ShoutOut Workshop

"I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state appointed
psychiatrist is our 'friend.' " --Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey


News and Notes, to people around our Community and the World:

--To David Mullany of Fairfield, Connecticutt, inventor of the Wiffle Ball: To you, we say cheers! Every spring, grocery stores get in stock a couple of cardboard boxes full of those plastic bat/ball sets, and I remember how much fun it was as a kid to swing away with those things. And because, by the time I was in high school, I pretended I was like an Incredible Hulk type guy when I'd use it on my brother...

--To the guy in the bank who drives the Audi and who wears the blue-tooth headset: What to say? Where do I start? We all get it -- you can talk on the phone without using your hands. Good for you. (I do this at home all the time, by the way - it's called a speakerphone and I don't look like an idiot when I do it.) Also, 1999 called and needs its technology back. Seriously, how much does that thing weigh? I've seen the newer, sleeker ones that are FAR less noticeable, so I do know they're out there. And one more thing: RETRO doesn't always mean COOL.

--To the guy we saw in the mall in Grand Rapids: I find it hard to believe you can't afford a shirt of some sort to wear under that amazing leather biker vest you own with the patches, so rather than offering a donation to the cause "Covering the Hairy Guy" I'll instead comment on the fact that I've never seen someone with such astoundingly impressive areolas. That's not a compliment. Seriously. Cover those things up -- they're like five inches wide. Nobody wants to see you jingle-jangle-jingle, shaking those things around like a set of sow's teats at a Kansas State Fair. 'Nuf said.

--To the cop who gave my wife a speeding ticket this week for five over: You're the same cop who gave a friend of ours a ticket for not having the proper insurance certificate in her vehicle. Not because she didn't have a current copy, but because she VOLUNTARILY spoke up without being asked and said actually the one in the vehicle wasn't the correct copy, she'd made an insurance policy change and had forgotten to put the UPDATED copy in the car. So you ticketed her for THAT. Seriously, how honest and trustworthy do you have to be in this jurisdiction to actually get drawn and quartered, anyway? By the way, I'll make sure we'll send in our donation to the Policeman's Retirement Fund pronto. We'll get right on that.

--To the guy who keeps jogging by my house and leaving his t-shirt in my driveway: You know who you are. We've got enough dirty laundry around our house already, thank you, so I'd really appreciate it if you could just keep your clothing on your body. Again, SERIOUSLY, do you have such a hard time figuring out what the weather is going to be a mile and a half away from your house that, what, soon you'll be leaving the house to start jogging in a snow parka? Or rain gear? It's the same here as it is OVER THERE!!! We're like six blocks away from each other! We share the same zip code and time zone!!! Now, if you'd like to leave something I could Ebay, well, that might be a different story...

--To the Editors of In-Touch Magazine: How many stories do you think the public needs that involve hidden cameras and 'Cellulite of the Stars'? 'You'll never guess whose bodies these are!' you say on the cover. I'll tell you who it is: It's the same three people whose pictures you airbrushed LAST month, when you needed their pictures for the story about 'Cheating Movie Stars,' or 'Pregnancy Rumors.' There is a special place in Hell for you, right between the level of moms who put their toddlers in beauty pageants, and Karl Rove's cretins who keep distributing the crap about Democrats and Socialism.

--To the guy who had his driver license revoked during the Carter Administration: Look, we're getting to know each other pretty well, right? You keep asking me for a printout of what you need to go through to make a formal appeal, so that you can start driving again, and the answer is the same as the last eleven times you asked me. I've gotta tell you between me and you, it's praaahhhbably not gonna happen, okay? Yer lookin' at climbin' a pretty steep hill, here, see? The way it works is, they generally DON'T go for giving out fourteenth and fifteenth chances to knuckleheads who decide to drive drunk over and over and over and over and over -- do you see what I'm getting at? So to save us both even more time and trouble, let me put it to you bluntly: you'll have your license back when: a) Hell freezes over; b) the Lions win the Superbowl; c) We discover life on Mars -- and it's little green men like they told us all along; or d) We discover the secret of spontaneous human combustion. So maybe you could work on one of THOSE things yourself -- as a kind of motivator. Instead of wasting MY time every few weeks coming in to ask the same question...

And now, reader, please comment!!! It's time to get involved, and give us your OWN shoutouts!!! :)

Stroddys: By the Numbers

It looks like this:


3 – Total number of children in the Stroddy household
4 – Total number of children John was convinced he’d want someday, long before he was married and found out what having kids was REALLY like…(who knew???)

1 – Total number of pets in the Stroddy household (down from 2 in ’07)
2 – Number of white lies we told our kids to convince them getting rid of the cat was really a good thing (“the Humane Society will find a new home for him”; “someone will adopt a 9-year old, overweight white cat that sheds and has bladder control issues”)

3 – Number of vehicles currently in the Stroddy driveway
0 – Number of vehicles currently in the Stroddy driveway that don’t have at least 1 major part broken

4 – Number of replacement mailboxes we’ve purchased over the course of our marriage
8 – Number of months between the time our last mailbox was initially damaged, leaving it without a door, and the time we decided we couldn’t deal with wet mail any longer and finally bought yet another one (condolences to our mailman – but, hey, better late than never, right?)

6 – Average number of months that LISSA thinks any given event occurred in the past
4 – Average number of months that JOHN is convinced any given event occurred in the past (um, is one of us remembering in Metric measurements or something???)

12 – The actual age our oldest is turning in April
17 – His adjusted age according to the Keynes-Rademacher emotional/hormone drama quotient pre-teen scale (which John is going to invent and win the Nobel prize for, someday)

9 – The age our middle child turns in April
0 – The number of times our middle child is convinced he wants to get married; also, the number of children he wants to have (he has stated, quite confidently, that he’s NEVER moving out, that he will live with us forever, that he would miss us if he moved out – how cute is that, right?)

2 – The age our youngest child turned in January
10 – The age it FEELS like she should surely have turned by now (seriously, how long do the ‘terrible twos’ last, anyway?)

42 – According to ‘Wii Fit’, John’s age (hey, come on now, I’m only 40 for crying out loud!)
0 – Number of times, since ‘Wii Fit’ gave John this unwelcome information, that John stepped back onto the Wii Fit Balance Board. (Fricker. I thought you were my friend, Tammy the Yoga Instructor! That’s why I picked YOU over the GUY!!!)

33 ½ - John’s current waist size
32 – John’s waist size in high school (hey -- not bad!)
60 – The age John feels when he tries to buy clothes at Abercrombie & Fitch. When did I turn into my father? (Why is this place so dark? Seriously, I can’t even read the labels, the strobes are flashing so much. Oh my word, did they make these clothes out of old rags? Why don’t I just -- $65??? For a flannel shirt??? What are you people, Communists???)

$5 – Record, in the Stroddy household, for highest amount paid out to date by the Tooth Fairy (there were extenuating circumstances, though, as our oldest had to have a tooth pulled at age 5, and my wife, under a wave of guilt because we’d waited so long to take him to the dentist, felt compelled to do SOMETHING to make him feel better.)
2 – Number of years after the tooth was pulled that Ethan held the moniker “snaggletooth”

66 – Number of friends John had, at last count, on Facebook
52 – Number of friends John has on Facebook that he actually knows (who are these people, seriously? Marcus who? And who is giving you all my name???)

House Woes #1

Another story from a long, long time ago…

Back in 2002, my wife and I were living in the first house we purchased. It was quite nice, a two-story/three bedroom thing with shiny dark hardwood floors, a fireplace, and built-in bookshelves that all made it feel like home. What we didn’t know was how much of a fixer-upper we had taken on.

Now, I’m not a big believer in karma, so I don’t necessarily think there’s any correlation between the hidden problems we’d begin to find in this house and our past behavior. But if you’re the sort of person who DOES believe in it, we must surely be horrible people.

I’m talking Bonnie and Clyde bad. Charles Manson bad.

Milli Vanilli bad.

This all started with the washing machine. Our experience with the Jackson house taught me that unless they’re brand new, whatever appliances you buy with a house can best be thought of like disposable contact lenses…everybody hangs onto them a little longer than they probably should, and whatever use you get out of them after the first few days should really be thought of as borrowed time that you’re not really entitled to.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when, during our second week of living in the house, something broke in the washing machine.

Now, at this point let me say that I am not, by nature, a mechanical person. Not per se. I wasn’t born a natural Mr. Fixit, I’ve sort of grown into that role in our household by the necessity that comes with living a certain lifestyle, described as, say, meager. Or paltry.

And of course growing up, I hated helping my father fix all the things that perpetually seem to break around the house – cars, appliances, the furnace, etc. – mostly because: 1) the repair always involved a complicated set of tools I didn’t know how to use (vice grips? channel locks?); 2) the broken object being fixed or replaced had a function which I had no grasp of at age 10 or 12 (carburetor? manifold? bearings?) 3) if the repair had to be done outside it unfailingly involved cold, miserable weather; and 4) having to repair things was a constant reminder of how much money our family didn’t have. (Are we poor? Seriously, we’re really poor, aren’t we? Then why can’t we just hire a furnace company to fix this, like Tommy’s parents did?)

And, oh yes, my role in helping my father was perpetually that of flashlight holder, I almost forgot to add that.

So I never learned much mechanically. Until the Jackson house came along.

My wife announced this the way wives always do.

Um, honey?

The washing machine didn’t seem to be spinning as fast as it should. That it didn’t seem to really want to agitate things this week, in the strict sense of the word. It’s heart just wasn’t in the work, it kind of looked tired…

And what was my response? Why, to boldly go, of course. This is what men do.

