Recent Events

It's strange I think what the schools chose not to teach you. They have classes about welding, how to paint a car, ancient history, health and sex education. But the one thing they chose not to teach you is the once thing that every single person has in common; the one thing that all of us will have to deal with at least once in our lives, and that is death.

There was no course on how to comfort the grief stricken. Tell me, how do you comfort a child who has lost a parent when, by God's good graces, you have never felt that loss? How do you comfort them when they realize the finality of it? How do you comfort them when they have been in the room with the reaper? They passed each other at the threshold. It seems like a small error now could make a huge problem in the future and there has been no training on avoiding those errors.

There was no course on how to deal with your own grief, your owns feeling of loss. How to feel about what has happened or how to express those feels. How long should you feel bad or how bad you should feel?

There was no course on the business of death. Where you go to take care of your business. How do you go about getting the survivor benefit from social security? Do you have to get legal contracts with the deceased amended? How do you go about finding out what you don't know about final expenses and inheritances? Death certificates?

Finally, how do you deal with the guilt? I am not experienced at this, but it would seem that most people don't have the chance to settle up before the sickle swings, and when that is the case there are bound to be things that you regret doing and you are disappointed with yourself and sad that you had behaved such.

In the end, it may be that the only one who is truly at peace after a death is the deceased, but society ill prepares us to deal with the very thing that we are assured to meet in our life.

In our house, sadly this lesson has been trust upon us, but if you have not already, before you give the lesson of the birds and bees give the lesson of life and death. Not the religious aspect but the hard crule realities, fill the void in their education.

Knownledge is power... give them the power protect themselves.

Quarterly Report

Since it has been roughly 3 months since I last posted, I thought I would drop a few thoughts.

I have been toiling away on my garage, building a website, and working on my estate for the better time between now and my last posting. Busy busy. Mom needs to walk a while in my shoes.

Anyway, I have got a few witty snippits for you.

Ok, Al Bundy never said that you had to be a rocket scientist to sell shoes, but come on!!!! Saw this in the window of a shoe store in Hickory Hollow mall.

Ok, I was in Wal-Mart trailing behind my brood when this caught my eye. To give you a frame of reference, my palm is 4" wide and my hand is 8" from heel to tip.

I mean, damn! Are we catching cats or something?

Its only a matter of time before you will see this on The Tinkerage!

Finally, we found the perfect bathing suit for my mom.

The False Economy of Hybrid Cars

Ever wonder why these things haven't caught on better? Why everyone isn't jumping off the couch and running to the dealership to buy one of these 60 mpg wonders? So did I, so our investigative team took a look.

Taking the Toyota Prius as a good base model, we found that this car gets about 60 mpg on the highway. According to the sources we found, it averages about 55 mpg between city and highway with reasonable driving. Pretty impressive. After tax title and tags, you are looking to spend about $30,000 dollars on one of these little boogers, financed over 5 years at 3.5%, the vehicle will ultimately cost you $32,745; that is the total cost we will use for our calculations...

So, at what increased fuel economy will this car pay for itself in savings at the pump?

As a base of comparison, let's use our family Ford Excursion. For the sake of this argument, let us factor out the cost of the Excursion. We are testing whether it pays to buy a hybrid purely for fuel efficiency, so we will not weigh it against the price of an existing vehicle. We are purely seeing how long it will take to pay for itself. This is the ideal comparison as you don't get much further on the other end of the fuel economy spectrum. The "Beast", as we call it, factors in at about 13 mpg. Considering the 8,000 lb truck, this is not too bad.

Using $2 for a gallon of gas, we subtract the fuel efficiencies (55 mpg -13 mpg) to get the difference in economy, 42 mpg.

Now, we take that 42 mpg, the cost of the Prius, and the cost of gas and make a pretty little equation...

($32,745 / $2 gallon) x 42mpg= 687645 miles

My logic here is you will have to buy 16,372.5 gallons of gas to equal the cost of the car. Multiply that by the delta in fuel efficiency and you have to drive the Prius 687,645 miles to pay for itself.
Or to put it in context I would have to make my 40 mile round trip commute 5 days a week for 66 years to come out even.

