Zero turning radius, front and rear HEMI engines.
Click here to see the Jeep Hurricane concept car.

Less than inspirational

    I have so far tried to keep this blog light and inspirational but I don’t always feel inspired. I am thinking about starting another one so I can write less inspiring things when I feel the inclination. I haven’t had any indication that my kids read this but I did send them the URL in an email. I might start another one that is more mature. I wouldn’t write anything that I wouldn’t want the people at my church to read but there are things that I might write that are too worldly for my children's innocence. I don’t even like it when they see the local news. We live near a big city so atrocities are committed and reported almost on a daily basis. We see these things on the news so often that what should be and would have been shocking when I was a kid has little or no shock value. I will try to keep it light here so that is all I will say but I do feel today like starting another blog.

The Island

    Have you ever felt like a castaway. Pretend you are stranded on an island with plenty of food, water and everything you need to stay alive. You have no way to get off the island or to contact anyone outside of the island. You don’t even know if there is anyone outside the island? Imagine you were born on this island and your ancestors were born there. No one is old enough to remember how you got there. All you know is everything you have learned from other people and from living on your island. You do have a book though. The book is thousands of years old. You were hearing stories from this book since you were a baby. Now you read this book to get some insight as to what is going on, who you are, why you are here and what you are supposed to do.
    There are some people on the island that don’t believe what the book says. The book says that there is someone that created you, your island and everything else. They believe that no one is that great and that everything just happened by chance. They believe that life is just what you can see and that when it is over it is just over. Some of the people that don’t believe what the book says are good people and just want to live there lives as best they can with out hurting others.
    Some of the people that don’t believe have no hope. They are frustrated by not knowing why they are here. They don’t know why there life is so hard and then they just die. They are afraid to die. The ones that believe don’t want to die but some of them are less afraid and they believe that when they do they will start their real life. They love this life but their book tells them that what happens next is so much better. Every one is afraid sometimes. Some are more afraid than others. Everyone knows that this life goes by so fast and that the older you get the faster the time passes. Some are comforted knowing that this is not all there is.

Today is my lucky day.

    Its Friday, I feel good, I'm having a good easy day. Things are going my way. My daughter asked me weeks ago to help her make a science project. When our lawnmower crapped out we thought about using it for the science project. I thought I would take the motor apart, clean it at the car wash, cut a slice off the side to show the inside moving parts and bolt it to a board. I put it on my list but my list is long and the priorities change daily.
    If you happen to have something you need me to do you might want to remind me frequently to keep it high on the list. She reminded me yesterday evening around seven o'clock that her project was due today. We had a backup plan. We had also been talking about demonstrating the conductivity of water. We happened to have everything we needed for the backup project so we proceeded. We took two half liter water bottles and poked two holes in the top of both. Then I ran two wires through the holes at different lengths and stripped the ends. My daughter filled the bottles with tap water and put salt in one of them. I attached alligator clips to the ends of the wire that were coming out of the tops of the caps. We were able to prove that electricity will travel through water but we didn’t get the results we expected.
    We both were sure that salt, a molecule made of sodium and chlorine atoms, would conduct electricity better than the plain tap water. Sodium is a metal. We put an ohmmeter on the wire going into the plain tap water and then into the tap water with salt. The salted water had a higher resistance than the plain. We went to the net and found similar experiments where the salt water was a better conductor. Also when we shook the bottle with the salted water the resistance increased. We decided that it was too late to do anymore and she would ask her science teacher in the morning. I got the following feedback this morning on the phone from my wife. "He is the coolest dad in the world. Not many dads would let his daughter bring an expensive multi meter to school." Maybe today will be her lucky and the presentation went well and she found out why her experiment behaved the way it did.

Monday, May 16, 2005
10:45 AM
This is a follow up. Her teacher told her it was because we used iodized salt.