So I traipsed on down to the basement, laid my tool box on the floor next to the washing machine to size up the situation, and decided the first step was to turn off the water supply to the washing machine, completely confident that I could figure this thing out.

Now, I hadn’t meant for this to turn into a plumbing repair job.

But I reached up to shut off the water supply, and discovered the valve didn’t really want to seem to turn as much as I WANTED it to turn. So what to do?

Obvious answer, of course, to use the first tool the male mind reaches for to solve most any problem: brute force.

So this time, I twisted reeeeaaallll hard on the handle. Which would become the first of many times when the Jackson house would give me even more than I possibly could have wished for – oh joy! -- because instead of just a handle, wow!, I got an entire length of copper pipe which snapped away from the wall.

Whoever suggested that the sound of rushing water is supposed to be one of those soothing sounds that lulls the mind into thinking happy thoughts of rainbows and unicorns, I discovered, was quite incorrect. That somehow, even under stressful conditions like the ones I was finding myself in, I took little comfort in hearing the quiet swooshing sound – ‘ssssssssssssssssssssss’ – as a glorious waterfall roared out of a tiny ½ inch wide corroded copper pipe above me.

And so began the first steps of my long journey to becoming the licensed family plumber; finding the main water shutoff valve for the entire house (the first of several times this would be done); the trip to Lowe’s (again, the first of many times for this to happen); and a quick lesson in soldering copper pipe from a Lowe’s associate.

So that the lesson you don’t take from all this is -- wow, he tried that, maybe I should too! – I’ll add, finally, that some three hours and forty dollars worth of supplies later, the pipes were still leaking, the water was never turned on again that night, and my wife and I finally agreed that what we really needed wasn’t more DIY info from Home and Garden tv, or another book on home repair, what we really needed was a plumber.

Who my wife called the next morning, at a cost of some $60, ironically about that same amount that we could have spent for an appliance repair guy to make a service call to look at our washing machine...

And tell us we just really needed to buy a new one.

One of the most difficult aspects to deal with in the current Recession we’re experiencing is the dramatic population shift seen in many areas.

At a time when revenues generated from income tax and sales tax have fallen dramatically, institutions like cities, churches, and corporations have the added burden of seeing people move out of certain geographic areas, perhaps mostly due to job losses. In turn, then, the revenue those people would have been pumping into their local economies -- more sales tax at retail stores, more income tax, etc. – evaporates.

It’s a triple whammy for government institutions, which I think most people don’t realize. Not only are jobs being lost – which leads to people losing their homes and having to move – but the jobs that ARE lost are some of the best paying jobs out there. You don’t see McDonald’s and Burger King and Walmart laying people off, and for good reason – those are companies that have a relationship with the economy that is inversely proportional; the economy tanks, and these places flourish.

So the guy stocking the shelves at Walmart and the girl working the McDonald’s drive thru get to keep their jobs. The jobs that are lost are much, much higher paying jobs with benefits – white collar administrative jobs, engineers, architects, etc. And the truly difficult thing for state governments – and an ironic thing -- is that now you have a system where the minimum wage job earners are supporting (through unemployment benefits) the guys who were at the middle and top.

The poor are funding the middle class, in order for the middle class to maintain their standard of living.

I write about all this, I guess, because I’m something of a government insider, and more specifically, because we have people within the department I work for who previously worked with the state departments that hammer out many of our state’s budget details. So I was interested and relieved to learn than my specific department’s budget isn’t really tied directly to many of the factors of the economy that have decreased so much in the past two or three years. Our department gets most of its funding from gasoline tax, which despite what you hear in the news actually remains fairly stable over the long haul.

But this population decrease is difficult most notably, I think, for cities.

Detroit is the best example in Michigan. Thousands of people have moved out of the city of Detroit, which in turn means thousands of fewer students in their public schools. Which in turn means the city of Detroit has too many teachers. Which in turn means they’ve had to lay teachers off. Which in turn means they’ve lost jobs with benefits…which in turn has led those people to either move or file for unemployment benefits if they can’t find jobs…

And so on.

What I can’t figure out is why no one – as far as I know, anyway – has stood back, taken a broader view of the problem, and made a public plea for a hard core restructuring of our governments and our tax and revenue system to deal with this problem, the problem of how to deal with shrinking revenues in the short term to survive over the long term.

For example, part of the problem with funding schools is how closely school funding is tied to population itself. This isn’t, in itself, a bad thing. If a school has more students, it needs more teachers, so it gets more funding. That’s obvious. But we don’t step back to wonder what we’re going to do when the sort of dramatic population shift that we’ve seen occurs at a city-wide level. What do we do when more and more parents move to the suburbs and to private charter schools? Or when the economy tanks like it has, and people move out of the state altogether?
Why aren’t schools allowed to plan for this? Why can’t they include in their budgets funding for just these sorts of shortfalls???

The only plan we’ve had is to lay off teachers. To tighten our belts. To buckle down.

State government is much the same way. We don’t let individual departments budget their own money. While departments can spend, they can’t save – they have no chance to plan for the year-to-year ups and downs of revenue changes.

Why don’t we allow departments to save, to invest? To plan long term???

About fifteen years ago, the State of Michigan finally began the long, slow crawl away from pension systems for retirement plans – from defined benefit plans, in which employers pay out retirement benefits based on an employees years of service and their pay scale, to defined contribution plans, in which the employer and employee pay into a 401K or other investment plan which the employee gets to keep regardless of whether he keeps his job, gets laid off, or finds another job with another employer.

It’s a better system, in a sense, but it’s only a tiny piece of the pie. General Motors still has an uncertain future because of these defined benefit ‘legacy costs’ as they’re called in the press. GM will ultimately fail – just my prediction as an outsider, I suppose, but consider: my grandmother draws retirement benefits from General Motors right now.

It’s 2009. My grandfather worked for GM in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

So fifty years later – fifty, five decades -- my grandmother, who lives with my parents due to her declining health, still gets a monthly paycheck because my grandfather worked as a window installer for Buick while Eisenhower was in the White House.

This system can’t sustain itself, and it’s obvious why GM has repeatedly bottomed out over the last few years. To earn the title overused by the press and the pundits – viable -- GM will eventually need to buy out all those remaining pensions with a one-time payoff, most likely with government assistance. Or it will go broke.

So what’s astonishing, I think, is that even seeing the problems so many companies like GM are going through, we still don’t get the urgency of the problem. It isn’t just that pensions are bad (why didn’t companies like GM consider keeping pensions, but making them more affordable? why not simply pay out pensions for a specific time period – say, twenty years of pension for twenty years of service, and at a rate the company could afford???) The problem isn’t just that we’re losing revenues from our tax base – that always happens, eventually, just as the stock market goes up and down. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough money now.

The problem is that we never thought about the possibility of not having money now. Or that we never planned for it happening.

We never plan for viability. Not over the long term.

There is hope, I think, for several reasons:

1) Several countries in Europe are going through some pretty frightening problems right now – Germany has been in a long-term population decline over the last several years due to fallen population rates leading to some labor difficulties, and France has found itself bankrupted by years of short-term payoffs without long-term planning – and I think we can and will learn from the mistakes of many countries like these (when a country like France goes broke, it means more to us – whether right or wrong -- than seeing the people of say, Zimbabwe, a Third World country, experience the same thing;
2) The market provided a tremendous wake-up call to people when it began to decline a couple years ago, and I think this time, with a different President in office, we may actually have the guts to regulate what should have been regulated all along, hopefully still allowing markets the flexibility they need to thrive;
3) We’ve seen people actually begin to save more than they’re spending for the first time in decades. I think we get it; we just feel powerless as individuals to get our government officials to see the same thing we’re seeing.
4) My generation has never been in a Recession like this before; we’ve never been told ‘no’; we’ve never had to learn how to spend less; we’ve never had to budget for the long term. And yet we are doing just these things.

I’d love any comment you’d have on this idea of viability. I think the more dialogue that’s out there, the better off we are.

Of course, forty years from now, I’ll most likely still be drawing a pension…

And payments from my 401K…

And Social Security benefits…

Another Post About Work

Haji (*not his real name, see below) was in my office yesterday, a Yemeni immigrant who after following several other flawed forms of the American dream – factory work, selling used cars on the side without a license, etc. – has finally fallen into the vocation of over-the-road truck driver.



To speak to him, you have to use a sort of hybridized language; part Arabic, part English, with lots of gestures and pointing and so on, and always with a large piece of scrap paper on the counter to chart out what I’m explaining to him.


There is tremendous fun in seeing him, now. Truthfully it isn’t because of anything that's happened recently, but rather that I see him so seldom now that helping him has gone back to being fun and amusing, rather than annoying or excruciating.


When he used to come in all the time -- several years ago – you never knew what sort of scheme he was working on next, and every time he would come into my office, he’d bring in the most complicated questions about automobile paperwork; vehicle titles from other states, odometer statements that were incorrect, how to get around having to pay tax in buying a vehicle in order to resell it – all questions that would seem more interesting if you didn’t have to work through the headaches of a language barrier and dealing with a person you weren’t quite sure you trusted.


But now is different. Again, because he’s in so seldom, I guess, and also because now that he has regular employment, his questions are much more routine. He isn’t trying to scheme anybody. He's stopped buying and selling used cars under the table because that pays peanuts compared to what you can make as a truck driver.


In an odd way, he’s been a jewel to get to know. It restores your faith in humanity to meet somebody like him, not because he’s honest, or trustworthy, or a spiritual person. He’s not really any of those things.



