Tag Archives: Me

Does this make me a geezer?

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lshs reunion 212x3001 Does this make me a geezer?

50 Year High School Reunion

Just got my invitation for the 50 year High School Reunion.  50 years ago I was sweating acceptance to college and dreaming of getting out of our backwater small town (or at least that is how it seemed to me at the time).  Looking back it was the classic American high school experience (think of the innocence of American Graffiti and you can imagine Lee’s Summit Missouri at the peak of the 50′s.  It’s still got a lot of the same character even though it is now a highly considered suburb of Kansas City with not one, but at least three (and maybe now four) high schools in the district all imaginatively named Lee’s Summit North, South, etc.  My parents and brothers are dead so there is not much to visit for except the cemetary but I have managed to attend the last two reunions and hope to attend this one.

Thinking about my high school days I remember a sports cheer LSMFT – Lee’s Summit – Mighty Fine Team modeled after a popular cigarette commercial of the time.
Times have certainly changed.

Originally posted 2009-02-25 18:21:03. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

More about Me

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300px Low Tatras blue trail More about Me
Image via Wikipedia

You may have noticed ed the Trailmeme plugin here at RCB.  This is a powerful way to link and organize posts by content or to tell a story.  I have been exploring the potential of this plugin and along the way I met on line with Todd and Venkat who are part of the Trailmeme team and who also have a blog about the web and lifestyle design.  Recently Todd asked me if I would answer some questions about my blogging experience. I agreed and this week over at Trailblazers it went live.  If you want to know more about why I blog and what shaped my life, then head on over to Trailblazers and check it out.  While you are there learn some more about the Trailmeme Plugin which I believe is a great tool to help shape the information in your blog and make it more accessible to readers.

More about Me

Class

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41Cad 300x240 ClassLast weekend, a local car dealer sponsors a Concours just down the street.  This year I planned to attend.  There are supercars on display which I probably wouldn’t enjoy driving even if I could afford them but they also had beautifully restored old cars like this 1941 Cadillac.  It looks pretty good showing up at the end of the depression and just before World War II, just like me.  I like to think that I have the same classic  look, holding up well after all those years but I expect I could find some people to disagree.

I have a few flaws.

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angry1 I have a few flaws.I am not talking about what others may judge to be my flaws, numerous as those may be. Right now I only want to talk about those behaviors that I recognize as flaws in myself but seem unable to eliminate.

An example is the way that I organize the paper in my life. For example, I am completely unable to file things. If I create a file folder (either a paper file or in the computer) and store the item, two months later I can’t find it. As a result I make piles of things on my desk, on book shelves, in baskets and when I need something I go through them until I find it. It’s a workable system and maybe if I were single I wouldn’t view it as a problem or a flaw to be fixed. My wife is organized, tidy and able to throw any object that gets in the way under the bus. Without her example, I might never have decided that my system is flawed. But with her continued comments on my system, I am able to understand how inefficient and unattractive my system is.

My difficulty is changing myself. I now have paper folders for each category of expense during the year and once my bills are paid, they go into the ‘for file’ pile which gets filed periodically. Bills yet to be paid go into the ‘to be paid’ pile and then move to the ‘for filing’ pile.

So there is a kind of organized chaos in a portion of my office relating to the bills. It’s the rest of the paper is beyond my control. This means such things as recipes, articles, garden ideas, catalogs. Things that I would like to keep but have no idea how to organize.

In the back of my head I keep thinking that maybe Leo or Manfred has the solution but who has the time to search for it. I am too busy looking for that article on blogging.

What’s in my Garden this week?

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cymbidiums Whats in my Garden this week?This week I have a pink cymbidium blooming.  This is one I got since coming to NorCal.  I helped a lady divide and repot some cymbidiums she had gotten from her mother in SF.  I would have picked another if I knew it was pink.    It is pretty nice for a pink however and because it bloomed for me, it gets a place of honor.  So far only my green from the SoCal collection has bloomed here for me but I havn’t given up yet.  Ever the optimist, I bought another cymb at the SF Garden Show last week.  This one is a beautiful white.  At least the mother plant is.  I have a start which will take a year or so to reach blooming size.

What I’m Reading

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I picked this up at a Leadership Conference this weekend and started reading on the plane home.  I was thinking that it would be about Internet 2.o networking but it is so much more.  It’s about the kinds of leaders and leadership and it begins by describing each level of leadership and how an individual progresses from one to the next.  I am part of a Level 4 organization with a level 5 leader.  Don’t be confused in thinking that my day job is with a Level 4 organization .  It’s a Level 3 with many folks (occasionally including me at Level 2).  That’s why I take my weekends and off hours to be part of my Level 4 organization and I hope that soon I can leave the Level 3 world behind.

tribal1 What Im Reading

Tribal Leadership

Of course, before reading Tribal Leadership, I didn’t know about those levels but reading the book, it all came together.  I could give  a brief synopsis but this is information that any working person needs to know so I recommend that you get the book and read it.  Tribal Leadership makes so much of the career struggles understandable and can help with dealing with them in constructive ways.  In an unthinking way I have been striving to live a Level 4 life for the past ten years but because I did not understand clearly what constitutes Level 4 (or in fact that it had a name) I didn’t do as well as I would like. Now I have a roadmap.

