Fun with a kids club ~

I had a good time at a kids club I help with recently. Our church runs a club at one of the elementary schools. I started helping out and find that I really enjoy it! Reminds me of when our children where in Cub Scouts and I was a den leader.



On one day I was asked to share about some of the big things that God made. The examples they gave in the lesson plan were redwood trees, whales, and stars. I liked their write-up about them but didn't like the idea of just sitting in the classroom and talking about these things.



So when the day came I went and helped the other adults set up the room. I brought my 100-foot tape measure with me in my backpack and pulled it out just before the kids got to the room. No one had any idea of what I was going to use it for.



When it was my turn I asked the kids to tell me what was big in the room. They pointed out the dry-erase board, the cabinets, the window, etc. I then showed them a picture of a redwood tree and talked about how wide they are. Then I had them come out in the hall for a demonstration.



I gave the end of my tape measure to one of the kids and had the group walk down the hall until I said stop, right around 14 feet away. I told them that's how wide redwood trees can grow. Their eyes got really big! Then I gave the end of the tape to one of the kids and asked her to start walking further down the hall while we waited with the other kids. She walked and walked and walked. When she got 80 feet away I had her stop and explained that this is how long a small whale is, and that there are whales that are much bigger than 80 feet long! Everybody oohed an aahed.



What was neat was that the tape measure was now stretched across the entry area of the school. My hope is that the next few days when they come in to the school they'll remember how big a whale and redwood tree is in comparison to the entrance and will remember the lesson about how much God loves them.



It's fun to do this kind of thing!



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Paying attention ~

One of the challenging things that I deal with in myself is that I actually watch and listen when people talk. I think about what they say and what they do, and then I act accordingly. If someone says they don't like a certain thing, then I try not to do that thing.



If someone says they feel left out, I do what I can to include them more and more. I like to help, and that gets me in trouble too because a lot of people don't want my help. Often, people will say things in passing and I pick up on it and I react to it and I plan and act accordingly.



And then they act surprised. And they say, that's not what I meant at all. And I have to explain, it's what you said. You were very clear and very adamant. To me, actually paying attention by listening and watching is respect.



I don't see a lot of respect from other people nowadays toward me or towards anyone around them. I was told recently and I've read in a couple of places that in our society our attention span has fallen below the attention span of a goldfish.



Scientists have studied goldfish and through their observations concluded that goldfish have an attention span of about nine seconds. With our devices and our screens and other distractions all around us scientists have determined that humans in our society can only pay attention for about 8.4 seconds. Less than a goldfish.

I'm not a goldfish and I'm not going to let a goldfish be better at paying attention than me.



https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/



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Music tastes have changed ~

As I have gotten older my music tastes have changed. I like a lot more instrumental music. I like a lot more relaxing music. And I don't really like a whole lot of words,



Once I got away from a lot of the songs that I listened to when I was younger, and then I went back to them, I realized how sad so many of them were. They told about sex, or chasing a woman, or losing a woman, or drinking alcohol. But so many sad songs. Great beats, great riffs, sad lyrics.



One of the things I've been trying to do is change the way that I think away from the negative to the positive. It's challenging, because I'm a "what could happen" kind of guy, and I think of lots of scenarios, including the bad ones.



I still enjoy my music, but I tend to listen to instrumental stuff a whole lot more now, just so I can get away from those words programming my brain that my wife is going to leave me for somebody else, or I need to have a drink of alcohol, or I need to do this or that.



It's kind of like with advertising, I've gotten to where my bubble is pretty well defined and I don't let in a whole lot of advertising. When I end up in a situation where I see commercials on a screen, I love the ones on TV if it's really TV but the ones on YouTube I've eliminated through a subscription and I really don't like having everything interrupted.



Social media has gotten to a point where it's almost every other thing that you scroll through is an ad. I don't like that so I've tuned out a lot of social media.



But the lyrics of the songs just get me now when I pay attention and really listen to those songs that I loved. I still listen to some of them. I have a jams playlist that I play when I'm mowing. I enjoy putting on rock and roll when I'm driving around in my car. But I really don't like letting those thoughts in.



I've come so far I don't want to jeopardize the progress that I've made.



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Electric football game ~

I remember when I was a kid getting a football game. It was electric, but it was digital. It was a sheet of metal on short plastic stands that held it off of the ground and it plugged in. And it had a little mechanism underneath it to vibrate the metal really fast.



The players that came with it were plastic and they were on little green bases that had four tiny, almost grass-like feet sticking out just below the bottom of the base. And when you put them on the field or the sheet of metal and you turned it on, the vibration would make them move along on the field.



Sometimes in a good direction, sometimes in a not so good direction. As long as we kept the game on the floor or on a table, it was good. I'd set up the men. I'd turn it on. I'd watch as everybody scattered in different directions.



