I'll know we've made it when...

Staci and I try and say no more often than we say yes.  Part of it is financial, part of it is spiritual.  I can probably afford to have a data package on my cell phone.  (almost all of my adult friends have it and appear to still be eating well)  However, I have chosen not to dive in (yet).

Staci and I often talk about the days in the future when we do not HAVE to say no as often.  We each have one milestone that once we are able to accomplish them, we will know we have made it.

Hers: She can shop exclusively at Ann Taylor Loft
His: We can buy DiGiorno's Pizza (and not Totinos or Aldi brand)

Twins separated at birth?

As you know, I like Aldi.  On Sunday, Staci and I needed to pick up some ingredients to make a dish for some friends that just had a baby.  We stopped by after church to so we could be done with errands and do whatever we pleased for the rest of the afternoon.  As we were checking out I think I ran into our twins that were separated from us at birth!  See my thoughts below...

1. They were two young married people who were shopping together.  Staci and I almost always shop together.  It may not be as efficient, but it is certainly more fun.
2. They were shopping at Aldi.  They obviously are conscientious  of how they spend their money.  I would probably prefer the atmosphere at Marsh, but I'm just not watching willing to pay a 30% premium for it.
3. He was wearing a name tag.  It was one of those printed on label name tags that are also used for address labels.  We had just discarded ours before we walked into the store.  It was obvious to me they were on their way home from church.
4. They went to Taylor University.  Taylor is the basically the equivalent to IWU.  We could have just as easily gone there as we did Indiana Wesleyan University.  I knew they were TY Alumni based on the license plate liner that was on their car.
5. Speaking of their car, theirs was very similar to ours.  It was a compact import (Nissan), very similar to our Toyota Corolla.
6. Lastly, after we left Aldi they went the same place we did.  We hit up the near by Wal-Mart, which is part of our shopping routine.  We stop by there to pick up the one or two things that Aldi does not carry.

This may not be interesting to any one else... I just thought all the external similarities were unusual.

Near death experience...

I almost died yesterday.  Well, that may be an exaggeration, but a situation was presented to me that could have led to death.  Staci and I were discussing something (I don't remember what) as we approached a stop light.  I was at the front of the line in the left lane of a two lane intersection at the corner of 146th and 37.  Below is a picture of the scene.

I would have been waiting for the light exactly where the white car is seen above.  Staci recommended we stop at the CVS that is now at the South East corner of the intersection.  That is the corner seen in the upper right quadrant of the above picture.  I looked to my right and saw that lady in the car next to me was texting, so I knew I would beat her off the line, change lanes to the right lane and safely turn into the CVS parking lot.  Everything went as planned and I stepped on the gas.  Something caught my eye, however, just as I was about to enter the intersection coming from the left.  Well after the light had turned red a big utility van came barreling across the traffic.  Had I continued to pull out, even at a modest pace, the van would have no doubt crushed in the driver's side of my car.  I stood on the horn as he blazed by, apparently oblivious to his red light running.

I have no idea how someone could miss a light by the degree required to come through that late.  I guess we are just fortunate and I will continue to check both directions, even when crossing at a stoplight.

How Stuff Works

I love the technology that pushes Blogs and Podcasts to me.  I check my Google Reader every day and listen to podcasts as well.  One of my favorite sources for both is How Stuff Works.  My favorite podcasts for are Stuff You Should Know and Techstuff.  I think everyone could like SYSK but Techstuff is probably more for people like me.  One of the blogs from HSW.com is from the founder, Marshall Brain.  Below is an excerpt from one of his latest posts.


Leigh cuts my hair. She cuts all of the kids’s hair too. She has been doing this for more than 10 years. It started because one day we were at a K-mart and they had a bunch of remaindered books on a table for a quarter each. One of the books was “How to cut hair” or something like that. If you think about it, that little book has saved us thousands of dollars over the course of a decade.
So I found myself sitting in the kitchen the other night and Leigh was cutting my hair. It was late and I had a lot I was thinking about, and Leigh asked this idle question: “Why do you think we have three blond kids when neither of us has blond hair?” I sort of went into a “pop quiz” mode. Imagine that you are in a science class and the quiz question is, “A man and a woman are raising four children. Neither the man nor the woman, nor either of their parents, are blond. Yet three of their children have blond hair. What are the possible causes?” Yes, there are genetic reasons for children to have blond hair even if the parents don’t. It works the same way for eye color as seen on this page. It gets kind of complicated though, and like I said it was late, I was thinking about other things, and I did not have any particular desire to probe complicated things.
What is a simpler explanation? After all, Occam’s razor says, “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one”, and in pop quiz mode the simplest answer almost always requires less writing. It’s not a radio interview or anything like that where I would need to apply a social filter – I’m in my kitchen talking privately to my wife. So, without really thinking about it, what I said was, “maybe I’m not the father.”
That is a perfectly acceptable scientific hypothesis, and probably the simplest explanation. But I had not bothered to factor in social implications, it being late and all. And really, why should you have to factor in social implications when it comes to science questions? Science is science, and that is a logical, simple answer to the question if it had been asked in a vacuum.
This situation did not turn out to be a vacuum. Fortunately or unfortunately, many humans are social animals. There is a funny quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, something like, “A gentleman does not offend people unintentionally.” That is a huge high bar if you think about it, because you have to be able to do on-the-fly social calculus that prevents offense to all parties in all cases. (It could be argued that Winston Churchill was able to do the calculus in the opposite direction, in order to maximally offend people when necessary). People who can do the calculus consistently in either direction definitely have a gift.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I very nearly ended up walking around the next day with half a haircut. The lesson you can take away from this vignette is that science can sometimes be dangerous, and it is unwise to make alternative suggestions to your wife about her children’s paternity. As the answer to a late-night pop quiz question, it appears to be ill-advised.
So we get past that awkward moment in our relationship, Leigh is cutting away and she muses once more, “I wonder why my hair is so different from my sisters’s?”
“Maybe you are adopted…”

Actually, that ended up being the whole thing.  Hope you enjoyed.