so close

Just finished my second to last class this week and I must admit I almost enjoyed it, almost. I am one class away from an MBA with a concentration in technology management from the University of Phoenix. I remember just before I graduated from Miami University I started to think a lot about Walt Whitman H. S. and was overcome with gratitude and was humbled by the education I had recieved in preparation for where I was. As I am close to the end of my U o P experience I am once again struck by how much Miami has done for me and how easily we can take our educations for granted. Miami, Pitney Bowes, Skico, The Jerome, Sysco, US Foods, Pfizer, and my wife and kids have prepared me for where I am right now. Once again I am humlbed and grateful. Suzy, thank you for all of your support. Without you there is no me.

always fall forward

My dad taught me how to pitch. We played a lot of ketch when I was a kid. J and I played a ton of ketch. J made me a really good pitcher. J's best friend Robert made me great. He was a strater on the high school team. Once he pitched a fast ball with a baketball and I swung at it and my bat bounce off the basketball and knocked me out. Later he taught me how to throw a wicked curve ball. My dad taught me how be a pitcher. Back in little league he taught me that if you keep on pitching you control the rythm of the game.

If you keep on pitching you will always fall forward.

Victory is compounded from defeat.

Defeat is not permanent.

Just throw strikes.

my youngest is telepathic

She starts with the Jedi mind trick. She knows the Vulkin mind meld. She understands English but speaks Chubaka. Here she is saying dad you work too hard. Come walk with me.

I took a long walk today

seems my dog had some things he had to say

He said

everythings going to be OK

today

Come walk with me

and see

So I took a long walk today

and I realy must say

everything's going our way

today

come walk with me and

 see

Come walk with me and see

Lyrics by Sammy D

as inclination leads

I was inclined to go back to school for my MBA. I have been tasked with so much reading that most of it has done me little good. What I have been tasked with the most and what appears to have done me great good is the task of writing. My online program is 13 six week courses and in each of these weeks a bare minimum is a 1,000 word paper and about a 1,000 words of online participation four out of seven days. That's 78 weeks, so we're talking over 156,000 words I was not otherwise inclined to write. This aspect of an online education I originally didn't comprehend. If I had done these calculations before I started I would have never thought it possible for me to to do what I am doing right now, writing myself a Masters degree.  My dad always used to tell me that the more you do something the easier it gets. Writing for me has never been easy, but it has sure gotten easier!

I am inclined to read Dean Koontz's latest Odd book, the Bible, this book Flourish that is on my bed side table as we speak, maybe a little Max Brand and anything else that I am NOT required to read. I look forward to having the time to read just as inclination leads and to write about those things for which I am inclined.

Wood Box Wisdom on the Common Law of Life

Among the many things my dad would say that I really didn't get was when he point at someone and say, "He's good timber!" I would look and think that he meant that guy was strong or tall or hard as wood or whatever a punk, spoiled, rich kid thinks when he's not really listening anyway.

Now I get it. He meant a certain kind of strong. A strength that only comes through experience, hard experience more specifically and I realize now it was one of his greatest compliments. "Good timber does not grow in ease. The farther the sky, the greater length; The more the storm, the more the strength."

My dad was good timber.

In weight lifting and in life there is a familiar mantra, "No pain no gain" I get it, but prefer my own philosophy of no pain no pain. I've always figured if it hurts you are doing it wrong and now I suffer from chronic pain and now realize that pain, struggle and storms are the things that help us grow. We learn to deal with the pain. We learn to struggle forward. We learn how to come in from the rain!

happy happy

The Happy Happy was the name of our boat.

Reading my last post made  me realize how much pain I've suffered over the years. It amazing how God let's us forget things for our own good. My dad said once if something is really bothering you, you need to address it and forget it. The sooner you forget the sooner no regret. If you forgive you forget. Pain comes in all shapes and sizes. No matter how much something hurts physically and emotionally you must first learn to cope then learn to forget. Try to remember the good times and the happy times for they will be many. They are the cure for the things that ail your soul but are forgotten in the sea of despair and believe me or not, but unhappiness is a choice. My dad was always there to help me make the right choice. He made it easy to choose happiness. To this day I choose to be happy happy.

