UnlimitedLicense

2011-11-28T19:43:00.000-05:00

2011-11-26T21:22:00.001-05:00

2011-11-19T08:43:00.000-05:00

2011-11-17T20:15:00.000-05:00

2011-11-16T21:07:00.000-05:00

2011-11-14T22:13:00.000-05:00

2011-11-13T21:24:00.000-05:00

2010-06-16T20:47:00.001-04:00

2010-05-18T20:08:00.001-04:00

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” -- Anne Lamott

2010-05-16T21:10:00.001-04:00

"To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. "

~ Lewis B. Smedes

2010-05-11T20:50:00.001-04:00

"When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and I get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty, I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer." -- Brennan Manning, "The Ragamuffin Gospel"

For Reference

2010-03-26T17:41:00.001-04:00

U.S. Presidential Oath of Office:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Oath Previously Administered to Applicants Applying for a Michigan License:“Do you solemnly swear or affirm that all the information you gave in this application is true and correct, and you have surrendered all licenses issued to you by this state or any other state, or that you have never been licensed in this state or any other.”

Oath administered to Kentucky Secretaries of State:“I do solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth, and be faithful and true to the Commonwealth of Kentucky so long as I continue a citizen thereof, and that I will faithfully execute, to the best of my ability, the office of Secretary of State according to law; and I do further solemnly swear (or affirm) that since the adoption of the present Constitution, I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this State nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending, so help me God.”

2010-03-25T17:39:00.000-04:00

13 Things You Didn't Know About McDonald's

2010-03-18T16:21:00.005-04:00

Source: minyanville.com

1. About one-third of Mexico's sesame seed crop is purchased by McDonald’s for its buns and there are roughly 380 seeds on each one.

2. When McDonald's was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1986, it set a record for opening-day trading volume of a non-Japanese company, with 615,750 shares changing hands.

3. By one estimate, a mere 6% of the Big Mac’s price comes from the cost of its ingredients -- the rest of the price coming from labor costs, rent, utilities, packaging, and the like.

4. Legendary Today show weatherman Willard Scott was the first Ronald McDonald.

5. Ronald McDonald's shoes are size 29 EEE.

6. The Happy Meal was first rolled out in 1979 and featured McDoodler stencils, McWrist Wallets, ID bracelets, spinning tops, and McDonaldland character erasers. St. Louis Regional Advertising Manager Dick Brams is credited with the Happy Meal concept, and is known as the “Father of the Happy Meal”.

7. There is a ski-through McDonald's in Sälen, Sweden.

8. In Japan, Ronald McDonald is known as Donald McDonald because there is no “r” sound in Japanese.

9. The smallest McDonald’s is also in Japan, in the Ginza district of Tokyo, measuring just 492 square feet.

10. The largest is in Beijing, measuring 28,000 square feet and seating 700 customers.

11. Well-known ex-McDonald’s employees include George W. Bush's first chief of staff, Andrew Card, Amazon.com (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, Robert Cornog, retired CEO of Snap-On Tools (SNA), astronaut Leroy Chiao, and Jay Leno.

12. With all the talk of dead-end “McJobs”, McDonald’s actually provides its employees comprehensive benefits, including medical, dental, 401(k) matching, and offers workers a program called Mc$ave, a money market fund managed by T. Rowe Price (TROW).

13. Suleiman Qassab of Kurdistan was denied permission to open an actual McDonald’s, so he took matters into his own hands:

2010-03-17T22:10:00.003-04:00

I don't do links very often, but if you get a chance, this one's a you-tube link to a group named "Hold Your Horses" acting out a variety of famous paintings throughout the music video...

De-Motivator for the day...

2010-03-15T22:21:00.003-04:00

Happy Birthday, Chuck Norris!

2010-03-11T10:07:00.002-05:00

With Chuck Norris turning 70, I thought it appropriate to add a post with the "Best of the Best" -- some of my favorite Chuck Norris 'Facts'; especially since our son Ethan, age 12, just started hearing these at school...

Actually, Chuck Norris didn't turn 70 today; 70 turned Chuck Norris...

But anyway, here they are:

-- "In Chuck Norris' beard, there is no chin.. only another fist"

--Chuck Norris doesn't sleep...he waits!

--Chuck Norris destroyed the Periodic Table of Elements because he only recognizes the element of surprise

--Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas to bed

--Everyday is a gift, a gift that Chuck Norris let me live another day.

--They had to rename a street in California that they originally named after Chuck Norris because nobody crosses Chuck Norris and lives.

--Chuck Norris is the only man in the world who can slam a revolving door.

--Chuck's view on health care reform: "I don't need it and you're already dead".

--They originally wanted Chuck Norris to do the movie "The Terminator" but realized it would have been a documentary.

--Chuck Norris sleeps with a night light....not because he is afraid of the dark, but because the dark is afraid of him.

Christmas Season 2009

2009-12-15T21:07:00.002-05:00

The Christmas Season this year will always be remembered as a year of transition...

For our oldest, Ethan, who is now 12, it's the last year of childhood...soon to be followed by the teen years. And because he's now in middle school, he's no longer involved in all the little kid stuff that goes on at church. Never again will he be our little angel with the tinsel crown, no more dressing up as one of the three wise men, no more children's choir.

And Ethan also really enjoyed the youth group stuff at church, highlighted by a gift exchange which was supposed to be a 'white elephant' affair. This didn't always translate well into the arcane language of the 7th or 8th grade mind, which made the whole thing much funnier. As the kids broke into their cell groups of 8 or 10 people, I saw cheap plastic toys (who knew they made no-name-brand slinkies?) and candy, a mechanical battery-operated crescent wrench, even a used basketball.

For Isaac, 2009 was a season of . He kept his parents running. First, he sang with the Jackson Children's Chorale Choir, which had the opportunity to sing with the Jackson Adult Chorale Choir as they were backed by the Jackson Symphony Orchestra...the whole production was amazing, but the day was packed. The minute the concert was finished, Ethan and I pushed our way frantically through the crowd to find him and haul him to the church so he could change transform into one of the three wise men via the magic of the bath robe. We just barely made it with perhaps two minutes to spare...whew!!!

And then came Gillian. Not quite age 3, she's our handful of joy (more handful than we can manage at times) and she's at a different stage of transition, not quite baby, not quite little kid. My wife and I woke her up from a nap to get her changed as quickly as possible from pajamas to tights and a dress, and again, just made it with about two minutes to spare.

Still sleepy and half in a daze, Gillian walked with the other two year olds down the central aisle of the dark church into the spotlights, all eyes on the children as they were herded into position by adult workers desperately hoping to get them to sit still...and of course, you could feel the smiles of the watching adults, all wondering how successful the whole thing would turn out.

The minute the two year olds were in position, the overhead screen displayed them seated on the steps where they sat...which was discovered by one little girl who was completely delighted to see herself and all her friends on two giant t.v. screens.

And her attention from that point on was completely lost.

But the show must go on, and so it did. Gillian, however, was too exhausted to sing anything, and she ended up first sitting on the steps staring half awake out at the crowd, then watching the kids around her do the motions to "Away In a Manger" which my wife had practiced with her for days.

So glad she had all that practice...so we could watch her sit there and watch everyone else...

Two

2009-12-03T09:22:00.002-05:00

“ ‘Snot Weekun!” our 2 year old exclaims impatiently, and her majesty is correct – it, the DVD player is not working…or more accurately, it isn’t working YET because the DVD she wants to watch (which she’s seen at least ten times already) hasn’t loaded yet.

Impatience. Defining hallmark of youth (though we all wish it just developed naturally with age, don’t we?) and no one in our household is more impatient than the princess. When the disc is put into the player it’s supposed to just WORK; not after four seconds. NOW.

She’s like this with many things. When she wants a sippy cup (a ‘baba’, to use her vernacular) thirty seconds is much, much too long to wait for the microwave to heat the milk. But if the glass we use to heat the milk is taken out of the microwave at, say, twenty seconds, well, as crazy as it may sound, SHE KNOWS. “Oh! Nah HOT! Heat-a-up!”

Age two has its bright spots, of course. Christmas will no doubt be amazing this year, perhaps the first one she will remember and definitely the first one where we’ve introduced the word ‘presents’ to her. And we’ve recently gotten video of her watching a Disney DVD. She always laughs hysterically at the same spot in the cartoon, and you can’t help but smile and laugh right along with her.

But how did ‘two’ come to an end so quickly? It feels hard to believe she’s almost three. THREE, for crying out loud, and while I can’t believe I’m saying this, there’s a kind of sadness knowing that in just a couple months, we won’t have a toddler in diapers any more, but instead a third child. A KID.

I’m not complaining by any means. Changing your kid’s diaper when she’s age two is kind of like changing your great Aunt Margaret. You don’t get cutesy little poo like you do with newborns, and it isn’t an experience you look forward to. Having her completely potty trained -- instead of having to change her underwear seven times a day -- will be a huge blessing.

But two is almost completely gone. And it wasn’t so terrible after all; in fact, am I actually going to say this? We’re going to kind of miss two…

Quick Quote...

2009-10-25T09:32:00.002-04:00

"You can run...but NOT WELL!!!"

         -- Bernard, from the Nickleodeon animated series, "Back in the Barnyard"

More Schrute, Baby, SCHRUTE!!!

2009-10-21T22:07:00.004-04:00

On Health Care:

Dwight Schrute: "Someone forged medical information, and that's a felony."
Jim Halpert: "OK, Whoa, alright 'cause that's a pretty intense accusation. How do you know that they're fake?"
Dwight Schrute: [reading from a sheet] "Uh, Leprosy, Flesh Eating Bacteria, Hot Dog Fingers, Government Created Killer Nano Robot Infection."

On Survival of the Fittest:
"In the wild, there is no health care. In the wild, health care is, 'Ow, I hurt my leg. I can't run. A lion eats me. I'm dead.' Well, I'm not dead. I'm the lion. You're dead."

On Friendship:

"I have been Michael’s number two guy for about 5 years. And we make a great team. We’re like one of those classic famous teams. He’s like Mozart and I’m like...Mozart's friend. No. I’m like Butch Cassidy and Michael is like...Mozart. You try and hurt Mozart? You’re gonna get a bullet in your head courtesy of Butch Cassidy."

Hmmm...

"I think one of the greatest things about modern America is the computerization of medical records. As a volunteer sheriff I can look up anyone's psychiatric records or surgical histories. Yeast infections...there are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from that old bread factory..."

On Marketing:

"First rule in roadside beet sales, put the most attractive beets on top. The ones that make you pull the car over and go “wow, I need this beet right now”. Those are the money beets."

Thought for the Day...

2009-10-21T14:35:00.001-04:00

After recently reading an article on CNN.COM, I've come to the following conclusion:

If you're going to post a comment on the Internet relating to a news story, and you plan on calling someone a 'buffoon', then it's really best to know how to spell the word...(baffune? seriously???)

2009-10-20T08:06:00.001-04:00

"No, Don't Call me a Hero. Do you know who the real heroes are? The guys who wake up every morning and go into their normal jobs, and get a distress call from the commissioner, and take off their glasses and change into capes, and fly around fighting crime. Those are the real heroes."

                               --Dwight Schrute, NBC's "The Office"

2009-09-02T21:02:00.002-04:00

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up…from MSNBC.Com:

Japan's next prime minister might be nicknamed "the alien," but it's his wife who claims to have had a close encounter with another world.

"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.

"It was a very beautiful place and it was really green."

Yukio Hatoyama is due to be voted in as premier on Sept. 16 following his party's crushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party Sunday.

Miyuki, 66, described the extraterrestrial experience, which she said took place some 20 years ago, in a book entitled "Very Strange Things I've Encountered."

When she awoke, Japan's next first lady wrote, she told her now ex-husband that she had just been to Venus. He advised her that it was probably just a dream.

"My current husband has a different way of thinking," she wrote. "He would surely say 'Oh, that's great'."

Yukio Hatoyama, 62, the rich grandson of a former prime minister, was once nicknamed "the alien" for his prominent eyes.

Miyuki, also known for her culinary skills, spent six years acting in the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theater group. She met the U.S.-educated Yukio while living in America.

A strong believer in spiritualism, Hatoyama said in a TV appearance earlier this year she met U.S. actor Tom Cruise — in a previous life.

"I have a dream that I still believe will come true, which is to make a film in Hollywood," she told a TV talk show in May. "The lead actor is Tom Cruise, of course. Why? Because I know he was Japanese in a previous life.

"I was with him then. So he would recognize me when I see him and say 'long time, no see!'" she said, though cautioned the program's young interviewer not to take her seriously.
Cruise starred in the 2003 film "The Last Samurai," which was set in Japan.

"I also eat the sun," Hatoyama said on the program, looking up with her eyes closed, raising her arms high as if she was tearing pieces off an imaginary sun. "Like this, hum, hum, hum. It gives me enormous energy."

She also has had a "Miracle Interview" column in the monthly spiritual magazine "Mu." Her columns were published last year in a book called "Most Bizarre Things I've Encountered," a compilation of interviews with 26 prominent people, including writers, scholars and culinary experts revealing their strange or spiritual experiences.

2009-09-01T16:37:00.000-04:00

“Let me tell you something, this is a sick town.”

A local businessman and I were talking several months ago as I processed his vehicle registration renewals. His response came after I asked him about a piece of property about two miles from my office, out on Erie Rd. maybe a half mile out of town. I drive past it every day, and couldn’t help but notice warning signs posted on the six foot tall chain link fence lining the property.

He told me the site had held an old factory that had dumped a bunch of chemicals into the ground. I recently did an Internet search, and the site is indeed designated by the EPA as a Superfund site, first proposed for cleanup 6/24/1988. It was actually an old landfill, and before that a foundry, and studies of the soil showed contamination of the following, probably due to discarded paint sludge (among other things): arsenic, iron, barium, manganese, trimethyl benzene, xylene, acetone, and aluminum.

‘Sick town.’ His words echo back to me almost every week, most recently yesterday. With a lobby full of people, a woman came in and asked one of my clerks if we could make a special accommodation for her husband who had a hard time standing or walking. After a quick discussion, she left the office and pulled her car into the alley next to the building to drop him off.

A few minutes later the door opened, and in he came. The lobby, with twenty plus people waiting, was instantly quieter, all eyes watching. He was wheezing so loud it was difficult to believe he could walk at all, sweating so profusely that he left big gobs of perspiration wherever he was sitting or standing.

And he isn’t the only person in town in such poor health, not by far. A little later in the afternoon a man came in shaped like a capital ‘C’ – back arched with age, head almost parallel to the floor. Where before he might have been five-eight or five-nine, he’d lost three or four inches to gravity and osteoporosis, and could barely look you in the eye.

I read the obits pretty regularly online, and can’t help but notice the variance in ages of the recently deceased. What would the average life expectancy be in a place like Albion, I wonder? Almost certainly below the national average –

This really IS a sick town. To me, it only emphasizes the class disparity in America, the advantages held by the upper and middle classes, and the difficulty in climbing the economic ladder. If America is a land of opportunity, then that opportunity might present odds that look more like a lottery and less like the true chance for improvement we’d like to think we offer everyone.

Or maybe the real opportunities available aren’t so easily recognized. Maybe we offer immigrants from Third World nations a chance at good, safe employment for fair pay that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

In light of the health care debate going on in Washington and around the country, I feel blessed to have the health care – and health – I DO have…

2009-08-27T14:44:00.001-04:00

Facebook’s gotten out of hand. I think we can all agree on that one.

In the past month, I’ve gotten friend requests from three people I’m not convinced I’ve ever even met. The last one was from some guy in Abu Dhabi, whose profile photo makes him look like a rock star. No kidding – he reminds of a young Lenny Kravitz, wearing dark sunglasses and a black shirt that’s half unbuttoned…and after I responded favorably to the request (hey, I’ll be friends with ANYONE on Facebook, don’t double-dog-dare me on that one) I looked down his wall and discovered a crowd of people who are posting that they have no idea who he is.

Amazing.

I’m considering starting a series of ‘Fan’ sites, though, to establish some sort of record. That way, for the masses of people who've made the mistake of ‘befriending’ me when they have no idea who I am, they’ll all get that continuous string of site suggestions popping up on the right side of the screen…with my name next to all of them! Almost like I’m famous!

“Game Show Hosts of the Seventies! John is a fan!”

“Things That Start With the Letter ‘C’! John is a fan!”

“Nebraska Zip Codes! John is a fan!”

“Things That Look Like Other Things! John is a fan!”

“Getting Kicked In the Crotch! John is a fan!

But the best thing about Facebook for me is that I now have a second piece of evidence (along with my seventh and eighth grade yearbooks) that I actually know actress Gillian Anderson, star of the t.v. show ‘The X Files.’ When her face popped up as a friend suggestion, I waited the required two days (no need to seem desperate, right?) and then sent her a request.

And she responded.

So how cool is that??? You actually know someone who knows someone who’s famous…

“People Who Know Gillian Anderson! John is a fan!”

A Bold, Fresh Nightmare: Being the VBS Host

2009-08-19T10:34:00.001-04:00

“That was great singing, boys and girls,” my wife says, and she says true. The nearly 300 kids attending our Vacation Bible School this week have been yelling their lungs out during every song – enthused to say the least.

“And now it’s time to meet our Bible Memory Buddy for today!” and it’s on to the next section. A picture comes up on the overhead projectors, a spoonbill bird with pink and white feathers and a goofy smile. My wife goes on to read today’s Bible verse, then it’s on to the next section.

Sort of.

“So that was great, boys and girls,” my wife is saying and she begins ad-libbing about memory verses, how beautiful the spoonbill bird is, etc. “But has anybody seen Skeeter?”

That’s me, the comic relief character for the skit each night. Lissa isn’t supposed to have to ask this question to summon Skeeter, and I’m supposed to have been on stage about thirty seconds before she asks about me…but instead, I’m behind the curtains off stage with a fish hook in my thumb, and part of my costume – a safari type hat with a bunch of fishing lures stuck to it – is tangled in tonight’s prop, a fishing net on a six foot long pole. A couple teenage girls that are helping to lead singing are backstage with me, and they begin trying to help me untangle the mess that I’m in.

After another unbearable twenty seconds goes by, I’m finally on stage, ad-libbing a different intro to the skit now that my other entrance has been completely blown (I was supposed to come out crashing into my wife, waving the fishing net in the air…oh well.) We finally continue on with the skit and finish…

But the nightmare isn’t quite over for my wife. At another point in the evening, she declares, “Now it’s time for you to share YOUR God-sightings!” and scores of tiny hands pop into the air like fireworks. She’d done this last night – asking kids to talk about something nice they saw someone do for someone else, or to give a story about how they experience God in their everyday lives…perhaps a tricky concept for some of the younger kids. But every child’s eager to talk into that microphone, and my wife is making the mistake of actually letting them!

“Let’s see, how about someone from over in this section,” she says and walks down the steps from the stage into the throng of elated children, desperate for their twenty seconds of fame. “Do you have a God sighting?”

“GOD HAS A MAGIC STICK!” the girl proudly proclaims.

Hmmm, my wife is thinking.

Err, the crew leader next to the girl is saying.

AWESOME! I’m sure the four-year-old is thinking, her face beaming proudly up at my wife.

“Let’s see what someone over in this section has to say – did you have a God sighting this week?”

“DREAMING!” the child roars into the microphone. What to do with this response?

“Yes – God watches over us when we’re dreaming? Right?”

And the nightmare continues…

Only two more nights to go…

Our New Favorite Comedian: Quotes From Demetri Martin

2009-08-10T21:09:00.003-04:00

"I wonder what the most intelligent thing ever said was that started with the word ‘dude.’ ‘Dude, these are isotopes.’ ‘Dude, we removed your kidney. You’re gonna be fine.’ ‘Dude, I am so stoked to win this Nobel Prize. I just wanna thank Kevin, and Turtle, and all my homies.’”

“I think that when you get dressed in the morning, sometimes you’re really making a decision about your behavior for the day. Like if you put on flipflops, you’re saying: ‘Hope I don’t get chased today.’"

“I saw a guy at a party wearing a leather jacket and I thought, ‘That is cool.’ But then I saw another guy wearing a leather vest and I thought, ‘That is not cool’. Then I figured it out: ‘Cool’ is all about leather sleeves.”

“When you have a fat friend there are no see-saws. Only catapults.”

“I like fruit baskets because it gives you the ability to mail someone a piece of fruit without appearing insane. Like, if someone just mailed you an apple you’d be like ‘Huh? What the hell is this?’, but if it’s in a fruit basket you’re like ‘This is nice!.’”

“I feel stupid when I write the word banana. Its like, how many na’s are on this thing? ‘Cause I’m like ‘B-a-n-a … keep going. Bananana … damn.’

“I wanna make a jigsaw puzzle that’s 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says ‘go outside.’”

“I like parties, but I don’t like piñatas because the pinata promotes violence against flamboyant animals. Hey, there’s a donkey with some pizzazz. Let’s kick its ass. What I’m trying to say is, don’t make the same Halloween costume mistake that I did.”

“People and squirrels are very different. Most people will not argue that. But I find that there is one situation in which they’re very similar. And that is: when I am driving towards them in my car. Then they’re kind of hard to tell apart… Especially if the human is kind of hairy.”

“They say that you can tell man apart from other animals by his ability to reason. I think you could also go by last names. What’s his name? Patches? Patches what? That’s a dog. Don’t waste my time.”

“The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades.”

“I like when good things happen to me, but I wait two weeks to tell anyone because I like to use the word ‘fortnight.’”

“I like video games, but they’re really violent. I’d like to play a video game where you help the people who were shot in all the other games. It’d be called ‘Really Busy Hospital.’”