So, next time you want to jump on something that will "save" you money by spending money, let us know and we will crunch the numbers.

Long Over Due I Guess

It has been quite some time since I have posted and even longer since I put anything up with any substance. In doing this I have a quandary. So much has happened since then I have no idea what to post about.

First, I would like to congratulate my wife who ate her first California roll today. This may not seem like a big deal to some, but if you knew my wife you would understand the great spirit of adventure she must have felt to try this. Kudos to her.

Bad luck has plagued me lately. It was bound to happen since I have experienced such good luck in the past years. I attribute this, after long thought, to the fact that up until lately I had enough wiggle room around my life to circumvent disaster and turn it into something somewhat successful. Since August, I have given myself no wiggle room. Like Bilbo, I was butter spread over too much bread and when I had wiggle room I was to wiped to make use of it.
I was building a garage, which from about mid-August to October was an average of 40 hours a week. Granted, during August and early September it was more like 60 hours a week. Me and my faithful crew of friends trudged through that while we were working 40 hours a week and I was taking 14 credit hours of classes at school. Coupled with home, I was running a marathon pulling a rickshaw. All was well until fall break and then the wheels fell off.

With my entire nuclear family in tow, I nearly lost everything on the interstate. We were driving to Nashville to pick up a load of junk that I had won in an on-line auction, driving my dad's excursion and pulling a trailer I had borrowed from short man. Doing 70 miles an hour on the interstate, the driver's side rear tire blew out and caused me to loss control of the truck. I managed to miss guard rails on both sides, and by God's own mercy came to rest safely in the median. Though I put on the bravest face I could I was shaken to the core. From there, it was all down hill.
School was too much so I had to drop a class, Algebra for the 3rd time. The rest of the classes I resigned myself to just try and pass. Nothing more, nothing less. The garage came to a screeching halt, what little effort I had to give went to the grind of school and work, which was more, drudgery than ever.
And then the storm hit... the refrigerator died... my truck broke down... the car broke down... garage cost spiraling out of control... it started to look like I would not even pass 2 of my 3 classes at all... work was a drag, to the point where it was actually painful to go... something had to give.

Then there was Christmas. My 23 days vacation to salvation. The semester ended the day before my vacation started so I decided I wasn't going to care what I made, I was just glad it was over. I needed to recharge my batteries, to get a fresh outlook. So for the next 23 days I did... nothing.
My fat ass sat in the chair for nearly a month, but it was exactly what I needed. That coupled with so times with good friends and family put me right back on track. I am again energized and feel like I did in August. Not as well as I did in July, but I think that will come with the looming completion of the garage and the launch of a new project.
Still, I am having bad luck but it isn't pushing me under the surface like it was. I am just riding the crests and surviving the troughs, but for now that will do until I can start making my own luck again. Sure, the truck going down again sucks... the van losing its mind sucks... having to spend extra money to do things that I was promised would be done for free sucks... but right now I don't care. It is what it is, and I can only control what happens tomorrow.
To all this, bless my wife.

more to envy

as if you weren't jealous enough, i am posting from my phone...

Rome wasn't built in a day

And neither was the garage.

After a month of waffling and procrastinating, the vinyl is finally on. What took a month to finally get going, only took a crew of 4 a day to do... go figure.

The siding going on really made a difference... Take a look.

A quick laugh

Two things I learned in the past week.

1. Never try and write a blog when you are half drunk. My sister made some lovely Margaritas while I was in San Diego, and after I finished my pitcher I decided to write a blog. You will notice that the incoherent dribble in my previous post was just that, incoherent. Now you know why.

2. When buy a wholesale lot of used good, inspect the lot first. In my case I won an on line auction for 3 pallets of ceramic supplies. After many trials and tribulations, I finally got them home; and what did I find when I did? 2 palletts worth of ceramic supplies and one whole pallet of buttons. Yes, buttons. A 4' by 4' pallet stacked roughly 4 feet high of nothing but buttons. By my reckoning it counts out to North of 450,000 buttons.

These things only happen to me...

If you ever loose a button, you know who to call.