And for that, I give thanks

Thanksgiving is around the corner, a time when people remember all the blessings in their lives. However, there are people who aren't satisfied with what they have. They think that if only they had a little more, then they'd be thankful. It's always easy to focus on what we don't have.

Today, I was riding on the local hike-n-bike trail. For most of the ride I was lost in thought, thinking about problems that needed to be worked out, bills that needed to paid, and chores that needed to be done. I wasn't paying attention to the beautiful weather, the red and brown leaves scattered along the trail, or any other blessings in plain sight.

On one part of the trail a woman was walking with her dog and not doing a good job of staying to one side of the trail. I sighed, slightly put out because she was blocking my path. I politely said "on your left" to let her know I was passing, and she scooted over with a bright smile and a cheery "oh, sorry."

It was then that I realized that there's a good chance she was blind.

It was not one of my finer moments. So for the rest of my ride, I thought about the things I had: my sight, my hearing, my overall health. I have a good job, a roof over my head, a mostly well-behaved dog, and a cat that tolerates me. I get to play the sports I enjoy, and my church choir doesn't mind having me as a member. My family gets along with each other and is only slightly dysfunctional, but in a good way. My life is full of people who genuinely care about my well-being.

And for that, I give thanks.

Ego search

An ego search is when a person performs a web search on their own name. A person might legitimately do an ego search to ensure there isn't false or embarrassing information about themselves online. Companies sometimes perform them to see what people are posting or blogging about them. Me? I just have an enormous ego.

I also have the distinction of sharing a name with the Representative for the state of Alaska. Congressman Don Young is currently one of the longest-serving members of the House. He has chaired both the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Resources Committee. He is noted for having lost his first election attempt to a man who had been missing for almost a month and was later declared dead. He has also been investigated on more than one occasion for ethics violations.

As you might expect, there are many web pages, online articles and blogs about Congressman Young and an "ego search" of Don Young returns a lot of hits. There was also an unexpected side-effect. People searching for the Congressman would sometimes end up on my personal website. Despite my "About Me" and "Contact Me" pages specifically mentioning that I am not the Congressman for Alaska, I would still get the occasional e-mail meant for that other Don Young.

One time, I got an e-mail from a woman who was VERY upset with the way I voted on a particular piece of legislation. She went into great detail as to why my vote was the incorrect one, and she was nice enough to thrown in a few insults, too. I had no idea what the legislation was about, and I didn't care, but I began typing a response to the woman. I gave my reasons for voting the way I did, all completely bogus, of course, and I included a few insults of my own. However, I thought better of impersonating a Congressman and deleted my response before I sent it.

I would hate to have been brought up on ethics charges.

I'm one of the select few

Temptation comes in many forms, and it usually strikes us where we're weak. A person with an addiction will often be tempted by that addiction. A person on a diet will probably be tempted by food. A person with issues with pride will be tempted by power and recognition. Or so I've heard. :)

I like nice cars. I like the big engines, the fancy options, the nice sound system, etc. However, when I have a car, no matter how nice it is, I get as much as I can out of it. I've never had a car for less than 6 years. I've had my current car for over 10 years and nearly 190,000 miles. In fact, I've been a car owner for more than 25 years, and I'm only on my third car.

I've had the new car bug for a few months, but I've been wanting to wait until next year when I'll be closer to paying off one of my mortgages and I won't have any other outstanding debt. I'm hoping my current car lasts until then with just the usual maintenance.

But temptation struck. Yesterday, a loan specialist from my bank left a message. I was one of the "select few" customers chosen for a special car loan rate. And by select few, they mean that I'm a customer who doesn't have a big outstanding loan with them, so they're not making any money off of me. How nice of them to offer me a loan out of the goodness of their hearts. :)

I thought about it a long time yesterday, but for now I'm going to wait. The new cars aren't going anywhere, and I'm guessing the bank will still have money to loan next year. Who knows, maybe I'll be one of the select few again.

Holly Day's Inn

Sometimes in life things work out despite our worst efforts.

Growing up I went to a very small church, and that meant that the youth group was small as well. One year the youth group put on a Christmas play called Holly Day's Inn. The story was about a man, Hollister "Holly" Day, who owned a hamburger stand called Holly Day's Inn. On Christmas Eve several unhappy people visit the stand, including a young minister and his wife, but they leave with their questions answered.

My incredibly handsome twin brother Ron and I were the only teenage boys in the youth group, so Ron played the minister and I played Holly Day. Despite my desire to be the center of attention, being in a church play was not something I wanted to do. So I complained constantly. I was sullen and moody. I purposely made very little effort to memorize my lines. In the acting world, I was what they call "difficult."

