In the air with fresh-baked cookies

Tough to beat this: I dozed off on a recent flight to Washington, D.C. When I awoke, two warm chocolate chip cookies were sitting on my tray.

Thanks, Midwest Airlines! The best care in the air, indeed.

There were also two cookies on my seatmate's tray, which led to this moral dillemma (seriously - the cookies are good).

1. If I took just one, would he notice that he should have had two?

2. If he did notice, would he confront a stranger for taking his cookie?


After much deliberation I left the man's cookies alone. I wanted him to enjoy the same experience I had when he woke up.

Also, he was bigger than me.

I invented the word Dingbat

I invented the word Dingbat.

Or so I thought.

It was the early 80s, I was in 3rd grade, and for some reason I was convinced I had invented the word "Dingbat." I have no idea how I came to that conclusion, but I do remember the pride I felt. I had invented a word!

Until I ran across this definition in a discussion of type-setting (This does beg the question, "Why were you discussing type-setting in 3rd grade?" No idea.)

Dingbat: An ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character."

I was crushed.

I was reminded of this story a few days ago when I thought I'd come up with the next million-dollar T-shirt slogan idea (assuming there is such as thing as a million-dollar T-shirt slogan idea). It's a red T-shirt full of four-leaf clovers. The caption: "Kiss Me, I'm Colorblind."

I know. I know. Genius. (I'll give you a minute to compose yourself)

Whenever I have a million-dollar idea, my new first instinct (stemming from my 3rd grade experience, I'm sure) it to Google it to see if I will, in fact, become a millionaire. Sadly, I was not the first with the Colorblind St. Pats idea. On the flip side, I'll have a sweet new T-shirt next March.

Oh well. Off to the next idea, buying the .com, and developing a perfectly type-set, dingbat-heavy patent to secure fame and fotune.

This drives me up the wall. Literally.

I try not to complain much on my blog. As a general rule I hate complainers.

However, I have a very specific pet peeve I'd like to share. When people add the word "literally" when using a figure of speech it makes me crazy. I was reminded of my aversion to this practice recently when it happened twice in the same meeting.

Quote 1: "Joe literally got beat up and bloodied by the legislature this
session."

Really? He looks OK to me.

Quote 2: "We've really struggled with this issue. We've been hitting our heads
agains a brick wall. Literally."

Wow. You have been literally bashing your skull against a wall made of bricks? Literally? I would not recommend that. And if it's true, I hope you have YouTube videos to show the world. I'd give me right arm to see that.

Literally.

In the Air with Mike Anderson

I occasionally have the opportunity to fly for business and pleasure, and when I do I often strike up a conversation with my fellow travelers (yep, I'm that guy).

I recently took my first flight out of the Columbia Regional Airport (COU for you frequent flyers), which, by the way, was a great experience. If you haven't tried it yet, I would highly recommend it. The 15-minute drive home after landing was awesome.

Mike Anderson, Mizzou's baskeball coach, was also on my flight to Memphis. Our plane had some mechanical issues that forced us to de-plane and hang out at the gate, which gave me time to speak with the coach.

He was heading to Birmingham to visit his family before starting a month-long recruiting trip. Now I'm a fairly busy guy, as we all are, and I understand that Coach Anderson is compesated royally for his efforts. But his schedule is impressive. In July he'll travel to various states to sit in the living rooms of 16- and 17-year-olds, most of whom will end up not playing basketball at MU. He'll take August off from traveling (per NCAA rules), but still be busy both with recruiting for the future and ... oh yeah ... getting the current Mizzou team ready to play.

The schedule doesn't let up during the season, as the staff is constantly switching hats from coaching to recruiting, present to future, and back again.

No over-arching life lesson or broad observations today. Basically, I just wanted to brag that I met Mike Anderson. :-)

Choose Your Own Adventure

I was recently reminded of one of my favorite book series as a kid: Choose Your Own Adventure.

The concept was simple enough. Every few pages you were given a choice, and that choice led you to another page in the book. Your choices created the story. It was fun because I was the star of the story (it's read in the 2nd person: "You are lost in the jungle...") and it was empowering (to some degree I drove the plot).

I recently read an artilce on line that reminded me of the book series. In it, the author makes a statement.

"Life is like that. It's waiting for you to decide whether you'll be average or remarkable."

Initially I was like, "Yeah! Life is just like Choose Your Own Adventure," and I think in some ways it is. But there is a significant difference.

You can't start life over.

As a kid I particularly enjoyed the aspect of Choose Your Own Adventure books that allowed a "do over." I could go back to the beginning (or anywhere in the middle) to make a different choice if bad things happened. None of the ramifications of the past choices mattered. It's as if they didn't exist. I could read through 40+ potential endings to the book.

