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• George H.W. Bush and Barbara have such a large family it would be easy to mistake them for being Catholic or Mormon.
• One of my favorite memories of former president George H.W. Bush involves him attending a Cowboys game at Texas Stadium sometime after he left office. It may have been a playoff game against the Packers. Madden and Summerall were on the call. Bush was in a suite drinking a glass of milk. The camera focused on him and Madden used the telestrator to circle the milk and commented on the wholesome image and the great example he was setting drinking something healthy instead of alcohol or soda. I looked for a good two minutes for the video but most of my searches resulted in Frank Caliendo doing a Madden or George W. Bush bit. So let this be a lesson to you kids, avoid broccoli but drink your milk and you too can live to 94 years of age.
• I saw some people on social media didn’t understand why former senator Bob Dole saluted G.H.W. Bush with his left hand. I guess they didn’t realize he basically had his arm blown off by a machine gun in WWII and learned to cope. He often held a pen in that hand to try to minimize the effect it had on it.
• Y’all know I’m a sucker for presidential history, but I’m not a fan of these state funerals because it makes the person and the office monarchal. We are a system of checks and balances, separate but equal power, and this stuff tends to tilt importance and power to the chief executive. I also think too much money is spent on these sort of things – federal employees (and I) get a paid day off, a presidential aircraft transports the body to and from Washington, personnel, security, yadda, yadda, yadda. I prefer the simpleness of Nixon’s funeral, but then again, his had to be toned down because of that whole resignation thing.
• Speaking of Nixon, and Trump, many think it’s a tradition for a sitting president to speak at a former president’s funeral. It’s not, though it has happened for the last three. For instance, LBJ died just two days after Nixon’s second inauguration and he didn’t speak at LBJ’s funeral. Truman died just a month before LBJ and didn’t have a state funeral, which I read mainly because his wife didn’t wish for it. With the death of those two, there were no other living former presidents.
• It’s well noted that only two pairs of father and sons have become president. However, John Quincy Adams was the sitting president when his father died (as well as Thomas Jefferson on the same day – July 4, 1826). If it were not for Jefferson’s death, I bet Quincy would have had his father lie in the White House. In case you were wondering, Jefferson was buried the day after his death, Adams three days after going to the great beyond.
• Eight presidents have had funeral processions down Pennsylvania Avenue, including all four presidents to die by assassination. Again, less is more.
• A bit before Thanksgiving my neighbor lost his wife to cancer. It was her second bout and her son recently became a teenager. It’s hard trying to be there for a neighbor and friend without trying to be intrusive.
• That same week, a former medical doctor of mine committed suicide leaving behind two young children.
• I work from home and have converted a room to a small home office. Every day, OtherDogGeedingII, the new pup, will bring a different toy from BoyGeeding or DaughterGeeding’s room into the office and prompt me to play. Sure, I could easily have the kids close the door to their rooms and resolve this “problem” but it’s entertaining to see what the pup brings me when he wants my attention.
• It took her three years, but DaughterGeeding earned her black belt in Taekwondo. I know some of you think these things are trivial and just a way for adults to make money off of parents. Even if that’s the case, along the way, she picked up some confidence and discipline and learned how to set an achieve a long-term goal (this one took over a third of her life). Sure, she ain’t no Bruce Lee and not a fighter, this was more about form and technique. For instance, from memory, she had to perform the technique for all her previous belts – white, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, brown, red, and black/red.

  
  

• To mark her achievement, I took one of the boards she had to break for her black belt test and made a personalized Christmas ornament out of it by carving, painting, and matting. She seemed to appreciate it, and I hope it’s something which hangs on her tree with her future family after I’m no longer part of this earth.
  
• Harvard Professor Suggests Eating Only 6 French Fries Per Meal
• The crazy thing about growing old is seeing others grow old.

It’s going to be an empty BagOfNothing for a while, which is a bit of a misnomer in itself – A bag of nothing is an empty bag so I shouldn’t have to make the distinction, but I digress. I don’t know how long it will be empty, and nothing major or behind the scenes is going on, I just need to take a step back.

In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment and tell me something you have changed your mind about and what caused the changed. I’ll start. For all of my teen years, I couldn’t stand U2, the name sounded stupid, they were too flashy, and Bono dressing like the devil (MacPhisto) made me align them with the worship of Satan. One day in college a friend was playing U2 music videos and Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me was on the television, part of the soundtrack of a Batman movie. It’s basically a long cartoon, but at one point, C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters randomly appeared. I only heard of the author a week prior and thought the idea of a book of letters written by Satan was fascinating. The idea of “mock the devil and he shall flee” is addressed in the forward or somewhere at the beginning of the Lewis’ book. This is what Bono was doing with his MacPhisto alter ego and the C.S. Lewis hat tip was kinda cool. It’s then I realized I was judging a book by its cover, or in this case, a band and their music. It made me think there was something deeper and more meaningful to their lyrics, that I was too quick to judge when it came to most things.