I put the following on our door yesterday after our candy bowel [SIC and SICK] was emptied by greedy children:
All the children
Took all of our candy
& made us cry all of our tears.
Sorry.
Category Archives: Confessions
Politics
So I did a survey and was asked about politics. What surprised me was less the discussion & more the after-discussion. Politics is personal. If you end up going into a room and are asked questions as individuals in a group then you’ve got to be vulnerable. After the session and the sharing that took place every man in the room exited without saying a word to one another; no shaking hands; no good-byes; no exchange of emails, phone numbers or very many glances. It’s the weirdest thing to experience that level of sharing end with nothing socially impactful.
Teeth
Evelyn – tomorrow being the 6th birthday of her life – has pulled out her own top right tooth. And now, ready to face her 6th birthday without a few teeth [her two bottom front teeth are finally growing in a bit] she’s going to grow faster than I’m ready.
She sure is precious.
[I realize this is not a picture of her smiling with missing teeth – tomorrow I’ll post one]
Man Up
I haven’t listened to Dave Ramsey in a while. Usually I find his dealing with certain issues legalistically to be a bit rough for me. However, my personal preference for grace aside, he’s got a message that I think is important for humans of the world: grow up. Be an adult. When people call him for financial advice he almost always tells them the same thing after hearing their situation: face it. Face the situation and be an adult. Don’t ignore it any more.
I hate this advice because it usually points out my own maturity problems, but it is what we need to be encouraged to do as humanz. If you’re having a problem in life it is possible it was thrust on you by someone else or out of your control. Doesn’t matter. Face it like an adult. You may be facing a financial or other hole where you’ve got to dig yourself out. Face it. Man up. Woman up. Don’t just ignore it until you’ve really, really screwed things up.
I listened to him a bit this last week via his podcast and I can say that if you’re going to talk about politics, religion, money, sex or any other taboo: don’t be afraid to face the root problem, and don’t be afraid to accept responsibility. You can’t deal with a problem until you’ve owned up to it and understand it. This counts for money, but pretty much the rest of life as well. Trying to do anything else but be an adult about it is just plain stupid. Dave says that, too. I don’t prefer it, but it’s probably true.
I Ate Some of This
Livarot Cheese that is. It tasted like barnyard, all right.
It made the Tawny Porto taste like honey, which was interesting given the manure taste that the cheese left in my mouth by itself. I can’t recommend it, but it was an experience.
History Repeats Itself
From the Stanford Technology Venture Program – Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders:
“I can only encourage you to make mistakes. It is perhaps the most valuable part of the learning experience. When you make a mistake it’s the only way for you to understand the context of the impact or the cost of your actions. … Just don’t make the same mistake twice. ” – Mark Jung
I try to learn from my mistakes and others’ mistakes, but I have to agree: when you make a mistake it sticks. Sometimes it’s the pain, sometimes it’s the survival, and sometimes it’s the wonder that you get to experience life in a new way. Don’t be afraid of mistakes as much as you’re willing to learn from them.
Bananas
It turns out that my family does not like dried bananas. At all. I discovered this during our family trip because I opened up a package of dried bananas and the whole car churned into a cacophony of complaints that it smelled bad or that someone had farted or died in the car.
I ate the dried bananas anyway. I enjoy them.
We’re Home Again
After 3 weeks of being on a road trip (during all of which I worked) we’re home. I’ve got plenty to share… later. It’s just that I’ve got more work to do than time, and more time than money, and more money than the impoverished people in parts of the world where I don’t live. I’m working on adjusting all of that as best as possible.
The girls are fine.
Jessica is fine (and beautiful).
The dogs are looking for discipline.
The weather is hotter than I’d prefer.
I’ll try to get back to this – eventually.
Too-ness and More-ness
There are things I don’t tell my children. I tell them to other people’s children, but not my own. At first you’re probably thinking of either something slightly evil or disciplinary. You’d be mistaken. What I don’t tell my own kids about are stunts I did as a kid. The reason? They’ll want to do it, too. If your child does it, I’m not responsible for their actions, you are. If I tell my children they will do it, possibly injure themselves and then I’ll be responsible for fixing my children.
It gets worse.
The problem with too-ness is that once they master the stunt then there’s something more impressive that needs to be figured out. If jumping your bike over or off of a large item is cool, why not jump on or over a car? If climbing in a door jamb is fun, why not also climb up a very dangerous elevator shaft? Children are creative, often more than adults, when it comes to doing more dangerous things. I take precaution in what I tell my children so that they will be safe, too, and probably more safe.
Changing Banks
When it is all said and done it will have taken us several months to actually change banks. We’re actually leaving our old bank to switch to a credit union. This is something that I like because firstly it’s a local financial institution, and secondly credit unions are much more service oriented in many cases because they have members who the employees are serving rather than some person that is not directly their ‘boss’. When I asked the employee at the credit union if I could do various things that my old bank wanted to penalize me (unnecessarily) for he simply said, “Yes, you can do that.” How about situation two? “Yes, you can do that, too.” Are there fees for this? Do I have to jump through this hoop? “No, there are no fees for that and we don’t own a hoop holder to put a hoop there for you to jump through.” [I made that last answer up, but he said the same thing in meaning, even if my imagination makes him more funny.]
The hardest part is the automatic withdrawals and direct deposits. Those seem to take weeks and up to months to get swapped over. And they want voided checks. And they warn you not to close down your old account until (insert some date/time here). Seriously: in the age of computers and databases are we that slow that what takes me seconds to enter into an online form takes weeks and months to process?
The Credit Union is not officially supported by Mint [and they are not presently working on supporting it], but I’m OK with that. I will likely pay for and install You Need A Budget and use that with regular downloads of our data. There are downsides to changing institutions like re-entering online billpay accounts. But those are minor in comparison to being nickel and dimes and treated like a money tree that needs regular pruning.
I look forward to being a member of a local credit union with staff that treat me like a human being.