My girls both sing loudly about random things they are thinking. Abby will walk around on our terrace in the back yard and sing loudly about princesses, God, jungle gyms, bikes and rocks. Loudly. Evie, right now as I write this, is singing in the other room as well. I can’t make out what she’s singing, but she’s doing it joyfully. There’s something wonderful about little girls singing and making noise that just brings a smile to my face. I am thankful to God for my little girls and their singing. I hope they never stop – as long as they keep off of American Idol. Heaven forbid they get on national television singing some made up song about jungle gyms 😉 [not really – unless the judges mock them]
Category Archives: Confessions
Sealants
Yesterday I went to the dentist and had two cavities taken care of. Cavities that were not from bad brushing recently, but cavities from when I was a young teenager or tween. The dentist I went to then was big into using sealants, which if you haven’t had or heard of are basically bits of melted plstic that are incredibly durable, and sealants last for around ten years. Except in my case they lasted for 17 or so years. So finally the sealants came out of my teeth and I had to have fillings put in. My cheeks are sore from holding my mouth wide open for the 30 minutes or so that was required (with short breaks here and there).
I used to be afraid of the dentist, but the truth of the matter is that I’m really glad that we have the technology we do today to fix our mouths up. Dental practitioners are still not all equal, but they all have access to some pretty amazing technology and I’ll take a few hours or days of discomfort for a life of teeth 🙂
Thankful Thursday: In-Laws
Two of my four in-laws are in town this week and I’ve really enjoyed the time with them. They put up with my craziness and sometimes contribute to it. They’re neat folks, they both love Christ, and they both walk in liberty. This morning they took us out to breakfast and then they’re off in the mountains with the rest of the family while I work (or blog as the case may be). These in-laws are the ones I knew best during my dating and engagement to Jessica and so I have longer memories with them. They’re a hoot to play cribbage with if you can get them to do so.
My other in-laws, who I don’t want to forget about in this post, are also pretty neat. They’ve got two teenage girls in their home… so I’m watching carefully because eventually I too will have two teenage girls in my home. Since I’ve known them a shorter amount of time (just shy of nine years of meeting in person) its been a different relationship because the time has been less and the frequency even lesser. They also put up with my shenanigans and contribute to them on occasion. These in-laws play a nasty hand of cribbage as well, but also will play Aggravation, Risk and Scrabble.
You can’t beat in-laws (its against the law [see previous notes about shenanigans and understand this is a play-on-words]), and I love mine. I’m thankful for them.
An Open Letter to NBC
[the following is from an email I sent NBC this morning]
I just wanted to let you know that I’m terribly disappointed in NBC’s decision to pull out of iTunes. It is a choice that the company has to make as a business decision but it puts customers at a disadvantage and I wanted to make sure that you knew customers were watching. I would also like for NBC to publicly announce what exact measures they expected Apple to take to prevent the ‘estimated’ illegal content from being distributed.
I don’t know what shows are on NBC that I will be watching this upcoming season, but I would have liked to have grabbed the missed episodes on iTunes for $1.99. I know you wanted to double the price, but that’s rather ridiculous. As it stands I will now have to just wait and watch them when I get home from trips on my DVR, which will record them, allow me to skip commercials, and watch them on my own schedule for the $5.00 a month Qwest/DirecTV charge me. NBC will not get any of that money instead of making some money off of the iTunes download that I would have given them periodically.
Please re-consider your position with Apple because it would be more than fruitful for you to make things available to your customers in a convenient, legal manner, without being invasive to their normal patterns for content acquisition. The assumption that was made in the Press Release assumes that the United State’s legal policy of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is just not part of the way NBC thinks. This makes me very concerned for the future of the network because it makes the consumer the bad guy immediately. Customer centric companies that buy advertising will identify this and may remove or adjust advertising budgets over time to reduce NBC’s income from commercials.
