I don’t have a desire to become a celebrity, but should it happen, I hope it’s somewhere below or above “Big Brother” and “Dancing with the Stars” status.
I noticed Chick-fil-A’s plastic utensils are a new color, a dark blue-grayish color. I like the color so much I’d be willing to take a piece to get color matched and paint my home office that color.
DaughterGeeding and BoyGeeding will both be baptized this Sunday. As I’ve mentioned, our pastor will be retiring this March so I think this may be his last baptism as pastor of our church. Our pastor requires a short home visit before the baptism, which I like because it’s a bit old-fashioned and gives me the “small town” feeling. There are so many mega-churches in DFW I wonder how often the senior or lead pastor actually visits the home of a congregant. In case you are wondering, our church membership is around 250 and the baptism won’t be full immersion, but more than just a sprinkle.
Oddly, we received two Christmas cards in the mail yesterday. Both had a postmark date after the first of the year, were from different states, and both wrote an apology for sending them so late.
I’ll give President Trump political points for delaying Speaker Pelosi’s Air Force travel overseas. He’s right, she shouldn’t be traveling when the government is shut down. Though, I think he would have scored more political points with her actually being over there and drawing attention to it while he is home abroad. But I’ll also note, Pelosi has done her part, the House already passed legislation to reopen the government. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has twice blocked the House bill to reopen the government, not even allowing it to be voted on and rejected a compromise proposal from his own caucus. He reasons nothing should be voted on unless he’s sure the president will sign it. McConnell is out of the spotlight, probably scoring the most political points out of them all.
I’m a government contractor and very, very fortunate my assigned project is deemed essential enough that I continue to work and receive a paycheck. Not all my coworkers are as fortunate. My company has this program in which we can donate any unused vacation we rolled over from last year (we can roll over up to 40 hours) to coworkers who aren’t able to work and would go without pay. Unlike federal workers, contractors won’t receive any backpay. This vacation donation program was employee-inspired and implemented during a previous shutdown. My company has treated me exceptionally well over the years. Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of my back surgery. Unprovoked, they gave me an extra two weeks time off with pay to ensure my back properly healed and that I didn’t return to work sooner than need be. They actually offered me more time than that. With that in mind, and knowing I have the added benefit of working from home unlike my coworkers in DC, I donated the entirety of my 40 hours. The CEO of my company was recently interviewed for this CNN article about how she’s trying to protect her workforce during this government shutdown. In it, she states how the bank was willing to extend her line of credit, and she has kept the equity line of credit open on her home to fund payroll if needed. Other options for our company should the shutdown extends:
The first is to pay employees 80% of what they are owed, she said. The second is to let her staff go so they can apply for unemployment, then rehire them when the government opens again, and the third is to institute rolling leave without pay. She’s concerned that if she gets to that place, she’ll start to lose her top talent.
While my back isn’t where I’d like it to be a year from surgery, I don’t regret having the surgery. It would eat at me if never had the surgery and be left with the thought of what would have been. I pretty much knew the answer of going through life without the surgery. It’s hard to remember pain, but I think I’m better now than I was before. However, I take responsibility and accept I would feel better about the whole experience if I were consistent with my daily exercise and stretching.
The Texas Rangers ballclub still have not announced what playing surface their new stadium will have. It’s speculated it will be natural, but not grass.
Crushed coconut husks and sand make up a large percentage of the “infill” in Shaw Sports Turf’s new baseball-specific B1K (as in “batting 1.000) turf. The mixture is designed to enhance the playability for baseball and the safety for players. It is a dramatic change from last generation of turf, which uses rubber pellets as the infill.
While reading this SI.com article on Sean Payton’s time assisting coaching Liberty Christian in Argyle during his forced sabbatical, I noticed one picture was taken at Camp Copass in Denton. I volunteered there a couple of weeks for two or three summers.
Kodak’s official date system, one with a 13-month calendar of equal 28-days and instituted by George Eastman back in 1928, was used until 1989.
The system, originally proposed by a chap called Moses B. Cotsworth in 1902, is called the “International Fixed Calendar”. It splits the year into 13 months of 28 days each, with one or two days each year not belonging to any month. The extra month, called “Sol”, appeared between June and July.
