Grandma

I am a story teller, so some of you may have already heard this, in fact all of you might have, but at the risk of boring you, I am going to tell it again.  In 1976, at the celebration of her 70th year, my Grandmother announced that she had reached a point in her life where she no longer needed to hold anything back and she could be totally honest with people.  I remember thinking at the time that I had never thought of her as someone that held back. On the contrary, I found her to be extremely open with her thoughts; having very little filter.  She was never hurtful.  Actually she was very kind, but she was also quite direct, at least that was my experience as her grandson.  As we approach holidays, her words come back to me and I am struck by the notion that it must be something in the DNA of the clan, as even though I am far from turning 70, I think that I have hit the point of not holding back, sometimes to the chagrin of others.  So, I feel compelled to say a few things.

For all of you who are friends or family, thank you for sticking with me through everything life has thrown my way.  I am sure there are times I have been way too direct, and not known that I should circle back and correct the comments.  I spent a great deal of time thinking that having the "truth" on your side was an absolute defense for anything that might come at you.  I now realize this isn't always the case.  Sometimes there are things that are more important than being right and having everyone know it.  There are people's feelings to think about and the game we are in - life - is long term, not just for today.

For all of the engineers and developers in the world, thank you for all that you do.  There are times I think that I was born in the wrong part of the century and would have been better placed in the part of the century where steam was still king and large industry was the way of the world.  I was having lunch with a friend the other day and there was a show playing on the History channel behind him and it was all that I could do to stay engaged in the conversation.  I can be such a nerd that way.  But, even after all of that, when I look at the things we have today, and things that are coming our way, I am so thankful for all of the smart people who have figured out how to do things.  We live in an amazing world that continues to change at breakneck speed.

For all in the medical world, thank you for helping myself and my family to have a healthier lifestyle.  Once again, I believe we are living in an amazing time.  Medical advances are advancing at such a rate that often times diseases and situations which would have been deadly only a few years ago can now be managed for years, if not decades.  When I was born, some friends of my parents had a child born with cystic fibrosis. At that time, the average life expectancy was only a few years, but she lived into her 40s because of medical advances.  Today the average life expectancy of a person with this disease is 37.  That is a drastic change.  Keep up the good work, stay out there ahead of us.  We need you to do your job so that we can live our lives in the best ways possible.

Finally, thanks to all of the teachers and the teaching institutions.  There are times that I become frustrated with the world of education and I worry that we are not turning out thinkers, but rather people who will just take their place in society to do what they have been told to do.  But when I stop and actually listen to some of the things that education accomplishes at a time we keep taking funding away from them, it is pretty amazing.  You do not have to listen very hard, or go very far, to find a story of a teacher using their own money to buy supplies for their classroom because the school  district does not have the funding to take care of the basic needs of the classroom.  Thanks for all you do.

So, with all that I have to give thanks for, and the time seems right to do exactly this, I finish where I began, with my grandmother.  Where she decided that the time had come to be more open and honest with her feelings, I think that the time has come where I have become more cautious with what I think and feel, and how I express all of that.  So I am going forward more careful than before, or at least I am going to try.  We will see how that goes.

Happy Thanksgiving

Vapor Lock

If you don't believe that we are creatures of habit, put yourself in a situation that you have been in a hundred times, and change one important thing.

Two weeks ago, I went to my Rotary meeting, just like I do virtually every Friday morning, thinking that things were normal. In the blink of an eye, it became apparent that things were different.  What happened?  We started the meeting just like we always do with the ringing of a bell.  Everyone stood and as the president asked us to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, hands were raised to hearts in the way that we have all done for the bulk of our lives. As the first word came out of our collective mouth, it happened ... NO FLAG!  Now what should we do?  Well, as indicated by the silence, we had absolutely no idea.  Fortunately, the president had the presence of mind to tell us that we would go ahead and recite the Pledge without a flag.  We did just fine after that.

Like many things, this was really no big deal, but my mind became fascinated by how programed we really are in our daily lives.  Want proof?  When you get dressed in the morning, which sock do you put on first?  When you brush your teeth, do you brush the left or the right side first?  When you answer the phone, are the words out of your mouth typically the same?  If you can easily answer these questions, you are programmed.  These are all examples, and there are thousands more, of the things we have come to do as habit.

