I just had a great lunch with a good friend of mine. We talked about our families and something struck the both of us. If you have children, you have given the same speech as every other parent has had to do. Maybe if you only have one child you haven’t had to give every speech, but if you have two or more they will be different enough that you will have given all the classics. Below I’ve listed just a few of them but we were thinking we should number these for future parents so they won’t have to give them. They can give a reference guide to their children with the numbers on it, so at the appropriate time they can just yell out the number.

1. Your not dumb, so why are you doing dumb things? This one should be number one. The only problem might be yelling #1!!!!! might not be as satisfying to yell as a larger number. maybe we should start at 1000.

1002. If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you? Self explanatory really!

1003. Get a Job!!!!

I know this isn’t extensive but it is a start. We parents should start gathering these so we can help each other out.

Are you a planner or a last minuter? I am a last minuter, I like to wing it a lot and that doesn’t always go well. I step in head first then I adjust as I go. This makes the planners in my life crazy! It means that I have an idea not a plan. If I sat down and figured out a plan, I would probably not ever get anything done. Plans make me crazy because they don’t allow for the inevitable monkey wrench that will come in whatever I do. I know what you planners are saying. You are just unable to plan, so you don’t! How about this one, you are just ADHD! I have even gotten the you’re just lazy. None of the above is true, because two programs I started are still running six years and thirteen years later. I isn’t that I don’t want to plan it is that I feel less creative when I do. I don’t want to stick to the plan all the time because there may be a better way to do something than how I planned it. Most of this, is just excuses for something I just don’t like to do. Maybe when I’m older I will sit down and plan my retirement, but I doubt it.

So a couple of young guys I work with are into guns. They are all worried that they aren’t going to be able to get the ammunition for the guns they own or that the prices are going to make it too expensive for anyone to buy. I believe we need to protect our right to have them and I think all the talk of taking them away from everyone is ridiculous. One of them asked me if I thought they should buy everything now before they can’t. I asked them if they remembered after Reagan got shot. Of course after he informed me he wasn’t even born and I sighed, I explained that there was a big dust-up about guns and bullets. The same conversations went on then that are going on now. Actually I explained until the law expired during the younger Bush’s presidency the “Brady Bill” had not allowed a lot of what they are talking about banning now. I also believe that very soon our politicians will find some other cause of the moment to chase after and leave this one behind. They will find something in our water or food that is killing us or making us fat and will cry out for change and will do very little before they move on again. This is the circle of political life. Do little scream a lot.

I love my pets, but some people take it way to far! We had a dog that got cancer, it was going to cost $1600 for us to give the dog Chemotherapy. So I asked the vet if there was any other treatment because I wasn’t going to pay for that. Now mind you, if I could write a check for that much money because I had tons more, I probably would have. I don’t have that kind of money so it wasn’t going to happen. We did do an alternative thing and the dog didn’t make it so we had to put him down. He didn’t last two weeks, so I don’t think any treatment would have worked. Some people are getting insurance for a pet or even as I discovered by going to a new clients. There are specialty clinics just for pets. The vet is no longer just the vet, you can now take your pet to an animal allergy clinic for specialized treatment. I know there are some things that are better left to a highly specialized vet but if my dog has the sniffles or a skin problem I am just going to go to the vet. even if I have to teach my dog to blow his or her own nose I think it is worth the savings versus a specialist. Because nothing says “I can’t afford it” like a vet specialist.

Some people have a death wish. I was driving to work today and saw an older man running on the side of the road. Not just any road, one of the largest in town. Three to four lanes each direction. At least he was running toward the cars but I would be totally freaked out even standing next to cars going fifty to sixty let alone running next to them. If one of the many text while you drive fans swerves at you, you are toast no matter what. And while on the subject I also love the bicyclists who ride on our back roads. We have one lane each way and no shoulder, but there they are putting their trust into strangers hands hoping the cars going by are paying attention. I talked to a guy who does this and asked him if it freaked him out. He said it did. He talked about the feeling of a large truck with giant mirrors on the side whizzing right by his ear. What I should have asked is if his life insurance would cover his children’s college? I like to ride and I like to run, but I will only do it where I am safe. Partly because I am a chicken and partly because I just don’t have that much insurance.

