Month: January 2018

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Returns Christmas Tree to Costco

I saw articles concerning this incident a few days ago and thought it was a joke, but apparently it isn’t. A woman in Santa Clara, California was spotted returning a Christmas tree to the Costco at which she bought it because it was now “dead”. Scott Bentley took the above photo of the woman returning the tree.

Seriously I am all for being cheap, I try not to spend money that I don’t have to and I am all for working the system, but there is working the system and then there is basically taking advantage of a lenient return policy to be a crook. You can find articles concerning this all over the web now. Here’s the Fortune article I read concerning the incident. This Reddit thread of odd returns that Costco employees have dealt with is also pretty fun.

 

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Word Time Traveler & Living Faith

If you want an interesting link for wasting some time you might enjoy Time Traveler by Meriam-Webster. I first heard about this link via the podcast 99% Invisible. If you haven’t listened to 99% Invisible before I would recommend you checking into the podcast. Anyhow Time Traveler is a feature of the online version of the Meriam-Webster dictionary that lists the year of the first occurrence of various popular, and at one time popular, words. Language is a living thing and thus constantly changing. Words die, are born, and change meaning throughout time as we and our culture do also.

Time Traveler shows just a sample of words first used within certain years, but looking through the years you can see modern trends and values take shape. You can also see older trends and values that we have moved away from, both for the good and bad. We call languages that don’t change “dead languages” and in reality at least our understanding of them continue to change as we discover more concerning word meanings and how they were used. Koine Greek (the Greek with which the New Testament is written) has been a living language since around 300 AD (It was used as an official language in Byzantine for much longer but let’s not go there) but our understanding of Koine continues to grow and improve.

“Dead languages”  come from dead cultures while living languages come from living cultures. Living languages and cultures change because the circumstances and environments they are located within change. This doesn’t mean rejecting our core values, rather it means letting our core values expand into areas that we hadn’t considered at before. Our country’s Founding Fathers wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” at a time when they had a very wrong understanding of who a man was and wasn’t, and didn’t understand that it should be “that all people are created equal”. The value was already there but our understanding of it changed in a very good manner.

The same should be true with our faith. Our understanding of the core of our faith should expand and grow. That doesn’t mean the actual core of our faith changes but our understanding of that core changes. It should widen into areas that we had never considered before. This isn’t change for change’s sake. It is allowing our faith to grow. If my faith had a “time traveler” feature and I could go back and look at some of the things that I believed when I first became a follower of Jesus I know that I would laugh and possibly cry about those beliefs. I believed Jesus is Lord back then but I didn’t have as broad of an understanding of what that meant. There are changes that can lead us away from the core of our faith, but that doesn’t mean we should avoid change. Instead it means that we have to constantly be making sure that our understanding of and, more importantly, our love of Jesus enlarges into more of our lives.

Living things change. Living faith does too.

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Two Dollar Bills

Soon, my lady, you will be running on the back roads again.

A friend stores Buddy the Mustang during the cold, road salty months of Wisconsin’s Winter. He gives me a good deal and I appreciate that. I tend to go by once a month to start Buddy and pay him for the storage. Last year I developed the habit of paying him in $2 bills when I remembered to go by the bank and ask for them before heading out to his place. It makes me laugh and he seems to get a kick out of it too, or at least he puts up with it bringing me joy. Today I went by to start Buddy for the month and figured I would go ahead and pay him through March. Thankfully I thought to go by the bank first and was able to pay him $2 bills.

I’m sure this is meaningless to everyone else but the thought of handing him $120 in two dollar bills is going to keep me smiling for a while.  I’m smiling to myself right now thinking about it. Which is probably kind of creepy being as I am at Emy J’s coffee & ice cream shop right now sitting by myself and typing this on my blog. “Mommy, why is that the man with the “grumpy old man” hat smiling so big as he types on his keyboard? Just avoid eye contact and walk away kids!” Yep, it’s the little things in life. 🙂

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The Best Sports Season is Over

College football is my favorite sport. I love the passion and excitement. I love ( and sometimes hate) the drama that each game can, and so often does, provide. I love the fact that 85% of the players on the best teams and 99% on the other teams are playing just because they love to play football and/or they love their school.. I love the rivalries and the fans.

Anyhow now I will have to wait till September for my weekly dose of spectator sports induced cardio activity. So for now I will record a few of my thoughts from the game last night. My thoughts won’t be a good as my friends Bernard or Grant ,who both offer excellent sports insights – even if they do so sporadically.