Rather, he’s from such a different ethnicity that it makes you feel better, somehow, to know that he doesn’t have some hyper-radical magnetic attraction to his religion, no ultra-nationalist pride toward his home country. No dreams of strapping a bomb to his chest to make a statement and
become a martyr for his people.


In other words, he is quite normal, especially by American standards. And boring. It’s refreshing to meet someone so foreign, yet so average. So different, yet still familiar.


“John, what I going to do?” he’s asking me as we look over a sort of flow chart he’s written out on the counter, a representation of what it will take to complete 2 vehicle transactions – which will actually, because he doesn’t have the proper documentation, turn into 4 transactions.

And so I explain. And after meticulous pointing with a pen, arrows and loops on the paper, lists of how much each step will cost, he finally has it.

I give him the total amount of money he needs to bring, and he ends the conversation the way he always does, in his Arabic accent using what little American language he knows, always full of exaggerated confidence:

“You gaaahhht it. “

And that is Haji.

Who is Rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody. -- Benjamin Franklin


The Stroddys have always had a precarious relationship with money. It isn’t just that we’d like to have more money, or even that we mistrust money. Rather, if you plotted our relationship with money, vis-à-vis the SAT questions about correlation, it might look like this:

Stroddy : Money ---as--- Wile E. Coyote : x

Where x, of course, is the Road Runner, always just out of reach; plus, we’ve never really come up with a viable plan that’s been any better than all the PREVIOUS schemes we’ve already tried.

I think most of America is in this boat, especially now that we’re finally calling it a Recession.

I also think, though, that the Stroddys have taken things to a whole new, deeper level, at least compared to our peer group.

Bottle deposits are an alternative source of income for us – we usually get a 1099 form from Meijer around the first week of February – and we’ve even found ourselves in what one comedian describes as “rolling-pennies-for-gas-money broke.”

You know what I mean – scrounging through the ashtray in your car to come up with an acceptable minimum amount of money to buy gas ("let’s see, I have two $1 bills, if I can find one more quarter, hmm, I think $4 wouldn’t look so bad…”) Kind of hilarious that we all need to make sure we’re putting on a good face for the lady with the hair curlers working the gas station checkout counter – but apparently, we think she must make millions working behind that counter selling cigarettes, and we wouldn’t want to seem poor or anything…

The Stroddys have also written checks for less than $2 -- in line at a grocery store to buy milk one time, I realized I’d spent my last $5 in cash on lunch that afternoon and didn’t have my debit card with me.

We’re re-gifters (Seinfeld reference, if you didn’t know.) Multiple, multiple, times. (By the way, to anyone who got the re-gifted wicker wine-bottle holders that somebody gave us as a previous Christmas gift, you have my apologies…)

This financial pinch goes back far in my family tree. My dad’s father worked for 50 cents a week plus room and board during the Great Depression, and I can remember that same grandfather selling shoes through catalog orders people would give him, right up until the time he had his second stroke.

My mom’s family was even poorer. They had an icebox instead of a refrigerator when my mom was growing up (well past the time when refrigerators were available, I’m sure), and grew much of their own food – and they didn’t live on a farm, their house was in the city limits of Mt. Morris. Hard to imagine people living quite that way today, with corn stalks and tomato plants and rows of bean plants in your yard right next to the apple trees. They even had a cow for milk…

To me though, the most fascinating story about them is this: One year my mom’s youngest brother received two things for Christmas: a tire and a rope; and he enjoyed them both immensely. It was a great Christmas.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

So when my wife suggested a few months ago that we sign up for a series of financial seminars our church was giving, she was surprised, I think, that I didn’t present any argument for why we shouldn’t do it. So here we are, some nine or ten weeks into the program, which I’ll admit has gone very well. We still haven’t gotten to the parts about Lottery Tickets as an investment tool (not that we’ve ever played the Lottery, but, hey, I was just wondering) nor has there been any mention of bottle deposits, but it’s still been worthwhile.

I can see little changes happening in our kids, as well. We’ve started to move away from trying to give them an ‘allowance’ – a term the seminar leader shuns in the DVD series – and instead are trying to get them to work on a commission system to earn spending money.

Our oldest son worked this past weekend at a neighbor’s house, picking up sticks in his yard for $5 an hour. This sort of thing hadn’t happened before – but what can I say? Maybe our kids are finally embracing their parent’s lack of abundant wealth. Or maybe they’re brains are biologically preparing for the worst. They’ve lived with their parents’ lifestyle long enough that they’ve begun a sort of Darwin-esque adaptation in preparation for some impending financial storm that surely must be coming.

Whatever the reason, I was glad to see Ethan outside working.

Our financial peace seminar instructor would want us to have alternate sources of income to fall back on; and if I lose my job some day, at least Ethan will be able to list ‘professional stick picker-upper’ on his resume.

Free Methodism Post #3

"Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. " --Garrison Keillor


So that you don’t get the impression that everything I think about Free Methodists is negative, a third post in needed.


If Free Methodists embrace the sins of gluttony and legalism a little quicker than others, then on the positive side I’ll say that if they love anything more than food or rules (or, okay, Sunday afternoon sports on tv) it’s their children.


We shunned the notion of idolatry, of being thought too fancy for our britches, and so in most churches you wouldn’t have seen men or women wearing any jewelry up through the 1960’s, and you wouldn’t see men even wearing neckties. Apparently, though, it was okay for kids to be allowed the freedom of adornment; and so was born the Wednesday evening program: CYC.


CYC stood for Christian Youth Crusade. I say ‘stood for’ rather than ‘stands for’ because you’d be hard pressed to find any local churches that use this program for their Wednesday night activities, but you can think of it as a sort of Methodist answer to the Boy Scouts.


At the beginning of the school year the program would start up at the beginning of September with kids graduating to a new class and meeting a new group of teachers, usually the same people who were forced to put up with teaching us Sunday School and Vacation Bible School -- in other words, the 20% doing the 80% of the work.


Each kid would receive a handbook of sorts, much like I imagine Boy Scouts receive from their troop leaders, only instead of instructions for earning badges for fire building or first aid, we had other goals.


First through third graders got the chance to earn patches, four per grade, with an extra patch at the end of third grade you could add if you’d worked hard and earned all the other patches. By “working hard”, I mean having a parent who harped on you week after week to help out around the house washing dishes, cleaning your room, reading your Bible, etc. By “earned all the patches”, I mean having the same parent harping on you each Wednesday to bring your Bible, CYC handbook, sash, scarf and plastic tube that held the scarf together to Church to get credit for what you’d completed that week.


This was all, remember, for first through third graders.


If I’m making this sound like something I resented, I need to tell you that to a boy of seven or eight, the whole idea was absolutely glorious. We’d gather as a group of maybe fifteen or so on Wednesday nights, and when you started that first year in first grade, you got to see the second and third graders, those who’d ‘gone on before you’, so to speak, standing there reciting the things we recited every week, so tall and looking so ‘with it’ wearing their red sashes and sky-blue scarves. Something to strive toward.


The catch in all this, though, was that a kid of six really isn’t quite ready for the idea of working in small pieces for a larger goal, and so while we’d get so excited in September to see all our friends again and see all those taller second and third graders wearing their sashes with all the patches already sewn on, the idea that those patches were something we were supposed to work toward -- every week -- was a foreign concept.


We’d all start out pretty good, doing a couple of chores a week. To earn each patch, you had a checklist of three or four things you could choose from to complete a section, which in turn was part of a larger section to be completed. And when you strung together a couple dozen completed tasks, bingo! You’d have earned the patch.


Over the course of the year, though, the actual effort could be charted as a sort of expanding curve, with tiny amounts of effort being exerted in September through say, March, when suddenly it would become clear that we only had a few weeks left to fill in all the blanks in our handbooks. And so it would be time to really buckle down. By ‘buckle down’ I mean begin to stress out about how little you’d actually accomplished early on in the year, but not actually exert any extra effort into doing anything about it (see related articles: Merriam-Webster, “procrastinate”; Brittanica, “First Grade Thought Process.”)


But then it was like the two weeks before Christmas, one of those time periods when you REALLY knew you had to be good, boy, or you were in for a world of disappointment. So you transformed into the perfect child. Dishes were washed without a parent asking; floors swept; carpets vacuumed; you were even nice to your little brother for a few weeks.


All of this by third grade. Fourth through sixth was worse.


Because the pressure was increased exponentially by fourth grade. The older kids didn’t earn three-inch wide patches; they earned 1 inch pins, and my, my, you could cram a lot of those tiny pieces of metal on the brand new royal blue sash they gave you in fourth grade. If I’d felt pressure in early elementary to have my sash filled in by the end of the school year, it was nothing compared to what these upper level required of us.


Bible memorization; Bible reading; all the other stuff we’d had to do for first through third grades; on and on and on, a whole litany of things to work toward, and certainly not the kind of stuff you could cram into the last 2 weeks of the school year. The ante was even upped with one particular pin that involved Bible reading; the more you read, the more pins you could earn, and every church had one kid who’d read through the Old and New Testaments like 9 times during the school year, and would look like he was wearing a suit of armor at the end-of-year ceremony where we’d all be awarded the pins we’d worked for that year.


We’d all gather on that last Wednesday night with our teachers, waiting to be called up in groups in front of the whole church, to be awarded the pins. This was where Free Methodists showed their true capacity for cruelty, because every church also had a dozen or so kids whose parents didn’t attend regularly. So they were kind of on their own to remember all of this stuff by themselves, and they never did, of course, they were the kids that had earned maybe three out of the twelve pins (TWELVE, for crying out loud, that’s what they expected us to earn; what are you people, NAZIS???) and you always felt a little embarrassed for them with the large, gaping spaces on their sashes where you knew pins SHOULD have been.



