Winter in Georgia ~

So it's funny. Growing up in Florida winters were warm. Holidays were spent in short sleeves and bluejeans and sometimes shorts. In January or February it might get down below freezing, so panic would set and Dad would teach us how to drip the faucets saluted and freeze.

I live in Georgia now. Cold temperatures consistently happen, but they're not as cold as they are up north. This past winter I noticed where my daughter's low temperature was going to be 2°. I asked my wife to go out and take her picture outside into degree weather while she was up there; she laughed at me and said she wasn't going to go outside for anything like that!

But I find myself in Georgia enjoying the temperatures in the mid 40s during the daytime.

It's kind of nice! It's cool, but as long as you stay in the sun it feels decent with the cool air moving around you. Granted, I'm not out there when the windchill is making it less than in the mid 40s, but still.

To that point that I spent the afternoon sitting on my front porch in the afternoon sun enjoying the mid 40 temperatures in the sunshine.

I don't know if that's experience, if it's age, if it's nostalgia, or if it's just wanting to be outside and have something different than the inside view that I've had for the past week or so.

But it feels good to sit outside and soak in some raise in the mid-40s. A lot different that it feels when I'm at the beach, but it still feels good.

Weekends and shift work ~

As an air traffic control specialist I worked shift work for many years. I had weird days off and worked different shifts on my workdays. For example, for several years I had Tuesday Wednesday days off. I would work Thursday evening, Friday evening, Saturday either a dayshift or an earlier evening shift, an early dayshift on Sunday, and then in early dayshift on Monday or sometimes a mid-shift on Sunday night into Monday morning. When I got a little bit of seniority I got to move to Monday Tuesday days off, and then as I got older I got Sunday Monday days off. Because I worked shift work it always bothered me when staff people with straight days with weekends off walk around laughing that it was Friday and they were about to have a nice weekend. If it was a holiday weekend they were to have a nice three day weekend while I work almost every holiday. I did get extra pay for working the holiday but I did not get very many holidays off for many years.

At one point I took a staff job so that I can have weekends off with my family of-small children I made a point to not celebrate the weekends that way. Because I understood how it grated on the nerves of the people working shifts and just starting their week on a Friday evening shift because they just came off their weekend of Wednesday Thursday days off.

Now that I'm older and much deeper into my career I'm in a position where I have straight days and weekends off. I'm still available to do things as needed at night or on weekends, but that does not happen very often.

I still make a point of not talking about "happy weekend" or "have a good weekend" and/or "thank God it's Friday" or any of those things. Because I know that so many people that work shift work either can't really bugs them when they have to work and other people are celebrating getting their time off.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy my time off. I love being at home with my wife. And being able to go and do things. It's odd now because every time I go to do things there's lots of other people doing those things also. One of the benefits of the shiftwork that I worked was being able to have my car worked on or have someone come in and repair something at the house and I didn't have to take leave to do it. I just did it on my day off.

I guess I'm trying to say that I'm sensitive to what those around me are doing and what they are working. I like to ask questions and find out if that nurse is just coming off a 3 12 hour shifts a day rotation. That's why the nurse gets four days off, because there were caring for people 12 hours in a day. Often times 12 hours in the night.

I suggest trying not to glory about a benefit people with "normal" schedules tend to take for granted and don't complain about so many other people trying to do what you're doing.

Enjoy!

Over the Rainbow ~

Last night I was eating dinner with my wife at our table in our kitchen. I had some music playing on our streaming device. The song "Over the rainbow" came on. And I cried.

"Over the rainbow" is one of my favorite songs that I try *not* to listen to. Because almost every time I listen to that song I cry. Sometimes just a couple tears. Sometimes deep heaving sobs. Often somewhere in between those two extremes. But the song makes me cry.

Even thinking about it makes my eyes start to water up. I don't know if it's Pavlovian reaction now. I think it has something to do with the words and the message.

For a while I kept a dish of lemon drops on my desk at work. They never melted away.

And I often wonder why, oh why can't I do certain things.

You can listen to the song at https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Ooxpz0Eqk&feature=share

Enjoy!

Old commercials ~

Commercials that I enjoy hearing are not from today. In my effort to avoid the commercials today in podcasts and radio I came up with my own daily listening podcast. It has devotionals and old-time radio episodes that help distract me and educate me and lead me to thinking about things that I want to think about.

It's funny listening to old-time radio. In the episodes from the 1930s, 40s, 1950s I hear commercials about cigarettes, tires that move water away like windshield wipers, and soaps that clean the floors to a shine without any rubbing. It's amazing!

But I enjoy the commercials from 70 or 80 years ago because they're so different from yet so much like today.

Use this and you will be better! Use this and you won't have any bitter aftertaste! Get a shine without having to expend any effort. It's amazing!