Please don’t distance yourself from customers. The networks operate and exist because of the customers who pay for content through watching advertisements, buying TV series in DVD box sets, and through word of mouth talking about content put out by the network, hopefully building up a fan base for the network’s shows. NBC has indicated to the public that they are not valuable as people, but only as income sources. I know you’re a business, but if you compare this to a restaurant experience this is the scenario that you would find:
The customer comes into a Denny’s every week on Tuesday and orders a grand slam breakfast [chosen as a low cost dining experience, we’re not talking about premium channel television like HBO]. The customer comes regularly and establishes an emotional connection with the routine, Denny’s wins, the customer feels they’re winning and the waitresses become friends. One day the customer comes in only to discover that all of the waitresses were fired because their content delivery method was deemed too susceptible to the fact that people could also smuggle in food from home for their children. The customer who was not smuggling in food for children is immediately shocked that there is a farmer standing outside saying, “We had the owner fire the waitresses because their content delivery mechanism was not bringing in enough for us. Now instead of us getting money for our eggs, poultry, pigs and produce, we’ll get nothing and you’ll have to go other routes to get food! We win!”
The customer loses, the waitresses lose (iTunes), the farmers lose (NBC) and yet the customer will go to another restaurant or a store and get their own food – maybe from other sources that will continue to cut out the very farmers that killed Denny’s supply chain due to the waitresses not being effective at stopping people from smuggling in food, a minority of customers.
I buy legal copies of everything I own. I don’t steel music, I don’t steel movies, I don’t steel software and I’m offended that NBC would imply such a thing. I am a software developer that has to make a living through people buying legal versions of the software I work on.
Five
Abby is five today. Five years ago we were in the hospital and Jessica was in intense labor (at the time of this writing, according to my computer she’ll be five in a few more hours). I can’t believe how much has changed in our lives since Abby was born, but much of that change is in direct relation to our having had Abigail. I remember doing a lot of crying when Abby was born. They were tears of joy and I’m sure they mixed with snot as I whimpered, wept and rejoiced over the new life I was seeing in front of me instead of her wiggling in Jessica’s stomach.
Abby can walk, talk, chew gum, read, imagine and laugh. My mother has often told me that my smile is something she remembers most about me growing up and I can certainly say that Abby’s smile is what lingers in my memories as well. Abby’s laughter and calling me silly, or asking me to tickle her, is something that I will cherish and recall when I hand her off some day to a husband who will hopefully find her to be one tenth as beautiful as I think she is.
Abby is smarter than I think any other children her age are. I’m probably rather biased. I’m rather biased about my daughters and wife, but I think that’s acceptable. [editors note: I’m crying now so I’ll stop. What a pansy guy I am ;)]
Happy Birthday, Abigail Ruth! Your mother and I love you very, very much! I hope five is more wonderful than four.
The CD is 25 Years Old
The audio CD is 25 years old. I remember getting my first CD: Queen’s soundtrack to Highlander. I believe my second CD was Diamond Rio (yes, I bought a country album). After that I don’t remember. I’m glad that I can buy all digital now 🙂
AT&Ted Off
So, in the continuing saga or me against AT&T I went into their store recently (as in Friday evening) and I asked an employee, “I have a weak reception area that I live in, do you know which phone you carry has the best antenna for improved reception?” The perfect answer was given to me, “Do you have friends that have AT&T service? You could invite them over to your house and see who has the best reception.” If I didn’t want one of those blasted iPhones so bad I’d totally jump ship.
Yet Another Post in Which Randy Cries Like a Baby
Today I got a phone call from AT&T. Well, it was from a computer at AT&T. Or at least I think it was. It could be the nation wire tapping program just doing a routine monitoring of my line pretending to be AT&T. But assuming its AT&T a recording, yes a recording, told me to call AT&T to ask them about my account. It gave me the phone number to call, told me that I should call them about my account, and then gave me the number to call again. Only I had no paper to write things down with so I hung up, tried to dial the number from memory and then got a wrong number message.
A recording! Why is it that they can afford to do any number of things that are called advertising but they fail to offer the customer service experience that would make customers want to do business with them? Can you believe that in a customer service scenario they chose to use an electronic device to 1) irritate me like nothing else and 2) cause me to have to scramble to remember a number and 3) use a recording to communicate ‘an important message’? So I called AT&T’s customer service line that is published on their website and after a little pinball-like action through their automated system I arrived at a customer service rep named Leslie. Leslie was nice and helped me the best she could, she helped me determine that something had shut off my auto-pay plan (which has worked for some time now without a problem). Something had shut it off three months ago. And after accumulating three months worth of bills they were kindly letting me know that, finally, I should pay my bill. Three months! A recording! Agggghhhhhhh!!!!!