For some of you, “Sol” will make you think of Matt Damon poop potatoes.
Few things make me feel dumber than trying to use a fake drawer handle on furniture, or fake pockets on clothes.
Every work day I feel like I’m trapped in the ’90s. My neighbor’s car alarm goes off twice a day despite nothing touching it. Car alarms seem like such a dated problem.
Thankfully, I haven’t experienced this problem in quite a while. Writing with a pencil, making a mistake, and to make things better, trying to erase only to find out the eraser is old and dried up and it just smears things up to holy hell.
Sticker residue from stickers which are supposed to come off grind my gears. My gears are further ground by those stickers which tear leaving only the bottom paper layer.
Jeff Fisher, who looks like he should have had a career NASCAR rather than the NFL, doesn’t have that great of a career win/loss record, .512. He only coached two teams, but consider this, those two teams played “home games” in five different cities and six different stadiums. Jerry Jones has an interesting relationship with him, and I can totally see him as the Cowboys next coach, not that Redball is going anywhere soon.
The last book I read about presidential history stated Nancy Reagan made couples sit at different tables at state dinners to encourage conversation and interaction. This was of great concern to Sylvester Stallone because his girlfriend at the time, Brigette Nielsen, didn’t like to be left alone in the company of strangers, so he called ahead and made a special request for them to be seated together, which was granted. Stallone also had one of his representatives reach out to the Reagan ’84 campaign with another request, he wanted to present President Reagan with the boxing gloves and robe he wore in Rocky IV, but a now-famous former lawyer reviewed the requested publicity stunt.
“The young lawyer wrote back up the chain of command and said, ‘There has already been enough publicity for Rocky, President Reagan has been more than generous with his time. I recommend we decline.’ And you know who wrote that? John Roberts, who is now Chief Justice of the [Supreme Court of the] United States,”
President Reagan’s sense of humor on full display during a West Berlin speech when a balloon unexpectedly and loudly popped. Quick-witted, he was. I’ve seen in some social media circles state this speech was given two months after his assassination attempt, but that’s dead wrong. The assassination attempt was on March 30, 1981, this speech was in June 1987 (01:20:15).
One reason I’ve been hesitant to leave DirecTV is that I have all the channel numbers memorized. So far, I’m happy I switched, but the adjustment is real first world problem.
A reader was kind enough to tell me he heard my hometown of Mineral Wells, Texas mentioned while watching an old western on TCM called Bad Bascom. While researching that I found out Mineral Wells is the setting for the fourth story of little known Marvel character Tex Morgan. The story includes the Ute Reservation, but if my hometown history memory serves me right, the only tribes in the area would have been Comanche or Wichita. However, per Wikipedia:
The name “Comanche” is from the Ute name for them, kɨmantsi (enemy), but known to the French as Padoucas, an adaption of their Sioux name, and among themselves as Nʉmʉnʉ (people).
A TAMU former student informed me of an Aggie effort to consider including personal pronouns in email signatures to help identify gender because of unisex or dual-gender names and names, as well as unfamiliar names from other countries. I’m not saying I’m for or against the idea (I know some of you are pulling your hair out thinking political correctness has run amok), but I experience this awkward issue a lot since so many people in my line of work are from other countries. With a romance language, most female names end in an “a” or vowel. But these Asians, I tell ya, they make everything complicated. At least I only make things half as complicated as they should be.
A funny bit of timing worked out the other day. While reading Barry’s blog he mentioned his heater needed to be repaired which reminded me I need to order a replacement filter for my HVAC unit. As soon as I finished reading that bullet point an email from my preferred filter store arrived in my Inbox with a discount code for twenty percent off. I have to order my filter since isn’t carried by any local stores, it’s an oddly shaped 16″ x 25″ x 1″ which only needs to be changed every six months.
A decade ago, in the depths of the worst recession in modern U.S. history, Arizona lawmakers took perhaps the most extreme step of any state facing massive budget deficits: They sold their state Capitol building and the buildings that house the state House and Senate. Now, with coffers flush with revenue, the state wants to buy those buildings back. Gov. Doug Ducey (R) said Monday he would move to pay off debt and reclaim ownership of legislative buildings, the state fairgrounds and the building that houses the state Supreme Court.