A Happy Life

    I just want to say that I am one of the lucky ones. Of course there are things I would like to have that I can't afford. There are things I would like to do that I can’t afford to do. I have to budget my money and save for my retirement.
    On the other hand I don’t really need anything that I don’t already have and I have almost everything I could possibly want. I have a young beautiful wife that is a wonderful cook. I am so well loved and taken care of. We have been together for six years and are in love with each other. It hasn’t always been easy. We went through tough times learning how to be married and how to stay married. We are still learning but it is easier now that we have some marriage skills. There were times when we tolerated each other and times when we thought we couldn’t. Now we hold hands a lot and long for each other's touch like when we were dating. I'm not saying it is just like it was in the beginning. I am saying that back then we were falling in love and now we are really in love with each other.
    We have great kids. They love us. I feel like we are good parents for our age and we are constantly learning how to parent. The youngest of our children have the advantage of the parenting skills we have learned with the older ones.
    We are not perfect. We do our best to teach them how to live a happy life with what we hope is the right amount of discipline, love and affection with the knowledge that having God in your life is the only way to lead a fulfilled happy life.
    No mater how much wealth you accumulate there will still be material things to peruse. Those things are insignificant if you are loved and your needs are met.

A Wannabe Writer

    I like to write. I do not presume I will ever be paid for anything I write though it is a favorite fantasy of mine. I know I could fill a book with words and I believe I could actually write something that someone would want to finish once they started. I have always enjoyed a vivid and productive imagination. It has always been easy for me to make things up. I'm not talking about lying. I am a terrible liar. I don’t mean I'm terrible because I lie a lot. I mean I suck at it and I have lots of guilt after I tell a lie. Well that’s another story that I think I will write about for another day. Anyway I love to read fiction. You know action, drama, horror and anything but romance. I like a little romance in the stories I read but I have never read a novel with a drawing of a love scene on the cover. Maybe it’s the same thing as my reluctance to try sushi. I can’t say I don’t like it because I have never tried it. I don’t think I would like either so it will probably be a while before I find out. Some of the books I have read I feel are from a genius beyond my capabilities. But sometimes I read a book and think, "I can do better than that." So far I have only one fan. She reads everything I present to her, sometimes while I am watching, and gives me feedback that makes me feel like I have really done something.

Road Rage

    I enjoy my thirty five minute commute to work and home everyday. I never get in a hurry. I never cut anyone off. I rarely pass or even change lanes. I have a set route that only changes when obstructed by an occurrence beyond my control. There is only one thing that can get me excited when I am minding my own business on the road. Tailgaters. When I have claimed my personal space in the slowest lane possible, no one has the right to ride my bumper. If I were in the fast lane this might be acceptable but when some person that slept late, left late and drank too much coffee to make up for a lack of sleep gets on my tail, my Zen is disturbed. I am not looking for trouble so I have various steps from subtle to less subtle depending on how tenacious the driver is.
    One Monday morning recently I was doing fine. I was listening to my favorite talk show on satellite radio half way to work and the traffic was lighter than usual. Coming up to the onramp of the loop the traffic always slows and bunches up at this time of morning. As it did I saw a young man in an old brown Dodge pickup truck with blue doors cutting and whipping through the lanes trying to keep his momentum. I was still traveling sixty miles per hour but that wasn’t fast enough for this driver. He got on my tail. I used my most subtle procedure for deterring a tailgater and let off the gas just enough to make my speed slower than my neighbors. That wasn’t good enough. As he got closer to my bumper I gently tapped on the brakes just enough to light my tail lights and not slow down too drastically. By then I was a little offended. For reasons that only he knew he was still on my bumper even though I was driving slower than the traffic around me. I am as territorial as any man and I also enjoy my coffee in the morning. The combination of caffeine and adrenaline creates a cocktail in the blood stream that can drastically accelerate anger. Well it did for me that Monday morning anyway. I didn’t slam on the brakes. I only pushed them hard enough to get his attention. Enough to let him know I was not going to just look forward and pretend everything was fine. Our bumpers bumped fairly hard. I was sure there must have been some damage. There was an opening in the traffic and he took it. As he passed me he made a rude hand gesture. I pulled in behind him and followed him off of the interstate onto the loop. As we left the interstate the traffic opened up. He started to leave me behind but my little old truck will do a good ninety miles an hour. I pulled up beside him and motioned him to pull over. He made his rude gesture at me again and ran me into the next lane. I in turn ran the car to my right into the shoulder. I punched it to try to pass him as the lane I was in was about to exit the freeway. My four cylinder didn’t stand a chance against his v eight and I chose to leave the freeway over the choice of hitting the shock absorbing barrels. As I left the freeway I guess I was probably decelerating from ninety because I couldn’t look at the speedometer and I had been going at my trucks top speed. The memory is a blur now but I do remember smoke coming from my tires and my emotions shifting from anger to terror as I tried to keep from killing myself and the innocent person I was about to plow into on the exit ramp.
    Post analytical insight comes naturally to me at an age that should bring the calm mature judgment that would have allowed me to avoid such a shameful display of childish ignorance. I feel better now. Yesterday a tractor-trailer rig was riding my bumper. I changed lanes and let him through.

