No Luck

Yesterday I wanted the repairman to show up early - he came late.
Today I wanted the repairman to come late - he showed up much earlier.
I'm just not having good luck with that.
Well, there's always tomorrow when he'll be out for the 4th visit. (He was here on Friday too.)
Grrrrr....

People Are Stupid.

People are so stupid.

Maybe that's a bit harsh - just a bit. We might not be stupid, but we really do some stupid things. I'm not talking about the occasional goof up or mistake. We all do that once in a while - no biggie. What I'm talking about are the major screw ups. The big mistakes. The I-can't-believe-you-did-that things. Here's some examples...
- throwing away many years of marriage for a few moments of pleasure with someone else.
- thinking the rules of the work place don't apply to you. So you don't have to do continuing education, keep your credentials/license current or even listen to your boss.
- ignoring overwhelming advice from all of your friends on a given subject and doing the stupid thing anyway.
- taking questionable short-cuts to reach a goal when we know the only way to achieve that goal is to do it the 'right' way. (is any one else thinking of the crazy weight loss or get rich schemes?)

Why are we so hard-heading sometimes? Why do we always think the bad things will never happen to us? Why do we think we can get away with breaking the rules and we won't get caught?

What stupid behavior do you need to eliminate? That's worth pondering about...

Jumping Jack Fail

This is just too funny. I guess some people have no coordination at all.



Watch the guy in the middle. I'm still laughing.

Softball Distractions

I was driving by a high school the other day and there were some young ladies out on the ball field practicing for softball. It looked like maybe they were doing batting practice, as the pitching machine was set up. As I sat at the light waiting for it to change, I noticed that the young ladies at bat were quite a bit more focused than the young ladies in the outfield. This closely matches my own experience with softball.

See there's only two kinds of batters in softball, those who can't get the ball out of the infield and those who can hit home runs. No one ever (or very rarely) hits the ball into the field. So if you are in the outfield you've got plenty of time look for 4 leaf clovers, count the number stitches in your glove and many other numerous mind-numbing activities. So while the young ladies at bat were concentrating very hard on hitting the ball (with limited success). The young ladies in the field were concentrating on something else. Namely, cheerleading. They kept doing some little dance step in-unison that ended with leg kick. That would probably be a better detraction than the old "batter, batter, batter... sswwiiiiinng" chant that we used to do in softball. Can you image all the fielders on the team breaking into a little cheerleader dance step right as the ball was pitched? That could mess up the batter's concentration. Not to mention make the game a whole lot more interesting for the fans. After all, you can only spend so long looking for 4 leaf clovers.

I suspect that there are a couple of young ladies out there that are good at softball and cheerleading. But I'm guessing they are the exception rather than the rule. Most that are doing both are probably not the best at softball or cheerleading. I'm reminded of the old saying - "No one can serve two masters." If you want to be good at softball, spend your time on the ball field batting and fielding. If you want to be good at cheerleading, spend your time working on your cheers and dance steps. It's not rocket science to figure that out. But how many times do we actually try to do too much? How many times are we spread too thin? How many of us have our kids in karate, ballet, music, soccer, etc.? Is it too much? Do you need to cut back and spend more quality time on fewer things? Most of us probably do.

So what are you going to give up? That's worth pondering about....

Simple Pleasures

My family recently got together with some long time friends for a fun evening. We didn't do anything spectacular. In fact, that's probably what made it so fun. We went out for some good Mexican food and then went back to their house. We had no particular plan in mind.

We ended up watching the Daytona Supercross race (dirt bike race). My friend is bigger fan than we are. But with his assistance of who to watch and who were the fast guys - we were able to enjoy the race. It actually was a pretty good race. Lots of drama, accidents and front runners trying to get back into the race. Very fun.

Then we ended up watching some of America's Funniest Home Videos. I haven't watched that show too much in recent years, or maybe that's recent decades. But for whatever reason, the program that night really struck a cord with us. A couple of the clips were closely related to various experiences in our own lives. We would pause the program to tell our stories (I love the DVR!). We were laughing so hard tears were streaming down our cheeks.

When was the last time you took a break and really just had a good time with something simple? When was the last time you stopped to smell the roses? You don't have to to spend a lot of money. You don't have do anything spectacular - just stop and enjoy a moment or two with some good friends.

That's worth pondering about...

Snow Day

Yea, we don't get too many snow days in So Cal. But last week I went with my wife's elementary school to the local mountains to play in the snow and go tubing. We had a great time and some fabulous weather.




As you can imagine the kids had great fun tubing down the hill. There was a flat spot at the bottom of the hill to slow down and then a fence at the end. There was snow piled up at the fence so errant tubers wouldn't plow into the fence too hard. Of course some kids thought it was fun to go flying down in to the snow bank and bounce around. Ah, the joys of being young and indestructible.

On the fence every couple of feet was a sign that made me chuckle.
I'm sure that sign is there for insurance reasons. But really, do we need to be told not to run head first into a fence? Did someone plow into the fence, pre-signs, and sue. I can hear the lawsuit, "I didn't know I wasn't supposed to run head first into a fence. No one told me that." Doh!

It seems like we've raised a generation of people with absolutely no common sense at all. I guess that bothers me. It seems like we should be doing a better job than that. If you've got kids, do what you can to make sure they develop some amount of common sense. It will benefit the entire world.