“I noticed that there are no B batteries. I think that’s to avoid confusion, cause if there were you wouldn’t know if someone was stuttering. ‘Yes, hello I’d like some b-batteries.’ ‘What kind?’ ‘B-batteries.’ ‘What kind?!?’ ‘B-batteries!!!’ and D-batteries that’s hard for foreigners. ‘Yes, I would like de batteries.’”

“A drunk driver is very dangerous. So is a drunk backseat driver if he’s persuasive. ‘Dude make a left.’ ‘Those are trees…’ ‘Trust me.’ "

“My favorite fruit is grapes. Because with grapes, you always get another chance. ‘Cause, you know, if you have a crappy apple or a peach, you’re stuck with that crappy piece of fruit. But if you have a crappy grape, no problem – just move on to the next. ‘Grapes: The Fruit of Hope.’”

“I went into a clothes store and a lady came up to me and said “if you need anything, I’m Jill”. I’ve never met anyone with a conditional identity before.”
My friend Steve likes cats. People are always saying “Oh, Steve’s really a cat person”. No he’s not. If Steve were a cat person it’d be, like, “Hey, Steve never goes in the pool”.

"If I ever saw an amputee getting hanged, I’d probably just start calling out letters."

"Untitled: A Blog Post With No Name; or My Untitled Blog Post"

2009-07-24T08:28:00.003-04:00

Well, the Bee Van has really amped up the pressure this week.

When a vehicle really doesn't like you, it doesn't just break down. If it did, you'd just get it fixed (as we have many, many times already); and if it broke down at a completely inopportune time, you might actually just consider junking it.

Instead of just breaking down, however, the Van began showing a few signs of trouble like dark clouds on the horizon. First, the "Service Engine Soon" light came on -- then went out -- then came on for a couple days -- then went off, then blinked right back on.

Hmmm....

Not really something to worry about, we thought...but then the speedometer stopped working (which also meant the odometer and tripmeter weren't working, as they're all part of the same component) but only until we stopped somewhere. When we got back in restarted the car, it began working again...and the speedometer was working again.

Then the speedometer stopped working, the Service light came back on, and engine hesitated, just for a moment, but enough to make us hold our breaths a little wondering if maybe this time, something was REALLY up. But then it was running fine...until my wife pulled up to a stop sign and it stalled out. But then she restarted it and everything was fine again.

I can't take this! I began thinking; and the Van has begun the long, slow, torturous process of making us lose our sanity.

Ugh.

In other news, I missed a perfect opportunity two days ago for the perfect blog post. Asia had one of the longest eclipses it will have this century. The post that I inadvertently omitted:

PEOPLE OF ASIA NOW HEAR THIS! YOU WILL ACKNOWLEDGE MY SUPREME AUTHORITY AS EMPEROR AND SOVEREIGN RULER OF YOUR PUNY CONTINENT, BOWING PROSTRATE BEFORE ME, OR I WILL BLOT THE SUN FROM THE SKY! THE DAY SHALL BE AS NIGHT AND YOUR LAND COVERED IN DARKNESS! FOR, SAY, 6 MINUTES AND 39 SECONDS GIVE OR TAKE...

2009-07-22T17:49:00.002-04:00

Recently came across this from CNN.com:

Hiring managers shared these 43 memorable interview responses:

--Tell us about a problem you had with a co-worker and how you resolved it
"The resolution was we were both fired."- Jason Shindler, CEO, Curvine Web Solutions

--What are your hobbies and interests?
"[He said] 'Well, as you can see, I'm a young, virile man and I'm single -- if you ladies know what I'm saying.' Then he looked at one of the fair-haired board members and said, 'I particularly like blondes.'" - Petri R.J. Darby, president, darbyDarnit Public Relations

--Why should we hire you?
"I would be a great asset to the events team because I party all the time." - Bill McGowan, founder, Clarity Media Group

--Do you have any questions?
"Cross dressing isn't a problem is it?" - Barry Maher, Barry Maher & Associates
"What do you want me to do if I cannot walk to work if it's raining? Can you pick me up?" - Christine Pechstein, career coach
"Can we wrap this up fairly quickly? I have someplace I have to go." - Bruce Campbell, vice president of marketing, Clare Computer Solutions
"What is your company's policy on Monday absences?" - Campbell
"If this doesn't work out can I call you to go out sometime?" - Christine Bolzan, founder of Graduate Career Coaching
"[The candidate asked,] 'Can my dad call you to talk about the job and the training program? He is really upset I'm not going to medical school and wants someone to explain the Wall Street path to him.' The dad did call. Then that dad's friends called and I ended up doing a conference call with a group of concerned parents ... long story." - Bolzan
"If I get an offer, how long do I have before I have to take the drug test?" - Bolzan
"When you do background checks on candidates, do things like public drunkenness arrests come up?" - Bolzan
"So, how much do they pay you for doing these interviews?" -- Jodi R.R. Smith, Mannersmith Etiquette Consulting

--Why are you leaving your current job?
"Because I (expletive) my pants every time I enter the building." - Abbe Mortimore, Human Resources Manager, True Textiles, Inc.
"I was fired from my last job because they were forcing me to attend anger management classes." - Smith

--Why are you looking for a job?
"Cigarettes are getting more expensive, so I need another job." - Pechstein

--What are your assets? (as in strengths)
"Well, I do own a bike." - Pam Venné, principal, The Venné Group

--What are your weaknesses?
"I get angry easily and I went to jail for domestic violence. But I won't get mad at you." - Pechstein
"I had a job candidate tell me that she often oversleeps and has trouble getting out of bed in the morning." - Linda Yaffe, certified executive coach
"I am an alcoholic and do not deserve this job." - Deb Bailey, owner, Power Women Magazine & Radio Show
"I'm really not a big learner. You know ... some people love learning and are always picking up new things, but that's just not me. I'd much rather work at a place where the job is pretty stagnant and doesn't change a lot." -- Michaele Charles, Voice Communications

--When have you demonstrated leadership skills?
"Well my best example would be in the world of online video gaming. I pretty much run the show; it takes a lot to do that." - Rachel Croce

--Is there anything else I should know about you?
"You should probably know I mud wrestle on the weekends." - Venne
Use three adjectives to describe yourself
"I hate questions like this." - Katrina Meistering, manager of outreach, National Fatherhood Initiative

--Tell of a time you made a mistake and how you dealt with it
"I stole some equipment from my old job, and I had to pay for its replacement." - Meistering

--Have you submitted your two weeks' notice to your current employer?
"What is two weeks' notice? I've never quit a job before, I've always been fired." - Meistering
Random responses
"One guy [said] 'it would probably be best' if I didn't run a background check on him. Of course, I did, and learned all about his long, sordid past of law-breaking. Our client actually offered him a job as a staff accountant, but quickly retracted the offer when I had to tell them all about his recent arrest for a meth lab in his basement." - Charles
"[A] guy said he did not have a mailing address, as he was living in a gypsy camp at the airport." -- Sandra L. Flippo, SPHR
"Wow -- I'm not used to wearing dress shoes! My feet are killing me. Can I show you these bloody blisters?" - Bolzan
"May I have a cup of coffee? I think I may still be a little drunk from last night." - Smith
(During a telephone call to schedule the interview) "Can we meet next month? I am currently incarcerated."- Smith
"[A candidate] was asked whether he could advocate impartially on behalf of the various universities he would be representing since he had attended one of them. He responded, 'Well, I don't like to poop where I eat, but I thought my education sucked, so I certainly wouldn't put that school above the others.'" – Darby

--Source: CNN.com, from an article by CAREERBUILDER.com

Lessons from Joseph Heller, Pt. 1

2009-07-21T08:06:00.003-04:00

I'm currently reading 'Catch-22' and I think I've stumbled on to a key ingredient that's currently missing from a number of American industries: a perfect blending of total mediocrity and complete ineptitude.

Mediocrity I think we've mastered. As Garrison Keillor recently said about Lake Wobegonians -- which holds true for the American Work Machine -- first place isn't really for us; honorable mention is more than good enough...if you gave us a gold trophy we'd have it bronzed.

But complete ineptitude, well, that's another matter entirely. Our lack of failure has nearly destroyed this country, evidenced most starkly by the downfall of companies like GM and Chrysler.

From 'Catch-22':

"Colonel Cargill, General Peckem's troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody." ('Catch-22', Joseph Heller, pp 33-4)

Diplomacy

2009-07-13T17:21:00.002-04:00

To have a toddler is to own a tiny, 30 inch tall dictator, a mini tyrant that struts around the house with a limited grasp of the English language; who’s not completely potty trained; and who makes constant demands of her subjects in her own gibberish-laden language, a sort of hybridized form of English, with much gesturing and grunting that everyone around her strains to understand as they try to appease her.

I’m upstairs painting our hallway and come down to grab a screwdriver when I’m greeted by the sight of her highness the two-year-old in a heated argument with my wife in the living room. Not that this is much different from most of the communication we try to have with our daughter at this stage– discussions are most often ‘heated’ – and this time, surprise, surprise, it’s about food.

What is it about food that gets this kid so worked up, I’m wondering?

Her choices for dinner were: hot dog; hamburger; potato salad; watermelon; cantaloupe; pineapple; baked beans; or chips.

She opted for chips.

Of course, chips not being a particularly satisfying meal, it’s now 7pm and she’s hungry.

“Hot Fries! Hot FRIES!” she’s yelling at my wife, meaning that her majesty, pointing at the front door, is requesting a trip to McDonald’s. She’s come to know french fries as ‘hot fries’ over time, as in ‘be careful, those fries are hot!’

But of course, when she hears the word ‘no’ – as in, ‘no, our lives don’t revolve around you NEARLY as much as you’re convinced they do’ – she breaks into hysterics and during the ensuing tantrum, my wife does her best to give her highness several other, more suitable options, something, say, without all the trans-fats and the cholesterol.

As I re-ascend the stairwell, they finally come to an impasse; the dictator’s demands go unmet by her subject the Mommy, and after tense negotiations, a compromise is reached; her majesty will have pasta.

I return to my spot upstairs and after removing a furnace vent cover, I resume painting only to find another set of negotiations are going on behind closed doors, and just within earshot. I’m not sure which war is being discussed – most likely WW2 judging by the machine gun noises? – but the Generals are hard at work in the planning stages of an invasion, as several lower level officers are being chastised for their poor execution in the face of an intense enemy embankment.

I can’t quite make out everything, but it’s clear from what I’m hearing that things aren’t going well for one side in the war.

There are many, many sounds that bring joy in life, but none quite as intensely for me as the sound of a boy making machine gun noises and explosions while he’s playing with the standby of boyhood: army guys.

Our 12-year-old is directly behind the door where I’m painting, completely unaware that a spy is straining to hear his generals.

Interestingly enough, I can only make out one side of the conversation, as if there really are two people in there. I hear a mumbled voice, followed by shouts and reprimands…then the whine of an airplane, followed by another explosion…

Oh to be 12 again!!!

I’d take 12 in a heartbeat. Not forever, of course, but for a day? Even a week?

Heck yeah…

Two, though, not so much. I don’t think I could wear the crown of monarchy. The responsibility would seem too great…

"Little Timmy Fell Down the Well..."

2009-07-10T11:57:00.001-04:00

…is what I write on the electronic signature pad as I’m buying groceries at Meijer, and the resulting piece of abstract art looks as much like my signature as if I’d actually tried to write my name. Meijer has many innovations; a way to capture a decent signature electronically, however, is still elusive, which is surprising. The store management has updated the checkout aisles several times over the last ten years or so, and each time I’m pleasantly surprised with what they come up with – first self checkout, then even faster self checkout…

But still no change in the signature pad…

Anyway, with the fourth of July recently passed, it’s post-holiday time again, and that of course usually means rock-bottom prices on holiday stuff. But this time, Meijer disappoints. I’m not actually looking to buy anything with the red, white and blue holiday motif (my family’s waiting for me in the car as I shop) but I notice there isn’t anything of substance marked down in the main aisles even if I were looking to buy, and that’s surprising. Am I too late? It’s only July 9th…but did I miss it? Have masses of humanity already picked the best merchandise clean before I arrived?

But no. Later in the shopping trip, there they are, the sparklers, Pop-Its (patent pending), and larger packages of fireworks, the ones that every boy knows are the only ones that really matter…IF you were going to buy your 4th of July fireworks at a grocery store.

In Michigan, where anything that a 12 year old would actually think was of a certain ‘coolness’ factor is deemed illegal, you can’t really get the good stuff, the ones that make the really big bangs, the stuff that shoots through the air like, well, a 4th of July rocket should…so you can only hope for an older brother or a generous uncle who’s willing to spend the time (and money) to drive over the southern border and bring back a load of contraband from Indiana where people REALLY know what the 4th of July is about.

If people who sneak illegal immigrants over the Mexican border into the United States are called coyotes, then perhaps we need a nickname for someone who sneaks fireworks into Michigan…”wolverine” would work, but somehow that animal has become too synonymous with the University of Michigan to use it for anything else. Something other than an animal name, perhaps?

Hmmm…

But I’m off topic. Meijer has their version of fireworks, in the large, cellophane-wrapped packages with the multi-colored cardboard backing, but they aren’t marked down yet.

Disappointing.

Again, not that I actually would have bought anything (they never mark fireworks 90% off) but I’m just surprised. Not even a measly 25% discount, nothing.

But I do notice something else.

When I was growing up, a store like Meijer would have maybe 3 or 4 really huge packages of fireworks, the ones that cost like fifty or sixty dollars, and you looked at that package that was as tall as you were, with its pink and orange and green mini-packages inside the giant package, tiny cardboard tubes and boxes with names that any 12-year old boy couldn’t help but admire – things with names like ‘Snapdragon’ or ‘Roman Glory’ – and you knew that only handful of kids in the entire county were going to get to watch those go off on July 4th.

But now, I’m looking at a cardboard display filled to the top with these things.

What gives, I’m wondering?

And what’s more, the prices are actually LESS than they were when I was growing up. You’d now be hard pressed to find a package of fireworks in Meijer for much more than fifty dollars or so. The cardboard package has a pre-printed price in the upper corner that shows the retail price…but then in small letters next to it, it shows the word ‘value’ – as in “$90.00 value” – and then an arrow points to the actual price, which is fifty percent less!!!

How is this possible?

But here’s the thing. We’re still not buying them. I’m forty years old, and if I wanted to, I could pick up any one of those packages, throw it in the grocery cart, and be the envy of every boy in the store who might be watching. So why don’t I?

I’m not sure if it’s the un-coolness of Meijer fireworks – after all, something called a ‘Showering Dragon’ isn’t actually going to do anything other than sit on the ground and shoot sparks three feet into the air…no matter what name you give it.

Or perhaps it’s that I’ve seen how much better Indiana fireworks are.

Or maybe it’s just that my values have changed, and watching things explode once a year isn’t all that important to me. Whatever the case, I’m realizing that we’re not grasping the opportunity we have to be heroes in the eyes of our children, and maybe that’s not all bad.

After all, if we DID come home with m-80’s and mini-cardboard cannons that shoot rockets three hundred feet high, we might not have any hands to grasp WITH and our kids wouldn’t have eyes to see us at all, let alone seeing us as heroes…

Hmmm….

A Haiku Project

2009-06-17T12:15:00.001-04:00

1

Legos vanished now,
Plastic pieces disappeared,
The dog will vomit

2

Money gone like air,
From our battered pocketbooks,
Our net worth shrivels

3

Diapers are like gold
As I drop them in the cart
Grocery bill expands

4

Sharpies are Satan
In the hands of toddler girls
The walls her canvas

5

Teen years loom like clouds,
Ethan’s future rushing in,
Hormones and drama

6

9 year olds are loud
Boisterous shouts and yells and cries
They have one volume

7

TV beckons me,
Shows and pretty people there,
Cable, drug of choice.

8

Alarm clock screaming
Piercing morning’s peaceful sleep,
Why so early, work?

The News: 6/16

2009-06-16T23:30:00.001-04:00

From the Colbert Report:

Tonight! Was the Iranian election rigged? 120% say yes...

and...

There's no sense in beating a dead horse...unless it's one of those zombie horses, you can't beat them enough...

Unraveling

2009-06-13T22:41:00.002-04:00

It's Saturday, 10:41 pm. For a while, it felt like our lives were unraveling at the seams.

Attempting to get all 3 kids to bed, my wife and I send the boys upstairs to get their pajamas on and teeth brushed, while Gillian, at age 2, seems to have more energy at 9:30 at night than she's had all day.

Not that she hasn't been keyed up for a while now. But somehow, she's even louder and MORE energetic now that we're trying to get her to calm down.

Isaac, meanwhile, has been in his own little Isaac world, laughing at what Gillian is doing, content to ignore us while we try to get him to brush his teeth. "But I can't," he's been telling us. "I just...I had one of those -- I ate..." He' s trying, unsuccessfully to tell us he can't brush his teeth because he just had a chocolate no-bake cookie...though I'm not exactly sure WHY this would matter. (Isn't that the point of brushing your teeth, I'm thinking to myself?)

Finally, he's upstairs to get his pajamas on, though he decides to wait on the teeth brushing. Fine, we decide. One battle at a time. Lissa and I try to get Gillian to lay down on the floor so we can get a diaper on her and get her pajamas on (which Isaac eventually brings to us) but instead Gillian has taken an interest in canned goods, and she spends five minutes bringing me cans from the pantry. First, it's garbanzo beans and noodle soup, then, these 2 go back and she returns with more beans and something else...

Unraveling, our world is. At the seams.

Then we finally have Gillian under control at the couch. I'm slipping her pj shirt on her, but that's left Isaac with just enough independence to figure out a NEW way to add some stress to our lives and he's on to bigger and better things; a pink, rubber finger puppet comes out, and he begins the task of distracting his sister -- while I'm trying to dress her -- by hiding behind the half-wall next to the stairs and popping his hand over the rail, which his sister thinks of as high comedy.

"Watch this," Isaac says, as he crouches down behind the stair rail for Act II. And the rubber finger puppet pops up again.

Ethan meanwhile has finished getting ready for bed and is upstairs reading, so score ONE for mom and dad at least. But we've found Gillian has just now picked up a new phrase from Isaac. As we're trying to finish dressing her, she's doing interpretive dance in the living room and kitchen, jumping around in circles and repeating one phrase over and over:

"Watch this."

No thanks.

It doesn't end. Isaac and Ethan are finally in bed (I think) and with pj's on, Gillian makes the 'hug and kiss' rounds one last time to everyone in the house, first mom, then Ethan, and Isaac, and last of all, me, and I put her in bed and pull the covers up. But as I walk out of the boys' room, I catch Isaac trying a new experiment; he's trying to turn the light switch off with his tongue.

I'm not kidding.

Unraveling.

At the seams.

And this 35 minute routine is what we affectionately call 'growing up Stroddy.'

Spoken by Stephen Colbert

2009-06-08T21:42:00.002-04:00

From the Commencement Address at Knox College: "I have two last pieces of advice. First, being pre-approved for a credit card does not mean you have to apply for it. And lastly, the best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show. It pays well, the hours are good, and you are famous. And eventually some very nice people will give you a doctorate in fine arts for doing jack squat."

Regarding Al Gore and New Orleans: "Al Gore has a hit movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth.' I have an inconvenient truth for him: you're still not the president. ... This past weekend, Al Gore's movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' earned more per screen than any film in the country. ... I dare say Gore's movie is the highest grossing PowerPoint presentation in history. ... Global warming: Can we live with it? ... It is time we did something, namely resign ourselves to doing nothing [on screen: Follow Congress' Lead]. ... For instance, when sea levels rise, we'll just build levees [on screen: Worked for New Orleans]"

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner: "To sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush...I feel like I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You now what, I'm a pretty sound sleeper, that may not be enough...Somebody shoot me in the face."

Also At the Correspondents' Dinner: "I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers, and rubble, and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message that no matter what happens to America she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world."

On the Middle East: "I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

On Tom DeLay: "I'm going to miss him, too. Another classy move from a classy guy. The man who stood tall even as his staffers dropped like laundered nickels from an Indian casino slot machine. ... He's doing it right folks -- going out at the top of his game in the middle of a criminal investigation."

On Funding NASA: "There's a more important reason to keep NASA's programs going strong ... to achieve that greatest of discoveries, the thing we as human beings need most: space oil."

On Liberals: "And don't think you're off the hook, voters, you're the ones who made this bed. Now you're the ones who are going to have to move over so a gay couple can sleep in it. Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high! You know what, I've had it! You people don't deserve a Republican majority! I quit!"

From Isaac's 2nd Grade Journal

2009-06-08T20:30:00.002-04:00

9-8-08 Let me tell you about my family. Last night my dad got stung by lot's of bees. Ethan is in middel school. Gillian staer's at me sometime's. My mom might teach me to tie my shoes again.

(no date) This weekend was cool! I got new shoes on Friday. I know I will be super fast. I might even win a race. I love my shoes very much. That was super duper cool!

9-14-08 This weekend was the best! I learned how to ride a 2-weeler. I was very happy. I wish I could ride one forever. I love my bike very much.

10-20-08 This weekend was great. But yesterday I tripped off my bike. My bike bumped on some rocks. Then there was rocks that made my bike trip. Simon came running over to me. He helped me stand up so I can walk to his house. I left my bike in the dirtpile. His mom put a band-aid on my hand. I felt better. Today my mark still hurts. Good thing I got my bike!