My older sister was also in the play. At the time she worked at a bank, and a few weeks before the play a bag of quarters fell off a table, landing on her foot and breaking it. I was ecstatic, not because she broke her foot, but because I thought we would have to cancel the play. But, she was a trooper and played her part on crutches. Darn it! :)

Despite my worst efforts, the play went off mostly without a hitch. Somewhere in the middle I accidentally skipped a few pages of dialog, which almost caused my sister to miss her cue to enter. Luckily, the people back stage noticed my mistake and were nice enough to push her onto the stage at the right time. In hindsight, that probably wasn't a good idea since she was still on crutches.

Also, my brother's duet of Silent Night with his "wife" was a little off-key (he blames the "wife"), but because of that, my line after the song made me chuckle to myself: "That was beautiful!"

So why did I not want to be in the play? I don't know. Our lives are filled with things that we don't want to do or that we think will be difficult, but the right thing isn't always the easiest thing. And sometimes we learn that it wasn't nearly as difficult as we imagined. Despite our worst efforts.

I was doing fine until the ants

Sometimes when you're trying to make a difficult decision, there are figurative signs pointing you in the right direction.

As noted before, I've ridden the MS 150 (a 2 day, 170 mile bike ride from Houston to Austin) five times and finished it four times. Back 1993 I first rode the MS 150 with some friends, including my incredibly handsome twin brother. It had been around 10-15 years since I had ridden a bike, but I was young and moderately athletic. I rode on some short rides around Austin to get ready, but my training was interrupted by a bout of the flu a couple of weeks before the ride. However, I recovered and felt ready to go in time for the ride. Or so I thought.

On the first day my group started out. The stronger riders in our group rode ahead, but several of us took a more leisurely pace, pausing frequently to take pictures. We stopped at all the break points to drink fluids and eat snacks (power bars, bananas, etc.).

Around the 50 mile mark, I started feeling bad. I had a fever, chills, and I felt very weak. I had to make frequent stops in between the break points and rest, so I told the group not to wait and that I would catch up.

Around the 80 mile mark, I made another stop on the side of the road to rest. I felt weak, and my whole body ached. I stood next to my bike trying to decide whether I should continue or not. I had no idea how many more miles I had left or if I could make it, but I didn't want to quit. I went back and forth, alternately between wanting to give up and talking myself into going on.

And then I felt a stinging sensation in my right foot and lower leg. I looked down and saw that I was standing in an ant pile, and my foot leg were being bitten by fire ants. I paused, took a deep breath, and thought, "Well, there's my sign." And I called it a day.

I was only 20 miles from finishing the first day, but I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have been able to ride the 70 miles on day 2. Plus, I knew how to read the signs.

Do not attempt

Toyota has a commercial where a driver pulls up to a drive-thru in an old, junky car. The person on the speaker asks, "Can I take your order?" Suddenly, a big mechanical claw drops onto the car and pulls it into the air, revealing a nice, new Toyota underneath.

If only it were that easy.

At the bottom of the screen during the commercial is the legal disclaimer: Do not attempt.

I understand that our litigious society is the reason for legal disclaimers in the first place, but what exactly do they think the viewing public will attempt?

If you come back tomorrow, it will be

When someone is a little too sarcastic or mean-spirited in what they say to me, I usually think of a nice retort much too late, sometimes not even the same day. Granted, sometimes it's better to not say anything, to be the bigger person, so to speak. But every now and then people (including myself) need to be reminded that they aren't the center of the universe. In a nice way.

My summer job during my college years was on the flight line at Sheppard AFB. The base trained Euro-NATO pilots on the T-37 and T-38 aircraft. As a summer hire, my job was to do the simpler tasks, like refueling and cleaning the windscreens, and to assist in the not-so-simple ones, like sitting in the cockpit pressing on the "brake pedals" while the real mechanics worked on the brakes. And most fun of all, I got to launch the aircraft (pictured).

Launching an aircraft involved taking the pins out of the landing gear (so that they could be raised once the plane was in the air) and stowing them, stowing the grounding wire, stowing the pitot tube cover, hooking up the compressed air hose to the engine (used to start the plane when the pilot was ready), and getting any items the pilot needed for the cockpit. While I was doing that, the instructor pilot and his student were doing their walk-around inspection and then getting strapped into the cockpit. Once in, I would remove the ladders and get ready to turn on the compressed air when given the signal. Once the engine was running, I would remove the hose, remove the tire blocks, and marshal them out. Simply put, the pilots could not take off without ground support.