Do you belong to a club or warehouse store? You know the ones where you can buy food and other things in quantities adequate for dinosaur usage. I love buying things in giant multi-packs but lets face it there are things that just shouldn’t be bought in bulk. Things like toilet paper are awesome to have, but when you have a case of it lying around you end up using it to do other things like oil spills in the garage or TPing the neighbor’s house. Toothpaste make great spackling paste in a pinch. Other things end up on your shelf for years until you don’t remember what you bought them for. I found a box of granola bars that had fallen behind the shelf with an expiration date from before we moved in the house. There isn’t much use for the chilli we all ate for a few months now that we are tired of it. The cans make a good door stop thou and the Ortega chills are fine but we will never use that many. The opposite is also true, I can’t believe we can go through that much cheese in a month and the Peanut butter doesn’t stand a chance.

Yesterday was one of those days. It started with the person doing twenty on the way to work. I know it was icy but a line of twenty cars behind you should give a person the hint to either speed up or pull over. The other one was finding out a website my company maintains had been hacked so that anyone going to the site with a iPhone or other phone got forwarded to a porn site. You can imagine how happy the customer was to get to find that out. Some days you feel like you just can’t get a break. What would have made the day is if my car decided not to start or my computer not start-up. I can have days where I am so busy I don’t stop for breaks or lunch and I still feel good when it is over. Then I can have days when by lunch I wish I could go back to bed and start over. Life isn’t a flat line it’s more like a heart beat. Up, down, and sometimes even sideways hopefully we string together a few good ones every once in a while so the bad ones don’t feel like they are piling on. Those who think as Christians we are not supposed to have bad days are just kidding themselves. God doesn’t promise things won’t go bad for us, he just promises we know how it all ends.

I hate exercising! The whole thing of convincing myself that it is a good idea to run for five plus miles is ridicules! I ate this awesome giant skillet breakfast at Village Inn. It had chicken fried steak and eggs, potatoes and gravy over the whole thing! It was awesome! Except when I went to register how many calories in my tracking app. That one breakfast alone put me over my daily calories! So the guilt set in, as the day went on I felt a greater urge to get on the treadmill and pay for my sin! The conversation in my head goes like this. First mile; you can do this, no i can’t, maybe only a mile today. No, don’t be a wimp, you ate the skillet now make amends. Mile two; if I just look at the tv and not the counter on the treadmill it will go faster. Mile three; you are a girly man! Mile four; maybe I can go two hours, or at least add ten more minutes. Mile five; this is easy, you got this, you can do a ten minute mile in your sleep. At about sixty minutes the negotiations ended and so did the treadmill. I really don’t feel bad after I’m done but convincing my self to start is the worst. I just wish I could feel the way I did at mile five, but today I am back to hating to exercise!

I’ve got the mid-afternoon sleepies! On Fridays the phones are a little quieter and the office seems a little slower. Not many people are as panicked as they will be on Monday. So it gets a little slow. That is when it happens, I start to drift off. Maybe the heat from the computer mixed with the fan noise makes it worse but I can’t seem to get my brain to engage! So what do you do when that happens? Some get up from their desks and start to wander about the office. They visit others in search of snacks, or talk in the hall about weekend plans or even start to clean out the office refrigerator. Others look for ways to leave, maybe a client close to home needs some work done, so they leave knowing they can get the job done and then head home. Those who measure office productivity have to throw up their arms in agony about this time of the week. I just returned from such an outing with two-week old Doritos in a paper cup and a microwaved cup of coffee from this morning. Yes the chips are hard and the coffee is bitter, but if it can get me to the end of the day it will be worth the bad taste in my mouth. These are the only times I think of using one of those energy drinks, but who really wants to be that awake?