As we look across our world on a daily basis, I think this type of behavior is more common than we really think, or even recognize.  When I was at Drake, we had a situation that really pointed this out to me.  One of the years I was a Resident Assistant, we had two incoming freshman women who were from two regions of the world. Their countries were sworn enemies.  This would have been the equivalent of having members of both the Hatfield and the McCoy families living under the same roof.  Early on, tensions were really high. No one knew exactly how this should be handled.  And then, over time, an amazing thing happened.  Because of the environment that our hall provided, these two women got to know each other, and at some level even came to understand each other.  Because there had been such strong emotion around it at the beginning, I think they actually listened to each other more than they would have in a regular situation. Then, as time passed, they became friends, and in the end, they really had no sense for why their families and countries despised each other so much.  They found the way to overcome the programming that had happened with them and the generations that had come before them.  It was wonderful to watch this happen as an outsider.

I was raised in what I consider a special family. Those that know us might just laugh at that statement.  My father was a polio victim as a child and walked with a cane his entire life.  Many of those who were around him considered it a handicap, or referred to him as a "cripple," but I was fortunate enough to have this help me in the way I look at people.  I was programmed differently than most.  I have never been enamored with the current trend or programming the world wanted to press upon me. I have always been this way. I am sure there are times when it has frustrated the dickens out of my family when as they wanted to follow the more popular route and I wasn't willing to be swayed.  But I look with pride, at the decisions that Andrew and Megan have made regarding friends and who they would support.  Some of the programming that came to me from the way I grew up has moved on to my children, and I hope that serves them well.

I realize that with more years, I have gotten a bit "crustier." I find that it is much easier to allow the world's programming come to the top and cause me to judge people and situations in specific ways without looking at the entire picture.  As I stood there, saying the Pledge of Allegiance without a flag, I thought about all of the assumptions I allow to come to bear and all of the times that I think about people in a certain way for an unknown reason.  I thought back to the mid 70's when I watched two women from around the world get to know each other as people, not as members of two different societies.  As we finished the words together two weeks ago, I found myself taking a different pledge: to renew the fight against things that attempt to program me in ways I don't necessarily approve.  All of this happened in the course of a minute or two on one single morning with a group of rather confused business men.

So, tomorrow just to prove that I am working on the things that I am talking about, I will put on my right sock first.

"Bye" Day

It may not come as a surprise to most of you and to others, here's the deal - I'm not much of a sports guy.  It is really just not that important to me.  I will watch a football game on occasion, or maybe one or two of the World Series games, or use the Super Bowl as a reason to have a party, but that is about the extent of it.  In the sports arena, my interests go to the more unusual, less seldom covered like luge, curling, and in the arena of motor sports, drag racing and tractor pulling.  Obviously I have sports tastes that run just slightly to the obscure.

But, there is one sports tradition that I like - the idea of a "bye."  In conversation with colleagues, I will occasionally hear that a team had a bye on a given week.  In thinking about this, I went to the dictionary and found this: A bye is a "situation in which a player or team is allowed to go forward to the next level in a competition without having to play against and defeat an opponent" (Merriam-Webster).  Well, obviously, what I needed last Sunday was a bye.  I needed to be able to go forward to the next day without defeating the current day.  So, I slept -  the deep and refreshing sleep of multiple naps throughout the day.  Every time that I thought I would get up and get going, another round of sleep would descend on me.  It was glorious and is something that only happens to me a couple of times a year.  This was one of my two.

As each of us go through lives that are so busy with all of the things we have to accomplish in a day, a week, a month, or a year, the thing that we tend to squeeze out is sleep.  And as we do that, it continues to get more and more difficult to do things that we need to do, much less the things we like to do.  There have been times when I've been in the shop, wanting to accomplish something and have been too tired to think clearly enough to be safe.  Because of the great mentors and instructors from my past, I have learned and believe that if you are not sure of your ability to focus, don't turn on the machine.  Another area that I have a problem with is falling asleep when driving.  My grandfather, who was an over the road driver most of his life, always told us that when you are tired, you should pull over and sleep, even if you are only a mile from home. There are all sorts of studies out there about the ills of sleep deprivation. It is absolutely critical that we rest enough on a regular basis that we can be safe and productive.

So, although I should get better sleep at night, I don't seem to be able to do that. This means that once in a while, I collapse like I did last Sunday. Fortunately, I had a very productive day on Saturday, so it didn't feel quite as bad.  I had gotten seven or eight cutting boards through several processes. When they are completed, they will either become Christmas presents or will be donated to organizations for holiday fund-raisers.  I worked on the landscaping project that Sara has me doing and actually made forward progress. I even cleaned the Toybox so wasn't embarrassing, which was terrific, because one of my best friends stopped by for some adult conversation.  Thanks Russell, that was wonderful.  All in all, a pretty successful day, and at the end, I had dinner with Sara and Megan at Rube's Steakhouse.  It is phenomenal to watch a college student get the chance to have really good quality beef.  In other words, I had a good day, got a lot done, and had a great dinner. All in all, Saturday was a success.