It's gonna hurt a little bit.

As a kid I got hurt a lot. I started walking way before I was one. My mom would always say, "way before you were one you stood up and ran after your brother and you never stopped running." I remember getting stitches in the back of my head after cracking it on the fireplace mantel after getting thrown from my horse. The horse was my big sister Carol! I got stitched when I was hit by a car and my brake handle stabbed into my knee. I ember getting stitches in the top of my head from a rock my brother J had thrown at me from way up on a hill. I had my face stitched up after being bit by a dog, twice. I have to stop but there are more. I had at least a thousand bloody raspberries, scraps and abrasions. My dad was the go-to guy whenever I got hurt, but it was never easy because he was a merthiolate guy. It's the red stuff and my day wouldn't use the plastic little applicator  he'd use q-tips to fully soak the wound with the pailful topical antiseptic. Man it burned, but he would blow on it until the extreme pain would ease. My dad would always say, "this is gonna hurt a little bit." That was his way of saying get ready this is going to hurt a lot. But he always knew how to make it better. He say something like, "it's OK to cry like a little girl, I won't tell any one or if you'd cry a little bit you'll forget how much it hurts." Or he'd say about pain, "if you ignore it it'll go away or don't answer the door and let it in."

My dad once broke his back stepping out of a golf cart. When he would explain how he got the huge scars from surgery on his lower back he'd say in the old days golf cart wheels stuck out in the back and I was stepping out of the cart while it was still moving and it ran up the back of my leg and yanked me so hard to the ground while running over me it broke my back. They had to go in a fuse a butch of discs so I could get feeling back in my leg. This was before I was born but I have a lifetime of memories of him laying flat on his back in  almost every room in the house whenever the back pain would be too much. I remember many times coming into a room and wondering if he was still alive. I would do a belly flop on hip and he yell, "DO NOT HOP ON POP!" I do this with my girls and my back hurts too. Or I should say they do it to me and it makes me think of him and I smile.

wood box wisdom

This clip reminds me of something my best friend’s wealthy father once said to me at a lunch on Aspen Mountain he said, “Andy you have to decide are you a person who likes to be told what to do or are you a person who likes to tell other people what to do?”

This conversation has stuck with me since 1994 and now I think with the help of a little wood box wisdom I can answer you Lee. I am both those people. I enjoy good coaching and receiving help from a mentor or friend and I also like sharing my expertise and influencing others.

I can do what I am told. And I can do all the things I want to do too. I can tell people anything and I can tell them what to do. I think what’s been most important to me are what things I’m telling myself to do. Telling myself what to do and doing it. Showing courage through action and wisdom by acting on the right things, this is how I strive to be brave and wise.

Tell yourself to do some really hard things and see what happens, you may be surprised. We can do hard things, really hard things, impossible things it’s in our nature to achieve the things we conceive. Name three things you'd like to do but think it’s just too hard. Go back to school, write a book, and be a great husband and father are mine.



My youngest daughter Mary has shown a natural talent for computer art. She callled this one, "black and white." She started calling me to the computer saying, "Save this for me Daddy?" I was struck by this art and she has done several more that have just blown me away. "Daddy will you save dis?"

I called this one "Mary's Galaxy."

She called this one "Mary Koconana."

"mary 3"

"lines"

I understand that as a father I am really bias but this art is awesome. Totaly blows my mind. Mary you rock! Yes Mary, I will save dis. She called me dumbdumbdaddyo the other day ansd it melted my heart. She told Suzy, "Mommy, I love you like a sweet potato."

Wood Box Wisdom

Looks like my dad typed this one up himself.

I remember him always hammering away on an electric typewriter at incredible speeds (100+ words a minute) and he always used a carbon sheet in between to sheets to make a copy. He probably wrote this sixty years ago, but so pertinent today! My dad was a lobbyist and a spokesman for industry and free enterprise his whole life. He was a conservative inside the beltway and this is the sort of thing he would use in a speech to agitate his liberal friends.

I am glad he is not here to witness the dismantling of the American free enterprise system, the negation of the Constitution and the loss of freedom we are experiencing today.

God bless America,

please!