Marketing hasn't changed a whole lot in 100 years. I'm hoping that virtual reality will exert some influence of hope and change, but I don't know that it will.

We'll see...

Thought we were paid ~

We have had two foreign exchange students come and stay in our home. One was from Spain. One was from China. The one from Spain was a girl. The one from China was a boy.

Both were interesting experiences that lead to very interesting outcomes in our family. We ended up going and visiting the girl student's family in Spain and spent almost 2 weeks staying with them and touring around Spain. It was amazing!

The parents of the exchange student from China actually came to our house a couple of times toward the end of the school year. He was having challenges concentrating on school and they came to help him focus as well as came to celebrate his graduation from high school.

The exchange student from China was the more challenging experience. He would actually try to hide from me and act like I didn't exist. The funniest part about it was he would walk by my desk upstairs on his way to go and see one of my sons and he would actually hide behind the corner of all and then while I was looking at something that the screen or keyboard he would try to sneak by without me seeing him. It was very funny I finally actually asked him why he hid from me and avoided me and why he did not even talk to me in the mornings when he was preparing for school and eating breakfast and when I came home where he came home and he couldn't avoid seeing. He mumbled a couple of answers four times and while he was doing that he made excuses and would not even look to me. I had explained to him that he was a guest in our home and that the student exchange program was an exchange and not just somebody living in our house.

At that point I felt a little bit froggy so I asked them if he realized that we were not getting any payment for him to stay with us. The look of shock on his face as he shook his head was disappointing. He explained that he thought that we were being paid and that he had no responsibility to talk or deal with us.

I explained to him that he was not renting a room, that he was a guest in our home, and that as a guest in our home he was being disrespectful when he avoided me and hid from me. I told him that we had invited him to be a part of our family in an effort to help them, and that everything else we were doing, from asking him to watch movies with us to taking him places to talking to him was an effort to help him learn and understand English and our culture a little bit better.

I don't know that he ever understood that. When his mother came mid-school year she was very focused on helping their only child pass high school. Which was much less rigorous than Chinese high school.

When both the mother and father came to celebrate his graduation from high school there is still this distance from him but the parents were very open and very appreciative of everything that we had tried to teach him.

I don't know if it's the difference between boys and girls, but he was not very receptive to being part of us and our family. Our exchange student from Spain was very receptive and handled us as best as she could. We're a different kind of family, and there's a lot of different energy running around in our house. She adapted well to it and actually seem to do pretty good.

If you ever have occasion to have an exchange student make sure that they understand if you're being paid to host them or not. That seemed to make a huge difference in our experiences with our exchange students. God bless America for encouraging exchanges like this!

YouVersion Bible app ~

So in an effort to grow closer to my wife and grow closer to God I have been doing devotionals in the EU version Bible have for about a year.

The devotionals are quick little blurbs about a lesson about the Bible and then some Bible verses. They're written by YouVersion staff people or by other big Christian names like TD Jakes, Craig Groschel, and others. And you can do them in a social fashion with other people. I haven't really involved too many people, the only person I've involved is my wife. She has different devotionals going on with friends and family all over the place like women do.

But my goal is to do something with her that we could do at different times without being tied down to a specific time and day every day of the week but also have something in common to talk about in relation to God and the Bible. In that respect it's been a huge success!

We don't talk about the devotionals a lot, but when we do we know what we've been reading and we can relate to each other in respect to what the devotional said. It's also fun to pose different things and encourage different thought as we go through each devotional.

I've enjoyed it. Please give it a try! You can find the YouVersion Bible app at this address:
https://youversion.com/products/

Enjoy!

Wordscapes strategy ~

So here is one of the things that I do to reduce frustration in my life, small frustration that it is:

I play this game called Wordscapes on my iPad almost every afternoon or evening. I do it so that I can say that I play games and also to exercise my brain at the same time with the cool word game on my device.

It offers little awards when you start out if you been away for a day or more. And one of the things it offers is a present that you have to tap on to collect. It gives you coins in different amounts, 10, 15, 20 or even 30 or 40 points. But it always gives you a choice of three boxes when it opens that window.

When I first started playing this game I would try to pick the box with the most coins in it and I would always end up getting 10 coins. Every once in a while I'd hit something bigger but usually only got 10 coins. I started to feel like this result happened because I kept picking a different box and it would be different every day.

To reduce my frustration when starting the game I started just picking the same present box in the same position every day. I've done that for more than a year and I've had a varied response from the app. Sometimes I get 10 coins, sometimes I get 20 or 30 points. But it's always changing and never the same even though I keep picking the same exact box on the screen.

Silly, I know. But that is one of the ways that I reduce friction and frustration in my life. Even though I like variety I tend to find a pattern and stick to it. Pretty funny!