It was kind of silly looking back on it. It was nothing like Madden football on video games nowadays. It wasn't even anything like the Coleco handheld football game where you had a little digital red dot.



You had to press buttons to make it go up and down and then sideways to run down the field. But it was fun. Sometimes I'd put a dinosaur on the field and see if it would run. It would not. It was too heavy.



I could put army men on there and the army men would jump around and move, but they tended to be too heavy also.



I don't think this game contributed to my not being into sports. But I enjoyed playing it for a little while, and then I didn't play with it anymore.





Fun memory.



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Dealing with assumptions ~

One of the interesting things I've had to deal with in my life are the assumptions of others.



People would not see me on Sunday mornings so they thought I didn't go to church. Early in my career I worked shift work and often worked Sunday mornings. But when I would go on Sunday night or Wednesday night people would greet me with "missed you on Sunday!" It just rubbed the wrong way.



Working shifts also meant that I was "too busy" or that my schedule was "too confusing" for others, especially my parents. They never did get the hang of my shift work and it led to several misunderstandings.



Because I was involved in Cub Scouts people have assumed I was an Eagle Scout. Sadly that is not the case. When I was a kid I was in Cub Scouts but never got involved in a Boy Scout troop.



Becaus my wife and I had four children many people assumed that we home-schooled. Each of our children attended public schools when they were growing up. Three of them attended public colleges/universities, two of them on scholarships for part of their time in college.



Because my wife and I like to travel people think that we've been gone on another trip when they don't see us. That's another assumption that often sounds strange when it comes up.



In my profession I was taught that "assuming" anything was not a good way to operate and that it made an "ass" out of "you" and "me". When I have applied this in the real world it has often helped me avoid issues but has also generated other issues.



I wish people wouldn't assume things about me. It's like I always told my people at work, just ask. If I can answer the question I'll answer it.



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Substack as social media ~

When Substack started I went ahead and started an account there and I posted a couple of things and then let it lay around. I've started posting on it more regularly. Mostly I just wanted to get my foot in the door with them and I wanted to see how it developed.



It's an interesting platform and makes blogging and updating people through a subscription easy and fast. You can quickly convert it to a paid subscription and you can engage your community via notes and other interactions.



I think of it as a blogging platform with a lot of social media aspects. The thing that I don't like is how so many of the marketers and wannabe marketers have jumped in there and every post that I see is about how to expand your reach and how to make money on Substack and how to take it to the next level and how to grow what you're doing.



I don't want any of that. I'm counter cultural in that way. I just want to post my thoughts for the world to see and let them go where they go. If lots of people see them, awesome. If nobody sees them, that's okay because all the bots see them and I will live on inside of artificial intelligence.



I just think it's funny in a sad way how Substack posters all are trying to make money off of you paying them to help you do something that you can already do for yourself.



I guess that's what it's all about. Here's this convenience platform but I can make it even more convenient for you to grow beyond your wildest dreams and you can't do anything except focus on numbers.



Ridiculous.



Man, I'm crabby today LOL



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Age and wisdom ~

I saw a meme float by in my Pinterest stream that had a quote supposedly from Ernest Hemingway. The quote said that "The great fallacy was the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise, they grow careful."



The definition of fallacy is a false notion, a statement or an argument based on a false or invalid inference, incorrectness of reasoning or belief, erroneous. So I find the quote a lot more careful because of the experiences I've had over the years and I'm trying not to do things out of urgency which I did for so much of my life.



But I still like to think that I'm doing it out of wisdom and not just being careful. Being careful is is exercising wisdom in a lot of cases. For the past few years, I've listened to the book of Proverbs, one chapter at a time each month.



That means every year I read Proverbs 12 times or more. I may not get the last chapter because there's only 30 days in a month, but reading a chapter at a time, one for each day of the month, has really worked well for me.



And, as it soaks into my brain. I steep in it, I feel like I'm getting wiser. I also wonder at the source of this quote, if Ernest Hemingway truly said this, he said a lot of things that people quote, and he's a celebrated author and famous guy that happened to be an alcoholic who lived in Key West and was involved in plane crashes and generally hiding from the world while he generated books.



So I don't know that I agree with him that it's a fallacy that older men are wise. I also again wonder why we celebrate these kind of people. This guy was no shining knight and not the best example of a stable male personality that was dedicated to a wife and children.



In fact, he got into a lot of trouble in multiple ways. And like so many of the other artists that our society celebrates, I just wonder why we celebrate this guy.



I actually think that's part of why I write and blog because we celebrate him because we have his words in writing in a book that we can go and get off of a shelf.



I want my words out there so that someday maybe somebody will celebrate me in that way.



You never know.



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