Sunday, May 24, 2009

Quick Shots

Here are a few photos Andrew has taken, presented without commentary:








Friday, May 22, 2009

Culture of Chai




I never got around to posting a lot of thoughts about my first trip to Turkey, here's one of them:

Of course there were many cultural differences to be found, but I've been thinking a lot lately about chai. In some parts of the world chai is a milk/tea/spice drink, but in Turkish it is simply the word for tea. After every meal they sit and have hot chai. I was only there in the winter, so I don't know if that's just a cold weather thing or an all the time thing. I suspect it's the latter.*

* It is, in fact, the latter. I was very happy to find this time around that chai has nothing to do with the weather at all. It's just as popular in May as it was back in January.

What strikes me about being a chai culture is what it represents. Why would anyone sit around after a meal (and we're talking all three meals of the day here) just to have tea? To sit and visit, of course! Relationships are highly valued there, so sitting and talking is a great way to spend more of your time.

It's not that relationships aren't important in America, but we seem to have something we value even more: efficiency. Most of us don't sit around and visit after a meal because we don't have time for it. There are just too many other important things to do with the time. At my house the process of eating dinner together might not take more than ten or fifteen minutes. I know others are so busy that they often don't have time to sit and eat at all - it might simply be grabbing something from a drive through and eating in the car on the way to somewhere else.

In trying to invest in international students at Northwest, I've found that the most important issue is simply spending time together. Sure it's great to help meet a need like providing furniture or a ride to WalMart. But then what? Is that the end, or is it a means to something more?

Maybe this is so intuitive to others that it's laughable to even post this. But while we're so busy trying to squeeze the most out of our time, we too have this same cry for relationships. It's almost as if we have competing desires, between being productive and connecting with people. Unfortunately our schedules are packed with important commitments which usually mean we have to sacrifice the relationships first.

I'm realizing more and more that I need to trim some responsibilities from my plate so I have more time with people. And even when I am around people, I need to make a greater effort to actually connect with them, and not simply be "around" people.

A second trip to Turkey has simply reinforced this truth.

Friday, May 08, 2009

Seriously?

By now I'm sure most people know that Manny Ramirez tested positive for a banned substance and will be serving a 50 game suspension from baseball. I realize I only have a few selected clips from the paper, but I want to throw this one out there:

In a statement, Manny said, "Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue... He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was okay to give me. Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility. I have been advised not to say anything more for now. I do want to say one other thing; I've taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons."

What's the deal here? Are we really supposed to believe Manny had no idea what was going on? Apparently the substance is "a female fertility drug that can also be used as a antidote to diminished testosterone levels at the end of a cycle of steroid treatments."

It's quite possible that everything he's saying in there is true. He had a "personal health issue." The doctor gave him "medication, not a steroid" that the doctor though "was okay to give." Those could all be true statements, and yet still be a complete cover to hide what was really going on.

And the way he says "that mistake is now my responsibility" makes him sound like a victim. Yet he's not going to appeal the results or the punishment dealt out by MLB. It's hard to believe an innocent ballplayer would sit back and take something like this quietly, which further leads me to believe it's true. Especially one who has "taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons."

It's amazing how easy it is to own up to something without really owning up to anything at all.*

* Yes, I realize this comes off a bit self-righteous, and who knows what I would do if I were a professional ballplayer. And yes, I do have plenty of struggles of my own, so it would be perfectly legit to say something about planks or stones. I was just struck by this statement this morning and wanted to throw some thoughts out there.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

New Family Fun



We picked up a new game the other day that has turned out to be a lot of fun. It's called Slamwich and here are the rules. It's one of those types of games that requires pattern recognition and quick hands and lots of slapping the table!

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Productive Day

At 8am this morning, Zach and I began moving furniture around and proceeded to tear up our old carpet and pad. Then we spent an hour or so pulling staples out of the floor along with random nails and things. When that was finally out of the way, our local flooring expert Kevin came over and helped us install laminate flooring! We wrapped up our day right at 6pm, knocking out the living room and dining room. Tomorrow we're going to try and finish the kids' rooms.

Here's our wonderful old carpet on its last day:


Here's a shot of the amazing tile that was hiding under the carpet in the dining room:


And here's a glimpse at the finished product:

Ah the Memories

So here we are getting the kids ready on Wednesday morning. One of the kids makes a comment about peaches, which naturally leads Karin to sing a song. I had to load up the video on YouTube so they could enjoy the song in all its glory. The ninjas at the end are classic!

Quick Wednesday Morning Thoughts

  • Go Royals! - when I signed up for DVR last spring, I only did it because the Royals had a new deal with Fox Sports KC that would put almost all of their games on TV. Last year was fine, but this year it's really turning out to be a great decision. I don't know what's going on with the team, but it's a lot of fun! They're winning games they never would've won in the past, including last night's slugfest against Chicago. I was really tired and went to bed at the end of the 10th, but I'll catch the 11th on DVR here real soon. Great job out of the pen last night by Jamey Wright!

  • Greinke Fun Facts - If you read my blog, you know by now that I'm a big fan of Joe Posnanski. Much of what he writes is must-read in my book, but you've got to check out these stats on Greinke so far. I especially like 5, 6 and 8.

  • Worth Repeating - I hope to see a few more of these this season, but the other night Billy Butler had an outstanding game: a single, a double and two home runs. Once again, Joe Poz comes through in splendid fashion, giving me a genuine laugh-out-loud moment, terming such an accomplishment as a "Billy Cycle." To quote Joe, "Billy is a terrific young hitter but, to be brutally frank, that triple probably isn’t happening." I'll take a Billy Cycle any day!