So all of this accepted form of adornment, the sashes weighted with the metal pins of victory, draped over our shoulders like Versace clothing on a mannequin, to show all the world what Free Methodist kids were capable of.



So I'm trying to think what applicable system or structure we should be trying for MY kids.



Maybe rings? Or bracelets?



Tattoos just seem a little much...

“If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends.

You talk to your enemies." -- Mother Teresa

Four Oakland, California police officers were killed this weekend, an event that we cannot help but react to. It is the type of thing that needs to be written about and commented on.

That this happened is another sign that in case we thought otherwise, we of course still have a long way to go in the area of race relations in this country, only this time, in a sense, the shoe is on the other foot,with four police officers shot for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oakland, you may remember, is the same city in which a police officer was caught on a cell phone video, shooting an unarmed civilian point blank as he lay handcufffed on the ground, with horrified passengers at a rail station looking on. This led to street protests and a renewed call from the public for police to be held accountable for their actions and a new dialogue to be opened between City Hall – the mayor of Oakland is, ironically enough, black – the police department, and the citizens of Oakland.

This all brings back so many other past transgressions committed by both police officers and members of the communities in which they work that it leaves one speechless and full of anger and frustration (the Rodney King beatings; the Detroit race riots of the ‘60’s; the killing of immigrant Amadou Diallo; and the list goes on.) And meanwhile, in the midst of all of this, four families deal with a loss that cannot be understood by anyone who hasn’t experienced it; instantaneous, brutal, random.

If you’re not familiar with the details of the news story, I urge you to read this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29816667/ for several reasons. First, I find this surprising, but most news sources I’ve read got this one right in my opinion, because there’s no immediate mention of Lovelle Mixon’s race; neither was the race of the officers involved listed in the initial articles.

And yet it is a case about race, for obvious reasons. Mixon was black; the four officers shot were all white. You can’t help but notice this from the photos shown. The shooting occurred in an area of Oakland that, according to news stories, is a black neighborhood. And a neighborhood in which residents are open about the fact they don’t trust police; even though area residents knew where Mixon was hiding after the initial shooting, they didn’t tell police where he was holed up, and police had to spend an hour barricading a neighborhood to find him.

My current interest in writing about this news story is not only about race relations. From a broader perspective, I need to say all this:

A few weeks ago I was reading in I Corinthians, and came across a passage about spiritual gifts, specifically speaking in tongues and the gift of prophecy, and about the edification of the Church: “…he who prophesies edifies the church” Paul writes, and “Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy.” These were from Chapter 14, if you’re interested, a chapter that gets little notice, especially seeing how it comes after Chapter 13 -- the Love Chapter,the one so often read at weddings.

Paul’s emphasis on prophecy in this passage struck me. Several things began to gel in my mind and heart, I think, over the past month or so, and it has felt as if God has been telling me something about the church I attend, the Church around the World, our roles in society, and my role in our local congregation.

Prophecy is one of those things we think we understand so we don’t study it. Or maybe it doesn’t even seem relevant enough to warrant our attention, something we don’t think really applies to us in the 21st century.

I think we’ve got it all wrong. That seems apparent to me when I study the early church shown in Paul’s writing. We have little prophetic voice in the church. We have no one holding our community, our church leaders, accountable for their actions.

I’m writing more about all of this soon, so I’ll only add that I’m learning that any voice that stands up to take to task injustice in the community is a prophetic voice.

And part of that prophetic voice could be this blog.

So what does this have to do with Oakland, California, a community 2500 miles away from me, stuck at the same crossroads it was at a month ago, three months ago, decades ago?

I am an outsider to California, but an insider to human nature and several things felt very clear as I read about what had happened: that all tragedy happens for a reason;
that the U.S. as a community has much to learn from what happened in California, if we seek truth, if we seek the will of God in all this; that the citizens of Oakland, California, while not responsible for the individual actions of Lovelle Mixon, are at the same time responsible for the myriad of actions and the conditions that led them to the place they find themselves in.

Consider: a multitude of people within that community knew he had an AK-47 (I’m not a convicted felon, but I do know it’s the kind of thing you can’t get on your own – there’s a supplier and a buyer – and it isn’t the sort of thing you can hide); they knew he had a handgun, knew he was a convicted felon, knew he was not allowed, by law, to own or even possess those weapons; the community refused to assist police in finding him, even when, by their own admission, residents knew where he was (this was taken from published news interviews in which residents stated this very thing); that family members knew he was struggling with depression – again, by their own admission – and yet still allowed him to be alone with a handgun and an assault rifle.

The problem now becomes this: a tiny percentage of residents of Oakland – perhaps 5% -- have led Oakland to this situation by their own inaction. By their refusal to address what should have been addressed, refusal to stop what could have been stopped. A simple call to the police would have prevented him from owning an AK-47. It’s the sort of weapon meant for mass destruction, not protection, and the kind of weapon police are most anxious to get off the streets. It would have been easy to find.

So this 5% has put an entire city back on a knife blade, teetering on the brink of either starting back at square one trying to open a dialogue with police, or instead toppling into anarchy, into further, harsher street violence, into another hard crackdown from an angered police department who will deliver justice on their own terms. And they will deliver, we all know this from past experience. If the citizens of Oakland in these communities rampant with violence and drugs are unwilling to open up to the idea of dialogue to fix the problems everyone knows are there – problems that poke their ugly heads out in news stories like this latest one – the police will come up with their own way to ‘fix’ the problems they see, and these fixes won’t be pretty or nice.

What I do know of human nature, too, is that people need control and if they feel out of control, they will take it in whatever form they can. If one police officer is gunned down, someone will be held accountable. The killer will be found. If the community is not willing to help, the police will resort to whatever means necessary to find the person.

If a group of police officers is gunned down like this, there is now a situation where the police feel out of control. Holding one person accountable – even if only one is responsible – isn’t enough. It isn’t fair. It’s a ratio of one to four.

This is all especially true in a situation where people could be perceived as culpable. People knew where Mixon was holed up; they said nothing. Two MORE police lives could potentially have been spared had someone stood up to give the police the information they needed.

(Note that I am not condoning a police overreaction; I am only saying it's most likely coming, if Oakland doesn't work proactively with their police department.)

So then the question becomes: what control can the police get back? With the equilibrium disturbed, how can things be brought back into balance?

It appears the only route available for Oakland to take is through dialogue. If the community has the courage to own up to its problems and take the inevitable criticism that will come, change could happen. It’s a big if, but it’s the only avenue left. Without that dialogue, without critical discussion, humans are no more than animals.

The Christian community needs to pray for this kind of dialogue in Oakland to take place; it also needs to encourage and listen to whatever prophetic voice from within its congregations or even from the outside might stand up to speak truth. And it needs to pray for the courage to listen to that voice and act.

We are all accountable to and for one another; perhaps that’s the most important thing to be learned from Oakland.

Encouragement For Today from a Total Jackass

"If life deals you lemons, why not go kill someone with the lemons (maybe by shoving them down his throat)?" -- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handy


I just had the following phone call with someone. My blood pressure is coming down now, but for a few seconds there I could feel a vein pulsing in my temple.


Me: Can I help you?
Caller: Yeah, I have this neighbor, and she, uh, has this car, in her garage, it’s been there for quite a few years, and I have this license plate – well, it’s been expired since last year, but I was hoping to transfer it to this car, and she was going to sell it me, apparently it was a relative of hers, and what I’m trying to figure out is how much –
Me: I’m sorry, who gave you this phone number?

(I need to mention our office no longer has a public phone line – neither do any of the other branch offices in our Department, and it’s because it simply takes too long to answer questions like this, too much time away from assisting the public – people who’ve taken the time to actually come down to my office. So I’m immediately irate, because SOMEONE in the community has our phone number – probably they got it from a car dealer, or friend of someone who works for a car dealership – and has been giving it out to more and more people in the last month.)

Caller: Uhh…(long, long pause.)
Me: I need to know who gave you this phone number.
Caller: I…uhh…

(Now it’s obvious to me at this point from listening to his lack of response that he knows he shouldn’t be calling, and that if he names names, whoever the person is who DID give him our number is going to get into some kind of trouble.)

(Did I also mention this guy doesn’t sound like he’s twenty years old? More like he’s in his fifties or sixties…so I’m a little ticked that he’s acting this way.)

Caller: Well, I, uh, looked it up.
Me: No, I need to know WHO it was. This number’s not listed.

(Now I’m completely infuriated, there I’ve said it – the point of this blog entry, my overreaction – infuriated because one of my least favorite people to deal with in ANY situation is somebody who won’t give you a straight or honest answer; and I have to deal with FAR too many dishonest people, even in a town as small as the one I work in.)

Caller: (Silence.)
Me: Okay, listen, I need the name of the person who gave you this phone number, because the next thing I’m about to do is dial star-69 to find out your phone number and give it to the police, so they can open an investigation and help me figure out who --
Caller: Heh, heh, sir, you’re scaring me a little here, I’m trying to give you the name of the person if you’ll just let me –
Me: Okay, I have pen and paper in hand and I’m waiting for a name.
Caller: Uh…
Me: Okay, that’s not a name, are –
Caller: No, no I’m giving it to you! Let me see, I called this phone number (he gives me a number) and then I called this other number (he gives me a second phone number) and they gave it to me.
Me: Okay, that’s still not a name. Are you saying it was Mark? (a name he had mentioned at the beginning of the phone call.) Is that the person?

