Communication Is Hard

At least that’s what they tell me.  If you tell someone something enough times your job as a communicator will either get infinitely easier because they’ll finally get it.  Or it’ll get much, much harder because the repetition causes the pith helmets and ear plugs to be put into place.  I tell my daughters, “Think before you act,” about a bazillion times a month.  I’m pretty sure they think it’s some mantra that my parents told me.  It isn’t.  My dad told me, “it is your mother and I’s responsibility to raise you to be an adult when you’re 18.”  That worked out pretty well because I was a kid who was just looking for a place, a time, and a thing to be scared about.  At 17 and 365 days I was scared of 18 because it meat adulthood.

I hope that my children one day learn to think before they act.  I suspect it’ll be a lesson they learn throughout their lives.  I also hope that when they turn 17 and 365 days they don’t panic like I did – because if there’s one thing I’ve learned it is that I have more than one thing to learn.

Strange Day in Marriage Land

So Harry Reid has decided that prostitution is bad for Nevada (I think it’s terrible for marriages).  And Obama thinks that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional.  If consenting adults… wait, you don’t suspect that these senators (one former, of course) are being inconsistent, do you?  Nah, that’s impossible.

20 Below

The temperature is supposed to drop to -20 Fahrenheit tonight.  It is at times like this that I’m grateful for engineers and those who went before me.  This part of Colorado, the plains before the Rockies, used to be populated with brave souls who lived in sod houses.  Their version of insulation was the thick mud and grass and they had a wooden door, probably with cracks in various places, and if they had the luxury of a stove or fireplace wood was more scarce, so you wouldn’t just burn it without considering the need to replenish the supply and cooking needs.

I suppose now would be a good time to point out that ice is an important part of making ice cream (in a traditional recipe and manufacturing process).  So bring on the 20 below, and pass the milk, sugar, vanilla, half-and-half and of course the mittens.

Insulation

This weekend I spent about 8 hours working on adding insulation to the garage roof (inside not outside).

I got the insulation because it was part of a rebate package.

I got the rebated insulation to complement the insulation I had gotten for the walls.

I got the insulation for the walls because I was going to drywall the garage.

I was going to drywall the garage because I got some new shelves and cabinets.

I got the shelves and cabinets because a guy I know kindly had some extras that were going to be thrown away at a job site.

No complaints, but these could be some of the most expensive free cabinets ever.

If You Ask God for Opportunities to Pray: He’ll Give Them To You

In the last 33 years of my life I think I have gone through cycles of more or less praying.  Recently I’ve had a deluge of reasons to pray, thus making my ‘off-work’ brain cycles a bit more prayer focused and not as much on the other things that I have normally spent my time on.  It doesn’t mean I’m not doing dishes, helping around the house, doing chores, installing installation, or reading RSS feeds, it just means that I’m doing more praying during those things than I’ve ever done in the past.  It’s kinda cool.

Why I Quit Facebook

I realized today that Facebook was not really my problem, but as a symptom I needed to move on.  We had a good fling, me and Facebook.  I realized I was not blogging in part because of Twitter & Facebook.  For various reasons I’m keeping Twitter active (most of them professional).  I also realized I was heavily distracted throughout my time as a dad, a husband, and as a brother-in-law (since my Sister-in-law has lived with us).

I was writing comments or responses to various folks, but then deleting them so as to not offend people who I had ‘friended.’  Therein lies the rub: if someone is your friend you want to care about them, but some folks were not friends, but acquaintances and I still didn’t want their facebook experience to be marred by my interjections on the site.  Here on my blog I can be forthright, opinionated, and even make mistakes, but it is in my sandbox.

I should be blogging more now and I should be my usual spouting self, but I’m going to warn folks: I may reign all of my blogs into one central blog and quit the split personalities.  That’ll mean religion, beer, food, programming and so forth in one place.  I may even switch away from WordPress to experiment with other platforms.

I quit facebook so I could start relating with a few people more, rather than more people just a little.  I’m back and I’m going to make an effort to spin things up to crazy, silly, funny, and personal.  I don’t think anyone else should leave Facebook because I did, I’m just doing this for my own focus and purposes.

Drink

Did you know that about 3.5 million people die every year from dirty drinking water related diseases [source,sanitation, etc]?  World Vision digs wells for communities in need at a cost of about $13,700.00 per well.  Those wells will help get clean water for 300 or so people a day.  Children who used to go collect water may be able to go to school at that point in time or do other essential tasks for their households.  They’re also much less likely to die from water related diseases.

The US federal government has earmarked about $1,000,000,000.00 dollars a year for the TSA to help save people from dying from terrorism.  I know I’ve been on a tear about the TSA in the last few months, but I was beginning to wonder what would happen if we started to think about really saving lives in a very effective, provable way.  What if we stopped funding the TSA with $1 billion and instead moved to a different, less expensive system (that could be more effective)?  What if we used half of that money to dig wells?

That would be about 36,496 wells (possibly too many).  What if we saved the lives for sure?  Those wells (in just one year’s budget) would provide jobs for the well diggers, provide water for people, and help feed through agriculture in some cases, too.  That could be water for up to 10,948,800 people.  This Christmas consider donating to World Vision at the link above to help support water rights.  Also, if you don’t mind me asking, contact your political officials to let them know that the TSA’s invasive scanners are expensive and don’t save enough lives.  Then be thankful for your glass of water.

Detoured

This morning on the way to Abby’s school drop off we had a bit of a shocking experience.  We drove about a mile out of our way to detour around the three lanes that were blocked (the entire northbound side of a 3 lane road).  The police had flares all over the road and many cars were routing elsewhere with a lot of confusion.  Abby was worried she’d be late.  She wouldn’t be my daughter if she didn’t worry about things that were not important 🙂

After dropping Abby off we headed south on the very same road we had to route around.  It turns out that we were not too far behind an accident where a woman was hit by a van.  She was crossing outside of the crosswalk wearing dark clothes.  The driver didn’t see her.  While the woman died the surviving driver will be impacted for days and weeks with great emotional trauma and months and years with emotional trauma.  It was a bit of a shocker as death often is, but it made me think about the families impacted by this massive change to two lives.

This Christmas – aside from thanking God for sending His son – take a moment to love your family.  Take a LOT of moments.  As of now there’s no time traveling so we can’t go backwards and make up for lost time.  My hope and prayers are that the folks who are reading this (and everyone else) would not go through such a huge event, but be grateful for the time you have – tell someone you love them one extra time today.