  • Cool Hand Luke? - Like many others, I'm wondering what in the world Sydney Ponson is doing as a continuing member of the Royals rotation. Interesting stat today: Royals without Ponson = 16-6. Meanwhile, Luke is tearing it up in AAA with a 5-0 record and a 1.13 ERA. What I really don't get is this quote from Trey: "I’m thrilled for Luke. I hope at some point we do get to see him, but I don’t want it to be because somebody is not performing or because we have an injury." Uhhh, is there a third option? Death? Abduction by aliens?

  • Idol Rocks - Last night was Rock Night on American Idol, and it was AWESOME! I definitely enjoyed it more than any other Idol so far, I think it was enough to completely wash the taste of Country Night out of my mouth. I agree with Randy that Kris and Danny sounded AMAZING together in their duet, even if they didn't do so well individually. Hard to guess who goes home tonight. Danny's never been in the bottom three and is probably safe. Adam was in his element last night and is probably safe. At this point I actually like Kris more than Allison, although that's like saying you like peanut butter cookies more than chocolate chip. They're both really, really good!

  • New Project Today - We spent a sizable amount of money yesterday on laminate flooring, and today the project begins! We ended up getting a great deal, so we decided to go ahead and do the kids' rooms as well. We've heard of many, many people that have done this themselves, hopefully it goes as easily as we are expecting it to. It will be nice to have some guys helping out, too, especially Kevin who has a background in flooring.

  • Spoils of War - I got my new set of Wow Minis, and I'm really excited about these figures. Even better was the fact that I got several loot cards I could sell on ebay. One went for over $100! I don't know why someone would pay that much for a Foam Sword Rack, but it's a great trade for me!!

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Adventures In St Joe

Quite awhile ago we got connected with Dave Ramsey's financial advice and have been big fans ever since. In that time I've also seen Dave speak in person twice at the Catalyst Conference and thoroughly enjoyed him both times. In fact, the first year I went he was the best speaker there.

Dave has some very simple steps to get people headed toward financial freedom, and it's something I wish we would've learned before we got married. First off is to set up a $1,000 emergency fund. The reason for that is that if you decide to immediately try to get out of debt, what do you do when an emergency comes up? You likely get into more debt. So you do whatever necessary to get your $1,000 emergency fun in place as quickly as possible.

After that you start working on paying off your debt. Dave suggests the "debt snowball" method, which is a very good idea. Basically you pay the minimum on all your debts except for the smallest one. On the smallest one, you pay as much as you possibly can each month. Once that one's paid off, you take the amount you were paying on the smallest and apply it to the new smallest. As you pay off debts, the amount you're paying toward each one snowballs until you've got them all paid off. Sweet!

After you're debt free (except for a mortgage, that comes later), you start working on an extended emergency fund. The amount depends, but it should cover four to six months of living expenses. We've had this done for several months and have been dragging our feet in moving on to step four: investing for retirement.

The main thing about investing is that I don't know anything about it. It seems like you could go in a thousand different directions, which left us paralyzed. Where do you start? A few weeks ago a Dave-approved financial adviser was at our church to talk about investments and we set up an appointment with him for yesterday.

Things didn't start out so well. Our appointment was at 9am in St Joe, so we took Allison to school and then hit the road. The office is in downtown St Joe, which is an area we're unfamiliar with. That being the case, we arrived early since we were able to find the place with no problems. He wasn't in the office yet, but the secretary assured us he would be there at 9am. No problem, we'll just wait for ten minutes.

9:00 comes and no adviser. 9:05 rolls around and the secretary starts to act surprised, so she tries tracking him down on his cell phone. No luck. 9:10, she tries him at home. No answer. 9:15, I decide to start reading some of these Forbes magazines laying in front of me. I now understand what's wrong with Nascar's financial set up! Finally, at 9:30, we decide to leave. This is very disappointing, as we've set up somewhere for Allison to go after school just to make this trip, and now we'll have to do it all over again.

So we take off, and after we're about five minutes down the road, I get a call on my cell phone. Somehow he thought the meeting was at 10 and promised he would be at the office soon. We turned around and got there at about 9:45.

As we pulled back in to the building, we parked at the same two hour parking we'd been at before. The exact same spot. I wondered aloud if that was a good idea, but was already a little bit annoyed at having left and returned, so I was just eager to get inside.

Once we finally connected at 10am, things went quite well. I'm now the proud owner of a Roth IRA with a pretty diversified portfolio. It's not worth much, but it feels good to finally be started. He did a very good job answering our questions and I think he gave us some great advice.

Our initial plan was to hit Home Depot and Target while we were in St Joe, but we were now out of time and would simply have to head back to Maryville. As we're walking back to the van, what's that on the windshield? It can't be! Yes, it is. A $7 parking ticket. Apparently leaving for ten minutes in the middle of your 3 hour stint doesn't keep you from getting a ticket.

No, $7 isn't a big deal, it's more of the principle of the thing. We were never there for more than two hours and shouldn't have a ticket at all. Of course we'd have to go back to St Joe to protest the ticket, and it's cheaper to pay $7 than the gas (and time) we'd lose otherwise.

It's funny how annoying something like that can be. A simple mix up of our meeting time kept us from getting to Home Depot (to buy some laminate flooring) and also got us this irritating ticket. But what happened today? Since we missed Home Depot, we decided to try our local Sutherlands out. Not only did we get a better deal (who knew?) but the stuff we bought ended up being on sale as well! That right there saved us another $100.

So now I'm glad we got detained in St Joe yesterday, but I still wish it hadn't cost me $7 :P