Floor Furnace

For those of you who live in other parts of the country, I'm not sure that you are aware, but we had some relatively cold weather last week. Now, I realize some of you've had challenging weather as well, and I am not in any way challenging you, I'm just saying it has been cold here. In fact it's been so cold I actually wore a jacket. Those of you who know me realize this is a big deal. I fight winter as long as I can and wearing a jacket is just giving in.

In the middle of this, I find myself thinking about ways to get warm and I remembered the floor furnace that used to be in my grandparent's home. Actually, they had two of them - one in the kitchen area and one in the living room. Early on, they were fueled with fuel oil and later they were either converted or replaced with units that burned natural gas. Fuel oil - we will come back to that in a little bit.

Back to the floor furnace. For those of you who were never around one of these, they were one of the best and quickest ways to get warm - ever. If you were outside and chilled to the bone, you could come inside, stand over the furnace and when it cycled, you would be warm. As a kid, I remember thinking of it as standing over the sun. The heat would travel up through your pants legs and just warm you all over. In only a moment, you were warm and happy.

Now the catch to a floor furnace (and there is always a catch) is that the grate in the floor was about the temperature of the face of the sun. Touching the metal with exposed skin, or even skin with one layer of cloth over it, like a sock, would result in a burn, often with the accompanying "sizzle" sound telling you that it was going to hurt. The other thing that you had to remember as you rolled into the house and dropped your shoes/boots, was that leaving them on the furnace could result in melted, burnt, or branded clothing.

But when you were cold, wow the floor furnace would fix that. For those of you that are younger and wondering how the decision could be made to have such a dangerous appliance in the house, remember, we were the children of full-blown chemistry sets, wood burning sets, and lawn darts. It was a different time.

The other thing that made a floor furnace a really great thing was the way the heat got to the second floor of the house. In the ceiling of the first floor/floor of the second floor, there were grates that could be opened and closed to let heat into the upstairs.  The thing that made this fun as a child was that they were also the perfect place to drop things on your cousins from upstai8rs, or listen to the adult conversation going on in the kitchen. You did have to be careful, though, as typically the people in the kitchen could hear you open the grate and would then yell at you about eavesdropping on them. Sometimes the reward was worth the risk.  My cousins and I found out some great things that way.

Circling back to fuel oil. Now that I work in the industry, I have a much greater awareness of the inherent risks in dealing with fuel. We all know some of them, but I'm probably more aware than I was a year ago at this time. Any fuel - fuel oil included - needs to be recognized not only for its flammability, but also for the chemical properties and the way that it interacts with the human body. Basically, you need to be careful with this stuff.

When I grew up, we used fuel oil in a multitude of ways it was never intended for. In fact, when Grandma and Grandpa change the house to natural gas, the fuel oil barrel was kept so we still had a good source. It actually became easier to use since the barrel was no longer attached to the house. To get fuel you just opened the valve and filled your three pound Folgers can. It was it for everything from lubricating the horse shears to cleaning paint brushes. Nobody thought a thing about it, and honestly, I liked the smell. We think of it all differently today. Sometimes I wonder how we ever lived through those days.

I've talked enough about the weather and the cold. I hope you all have a great way to stay warm, and I hope that you have a source as good as an old floor furnace to heat you up.  Take care and talk to you soon.

Bag Balm

Something brought this product to mind yesterday. Not really sure what it was, but it seemed worth sharing. For those of you that are not from an agricultural, or near-agricultural background such as I was, bag balm is a lanolin based product used in dairy operations for soreness in a cow's udder. For people that worked around this environment, it was also the cure-all for many of the maladies that occurred around animals and farms. Sore hands, small cuts and abrasions - these were all helped with the application of a little bag balm.

When I was in about the third grade, I was up at my Aunt Dorothy Dean's in the late summer or early fall.  I was trying to help with some of the chores and in my typical manner, I slipped and fell. But this time a piece of steel was involved and I ended up with nearly one hundred stitches. With blood flowing from my leg and tears from my eyes, I asked Aunt Dorothy Dean on the way to the hospital if we couldn't just put some bag balm on this. Not funny at the time, but hilarious years later.

What got me thinking about this yesterday is this is exactly what we need now. We need something that will just fix everything. Knees hurt from aging? Bag balm. Hearing a bit problematic? Bag balm. Can't seem to get enough sleep and are always tired? Bag balm.

While we all know that there's no way anything like this will ever be true, there are certainly times we let ourselves be lulled into an thinking like this, or at least I do. Right at the moment, we are about to have a drawing for one of the largest lotteries the United States has ever seen.  When I looked a few minutes ago, it looks as though the amount of the drawing will crest the $900 million mark. When we stop and think about this kind of money, it's easy to think that this would fix everything - bag balm.