  • Watching a game with my kids when we are all pulling for the same team is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon or evening. Watching a championship game where I am pulling for one side and one of my sons has rooted for the other team for years is no where near as much fun. Actually it basically stinks. I hope Alabama and Georgia never play another meaningful game against each other, though I know that is an unrealistic wish.
  • Jalen Hurts handled being benched as well anyone ever has. He was a gentleman and a very good teammate. I was very impressed with him. Bama definitely made it to the finals in large part because of him and the way he handled being benched in the second half helped them to win the whole thing.
  • Benching your starting QB (who has pretty much done nothing but win for the past two years) for the second half of the national championship game is a strong move. Saban has the clout to make a move like that and survive, but man that was still an impressive move.
  • Georgia is going to continue to be scary good over the next several years. From the number of true Freshmen making plays for Alabama last night it looks like there is a really good chance that Alabama will simply “reload” again for next year. This should be a match up that we see several times at least in the SEC championship. I can’t imagine two SEC teams being allowed into the playoffs again anytime soon.
  • 5 Championships in 9 years is absurd. “The Process” that Nick Saban pushes within Bama definitely produces results. HT to Lindsey for this interesting article on the Masochism of Nick Saban.
  • Before the game Pam and I made a bet with friends of ours who live in Athens, work in a campus ministry at UGA, and have a son who plays in the band. We would send them cheese is Georgia won and they would send us something from Georgia is the Bulldogs won. I look forward to seeing what they send us.
  • If my friends who are Big 10 fans who live around me want to complain about Alabama being in the playoffs they should blame Wisconsin. If Wisconsin had won the Big 10 championship Alabama would not have been in the playoffs. After losing to Iowa there was little chance that Ohio State was ever going to go into the playoffs ahead of a one loss Alabama team. The University of Central Florida has a better argument but I wasn’t surprised that they were left out of the playoffs.
  • While I am glad that Georgia’s Tyler Simmons was called offsides, he sure didn’t look offsides to me. Of course, all dealing with bad calls is a part of the game.

Anyhow Roll Tide Roll!

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The History of the SEC Chant

A few years ago I posted concerning why I believe SEC fans chanted SEC. The post is here and it is consistently one of the most read posts on my blog. Yesterday Kirby, a friend and former neighbor, posted this article from ESPN concerning the actual history of the SEC chant. I remember Arkansas chanting this during their basketball championship runs but I didn’t realize that was most likely the origin of the chant. So I guess I am thankful for something that has come out of Arkansas. Who knew?!?!?

Most of my friends and acquaintances around here don’t care that much about college football, unless Wisconsin is winning (which most years means they don’t care very much 😁), so they usually don’t get the whole SEC chant thing. I suspect they will hear a great deal of “S!E!C!” tonight. I sure hope Bama wins, but no matter what it is going to be a fun night watching the game with my Georgia loving youngest son and chatting about the game on Twitter and Facebook with my SEC loving friends around the nation.

Roll Tide Roll!

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Freeze Your Credit

Pam jokingly refers to Clark Howard as my “man crush”.  I do really like listening to his podcast and I definitely often recite some of his financial wisdom to other people around me. For example, today as we were tearing down our equipment from Tapestry‘s Sunday morning gathering I talked with a couple of “threads” concerning some of Clark’s advice. In this case the advice was to freeze your credit.

Here’s Clark Howard’s guide on freezing and thawing your credit at each of the three major agencies.

I wish it didn’t cost anything for us to freeze our credit because it shouldn’t. The credit agencies should not be able to charge me to keep them from selling personal information they have about me that I didn’t give them permission to gather. Perhaps the state that you live in agrees with this sentiment and has told the agencies that they can’t charge you for the freeze or the thaw. Wisconsin allows each agency to charge $10 for freezes and thaws. Still it is money well spent because it is the best way to protect your credit. It keeps people from being able to pretend to be you and take loans or apply for credit cards in your name.

Anyhow, go read Clark Howard’s post and then freeze your credit.

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Car Repair in the Winter vs Any Other Time of the Year

Adam’s car is one of the cars hit by the Takata airbag recall. So I took it in the have that fixed.  Roosevelt (the name of his hatchback) recently developed a slight vibration in the steering wheel which I assumed was an out of balance tire. Let’s go ahead and have that fixed before getting his car back to him.  While driving his car to the mechanic I thought “hmmm, the car is slowing down faster than it should when I push the clutch in. I wonder if a brake caliper is sticking?” So I asked the mechanic to look at that. I was right, one rear brake caliper is sticking and the other shows signs of having stuck (i.e. bluing of the brake disc).  So I thought I would use this moment to briefly explain the difference between car repairs in Wisconsin during the the Winter versus any other time of the year.

Any other time of the year other than Winter: I need new rear brake pads, discs, and calipers for the rear of the car? Well I can do that. I’ll set aside Saturday morning for that.

Winter in Wisconsin: I need new rear brake pads, discs, and calipers for the rear of the car and it will cost more than double the cost of me doing it myself? Yeah that seems fair. Do it.

My desire not to have to handle metal parts that have been sitting in negative temps turns me into a much better customer for auto mechanics.

SIDE NOTE – Yes I could use my garage but even that is more complicated than you would think. Salt and snow from the road make for a still very cold and wet garage floor.

SIDE SIDE NOTE – Conor, I hope you don’t mind that I used a photo of you from when we were working on Buddy.