Voting

For those of you in Iowa, you either looked forward to or are thankful that we just finished the Caucus season. For those of you living somewhere besides Iowa, the state's "First in the Nation" status regarding the Presidential contest does in fact come with some baggage. We've had more access and exposure to reporters from around the nation than is ever required. In the last two weeks, at least half the time my commute included a news crew doing a story about the conflict....oops, I mean contest.  But now that is all over for a while. The candidates have packed up all of their slogans and promises and moved on to New Hampshire, and I am sure I speak for many when I tell them to travel carefully. Even though we worried a blizzard might keep people here another day or so, it looks as though they are gone.

So, let's talk about the real power of voting. I am not talking about the caucuses, although all of that was important, I am talking about voting economically. We've all thought about this at one time or another, and have probably executed this at one time, but if you are like me, I always wonder if it really matters.  Well, I am here to tell you for me, it does.

You know me - a story has to come with this. I have been with the same bank for over 26 years. I moved to this bank in 1990 because I discovered a very interesting thing. At the time, if you were with a bank in one state, and at an ATM in another state, you could not make a deposit.  At the time I was with a local Des Moines bank and working in Kansas City - in the days before direct deposit. In order to deposit a paycheck, I had to drive to Iowa and find an ATM in the middle of the night. Yes, if there is any doubt, the deposit needed to get into the account and HOW. So when the smoke cleared, we moved to a bank with a national footprint so this wouldn't happen again. And I have been with them for 26 years. Until a week ago.

Over the time, this bank has added more and more fees, as so many have, and I just accepted it, but a week or so ago, they charged me $37.00 for something which was incorrect, at least in my opinion (by the way, remember, I am the customer here). When I called to speak with someone, I was pleased to be talking to a call center immediately identified as being in Rhode Island. Okay, good first step. Then after I explained what my issue was, to my amazement and disappointment, the person on the other end of the phone tried to explain to me why I was wrong, and in what seemed to me to be a very demeaning tone. This after they identified me at the beginning of the call as a "Preferred" customer. By the end of the call I had to resort to telling them in the event they did not want to fix this, I  would just leave. They fixed it and I came off the phone angry enough I decided to leave anyway.

In steps JP at a local bank. I've used this institution to finance the Toybox for several years now, and even though JP on occasion asked me about other opportunities, he never pushed or treated me like any less of a customer because he only carried the paper on the Toybox. When I called him to make an appointment, he told me he was working on Saturday and typically after the rush first thing in the morning there was a very quiet period of time. I went in during that window and found things to be just as JP had said. We sat and talked about all of the things he could do, and I set up accounts with him on the spot. I also believe if there is ever an issue with anything, JP will take the time to listen to me and come up with a solution appropriate for the circumstances.

Now, in looking at the total current assets of the bank I am leaving, they show 2.144 trillion dollars. I feel highly confident nobody in that organization woke up this morning and said, "Crap, I think Jim Martin left us."  From the point of view of voting economically, this did not affect the company I left even one bit. But it mattered to me.

I feel as though I will be taken better care of in a more local situation. I know the name of the person I am dealing with, and I believe that getting my business matters to him. And that is good enough for me. Thank you, JP, for caring enough to treat me as not just a customer, but also as a person. I look forward to doing business with you.

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.

Programmed

At the beginning of this last semester, as I moved my daughter into her apartment, it struck me that she needed a basic set of tools. I went to K-Mart and collected every tool she might possibly need. A hammer, pliers, etc. - just the basics.  I even got her a bag to hold all of these items. When all was said and done, she was ready to go. I did all of this early in the morning before she was even awake. The funny part of the whole experience was when I got to the register to check out. A gentleman  probably ten years my senior looked over all of my items and said, "Someone starting school today?" Well of course. It was so obvious from the things I had purchased exactly what challenges were ahead during the upcoming day.

I flashed back to a time much earlier in my life just after Andrew was born. For those of you who've experienced having children, these are times with little sleep and a lot of unexpected things pop up that need to be accomplished.  So at eleven o'clock one night, I was standing in a cashier's line with a package of disposable diapers and some formula. We'd run out of these two essentials and there were no replacements in the house. And even worse, there was also no waiting for these items. Of course the part which made this funny was that the other three men in the line had the exact same items, and all of us looked as though we'd had no sleep in the prior seventy-two hours.