After a little more prodding and a few more questions, it turned out a local business had our phone number (not a car dealer, by the way) and I ended up calling that office and giving them an earful for three minutes.

And the point of this entry:
I intrigue myself – not because I can be so obnoxious to people on the phone, but for two other reasons:

1) I feel so bad about behaving so poorly on the phone that, after I hang up, I spend the next twenty minutes in my office away from the counter, because I am somehow afraid the next customer that’s going to walk in the door will be this guy, and he’ll get to see face-to-face the jerk who was just so demeaning to him on the phone (no kidding, this is what’s going on in my mind. I’m not afraid of the guy – he sounds anything but intimidating -- and I’m not afraid of getting into trouble at this point, because he’s the one who’s not supposed to be calling me.)

and…

2) My overreaction to this guy is so over the top that what positive result could have come from me acting like such an idiot? So I found out the person’s name who gave him our number – great, nice going, genious, you’re a real Sherlock Holmes. Maybe the CIA should hire me for the next round of Guantanamo interrogations, or the Iraqis could hire me to work at whatever complex will replace Abu Ghraib, because apparently I’m so good at making people feel bad.
I am completely ashamed of the way I just acted, and yet it’s done. I can’t take it back.

So how is this ‘encouraging’? What good do I see in this?


I went into my office and picked up my Anne Lamott book “Traveling Mercies” that I’ve been reading for the past few weeks, and read a story from a point in her life several years ago when she was going through a period of chronic flu. Her son was at the age when he was continually picking up flu bugs from school, and they kept passing the sickness back and forth.

She’d finally had a brief period of good health, then woke up one morning with a flu whose main sympton was a migraine-bad, splitting headache.

She was going out to get the newspaper, squinting against the bright sunlight, when a friend drove by who was recently diagnosed with stage-four metastatic lung cancer that had spread to his brain – and of course, he was ‘coping’ with this beautifully, though she makes it sound like he is the sort of person who would never have used that word to describe himself. She talked about how handsome he still looked, driving around with the windows rolled down (they lived in California) and how he was experiencing life to its fullest, savoring every moment. She even said he was diagnosed with this life-threatening disease that in turn had allowed him to live a disease-threatening life. Very powerful stuff.

And finally, this next part is what struck me. She commented– to him – on how badly she felt with her aches and pains and how she just wanted to hang herself because she felt so bad and she quoted him as saying this: “Sometimes colds and flus are harder to handle than cancer…You’ll be better soon. God, what a day!” And with that, he drove away.


And after reading this, I thought, yes, I believe this is true, I believe in this. That sometimes the small things that you have to struggle with in life are far worse than the big things; that the Grace of God gets you through the big things not because they’re not big, but because you’re not afraid to ask for Grace, and that if you just asked for it with the small things, then THEY’D be easier to deal with, they’d be even smaller. That it’s okay to have to struggle with stupid little things like this, to make mistakes you didn’t think you’d make again as an adult, to re-learn the hard way the lessons you learned when you were younger.

Just make sure you re-learn them and move on.

I essentially decided to let myself off the hook – not that I didn’t want to go back and change the past because I did, and not that what I did wasn’t wrong, because it was. I’m not minimizing it, because that isn’t the point. Somehow, though, when I really think about it all, I am able to, I guess, forgive myself. I know that seems asinine, self-centered, all of that, but there it is. I’ve said it.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, as the book title goes.

Follow Up:

Most of what you’ve read from above I typed right before I went to lunch.

So I get up from my desk, put my coat on, grab the Anne Lamott book from my desk, and head out the door.

And as I leave the office, for the one and only time probably all morning, there’s a little traffic jam so to speak at the front door of my office, with two of us going out, and two people coming in. And a guy holds the door for us, and both I and the lady in front of me say our "thank you’s" as we walk out, and he replies with something like "sure.”

And no, I’m not making this up, it’s HIM. THE GUY. I was 90% sure of it the second I heard his voice as I walked outside of the office and the door closed.

I was 100% certain as I thought about it, standing there outside my office.

So I get about twenty yards down the sidewalk, and I don’t know what made me stop – yet I DO know what made me stop, really – and I turn around to head back into the office to apologize.
I open the door and go in. He’s poverty, and no I’m not trying to be rude - I know him, I’ve seen him before, he’s been in my office a dozen times or more. He walks with a limp, mild paralysis on one side possibly from a previous stroke, wearing comfortable but somewhat threadbare clothes, poor dental work, poor plain and simple, and I’m feeling like everything about him contrasts with me – younger, dressed in a new sweater I got for Christmas, new blue jeans, dress shoes, soft cotton jacket I received from my wife for Christmas (which I rotate with the hooded sweatshirt I received from my brother and sister-in-law for my birthday – apparently, I need a lots of jackets.)

And so I tap him on the shoulder and say, “Hi, did you just call a few minutes ago?”

Now, you’re thinking this is the touching part of the story, when he says yes, and I say, I’m so sorry, I just wanted to apologize for my behavior on the phone a little while ago, and I’d go on to explain why I got so upset, and he’d say that’s okay, and music would start playing like in a greeting card commercial, the kind of music that reassures you that everything is right and true in the world, violins and cellos and maybe a harp, and then we’d even hug and school children would walk by my front door holding hands and an older couple sitting in two seats nearby would tilt their heads toward each other and smile knowingly.

That’s what was supposed to happen, I really was planning on telling him ‘I’m sorry.’ But of course, life couldn’t work out that way. It wouldn’t be NEARLY as amusing for you, reader…

Instead, the guy turns in his seat with a deer-in-the-headlights look as he realizes I’m THE ONE, the crazy maniac on the phone that just pushed him to name names, to sell out his friend to THE MAN, now leaning in, a mere thirteen inches from his terrified face, and he stands now to face me.

“Uh, no!” he replies. “It wasn’t me. Besides, you can’t call here – they don’t even have a listed phone number!”

Well, at least he got the message…even if I had to verbally beat it into him…

Free Methodism Post #2

I’m wading through “a Generous Orthodoxy” right now by Brian McLaren, a challenging, lengthy but worthwhile read, but at the beginning of Chapter One he mentioned something that triggered an avalanche of memories that had been held back in my mind for a long time:

Flannel graphs.

I'm not sure if you would know what they were if you didn’t go to a Protestant Sunday School as a kid, or if you never attended Bible School. But at any rate, they now seem horribly outdated and irrelevant, especially from a 21st century perspective.

They worked like this: a piece of cardboard or thin plywood – about, say two feet by three feet – was covered with a piece of felt that acted as a background. The board was placed on an easel in front of a group of wide-eyed, unsuspecting children who had NO idea what was coming next.

The teacher would then tell a story, using characters made out of felt that were placed on the felt-covered board along with other background items. It was kind of like Colorforms only way cooler, because there were all sorts of characters and items, whales, soldiers, palace columns, kings and queens, and as a little kid, the magic of seeing things stick to other things without use of glue (we didn’t even have Velcro, yet!) was nothing short of amazing. It defied the law of gravity! And if you were REALLY lucky that week, the leader chose YOU to be the assistant that placed the items on the board (and to help hold on the one or two that had a big, fat crease in them because they’d been mislaid inside the plastic Ziploc baggy that housed all the flannel pieces.)

So the teacher would place a character on the board, sometimes telling a story from the Bible like David and Goliath, or Jonah and the Whale, or whatever. But sometimes it would be another story.

The one I always remember when I think about flannel graphs involved a little frog that hopped all around a little sky blue felt lake with all of his little felt frog friends. I think there was a grasshopper or something in the story, too, but it’s hard to remember details from thirty years ago. But the story is essentially this:

(Brown felt leaves added to flannel graph) “Mr. Frog’s friends realized, one by one, that autumn had come and was leading to winter. Brrr…it’s sure getting cold they all began to realize (teacher brings out some frogs that have little felt scarves and mittens), and one by one they all began hibernating (teacher takes off frogs one by one from the board)…but not Mr. Frog (white felt snow added) and soon – oh no! The snow had come (grey flannel added to cover the pond) and now ice! The pond was frozen! Mr. Frog had waited TOO LONG!”

And a group of twenty wide-eyed children were surprised to see that, yes, clearly, Mr. Frog wouldn’t be able to swim through that ice – she wasn’t kidding. You could see it, just look at how gray it was, it was indeed frozen – the frog had waited too long. What was he going to do now?

But of course, he couldn’t do anything, the teacher would explain, leaving us all shocked, wanting more. A group of twenty school children, previously wiggling in our seats, now feeling an unsettling quiet move in like a midnight fog.

I was like six or seven -- I liked frogs, right? And at first many of us were wondering, what are you trying to tell us lady?

But I knew EXACTLY what she was telling us, I knew the pond was like heaven, and Mr. Frog had waited too long to ask Jesus into his heart and now he would die and never play with his froggy friends again, never taste another black, felt fly like the teacher had shown them do before and he would spend eternity in Hell for thinking he could try and slide under the doors of Heaven as the gate came down like a set of bank vault bars.

Those of us raised in the Church knew -- you couldn’t just pull a fast one on Jesus like that.

Morbid and frightening, to be sure, and from the perspective of a forty year old, I now think it's a little weird to think our Church leadership would use such blatant fear and terror to push a few more kids each week off the fence of un-decidedness into the Milk-and-Honey Promised Land of Protestant Christianity, but there you have it.

Life as a Free Methodist.

We don’t exactly do this with our kids any more, I suppose, but I don’t think we realize what they really might be bringing away from many of the stories we do give them: Jonah and the Whale (do exactly what God tells you to, or something terrible could happen); David and Goliath (consider this from the point of the CHILDREN of the Philistines); and my personal favorite, Noah and the Ark (we give them animals, and leave out the part about thousands of people perishing in a violent flood, scratching and clawing at the wooden ark doors, begging to have their lives spared as their lungs slowly fill up with water, while Noah and company only listen in pity. Ouch.)