And now, in the words of Paul Harvey, "for the rest of the story." After all of the sleep that I had during the day on Sunday - maybe 5 or 6 individual naps, do you think that I could actually go to sleep on Sunday evening?  Short answer here is NO.  So, everything I hadn't done during the day, that could be done at night without waking Sara, I did Sunday evening and Monday morning.  At the end of it, I don't think that I got any more sleep than I would have, and I got just as much work completed.  But even so, I felt as though I had "won" by taking some time for no good reason, just for myself.  I would encourage everyone to declare a "bye" day once in a while, even if you immediately pay the time back.

It is one of those things that is just good for the soul and we all need those once in a while.  Happy napping to all of you.

Measure once - Cut twice ... Darn

We have all heard the old adage: Measure Twice-Cut Once. 

Last weekend I managed to create the perfect example of what goes wrong when you don't follow this. Fortunately the drawer box I built was too long so I was able to remove, rebuild, and get it fixed before anyone else saw it  That isn't necessarily always the case however.  If you walk onto job sites or into shops anywhere, you will find pieces that look like they have been made for a specific reason, but are in the scrap pile/bin.  Typically, they are undersized.  When I was still doing light construction for myself, family and friends, I referred to these as "pattern pieces."  These were mistakes that let me get it right the second time.

As I worked on fixing the drawer box and thought about it, I realized that this happens to me less than it used to and I wondered why.  As I really stopped and thought about it, I realized that this most often happened when I worked without a plan.  In the case I described above, I knew roughly what I wanted and I had the space that the unit would need to fit within.  So I started cutting parts and assembling the box.  Everything went together nicely, and resulted in a well fitting drawer unit, right up to the minute were the drawer stuck out of the back of the unit.  That wouldn't work.  So, as I usually do, I shouted obscenities for a moment, then walked away from it for a week.  I guess that I hoped when I looked at it again it would have miraculously corrected itself.  No such luck.

While this is a really good lesson for the shop, there is a much bigger application for the rest of my life.  Just like in the shop, when I fly by the seat of my pants, I am much more likely to make a mistake and have to do things over again.  Maybe it's because I believe that I am capable of figuring things out as I go along. That works sometimes, but often times falls short.  I need to stop and take the time to plan so I don't waste precious resources that I am using on any given project.  In the shop, this is most notably hardwood lumber and plywood products, but in the non-shop world, there are even more precious commodities.  When I fail to plan in the "real world" I have a tendency to waste other's time and talents. These resources are generally in short supply and should be used in the most conservative manner possible.  In times when we are asked to do more and more with less and less, the planning process needs to be the most critical component in any activity.  I knew this when I worked in a very large company, but now that I work in a smaller organization, I have forgotten some of this.  We have the ability to get the right people in the room quickly and make a good decision to move us forward that sometimes I forget how important planning is.

Now that I've thought about this, my tendency is to circle back to the place I have always been the most comfortable.  When faced with a challenge, I need to stop and consider the best way to tackle it.  When I was little and did this, my mom referred to me as "lazy." Even though those words still echo in my ears, I know this is the smart way to do things. 

Stop and plan - plan to an absurdly finite end.  Plan down to the least little thing.  If there are 305 steps to a project,  make sure that each one is planned. Know what each step is and in what order it will occur.  And when this is finished, go back through it all again.  Make sure that all of the contingencies and possibilities and anything that can go wrong is considered. 

When I can truly answer that I have planned to that level, then I can move forward, using the plan as a road map to success.  Not just a guess, but truly a plan, that if followed, has a great likelihood of success.  This means using all of the tools that are available, and constantly looking for new tools to use and new ways to think about doing things.  In the end, more projects and and pieces in the shop will be completed well because I have gone through all of the right steps and spent time thinking about where things could go wrong,

And ... I will end up with less "pattern pieces."

Up In the Air

 Last week business took me to the city of Las Vegas.  There are many other locations I would rather spend time in, but as all of you know, I love watching people, and that is a great place to do that.  So, I did just that and had a great time.  The reason I was there was for a convention - the biggest for our industry in the United States. As would be expected, vendors pulled out all of the stops, making sure their booths were impressive and offers were breath taking.  I know that my purchasing team came back with a bunch of really good information that will help us to be stronger as we move forward.