As you watch people around you  every day, it's amazing how much you can tell about the things they are in the middle of, or just the kind of day they're having. Sometimes it's based upon the place they are, or sometimes it's only based on the way they look.  My daughter and I like to play this game at places like the Iowa State Fair. We will pick a place to sit and then we discuss if people are really off the farm, or if they're just dressing that way to come to the fair.

New boots, new blue jeans, John Deere cap that had never seen the sun before? They didn't live on a farm. Either that, or they'd saved their Sunday best for just this occasion.

I was in Winterset this morning and saw the perfect example of just what I am talking about.  Really, here in Iowa, boots, jeans, and a black Stetson hat aren't what you would call typical. However, sitting in Winterset this morning I watched a man get out of his pickup truck and walk down the street dressed exactly like that and you could tell he thought nothing about it. This was the way he is suppose to look and there was nothing the least bit strange about it. I'll even bet if the right person is reading this right now, they know who this man is.  He's probably a fixture in the community and that attire is common for him. He is programmed to act and look this way.

The greatest thing about being human is that we have the ability to change or fight this programming. On any day, we have the freedom to get up and look at the world and the way we interact with it and make a change. I remember when my son decided he was going to be Andrew rather than Drew. That was a day he changed the way he was programmed and began to change the way others around him were programmed. He changed the way the world viewed him and the way we interacted with him. Honestly, I still have trouble some days with remembering he is Andrew, but I am one of the last holdouts regarding this change of programming.

I know for myself, there are a lot of things I have just always done, many of them without even thinking about it. As we wade through this last month of the year, and in to the New Year, with all of the resolutions which typically come along, I need to take a little time and see if there are things I should do differently.  Although everyone thinks about the beginning of the year as the time we come up with resolutions, there is never a bad time to take a good hard look consider things we can change, or upgrade.  This type of reflection is going to be something I do over the next few weeks as we work our way through  the holidays and the beginning of a new year.  

From my shop to yours, I hope you have a great holiday season and a truly blessed New Year.

Night Sky

Often as I think about the things around me, I have a tendency to look back, and today is no exception.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Iowa Great Lakes area to spend the weekend with a group of friends. As many of you know, I spent a lot of time there in my youth, so being at "The Lake" as we always called it makes me nostalgic. On this particular trip however, I didn't even get close to the area before I started thinking.

I can remember when I was a child and traveling anywhere at night was amazing. A lot of this was because the sky was so dark and the stars were so bright. This was long enough ago, that we were just at the beginning of the electrification of Iowa's rural homes and farms. In those days, many times the only sign seen as to a farm having electricity was the single security light in the center of the yard. This made traveling in the night very overwhelming for a child. This amazing darkness was also compounded because automobiles weren't nearly as reliable as they are today, and everyone had stories of breakdowns where walking was required. I remember when a trip either to, or from my Aunt Dorothy Dean's house, north of Keswick, Iowa, seemed as challenging as going to the moon (which obviously we hadn't yet done at the time).

But the stars. Wow. I remember sitting in the back seat of my grandparent's car, a huge auto, and leaning my head back on the seat and looking out the back window and seeing all of the stars that the universe presented. It was amazing. The other piece of amazement was that from a distance, you could see the glow of big towns - like Sigourney (population 2300). And then change happened and with REC's, electricity became easy to get and inexpensive by comparison. The countryside became much more well lit. Security lights on barns, lights in workshops and out buildings, and of course, homes lit up. The countryside started to feel like one sparsely populated, extended suburb between larger towns.

When we lived in Humboldt, we started to see this go the other way. We were just at the beginning of the roll up of the smaller family farms into larger units. To be clear, it was still family farming and I believe that much of it still is today, but I'll leave that argument to others. Anyway, I remember going to work in the morning and driving by an abandoned farmstead, still in decent shape and driving by the same place in the evening and it was gone. Everything was gone except for the water wellhead, the land put back into production to help drive the productivity of the enterprise. The countryside started heading back the other direction.

This is what I noticed when we driving to Northwest Iowa in the darkness a few weeks ago.

