Cascading

Does it ever happen to you?  Every single time I start a project, either at work or at home, it happens to me.  Are you curious, yet?  Let me explain with an example.  I need to replace a wax ring on the toilet in the basement of the house.  Simple enough, right?  Oh no.  Since I am going to have to pull the toilet I might as well think about what else needs to happen.  Well, honestly, I've wanted to replace the shower with something a big larger.  So I need to hire someone to come in, pull the shower, and tile the area for the bigger shower.  After all of that work is complete, the vanity will look tacky and need to be replaced. The paint on the wall outside the bathroom will be old and discolored since everything in the bathroom is now fresh and new.  Get the picture?  The next thing that I know, I am replacing the doorbell button on the front door as a result of needing a new wax ring for the toilet.  How does this happen?  How do we stop it?

Whether we call it creep, or mushrooming, or cascading, it just happens.  Keeping the scope of a project in check is difficult.  This is the same whether at work or home.  I really believe that it all starts with complete clarification of the project, probably best captured in writing.  The other critical issue is to make sure that you have the right people involved in the decisions.  I know of multiple occasions over the years when I thought that I knew the scope of a project, only to find out that I had been very, very wrong.  In starting to consider the downstairs bathroom project, I discovered that my thoughts had been less than complete.

The good part about cascading is that once you know it is going to happen and you embrace the fact that you can't stop it, you can plan for it.  If you take the time, and put the effort in, you will be able to come up with a very complete list of all of the likely items that will be involved.  In my wax ring project for example, I know that there will be demolition, some rough carpentry, tile setting, and painting.  Then come the items that I always add, because it just seems that they happen.  In this case, there will be electrical work and plumbing work, even if, at the beginning, it doesn't seem as if those are an issue.  So, at the end of the planning process, I can have a pretty complete list of all of the things that will be involved. This does get easier as you do more of it.

I bought my first fixer-upper house in 1989.  I was working at Payless at the time and thought I had all of the bases covered.  I'd been through the house, and determined it needed a new roof. I had gotten estimates and commitments from all of the folks that needed to be involved.  Then I bought the place and told them we were ready to go.  Rick Vertz looked at me and said, "You actually bought it?  Ah crap, I never thought that would happen."  The first morning, right off the bat, Rick went through a soft spot in the roof that we didn't know was there.  Twenty-four hours into it, I thought I was living in a war zone because of the way the place looked and wondered if I had lost my head.  At that point I was just beginning to understand the truth of cascading.  Four months later we completed that first project, but as only a good cascading project will go, I had also replaced a furnace and redone part of the main wiring in the house. I was fully immersed in my understanding of the process.

It seems that the best idea is to get comfortable with the fact that a project will go places you can't imagine and plan as well as possible for it.  In the end, hopefully you will end up with a good outcome and all of the work is worth it.  Most, if not all, of the projects I have taken on over the years have come out well.

Okay, enough of that for the moment.  I actually have a Toybox story to tell you this week.

Apparently I've become a collector of extraneous lumber and wood from the people I know.  In the last few weeks I have received two separate phone calls to tell me that someone has wood product they don't know what to do with and don't want to throw away.  There are those of you who are forever agonizing over animals that need a home.  You read about a rescue animal on Facebook and will do anything possible to reach out and help.  Well, apparently I am the same about wood.  I just can't stand to see it go to a "bad home" or worse yet, be disposed of.  If anyone is looking for a very nice bunkbed built out of red oak, or a 4X8 piece of MDF with laminate on one side, laid up to be used for the front of a cabinet, call me. I have both of these things.  I am the collector of distressed, or extra, wood products. Given time, I will turn these products into something else.  However, if someone can make a good home for them as they are, I would be happy to see that work.  Think about it, maybe you could use a handmade oak bunk bed.

Pickle Dish

Isn't it amazing how the tiniest moment in a day will bring back a flood of memories that make you really consider the singular moment and its relationship to those memories.  This happened to me this week when I found myself thinking about my Grandma Jo's pickle dish.

Any time we had a family gathering at my grandparent's home, a ritual was involved in everything: where people sat, what time people arrived, what food they brought to share, in what dishes they brought it (another story sometime), and the dishes we used to serve food at the "big" table.  I had quite honestly never thought of it.  I just knew that when we were setting up for a meal, you opened the sideboard and there were certain dishes used for certain things.

And then, in the late eighties a new person entered the mix - Sara.  The first time we went to something at Grandma's, the table was set as usual. Things were where they belonged. Though the dishes hadn't been filled yet, we all knew what went where.  About then, Sara came to me with the pickle dish cradled in her hands.  She asked if I knew what is was.  My answer was as sure as the rising of the sun - it was the pickle dish.  What kind of crazy question was this?

Sara explained to me that this was a crystal dish that had probably come over from pre-war Europe and it would be a shame if we accidentally broke it.  That completely changed the value of the dish for me. It went from a common pickle dish to something that needed to be treasured and set aside. So, with this new found information, I went to Grandma to ask if maybe we should rethink the decision about using this, now valuable to me, dish for the meal at all.  Grandma answered as only she could, telling me that it was only a dish, that we put pickles in it. She explained that if we didn't use it, it would have no value at all.  She went on to tell me that if it broke we would find something else to put the pickles in.  Okay, there was something to think about.

