Category Archives: Confessions

Things about me you probably never wanted or don’t need to know.

Abby’s First Gum Experience

This morning I gave Abby a small piece of spicy cinnamon chewing gum because I could tell that she wanted to have some gum. She has delt with spiciness well so far, so I wasn’t afraid of burning her mouth out or causing her life-long emotional harm for one small piece of gum. She agreed with me that she would not swallow the gum and with delight in her eyes she took the piece of gum from my hand and delicately placed it into her mouth and started chewing. About 45 seconds later it was in the trash for being too intense, but she didn’t swallow it, which is better than I can say for my vague recollection of my first gum experience. She did well for not enjoying the intense flavor.

When I was a little boy I think we tried to promote the most outlandish lies about gum and how long it sits in your stomach and how it will kill you because it turns into a fire breathing porcupine that is guaranteed to erupt out of your stomach one night while you’re asleep. Needless to say I was rather worried to learn what my fate would be after swallowing my gum. I’m still here, so you know that I survived the fire breathing porcupine. Whew!

Compromise: Best Buy Shopper

I don’t care for Best Buy. Their policies require employees to lie about their ‘service accounts’ so at to try to manipulate into buying extended warranties. However, they had the absolute best price on a wireless router that I needed while here in Washington State. When I was paying for the router the gal who was checking me out (taking my money, not looking me over, in case you thought I was getting into trouble) asked me if I was going to have someone else install it. This Netgear router is so easy to install that people who know nothing about routers can plug it into their broadband modem and install it with great ease. I told her that I was going to install it and she stopped there. I could tell the question was priming me to see if I wanted to fall under their FUD attack. One thing I hate about companies now is that they’re trying to milk you for extended warranties, service plans and blatantly charging exorbitant fees due to potential failure of the components. They advertise, “Buy this Sony product, its the best most reliable product on the market.” And then immediately they come back, smashing you in the face with, “If this product goes out, Sony doesn’t cover X, Y, and Z.”

If I lived my life with that sort of fear I wouldn’t ride in cars, planes, trains, buses or ride bicycles (let alone try to learn how to ride my new Unicycle). I wouldn’t have had children with Jessica. Heck, I wouldn’t have married Jessica due to fear that the relationship would have failed. Can you imagine reaching for a knife to cut up some chicken and then having a FUD attack? I see things playing out like this:

Self, you can’t pick up that knife, if you drop it or slip you could cut your fingers damaging your tendons, nerves and skin. You could be permanently injured due to the knife. Wait! If the chicken is carrying food-borne germs and diseases I could cut myself and infect myself with somem fatal disease and then die due to the chicken in combination with the knife. Worse! I could cut the chicken, then myself, then drop the knife into my foot causing me to be pinned to the floor by my foot and die not being able to reach the phone to call for emergency help. Self, you better cut the chicken with the scissors after sterilizing them with bleach just in case they have other germs on them from cutting the wrapping paper. I don’t know where that’s been to…

And the lunacy goes on and on! The government, and even your own parents, probably, wanted to protect you with warnings of caution, but instead of mildly presenting warnings they told you things like, “Never run with scissors. Always pay your taxes. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t run with your shoes untied. Don’t drink out of the milk carton. Don’t masticate, you’ll go blind. Don’t chase your brother with a hatchet ever again or we’ll permanently remove your hatchet privileges.” All of these have a bit of wisdom in them, but they’re just rules instead of principles which are applicable to broader ranges in life. Wow, I’m way off from where I started…

To put it simply: I love the router but I wouldn’t get an extended warranty plan on it because I’m buying it because its a good router. I wouldn’t buy a Honda if I didn’t think it was going to be a good car for my money. I wouldn’t buy a Kitchen-aid mixer if I didn’t think it was the best mixer on the market. I wouldn’t buy an Apple if I thought it was going to up and crash on me and give me a blue screen of death like some warmed over Windows 95 box. When companies try to hit you with a FUD, hit them back with some diatribe about how you’re afraid to touch anything on their shelves because what if someone didn’t wash their hands in the bathroom after making a messy situation of their hygiene, or sneezed or maybe accidentally drooled on the shelf. Further, you want them to sign a contract stating that they will take care of any medical attention that you might need do to getting sick within the next 48 hours from being in their germ infested store. See if they like being FUDed themselves. Oh, and make sure the manager is there to be embarrassed in front of other customers… it’ll be more fun that way.