I don’t know who is responsible for the numbskullery that is their procedure and policy in dealing with billing snafus but this was a really irritating way to interrupt a Friday. So I’m going to pay my bill and attempt to reset my auto-pay program, but this is just irritating. Thanks for nothing AT&T. A recording!
With Walls Like This, Who Needs a Museum?
I happen to have had a very forgiving set of parents. They put up with my playing loud music (live loud music, not just recorded loud music) and they would also put up with my thundering down the stairs when I descended from the second story of the house. As a teenager very few things I did were quiet. They endured it all and never allowed my brother to kill me no matter how much he might have wanted to end my noise at any given moment. One other thing they allowed me to do was to completely cover my walls with memorabilia from events in my life. I had everything up on my walls.
It all started with eight pieces of paper that I drew a face on with chalk. I took those six pieces of paper and made a large rectangle out of them (assuming 8.5″ x 11″ pieces of paper edge-to-edge that’s approximately 34″ x 22″). Then, next to the chalk drawn face things began to be stapled up. I initially wanted a ‘nook’ of focused cluttered above my desk but it didn’t take long before the organism grew to take up much of one long wall. After several years time I had stapled, tacked, taped or nailed pretty much everything onto my wall leaving only small bits of actual wall showing.
Ketchup flavored potato chips my aunt gave me, an engineers cap that had died throughout my junior high years, pictures, receipts, ticket stubs, advertisements, drawing and other assorted things arrayed my walls. People would come into my room and just stand there taking in the volume of crud that was mounted in the room. I have zero aspiration to replicate that cacophony of ‘decoration’ but it was fun while it lasted. It was passed onto me later that my parents were heard mumbling, grumbling and groaning as they patched the hundreds if not thousands of holes in the walls to repaint the room after having to remove the wallpaper. I got off easy simply removing the junk from the walls and putting most of it into garbage bags when I moved out 🙂
Thankful Thursday: Stories from Sunnyvale
I just posted a story about Sunnyvale, California on my finances blog and it reminded me of some other things that had to do with Sunnyvale. I’m grateful for the good home my parents raised me in. It was warm, safe and always big enough for me to mess up. Here are two short stories for your amusement:
Nick
Nick was my neighbor down the street. Nick would get home from school a little later than I would. He would get home and I wouldn’t be far behind. Usually hoping to score some sort of snack from Nick’s mom who would buy sugary treats for her children. My parents were ‘granola’ in comparison. That is to say that they would buy healthy foods for us to eat. Imagine that. Healthy food – ugh – things that probably didn’t have a high refined sugar content.
So I would show up at Nick’s house and ask if he’d had snack, hoping that he hadn’t, and then after his mom kindly fed us a treat we’d play GI Joes in her garden bed. Hours of GI Joes. We probably killed a plant or two, but we dug tunnel after tunnel and probably lost five action figures over the time we played out there. A bomb would blow up the tunnel, which would then bury the GI Joe, and then we’d forget about it. A few times we actually found buried GI Joes – score!
Nick was older than me and when we left he was probably a little glad to get rid of the leach that was Randy Peterman, but the downside was that he had one less person to play GI Joes with. He probably lost a lot fewer actions figures after that!
Israel & Sharone
We had two Jewish neighbor boys. I wouldn’t normally point that sort of information out except that they were practicing Jews and not just the ethnic variety. Every Friday night as the sun was going down their mom would call them in and they would pack up their bikes, their toys and whatever else and disappear until the next Sunday. When it got dark enough for the Sabbath to be over it was too dark to play so we lost a full Saturday with them as they obeyed the Torah (the Law of the Old Testament).
Every once in a while their mom would be without some ingredient or some cooking tool and she’d send them over on the Sabbath. That was fun because they weren’t allowed to leave their property which was two houses down and a phone call was work [which if forbidden on the Sabbath]. However, to try to bend the rules and to get the needed item they were allowed to carry a stuffed animal fifty steps from their house, place it down, walk fifty more steps and then place the animal down. Usually they needed 4-5 stuffed animals to get to our house’s front door where they would ask for something. One time they asked if we had a brand new skillet that had not been cooked in or touched other pans that had cooked bacon or pork. Unfortunately we didn’t ever have things they needed, but it was fun to watch them carry toys, which looked like work to me, just to come get some food or item, which would have been carried back, looking like work, to their house where it would have been used in food preparation… which would have been work 🙂
Good times.