10-27-08 This weekend was fun! On Saturday I went to a Halloween party. It was a great party! On Sunday I went to church because I got to sing on-stage. That was when I was not supposed to be silly. I should have --

(no date) This weekend was fun! I was supposed to sing in Jackson Quire. My mom and dad were there from the Couples Getaway. My grandma and grandpa thought me and Ethan did great, but that had to --

11-10-08 This weekend was outstanding! Because I played with Simon and Sheldon on there Wii Saturday and Sunday. I just can't wait for Thanksgiving. That is when my cusins come again.

11-17-08 This weekend was brilliant! Friday was Caleb day! Me and him had a great time! His dad gave me a new hat and a new water bottel with a belt! My baby-sitter was waiting for me. Then my nanna picked me and Ethan up to her house. We spent the night at her house.

11-24-08 This weekend was fun! Me, Ethan, and Grandpa went to the target palace. We saw it was closed. But men were shooting there. I didnt know why. Then we went in the office. A man let him read a paper. After that, he said we might be in trouble. So we went to his house and did shooting.

12-15-08 This weekend was great! I went to Aunt Pam and Uncle Chucks house to have dinner. I had a turkey and cheese sandwich. Then everyone sat down on the couch to watch cartoons. Then we got off and Aunt Pam made the couch to a bed. Ellie was not on the bed. At 11:00 or 11:30 my parents picked me up. That was the best night ever!

1-5-09 The Christmas was great this year! First, we did a concert at the Free Methodist Church. Then, we went to Grand Rapids for my Grandma and Grandpa house. That is where we celabrate Christmas. On December 27th, it was time to go home. But that is not all. On New Years Eve, the Ar --

1-12-09 This weekend was great. On Sunday, I started my first day of Wii Fit. My Dad alredey set the Balence Board up. There is good news and bad news. The good news is I love to exersise because this makes yourself healthy. That bad news is some moves are hard for me. It should make a diffrenc, but it is hard to tell.

1-20-09 This was a great weekend! I had a fun time on a good break. Now I have a file on Wii Fit. Their are four Training Exerciese Subjects. They are Yoga, Streighnth Training, Abercobs and Balence Games. Their is a Body test also. Then, you have to try to --

1-26-09 This weekend was great! Yesterday there was a party. A birthday party for my friend Sheldon. It was for his stuffed pig. It was exiting because everyone (plus me) had pizza for dinner and treats for dessert. Piggy had a king throne because it was his birthday and he is the king.

2-9-09 This weekend was great! On Saturday I went to my grandma and grandpa's house. It was fun because my cousins Nathan and Ryan came there also. I had a great dinner because part of it was my favorite meat. All I did was I put the fork on the meat like always. Then I lifted the fork with the meat and I ate it all up like a carnivoire. On Sunday it was a --

2-12-09 This weekend was horrible. When I play with my 2-block-away neighbor friends, I don't know why they always are bossing me. And why am I the only one that's thinks I am the worst at science? And why do I master only two subjects at school? And I always think I get no ranks on my report card. I know this is my worst day ever.

2-23-09 This weekend was awsome! I can't wait for Kris's party today. And Josh is so lucky. I wish I could go to Washington. Mabey I could go to Ten(nessee) on Summer break. But I just can not get my mind off Japan or France. In France, I would love to climb the Effle Tower. I never spoke Chiniese before. That will be my wish Then I can teach you guys. It would be a dream come true, I tell you! Or I could got to Africa. I would be able to reserch the animals. But it might be too dagoures!

3-9-09 This weekend was great! On Sunday I did nusury again. This time there wasn't a lot of babies like there was though. But tonight, I am doing a sleepover! I am sleeping at my uncle Lee and aunt Kris's house but I forget where my mom, dad, brother, and sister are going to. On Friday I went to Caleb's house. It was awsome. Well, I hope Caleb's dad is safe right now. He showed me a badge he will show us when he gets back from Afganistan.

3-23-09 This weekend was great! Although we lost all our games at basketball, I did not care. Right? Right. Because basketball does not matter if you win or not. It may be about your teamwork that your team does to do their best. Or your good progress for your health. But what I think it is mostly about is the teamwork about God. He does not walk away to help someone else. He helps people all at once. Tonight is the night all basketball teams get a trophe.

4-6-09 Spring break was a blast! I had a great time with my friends. Ok, well, I'll explain two things, ok? One, forget the arguing, got it? Two, they are not two blocks away. Never forget that. On with my own facts. Last Wensday we went --

4-13-09 The Easter this year was a blast of crosses. On Saturday the Archers, Dirocers and Nana and Papa (witch you shoudent call them) came over to celibrate Ethan's birthday

6-8-09 This schoolyear was fantastic. I liked math, social studies, math-around-the world, almost everything. I didn't like hard math problems for me. I ecspecally didn't like sience. I loved it when Kris and I became friends. I'll teach him to read the bible one day.

Latisse: The Latest Miracle of Modern Medicine

2009-06-03T11:49:00.003-04:00

Well, America, we’re finally there. We’ve finally arrived.

It’s happened.

I’m a little embarrassed to say ours boys down in Research and Development here at UnlimitedLicense couldn’t get this accomplished first…but thankfully, the miracles of modern medicine found a way, and the pharmaceutical company Allergan – which previously brought us Botox – got the job done.

After years of waiting – and I can tell you, this has been keeping me up at nights – we finally have prescription medication – PRESCRIPTION medication -- that will grow longer eyelashes.

It’s true. I can hardly believe it, as I’ve waited decades for someone to come along who could solve this problem. Never again will anyone suffering from hypotrichosis (no, I’m not making that up – it actually is a valid medical diagnosis) have to suffer through the embarrassing agony of wishing for slightly longer, thicker eyelash hair.

Who goes to their doctor for this? Who is actually so embarrassed about the length and thickness of their eyelashes that they’re asking a medical doctor if there’s any medication available that will grow longer hair on their eyelids?

And what doctor is on board with prescribing this stuff???

I’d make the suggestion that if you’re that embarrassed about your eyelashes, you may have something more than a medical problem, and perhaps instead of looking to the pharmaceutical industry for help with this problem, it might be time to seek a solution elsewhere…

And of course, EVERY medication has its side effects. Most of those listed for “Latisse” – the trademark label for the drug bimatoprost – are predictable: redness of the eyes, irritation and
itchiness.

But then there’s this, from the Latisse.com website frequently asked questions:

*** “What is skin hyperpigmentation?” This is a common, usually harmless condition in which areas of skin become darker than the surrounding skin color. This occurs when there is an increase in the melanin, the brown pigment that produces normal skin color, in the skin. Skin hyperpigmentation is a possible side effect of LATISSE™, but may be reversible after discontinuation of the product.

Um, ‘may’ be reversible? Just how reversible are we talking, here? I don't know if I --

***“What is elevated intraocular pressure (IOP)? This is a condition where the pressure inside the eye is higher than normal. LATISSE™ may decrease IOP. So talk to your doctor if you are using IOP-lowering medications. Concurrent administration of LATISSE™ and certain IOP-lowering medications in ocular hypertensive patients should be closely monitored for changes in intraocular pressure.

Err…how do I monitor THAT? Is there a --

***”Why do the directions say to only apply LATISSE™ solution to the base of the upper eyelashes?”

Right, rather than the actual eye itself -- I’ll field this question, Steve. Because who would want hairy eyeballs???

Latisse may not be right for you. Ask your doctor.

2009-05-30T08:50:00.001-04:00

Despite the humor of my last post, the last few weeks I’ve been in a funk, and I’m realizing it was for several reasons.

First, let me say that financially, we’ve had a couple of atomic bombs dropped on us recently. About two weeks ago the riding mower that my in-laws gave to us a couple years ago stopped working. You might think, well just buy a new mower, right? Get rid of this one? But it’s a zero-turn-radius Dixon, which costs several thousand dollars…so discarding it never really felt like a reasonable option. The engine apparently threw a push rod, which meant that rather than trying to actually repair the engine itself, a cheaper and easier alternative would be buying a new engine.

I was able to find one on Ebay for just under $500 with shipping, which I was greatly relieved to find…but still, it’s $500 we hadn’t quite itemized into the “Lawn and Garden/Landscaping” portion of our monthly budget. And also, the engine I bought needs an exhaust system which didn’t come with it, a new throttle cable, and of course, we’re having it installed for us…which all add to the cost of these repairs…

Also, we found out this week from our orthodontist that both our boys will be getting braces in the next couple months – and both are needing to have teeth pulled. While I do have excellent dental insurance, it’s still a motherload of information for us to process through. And our orthodontist informed us that we have to pay one lump sum up front, and then pay monthly dental bills up front, for which we then get reimbursed through my dental plan.
But still, I heard someone once say if you have a problem that money will fix, then you don’t really have a very interesting problem…

What I think really started me down the road to this mild depression, though, was seeing a person in our community die in a car accident.

Mrs. Page was a local teacher greatly, greatly loved by her family, friends, and students. She passed away about ten days ago in a car accident, an event that roared into the community like a tornado and left a lot of people feeling completely devastated. And knowing her family, her death just seemed inconceivable. Her husband has cancer; her son is in remission from two forms of leukemia; her dad passed away of cancer this last year, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer around the same time her dad was…

I have this image in my mind, a sort of representation of the way our lives are lived, and it’s this: I see myself walking on a long plank of wood that’s balanced on a fulcrum. The plank represents the amount of time we hope we have to live our lives – eighty years, maybe? ninety if we’re lucky? – and we start out walking along the plank on a steep incline.

Those first years you live seem to take forever. You’re a kid, and it seems like all you want to do is get to the next stage, whatever that is…first, you want to be a teenager so people will stop treating you like a child, then when you’re a teen, you want to be old enough to drive…and then you can’t wait to be old enough to move out of your parents’ house and get your own apartment.

Then, we’re often looking to get married…then, we want kids…more job experience to get a better paying job…then a comfortable retirement…

And for me, I think what’s really put me in a funk these past few weeks is feeling like I’m already at the fulcrum, like life is suddenly rushing me forward faster than I can handle, I’m wishing for the next step, and the next step, and not living in the moment.

Somehow when this teacher died, I started realizing how many people I’ve known that have passed away. Just in the time I’ve been at Albion, I’ve seen maybe two dozen local people disappear…

Blanche, who worked at the bank I used…I came in one Monday afternoon, and found out she’d passed away that weekend.

Bobbie, who used to work at a local liquor store…he was shot and killed by a fellow employee…

Mr. Seiler, who used to own a car dealership and several other businesses across the country. A heck of a nice guy with very salty language, who always drove big, fat American cars and complained that the Japanese could design a reliable car, but never a comfortable one. He died five or six years ago…

Gary, the local AAA insurance salesman who had a bad fall a few years ago that he never really recovered fun…he ended up dying about two years later.

I could go on, but you get the idea. And all these people I’ve listed are only people I’ve known through work. There are perhaps a couple dozen more I could think of that we’ve known through the community we live in, through our church, etc.

I was thinking about all of this in relation to the fulcrum metaphor, and I realized that if we live long enough, we all come to a point in our lives when we have more close friends that have passed away than are living. That thought really hit me hard for some reason, and I think it’s because it says something about human existence and human suffering.

There is no question that life for all of us will be hard, the only question is: will it be bearable?
I finished reading the Book of Matthew, yesterday, and flipped through the concordance in my Bible to find references for the word ‘hope’ – and I ended up in Lamentations, which seemed to feel somehow right, a representation of where I’ve felt I’m at…and perhaps the only way to end this post:

“I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, the Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” (Lam. 3:19-24)

2009-05-28T12:29:00.001-04:00

After a short hiatus, UnlimitedLicense is back. During the past few weeks, the sabbatical I was on allowed me time for inner reflection, for careful consideration and meditation…even enlightenment.

Oh, one thing I need to add here for the boys in our Revenue Department: “This week’s enlightenment is brought to you by Budweiser, the King of Beers! When you need enlightenment, reach for a Bud – this Bud’s for YOU!”

Okay, with that out of the way….

How about a horribly embarrassing story???

Okay, actually that’s not really true, reader. YOU shouldn’t feel embarrassed about what I’m about to type, only my BROTHER should feel a little trepidation at this point.

On May 27, 1975, James was born into our family turning three Stroddys into four, a nice round number that we settled on from that point forward. So with him turning 34 this week, what better way to celebrate than by dusting the cobwebs off a few stories from our childhood at his expense???

The summer I was twelve – which would mean James had just turned six – I begged and pleaded with our mom to let me ‘baby sit’ him, rather than sending us to the babysitter we’d previously been with all year. I was old enough, right? I could handle this responsibility, yes? And besides, it wasn’t like there was anything complicated in hanging out with a kindergartner…

I typed the term ‘baby sit’ in the previous paragraph in parentheses purposely to indicate a couple of things. First, I don’t think that what I did that summer in any way involved ‘sitting’ on anything, or even really any ‘baby’ for that matter – which I guess just goes to show I had no idea what I was going to really be doing when I volunteered for the job…And second, I don’t think that what I ended up doing that summer would really line up very well with what babysitters usually do.

Don’t get me wrong, reader. I didn’t lose my brother, I didn’t burn the house down…Nothing major really ever got broken or anything like that.

It’s just that nothing really constructive was accomplished, either. We’d sleep in until maybe 9 am, then watch lousy morning t.v. while eating three or four bowls of Lucky Charms or Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, followed by a game we’d invented that was a sort of hybrid of indoor football, wrestling, and Olympic sprinting that involved James starting on one end of the house and trying to get past me and into the living room doorway, eventually jumping into the room and sometimes onto the couch.

But that’s another blog post…

So things were going pretty well, except that James kept wanting to do things that I, with a wisdom far beyond my twelve years, didn’t think he should be doing.

I don’t really remember what the things were exactly that he wanted to do, and it doesn’t really matter for the point of this story. Because with me at age twelve – and him at age five – we disagreed about everything, all the time, day in and day out.

We argued about what we were going to do that day…what we should have for lunch…what he should be wearing…

And it’s this last one that provides the most embarrassment for him, and consequently, the most amusement for you.

He came down one morning wearing nothing but a green t-shirt, which doesn’t in itself seem odd, kids wear that kind of thing to bed all the time, except he was wearing his like a pair of pants, with his feet through the arm holes, the shirt tail hoisted up to his neck, and his, err, derriere hanging out of the neck hole for all the world to see.

He thought this was hysterical. And I did, too, for the first few minutes. But then when I told him he needed to get dressed (why, exactly, did I tell him this? I’m not sure – we weren’t going anywhere, no one was coming over…hmmm….) he just kept laughing and jumping around and doing a little leprechaun dance with his butt hanging out.

“Get dressed,” I said in my most serious voice.

He danced and laughed.

“Jamie, seriously, you need to get your clothes on,” I said, trying to sound very stern and grown up.

Still, the dance continued.

“Look, are you going to get dressed, or not?”

The dance continued. Apparently implying his answer was ‘not.’

And so, with no other option I could think of, I shoved him outside our front door and into the bright sunshine on our front porch, at which point he still danced, but it was a different sort of dance, changing from one of merriment and frolicking into the sort of panicky thing a person might do if he found he was on fire with no immediate source of water around to put it out.

I didn’t torment him too long. When I started to see traffic pass by and people looking at him from their cars, I thought somebody might call the police so I finally let him back inside.
Which all goes to show, I guess, what a horrible idea it was for me to have this responsibility at age twelve.

But also shows how DEEPLY I cared about my brother’s personal hygiene, right? That I would take the time to patiently reprimand him about his choice of attire, pointing out the inefficacy of his choice of wardrobe, how drafty it might feel were he to go in public dressed this way…

So nearly thirty years later, here we are.

Run Free and True, Dancing Half-Naked Leprechaun Boy!!! Run Like the Wind!!!

And happy 34th…

Regarding the Miraculous...

2009-05-07T23:02:00.004-04:00

"The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it." -- Simone Weil

I’m not a Bible scholar by any means, but I do try to read something from the Bible every day. And right now, I’m plodding through the book of Matthew.

I say plodding not because I’m not enjoying it – I am, very much – and not because it’s taking longer than I want it to. It IS taking me a long time to get through, but not in a bad way. Rather, as I’ve been reading, I’m finding that Matthew is becoming one of my favorite books.

From what I’ve read, Matthew paints one of the most fascinating pictures of Jesus -- and there are so many passages that I find very slippery and mysterious, and I’m taking joy in my lack of understanding it all.

As the first of the four Gospels, you might think it would paint an easier, more direct picture of Jesus. And yet, the more I read, the more I find that, even as someone raised in a very conservative Christian church, there are more and more parts of it that I don’t remember reading before.

I’m about halfway through it right now, in Chapter 15, where Jesus, after again confounding the Pharisees, performs more miracles, including healing a Canaanite woman and feeding four thousand people near the Sea of Galilee. Earlier in the book of Matthew, he’d already healed the sick ‘throughout Galilee’, healed a man with leprosy, healed a Centurion’s servant, healed two demon-possessed men, healed a man with paralysis, brought the daughter of a ruler back to life, and healed the blind and mute.

I have read that many branches of Christianity read these stories of the miraculous in different ways. For some – like the church I was raised in – they are meant to be taken very literally; we see Jesus in a direct, overt way, bringing supernatural power to touch people and heal them. We’re supposed to use this as an example, to ourselves grasp that power and act as Jesus did. The fact that many of these people had suffered for years only demonstrates how the power of God is able to overcome any difficulty, regardless of history or circumstance.

But for some Christian traditions, the stories are meant as a kind of allegory. Maybe Jesus really did heal many of these people, but that isn’t necessarily the point – rather, the portrayal laid out in the four Gospel books is meant to provide a framework for the Church, a guide to what is possible through the power of God. Jesus brought compassion and healing to the lost in society, and we are encouraged to do the same in whatever way we can, though it isn’t necessarily supposed to mean we’re doing these things supernaturally.

Much of this was explained more eloquently and in better detail in Brian McLaren's book, "A Generous Orthodoxy."

Both views, I suppose, have validity, and there’s a danger inherent in being closed to either idea. On the one hand, if we ONLY believe these miracles are meant to be taken literally, at face value, then what do we make of instances in which people pray for healing and it doesn’t happen? And if we ONLY have an allegorical view of the miracles Jesus performed, is the Church selling itself short by not allowing the power of God to work to its full potential?

But beyond these ideas, a third one came to mind as I was reading. And that is, that it seems to me Jesus always granted the miraculous to those who had no other hope of finding healing or relief. When he feeds four thousand people in Chapter 15it isn’t just because they’re hungry: “I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry, or they may collapse on the way.” (Matthew 15:32) They are perhaps miles away from any food source…

In contrast, the Pharisees and Sadduccees come to Jesus in the next chapter, and ask for a miraculous sign from heaven; and they are quickly rebuked. “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” (16:2-4)

I guess from all of this, I take away two ideas…first, I see the underlying message being spelled out that God helps those who help themselves – we’re not to rely on the miraculous when it isn’t necessary, because that isn’t what faith is about. Handling poisonous snakes for the sake of doing something dangerous to prove the power of God is beyond foolhardy – it’s in violation of what we’re meant to be doing with our time and effort, especially when so many people are suffering and need our help.

And second, I believe, the miraculous is real…it’s just that in the present age we live in, it’s becoming less and less necessary. Is there a necessity to miraculously stretch tiny amounts of our food to feed the hungry, when our real problem in feeding the poor in places like Africa is one of distribution? We have enough food to feed the world…how do we get it to people in countries ruled by dictators who refuse to give that food to those who need it most?

But that’s not to say it’s NEVER necessary. We still pray in my church. We still pray for the miraculous, for healing, for peace. People will always have needs that aren’t met by modern medicine or modern conveniences.

I hope we never sell ourselves short in this respect…

A Brave New Prophetic Voice: Condi Speaks

2009-05-07T12:21:00.002-04:00

“Even a child is known by his actions, by whether his conduct is pure and right.” Prov. 20:11

I was fascinated to hear former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s response to a question asked this week by a fourth grader.

The former Secretary of State was taking questions from a group of students at a school in Washington D.C. According to the Washington Post, the questions weren’t screened (oopsy…) and after several ‘innocuous’ questions (language used by the Post) a 4th grader then asked this:

What did Rice think about the things President Obama's administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?

And her response, after first explaining she didn’t want to criticize the Obama Administration, was quoted in the Post as this:

"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country. But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country. I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."

Let me add, here, that I am:

--An Evangelical Christian

--Generally a Moderate Conservative

--Traditionally a Republican Voter

--In the 36 to 64 demographic

--Middle Class

--A Midwesterner

…and her response makes the hair on my neck stand up, and it gives me a sense of dread in my stomach.

I won’t make a comment on whether or not we should be waterboarding people to get information -- it isn’t productive, in my opinion, at this point in our history and the past is the past; I won’t comment on whether waterboarding meets the technical definition of torture as outlined in the standards of the Geneva Convention we’re supposedly adhering to, because that isn’t the point of this blog post; and I won’t even comment on how hypocritical Rice’s words are, especially in light of the fact that our actions were so disgraceful that we invented a new term – “extraordinary rendition” – to allow other countries to do what we didn’t want to be accused of doing on American soil.

Beyond all of these things, though, let me say that with regard to any and all of the detainees we took into custody under the Bush Administration – from the people being held at Guantanamo Bay to the Abu Ghraib prisoners to any of the foreign nationals we hauled all over the globe – to suggest that what we did to these people was necessary because of the fear Americans held after 9-11 is perhaps the biggest miscarriage of justice created by the Bush Administration.

We were in essence being told that we were spineless; we couldn’t make our own decisions; we needed the government to take care of us; we didn’t have the courage to return to the normal routines of our lives.

Because approximately 3000 people died in a series of terrorist attacks.

For reference, about 40,000 people die each year – 100 each day – from car crashes. This month alone, more people will die from car accidents than were killed on 9-11.