But in life - this life - we get one shot. Each choice (hunt down the elephant? or ride the hippo through the swamp?) changes everything. We don't get to turn the pages backward to start over. As Anna Nalick poeticized a couple years ago: Life's like an hourglass glued to the table.

So as we're making "big-ish" life decision at our house about education, careers and geography, I'm transitioning from "mostly scared" to "still scared but very excited" as we choose our adventures as a family. And as we keep choosing and turning, I'm exciting about what's on the next page.

Don't let your dreams be dreams

"Don't let your dreams be dreams" - Jack Johnson

I recently read a manifesto by Chris Guillebeau entitled A Brief Guide to World Domination* : How to live a remarkable life in a conventional world.
*and other important goals

In it, the author makes the argument that you don't have to live life the way other people expect you to. You can focus the majority of your time on the things you enjoy, and in the midst can make a big difference in others' lives as well. His assertiion is summed up with this quote by Alan Keightely:

"Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to."

Guillebeau goes on to lay out his selection of the two most important questions in the universe:

1. What do you really want to get out of life?


2. What can you offer the world that no one else can?

To avoid spoiling the other 28 pages of the manifesto, I'll stop here and recommend you give it a read (you'll get through it in 15 minutes). Enjoy!

I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is.

There we are: June 19, 1999. At 22 and 23 we looked like teenagers. In fact, when we would take the kids to the store (2 year-old Madilyn and Infant Blake), we would got stares from old ladies of the "didn't you figure out how that happened the first time?" variety.

The truth was we were young, and often didn't feel that we were really adults. We talked during our honeymoon to the Smokey Mountains that we felt like we'd run away from home. I guess in some ways we did.

What a difference a decade makes.

I've been married to my best friend, and my personal choice for "most amazing person on the planet," for a full ten years. We've experienced pain and comfort, sadness and joy, confusion and understanding. We've asked questions, answered them, and then questioned the answers. We've built one incredible relationship, made two beautiful babies, and wrestled with lots of life stuff along the way.

I've become less and less sure about many of the things I held true at 23. I have more quesitons than ever, and I'm excited about the search for both the answers to these questions and the discovery of new ones. But I've never been more certain of this: I am in love with Janelle Chandler, and I cannot wait to add more and more decades to our adventure.

Want to pack your bags, something small.

Take what you need and we’ll disappear,

without a trace, we’ll be gone gone.

Moon and the stars will follow the car.

Then when we get to the ocean,

gonna take a boat to the end of the world,

all the way to the end of the world.

And when the kids are old enough,

we’re gonna teach them to fly.

You and me together, we can do anything, baby.

You and me together, yes, yes.

- DMB

Official Sponsor of Birthdays

The best PSA I've seen this year. Props to the American Cancer Society and whoever came up with this one.

Crack the shutters open wide, it's 20 degrees!

I was driving by the bank last week on my way to work, and a question struck me: Why does my bank continue to show Celsius degrees on their marquee? Does anyone in this country actually care what the Celsius temperature is (BTW, it was 21. 70 degrees Farenheit).

And what's up with the formula to convert the two? Tell me if this sound like it was made up by scientists spending too much time in the lab.

Nerd: Take the "normal Fahrenheit" temperature and subtract 32
Geek: Why 32?
Nerd: Um... Not sure. Just trust me.
Geek: OK
Nerd: Now take that number and multiply it by 5.
Geek: OK
Nerd: Now divide that number by 9.
Geek: What?
Nerd: Divide it by 9.
Geek: Seriously? I just multiplied it by 5?
Nerd: Just do it.

Eureka! We've discovered the conversion: Celsius = (5/9)*(Fahrenheit-32)

I'm sure there are good scientific reasons for the formula (reasons I likely learned in 8th grade but have since purged from memory), but it always seemed terribly random to me. And because of how it's set up, check this out. At -40 degrees Farenheit, it's -40 degrees Celsius. Wait...what? In Antarctica they don't even use Celsius and Fahrenheit. It's just -40.

Ridiculous.

But wait. Celsius is a much cleaner measurement of temperature. Zero = Freezing Water. 100 = Boiling Water. Why would we not use this?

This blog post could quickly fall into my "English systems of measurement are crazy" soap box (and who isn't waiting for that?). More kids would pass Jr. High math and science if they didn't have to deal with feet, miles, pounds, ounces, and kips. Kips? Really? A unit of force is called a kip?

I'll save the remainder of my metric measurement rant for another day.

So I'm thinking of learning the Celsius system (it's not that hard - 0 to 100) and using it in everyday speech.

"Hey Joe, it's gonna be a scorcher today. Might reach 35... Celsius"

Roses are green...

Thanks, honey, for finding this one. Christmas is coming!