I had some lasagna for lunch yesterday and didn’t want everyone I was meeting with to have to share it so I stopped by the cafeteria at work and bought a package of mints. They only had one kind so I grabbed them on the run and headed off to my meeting. As I sat in my seat and tried to open the package I had just purchased, I thought I would glance at the calories just to see if I was going to have to record these calories in my iPhone App. As I did I noticed that these mints only listed three ingredients Xylitol, Natural Flavors, and Magnesium Stearate. The meeting was less than invigorating so I decided to look up what the heck Magnesium Stearate is. This is what Wikipedia said. “Magnesium Stearate is a major component of “bathtub rings.” When produced by soap and hard water, magnesium stearate and calcium stearate both form a white solid insoluble in water, and are collectively known as “soap scum.”” What???? I am sucking on a bathtub ring? Who decided this was the ingredient to use in a mint? What there no Guar gum or some other unknown substance you could have used? This won’t stop me from eating them but every time I do I am going to think about how my shower needs a cleaning!

Supposedly, coffee was discovered by some goat herder who watched his goats get all hopped up on caffeine after eating the berries off of the plant. This herder discovered what has become the drug of choice for many in the working world. In every company I have worked a coffee maker has been a fixture. Some places have the traditional pot where everybody chips in and buys coffee, others are provided coffee by the company. The quality also varies, some buy the can or packages of coffee others have new fangled machines that can produce a foofoochino at the push of a button. I have noticed that the care the company puts into the coffee directly correlates to care they put into the staff. I have been at small companies who are struggling and they served good coffee, and large companies who are raking it in and they served garbage. I know the coffee wasn’t the only thing that affected the employee morale but it sure came out around the coffee pot. The goat herder could have had no idea that what he found would not only fuel the industrial revolution, but it’s consumption would also become a workplace barometer.

My wife asked our daughter what she remembers about 9/11. She was four years old and she says she doesn’t remember anything about it. She does know what it is and what happened but she was too young for us to involve her in all the TV news we watched over those weeks and even months after it happened. Even I being in Colorado far from what was happening, it seemed a little surreal. I am sure that those who live in those areas and lived it are not so casual about the day, even twelve years later. The “experts” say we should not show the video of the planes because it causes strong emotional responses, and I ask why that is a bad thing? I watch Saving Private Ryan a re-enactment of some events of world war two and I get a sense of what those who served did to rid the world of evil. It reminds me of the cost of our freedom and it makes me think about my duty as a citizen to protect what I hold most dear! So I applaud the channels that show it every year on the anniversary and I hope in the future those who were not even born yet will get the sense of what is at stake!

As I sit here waiting to hear what Apple is releasing today. I can’t help but wonder what would have been an equivalent to Apple release conferences in other centuries? Was say, the announcement of a new Pope in the eighteen hundreds a big media event? How about when a king died? I can’t imagine people in other centuries even stopping their lives for these events because of the amount of work they had to do just to survive each day. Much of what we do or watch these days would not have even made so much as a head turn, and having a phone in your favorite color would not feed your family! As I sit here trying to figure out how to get out of my current phone contract I guess I should be grateful I don’t have to return to the field after I microwave my lunch!

I am no master mechanic, nor am I a woodworking master. I do however spend quite a bit of time on each of these. I have cars that are old and the fire over the summer has made me spend some quality time working with wood. What I can’t figure out is how professionals in these areas keep from having hands that look like scrambled eggs? No matter if I wear gloves or try to avoid it I always end up with one purple colored finger, and usually some blood is spilled. I don’t care how careful I am it is going to happen. Maybe this is like a kung fu thing. I will be a true master and be able to leave my training when I can change the brakes without injury. Until then I will still retain my amateur status.

I am turning 50 in a year and three months. Yet there are things that still make me act as goofy as a teenager. Some things like watching Football or riding bicycles are connections to my youth, others are just things I enjoy. Figuring out some cool tech thing is one of them. Yesterday I got a brilliant idea! I wasn’t sure when a guy was coming over to the house to start working on the roof of our barn. It struck me that if I had a webcam I could just look at it from work to see if he was there. So I took the laundry basket and set my laptop on it looking out the sliding door of my bedroom toward the barn. Then when I got to work I connected to it remotely via the web and turned on the webcam and could see my barn. I thought myself smart. But the of course the video is OK so I started researching better webcams and how I could post it to my website, which I can. I burned my whole lunch hour figuring it out! This put a big smile on my face. I am not going to do all those things but just figuring out I could make me just silly. Something about technology and being able to do fun things with it really gets me going. I think this classifies me as a geek, but at fifty am I supposed to get over it? That ain’t gonna happen!

I read on a news site today that a guy in Connecticut is suing the local catholic church because he says the bells that they ring several times a day caused him and his wife to divorce. I get that divorce happens, but the bells of a church causing it? I think there was more going on here, if the bells could break you up, you had no place being together in the first place. This one is truly dumb, but If you ever read Anne Landers column you see some of the dumbest things people fight over. Below is a list of some I think I have solved.

1. Which way the toilet paper comes off the roll. Over the top or under the back doesn’t matter as long as the person who finished the last roll replaces it. Leaving an empty cardboard tube should be outlawed in all states.
2. Which set of relatives to spend Christmas with? Come on! Are you so stupid that you can’t share holidays? I love my family but I am not going to fall on my sword over a holiday schedule. Like they told you in kindergarten, share!
3. How well your parents treat your spouse. I have good rule I just made up. The distance you live from your parents should be proportional to the treatment. Keep moving further away until the visits are at the right intervals for peace to be maintained. If you are both living with either set of parents, my condolences.
4. Color of the bathroom towels. When we were registering for our wedding twenty-four years ago I pointed at the black towels she pointed at the pink. My thought was that they eventually end up black from me wiping my dirty hands on them, but hey, if they start out some other color I still win in the end.

When I walk into my local Walmart there is a section in the front that has only one purpose. That purpose is to hold whatever seasonal items are being pushed at the moment. During the summer it had folding chairs and ice coolers and on occasion American flags. Last month it was full of school supplies, all the ten-cent pencils and notepads you can need, with a few backpacks thrown in for good measure. They are starting the transition to Halloween but I have noticed that this section always starts out the season well-organized and attractively arranged and ends up looking like monkeys are using it for a playground. The little cardboard display marked pencils was filled with erasers and mini notebooks, glue sticks were scattered in multiple bins. Every shelf seemed to have been tipped over and then the mixed items were just shoveled into the closest opening. It resembled more of a mystery grab bag than any organized store shelves. I can’t really blame Walmart, it was after all, school supplies. If you saw the hordes of parents and children ransacking them the weeks before school started you would wonder how they would ever get the shelves clean again. While it looks cleaner now all of those costumes are going to end with the same fate as the pencils right around October 31^st.

Is there somewhere where they post rules for cemeteries? I always feel awkward traipsing through the rows of headstones. Is it ok to walk over the middle of the row or should I walk more by the end? Is the headstone over the head or is it on the feet of the guy in the next row? When the stone has three names on it does that mean they are stacked three deep or are they all around the stone? What happens if they start digging a new spot and they hit someone who was unmarked? These are some of my questions but I have more. Why are many headstones shaped like the Washington monument? Does that mean something? If I see one guys name and fifteen women listed after his, is that all his wives or is this a family who all died together? What kind of mower do they use to keep the grass that nice? I could really use a Wikipedia entry on this. In a ten minute visit I come away with a week worth of pondering.