We did get a glimpse of this children's perspective with our second child Isaac, who seemed most fascinated by one specific picture in a Bible Story book, a cartoon-like picture of Jesus hanging on the cross. He was mesmerized by this at age three, and would point to the blood spots on Jesus’ hands and ask, “Ow-y?”

I think kids get all this at some point – we all realized these things as we grew older, after all, and maybe it’s just a necessary part of growing up, that realization that what you were given as a kid was a greatly simplified, watered down version of what’s actually in that Bible book.

It’s insane to me that we tried to do this with adults (still do, though rarely now.) We had pastors explaining to people that no one knows when they’ll die, that you could walk from this VERY BUILDING, RIGHT NOW, TONIGHT, and get hit by a bus on your way home. If have haven’t read it already, Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon” puts into crisp detail exactly what Protestants experienced as recently as twenty or thirty years ago.

Christianity as Fire Insurance.

So all of this was conjured by a few words from Brian McLaren’s book. I’m excited to keep reading it, as I can already tell that even though McLaren’s about 10 years older than me, I’m going to identify heavily with much of what he’s experienced in his past.

I can’t wait to get to the good parts in the book – where he goes into more detail about the Flannel Graphs…

Free Methodism Post #1

“Generosity without orthodoxy is nothing, but orthodoxy without generosity is worse than nothing.” --Hans Frei, as quoted in Brian McLaren’s “A Generous Orthodoxy”

I was raised a Free Methodist. I’m not sure why that’s the right way to start this entry, but it is, so here we are.

Sumus quod sumus. We are what we are. So said Garrison Keillor referring to Lake Wobegonians, and growing up, I found the same to be true of members of my church.

There's a certain charm to people willing to so grossly indulge in the sin of gluttony as demonstrated at every major holiday potluck, yet so intolerant of even a taste of alcohol; so terrified to seem guilty of the sin of adornment that women abstained from wearing jewelry and men from neckties, yet so fiercely competitive at slow pitch, interdenominational softball that they'd argue with a referee to the point of shouting over a called third strike that clearly was high and outside.

This was my childhood.

But I'm jumping a little ahead, I suppose, because you need to know something about Free Methodism, with regard to both the history and the current state of affairs. Many of you reading this will know much of this already, but please indulge me.

The denomination started in 1860 with a man name B.T. Roberts, who'd been 'defrocked' as it was stated in one publication I recently read, by the Methodist Episcopal Church of New York. Trying to figure out exact truth from hearsay is a little complicated, so I'll only say he began Free Methodism as a denomination in part to get back to what he saw as the Wesleyan roots that he perceived the Methodist Church had lost.

Early Free Methodism held strongly to several views, most notably: 1) a support for the abolition of slavery; and 2) a belief that churchgoers shouldn't be required to pay money for church pews. It now seems a little odd to think of a church needing to use these platforms as part of a basis to form an entirely new denomination, but what can you say? This was the nineteenth century...

As a kid of eight or nine, I had grand visions of our Church forefathers, brave, radical men with the Santa Claus beards shown in all the photos of that time period, men willing to swim upstream against a worldly tide of idolatry and deceit that could clearly be seen even today in the likes of Democrats and those who would buy Chrysler products.

So saith my father, and yea, verily I did believeth him.

But this vision blurred as I grew older, finally washed away altogether by the time I was a teenager and old enough to see the truth for what it was. Our local congregation wasn't full of high ideals or brave trailblazers, it was just a lot of male pattern baldness and potbellies and men with too much Brylcreem.

These were good people, though. You had to admire their grim determination and hard work. The year we decided the church building needed renovation and an addition we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars selling bonds, all of which were paid off in just a few short years -- and this from a congregation of just over a hundred people!

This kind of thing amazed me. What they weren't spending on liquor and fancy cars they were more than willing to give to build hospitals in Africa or to send missionaries to New Guinea. Real salt-of-the-Earth stuff.

So now I'm back in another Free Methodist Church some twentyfive years later and I'm wondering, am I doing my kids an injustice by raising them in the same church I grew up in? Perhaps. It's a thing I wrestle with sometimes, I guess, because I’ve come to believe two things: first, that any human organization has its inefficiencies and deficiencies. You can only hope to minimize the bad stuff and maximize the good – and you make your choices based on that; and second, that it’s better to teach your kids how to think and learn rather than to teach them facts – an Education degree gave me that.

I’d rather have them raised in any church that I believe is teaching them truth about God and life and themselves, and I’ll take the shortcomings that come with humanity and a human organization – if it gets them closer to God.

I think it’s what we’re commanded to do.

The Art of the Prank

"“Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I'll have a witty and blistering retort! You'll be devastated THEN!" Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes


We’ve just passed the Ides of March, and as the calendar shows us careening toward April Fool’s Day, a note is required here about my family.

We all have our opinions about what we might do if we were elected President. Our oldest son Ethan, when asked this question by an early elementary school teacher, had a laundry list, which included perhaps most notably: any women who had pierced ears would be required to wear earrings.

So we all have our list of wishes. And I am fully convinced that if my father were President, an Executive Order would be issued instituting April Fool’s day as a National Holiday, with some sort of Presidential or Congressional Honor to be given to the person who had played the best prank that year.

A large cash prize would be awarded, much like when the Nobel Prize is issued, and perhaps a plaque or some sort of trophy would be given though I’m not sure what the trophy might actually look like (a clown having a cream pie smashed in its face? a rubber chicken?) and the President (my father) would be required to MC the event with scores of onlookers, a real A-list crowd, watching video after video of the best pranks pulled that year in a variety of categories…(“The 2009 nominees for best practical joke involving livestock are…”)

And if an Award Committee were created to vote for nominees, my father would be nominated many, many times.

The list of pranks this man has played over the course of his 63 years is truly monumental, but to give you several reference points for what I’m talking about I’ll give you these two:

--First One: My dad’s best friend when we were growing up was Bill Smith. Bill was a vice president of marketing for a major retailer, and worked with a man he wanted to prank so… Bill employed my father’s service to: a) load 2 junk snowmobiles on a trailer; b) drive to the man’s house on a Saturday when he knew the guy would be gone; and c) show up at his front door, explaining to the man’s wife how her husband had agreed to buy these rusted-out, unusable snowmobiles for $200, and how he had agreed to pay cash. And yes, my dad supposed he could accept a check but he didn’t quite have enough gas to get all the way back home so could he also get $20 in cash as well???

And she relented, all of which nearly ended their marriage. When the man came home, he found his wife in tears with cries of ‘how could you?’ and ‘I thought we agreed no major purchases!’ and so on, and in the middle of the chaos and the crying and the arguing the light bulb came on and he uttered one word:

SMITH.

But this wasn’t the end of this one. Fast-forward six months later when my dad is playing Santa Claus for a Christmas party for the same company that Bill and this guy work for. My dad shows up at the restaurant with the “Ho-Ho-Ho!” routine, bringing gifts out of his large red cloth bag, each one tailored to something specific and funny about each person, and the last one he gives out is a small, gift-wrapped box which he hands to Bill’s friend. And as Santa leaves the restaurant wishing everyone Merry Christmas!, and Happy New Year!, the friend opens the box and finds…

The check. Written by his wife, six months before.

--Second One: Bill gets my dad to go to a shoe repair place, one of those stores you might find tucked away in a corner of a mall that does a dozen different things like shoe shining, shoe sole replacement, and…making replacement keys, and he asks for a bunch of botched keys, that is to say, keys that were cut with a defect and couldn’t be used.

And he takes these keys, and to help Bill out –Bill who wants to prank a friend (with friends like these, right?) -- he gets little tags and writes the friend’s phone number and “If found, please call…reward” on each of them.

And he drives down to the worst part of Grand Rapids, an area full of prostitutes, pimps, and the homeless, the kind of people who are all looking to make a quick buck, and he throws a set of keys onto the sidewalk every couple of blocks.

And about an hour later, the phone calls begin.

And after about the fifth somewhat unintelligent/highly unintelligible phone call to his house, the friend realizes what’s happened. But he’s no slouch either when it comes to pranks, so he changes his home answering machine message to say: “If you’re calling about a set of lost keys, please call…” and he gives out BILL’S phone number…

Ouch.

And so it goes. My dad’s the sort of person you find yourself thinking about on nights you can’t sleep. What would be the best way to get him back?...or what could out-prank that prank?

It’s tough, too, you know? It’s that old thing, it’s hilarious when it happens to somebody else, not so much when it’s you…

So last week, I’m off for a few days and my wife and I are sitting in my parent’s living room talking about where we want to have lunch, and my mom says “we should go to Fire Mountain Grill, your dad eats there all the time and Sarah Palin’s sister works there.”

Um, I’m sorry what?

“Mom, what do you mean by that?”
“Oh, it’s her, you can tell by looking at her.”
“No, I need you to clarify here, are you saying this is somebody who looks –"
“ No, no, it’s really her. Your dad eats there all the time and struck up a conversation with her. He asked her if anybody told her she looks like Sarah Palin, and she said, ‘well actually, I don’t tell a lot of people but that is my sister.’ “

So at this point I was intrigued. No, obsessed, not because I’m a big Sarah Palin fan but because of this other idea I’ve had for about 10 years that it would be a really cool idea to write a book – which I still might do, so don’t steal my idea – which would involve me having my picture taken with dozens of different sort-of-famous people. Like a guy who’s a driver for Bono, or somebody who’s a waiter where George Clooney always eats, that kind of thing.