And there are still many cars out there on the road; should we be terrified of them? We are much more likely to die from a car crash than a terrorist attack, and the men who carried out the attacks of 9-11 are all dead.

This all brings to my mind what we did to Asians during World War II in the name of ‘fear’; we couldn’t have a bunch of Asian people just wandering the country, could we? After all, we were at war with Japan. So in the name of protection, we locked up thousands of Japanese-Americans in internment camps around the United States.

Perhaps most ironic of all, for me at least, is the method the U.S. used to create
internment camps: The Executive Order.

And this was exactly what George Bush used throughout his presidency to side-step the guarantees, the checks and balances, that the framers of the U.S. Constitution set up.

So was it right to send the Japanese to internment camps? Was this fair? Was this justice? I’m sure at the time, being asked these questions, people were responding with answers about necessity and taking 'extraordinary measures during extraordinary times'…and that this was only temporary.

And yet if we just repeated these types atrocities, these types of human rights violations, under George Bush, were those 'extraordinary measures' really temporary? If the Bush Administration got to do whatever it wanted to in the name of protection, have we made any progress???

Since 1944???

Oddly, I feel a sense of relief. Not that we, the United States, tortured, of course, and not that we won’t do it again. And the fact that these things are out in the open doesn’t really make me feel any better either.

Rather, I’m glad that with the Bush Administration hopefully behind us (and getting farther every day) we can finally begin to move into a new phase in which the international community doesn’t despise us for saying one thing and doing something else.

And hopefully get past using 'protection from terrorism' as a justification for our actions...

Worst...Night...Ever...

2009-05-05T11:31:00.003-04:00

What is the worst nightmare you’ve ever had???

I’ve always had a great relationship with sleep, we get along really well – I’m generally not the type of person who has difficulty in falling asleep quickly or with staying asleep once I’m out, but last night…

Wow. I think I had the second worst nightmare I’ve dreamt in the 40+ years that I’ve been a professional sleeper.

The absolute worst nightmare I’ve ever had occurred about eleven years ago, when our son Ethan was still an infant. He was at the crawling and climbing stage, walking but not really comfortably yet. And in that dream…

…I have Ethan – his tiny little infant body, held precariously in my left arm – as I’m climbing a structure that reminds me of the Watson/Crick DNA model I learned about in seventh grade, the double helix that’s like a ladder. The room – but it isn’t a room, not exactly – rather, the space I’m in is all black, black background with no form or shape, and I’m climbing very slowly up this ladder-like model one hand-hold at a time.

And as I get to the top, I’m relieved because I’ve made it, though who knows why I’ve been climbing…and then it happens, Ethans wiggles as I’m trying to hold him, and he topples from my arms, off the top of the ladder-thing, and I snatch at him to try and stop him from falling but he goes falling down and I realize I’ve failed as his body slips away from me…

…and I wake up. Didn’t really get much sleep that night at all, I’m afraid.

But last night’s was almost as bad,…

…because it’s Ethan again, only this time the 12 year old Ethan. We’re all (I’m not sure who ‘all’ is) in a basement, concrete walls, damp feel, dank smell, and the lighting is creeping me out, because it’s fluorescent but there aren’t any fluorescent lights overhead, the light source is coming from somewhere unseen…

But we’re all searching just the same, it’s like a scene from a t.v. show – wandering down long tunnels, and two girls are in trouble and we don’t know if we’ll get to them in time. I think they’ve been kidnapped but I’m not sure…

And then someone yells out that they’ve found ‘the door’, and sure enough, as we all rush over, Ethan pushes through to the front of the crowd and opens the passage, a twenty inch door that he steps through. He goes in because he has the cutting tool, a thing made of plexiglass but shaped like a ray gun you might see in a ‘B’ sci-fi movie.

So he’s through the first door, in a small passage that is barred by a second door to the right. It’s this second door he’s going to use the gun on, and he holds it up, waits for a second for it to charge, and I see, from where I’m standing outside the room, that as the ray gun goes off, it lights Ethan’s face up like he’s watching an atomic bomb go off in the distance. There’s no explosion, the gun just sort of melts the door away…

And I rush through the two doorways. But the two girls that I thought would be there aren’t. Instead, the sense of dread crashes on me like a tsunami as I see a large pile of leaves and sticks with a red phone cord coming out of it, leading to a red phone on the ground in front of me. I pick up the receiver and listen.

There’s a tremendous amount of static in the background, but it’s a recorded message that plays over and over, with the voice of the older of the two girls saying very matter of factly (though I can barely hear her), “Better hurry up…time’s running out…”

And I suddenly know what to do…I drop the phone to the ground, climb over it, and begin digging through the pile of leaves where I realize the two girls are buried…and a second later, a hand comes reaching from the ground, and I try to pull her out…
…and I wake up.

At this point, it was around 2:30 in the morning, I think. With the dread I was feeling, I couldn’t let myself fall back into the dream, because I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to that. And then I heard a loud ‘thump!’ from downstairs? the basement? outside on the deck? I wasn’t sure, and I ended up getting out of bed checking every door and every room in our house, but nothing was there.

Then, about ten minutes later, Gillian woke up for the first time. I say first, but truthfully, after I finally got her back into bed I don’t think she ever really did get back to sleep until the morning. At one point, Lissa got up with her, tried to get her to calm down, and then brought her into bed with us. This lasted about fifteen minutes, I think; I can only take a foot being stuck into my back so many times before I start to get a little testy…

But as I'm writing all this down I'm wondering about the significance of the two dreams. Specifically, why are my two worst nightmares involving my oldest son? Is there any thread, any relationship between the two dreams other than him? And for any of you reading this who are interested in the whole dream interpretation thing (and I know a couple of you are) what's the significance of the pieces I remember?

(Um, is there something really wrong with me???)

Only in Albion...

2009-04-30T23:22:00.005-04:00

...could I be driving to the bank, on M99, a two lane highway that comes through the old business district in town. As I pull out onto this street in the afternoon, the traffic's pretty heavy. There's an SUV next to me, a car in front that turns left, and my lane is finally open as I pull up next to a pickup right as we come to a red light.

Or rather, I TRY to pull up next to it. I've been watching it for the last couple blocks from a few cars back, and the driver can't seem to decide whether he wants the right lane or the center lane that I've been trying to drive in...so he's just driving right on the dotted line, taking up 1/2 of both lanes.

It's a 30-year old Ford pick-up truck, rusted out fenders, rusted bumpers...but the truly striking thing is that apparently the rear suspension began going out on this thing about fifteen years ago, and the owner's decided it really isn't worth fixing, instead he's just drivin'. So with a load of junk on the back of it, the back bumper on the driver's side is about six inches off the ground. That's the ONLY corner of the truck that's sagging like that. And...the driver's blug-blug-blugging along at about 12 miles an hour as we both come up to the red light.

He doesn't give a crap, so, hey, what the heck, neither do I. I pull up to the intersection in my lane -- it is MY LANE, after all -- and I squeeze right in there next to him, so that my passenger's side door is about eight inches from the extra-wide mirror he has sticking out from the side of his truck like a boat oar.

The sign on the door of the pickup? What business owns this stellar piece of transportation, this sterling example of American innovation?

"SPEEDY HAULIN'"

Riiigghhht...

And let me add a P.S to this post that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with what you've just read but just heard on Comedy Central, I thought it was hilarious:

"I don't know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie-Roll Tootsie pop, but it takes twelve-thousand four hundred sixty eight licks to get to the center of an I-Phone..." --- Stephen Colbert

The Prophetic Voice

2009-04-28T18:32:00.006-04:00

"Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel

So the subject of this post started for me about 2 or 3 months ago.

As I was reading through a passage of the apostle Paul’s writing in the book of I Corinthians, I came to this: “Follow the way of love, and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy.” (NIV)

For reference, the rest of the chapter is mostly a discussion of why prophecy is such a better thing to pray for than speaking in tongues. Then later in the chapter, we get this:

“Tongues, then, are a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers;

prophecy, however, is for believers, not for unbelievers… But if an

unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is

prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged

by all, and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare. So he will fall down

and worship God…”

As so often happens when I’m reading the Bible, part of this passage got stuck in my mind – why the emphasis on prophecy here? Growing up evangelical (the title of my new autobiography? Hmm…) I can’t ever remember a sermon being preached that really talked much about what prophets were and what they did.

We see Paul’s instructions about multiple people taking turns in church services, giving instruction and encouragement for everyone to hear. He talks about lay people openly being engaged to speak truth to other members. (What exactly would happen if we opened up services like this today? Do any denominations do this? I suppose some do…and what do we think about this? What does that say about us?)

Yet I'm seeing the picture of prophecy, as it's laid out in the Old Testament at least, as a pretty radical one.

The Old Testament prophets are perhaps what come to mind first when the word ‘prophecy’ is mentioned…the extreme radicals of Judaism, wandering the deserts.

Jeremiah, the ‘Weeping Prophet’: “…Sovereign Lord…I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.” (Jer 1:6 NIV) Born in the 7th century B.C. – a time of dramatic upheaval according to my study Bible notes, when western Asian countries were in constant power plays against each other and against the larger kingdoms of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Jeremiah hears the call of God, and though reluctant at first, eventually finds the courage to be a voice of truth, eventually delivering the unwelcome message of destruction for the kingdom of Judah.

The longest book in the Bible, Jeremiah is disturbing in its imagery; “Look, an army is coming from the land of the north; a great nation is being stirred up from the ends of the earth…they sound like the roaring sea…we have heard reports about them, and our hands hang limp…” This was the Babylonian empire, that according to our pastor, would overtake their enemies, pierce the noses of the survivors, feed a chain through the nose rings, and lead them away to become slave labor.

Other Old Testament prophets, too, give us this imagery; and maybe because of the dire nature of the call placed on their lives, they behave in the strangest of ways, demonstrating in the most shocking and stark ways possible the seriousness of what they’re trying to convey...

Isaiah, going naked for three years, as a sign of what the Assyrians would do to Egypt.

Or Ezekiel, instructed by God to pack up his belongings like he was an exile, for everyone to watch what he was doing as a representation of what Israel would go through. And later, being instructed not to mourn at the death of his wife, not to “lament or weep or shed any tears.” (Ez. 24:16)

So how does any of this translate into the modern day church?

I had previously heard that the ‘prophetic voice’ isn’t always like the one portrayed in the Old Testament, where guidelines were laid out for the standard the prophets were held to – truth was spoken, and if a prophet’s word was found false, he was put to death. So then this newer idea of “the prophetic voice”, rather than the “Voice of the Prophet”, becomes less clear.

If we live in an “Age of Grace” so to speak, where we no longer put people to death for anything other than capital murder, what standards do we hold to determine what is and isn’t the prophetic voice? Do we even need prophets in our modern day world, and if so, what should their role be?

As it turns out, I have a friend who is getting ready to publish a book on this very topic. I bounced a bunch of these questions off him, as well as my ideas for what I thought were probable answers.

I definitely don’t know as much as I’d like to yet, but he did give me some great insights. Our discussion covered a number of aspects in all this, and I’m going to do my best to put down from memory what I think I’ve come to understand over time. What I’ve come up with so far:

--In defining the prophetic voice, we're talking about a voice of truth that is spoken to a group of people to communicate truths that need to be heard; the truth isn’t scientific truth or rational truth, but spiritual truth, a truth of motivation, of values, of soul. And by necessity and by definition, then, it must be truth given to someone who holds some position of power – not just a ‘Pastor’ or ‘Preacher’, though that is a necessity as well; but to the Church itself, because the power the Church holds is the power of possessing a message of healing and love that it should be delivering to a world of people that don’t have that healing and love, but need it; in possessing that message, the Church possesses power. And because the Church does its job imperfectly, the need and relevance of the prophetic voice are apparent-- to propel it, by encouragement and also criticism, to excellence.

--The prophetic voice is often most powerful when spoken by someone from within its own ranks. To speak the voice of truth, you have to be part of the tribe being spoken to. People will most often hear your voice when you’re a member.

The question then becomes, what if no one within that group is speaking? Where does the prophetic voice come from? How is Truth discovered? “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’ ‘I tell you’, he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.’” (Luke 19-39-40) And my study Bible, interestingly enough, has no commentary or explanation to add. But don’t we have this now, rocks crying out?

A police officer in Oakland, CA abuses his power and shoots an unarmed man lying face down on the ground. Is this event lost? Is it swept under the rug? Not at all –instead, because it’s captured by cell phone video, the outcry from the community of Oakland – the black community, who justifiably feel they’ve seen proof positive of how their police department treats minorities -- is heard around the United States.

Is this the rocks crying out? Is this the truth being seen when it would otherwise have been hidden? The prophetic voice isn’t delivered by a human voice; no human voice was available in Oakland at the place and time of the shooting, or at least, no voice that would have been listened to; but isn’t the truth of these events seen around the world anyway?

You could go on…dozens of other incidents captured on video; the outcry over Catholic priests sexually abusing hundreds of children, and the Catholic Church trying to cover it up; Wall Street firms doling out million-dollar bonuses to the heads of companies that lost billions of dollars, etc.

--The challenge as I see it, then, is twofold for the Church:

First, this prophetic voice is painful, so how do we foster it? If it’s necessary (as I think it is), if our current Church is supposed to model what was shown in the Old and New Testaments – then how do we get individual churches and whole denominations to buy into the idea of its necessity?

And second, if you’re a member, how do you know you’re not as blind as everyone else? But this only seems to highlight the necessity for encouraging as many people as possible to speak truth. It’s why Paul encouraged this voice, multiple voices, to come forward, to mold the Church into what it should be.

Institutionally, we’ve lost this voice. And we need it badly.

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets," Jesus said in the Book of Matthew, but unfortunately, that is exactly what we seem to have done.

So how do we get that voice back? And who is out there waiting to speak?

While Driving...

2009-04-24T18:23:00.023-04:00

I am driving to a meeting scheduled an hour and a half away.

This itself doesn’t bother me, being scheduled so far away from home, except the meeting is supposed to start at 9:30 in the morning. Meaning I have to leave earlier than the time I normally drop our middle child off at school.

As I drive, I’m reminded of the months I worked at my previous office, when I commuted about 50 minutes each way. That drive, which allowed me time to gear up in the morning and unwind after work, had the disadvantage of rush hour traffic on Interstate highways.

But the drive this morning actually seems quite different. I start out on an Interstate going west – instead of north, as I did when I commuted – and the traffic is much lighter. And only half of my route takes me on a major highway.

The second half of the drive takes me off the main interstate and onto a series of back roads and two lane highways that give you the kind of view you only get in the Midwest. Not that other places in the country don’t offer great scenery, too. My wife and I spent the second half of our honeymoon driving through gorgeous parts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and I remember the scenery on that drive being filled with 18th century homes, trees in a rainbow of colors, and old white churches with steeples and bell towers.

But that was the Eastern seaboard. The drive I’m on today brings me through small Midwest towns that nobody has ever heard of. And probably never will. Places like Bedford and Dowling, towns without the tourist-y romance of Boston or Concord.

The drive keeps my attention in a different way, however, because even though I grew up in the Midwest, I’ve never been down this particular road before. These small towns all end up seeming kind of the same, though. You leave a slightly larger city, some place like Battle Creek or Kalamazoo, and the two lane highway takes you winding through the outskirts of the town, past factories, schools, and finally to the in-between areas, where you drive through parcel after parcel of farm country.

Then when you get to the small town itself, you're greeted by the usual local businesses -- a tractor dealership, a local mechanic, often an antique shop –- then on to the newer commercial district with fast food places and one or two car dealerships. What ‘folks’ in the forties and fifties would have called ‘fancy’, a word that went out of fashion when Generation X came along.

Like the phrase 'going out of fashion.'

Sometimes you even get a small shopping mall in these towns. But eventually you’re into the old business district, the place in town that had its heyday like fifty years ago, with local insurance agencies and government buildings.

So as I’m driving this morning, I come into the first town between the larger one I’ve left and the one I’m eventually trying to get to at the end of the trail. And I see right away the reminder that I’m in the Midwest, strapped tightly into the Bible Belt, because the first major building I come to as I arrive 'downtown' is a Methodist Church.

I’m reminded I'm in the Bible Belt not just because it’s a church, but rather two other reasons.

First, the architecture of the building isn’t architecture. It’s the cheapest way to make a buiding in a town that requires a builder to follow standard building codes – no frills, no stained glass windows, no style or design. (Though the church congregation has made sure it still has a steeple.) Commercial buildings for businesses aren’t normally made like this, but the business of church is always different…

And second, there’s the sign out front, a good thirty yards away from the main building, right out close to the curb, so traffic zooming by will read as they pass:

God’s Stimulus Package Was Signed At The Cross.

This makes me sneer.

To me, it seems an obvious affront to the Democratic Party, worse yet, it probably wasn't intended to be. I’ve voted mostly Republican since I’ve been old enough to vote, and raised in an Evangelical church. So you’d think I’d feel a sense of kinship with whoever changed the letters on that sign to form that message. Instead, I feel a little revulsion.

I'm thinking, if you can’t see why the sign would be offensive to members of the Democratic Party, then you probably shouldn’t be the person in charge of deciding what to put on the sign in the first place. Especially with a Democrat in the White House and the words 'Stimulus Plan' splashed across the front page of every newspaper and online news source.

And if you’re goal is to use the sign that’s decorating the front lawn next to your place of worship to poke a jab at Democrats and liberals, then you might want to take a good long, hard look in the mirror and try to see yourself through the eyes of the person you claim to be representing.

All this is going through my mind as I drive, and I’m again reminded of Anne Lamott’s words, which I quoted in an earlier post: it’s safe to say you’ve created God in your own image, when it turns out God hates all the same people you do…

And then, too, it all brings to mind Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon Days" and a passage about Sundays and church:

Blue laws once frowned on Sunday labor, also loud recreation,

unseemly dress, and any "deportment inconsistent with proper reverence," and

those laws still frown but do it in private, in the book of old ordinances, in a

section unread for many years. Still, as recently as last summer, when Corinne

Ingqvist, home for the weekend, walked four blocks to the lake in her red

bathing suit, people who passed her going the other way, to church, felt that

something was definitely not right.It bothered them. She is Pastor

Ingqvist's cousin, a slim connection, but it made for a disturbing note, a long

red honk in the middle of a peaceful Sunday morning. They prayed that she would

leave town, and on Monday she did.

And that is what the sign is for me. A long red honk interrupting a calm, sunny drive through a small town.

So as I continue on, I’m pondering in a very obtuse and abstract way the bitter taste left in my mouth by this experience. My thoughts turn cynical as I consider this church I've passed, probably much like the one I grew up in (though we never really put anything on our sign as gauche or coarse as what I just read). It seems to me a church projecting its own image on God the way a young girl might paint her face when she’s first allowed to put on makeup, doing what she thinks is correct, trying what she hopes would look best, mimicking what she's seen others more mature than her do.

And unaware of words like ‘subtle’ and ‘elegant’ and ‘graceful.’

So with all of this, was the drive ruined? Not at all. Grace, after all is said and done, instead comes in the strangest and sometimes funniest ways. A little farther up the road, I find a church perhaps more to my liking, a stone's throw away, and my only regret is not having a camera to capture the moment.

The sign outside this church has been posted with the following message:

THE PASTOR TOLD ME TO CHANGE THE SIGN.
SO I DID.

Best Status Updates: Bill is...)

2009-04-23T23:14:00.003-04:00

I recently found a part of Facebook I hadn't seen before -- a contest that runs regularly to see who can come up with the best Status Update. As it turns out, there are already a few blog posts out there about the subject of Status Updates, but they mostly just copy each other's info...so I did a more extensive Internet search. And these, I thought, were the best:

Name...

can’t listen to that much Wagner. He starts getting the urge to conquer Poland.
doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work…he wants to achieve it through not dying.
places his boss under a pedestal.
is hoping God would give him some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in his name in a Swiss bank.
is sure that money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
is cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
couldn't myself have better it said.
is proud to be modest!
hated it when old aunts used to come up to her at weddings, poke her in the ribs and cackle, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.
says "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar!"
thinks it's impossible to look at a baby penguin and not get angry!
reminds you that when we resort to violence, nobody wins. Wait, that's wrong. I win...always!!! Got that! ALWAYS!!!!
Some people are like Slinkies - not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see them tumble down the stairs.
was wondering why the frisbie kept getting bigger. Then it hit him.
is doubling the recipe and putting the oven at 700 degrees.
says cancel my subscription, I'm tired of your issues.
is fed up with Indian givers...wait, no, I take that back.
is bringing sexy back, but lost the receipt.
is planning to be spontaneous tomorrow.
feels a clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.
says anyone who uses the phrase 'easy as taking candy from a baby' has never tried taking candy from a baby.
25 reasons Lisa procrastinates. 1.
can see Alaska from her house.
wouldn't be caught dead with a necrophiliac.
Jim is letting you know that he won the Jim death pool. So pay up, suckers!
lost his focus, but has since regained it. Oh, look, a cat...

A Sort of Morbidity

2009-04-22T12:07:00.026-04:00

So this is the way my mind works.

There is consistently a pretty bizarre stream of ideas that pop into my head, for no good reason that I have never been able to figure out. Quite honestly, I think blogging hasn't helped this situation...