With one really notable difference. In the early days when you saw a glow over the horizon, you knew that in the next few miles, you'd come across a city. Not anymore. Now, the glow that you see is one of two things. It is either the hub for one of the larger farms that has been created in the rollup of the smaller forms, or it is one of the many production facilities in the state that supports the agricultural industry, or uses the products from the farm as their inputs. This could be an ethanol plant or a production facility that produces farm equipment. Either way, they are usually the glowing lights that you see in the otherwise dark sky of rural Iowa. The other thing that you see, particularly as you go Northwest is all of the red lights at the top of the windmills so pilots know where they are.  Otherwise, the night has gotten darker again and it is easier to see stars in the night sky.

The future will bring even more change. There was a very interesting article in Time magazine in the last couple of weeks talking about fusion. The fascinating thing is that they actually think it may be possible to accomplish in our lifetime. This has always been a bit of a pipe dream, but now with many of the world's most forward-thinking and wealthiest people getting into the middle of this, it would seem there really is a hope that this could happen, and if so it would be a game changer. It could well be the thing that changes the world, taking energy off the table as one of our biggest challenges. This would allow the reversal of climate change and would turn many industries on their heads.

I hope for two things with this. First, I hope that this discovery happens in a way that everyone will be able to participate in the change, and second, I hope that I am here to experience it.

Have a great week.

Stretch

I've had a great week in so many ways. A lot of projects moved forward, and  obstacles overcome, but as I consider the week as a whole, what I really thought about was stretching. This isn't really something that often comes to mind for someone in my age range when thinking about their occupation.  I think more often than not, when people reach a certain age, they settle in and very effectively accomplish their work for the rest of their lives. They do it without a great deal of innovative or new thought and without a great deal of change. I remember hearing that in the scientific community, almost to a discovery, all of the big things are discovered by those under 45 years of age. When I read this the first time, I remember not really believing it. I think maybe I am closer now.

This last year gave me the opportunity to start stretching again and now I am watching someone close to me do the same thing. In both situations it was due to a change in employment. As any of us begin something new, we are deluged with a constant stream of things that even if we "knew" them in a different environment, the differences of companies and individuals makes the whole idea seem alien.  With time and repetition we stretch and adapt and make these strange and alien activities part of what we know and what we can accomplish.

Sara started a new job and she has been in the throes of learning new processes and procedures. Finally, by the end of last week she had confidence in what she was doing. One of her teammates even mentioned that she was moving around the office and getting things done with a great deal more confidence. I believe her confidence came as a result of the stretching.

When we watch younger people and children, we often see this phenomenon very clearly. We even talk about "growing pains." You may remember, if you had boys, times when the growth experienced overnight was actually painful and would wake them up from a sound sleep. This is probably the most extreme case of this type of growth and change. We also get the opportunity to watch this through the educational process, most specifically when we have our children in college. They tend to go in with one idea, or thought, and at the end of the experience, they have changed the plan several times. All we can hope is they have something they will be able to use as they move forward. I've watched my daughter do this, starting with a degree in Biology and now as she moves to a degree program in Biochemistry. This came as she discovered her love for chemistry and her disappointment when she came to her final chemistry class. Her stretch came as she discovered a need to change majors so she could continue exploring through more chemistry classes. Interesting, huh?

Those of you who know me know I am committed to lifetime learning. I believe we continue to learn from the first day of our lives to the last. The thing I've found out about myself is there are times you may still be learning something, but the rate at which this happens is less than what we should expect of ourselves. When this happened to me in the past, I filled time with activities far from appropriate to get me moving forward again. One of the classic things I do is shop on Amazon and Ebay way too much. I developed whole collections of things which I sold later because I wasn't stretching, I was bored. So in order to not let this happen again, I am developing a personal list of things I will fill time with when I am not stretching. Hopefully, this will be a combination of things to move me forward at work and things which will just make me a better person. One of these items will be learning to weld. This is undoubtedly something which improves my life away from work, not at work.

As I end this thought today, I challenge you to ask yourself if you are continuing to stretch?  Whatever your answer, then you need to ask if you really want to.  Based on those two answers, decide what to do with this going forward. I hope you find answers which help you to find joy in your day to day world.

Have a great week.