One of My Worster Mistakes Ever

Last night, in what is possibly one of the sins in life that could be compared to say, murder, being discovered to not be wearing clean underpants when you get in an accident or not flossing daily: I went into Wal-Mart for a quick pickup of a few items Jess had put on my shopping list that were not at Whole Foods Market. Woops! I said ‘Quick’ and ‘Wal-Mart’ in the same sentence. However, this is not about sins or quick, or a quick sin for that matter (see: teaching a 3 year old potty words).

What amazed me was that a 2 liter bottle of Fresca no calory fruit soft-drink was 88 cents. A 20 ounce bottle was $1.20. If you do the math I could dump what I didn’t need down the drain and come out ahead just for buying 2 liters. I don’t think Coke is making its $100 billion on 2 liter bottles, but instead from those smaller bottles that people buy for convenience.

But enough about convenience. I think the Wal-Mart employees are working so slowly at the checkout lines because the ‘Wal-Mart Channel’ speakers are blaring Wal-Mart propaganda at them and their customers for hours on end. You can’t listen to, “We care about you and your family at Wal-Mart,” while making a $5.34 an hour as a cash register clerk and think, “Heck, yeah! Wal-Mart cares about me!” In fact if anything you can only think, “Turn this freaking thing off before somebody gets a load of damaged groceries for free!”

I especially liked that the Wal-Mart channel had a suggestion that people bring in photos and have Christmas cards made. One happy customer on the commercial said (and I’m not making this up) that people called her to tell her how professional they looked. Do you call people up and say, “Dang, Lucy, that’s the most unprofessional Christmas Card I’ve ever seen. If you send something like that out again, I’m never going to talk to you again!” I didn’t think so.

So, I learned a valuable lesson: buy cheap soda at Wal-Mart. But I learned a more valuable lesson: don’t shop at Wal-Mart period.

Lost in a World of Aliases

Jessica has been a big fan of Alias and Lost, both JJ Abrams production, for some time now. I was initially into Alias, but it eventually got too formulaic. Then Lost came out and I’ve been more hooked on that show lately. However, almost everytime Jessica watches Alias I call it Lost for no apparent reason. It is as if Alias does nto exist and my mind can only spew out ‘Lost.’ I hope this doesn’t happen in other areas of my life. It would be really annoying to have word associations in my head so as to place me in a scenario where I find that I always tell people that they look ‘fat’ instead of ‘good.’ As it is I can’t hardly not say that Jessica is pregnant even though she just had Evie. And by just I mean 6 weeks ago, which is plenty of time for recovery and getting pregnant again. That would be just slightly intense.

I’d rather keep calling Alias Lost and just move on now.

Bredth of Knowledge Verses Depth of Knowledge

In life I have been a jack of all trades, but master of none. Or so the idiom goes, and my English isn’t spectacular so I’ll stick with that idiom. You see, I’ve been fascinated with life around me and wanted to learn about as much as possible at least just to know something about it. I have picked up bits of musical training, juggling, slight of hand tricks, bits of languages [Spanish, German, French and Greek all mean almost nothing to me, but not nothing like Russian], mathematics, philosophy, woodworking, gardening, driving a car, riding a motorcycle, fishing, coffee brewing, tea brewing, cooking, bicycling, photography and parenting 🙂 However, there are a few items that are on a much shorter list, a list of things that I want to know a lot about. I want to know about programming and computers, I want to know a lot about theology and I want to know a lot about my wife. Those subjects are very important because my depth of knowledge in those areas has a broad impact on my future.

I want to add hundreds of things to my repertoire of experiences and understandings so that I can have a breadth of knowledge that understands how various fields of learning interact. Sometimes breakthroughs in one field are a direct result of knowledge of things in another field. At other times having a knowledge of one field helps you explain another field to people who only have a good grasp of the first field (example: explaining how Apple OS X works to people who use Windows requires a third party object to explain simplicity. Windows users inherently look for more complexity in software which makes learning how a Mac works twice as difficult for experienced Windows users). I once read an essay by Albert Einstein in which he encouraged people to gain a broad knowledge of many fields so that they could be educated.