Or Sarah Palin’s sister.

But of course, you know from what I’ve told you about my father already where this is going. My mom assures me that, yes, this really is her. We get to the restaurant, get seated in a section across from where she’s working, and after discussing over lunch with my brother how we’re going to approach her to try to get a picture, I turn our digital camera on and the message reads: “Battery Exhausted.” No kidding, that’s what it said, not “Battery Needs Charging” or “Low Power”. So it wasn’t going to happen.
My brother assured me this would almost be better, because it could turn into one of those urban legend things…where I’ve never actually had my picture taken with Sarah Palin’s sister, by I know a guy who’s had his picture taken with her, and we could put that on this very blog (future post, perhaps.)
I thought this a grand idea, so we got up from the tables and got to the parking lot when my mom comes through the door behind us shouting, ‘John come back – she wants to meet you.’

So I did. I went back in, and met this woman who really does bear a kind-of/sort-of-in-a-way resemblance to an older version(?) of Sarah Palin (and hey, she even has glasses, right?) and it’s all “So nice to meet you,” and “Your dad comes in here all the time.” So at this point I really was pretty convinced.
Until we got home that evening, and found the voice mail service from my mom telling us it was all a hoax.
And she was going to kill my father.

So here we are, a mere two weeks from the first of April…
And I’m WIDE open for suggestions –
Please, PLEASE, comment. Throw me a bone, here, people, if you have an idea…

I've been thinking about this for close to thirty years. This might be the year it happens.

For those of you who didn't know, it's my wife's birthday today, and she's been violently ill apparently with food poisoning (no details, but you get the idea...)

So if you have her as a "Facebook" buddy, you might want to drop her a note to say Happy Birthday; this wasn't the way the day was supposed to turn out...

I LOVE YOU,HONEY!HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

THE WARNER/SILHOUETTE NEWS

News from the Warner Elementary/Oldsmobile Silhouette Community

Communication Mixup Causes Mass Panic; Improper License Plate to Blame

Authorities today urged caution and asked local residents to resume their normal activities, today, after a large crowd waited almost 45 minutes in line next to what they thought was a bagel vendor, causing a near riot when it turned out no bagels were going to be sold. As one resident explained, "I guess we all just assumed -- I mean look at the vehicle." Apparently the miscommunication was caused by a license plate issued by the State of Michigan starting with the configuration "BGL." Several persons saw the vehicle as it pulled into a school parking lot, and, assuming the man to be a Lox/Bagel vendor, began waiting. A passing resident, Mark Thompson, was walking his dog at the time and upon inquiring what everyone was waiting for, broke from the route he normally took with his Yorkshire Terrier "Mitzy" to join the queue. The owner of the vehicle had apparently left, exiting from the front driver's side door but his exit was unseen by onlookers. "It's just the way I've always exited the van," he explained. "Besides, I don't even have a permit for selling those sorts of thing!" Local police officials refused to comment, citing an ongoing investigation, but an unnamed source familiar with the case said he doubted charges would be filed. -- John Johnston, SAP Reporter

Court Decision Sides With "Big Business"; Family Left Dogless

In a stunning 7 to 2 decision this morning, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of a local fencing contractor who had been sued by a Spring Arbor Township family for breach of contract and pain and suffering, after the contractor failed to make good on a promise to install a wooden fence that was to have surrounded their 1/4 acre plot of land. The property was to have eventually housed a breeding farm for miniature chihuahuas, a company started by the family's son Hans Grautner. "Are you serious?" Hans' father Gunther replied, when asked for comment. "We're devastated."

The court ruled in favor of the contractor, A to Y Fencing LLC, who had advertised the fence installation in a local circular as "1/2 off'". Their lawyer argued successfully that this actually referred to the size of the fence, not the price. The Grautners believed they were having a fence installed around the entire edge of their property; in actuality, the fence only covered part of two sides, leaving a wide open space in which their dog could escape.

"Well, when the contractor gave us the invoice and said he was finished, we just opened the back door of the house and..." Mrs. Grautner began, but couldn't finish.

Her husband continued.

"Well, Little Man just ran away. Right off down the street." Little Man was the first of what was to have been a herd of nearly 300 miniature chihuahuas, a specific breed valued for their tiny size. Some 40% smaller than the chihuahua breed most people are familiar with, many people have turned to them as pets due to the savings in feeding costs; since the economic downturn, the American Kennel Club said they've seen an almost 85% increase in miniature Chihuahua purchases, no doubt also spurred by the recently released film, "Beverly Hills Chihuahua." --Barb Massey, Warner/Olds Reporter

Boy Denied Access to School Bus; Parents Vow to Sue

A local boy trying to board a school bus was denied access, this afternoon, when a bus driver, questioning the boy about his apparel, refused to allow him to board after it was determined the boy was not wearing any western gear. After noticing the boy had no ten-gallon hat, spurs, or any other type of cowboy gear, the bus driver contacted a dispatcher who notified the parents the boy's attire did not conform to Western School District rules. They were shocked by the policy, but the bus driver and school officials were unmoved.

"Look, it's called Western School District for a reason," said dispatcher Alan Lemon. "And we're not just talking about spurs that jangle but don't jingle. This was a student that had absolutely NO cowboy gear on whatsoever. " He went on to explain that though the written policy is very explicit about what constitutes 'western' gear, the school district is generally lenient if students and parents show some attempt to stay within the guidelines.

"Clearly, that was not the case with this student." Lemon went on to point out the lettering on the busses themselves. "It's right there, plain as day. Western School District."

After removing their child from the school property, the parents vowed to contact a lawyer, though they were unsure what action to take next. "Oh, we'll be back," stated the child's father as his mother broke down in tears. "There's a new sheriff in this -- well, anyway, we'll see." Tanya Blotterman, Warner/Olds News

Economic Downturn Shows In New Indicator: Vehicles Going Colorless

In a surprising twist that has taken analysts by surprise, GM CEO Rick Wagoner announced today that customers will begin seeing a dramatic shift in production.

"Specifically, this means that along with other cuts being made to our lineups, we will no longer be painting vehicles." Instead, he said, vehicles will be left with an assortment of grays -- that is, with primer rather than finish paint. "It's just become necessary in this economic climate," he continued.

The change was already being seen in 0ne local parking lot; hardly any color was to be seen in an array of cars that local residents had parked there.

"I don't really mind it," one resident responded when asked what she thought of it all. "It isn't like a car rides better if it's red or green or blue. And if this is what it takes for the Big Three to survive..." She just shrugged. "I guess we're all tightening our belts a little more. I'll still buy them." --Allison Gray, SAP Newssource

Local Doorman's Union Strikes; Hundreds Left Out in the Cold

Residents and School Officials floundered today, attempting, often unsuccessfully, to open the front door of a local elementary school after long-time doorman Oscar Hanson joined the local chapter of the International Gatekeeper's Union in going on strike. The walkout was reportedly triggered when school officials and the Union were unable to reach an agreement on a variety of issues, from upgrading doorstops to providing uniforms with a less itchy material.

"I'm at a loss," the school's principal said. "I've never -- how do these door things even work, anyway? How am I supposed to know?"

He wasn't alone.

"This is a travesty and an outrage, and I won't stand for it," cried one local resident struggling with the front door's push/pull mechanism. "Someone should be held accountable for this."

The Obama Administration could not be reached for comment, but one insider reported that talks would continue long into the night, if necessary, in an effort to avoid other walkouts as well.

"What happens, God forbid, if the pencil sharpeners union strikes? I fear for the safety of these children," the official said. --Dan Gil, SAP

A shameless kind of plagiarism, sure, but worth it as the video below I found quite good. Stole it off of my friend Jason's blog, which HE in turn stole from somebody else...so maybe 2 wrongs do make a right...

Continually amazed at the technology available to those with too much time on their hands -- and also glad people are willing to put such a large amount of time into creating something to be enjoyed by other people...with no other expected reward!!!

At any rate, hope you enjoy --


Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

"Bee Van" or "Our Season of Frugality"

This all started about a year and a half ago.

At the time, our family was still riding around in a 1999 black Ford Windstar that we'd owned for around seven years. A good amount of time to have driven a used vehicle, and a good amount of miles, too -- it had 40,000 on the odometer when we'd bought it and we'd added close to 100,000 in the time we'd been driving it.

At point of purchase, the Windstar was all shiny and black and new car smell. Seven years later, it had morphed into the Millenium Falcon of vehicles. The back door didn't close very well (we'd been rear-ended, which had also left a crack in the back bumper.) One light on the control panel had popped on, then another and another, all shining quite persistently. Which I think were all put there by the manufacturer, a series of carefully timed warnings: look, you really should probably get this vehicle serviced, the first one seemed to be saying; then, I'm serious -- something is really wrong; and finally, Danger, Will Robinson, Danger...

The real indication that something was wrong came in a trip we took across the Great State of Michigan to the water park we go to every year with friends. About halfway into the trek, our cell phone rang.

"Is everything okay up there?" our friend in the vehicle following us asked.
"I think so," we replied, "why?"
"Um, our windshield is covered with motor oil or something..."

And it was. We would find out later a leaky manifold gasket was to blame, one of those car parts that just SOUNDS expensive to fix -- and is. Easily costing several hundred dollars in car repairs AND embarrassment (words cannot express the dismay you feel at seeing someone's car covered in motor oil -- and feeling you're responsible.)

But this wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, that would come the next summer when, after a series of minor repairs, we took the same trip from Jackson to Muskegon...