Amateur Writers Curse

    I am starting to think I a have a curse that prevents me from writing. I sit here for hours sometimes researching, reading and playing on the internet uninterrupted. Then when I am inspired to write someone wants to talk to me or other people in my general area want to talk to each other. I was reading peoples blogged novels at http://nanoblogmo.blogspot.com/ . There they try to write fifty thousand words in a month. I was reading one where the author complained about having no time to write at all. I know the feeling. I would never attempt fifty thousand words in a month but I would be happy if I ever achieved fifty thousand words in one document other than my personal journal. I know I can do it but there are so many excuses available to me. Its hard enough to read a novel with constant distractions let alone write one. I find the best time for me is when I can go to bed a couple of hours early and get up a couple of hours early. I know I could put together fifty thousand words in a year but I am afraid I would forget the plot.

What happened

    Wow, I guess I forgot about it for a couple of days. I'm sure no one is reading or will ever read this anyway.
I had some cool dreams this morning when my alarm went off and I went back to sleep waiting for the next alarm. I dreamed that I was in a house similar to the house and neighborhood I lived in two houses ago. That neighborhood is really old with small three bedroom houses. I hear it was a nice neighborhood forty years ago but it has no deed restrictions and is in the middle of a city. It was my first house. In my dream my teenaged brother-in-laws were there. I was doing some kind of wiring repair. Something arced and two transformers blew separately on opposite sides of the neighborhood. It was night so there were bright flashes to go with the booms. Then I think I had to leave or something and I told them to leave. I said I wasn’t going to leave them there without my wife there. I started to call her and they left.
    There were many but I can only remember two. In the other one I told someone or heard someone telling someone that all you had to do to get Satan out of you was to say "Satan get out of me" and he would have to leave. I saw a person say it and go up into the sky but low enough where I could see them perfectly. It was probably about thirty feet or so. I knew Satan had left him but I didn’t see anything and I was disappointed. Then someone else said it and went into the sky. I actually saw something white but blurry like a ghost or something leave his body.

Air Powered Cars

    Wow I guess I missed this one. I was checking out the big list on www.howstuffworks.com and read about cars that run on compressed air. I went to the site of a company that makes them and found that theirs go sixty eight-mph and will travel 124 mi. before refueling. I want one. I read that they will be selling them in the US soon. I drive thirty-five miles to work every morning and thirty-five home. I'm sure they will be too expensive at first compared to the fuel savings. Wow, hook it up to the compressor at home at night and never have to buy gasoline.


Click here to see the MDI Air Car.

Click here to see the air car at howstuffworks.com.

Feeling good

I'm feeling really good today. I usually do. I have highs and lows but my highs last much longer that my lows. My lows are mostly unsubstantiated and I usually don't even know why I am feeling down. My lows seldom last for more than a day or two. I have a skip along la ti da philosophy and I seldom worry about anything for long. It is mostly a gift I was born with but I do work to enhance the quality. Anyway I feel really good today.