One day, we were extremely busy. A couple of pilots had done their walk-around and were waiting for someone to launch them. They were concerned that they weren't going to make their launch time, which meant having to come back later in the day. All of the mechanics were busy. I was refueling the plane next to the waiting pilots, and I couldn't leave to help until I was finished with that job. When I finished 5-10 minutes later, I told the fuel truck driver that I would start refueling the next plane once I launched the other plane.

So, we're extremely busy, and I was taking time out of the task I should've been doing to make sure these guys made their launch time, which was observed by the waiting pilots. I rushed over to the other plane and asked the instructor if they needed anything for the cockpit, and said in an angry tone, "I need a couple of spacers for the front, and I needed it done yesterday!"

To which I calmly replied, "Well, if you come back tomorrow, it will be."

No, I ain't no Denzel Washington!

Many years ago I was in Hollywood with my girlfriend at the time and her son. Let's call the son James. We were shopping one day and stopped into a comic book store. Each of us has gone off to look at different things. I was looking at the old Spider-Man comics when I suddenly heard a recognizable voice over the racks of comic books: the voice of Samuel L. Jackson.

"No, I ain't no Denzel Washington!"

Apparently, someone had mistook him for another actor, and he was letting that person know that he was mistaken. He didn't sound angry, but imagine the tone of Jules from Pulp Fiction during his "furious anger" speech.

And then I had a thought. Oh please don't let him be talking to James. I worked my way through the store and bumped into James working his way through the store to find me. He asked who that actor was, and I told him. And then I asked him if Mr. Jackson was talking to him. James lowered his head and said, "Well, I couldn't remember his name."

We asked for a picture, but he politely said no (very politely actually), so we left him alone. I'm just thankful he didn't sound entirely like one of his characters and add a curse word or two to his response to the Denzel Washington question.

I'll leave the curse words to your imagination.

I smell smoke!

I'm not a teacher, but I'm guessing that they prefer a class full of honor students versus the alternative, but sometimes those smart kids use their big brains for evil instead of good.

When I was a senior in high school I took a Calculus class. The students in that class consisted entirely of the top 20-30 in that grade. The teacher was a very nice woman, although she had a tendency to go off on tangents. She had a clock sitting on her desk, and she once mentioned that the alarm on it sounded very similar to the fire alarm our school used.

A few months later we had a substitute teacher. Before the class started (and before the teacher was in the room), someone came up with the idea to set the alarm to go off during class. (I would credit the person who came up with the idea if I could remember who it was. No, it wasn't me.) When the alarm went off, the substitute asked what it was, and we innocently replied that we thought it was a fire drill. And one of the students, who had a very prominent nose, started sniffing the air and shouted, "I smell smoke!"

The substitute wasn't sure of the fire alarm process, so she told us to do what we normally do. We hadn't really thought that far ahead, so we just went outside. While we were heading out the teacher in the room next to ours told our teacher that there hadn't really been a fire drill, so those of us who had made it out of the room were sent to the office.

We didn't do anything too terrible, so we weren't going to get in a lot of trouble. But it was even less of a problem since both the principal and assistant principal were out of the office that day. The only two staff members working at that time were the secretaries, my mom and Mrs. Biddy, who also had a son in that class. When they were told what had happened, they both just rolled their eyes and sent us all back to class.

Of course, there were other consequences. When our regular teacher returned the next day she gave us a 1 question pop quiz. You either made a 100 or a 0. But I think most of us in the class thought it was worth it.

Let me help you fix that Bible

As you might have noticed, I'm a bit anal retentive. (That's like saying a woman is a bit pregnant.) And obsessive compulsive. And a nerd. I'm fortunate that the work I do (testing software) is made for people like me, but it also means that I like to fix everyone and everything. Even the Bible.

I have a study Bible, also jokingly known as a cheater's Bible, and I gave myself a goal of reading the entire Bible since it's something I've never done before. I started with the New Testament (because it's shorter). When I finish I plan to go back to the Old Testament for more of the historical information.

One of the things I like about the study Bible is the section before each book that describes who the author was, who it was written to or for, and the major themes of that book. Last week I was reading 1 Peter when I see a small typo ... nothing major, and it didn't hinder the meaning of the passage in any way.

But, I couldn't let it go, so I e-mailed the publisher Zondervan this following tidbit:

On the Megathemes section of 1 Peter (pg. 2100), in the Importance portion of the Salvation theme the last sentence spells "should" as "shuld".

I included that I was pretty sure that it had already been corrected for future printings, and I expressed my gratitude for a wonderful Bible.

But now I can rest easy knowing that this version will be fixed for future readers. You're welcome!

EPILOGUE: I got a reply from Carrie Colter in Customer Care (a nice bit of alliteration) saying that the information had been passed on to the Bible department for advisement. In other words, "Thanks, nerd boy. Go have that OCD looked at." :)