Since then, there have been a couple of times in my life that by many current standards, I had very little in the way of wealth or personal belongings, or even personal security.  I remember when we closed Payless Cashways and I was looking for a job. I wasn't having much luck and was so worried about things - money, the house, all of it.  But when I talked to my kids about that period of time, they said that what they remembered was that dad was home and they got to have hot breakfast every day.  Perspectives, eh?

Something in this last week made me think about all of this.  Not really just the pickle dish, but the conversation with my grandmother.  When she pointed out to me that if you had something and did not use it and enjoy it, there was really no value there, I learned a lesson.  It wasn't a long conversation, but it was powerful and I know that it molded the way that I moved forward.  I also know that there are times that it frustrates those around me.  Life isn't really about stuff, and the things that it is about should be important to you on a daily basis.  I know there had to be a story around that piece of crystal, but I never heard it. That wasn't important to her.  The importance that pickle dish held was when her family got together, they would used it to pass the pickles around the table.

So, what do I do with this today?  I continue to talk about enjoying the things and the opportunities we have.

Take a day and eat on the good china, or wear your best dress to the grocery store.  If it makes you smile, then why wouldn't it be a good thing to do?

I remember what this looks like, it was the joy on Grandma Jo's face when she finally sat down at the dining room table to enjoy a meal with her family.  It was the joy of passing the pickle dish around, not because of its intrinsic value, but rather because of what it meant in Grandma Jo's world.

A quote from Seth Godin in the last week or so, "Here's conventional wisdom:  Success makes you happy. Happiness permits you to be generous.  In fact, it actually works like this:  Generosity makes you happy. Happy people are more likely to be successful."

Go out and find some joy, even if nobody else even sees it.

Peace Officers

Depending on your age, you might call them cops, police, the fuzz, or pigs; but I call them peace officers and I think that we ask more of them today than ever before. I grew up in a County Attorney's home and one of the places I played as a child was the county jail.  When there were people around my kitchen table in the evening, there was a better than even chance that at least one of them was a peace officer.  When it was time for me to learn to drive, my mother didn't handle the duty.  She asked our Sheriff, J. "Bud" Wallerich if he would take care of it.  Bud taught me to drive by showing up at my grandparent's home one Saturday morning.  He loaded me in the driver's seat of the squad car, took me out driving for about three hours and when we returned he announced to a relatively panicked Betty, "Don't worry, he can drive."  This was the kind of relationship I had with the peace officers in my community.

The interesting thing for me is that when I was a youth, and did something wrong, our local officers reprimanded me personally, in private, rather than using the law. I thought that it was because of who my parents were.  With time and distance, I've come to think of it very differently.  I believe that it was because they knew me as a person, a relatively responsible young person. Because of that, if I found myself in a bit of a jam, they helped me out.  Now (and remember I am a child of the 60s and 70s), if I had been out marching, protesting and throwing rocks, and these same people knew that, I am pretty sure their treatment would have been different.  Aren't we all like that? If someone treats us with disrespect, it jaundices the way we think about them.

So, you may ask me what led me to these thoughts today.  There have been a couple of things that I heard lately.  First, a story about a little girl, who when asked what she was going to be when she grew up, her answer was, "In jail."  Wow. She's only known the dark side of life. The second thing was a plea to tell our children that police were to be trusted and were our friends.  I was blown away by both of these, thinking that this really is the way we are training our children.  When I grew up, you always knew that if you were in trouble, you could find a peace officer and they would help make things better.

Not so very long ago, when soldiers returned from overseas, they were jeered at and even spit upon.  Fortunately those days are behind us.  Now, generally, if someone sees a soldier they look at them with respect.  It is not uncommon to be in a plane and see someone in first class offer their seat to a traveling military person.  I've seen this twice in my own travels over the last year or so.  During the same time, the way that we treat our peace officers seems to have gone the other way.  We don't treat these people with the respect they deserve and then wonder why they don't live up to the standards we want to hold them to.  One activity feeds the other and we need to break out of the cycle we have begun.  In an emergency, one of the first people who will rush into it to are your local peace officers and we need to appreciate that now ... when they do it ... and afterwards.  

The next time you are at HyVee and one of the members of the local force is eating lunch, smile and say hello.  Talk to your kids about them being the "good guys" and people you can count on. Show your kids what respect looks like. It will be amazing how that will actually help to make it even truer than it is today.  It only takes a little change to start making a big difference.

In honor of TBT, I am including a picture of Bud Wallerich.  He is in the middle.  He is the man who taught me to drive, and when I was laid up with a really bad leg injury, he came to my house and taught me leather craft so I would have something to do.  Our peace officers still have this kind of passion for the people they serve today. We just have to help release it by giving them the respect they deserve ... as humans and as peace officers.