I love history. Not just dates and times, which are of some use, but stories of people who lived through things and hopefully learned things as well. I love to learn about how nations were created, wars were faught and won, and how people succeded through failure. I figure that failure is only part of learning in this human life. Sometimes death is the only way to see life [see: Christ’s Resurrection]. Sometimes we have to try the many possible solutions before we succeed [See: Thomas Edison and Team’s work on the light bulb to find the right filament]. Sometimes we get it right the first time, and those times are often sweet. They are when we feel like we’re ‘naturals’ or that we have a talent or knack for something. I have a knack for learning things and I think making people laugh. My depth of knowledge in many areas is not very deep, but enough to make me dangerous, but I do know one thing: I know what counts. Do you know your strengths and weaknesses and what matters most? No matter what I learn I’ve found that knowing those things keeps me grounded… well, that and gravity – I know a wee bit about physics.

The Most Shameful of Confessions

I don’t know how to tie very many knots. I was never a boyscout, I didn’t learn how to tie knots on my grandparent’s farm, I didn’t learn how to tie more than my shoes at any given time. I can barely put together a slipknot. However, there’s hope for me yet: I Will Knot!. Its a site with simple text based descriptions and quick videos demonstrating the knotting techniques. I think that I’ll have to get a small piece of rope from the garage and get thist stuff down. Then I can check yet one more thing off of my list of things to do before I die.

Well, at least I can trade this for another thing like riding a uni…umpgh [and the sound of crashing]!

The Drumstick of Doom

When I was a boy I did not like chicken. There wasn’t a meat besides hamburger that really appealed to me, but chicken was right out. My mom probably cooked it because it was inexpensive to feed a family of 5 with chicken instead of steak and Lobster. However, I was not a big fan and so I took every oportunity to complain and gripe.

One night my dad was not home from school yet (my dad was in school for much of my youth, at least before I was a teenager) and my mom stepped out of the dining room for a moment. Not being keen on chicken I took that oportunity to slide the sliding glass door open and race to the trash can and dispose of the chicken I had been served. Brilliance. How could I lose for clearing my plate?

Well, for starters there was no chicken bone on my plate. That drumstick had a bone down its center that clearly made up a non-edible piece of chicken. My mom, not being as dumb as I had for some reason anticipated, asked me if I had eaten my chicken [I should not quickly that she most likely heard the door open and close]
“Yes,” I answered.
“Where is the bone?”
“Um… I ate it.”

I don’t recall the conversation after this point, but I do know that my mom went out to the trash can and found the chicken in it. I was punished with having to eat two pieces of chicken. Doh! The moral of the story should be something whittier than “don’t lie,” except that its not. At least she didn’t make me eat the chicken I had thrown away!

Confession: I Was/Am A Heartless Pig

I was just chatting with my friend Robin and I told her a story that I thought, “I had better blog this,” about. WhyI am a heartless pig will become quite obvious in a moment. You see, I was telling her about how we never had a pet dog growing up. I was telling her how not having a pet dog while growing up had allowed me to become quite callused. I had been involved with the death of numberless fish, some birds and I don’t know about how many other critters that made their way through the Peterman household. I had told Robin about how I was a heartless pig because though I had killed lots of animals [thank the Lord for Grace. I really mean that, if I was Hindu I would probably now be suicidal] when I went over to a friend’s house his family was in tears because they had just had their family dog put down.

I thought their crying was rather wimpy. I am scum for this. Really.

Does that not make me a callus, heartless, pig? To quote John Cleese, “Well, that’s the sort of blinkered, Philistine pig-ignorance I expect from you non-creative garbage.”

Vittles

This year we will be attempting the Alton Brown method of cooking our turkey. This involves days and days of brining the turky, and only hours of cooking. In theory this will be the best turkey dinner we’ve been involved with. In actuallity I think it will be yet another fine turkey meal. The best part is that we’ll have lots of family at the place, the worst part is that those same wonderful people will generate dirty dishes. My mother-in-law has been doing so much housework that I’m almost certainly going to volunteer to do the dishes after the meal, it is only fitting that if everyone else is involved with all of the other aspects I shall be the one to clean up the left-overs, clear the table, wash the table, wash the floor, wash the dishes and make sure I check all of the belly-buttons of the dishes for lint.

What sort of Thanksgiving traditions does your family have?

14 GB and Still Not Satisfied

Yesterday I finished importing my MP3s into my computer. I have been through this process before but had to do it again. I ripped them at 128 kilobits per second so that they’re of decent quality but do not take up my entire hard drive. Its over 8 days of MP3s. What on earth am I doing with this much music, and why don’t I have more? I’m going to have to record some of my own music into this array of music so that I can be inspired to write more (because my own stuff will eventually prompt me to write more, it always does).

I can understand why people have 60GB iPods though, it would be easy to fill them up.

Currently listening to Poor Old Lu, Cruciality