William Henry Westcliff Folder with a carbon fiber frame and damask blade. It makes me feel light headed and funny in the lower abdominal region…

Glasses: I am as blind as a garden mole at night and I can’t read signs that are further than ten feet away in bright sunshine without some sort of corrective lens, so I have worn glasses of varying degrees of stylishness since I was fifteen (I won’t discuss the 1980’s YSL red leather covered specs that were my first pair. Those frames coupled with my ultra-cool hair-helmet, spike bracelet, and teal blue Miami Vice outfit – God, I was sexy!). As my glasses are one of the first things people notice about me when I first meet them & I am now a bona fide adult, cheap clunky frames are no longer an option. I don’t mind paying a good bit for a classic frame that is both light and stylish as I generally keep them for three to four years. In the same vain, my sunglasses have prescription lenses in them as well. I chose finally to go with Oakley’s after years of cheap ones and a couple pairs of not so cheap shades that were ultimately crap. I have had this relationship with Oakley for the last eleven years (three different styles) because they weigh almost nothing, look great on my funny shaped head, and they have a great guarantee – forever! I have tested it by cracking a couple sets of frames – ugly bike crash and I sat on one pair once too often – and Oakley replaced them right away with no questions at all. Great customer service!

As an additional note, I don’t buy a thing anymore without a lifetime warrantee or one for some ridiculous amount of years. All my packs, tents, appliances, bike locks, glasses, electronics, everything… is warranted until I either leave this world or am a very old man.

What I have become

/ Matt Talley

About four years ago I woke up one morning, biked into work, had my Starbucks Tall Mocha, plopped down in front of my computer and spent the entire day drawing a satellite LMB load simulator for a terrestrial aircraft mock up lab. I ate take-out pad-Thai at my desk while drawing the wiring schematic, engaged in some Dibbert-esque banter with the engineer sitting in the next cubical, and rode my commuter-bike home listening to an audio-book on my MP3 player. Although I lived 300 steps from the Pacific Ocean, I didn’t run to catch the last sweet surf breaks before dusk or head to a beach bonfire with a six-pack and a bottle of red wine, my flip-flops going clickety-clack. Nope, I took a shower and hopped on my home computer to check CNN, e-mail, and look for the cheapest 500Watt power supply I could find for a new computer that I was building. While searching for said computer part, I accidentally popped onto an adult site. Annoyed, I clicked back and muttered about just wanting the damn part… BAM! It struck me, I am a nerd. I had been more interested in a computer part that boobies. I was horrified at what I had become and spent the next two or three months trying to prove to myself that it was only a temporary affliction and it wouldn’t leave any permanent residue. I was wrong. I have been forever tainted. Instead of fighting it now I accept that I can fix almost any electronic device, have become my entire family’s call-in computer help desk, find Weird Al Yankovic mildly amusing, and can discuss the nuance of data rate transmission with aplomb. I try to balance this new life of the geeky-stain with climbing, running, and cycling. I have a hot GGG wife and friends that pull me back in when I am seized in a fit of super-nerdy and try to discus free-market economics while drinking beer or like the time I decided to run a 10 gigabit optical line into the house for faster download times. There are no Geek/Nerd/Dork recovery meetings, no 3.14159265358979… step programs, and no pills I can take for this affliction. I will have to just live with my shame and strive for balance