I need to interject something here, and that is the fact that the easiest way for a male to make himself look like a jackass is to utter the phrase "Everything's fine" to his spouse.

Even if you're sure it is. Because there's a cosmic guarantee that speaking those words will promise disaster.

It has been said before that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. This holds true for trips involving any form of motorized transportation. We were planning to leave Friday evening, spending the night at my parents' house, and then going on to the water park Saturday morning. I had spent a couple hours that week getting the Windstar ready to go -- changing the oil, checking fluid levels, vacuuming it out. The transmission had been acting up, but I discovered the source: a terribly low fluid level. Apparently it had small leak. So I simply added fluid and a bottle of "Stop Leak" and called it good.

"Are you SURE everything's okay?" my wife asked.
"Yeah. Wait, what do you mean?" I responded.
"With the van.""Oooooh, you mean the transmission problem. Of course!""I'm just asking," she asked. "Can you guarantee this van is going to get us there?"

And that was when I made the mistake and uttered the phrase, a kind of alchemy that, instead of turning things to gold, turned them to...well, you get the point.

I'll summarize by saying the van DID make it to my parents' house, just barely. We had to stop every ten minutes to dump in as much transmission fluid as possible (it was actually dripping out of the bottom of the engine onto the ground almost as fast as I could pour it in.) We'd pull off an exit ramp and I'd run, Keystone Cops style around the front of the vehicle, pop the hood, dump in two quarts of fluid, jump back into the driver's seat and roar off the down the highway.

It was a long trip. I can still feel the heat on my skin from the glare my wife was giving me.

So with as bad as this experience was, you'd think karma would have had its fill with us. But no. We didn't realize it had only back-handed us, and was returning a second time for a full, open-handed face slap.

Fast forward to a few days later when, after returning home (an adventure in itself getting that heap of metal back home so we could junk it) we received a phone call from my parents.

We'd been shopping for another vehicle, and were looking at buying another minivan from a state auction I'd found online. When we didn't end up getting that vehicle, my dad called with this offer.

You saw the van parked in our driveway? my dad asked. We'd like to give you that.

We had seen it. My dad had bought it from a man who lived about a mile away. The van, a gold Oldsmobile Silhouette was sitting in his front yard with a 'For Sale' sign and a price tag of $400. It needed some major transmission work and some other minor repairs but the body, made of fiberglass instead of steel, was in great shape. Would you take $100 for it? my dad offered after looking it over; the owner would.

And so there we were.

If this seems like a too-good-to-be-true story, that's because it is.

My dad was offering to have a car dealer install a factory-rebuilt transmission in it, at a cost of several thousand dollars, along with making all the other necessary repairs. And all this for a used minivan with a total of, get this, 200,000 miles already on the odometer.

"No, no, only 194,000" my dad responded.

Several days later, there we were, being given the tour by my father, proving that along with all of the other careers he's had (repo-man, mechanic, magician, factory worker, etc) he could easily fall back on a career as a used car salesman, should present conditions require a career change.

Upon inspection, my wife first noticed that a family of yellow jackets had decided to create a nest in the back door (between the door seal and window) so there you have it...we christened it 'Bee Van.' (Haven't checked yet, but I'm wondering if this configuration would be available as a vanity license plate...hmmm...)

This would be the first in a long line of deficiencies and defects we've found over the last 18 months. After my parents spent the time and expense of having the rebuilt transmission put into it, as we were driving it home we noticed a whine coming from the front of the vehicle.

I called my dad that week and after talking it over, he came up with a diagnosis: a defective wheel bearing. Again, one of those parts that, unless you're a mechanic, you have no idea what it does or where it is; which of course means it's a relatively expensive fix.

"But you guys are coming this weekend, right?" my father asked.

My stomach began churning as I knew what was coming next.

One of the things I've learned over the course of my forty years of living with my father is he's a big picture guy. If the devil is in the details, then why even bother looking at them? It's much more pleasant to see the overall picture, to get a nice wide, faraway look at the problem and see that things really aren't as bad as they might seem.

As it applied to this present situation with Bee Van needing the wheel bearing, his perspective was this: I've fixed this before. We can handle this.

In other words: EVERYTHING'S FINE.

That I should have had this churning sensation in my stomach might make it seem like I was ungrateful for the help he was offering in helping us fix this problem; he was going to pay for the parts, and we were even going to use his tools to fix the van. And, remember, he'd been a licensed mechanic previously -- so what was the big deal, right?

And from MY perspective, the big deal involved all of these things: 1) my wife and I felt TERRIBLE that he was willing to invest YET ANOTHER fairly large amount of money (money which, let's face it, we didn't have) in the vehicle that my wife and I weren't sure was worth more than the price of the scrap metal holding it together; 2) previous experience has told me that the 2 or 3 hour fix he was promising would probably turn into 5 or 6 hours; and 3) if we couldn't get it fixed in that period of time, what were we going to do for a vehicle? We were 2 hours from home.

But he was undaunted, not even remotely dissuaded by my reasoning. And with no other good argument I could think of, I agreed. Since it had to be done, we might as well do it. So after driving into an auto parts retailer to buy a wheel bearing, we set out to work.

Another note needs to be interjected here, concerning the process of installing wheel bearings. "Bear with me" if you'll pardon the pun, but several things need to be explained to squeeze the full humor out of what I think you'll find is a hilarious episode in the saga we call "Growing Up Strodtbeck."

Each wheel -- that is to say, the thing that a car tire is bolted to -- has a component that bears the weight of the car as it drives down the road. This is a wheel bearing. (I'm not a mechanic, I only play one on tv, so my description is a little light on details.) Over time, the 'bearings' -- that is, the little metal ball bearing inside the wheel bearing component, wear down. The grease that lubricates them breaks down, and eventually instead of rolling smoothly as they are supposed to, to bearings begin grinding, louder and louder and louder until they become so hot that something even more serious can happen to the vehicle.

The wheel bearing assembly is purchased as one unit on most vehicle, about the size of, say, a portable Compact Disc player. The way the disassembly is supposed to work is this: Jack the vehicle up, take off the tire, take off a bunch of brake parts that are in the way of what needs to be replaced, take off the old bearing assembly, install the new one, and put everything back on.

So the question always arises in ANY and EVERY single car repair that I have ever dealt with, from changing the oil to replacing a complete exhaust system: what do you do when something goes wrong?

What went wrong first was how long it took in taking everything apart. We couldn't seem to get the old bearing off. Numerous parts were taken off -- brake parts, springy things, suspension components. Still the bearing unit wouldn't come out.

"We must need to take the sway bar off," my dad said.

Definition of Sway Bar: a torsion spring that resists body roll motions...i.e. this is an enormous spring -- nearly as wide as the vehicle you're driving -- that has enough tension in it that it keeps the entire vehicle from rolling over if you, say, jerk the wheel to one side to make a sudden swerve.

That I didn't know what this device was should have been a warning sign. Had I realized what we were taking off, I'm not exactly sure, but I think I would have dropped the tools we were using and repeatedly asked the question, "Are we sure we should be doing this?"

Consider: a four foot long spring that prevents an entire automobile from tipping over at high speeds must have like, what, four or five thousand lbs. of resistance to it?

I don't know. I don't even know if 'resistance' is the right word used to measure springy things, but anyway, we worked for like an hour just to get the thing off...only to find we never had to take it off in the first place, another part was actually preventing us from finishing the job.

But we finally finished after about 3 hours. We had to grunt like animals, like cave men to get that stupid thing pried back into place, but finally...

...it was done.

My dad grabbed the keys, jumped behind the wheel, and asked excitedly, "Ready to try her out?"

"You go ahead," I replied. I was exhausted and covered with grease and grime.

And off he went, roaring down the driveway and onto their street.

Two minutes later, he was back. The look of defeat and exhaustion on his face brought a flurry of klaxon warning signals to my mind: "What's wrong?" I asked, not really wanting to know.

He padded slowly toward me, handed over the keys, and closing his eyes in resignation, said: "It was the wrong one."

"What do you...the wrong side?" I asked. "You're lying." He only slowly shook his head.

"See for yourself." He handed me the keys.

And sure enough, he was right. Somehow, we'd managed to take wheel bearing off the wrong side and replace a perfectly good wheel bearing with another one.

That same day, we drove back into town, bought another wheel bearing and replaced the other one. It was the first in a series of repairs Bee Van has needed, including the following: driver's side door handle (outside, replaced TWICE), passenger's side door handle (outside), rear seat belt, driver's seat belt, driver's side door lock assembly, passenger's side door lock assembly, turn signal switch (twice), steering wheel (yes, apparently those can wear out also), front brakes, battery, and wiper transmission assembly.

I'm not making any of this up. Either the mechanic my dad uses is taking him for a ride -- and trying to put his kids through college? pay for a yacht? -- or this van is a bigger piece of crap than even I would have believed possible.

Either way, I'm convinced I'm right; it probably wasn't the best purchase, nor was it the best decision to spend such an unbelievable amount of money on a vehicle that my dad HAD ORIGINALLY PURCHASED TO USED AS A PARTS VEHICLE.

And my dad is equally convinced it was STILL the right decision; after all, his Oldsmobile Sihouette has over 300,000 on it, right? He can't understand the skepticism I have toward his belief that EVERY Olds Silhouette should be capable of going over 300,000 miles...

So, to recap:

1 used bee-infested van... $100

1 rebuilt-transmission/brake repairs/2 wheel bearings/new turn signal switch/new steering wheel/assorted door locks and handles...$4500

Getting to tell your father 'I told you so' for the foreseeable future?

Priceless.