When you let the totally unrealistic side of your brain go and think about this from a much more logical basis, of course you realize there is no way that there is any one thing that fixes everything, least of all money - even really big money.

This last year I've been given a wonderful opportunity to get back out into rural towns throughout Iowa with my job. The interesting thing about these communities - Bridgewater, Neola, Perry, Grand Junction, Osceola, and State Center (really - all over Iowa) - is that they are able to get things done within the confines of the community that they have and accomplish it without really big dollars. These communities continue to move forward into the future.

Now that I've wandered all over the place with these thoughts, what I really want to say is that although I would love to have a bag balm for all of the issues we have in our lives, our jobs, and our communities, there isn't any such thing. Additionally, money will not fix everything either. It is, as it always has been, about people working together and coming up with creative solutions to overcome the things we are faced with. Friends, and family, and those around us, work together to make things better.

But if you happen to win $900 million this weekend, you will be in a position that lets you help with a lot of these issues and can make the corner of the world that is yours better. I think that would be a pretty wonderful way to use that kind of big money, So, an agreement between friends - pinky swear - whatever you want to do. If we have the chance, in any and all ways, let's make the world around us a better place. We can be the bag balm for our corner of the world when we work together.

Re-Set

Last week a dear friend of mine, Russell Jensen, posted this on Facebook:

Dear 2015, while I am eager to see you leave, I at least owe you some thanks. So thank you for the priceless lessons you taught me about living, which is really about about faith, family, resilience and gratitude. I like who I am and where I am today better than who I was and where I was a year ago.

Dear 2016, any chance I can get extra credit for 2015 so we can we just skip the whole lessons learned thing this year? Yes?

First of all, I loved this post. Yes, 2015 was a tough year for Russell and like many of us, I'm glad he is through it. I also wish that I could have done more to help him. But one thing this post made me consider was all of the thought we put into the first of the year. Like everything else, it comes with its good and its bad.

In terms of the good, many of us use this as a time to reset. In the next few weeks the gym I use will be absolutely packed with people who made a New Year's resolution to lose weight, or get healthier - whatever the goal may be.  This is a time to quit smoking, or any number of healthy challenges.  Like I said, it's a really good time to reset.  And  I hope that for everyone who sets a plan for the first of the year, this is the most successful attempt you've ever made.

But, and here comes the Jim part ... why is it that the first of the year holds such a magic? Why could we not use the 12th of April to think about things for the upcoming year? What is it about January 1 that has such a grip on us?

I've talked about will power and the fact that it actually is an exhaustible resource. The book I read talked about will power and self control as something you have a limited amount of. When you start using it - it will run out.  Then, it takes time to rebuild your reserves back up. The author explained that this is why diets fail. "Change is hard because people wear themselves out." We start strong and when our will power fades, we are right back where we started. It isn't laziness, he says - it's exhaustion.  (Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

So what should we do with all of this?  I have a thought and I think that it's a good one. I think we need to slice the time that we have into smaller segments and allow ourselves to see them as an opportunity to re-set.  Rather than just celebrating the beginning of the year, maybe we should look at quarters, or even months. Would it not be better to think about all of the good that happened and get rid of the bad in three months rather than a year? This really seems like something I can get my head around.  It makes the chunks that we are going to bite off less overwhelming and maybe I can set goals that I will be able to accomplish in a quarter, rather than run out of stamina over an entire year.

Think about it. What changes can you break down into quarterly segments. Would you celebrate those and then start something new? If you decide to join me, great, and if not, I will celebrate with you once a year and then have three other quarterly celebrations by myself.

Okay, so at the beginning I wrote that the first of the year was mostly good. But I have to share one with you that really just made me shake my head. I worked for a person at one time who saw the beginning of the year as the worst of times. Every January we heard the same rant - all of the costs of the whole coming year had to be covered before there was any opportunity for profit. Rather than see opportunity ahead, this person only saw the costs of the entire year. Like all of these came about on the first day of the year rather than across time. We were already in the hole and had to dig ourselves out. It was one of the most ludicrous ways I'd ever seen to think about the new year, and I was glad it wasn't the way that most of the world saw it. It really takes the fun out of a fresh, new year.

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and that you are ready for the New Year. It's already arrived, and as we all know, it will run by us at a staggering rate. May you all be happy and healthy during each quarter of 2016, and may you discover opportunities to re-set more often and feel good about the things you accomplish.