But one idea I had recently was this:

If I could somehow know exactly when and where I was going to die -- and if it wasn't going to be something sudden and tragic like a rare allergic reaction to Jello brand pudding, or a freak accident with a Lite-Brite -- but instead was maybe, say, dying in bed at the age of a hundred and sixty six (I don't plan on dying for a while, yet) then I think what I'd do, see, is to buy a really expensive package of vellum, something that would age really well and look really important, and then I'd learn calligraphy from a professional calligrapher for like three years, and then to give the end of my life even more purpose than I already think it has -- and to perhaps create some sort of legacy for the whole world to remember me by -- I'd copy a bunch of diagrams out of DaVinci's works, and maybe throw in some stuff from Einstein, too. And then, on the last page left in the package, I'd write out the paragraphs below, and scatter all the pages around the room for everyone to find:

"To anyone who finds this journal, I now know the antidote has failed. There is no hope for me to escape this thing that I have become. In hindsight, it is clear to me that my greed has been my downfall...just as my assistant tried to warn me it would be.

He is now gone, all my friends are gone, victims of the monster my ego has turned me into, destroyed by this thing living inside me... I was a fool to think I could harness lightning in a bottle, though I suppose I am not the only one who has given in to the temptation of attaining something so wondrous...

I only pray that in reading this, others in the future will be warned away from the path that I so foolishly chose. Or perhaps another might learn the true secret of my demise, might understand how I have become what I have, and in the future find some way to master what I could not control...

But no. On final thought, turn back now. Burn these papers. Let no one else undertake such a ghastly endeavor. Though the rewards for success are immense, the risks involved are simply too great, the burden too heavy, the knowledge too much.

It is a power that no human should be allowed to hold...

Me transmitte sursum, caledoni!

A Note About This Blog

2009-04-22T12:02:00.004-04:00

Nation, (I'm taking a cue from Colbert, here, so bear with me,) Nation it's time to take stock of your blog and come to terms with some facts.

Okay, that's all drivel. Actually, let me say a few things about this blog that intrigue me.

First, I recently added a more in-depth counter, one from Google Analytics (thanks to Patrick -- who turns 40 very soon, by the way, gotta rub that in when I can -- for the recommendation.) This was a great find, mainly because the information is analyzed and categorized for you by Google when you sign up for the service.

So what have I learned so far? Rather than just a count of the number of page loads I've been getting (that is to say, the number of times computers have looked at individual pages, which is the only thing my previous site counter told me) this new counter has much more specific information about my blog that I find interesting.

For example, approximately 30 of you are following this blog regularly. I only have one listed follower, at this point, but that's because he's the only follower who has a 'Blogspot' address.
But much more intriguing than all of this is the following:

The other day, I noticed that Google Analytics had a whole host of information about IP addresses and users that I hadn't really checked out before. (I guess when I first signed on, I was really trying to just get a more accurate count of individual viewers, rather than what I had previously.) So when I checked THAT out, here's what I found:

97.14% of you are in the United States. Not really surprising that that's where the majority of viewers are from, but wait, that means that like 3% are OUTSIDE the U.S.

So what gives?

As it turns out, I've had international viewers from 2 sources.

The first is from Blogspot itself. You might have noticed at the top of this blog a link that says "next Blog". It's just a reference point that allows you to randomly jump to another Blogspot page from a different poster.

It's kind of fun -- check it out some time. Just not now.

No, I'm serious. Don't leave...

Anyway, through Google Analytics, I can tell where these viewers are from, via an IP map that's provided by Google. And the listed 'entry point' -- a description of how they found my blog -- shows in the IP address as 'NavBar' meaning they found me through the random search provided by Blogspot.

But the second source of viewers has apparently come from the previous post I had regarding the Nigerian email/fax scam that's been going on over the previous twenty-some years. I think what's happened is that international Web users might search the Internet for the word "Nigeria". Or maybe they're searching for the names I have listed in the post.
Those are the only things I can figure out, at this point, that seem plausible. Country of origins for these IP addresses are:

3 0.61% South Africa
2 0.41% India
2 0.41% France
1 0.20% United Arab Emirates
1 0.20% Nigeria
1 0.20% Spain
1 0.20% China
1 0.20% Singapore
1 0.20% Brazil
1 0.20% Mexico

So you're visiting the new INTERNATIONAL 'UnlimitedLicense.' And to increase the likelihood that international viewers might find this blog, NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA

Regarding Shopping...And Revenge

2009-04-21T21:09:00.004-04:00

Ah, Meijer, you tempt me so...

So most of you who read this blog know me pretty well, but one thing many of you probably don't know about me is that I'm a sucker for the 90% off sale.

No kidding. Among the items I've purchased at this discount -- or even less -- are the following: t-shirts for 49 cents (in Florida, at the flea market), tapered 8" candles for 2 cents (seriously! 2 cents! how can you go wrong? I bought a whole shopping cart! ), tissue paper for a dime a package, miniature Christmas stockings (from a Dollar Store, in January, that I gave to a friend who's a teacher, to give to her students next year,) red Santa Claus hats (again, for a teacher, I bought boxes of them) wrapping paper in the off season, children's books that we gave to our kids for Christmas...

I could go on, but you get the idea. One year, we even bought hors d'oeuvres plates (I think I spelled that correctly ??) from Pottery Barn. These weren't quite 90% off, more like 75 to 80%, but I couldn't pass them up -- they had pictures of little drunk penguins on them, with sayings about getting inebriated (e.g. 'A stiff drink unravels the best written mystery' and 'the wages of gin' and so on.)

Couldn't turn them down. We still get them out almost every Christmas for at least one party. Which is quite hilarious, because a pretty good percentage of our friends don't even drink, and there's always that one uncomfortable moment when you're not quite sure how everyone is going to react.

So with it now being the week after Easter, I feel a little thrill as I realize I need to pick up a few OTHER things from Meijer tonight, and surely there must be Easter items on clearance, right?

But as I pull into the parking lot, I see something even BETTER. My brother-in-law (who will read this post, I'm sure) has made the mistake of parking his car in a space that has an adjacent space open right next to it.

Surely, the hand of Providence has handed me this opportunity. So how can I possibly resist the temptation?

So I pull into the space next to his car rrreeeeaaaaalllllllll close, but that isn't quite close enough -- like, say twelve inches -- so I back up and get just a little closer.

But no, that isn't quite it.

The third time, though, like Goldilocks with the porridge, is just right.

Four inches.

I'm ecstatic. Nay, friends, elated. I only wish I'd had a video camera to record his reaction, which I never got to see...

So I go into Meijer, and yeah verily, I say unto thee, it's there! 90% off stuff from Easter!!!

Everything's coming up Johnny!!!

My only dilemma: how much to spend? And on what? At 90%, I can buy TEN TIMES as much crap as I could just a week ago, for the same price!!! Think of it! What if cars were like this?

Or pudding???

Or even pets???

So it only takes me a few seconds, because actually, at least at the display I'm at, there aren't that many choices. I get the following: 4 rolls of gold colored cellophane wrap (the kind you'd wrap gift baskets in) and 5 boxes of Easter Egg dye.

All for just over a dollar!!!

So I get the rest of my groceries and finish up, and as I'm leaving the store, it's really coming down outside now, the weather's cold and wet and pretty miserable, but I'm really thrilled to have gotten this Easter stuff for next to nothing.

I notice my brother-in-law must have left quite a while ago, because his car is nowhere to be seen. I drop the groceries in the back of our van, give the shopping cart to the poor Meijer employee who's drawn the job of going out into the rain to retrieve carts (don't you always want to tip those guys?). I put the key in the ignition, flick the lights on, and turn the wipers on.

And I'm greeted by SCREEEEEEEEKK--SCREEEK!!! SCREEEEEEKKK--SCREEEK!!!

My brother-in-law has just made my night, because he's taken the time to turn my wiper blades upside down -- with the metal part of the blade scraping the window like a razor blade after I hit the switch.

I can't help myself. I start busting out laughing, loud enough I'm sure for the Meijer employee to hear me, even as I'm inside the van with the doors closed and he's outside.

I'd LOVE to tell you all what I'm going to do to my brother-in-law's car the next time I see it in the Meijer parking lot, but again, he, too, reads this blog.

So in his honor, I can only think to end this post one way:

Well played, sir.

Well played indeed.

On Contentment

2009-04-21T15:48:00.003-04:00

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis. -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey

Finally, after several days absence, I’m able to post again. Between this past Friday, which was crazy, and Monday which was even worse, I feel like my brain has been on overload.
Among the problems – er, challenges I’ve been dealing with recently, the following are included:

--A customer came in last week asking how to register a 50-year old wooden boat with no registration materials; how to register a 25-year old boat with an inboard motor purchased out of state with an improperly assigned title certificate; how to register a homemade aluminum boat with no registration certificate and no bill of sale; and how to register a new boat with no serial number imported from Asia…and he then came in later this week to register all of these at the same time...

--A customer brought in one of his employees who spoke little English and needed to renew his driver license. When I asked the employee for a Social Security number, he produced an obviously fraudulent card – something I hadn’t seen in several years. (When you apply for a license or state issued ID card, states now cross-check your Social Security number with the Federal government to verify the correct information is on file – to make it that much more difficult to create a false identity or steal another person’s identity.)

--A customer came in to title and register a vehicle he’d purchased from someone with an improperly assigned title – only to find out a different person had already scrapped out the vehicle. Because the title record was flagged as 'junk', the vehicle would have to be registered as assembled – requiring a physical inspection by a police officer, a new vin number to be assigned, a new vin tag to be ordered, etc. etc. etc. The type of transaction we process maybe once or twice a year...

--A customer has been in several times trying to obtain a state issued ID card; he has been continually arguing with me and my clerks about why he shouldn’t be required to bring in additional documentation from the list we provide, saying things like “look, I know my name, I don’t have to read it off a piece of paper to know who I am…”

--A customer was in to register a 150cc ‘scooter’ (name assigned to it on the out-of-state paperwork he provided) which, in our state, is a motorcycle; because it is a newer vehicle, we need a title to register it, or a surety bond is required. If you’ve never heard the term ‘surety bond’ before, consider yourself fortunate. Essentially, it’s an insurance bond drawn up by a local insurance agency to insure the owner for five years against someone else coming forward to claim ownership of the vehicle. It’s the kind of thing that we do once or twice a year – the paperwork is written up by hand, updated manually by our Department once everything is in order – and yet, this is perhaps the third or fourth one I’ve done in like a month…

--A customer bought a vehicle from a dealer who had already sold that vehicle in error (on paper, anyway) to another buyer, who got the wrong title and registration issued to him.

And on and on…

So by Monday afternoon, I was exhausted and drained, both physically and mentally. We got the office closed, and as I was walking out the door to go home, our janitor came up to the door.
Quick note to insert here: we’ve had the same janitor in my office for about three decades now, a local man in his seventies who is the nicest guy you’d ever hope to have clean your office. And he’s dependable, honest, hardworking. The company he works for recently lost the contract for our office, but soon after the new company signed on, I received a call from the owner of the new company asking if I knew anyone locally who might be interested in the position.
So of course I gave the owner the name of the janitor we’ve had for so long. And this past Friday, after we closed the office, I asked the janitor if he wanted to stay on and work for the new company. You would have thought I was giving him the keys to a new Ferrari with the way his face lit up, so to say he was appreciative is an understatement. So he’s thanking me for recommending him, and telling me how much he’s appreciated the opportunity, and how long he’s worked for us…

That was all on Friday.

So Monday evening, I close out the office and I’m exhausted and wanting so much just to be home and eat dinner and he comes to the door and tells me he has some paperwork for me – but that I probably don’t have time for that, I’m probably trying to get home. Which is just killing me, because I am tired, but after all, this guy has been loyal to us for so long, it’s the least I can do to sign a couple pieces of paperwork for him, right? I’m assuming the new owner needs me to sign a couple of forms for his application or something, in order to complete the new contract.
But actually, NONE of this was correct. Rather, while he was talking to me on Friday, at some point, he apparently felt like he was bragging himself up. I’m not exactly sure why he thought this – maybe it’s a generational kind of thing, maybe he felt like he’d tried to make himself look better than he should have. So after I tell him that, no, I’ve got time to look at the paperwork, he goes back to his car and gets a manila folder and follows me in to my office.

And when we get inside, he hands the folder to me and I lay it on the counter and open it up. It’s got like fifty pieces of paper in it – no exaggeration – and here is what I see: a letter of commendation from time he spent in the Air Force (he retired in the seventies); a letter of recommendation on what a great employee he’d been during the time he worked for a local food retailer; multiple references from individuals who live in the community; letters of thanks for the time he spent helping local charities; and on, and on, and on….

I was completely overwhelmed. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, not that I thought any of it was inaccurate, but rather that he cared so much about his own reputation that he wanted to make sure that I understood he didn’t want me to think he was saying things about himself that weren’t true.

Which all put into perspective several things for me:

I need to be happy – content – with what I have, with the life I get to experience, with the job I have. He’s this thrilled, after all, to have a part time job as our janitor.
I should be so mindful as to care about my own reputation in the way that he does. He is the sort of person that, if he doesn’t show up one evening, is always careful to come in the next day to explain why he couldn’t be at work – that he had an emergency, had to help a family member, etc.

Little things are noticed. When we had the opportunity to keep him as our janitor, I jumped at the chance to get him hired back. Governments are notorious for hiring the worst of the worst when it comes to getting this kind of help (more on this in another post, perhaps). And I was eager to get him back not because of any one great thing he’s done, but because when you look at the expanse of little things he’s done in the time he’s been at my office, they add up to lot.

And I guess I write all this to say the experience I had in talking to him made me stop and think very consciously about what I find important, what I should find important, and how it stands up against what he values…

I should hope for this contentment in the position I have in life.

Hmm...

2009-04-16T14:36:00.002-04:00

So what to write about next?

There’s Ethan’s birthday celebration at my parents’ house – and the awesome gift of the rocket set that my brother got him, and how we shot the first one up to over 900 feet, and that wasn’t enough, so after lunch, we put together the second one and shot that up over 1000 feet. The first time we shot the bigger one up, we nearly lost the rocket – we’d made the mistake of standing directly underneath it and as it ascended we were all standing in the same place looking directly into the sun to try to track it. It ended up going in the complete opposite direction of where we’d thought it was heading, but fortunately at that point the wind hadn’t picked up so it didn’t go too far. But then, of course, one time wasn’t enough, and so we shot it up a second time only this time, the wind had picked up just a little bit, not much really, but by the time it had gotten to the top of its flight path and the second stage of the rocket popped -- shooting the little plastic parachute out of it -- the rocket stayed in the air for another three minutes and ended up over a quarter of a mile away in a tree.

But it was awesome!!!

Or maybe I should write about Sam the Magic Man’s magic show at the party we had at our house for Ethan’s birthday. The first trick Sam pulls out of his travelling suitcase is a device that a volunteer sticks a finger into – a little blade is pushed down, and it looks like the participant is going to get a finger chopped right off, but of course, that’s the trick – the little blade appears to go right through your finger! Sam made the mistake of choosing Ethan as a 'volunteer', and seeing the look of dread on his face when Sam asked him to put his finger into the device, we weren’t sure Ethan was going to hold it together long enough to finish the trick.

But he did – and still has all ten fingers on his hands…

Or maybe I should write about all the hilarious words I keep hearing people come up with at work. People don’t ‘specifically’ speak the ‘Arabic’ language in this town, they ‘pacifically’ speak ‘Arabetic’. (Is their collection of letters the Arabet? Hmm…) We don’t check people’s ‘peripheral’ vision for driver license renewals – instead it’s ‘periphial.’ One of the court documents required for certain transactions isn’t just a notice of ‘adjudication’, it’s any of a variety of other names people have invented. (“Ad-Jude-uh-cay-shun, people, say it with me – no, not like that, say it again. Again. Oh, never mind, I’ll just write it down on this sticky note which you’ll end up losing anyway…)

(Sigh...)

I need more posts about life with our two year old. Since she was old enough to walk, she’s been in a phase of wanting to get two containers and pour liquids back and forth between them like a scientist with two beakers in a lab. She’s often at the table with two glasses of water. Or milk. Or juice. Just pouring back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, each time spilling a little more of whatever she has onto the table. And the floor, and herself, and the chair she’s sitting in. She’s also done this with entire bottles of baby shampoo and shower gel. Oh, and foaming hand soap -- which, we can tell you from experience takes a lllooonnnnggg time to get out of the carpet – but on the up side, it gives your house that ‘extra fresh’ smell that shows people you really care about personal hygiene.

But naaahhh…

You probably wouldn’t want to read about all of that…

Practicing Embedding Audio...but if you're reading, enjoy...

2009-04-14T23:22:00.027-04:00

Habitual Tardiness...

Alternative Medicine...

Motivational Advice...

Physics, According to Homer...

A Beautiful Word...

Jurassic Homer...

A Reading: II Festivities 3:11-23

2009-04-14T20:39:00.006-04:00

11 And they spake unto the children in earnest, for both to hear, giving the commands as the man and woman knew them to be true: 12 "Thou whilst clean thy room, yea, verily, to utmost cleanliness; thou whilst put away the soiled garments, even the wrinkled and the unclean, those which do lieth upon the floor, 13 and lay them in the place prepared for them; and the playthings and the books, both those of covers soft and hard, thou whilst stack neatly upon the shelves.
14 And the children cried aloud, for they did suffer at this. "Woe to us, for now we are being delivered into bondage, yeah even so, we are not fit for this task placed upon us." 15 But the man and woman again did abide in their commands. 16 "Thou knowest in thine hearts, o children, that we do speak the truth; that thou hast cleaned thy room thrice before already." 17But still, the children did not refrain. 18"Tell us, elders, how this feat will be ended, for we are sore tired in our very marrow. Whilst thou not show us mercy?" 19 But the elders would hear no claim against them, and replied, saying, "As thou standest here, thou whilst complete this task of cleaning which we have laid before you; else will we deny the Easter goods, yea, verily we say, the chocolates, which some call Snickers, and the Peeps, and the jelly beans, yea every one. 20 And the young ones were sore afraid, for they did love their sweets. 21They replied unto them, "pray, tell us elders, how can we bring to an end this punishment? What wouldst thou have us do? For we tremble as the Easter grass blown by the wind to believe thou wouldst withhold the sugary treats. 22 And they replied, "then thou whilst surely work and will not protest, nay, neither whilst thou cry your lamentation, for thou hast been given all these things; thine clothes, food, even the bed where thou dost lay thine heads. 23 Then the children were sober, and their anger cooled as the spring rain cooleth the ground; and they did clean.

Mark Fidrych, 1954 - 2009

2009-04-14T12:29:00.002-04:00

In the early 1970’s, my grandfather retired from General Motors and my grandparents bought a mobile home in Lakeland, Florida and began spending their winters there.

To say times were different then would be a gross understatement, of course, but let me add this one thing. During spring training, major league ball clubs would bring their players in to southern and southwestern stadiums, much as they do now, but with one major change: you could show up in the parking lot outside the stadiums and wait for players to arrive first thing in the morning – and actually get them to sign autographs.

You could still do this now, I suppose, but I don’t think things would quite be the same. When you begin paying people seven and eight figure salaries, they begin to feel and act differently. Not intentionally, necessarily, but still. However, in the ‘70’s, while professional baseball players did make good money, many of the lesser known players – even some starters – didn’t quite make the shoot-the-moon salaries we see today. So if you were a fan, you could actually watch players arrive at spring training, driving pickup trucks and even riding in on bicycles, unshaven and half awake at 7:00 am, before they’d even showered.

So the first winter my grandparents spent in Lakeland, Florida – where the Detroit Tigers hold spring training -- my father bought a baseball and went down first thing in the morning and got the autograph of every single Detroit Tiger player he could find. If you’re a Tigers fan who remembers the great “Bless You Boys” Season of 1984, you’d recognize many names on it – “Sweet Lou” Whitaker, Lance Parrish, Alan Trammell…

And Mark Fydrich.

Fydrich passed away this week at his home in Massachusetts, in an accident on his farm. Rather than trying to sum up anything about him, I found a great article online through CNN.Com, from a sportswriter working for Sports Illustrated Online that really summed up the brief magic Fydrich brought with him onto the baseball scene – and emphasized the tragedy of how quickly his career came and went, especially when you consider how he really came out of nowhere and was transported to national fame in a matter of months.

At a time when the baseball community is beginning to settle down a little from the initial shock of yet another series of steroid scandals, and maybe beginning to try to come to grips with how to handle all the problems Major League baseball has created for itself and its fans, it’s nice to remember a time when all these problems weren’t around, when baseball was more of a game and less of an industry, and when baseball fans were seen as just that – fans, and not consumers.

Here are excerpts from the article:

“It's impossible to look back at Fydrich's remarkable 1976 -- knowing what we know now about pitch counts and such things -- and not cringe at the way manager Ralph Houk abused him. Of course, nobody was counting pitches in 1976, but even so it's hard to believe a manager would allow a rookie to throw five extra-inning games. Five! Or how about this stretch: From July 29th to August 29th, The Bird threw a nine-inning game, a seven-inning game, a nine-inning game, another nine-inning game, another nine-inning game, a 10-inning game, a nine-inning game and an 11 1/3 inning game -- each one on three-days rest. Imagine that: Fydrich threw 73 1/3 innings and seven complete games in a month.

To give you a comparison, K-Rod threw 68 1/3 innings all last year…

Everyone knows how it ended for Fidrych. He hurt his leg, then his shoulder, and though he did pitch well at times, he never quite felt right again. He only started 27 games in the big leagues after his rookie season. He tried to hang on, and at times toward the end it was sad to watch. I remember the game he started in Cleveland in 1980, when he was 26 years old, going on 40. He pitched to two Indians batters. Miguel Dilone singled and stole second. The Bird hit Dell Alston with a pitch. And The Bird was taken out of the game.

Two weeks later, in front of 12,000 or so in Toronto, The Bird pitched his final game. In the fifth inning he gave up a three-run homer to Ernie Whitt. Then he got Lloyd Moseby to ground back to him. And the career was over.