Here’s my crazy political prediction you should bet the pigsty on. In other words, it’s a bunch of crap and slop so don’t even give it any real consideration unless it happens and I’ll take full credit for the stranger than fiction idea. One morning Americans will find out that Trump’s cabinet, in a surprise move, turned on him invoking the 25th Amendment. This will happen because of his refusal to budge on re-opening the government after some budging from the opposing party, not working with his own party, and another month of employees unable to pay bills and business owners’ bottom lines being affected, not to mention the “full faith and credit of the U.S. government” taking a huge hit. Republican strategists are already working on this thinking about how much easier it will be to rally behind Pence for 2020 and making all the Russian collusion and any moral shortcomings of Trump go away. For your Trump supporters, don’t get all sensitive on me, just allow me to dance in my delusions of grandeur for a bit.
BoyGeeding needed a new pair of shoes for school. He “demanded” they have laces this time.
The pastor of our church (the founding pastor of the church, actually) will be retiring in March. We’ve been searching for a new pastor and the process has been a bit cloak and dagger. The new pastor was introduced to the congregation, someone who was once a member and was enthusiastically welcomed. Before we voted as a congregation to accept him, there was an opportunity to ask him questions. Even though the candidate was familiar to the congregation, he hasn’t set foot in our church in seven years so I was surprised at the lack of substantive and foundational questions asked, stuff I’m used to hearing in my Baptist roots. Stuff like, how did you know God called you into the pastoral ministry and how did you come to know Christ? But then again, I’m a deep thinker.
This will be the first time I have a pastor who is younger than me. I better get used to this phase in life. One day I’ll have a boss who is younger than me, as well as a president, maybe even a mother-in-law.
I couldn’t help but laugh at Zeke Elliott after he made a first down and did his trademark “feed me” routine only to immediately ask to be taken out of the game. Hey Zeke, they can’t feed you the ball if you ask to be taken out of the game.
I meant to mention this at the end of the NFL regular season when it was more relevant. Eagles QB Nick Foles fell four snaps short of a $1 million incentive this season, playing just shy of 33% of Philadelphia’s snaps. The Eagles owner worked things out in which Foles will get the bonus. Back in the old days, when people like Tex Schram and Jack Kent Cooke were in charge of payroll and finances, they’d remain hardline saying business is business. But times have changed and what Eagles owner Jeff Lurie is smart. Now that free agency is a thing, an act like that will help recruit players, they feel their owner will do what’s in the players’ best interest instead of what’s best for the bottom line.
I think the new “It Girl” in television commercials is the TurboTax red-head with glasses.
’60 Minutes’ had a great story on Chinese invenstmenton AI. Two parts stood out. One, as the most populous country, they have a plethora of data to collect from humans doing everyday tasks. And two, they had an AI camera focusing on an elementary classroom and could immediately identify when a student was paying attention, distracted, or bored, which allowed the teacher to identified what parts of the lesson to adjust or how to individually tailor something to a particular student, and to figure out when a student is motivated or identify likes and dislikes. The story mainly focused on one Chinese investment capitalist (somewhat of an oxymoron if you think about it). He talked about coming to America as a child and enrolling in a Tennesee school and how the principal would personally tutor him during lunch to learn English. The individual attention he received floored him and he’s trying to instill that culture in Chinese schools. He went on to become an executive at Apple, Microsoft, and Google; and, has a new book out which I’m intereted in.
Kai-Fu Lee: When I arrived in Tennessee, my principal took every lunch to teach me English. And that is the kind of attention that I’ve not been used to growing up in Asia. And I felt that the American classrooms are smaller, encouraged individual thinking, critical thinking. And I felt it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Wichita Falls news – Police were called to a Texas Walmart after a woman was reportedly drinking wine from a Pringles can and riding an electric cart in the parking lot.
I like following Michael Morrell on Twitter and his analysis on the news, he was the former Acting and Deputy Director of the CIA. Recently, he provided this bit of insight on G.H.W. Bush who requested his presidential briefing to have more humor.
I had a similar experience with “41.” On a paper my team wrote for him on a foreign leader, Bush wrote a note to us saying “To his hobbies, add tennis. Likes to play the net. Weak backhand.” His sense of humor is just one of the reasons he was a great man. https://t.co/57znpZy9kM