This book makes very clear what these levels of leadership are and how you progress (or regress) and was very intuitive for me.  I got it while I was reading and understood where my frustrations had their roots and why I was never as good as I wanted to be. It also provide advice about help yourseld and others make the progression up the levels.

From another perspective, the book is a bummer because reading it makes you aware of the difficulty in finding an organization where Level 4 and even Level 5 Leaders can work and grow other Level 4′s and where you can find fulfilling work.

For the entrepreneur, it should be required reading.

More 50′s Nostalgia

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edsel More 50s Nostalgia Let me just start with this.  My father bought one – a 58 four door (the small one using the Ford rather than the bigger based on the Mercury.  It was the car I drove to the Prom my junior year (limos were unheard of in those days).  I remember waxing it in the driveway.  I thought it had a rather sprightly look.  It certainly didn’t seem uglier than any other cars of the time.  What was surprising is I can’t remember why my father bought it.  It was the first Ford product he ever owned (as far as I know).  He was always a GM man and we typically had Chevy’s and Buicks.  Likewise, I can’t remember why we got rid of it so fast.  I want to say that we had trouble with the push-button transmission but I can’t be positive.  I do remember that for my senior year, I was driving our new car.  I loved that car even though it was like driving a tank and my mother couldn’t drive it when the power steering went out.   It lasted until my second year of college when flames shot out from under the hood as my parents accelerated after a stop sign.  This was apparently enough Ford foolishness for my father and he replace our burned out Lincoln with this.

More Edsel nostalgia at Carlust.

I am a lazy slacker!

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We spent a long weekend in LA two weeks ago and took along our small camera. My wife is a professional photographer and had her big Nikon but for some things, the little camera is handy. I have lately appropriated it and managed on our trip to New York last October to take some pretty good pictures. This trip the pictures which I snapped just as mindlessly as in New York were lousy – fuzzy and pixilated.

ocm 008 300x2251 I am a lazy slacker!

I discussed this with my wife who very naturally responded that I should read the manual. As you may have guessed, reading manuals is not my normal operating mode but I committed to reading the manual and discovered the wonderful number of special settings provided. I was amazed.

 

All this time I was expecting the camera to think for me – which I still think is a splendid idea but probably unrealistic. Anyway, I promise to actually learn the capabilities of my tool and maybe avoid such lousy pictures as the one above.

 

 

Compare with the better one from New York.

 

img 0537 300x2951 I am a lazy slacker!

United States of Wimps

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Having grown up in the practically prehistoric 40′s and 50′s, (For example, my family did not have a TV until I was in the third grade.) I have to shake my head in wonder at the scaredy cat world we have made.  It seems a miracle to me that we still have young people willing to fight to protect us or serve as cops when everything in our society is directed to make sure that nobody ever has any risk.

This article brought the whole strageness back to me.  Every other commercial on TV is for antibacterial something.  How did we survive with out them.  How did our parents and grandparents manage to raise children unprotected from those dangers?

Then take bicycle helmets.  Nobody ever heard of a helmet for riding a bicycle when I was a kid and yet everybody had a bicycle.  I never knew anybody that was injured other than skinned knees.  Today, I think the state will take your kid away because you are obviously an unfit parent if you don’t make sure that they are wearing a helmet.

And what about all the state requirments  for transporting your kids. It’s totally ridiculous. I still remember when our first son was born and he had to stay in the hospital after my wife was released.  In those primitive days it was permissible to hold a baby in a car and of course we didn’t have those life-endangering air bags so the kid could be in the fron seat.   (I don”t even know the complexity of what the state mandates for transporting a kid these days.  I think it involves a child seat until they are 12 or so and no riding in the front but it may be worse than that).  Anyway, my wife was sick and didn’t want to contaminate our son so she couldn’t go with me to get him but I couldn’t do it alone because the hospital wouldn’t release the baby to me unless there was someone to hold him.  I had to get our neighbor to go with me.  What amazed me at the time was that the hospital didn’t care one bit that I didn’t have a clue what to do with a newborn baby.  I was practically in a panic about feeding him and changing diapers and who knows what else might go wrong but the hospital was fine with letting a total incompetent take a helpless baby.  What they did care about was making sure that somebody was holding him in the car.

What in the world has happened to our country?