In many ways, time has reduced Fidrych to one of the 1970s fads -- like Evel Knievel, bell-bottom jeans, disco and the guy who said "You doesn't have to call me Johnson." But Fidrych was more than that. He was what's possible. He was an overgrown kid living his dream. He was magical. Monday was a sad, sad day in baseball. First we heard that Harry Kalas, the Philadelphia Phillies announcer with the voice that sounded like it should crack the clouds, died.

And then we heard that Mark Fidrych was found on his Massachusetts farm, dead at 54. There are a lot of things to remember, but I mostly recall watching him kneel on the pitchers' mound and smooth out the rough Cleveland dirt that day when I was a kid. All these people around us laughed and pointed and yelled insults. The Bird did not seem to mind at all. He just kept on working the dirt. He knew the score. He was exactly where every 9-year-old boy in America wanted to be.”

– Joe Posnanski, “Inside Baseball”, an online article from SI.Com

The Top...

2009-04-13T22:38:00.003-04:00

...13 Cheers, but mostly Jeers (and Laughs) from YouTube.

I know, I have WAY too much free time if I'm doing stuff like this, but anyway, it's intriguing what people will put on the Internet, isn't it???

1--From the "I Actually Wasn't Joking" File:
How to Make an Ocarina From a Carrot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsboQ7cp7a4
2--Perhaps the Worst Idea I've Seen So Far (botulism, anyone?):
How to Make Your Own Cheese
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBPYopcoeqs
3--Most Intriguing, and I'm Not Quite Sure Why: How to Write Like an Architect
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5p-L_m6BQ
4--From the True Believers File: I Have No Idea What This Is;
Alternate title: "They Drank The Kool-Aid" (I think this is supposed to inspire me, but to do what, exactly???)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwBA4rjKZqw
5--Award for Most Dedicated Nerd of 2009:
How to Play World of Warcraft on your Ipod
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRiK0UltlYU
6--Who ARE these people??? How to cuddle???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a6vS-V_5r4
7--How to Cheat On Any Test; Or, An 11-year-old's Guide

to Surviving 4th grade for the 3rd time...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZg_G8djiHY
8--From the 'Worst Roommate of All Time' File: How to prank your roommate...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IycOULjUGg
9-- Because of the continuing outcry from a public yearning to emulate their favorite heroin addict..."How to Make an Amy Winehouse Look-alike";
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVoxsRmZrC8
10--From the File "Way Too Much Time On My Hands":
How to Pluck Your Eyebrows with a Piece of Thread
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVmbHB2p4WM
11--You know she's going to feel like an idiot when her friends bring this up in twenty years: How to Brush Your Teeth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACgPHDzTHaU
12--1946 called, and wants its household hint back: How to Darn a Sock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nY1jTVyBE0
13--Is This Really Worth Your Time? Seriously? How to Seal a Bag of Chips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdhUifjOahs

On Taxes...

2009-04-13T21:08:00.004-04:00

"Let me tell you how it will be; There's one for you, nineteen for me."
-- Tax Man from The Beatles Album "Revolver"

With April 15 looming just around the corner like a disgruntled auditor, I thought it appropriate (or apropos, if you prefer the $2 word, though I'm not paying taxes on it) to create an entry regarding taxes and tax publications.

The above lyrics were written by George Harrison, who at age 23 discovered how much he and the other Beatles band members were paying in taxes. (It's an interesting Wikipedia article if you're interested: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxman ) Beatles members were in the top 95% of wage earners in England, and at some point, Harrison realized that when you added together not just employment tax -- currently 40% in England for the highest wage earners -- but also sales tax and other taxes paid, he was paying the majority of his income to the government.

The average American doesn't pay quite that much in taxes yet, but one of the most interesting figures released each year is the calculated date Americans have to work until, in order to 'break even.' That is to say, when you add up income taxes, property taxes, gasoline tax, sales tax, use tax, cigarette tax, luxury taxes, and so on, it's the date beyond which the money you get to keep is actually yours as opposed to what federal, state and local governments take from you. Currently that date, last I heard, was some time in May...

Anyway, regarding all this, what would we do without the IRS? Well, probably buy a lot less stuff on credit, that's for sure, but also we wouldn't get all the great advice available through their website www.irs.gov. Currently, they're up to around 850 publications -- TONS of great information like this:

According to Publication 225, the "Farmer's Tax Guide" you're given several reminders -- things like allowable mileage rate deductions and when you have to file certain 1099 forms. But also, the IRS wants to inform you to "set up your record keeping system using an accounting method that clearly shows your income for the tax year." I guess Oliver North's experience could speak to the importance of having your documents readily available for easy shredding, should the need arise...

The publication also explains to farmers the definition of what a plant is, as if they didn't know, and even what a farm is. And get this -- Chart 6-1 on page 31 shows a list of 'Plants with a Preproductive Period of More Than 2 Years'. (If you were planning on farming as an occupation, I've gotta think you already know this stuff, right? Isn't this covered at some point in 4-H???) Things like walnuts, pears, and cherries are listed, is if farmers weren't aware it takes at least 2 years for a pear seedling to grow large enough to bear fruit. But anyway, what I'm not sure about is why this matters -- and what would the IRS do if for some reason a plant became 'productive' in a year it wasn't supposed to? Would another publication be necessary?

Things that make you go hmmm...

And one of my personal favorites among those listed: Pub. 529 titled "Miscellaneous Deductions" suggests, and I'm not making this up, that you may want to keep your Keno receipts, as proof of gambling losses should you decide to write them off. If you play the slot machines, it advises keeping "A record of the machine number and all winnings by date and time the machine was played." (Who is keeping this journal, anyway? Las Vegas, October 11th, 2:36 p.m. played machine 4, put $5 on black, lost; 2:41 p.m. played machine 4 a 2nd time, won $6.)

And then in the same publication, 2 pages letter, it explains you can't deduct health spa expenses, "even if there is a job requirement to stay in excellent physical condition, such as might be required of a law enforcement officer." Word for word, that's what's in there. So, Gambling addiction = acceptable write-off; Staying physically fit, even if required by my job = no write-off; got it...

Is it any wonder Americans are overweight and overstressed???

One last laugh from this publication: "You generally cannot deduct amounts paid or incurred for lobbying expenses." It goes on to explain you can't list deductions incurred in attempting to influence legislation being passed (or, I suppose, not passed); you can't write off expenses incurred while attempting to influence the public vote in election matters; or while communicating with executive branch officials.

But then this exception: "You can deduct certain lobbying expenses if they are ordinary and necessary expenses of carrying on your trade or business."

Like the business of, say, LOBBYING...

So if you're going to lobby your congressman, just remember:

Lobbying is for professionals only. It isn't something to play around with.

And for crying out loud, how many times do I have to remind you:

GET A RECEIPT!!!

A Sort of Quiz

2009-04-10T20:26:00.004-04:00

Something to kill three minutes of your day -- a quick quiz on classic television police dramas. Can you name the show featuring the following characters?

1. Det. Stanley "Wojo" Wojciehowicz
2. Francis (Frank) Llewelyn Poncherello
3. Bill Gannon (Hint: His partner was the more famous of the two detectives)
4. Chief Fletcher P. Daniels; Det. Sal Benedetto; Sergeant Philip Freemason Esterhaus
5. Carroll O'Connor as Bill Gillespie
6. Telly Savalas as Lietuenant Theo
7. "Rico" Tubbs
8. Andy Sipowicz
9. William Shatner as Sergeant Thomas Jefferson
10. Thomas Hanson Jr. (hint: actor is now an A-list movie star; also, the show was on Fox)

The Answers:

1) Barney Miller
2) CHiPs (Erik Estrada was "Ponch")
3) Dragnet (Partner: Joe Friday)
4) Hill Street Blues
5) In the Heat of the Night
6) Kojak
7) Miami Vice
8) NYPD Blue
9) T.J. Hooker
10) 21 Jump Street

Score: Rank Yourself!!!

10 Correct: YOU GOT 10 CORRECT!
6 to 9 Correct: YOU GOT 6 TO 9 CORRECT!
3 to 5 Correct: YOU GOT 3 TO 5 CORRECT!
2 or Less: UnlimitedLicense and its producers make no guarantee, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information in this publication; information is for entertainment purposes ONLY; void where prohibited by law; see store for details; no animals were harmed during the making of this blog entry...

2009-04-08T22:42:00.023-04:00

WARNING!WARNING!WARNING!WARNING!WARNING!WARNING!WARNING!

This particular post NOT meant for immature viewers -- oh, no, wait, it IS meant for ONLY immature viewers...

"Holy Crap, Batman!: Assessing the International Dynamic Challenges of Canine Fecal Production, Analyzing Available Handling and Disposal Methods, and the Future of 'Green' Technology for Canine Waste In a 21st Century/Postmodern World";

Or, "Why I Think Watching Dogs Pooping Is Hilarious"

Okay, honestly, I don't know where this post is going exactly, but here we are. Gosh golly, I'm so thankful for the Internet where I can come up with completely useless, but hopefully awfully entertaining material like this...but hey, you've actually read this far, right?

So it really has struck me as hilarious for a long time that dogs actually have to go through the above postures to, um, 'do their business,' so to speak, and I think the reason it strikes me as so gosh darn hilarious is: a) they get to assume this position out in the open for all the World -- including other dogs -- to see (I often wonder, do animals ever feel embarrassed by anything? Is that in their DNA, or is it a wholly human sensation?) and b) so many people are absolutely TERRIFIED of dogs, that it strikes me as funny to think of these 'vicious' animals with fangs and claws stuck in this bizarre pose. And let me say, I know they really are stuck there in that position because I've actually watched our dog in the yard and tried to scare her by sneaking up on her when she's doin' her thang, just to see if I could get her to stop and run, but she really can't do anything but let Nature finish what it started, once she gets going...

If this all seems to indicate that I have a MUCH warped version of what humor consists of, you'd be absolutely correct -- and my wife completely agrees with you.

It's also interesting to note how many countries outside the U.S. really are in a 'bind' so to speak (pun COMPLETELY intended) when it comes to figuring out how to deal with the problem of animal ownership as human population continues to increase dramatically, especially in major cities. Europe most notably has begun to tackle the problem head-on as municipalities have passed legislation making dog owners responsible for disposing of animal feces...

Though I'm not sure exactly what these signs are trying to say...

This one seems pretty straightforward, except I'm not sure what the waves emanating from the fecal matter is meant to tell the viewer -- that it's okay to leave the feces if it DOESN'T stink? And wait, is that a picture of a dog, or a goat? It's a little difficult to tell...

And this one seems to be indicating that the fecal material of only CARTOON dogs need be picked up. Seriously, what dog actually looks like this? Doesn't that look like Disney's Goofy, if he was squatting on all fours without the signature hat???

And this one...how to read this??? No dogs that poop I-Pods???

OUCH!

And this one. 'Gracies' it says -- 'thanks'...for reaching down with your bare hands to scoop up your dog's turd...

Or this. It's a good sign, easy to read and all that, but if you look closely, you'll notice the dog feces have actually been digitally enhanced...'Photoshopped' into the picture. Um, is dog poop really that rare that they couldn't find the real thing? Or did they look at all the poo-poo brought in for the photo shoot, and they just couldn't find a good piece of dooky with that certain 'IT' factor? And then there's THIS product...we've actually come to the point in human history when we are so disgusted by the natural process of digestion that we can now buy an aerosol can that will let you temporarily freeze your animal's fecal material for the ten or fifteen minutes between the time you walk your dog, and the time you get home to place the waste in a garbage can. And we wonder why there's global warming...

So there you have it. An entire post about dog poo. But seriously -- are you laughing yet?

2009-04-08T11:44:00.002-04:00

It’s time to take time out of our busy lives as Americans and pay tribute to the dozens of hardworking men and women of Nigeria who have worked so diligently over the past 25 years -- throughout Africa and Europe -- to scam hundreds of greedy, unsuspecting people out of millions and millions of dollars.

If you’ve not heard of the Nigerian 419 scam, it began in the early ‘80’s, according to what I’ve read on the Internet, as the Nigerian economy, heavily dependent on oil prices, began to decline. Several unemployed university students first started the scheme by targeting businessmen visiting Nigeria looking for risky opportunites and big rewards. The students eventually branched out to businessmen in the West, and eventually, by the 1990’s, to companies. Emails and faxes were sent out by the hundreds of thousands around the globe.

The number 419 refers to the Nigerian criminal code of conduct involving fraud. The scam worked something like what’s in this letter, the first of several that were sent to my office by fax (I’ve kept the layout as close as possible to the original letter, INCLUDING all the typos and bad English):

===============================================================

FROM:
Dr. Chukuma Okpara
DATE: 8th April 2001

Dear Sir,
URGENT BUSINESS PROPOSAL: STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
I AM Dr Chukuma Okpara Director of procurement and contracts with Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) of the Federal Republic Of Nigeria.
Sometime ago, my corporation (NNPC) awarded a contract to Total Oil International, to service Turn Around Maintenance and rehabilitation work in Kaduna Refinery and Petrol-chemical Company (KRPC) plant in Nigeria. This contract was over-invoiced by us to the tune of US $75 Million (Seventy Five Million Dollars). Some officials and myself reached a compromise to transfer the fund into a foreign bank account that will accommodate this fund.
For providing the beneficiary’s account you will be entitled to 25% of the total sum, 70% for myself and partners, and 5% will be set aside to offset any expenses that may be incurred by either party during the transfer process.
To enable us put up claims, we would require the following information (1). Name to be used as beneficiary, telephone/fax number. (2). A written and signed letter of guarantee to confirm to us that the said fund is safe when transferred and our share will be given to us accordingly. After the successful completion of this deal, we intend to use part of our share to invest into your corporation or any business as may be advised by you.
Please contact my financial adviser Mr. Yaya Ahmed in London who will give you brief details of this transaction. His telephone number is + 44 772 0480 902 or his Netherlands no: + 31-612 309 149 and fax number is +44 870 135 2749. Be advised that confidentialty is required because we are civil servants and do not want any scandal.
Yours Faithfully
Signed
Dr Chukuma Okpara

===============================================================

Let’s see, $75 million, and I get to keep a whopping 25%!!! Sounds pretty good – oh, but wait, better offers were to be placed on the table:

===============================================================

(Received by fax12/30/01)
FROM THE DESK OF ENGRAKMED HARUNA
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF NIGERIA CONTRACTS REVIEW PANEL
FEDERAL SECRETARIAT COMPLEX (ANNEX)
LAGOS-NIGERIA
ENGR. AKMED HARUNA
TEL: 011 874 762 534 845
FAX: 011 874 762 534 846

Sir,
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP.

First, I must solicit your strictest confidentiality in this transaction. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and ‘TOP SECRET’. You have been recommended by an associate who assured me in confidence of your ability and reliability to prosecute a transaction of great magnitude involving a pending business transaction requiring maximum confidence.
We are top officials of the Federal Government Contract Review Panel who are interested in importation of goods in to our country with funds which are presnetly trapped in Nigeria. In order to commence this business, we solicit your assistance to enable us transfer into your account the said trapped funds.

The source of this funds is as follows: During the immediate past military regime here in Nigeria, government officials set up companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over invoiced in various ministries. The present democratic government set up a Contract Review Panel to look into these contracts as well as those awarded to contractors, for which payment has not been made. In the course of doing this, we identified a lot of inflated funds presently floating in the Central Bank of Nigeria and ready for payment. However, by virtue of our position as civil servants and member of this panel, we cannot acquire this money in our names. I have therefore been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the panel to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of US$21,320,000.00 (Twenty One Million, Three Hundred and Twenty Thousand U.S. Dollars). Hence, we are writing you this letter.

We have agreed to share the money thus:
25% for the Account owner (you).
65% for us (The Officials).
10% to be set aside in settling all foreign expenses (by you) and local expenses (by us) incidental to the actualisation of this project.
As a token of our gratitude, as soon as you confirm the arrival of the funds in your Account, we shall arrange for you the equivalent of 500,000 barrels of Automotive Gasoline Oil (AGO), for spotlifting at a price less than the prevailing market value per barrel.

We wish to commence the importation business from our 65% share of the proceeds from the project. Please, note that this transaction is 100% safe, and we intend to effect the transfer within 10 banking days from the date of receipt of the following information via Facsimile on my Number: 011 874 762 634 846, your Bankers name, Company’s name and address, Account number and fax number.

The above information will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively. This way, we will use your company’s name to apply for the payment and re-award the contract to your company. We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction. Please acknowledge the receipt of this letter using the above Telephone and Fax number. I will bring you into the complete picture of this pending project when I hear from you.
Your faithfully,
ENGR. HARUNA
P.S.
My email address is as outlined; akmedharuna@totalise.co.uk

==============================================================

Holy Cow! This one also gives me 500,000 barrels of Gasoline Oil Uh, I’m not exactly sure what that is, or what I’d do with it, but hey, it’s Africa, right? And those people know oil -- plus I get the same 25% share, oh, but wait, it’s less money. Ooohhh, but it also says TOP SECRET right in the email, I like that, and check it out! I was recommended by a top associate! A truly astounding deal, here’s a guy who obviously has his act together, and apparently knows my friends. It sounded perfect until I received this:

===========================================================================

(Received by fax, 10-16-02)
ALBERT KUMALO, PH.D
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH-ARICA
CONFIDENTIAL E-MAIL: -ALBERT KUMALO@EXECUTIVEMAIL.CO.ZA

DATE: -15/10/2002

DEAR SIR/MADAM
BUSINESS PROPOSAL :STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

I AM ALBERT KUMALO PH.D, CHIEF ACCOUNTANT TO THE CONTRACT AWARD AND MONITORING COMMITTEE (C.A.M.C) IN SOUTH AFRICA DEPARTMENT OF MINERAL RESOURCES AND ENERGY SOMETIMES IN 1998, A CONTRACT WAS AWARDED TO A CONGLOMERATE OF FOREIGN COMPANIES IN JAPAN BY MY COMMITTEE. THE CONTRACT WAS OVER-INVOICED TO THE TUNE OF UF$21,700,00.00
(TINTY ONE MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS ONLY).

THIS WAS DONE DELIBERATELY; THE OVER-INVOICING WAS A DEAL BY MEMBERS OF MY COMMITTEE TO BENEFIT FROM THE PROJECT. I NOW DESIRE TO TRANSFER THIS MONEY, WHICH IS PRESENTLY IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT WITH THE SOUTH AFRICA DEPARTMENT OF MINERAL RESOURCES AND ENERGY INTO AN OVERSEAS ACCOUNT, WHICH I EXPECT YOU TO PROVIDE.

BENEFIT FOR PROVIDING THE ACCOUNT WHERE I SHALL REMIT THE MONEY, YOU WILL BE ENTITLED TO 30% OF THE MONEY. 65% WILL BE FOR ME AND MY PARTNERS, WHILE 5% HAS BEEN MAPPED OUT FROM THE TOTAL SUM TO COVER ANY EXPENSES THAT MIGHT BE INCURRED BY US DURING THE COURSE OF THIS TRANSACTION, BOTH LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL EXPENSES.

I WOULD REQUIRE THE FOLLOWING:
THE NAME AND ADDRESS OF YOUR BANK
YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER/SWIFT CODE
YOUR PRIVATE TEL/FAX NUMBER

THE ABOVE DOCUMENTS WILL BE USED TO MAKE FORMAL APPLICATION AS A MATTER OF PROCEDURE FOR THE RELEASE OF THE MONEY AND ONWARD TRANSFER TO YOUR ACCOUNT. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHETHER OR NOT YOUR COMPANY DOES PROJECT OF THIS NATURE DESCRIBED HERE, THE ASSUMPTION IS THAT YOU WON A MAJOR CONTRACT AND SUBCONTRACTED IT OUT TO OTHER COMPANIES, MORE OFTEN THAT NOT, BIG TRADING COMPANIES OR FIRMS OF RELATED FIELDS WIN MAJOR CONTRACTS AND SUBCONTRACTS TO MORE SPECIALISED FIRMS FOR EXECUTION OF SUCH CONTRACTS.

I HAVE STRONG CONNECTIONS AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF SOUTH AFRICA AND THE FEDERAL MINISTRY OF FINANCE AND I HAVE NO DOUBT THAT ALL THIS MONEY WILL BE RELEASED AND TRANSFERRED IF I GET THE NECESSARY FOREIGN PARTNERS TO ASSIST US IN THE DEAL. THEREFORE, WHEN THE BUSINESS IS SUCCESSFULLY CONCLUDED, I SHALL THROUGH OUR SAME CONNECTIONS WITHDRAW ALL DOCUMENTS USED FROM ALL THE CONCERNED GOVERNMENT
MINISTRIES FOR 100% SECURITY.

IF THIS PROPOSAL IS OF INTEREST TO YOU, THEN CONTACT ME THROUGH E-MAIL AT ALBERTKUMALO@EXECUTIVEMAIL.CO.ZA SO THAT I CAN SEND YOU THE CONTRACT APPLICATION FORM FOR YOU TO FILL AND RETURN TO ME BACK BY FAX
PLEASE CONFIRM THE RECEIPT OF THIS LETTER BY E-MAIL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
YOURS FAITHFULLY,
ALBERT KUMALO, PHD

=============================================================

Holy $*@%! This guy’s an accountant for the, what was it? Contract Award and Monitoring Committee? That even has an ACRONYM, for crying out loud! Sweet! Ooh – and it says strictly confidential, right at the top of the page! And he has connections at the Central Bank of South Africa. Holy crap, who is this guy, BONO??? And again a healthy cut of over $20 million!!! But even BETTER offers would follow (don’t settle for cheap imitations, after all – act now! Supplies are limited! Operators are standing by!!!)