Although all of that is important, it pales in insignificance to the story I want to tell you today.  Although I have lost quite a bit of weight in the last year, and my daughter calls me " The New Travel-size Dad," folding into an airplane seat is not something I do easily.  I never look forward to the experience and I have a tendency to just shut down once I am in an airplane, hoping it will be over soon.  That was certainly the approach I took on the way out, all 275+ pounds of me in a center seat. That was the approach I had intended to use on the way back.  I was seated in seat 37A, a window seat in the last row of the plane.  What I got to witness there was truly inspirational.  After we were all boarded, but before the doors closed, one of the flight attendants came back to our part of the plane.  She approached a young man who was sitting two rows ahead of me and told him there was a person in First Class who wanted to give him their seat.  The young man was a soldier, and the person up front wanted to do something special for him.  Although very gracious, the young man declined. It was just a moment in time passing before me, but one that brought tears to my eyes.

The rest of the flight passed quite differently than I originally expected. I was overwhelmed with a flood of thoughts and emotions.  My first thoughts were about the fact that I had been in the last group that not only had draft cards but that also had draft numbers.  For those of you too young to know, these numbers told you what order you would be called to service in any given year.  They were 1-365 and pulled once a year, then the Selective Service would start notifying people based on the number.  People with the birth date picked as number one would go first, then number two and so on.  In the years of the Viet Nam conflict they generally got about half way through the year.  The year that I would have been eligible for the draft, I was number eight.  I would have gone, but that was the year they stopped the draft.

Those thoughts drew up memories of those years when young men returned from military service and were defamed and spit on for their part in a war nobody believed in. But they had been called to serve and die for their country. I am thankful that military service has come to be a good career path for many and I am glad neither of my children was forced to serve.

There are other members of my extended family who have serve. I am proud of each of them, and I realize that I've probably never told any of them.  On that flight, I thought about Veteran's Day and the older people who served and are honored on that singular day of the year.  All of these thoughts poured into my mind during that flight, triggered by the generosity and of someone in first class and the grace of a young soldier in coach.

So I came home from Vegas, not thinking at all about the show, or business, or any of the things that had been so important just a few hours before.  I came home thinking of the men and women who are willing to put on the uniform of our country and stand in harm's way to protect each of us and the liberties we sometimes take for granted.

Wow, all of this from a plane ride.  If that were not enough, when I got off the plane, at the bottom of the escalator was the young man's entire family, signs in hand and tears in their eyes because he had come home to them.

This weekend, remember our military and what they do for each of us, and if there are military members in your family, tell them thanks.  Have a great weekend.

Time

This last week has been a whirlwind.  Although I typically get up early in the morning, this week I've had to get up, AND get going every day.  In the middle of all of this, I could not help but think more about time as a concept, than I usually do.  I was reminded of the 2011 movie "In Time."  The basic premise of this movie was a future state in which time had become currency, making "time" the way people are paid, and the way that people buy things.  In a strange way, I guess that is really the way things are for us today, with the things that we do either adding to or depleting the time reserve we have.  The movie has a visible timer that tells each person how long they have. While we don't have that, we do know that when we are out of time, we cease to exist.

Wow, I have to tell you that for an old woodworker from Southeast Iowa that was pretty deep.  I had to stop and get a cup of coffee.  But now, fully armed with something to drink, I can move forward again.

I remember someone telling me there is research which indicates that the speed we experience time actually does change over our life span.  When we are young, everything is new and as we create new memories that makes the experience go slower.  This really seems to make some sense to me. I remember summers when I was young that seemed to go on forever.  I remember wishing that we could go back to school because I hadn't seen my friends in such a long time.  Time really did seem to go slower.  The research goes on to indicate that in the middle part of our lives memories compress since we are generally doing the same thing over and over (like work) and that there are fewer new memories being created.  The mind "speeds" through this, giving us the illusion that time is going faster.  As with early memories, I can remember sitting on the porch at a friend's house in Kansas City talking about the fact that I felt like I had lost the 1980's and part of the 1990's.  Very quickly and intelligently, Barb pointed out to me that I was busy working on a career, and quite honestly, trying to save a company.  We failed, just by the way.