==================================================================

(Received by fax 9-26-03)

FROM: MR MARK GREEN
EMAIL: MARKGR@MAIL15.COM
Efax: 1-206-202-0880
ATTN: CEO/PRESIDENT
I want you to patiently read this offer. I am Mr. Mark Green the Head of Delegation to the World Bank if West Africa. I am the linkman between the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – OPEC and the petroleum sector in a West African country. I also attend OPEC meetings constantly in Geneva on the auspices of World Bank.
Through the sale of our allocated oil quota in OPEC, I was able to make S$22.2million, which is currently deposited in a Security and Finance company. I want you to assist me to claim this money as I cannot it directly because I am still a civil servant, and the code of conduct bureau forbids me to acquire such amount of money.
It is on this basis that I am contacting you for assistance. If you will be interested in claiming the funds on my behalf. Claim documents will be pricessed and sent to you. The documents with which the fund is deposited will be changed to reflect you as the new beneficiary so that you will be eligible to collect the fund on my behalf.
I will give you 20% of the fund for this assistance. I am aware of the international monitoring of all large-scale financial movements after the September 11th 2001 terrorist attack on America and to avoid any state of financial investigation I will provide a classified clearance paper from the relevant body which will exonerate the money from either drug, money laundered or terrorist related proceeds.
Kindly responds to me proposal through this my private email: markgr@mail15.com or Efax: 1-206-202-0880, the receipt of your mail or fax indicating interest. I want to assure you that there is no risk attached in this transaction. You should also provide me with your private telephone and fax numbers for easier communication.
Expecting your response.
Best regards,
MR. MARK GREEN

=================================================================

Now this I like – finally, a guy with an American-sounding name. Probably knows a lot more about finance than those other guys, and I’ll bet HE’S not a scammer like all the rest…and he’s a lot more sensitive, too, what with all the references to 9-11 and terrorism and so on…hmm…but then I got this one…

=================================================================

Tel: 44 704 011 6658; Fax: 44 207 060 0743
From: David Roberts Date: 16th December
2004
My name is David Roberts, Head of Private/Investment Banking Division of the Barclays Group, 48 Brook Str, Raunds, Northants, NN9 6LP, U.K. Our Private Banking client Hatem Kamil Abdul Fatah who was the deputy governor of Baghdad in Iraq and also business man made a numbered fixed deposit for 12 calendar months, with a value of (8,500,000.00) Eight Millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars only in my branch. Upon maturity, several notices were sent to him. Again after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, another notification was sent and still no response came from him. It was later discovered that the Governor had been assassinated in Baghdad. The websites below is a verification of the news about his death.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/worl/middle east/3970619.stm
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article/pho?id=6979
On my knowledge of his death, I immediately froze all transactions on this account pending when his next of kin would come forward or present evidence for necessary identification. Unfortunately, from my investigations and enquiries, he had no family members who were aware of the existence of the money and as such, I have decided to do business with you, by presenting you as the beneficiary of these funds. Obviously I would not want this money to go into the Bank Treasury because the banking law and guideline stipulates that if such funds remain unclaimed for a year, it will be regarded as unclaimed funds.
If this interests you, please reply through my private email: davidrobertsjnr@mail2world.com stating your telephone numbers for detailed discussions. You can call me on telephone: 44 704 011 6658.
Best regards,
David Roberts

===============================================================

Now HERE we go – actual internet links to news stories to add a little credibility (well, okay, so the links don’t actually WORK…but still.) And he’s head of a bank in the U.K, for crying out loud. And $8.5 million seems a lot more plausible than what those OTHER guys were promising…

And on and on…this isn’t even all of the ones I received, but you get the idea.

So reader, I’m looking for any donations you’d care to send – whatever you could spare – just a few pennies a day would mean SO much to SO many of us bloggers out there who could really use your help…YOU could change a life, just by sending a check in the mail.

Won’t you call today?

2009-04-07T15:25:00.004-04:00

"One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating." ~Luciano Pavarotti, My Own Story

So my wife and I have taken a joint interest in living a healthier, better lifestyle and one central component of that is eating better.

Now, let me say at this point, that I am a fairly thin guy. I always have been. Since high school when I weighed about 165 and had a 32 inch waist, I’ve only put about 15 lbs. more on my frame and an inch and a half on my waist. But still, my wife and I both know we could and should be eating better -- especially since we’re raising three kids who will most likely take their lifelong relationship with food from the cues we are giving them by our own actions.

Food itself has always been a wonderful part of my life. I admit it. I love to eat. Just last week, I was reminding my brother of the year when we were both teenagers and our parents went on vacation. And finding ourselves home alone and able to eat whatever we wanted, we each ordered a Domino’s medium pizza loaded with just about everything available (one of those things that, now that we have kids, I’m rarely able to do -- order a pizza that actually has TOPPINGS.) Both of us EACH consumed his own entire medium pizza. In one sitting.

MMMMmmmm…

So I, at age 40, and my wife, 35, have decided to begin living with purpose, as the saying goes, and we’re actually thinking about what we should be eating instead of just what we want to eat.

So the first thing I did yesterday was to search the local library near my office for books on diet and nutrition.

The section was overwhelming.

Apparently, we Americans really do have some major issues with what we eat, and for a variety of reasons. On my desk next to me, I have the following selection, a VERY TINY portion of the hundreds of books at the library I was just at:

--The Calorie Counter, by Annette Natow and Jo-Ann Heslin
--The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, by Rachael Hell and Richard Heller
--Dr. Atkins’ NEW Diet Revolution, by Robert Atkins
--The Sonoma Diet, by Connie Guttersen
--My BIG FAT Greek Diet, by Y. Phantides
--The Best Life Diet, by Bob Green
--The South Beach Diet, by Arthur Agatston
--Mastering THE ZONE, by Barry Sears

There are many others out there, too, that I remember being around when I was a kid: the Grapefruit diet, the Maker’s diet (eating from dieting principles supposedly listed in the Bible), low-carb diets, good-carb diets, the Sugar-Busters diet, low-fat diets, no-fat diets, weightlifter’s diets, Olympian diets, etc. With virtually any of them, you’d of course lose weight, but the trick becomes finding the one that you can actually stick to, and that’s where the diets become a little absurd (how could you possibly stay on a diet that involves eating so much grapefruit? What would you do on a vacation???)

What’s fascinating to me is if you gather information from each of them and pit them against each other, they often totally disagree, yet each author can site clinical examples of how and why the diet is supposed to work. The Atkins diet involved eating virtually no carbohydrates for a period of several weeks, during which your body is unable to process and store fat, forcing it instead to burn the excess fat that it has stored on-hand.

Great idea, right? Until you read Skinny Bitches, a book mostly targeted to a younger female audience that shoves Atkins’ love for steak right down his gullet for introducing the idea that a better way to lose weight involves eating LESS fruit and LESS vegetables – both of which are held as some of the best foods you can possibly eat in the Skinny Bitches book. Their beef with beef? Eating that much protein causes a massive increase of urea in the body, as well as a huge increase in toxins. Even though your body will begin burning fat stores, the authors argue that most of the weight lost is actually water weight, not fat, because pulling water from your fat cells is the only way your body can get rid of all that ingested protein.

So who do you believe?

Atkins is a doctor – it says so right on the cover – and the authors of Skinny Bitches are nutritionists with degrees as well. Oh, and they’re quick to point out that according to a clinical study, doctors in medical school receive on average three hours of nutritional training throughout their entire educations.

Ouch.

The Sonoma Diet isn’t any better. Check this out:
“There’s no ‘diet food’ on The Sonoma Diet. No specialty foods. Nothing out of the ordinary.” (pg 6) and then later: “Forget about eating different foods than everybody else around you. You’ll barely remember you’re on a diet.” (pg 7) and finally: “The Sonoma Diet is not a deprivation diet. Meat, fish, beans, eggs – they’re all there for you. Snacks? Of course. Wine? Sure, if you like. In moderation…” (pg 8)

Umm, this isn’t just stretching the truth, it’s an outright lie. What the authors don’t tell you in the beginning of the book is that the diet involves two phases. In the first, extremely restrictive phase, you get to choose from these “Wave One” foods (from pg 75): Bok Choy, Chayote, Jicama, Kohlrabi, Okra, Radish, Edamame, Tofu, Barley, Bulgur, and Quinoa.

Now don’t misunderstand me, this isn’t the entire list, only a sampling of what I’m talking about. There are also easy to find choices like whole grain breads and lean steak and so on. Oh, and also, you get to eat 'game meats' including deer, elk, and bison. There's apparently an abundance of this stuff in big city supermarkets waiting to be bought.

So come on. Don’t tell me that I’m going to be forgetting I’m dieting when I’m at the table eating jicama and everyone else is having Chinese takeout on fried rice.

What’s really interesting to me is how so many of these authors extrapolate such a major amount of information from such a tiny amount of research – or no research at all.

Take Atkins. Part of his reasoning for switching to a low-carb diet involved the death of his father at a very young age from heart disease. His father looked healthy, exercised often, and didn’t seem like a candidate for dying of a heart attack. And yet he did.

So with this amount of information, how do you extrapolate that eating less carbs and more protein is a better way to live? Aren’t our bodies designed to eat as omnivores? Isn’t that why our teeth are shaped the way they are? I’m greatly oversimplifying here, but only because this is how Atkins introduced his first book. He talks about clinical studies involving low-carb diets and has a host of anecdotal evidence from people he’s helped over the year lose weight – as many authors do. One last laugh: in the book I have next to me, he says this: “I’ve yet to see a single study that has shown that a high-protein diet causes kidney problems.” (pg. 21) Right – oh, wait, unless you consider kidney STONES to be included in ‘kidney problems’ – he neglected that tiny, little, jagged shard of information. Maybe this research wasn’t available to Atkins when he wrote the book, or maybe he just hadn’t seen it: high-protein diets carry an increased risk of kidney stones.

The Zone Diet was another bizarre one, if for no other reason than this: how could you possibly expect someone, over a lifetime, to adhere to these rules: 1) Never consume any more protein than your body needs to maintain a lean body mass, but never eat less. (How is this even THEORETICALLY possible? Do you FEEL different if you need more or less protein???) 2) Never consume more low-fat protein in one sitting than you can fit on the palm of your hand (I get it – but is this really best for everyone? And what do you do if you’re a vegetarian at, say, a wedding reception? Bring your own protein tofu bar because you don’t eat steak? Because NOT eating protein isn’t an option if you want to stay ‘in the zone’…)

So where does this leave us? Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve sifted through and thrown out a LOT of information. I’m convinced that most of what’s in these diet books is put there for these reasons, in this order:

First, to convince you that you REALLY need to buy this book because you’re obviously not healthy -- One of The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet authors relays stories of how unhealthy her childhood was, so clearly you must be like this to; The Zone author calls for you to find the hormonal balance that your grandmother had (um, I don’t want anything to do with ANY of my grandparents’ hormones, ESPECIALLY either of my grandmothers’); the author of My Big Fat Greek Diet spends the first 100 pages – count ‘em, 100! – in a series of personal anecdotes convincing you that HE REALLY WAS GROSSLY OBESE. This in a book that, through the epilogue and not including the “About the Author” section, is only 289 pages long – somewhat entertaining, but useless for dieting – we get it, you were fat. We got that after the first half dozen pictures you showed of yourself at varying stages of obesity. (This book really was the least helpful, in my opinion.)

Second, the authors are trying to convince you, with a limited amount of information, that you should believe them above everyone else. They cite anecdotal evidence; they cite clinical evidence; they cite other dieticians that believe what they’re saying.

Third, (in many cases) to get you on a system of buying their products: Atkins wants to sell you not only his book, but his Bake Mix (trademark of Atkins, Inc.), Heller and Heller want to sell you their Carbohydrate Addict’s Complementary French Toast (trademark of Heller and Heller Inc.) and their Carbohydrate Addict’s Complementary Light and Airy Muffins (trademark of Heller and Heller Inc.); and don’t get me started on Weight Watchers…
Which all means more sales and more money.
And one more thing to think about? One other reason I’m completely skeptical of diet books? Virtually EVERY ONE of these authors is a licensed medical doctor, and apparently making a low six figure salary as a doctor isn’t quiiiite good enough, so to truly serve humanity even further, the authors have written this plethora of twenty dollar, hardcover books for you to buy, to TRULY show how much they care about helping people…just make sure you also buy their specialty, brand-name items (in retail, called upselling – I know, because I used to do it…shame on me, too, right?)

So, to end this post that’s already too long, I’ll just finish by saying this is the first of a series of posts…

Much, much more to come in the future to update how our family is doing in changing its lifestyle habits…

If American Idol...

2009-04-03T09:25:00.010-04:00

...judged based on photographs.

(I enter through the double doors, like all the other contestants have done at the tryouts in Houston, with my photograph in a manilla folder.)

Simon (reading from a clipboard): Alright, then, John is it?
Me: Yes, that's right.
Simon: Okay, and what are doing for us today?
Me: This is a photograph of me when I was in third or fourth grade.
Randy: Yo, dog, you don't know which year it is?
Me: Well, I --
Randy: Yo, man, that ain't cool. You feel me? The one thing we always tell people -- (makes a swishing sound through his teeth -"ssshheeeee") -- is you gotta know what you're showing us, right? You gotta be able to tell us what we're looking at...
Me: I know, I'm really sorry, it's just that I didn't have a lot of time to come up with --
Paula: You know what, I'm sure it'll be fine you guys.
Simon: All right, then, off you go.

(I take the following photo out of the envelope and place it on the easel next to me.)

(Hoots from Randy; Paula gives an 'awwww' sound like she's looking at a six-week old puppy; Simon is silent.)

Simon: Alright, then. Randy.
Randy: (barely stifling the laughter) Heh, heh, okay, man, what -- ahahaha, I'm sorry, what are we looking at?
Me: Well, this was a class photograph taken at my elementary school in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Randy: Yo, I gotta tell you man, this? I don't know, man. I look at you standing in front of us here in the studio, and you got this whole normal guy/blue jeans and t-shirt thing going on with maybe a little soul thrown in, you know? But this...this photograph...I don't know man. This just ain't you.
Paula: What do you mean? I think it's adoooorrrable. Listen, it's like seeing a little, snuggly...hamster or something, I think. You have this amazing presence in this photograph, you bring such a warmth to your artistry, a wholesomeness. I wouldn't let anyone take that from you. You do you best, you know?
Simon: (Rolls eyes as he's chewing on a pen cap. Then...) Okay, John, here's the thing. What exactly aahh we supposed to do with this photo? I mean, on the one hand, I see a neo-hillbilly thing with this bowl haircut and the plaid shirt and all the plastic button-snaps. But at the same time, you're trying a little too hard, don't you think? With the looking-off-to-the-side inset photo. It all seems a little precocious to me.
Paula: Simon!
Simon: Well what am I supposed to think about this? It's self-indulgent rubbish. Total claptrap. All right, Randy, yes or no.
Randy: I don't know, dog, it's just, I gotta say no, man.
Simon: All right. Paula?
Paula: A thousand percent yes, you have such a light that shines from --
Simon: And I say no. Sorry, John, better luck next time.

ShoutOut Workshop

2009-03-28T18:34:00.005-04:00

"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

2009-03-26T23:37:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-26T15:17:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-03-26T11:39:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-25T18:12:00.004-04:00

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.

2009-03-25T12:01:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-24T15:26:00.004-04:00

"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...

2009-03-24T12:31:00.003-04:00

“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

2009-03-20T16:03:00.006-04:00

"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

2009-03-19T18:18:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-18T21:26:00.003-04:00

“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

2009-03-17T15:14:00.002-04:00

"“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.

2009-03-14T09:21:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-13T15:45:00.020-04:00

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

2009-03-13T07:21:00.003-04:00

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"

2009-03-12T17:19:00.004-04:00

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.

Hand-Me-Downs

2009-03-11T09:13:00.006-04:00

The house I grew up in sat 2nd from the corner on the widest street in the neighborhood.
It was built around the turn of the century, a white clapboard affair with what seemed at the time to be two majestic cedar trees in the front (the older I got, the weedier these trees began to look) and it had an enormous L-shaped porch made of cracked cement and a rail of loosened brick that at age five seemed made for climbing on.

As an adult, thinking of that house now brings to mind Garrison Keillor's description of Lake Wobegon's store fronts; trying to be everything two stories can be and a little bit more.

My memory is that we moved in at the beginning of winter, though after thirty five years, that may be something my mind created or pieced together from other events, but at any rate, the day we moved in, I remember feeling like we'd bought a mansion. A run-down, dirty mansion with buckled linoleum and cracked plaster, but a mansion nonetheless. The place my family had moved from was the upper floor of a farmhouse, one of those apartments that wasn't really built to be an apartment, and moving to our own two-story house in the city seemed miraculous.

Many things about that time, though, seemed miraculous. Like how I learned a couple of years after we moved in that our neighborhood actually sat on what used to be a landfill for the city of Grand Rapids. Of course, this would have been a period in history -- a hundred years, or so, earlier -- when 'landfill' would have actually been meant 'dump.' But rather than feeling uneasy or embarrassed, I was instead awed by it; you could actually go into our tiny back yard, dig down into the soil and find broken bottles and rusty license plates.

Incredible.

That was hardly the limit of my amazement with the place, though. I found out at one point our house actually hadn't been built on our property, it had been moved from about four blocks down the street. My dad even took us to the spot it had been moved from, where another two-story house stood. I always wondered about this; in my mind I imagined somebody actually thinking about buying our house sixty or seventy years ago, and saying something like, "mm, I'll take it but only if you move it...over there. Right to that spot. Yes."

And it was a great neighborhood for a boy to grow up in. So many truly remarkable things happened while we lived there that when I think of all the things my own children haven't seen, I feel like they're being cheated a little.

And I got to see these things with my own eyes.

Like the time a one-armed man, drunk or high, chased his girlfriend down the street trying to beat her up. As an adult, I'm mortified to think I couldn't take my eyes off this sight; but again, through the eyes of an eight year old, I was left speechless.

Or the time the apartment building around the corner and directly across the street caught fire. It was a two story monstrosity of a building that held about six apartments, I think, and when the fire really took hold, you couldn't stand in our front yard for more than a few seconds -- so much heat radiated from the front of it that it burned your skin and you had to move farther down the block. I remember feeling sad for the people who were losing all their stuff in that fire, but again, I couldn't take my eyes off it: flames twenty feet high.

Our neighborhood was so typical of big city life at the time, I think. As kids, we knew virtually every house by memory within about a four block radius, and you knew who the nice people were and who the grumpy ones were as well.

We drove back through that area a few years ago, including the area a few blocks south where I had my paper route and I realized how much everything had truly changed.

And yet, in a way, had not changed at all, really.

The buildings, for the most part, all looked the same. But I thought about how much society had changed.

Or maybe just I had changed.

The houses I and my neighborhood friends all grew up in now seem inadequate in so many ways. Hand-me-down houses. There's an inefficiency factor, for one thing. Houses back then weren't insulated so well, and the windows (if they opened at all) were all drafty. And they all had old furnaces, old appliances, old everything, really.

And it made me realize how our neighborhood had become the 'new' bad part of town, in a way. It hadn't turned in to a ghetto, full of pimps and drug users and gangs. But you could clearly see that was where it was headed.

Though I'd feel comfortable living there by myself, I wouldn't raise my children there.

And the good and bad of all of that is this, I think; that my parents, who had bought that house for around $12000 back in the early seventies had purchased it as an investment toward obtaining bigger things, living in better places. For us it was a starter home, and little more. That was the good. But how many of those same families still live there? How many parents passed those house on to their own kids, without ever considering that maybe it was time to move on?

It's a tricky thing, really, because for a place to not become run down, a group of people have to create a neighborhood like the one I had growing up. But more and more, our society is asking for bigger and better things. To live in a some of the houses my friends and I lived in almost wouldn't seem like a middle class existence any more; it's encouraging and frightening at the same time as it says something about my own values and the materialism of the culture we're creating.

We were fortunate to have what we did. I grew close friendships there with several kids, and I attended a local school with great teachers (one of whom still knows me by name, even after thirty plus years!) But my parents never wanted to stay in the city, and by the time I was sixteen we moved about ten miles out of the city to a ten acre piece of property where my parents built the house they still live in now.

Seeing my neighborhood change was hard; thinking about who might be living there now is even harder. And thinking about how high I've set the bar for my own kids -- what I'm teaching them is acceptable, and what they are growing to 'need' -- is the most difficult of all.

2009-03-08T22:44:00.003-04:00

Spring has come to Albion, most notably in the way snow has been replaced by rain. Winter snow provides a kind of reprieve for poverty; like charity, it covers a multitude of sins. Run-down houses, vacant lots, cracked sidewalks, weedy lawns -- all are hidden behind the white of winter.

No longer. As winter's cover is washed away the distinctions between poverty and wealth begin to seem less like lines and more like impassable chasms. While Albion doesn't have any visible examples of extreme affluence (see my post from a few days ago) the division between the needs and haves is apparent, perhaps most so in the clientele who visit my office.

A note is needed here regarding where we've been and where we seem to be headed in Michigan in terms of our laws and our criminal justice system.

You may not know this but about 20 years ago Michigan legislators began to take advantage of the effect shame could have on deterring crime. Shame has been used as a deterrent to criminal behavior about as long, I suppose, as humans have been writing laws. This is why we force jail inmates to pick up trash from the side of the road; not that having clean roadsides isn't a nice thing to have, but let's face it there are other more useful and helpful things we could be having them do that would benefit society more.

But regarding shame, in the late 1980's, a law was enacted that allowed police officers to confiscate the driver licenses of drivers who were under reasonable suspicion of driving while impaired or intoxicated.

That law stands to this day, and the way it works is this: if you're pulled over by a police officer with probable cause (driving erratically, speeding, etc.) and the officer believes you may have been consuming alcohol before driving, your driver license is confiscated and destroyed. As a replacement license -- because after all, you haven't actually been convicted of any crime, only accused at this point -- the officer issues you a paper permit to drive with, which essentially does this: notifies anyone who needs to see your driver license that you are believed to be a drunk driver. The idea is to provide an external motivator to all of us to not get ourselves into this position in the first place; and, for anyone caught and issued the permit, it provides the element of shame to prevent future occurrences.

If the language of my writing makes it sound like I don't like this system, let me here explain that I'm actually ambivalent toward it. But I will say this, it would seem that though drunk driving rates have leveled off over the last 20 years, I would doubt that this law has had little if any effect in reducing drunk driving.

In part I believe this from anecdotal evidence. Working in Secretary of State branch offices, I have come to believe there has never been and will never be a shortage of people willing to have a few beers and then get behind the wheel of a car. But also, I've seen numerous people who have no idea how the system is supposed to work -- so the idea that giving them a paper permit to shame them into not driving drunk borders on the absurd.

In writing about this I could cite an abundance of cases in which the law has actually worked and not worked as a deterrent.

I dealt with one woman about three years ago who I believe will never, ever drive drunk again. I called her to the counter and the best word to describe her demeanor was embarrassment. Though there was only one other person in the office (and clearly not someone she knew) she slinked to the counter, handed me the permit she'd been issued, and whispered to me as she leaned over the counter that she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do next to get her license back.

Clearly, the law was designed for people like this.

But she is clearly, of course, the exception to the rule and the reason is this: she lives in a sub-culture of our society for whom drunk driving is a horrible embarrassment.

In other words, she does not live in poverty.

She stands on one side of the chasm that divides poor and rich. It's funny, too, because of the hundreds of people I've talked to about their problems with suspended driver licenses, she is undoubtedly one of the few who would feel the punishment of our drunk driving laws as a minor sting rather than a bruising blow. She can afford the pay the legal fees, court fees, state costs, and traffic citation fine itself and this, coupled with her embarrassment, will be enough to prevent her from ever driving drunk again.

In contrast to this middle-aged woman stand a line of poor, mostly male drivers who are in my office almost every day. If the middle-class woman's embarrassment (and reasonable wealth) will ensure she never loses her driver license again to a drunk driving charge, then the actions of the poor almost surely guarantee the opposite for them.

One of my clerks waited on a young man this week who'd spent over four thousand dollars clearing multiple license suspensions and state fines to try to get his license reinstated. About four months ago, I waited on woman in her mid-twenties doing almost exactly the same thing. This past Friday, a clerk waited on a man who'd recently been cited driving suspended -- his license had been revoked two decades ago.

These people all live in extreme poverty. I know because I know where they live, and in most cases, where they work if they have jobs at all. I see them and people like them every day.

Clearly, then, shame as a deterrent has not worked. In part, this seems because with drunk driving ingrained into the culture of poverty, the element of shame is gone. The drunk driver is only doing what everybody else does; it has been modeled for him his entire life.

Our society has come up with a solution. With other avenues now cut off (such as corporal punishment and lengthy prison terms) the only thing we have left is this: levying even heavier fines for people found guilty of certain driving offenses.

The absurdity of this should seem painfully obvious, but to make sure we're all on the same page, let me paint the picture:

We've come to a point where legislators feel they've had their hands tied too long. They are right. Our society refuses to hold people accountable for their actions with lengthy prison terms, mostly because we simply can't afford to put more people in prison. We have done away with corporal punishment -- public floggings, putting people in stocks, etc. -- and so with no other choice available, out of frustration our legislature has decided fines are the only choice left.

Interesting to note here also that we no longer put people in debtor's prisons for failing to pay back loans, even outrageous loans like thousands of dollars in credit card debt or second and third mortgages on vacation properties.

Yet boxing people into the corner of paying heavier and heavier fines to make up for their unacceptable behavior is where we've turned.

There are numerous problems with this which are apparent, I think, just from my description of the current state of our affairs but let me point out two major problems with this system: First, without a driver license, obtaining employment -- any employment -- is extremely difficult, so how could one possibly hope to pay back the fines and costs that driving drunk brings? And second, the poor are already wallowing in the hopelessness of their situation; beyond a certain point, you might as well ask them to pay down the national debt -- in their own minds, they'll NEVER get out of the situation they're in.

For the most part, they are correct. They will never get out of debt. Their cycle of poverty is just that: cyclical. They will live their lives in debt, and then hand the cycle of debt to their children who, instead of inheriting trust funds or the deed to a house, will instead inherit the on debt of providing a funeral.

I type this fully aware that I sound like a far-left liberal, which I am not. If you're curious, I've grown up in an Evangelical Christian household, I was a raving Reagan supporter even before I was old enough to vote, and I voted for Bush in 2000 (yes, the blackest spot on my voting record -- but I'm digressing.) I now consider myself neither Republican nor Democrat, and in writing all of this, the pragmatist in me sees that though the system is working -- we are, after all, taking in MILLIONS of dollars in Michigan alone and people are willing to pay the fines -- the system is also greatly skewed to favor the middle and upper classes.

And saying something like 'well life isn't fair' only serves to dismiss the nagging feeling we all have in our consciences when we try to face facts as difficult as these. Should we, as a society, not TRY to make things more fair? Should we accept the system the way it is, allowing people (i.e. the middle and upper class) to buy their way out of criminal sanctions?

And what price are we willing to pay to ensure public safety on our roadways? Until we can figure that out, I shudder to think where we're headed in another 20 years.

If fining the poor for their actions doesn't work, what's left???

2009-03-07T10:05:00.004-05:00

"The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop”

--Mark Twain

Undaunted...

...is the best word I can think of to describe Isaac, our 8 year old. He comes down the stairs wearing his basketball uniform, though his game is still a full 3 1/2 hours away. Apparently he couldn't wait to lose his fifth straight in a row (he will lose, I'm not being pessimistic; I'm his team's coach, I've seen his team play four games already, and I know who we're playing -- a team that beat us handily a month ago.)

He's undaunted, though. Hard to believe he's the same kid who, last Saturday after losing by one point, bawled his eyes out and punched his fist into his leg over and over the way I envision my grandfather must have done a hundred years ago when he was a kid.

I'm in the kitchen now loading the dishwasher when he begins the conversation.

Let me interject first, though, the innocence I see in this kid's personality. He has a COMPLETELY self-centered character appropriate for his age; I'm not implying he's selfish or rude or anything. Rather, that he continually can't understand why anyone wouldn't want to automatically play along with whatever bizarre game or activity his brain has cooked up spur-of-the-moment.

These games never really make sense, and he finds an abundance of humor in two things -- being silly, and being repetitious.

Very, VERY, repetitious.

It's as if things seem exponentially funnier to him the more times he does them.

So this morning as I'm finishing up loading the dishwasher, he begins a slow robot walk, and begins explaining to me the "game."

Isaac: So daddy, do you know what?
Me: What?
Isaac: I'm a robot bomb (he's doing a sort of waddling penguin-walk at this point, with an exaggerated side-to-side lean.) And guess what?
Me: What?
Isaac: When I start to talk faster, guess what?
Me: What?
Isaac: It means I'm about to walk toward somebody and blow them up.
Me: (Now finished with the dishes) Wow. (I walk toward the table, coffee cup and book in hand.)
Isaac: (Nonsense robot talk, here.) Blaahhg....Ma....Tahn...Bah--bah--bahbahbah....PKKEWWW!!!
Me: That's funny bud, really.
Isaac: Blah...blah...blaaah...blah-blah-blah...blahblahblah....PKKEWWW!!

I'm reading and sipping coffee at this point. Isaac does his duck/robot walk over and over, and I'm wondering how long will this one last? He can entertain himself much longer than you might believe, a blessing in many ways. Isaac is one of those kids who can make a game out of almost anything he finds laying around. Several moments later:

Isaac: And daddy, guess what?
Me: What?
Isaac: Do you know what happens when I blow someone up?
Me: Allah gains the glory?
Isaac: Uh...no. No, do you know what happens? The explosion causes the factory to blow apart, and a thing goes into outer space, do you know what it is? It's the mother heart of the factory, and...

And he's simply, in one word, undaunted.

This ability to spring back, his resilience, is undoubtedly part of what got him through cancer treatment. Hard to believe at age 2 months he was sitting in a hospital room where he'd spend nearly half of his first year of life.

I don't ever want to forget that, that we were there and we got through that, with a lot of help from friends and family and a lot of prayers.

We were told so many things MIGHT happen due to all the chemotherapy he was receiving. He MIGHT not have any teeth develop properly; he might have heart development problems. The chemotherapy could cause other cancers. He even received treatments injected directly into his central nervous system -- the effects of those were unknown, as the doctors knew of very few (if any!) cases of an infant so young receiving them.

And now he's this vibrant, happy, crazy 8-year-old. Considering the length of his hospital stay, we were blessed with very few long-term effects from his treatments.

And we're now on to another game -- but this time, his mother has become the player.

Isaac: Guess what, mommy? No, not like that, you put your feet up on the ottoman and...

And here we go again...

Undaunted...

2009-03-05T18:40:00.007-05:00

"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known."
--Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

I’d mentioned in my last post how much I enjoy working in a small town, and for some reason felt like I needed to write more about that.

After ten years working in Albion and after talking at length with literally thousands of people, I’ve come to realize one major presumption people make about small town life that is a complete myth and that is this: that most people living there are doing so by choice.

I think that we think of small towns as places full of quaint, folksy, down-to-earth people who have chosen to live a simpler, quieter existence that has given them happiness. And while this is undoubtedly true in some cases, for many people Albion wasn’t a place they chose, it was a place that chose them.

And given the chance, they’d much rather be someplace else.

Or maybe I’m being too pessimistic. I guess what I mean is that at least at the start, many small town folks are looking to get out. Young people don’t see themselves staying in the same neighborhoods for the rest of their lives, and neither do young professionals fresh out of college who find their first job at the local high school or an insurance agency.

But then I think something happens. Maybe it’s a sense of resignation about how unlikely it is that things will really change, because for things to change you need to make that change happen. And change is hard. No one’s going to hand you the keys to your new house and a contract working for a Fortune 500 company, those are things you have to seek out, to work for.

Or maybe, too, people come to a realization that different doesn’t always equal good; and that you can’t move away from your problems, they follow you wherever you go.

And what I’ve seen in people is that they grow roots that would be painful to pull out. Friendships are made. You find people actually willing to babysit your kids, for no other reason than because they like you. You find a local church that’s a good fit, you know your neighbors by name.

You get hugged in the grocery store.

It’s really funny, too, because I don’t think we realize when we’re young just how much our values are going to change. There are so many things I love about Albion that are hard to put a name on or point a finger at, things I just didn't even consider when I was younger.

Like the way people here talk. They have this ability to just state the obvious -- Sure is cold! or Wow! That truck is loud! We all do that, I guess, but small town people do this is in abundance.

And their speech is funny in other ways, too, and even though sometimes they say things you’d find horribly offensive at other times you can’t help but smile listening to them.

I overheard someone ask a local tavern owner one time how he was doing on a Friday afternoon when the place was lined out the door with customers: “Busy as a one-armed paper hanger, today, boy!” was the reply.

And Albion has money, too, not the Donald Trump billionaire kind but a better kind, I think, a hidden kind. Unlike the flash you’d see in big cities it’s mostly tucked away in corners and hard-to-find places. It’s difficult to tell who the richest man in town really is and maybe that’s the way it should be. I think this says something good about Albion -- anyone who has to show you how much money he makes has a seriously flawed values system in my opinion.

Let me add here that life is anything but idyllic in Albion. I’ll clarify that in case you think I might be seeing things through blinders or sugarcoating the bad to make it seem better than it is. Though many people have found a sense of belonging in the community and comment regularly on how much they enjoy living here – I hear this quite regularly – there is a also a price to pay for raising a family in a place this isolated.

Like crime for example. While the statistics would say crime rates are relatively level in Albion, crime itself is present in very shocking ways in a town of just a few thousand people.

Until a few years ago there was a convenience store down the street from my office. It is now closed. Not for lack of business, but because an 18 year old who used to hang around while his friend worked the counter was playing with a 9 mm loaded semi-automatic handgun one evening and accidentally shot and killed a co-worker.

I knew the victim Bobby well; saw him many, many days walking down the street.

And Albion is a town drowning in poverty. There isn't any hustle and bustle here, because there isn't anywhere in town everybody needs to get to. As I drive to the post office each day, the route I take passes through a section of town in which more than half the houses over an area several blocks long are boarded up and condemned; not repossessed, not vacant, but actually tagged by the city for demolition. And if the economic climate in town ever improves to any great degree and the city can afford to do it, people will be glad to see the houses torn down.

Around the fourth year after I came to Albion the economy really tanked. Two of the town’s largest employers closed up, a factory and a foundry. Both were the kinds of places people hoped to retire from with full benefits. Pensions -- for those who’d had 29 ½ instead of the full 30 years -- gone. (Yes, this did actually happen to a few people; and many more had 20+ years of experience.) Then a few businesses down the street closed – retail places like restaurants, and an office supply store.

Then the theater changed ownership. Then it closed. Then it changed ownership again. And re-opened, and then closed again. And then finally it is now under new management and is open once again for who knows how long.

Then the hospital closed – the hospital. Not to expand, or relocate, it was simply gone presumably because the majority of its patients were on Medicare or Medicaid or didn’t have any insurance at all. The administration simply couldn’t afford to keep it open; you can’t really blame them. A hospital is, at the end of the day, a business.

But there is hope in Albion as well. People always seem to find it or create it. If the tide of poverty seems like it’s rising, then people are learning to swim.

A small retail space directly across the street from my office was renovated after a large donation was made by a local businessman to turn the building into a children’s hands-on museum. It is thriving, a beautiful, beautiful place where hundreds of school kids are bussed in each month. I watch them on warmer days walk hand-in-hand from the bright orange busses to the front door, corn-braids and miniature backpacks bobbing to the beat of their tiny steps. I love this. Children are supposed to be our hope, our future. Seeing their excitement, that's an easy thing to believe.

Albion has given me that.

The trouble is people look at the museum and say now that's what we need more of -- but are too willing to wait for someone else to bring it to them. This, too, comes with poverty.

A sense of hopelessness, of resignation.

I consider all of these things about Albion, knowing that I could make more money working in another city. But with larger cities I suppose come other problems – the stress of a longer commute, or if I moved, more expensive housing. And big city people.

So in staying here what do I gain? Besides folksy talk and friendly smiles?

In a town this size you’re treated like a celebrity for one thing; you walk into the store and everyone knows who you are, by name even. A lot of times I wouldn’t even have to show ID to cash a check. And almost everyone gets treated this way – so being a celebrity suddenly doesn’t seem so special. I love that.

I also love how people whose names I can’t remember come into my office and actually ask about my kids. I can't remember all my customers' names, but they know about how old my kids are. How cool is that? You can’t really put a price on having that – people actually caring about you. And you know they care because they remember.

And even though I work in a government office with very stringent rules and guidelines, people are rarely rude. Working at my last office I was cussed out to my face with grueling regularity, sometimes more than a dozen times in a given week.

But I think ultimately I’m still in Albion probably because like so many other people who never planned on staying, leaving would seem too difficult, the change too painful and too stressful. Albion has its flaws but it also has my roots and I think, for now, those are here to stay.

2009-03-05T13:08:00.002-05:00

I’ve worked in my office for about 10 years now and small town life is beginning to fit like a well-worn shoe. Growing up in a fairly large city I wouldn’t have believed that working in a community like this would bring the fulfillment that it has.

Things apparently look much different at age 40 than at 20 or 25. Is life supposed to be coming into focus in a clearer way the older I get? Or am I seeing my preconceptions turning fuzzier? I’m not really sure. Maybe both.

At any rate, what is enjoyable about working in a small town is small town people. They’re just different than people in big cities – not always in good ways, or bad ways, just different. I think it’s that way a lot of times, with jobs and places and circumstances, that the people involved are a key part of happiness.

I’ve had jobs where the work and the money were good, and some where both those things were lousy. And it’s a cliché, but people – both customers and co-workers – have always played a bigger part in determining my level of enjoyment and fulfillment than the money or benefits.

Or even the type of work involved.

The first real job I had was working for a small regional grocery store chain in the meat department. In our stores, like many others I suppose, you worked one of two jobs in meats – either you worked the counter, where customers would pull the little white paper number tab and wait their turn to tell you they needed two pounds of ground beef and a chuck roast; or you worked with prepackaged stuff.

For the most part, I worked prepackaged. This meant you worked a lot of the time in a huge meat locker opening large boxes of chicken and pork and then using a shrink wrap machine and labeller to put the meat into smaller packages for people to buy.

And this was the first job I actually had to apply for.

Before she retired, my mom used to work for a government agency that matched the unemployed with employers looking for help. She was always getting me temp jobs – day stuff, mostly, that usually paid in cash. But the summer I turned 16 I actually applied for the job at the grocery store.

I filled out a standard government application and I got dressed up and everything, even wore a tie. I was expecting the formal questions that I thought you always answered during an interview (‘tell us a little about yourself,’ that sort of thing.)

Instead, I showed up at the grocery store and was directed to see Helen. She was the supervisor of prepackaged meats. As she walked me to the back of the store I was incredibly nervous. I’d never done ANYTHING like this before. I’ve been hardwired from a very early age to always aim to please other people and I think that if I hadn’t gotten the job I would have been incredibly depressed with myself.

As we approached a room toward the back, she took an apron off a nail. “Well, you’ll need this,” she said or something like that. I don’t really remember exactly because I was too nervous to hear much of anything. My mind wasn’t comprehending what was going on. Nervousness turned to shock, however as my presumption aboout the way this was all supposed to work wasn't matching what Helen was saying or doing. She was explaining where I would need to stand, introducing me to the 2 people I was going to work with.

There would be no interview, apparently. I had a pulse, I spoke English with reasonable fluency, therefore her assumption must have been I could work. Standing there in dress slacks and a shirt and tie, I looked around at everyone covered in the sight and smell of chicken blood.

And I was hired.

Or, more specifically, drafted.

I hated this job almost right from the start. Helen was a terrible boss, and it was apparent from day one that everyone around her learned to endure rather than admire her. She was competent, don’t get me wrong. But she was just very, very cranky.

And the work itself was terrible too. I was always cold from going in and out of the meat locker and my hands were always lacerated because we’d have to open up huge boxes of chicken leg quarters and break off the ice they were packed with to get to the chicken.

One night I was working alone packaging leg quarters again and the skin on my knuckles felt like it was on fire. I already had band-aids on several fingers, because the way my job worked was this:

I’d pick up a forty lb. box of chicken, drop it back down on the pallet to break most of the ice free, and then take the top off the box. To separate out the chicken I had to push my hands into the loosened ice. It felt like I was sorting through a box of shattered glass, tiny cuts covering the backs of my hands. I’d then drop the chicken pieces into a large plastic tub and when the tub was full I’d haul it into a separate room to be shrink-wrapped, weighed, and labelled.

I’d been doing this for nearly an hour when real tragedy struck.

I was alone in the meat locker and after opening what must have been my third or fourth box of chicken, I decided to catch my breath for a moment. The heavy lifting involved was another aspect of the work I had grown to hate, and I knew I’d have about a thirty second window to rest in the cool air before I’d start to feel cold again.

Leaning on a crate of packaged meat, I looked down at my hands. The skin was chafed, too pink and raw. But then I realized…

I was supposed to have THREE band-aids on my hands. I was sure of it. I had one spot on one knuckle that had split open and I looked with horror at TWO fingers with band-aids and one now band-aid-less finger wondering how long it had been since the band-aid had come off.

It was nowhere to be found in the meat locker and the only other place it could be was in a package of chicken – one of the maybe fifty or so that I’d already packaged, sealed, weighed and labelled.

Some of them were already on the shelf.

I pictured myself like someone in a B-horror movie kicking open the meat locker doors. “BACK!” I’d yell. “THIS ISN’T SAFE TO EAT!”

But that isn’t the sort of thing I was capable of, at least at that age. Instead – me, aiming to always please, remember, not wanting to rock the boat – frantically pored over package after package of chicken, turning each one over and over in a fruitless attempt to find a ¾ inch wide bandage.

Fifteen minutes of searching yielded no results. I never did find the thing.

Which means…

But no one ever complained. No customer, to my knowledge, ever returned to the store demanding to know how something like this could happen. No lawsuit was ever filed.

I could say the most important thing I learned from all of this was not to worry so much about the small things in life – but is finding someone else’s band-aid in your packaged chicken a SMALL thing???

But the bigger thing I saw was this: I hated the job, the actual work involved, but it would have been endurable had I not been working with a boss that stressed me out all the time. I really hated working there because SHE was there. She’d watch over your shoulder correcting every little thing you did, the way you did every little aspect of your job, the way you’d lay something down on a table next to you (Not there, keep that stuff out of the way! she’d gripe at you.)

And I finally got up the courage to quit. Sort of. When school started back up I finally went to her and said I had to leave. The schedule was just too much for me. I couldn’t do BOTH work and do my best in school, so there you go.

But every once in a while, I think about Helen and the other people I worked with. And it’s really kind of sad, that the thing I liked the least about the job was her. I can only hope there isn’t anybody out there thinking that same thing about me. If so, I guess ignorance really is bliss.

And I guess that I hope my wife and I will be able to teach our kids just how much you really can affect other peoples’ happiness.