At this point, we come to the problem part of this whole theory about time and the speed at which we experience it.  The theory goes on to hold out that as we reach a more mature age, somehow the mind "knows" that we are getting closer to the end of our lives. It focuses more on the things that are happening as though each experience might be the last time that we are doing it.  So....what to do with this?  I know that as I think about this last week, there are only a handful of things that had enough impact to be truly memorable, even now, just a few days later.  I really think that the thing that I need to add to my To-Do list is to spend more time focusing on the things that I do as if they are the last time I might do them.

When we lived in Kansas City, we had an acquaintance who had been on a boat going around the Cape of Good Hope when the boat capsized.  At that point, Bill truly believed that he might be at the end of his life.  Fortunately, the boat righted itself and they completed the trip safely.  One thing I remember about Bill is that he was a great story teller. When he told stories, it was almost as if he were reliving it.  I wonder now if this is because he always felt that he had truly been given a second chance at life.

I am not sure about this, but I am picking up the gauntlet. I want to make sure my mind knows that I want to be fully engaged all of the time, and that I want to remember everything.  So, when we are around each other in the next few days and months, and I seem to be concentrating more than usual ... I am.  I am going to work diligently on filing away more memories and discarding fewer of them.  My goal is to have fewer whirlwind weeks and more memorable experiences.  

Have a great weekend.

How Did We Survive?

In the last week, I read something about safety for our children. It was about swing seats or children's toys, I am not sure which and it struck me that we are lucky our civilization survived.  I mean, think about it, we had Giant Slides and monkey bars, and swing seats made out of boards.  On top of all of that, many of us remember when seat belts weren't even an option in cars and "car seats" for infants actually hung over the back of the seat and had a steering wheel for the child to play with.  We shouldn't have survived any of this.  I want to make sure that nobody misunderstands me here: I am all for children, and all of us being safe, but sometimes you have to wonder if we haven't crossed the line between safe and silly.  I have to admit, some of the most joyous times we had as children were in the wild games of chase on the monkey bars, and yes, often someone ended up in tears from a fall, but I do not remember a serious injury.

My generation used to be able to have fun with two tin cans and a piece of string.  Do kids still play telephone?  Now, I have to admit that there were probably some things that we did that would not be considered smart at this point, and were probably really questionable then.  Some of the things that fall under this category are bottle rocket fights, shooting each other with BB guns (but not from close range) and of course, what about Lawn Darts?  Who would ever think that throwing a weighted, pointed piece of steel into the air and waiting for it to come back down wasn't a good idea?  You have to wonder when they pitched that one at the toy company, who was thinking on that day.  In fact, I have to admit that I have never even seen a set of lawn darts in a garage sale.  This is probably a pretty good indication there was universal consensus that these were a bad idea.

So where am I going today?  Last week I celebrated the birthday of my daughter, which means I no longer have teenagers in the family.  In the midst of this change it struck me that as diligently as we try to protect our children from all of the lawn darts of the world, we still have to send them out there to be on their own.  I had to ask myself if by protecting them in every way that I could, had I really prepared them for the world that they are going in to.  When we went into the world, we knew that a sharpened piece of steel thrown into the air would come back in a manner that could really hurt.  I hope that all of the children we have raised know that.  When I worked for Drake, I remember listening to the VP of Academics speaking to a group of parents at a Freshman orientation.  He had been asked how Drake could assure that this parent's pride and joy would not come to Drake and embrace all sorts of radical ideas.  I remember being glad that I didn't have to answer the question.  But in truly admirable fashion, he explained that if the parents had been educators, and not just providers, they had nothing to worry about and the children attending Drake would grow to be productive members of our society.  I also remember watching parents ask themselves that exact question as though it was not something they had ever considered.

At this point, I believe that I have been an educator for my children and that they are prepared to go out into the world and do great things.  But at the same time, I wonder if they may have missed out on some of the adventures of life because Sara and I were so busy keeping them safe.  There is no doubt that we did the job the best way that we knew how, but still at the end we send them out to tackle the world on their own.  I know they will do great, but over two decades of programming, I will continue to worry about both of them.  I doubt that this is any different than our parents felt, sending us off to cope with the world and worrying about us the whole time.  Time will tell.  In the midst of this though, look out if I ever have grandchildren.  We are going to do all sorts of activities that will get me labeled as the "fun" grandparent.  So...beware.

On the Toybox front, I actually opened an Etsy store this week.  There is only one item out there, yet but it would be my intention to increase my offering over time. It will be fun to let people see what I can make and what kind of quality I believe in.  Heck, maybe somewhere along the line I may even sell something.  Who knows.  Find me at http://www.etsy.com/shop/ToyboxWoodworking.