Questions and Answers

Yesterday as I was driving in my truck at work, I realised something.  It was something very profound and relevant to life.  As I pondered this stunning revelation I thought of writing it down, but decided not to. Of course, by the end of the day I had forgotten it.  If that were the end of the story, this would be the end of this blog entry, and be one of the most pointless entries I have ever made.  However, today I remembered it, and decided to write it down on my blog.

My thought was this: We don't find an answer, we accept an answer.

Which doesn't seem so profound now I just write it down like that.  However, let me take a few words to explain what I mean.  Everybody has questions.  Everyone is looking for answers to their questions.  While there are many answers to each question, we end up settling on one particular answer to accept as our own.

OK, so simple example, what is one plus one?  This is a simple question.  Let me give you a few options to answer it with.

1. 1+1=2
2. 1+1=11
3. 1+1=1
4. 1+1=4

So, which of the three did you accept?  I expect you got the first, but all are valid answers, all have an element of truth.  Lets justify each of the answers

1. It's what teachers tell us in school
2. It's what pupils joke about in school
3. Scriptural marriage: Mark 10:9 They two shall be one flesh
4. My Marriage, Man plus woman equals Man, Woman and 2 kids.

The answer that you accept depends on how you are approaching the question.  While all the answers are applicable in their own way, for the most part the last three are useless for day to day purposes.  So generally we accept the first answer that one and one is two.

There are many other more complex questions that appear in our lives.  How to deal with relationship, how to make the best choice between bad options.  We should be able to find many answers, but the important thing is accepting the right answer.  Or at least accepting the best answer for our situation.

Good Excuses

I hated homework.  I rarely did it, which is why I am in a job cleaning carpet, rather than designing space stations for NASA.  Or discovering the cure for cancer.  Or writing my nobel prize acceptance speech - you get the idea.  The part about homework I hated most was the excuses I had to offer.  I usually never got further than "I forget it".  Unlike the comic strip characters, I never had a dog trained to eat homework.

This line of thought was prompted by an interesting occurrence at the carpet cleaning company at which I currently work.  Names have been changed to protect the guilty.  Photos have been scribbled out to safeguard the identity of parties concerned.  But how is this for a really good excuse for making someone fill in a form again?

Good news for some in Minnesota

Thanks to global warming scientists have confirmed this will be the shortest winter on record in Minnesota. Snow is already melting before the end of November and we are looking forward to the return of the geese and the budding flowers peeking up from the ground.
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Several large retailers have issued profit warnings as a result of this. Gander Mountain and Cabellas are especially concerned about their stock of ice fishing gear.  One manager said "we many have to resort to a giant yard sale to shift this stuff". One inventor sent us a picture of a freezer on a boat with a hole in the bottom. "It's for all those guys who want to freeze their butt off while fishing this spring".

More updates to follow

Paul Thompson: the wacky genius uncle

The other day Paul Thompson showed me his latest Invention.  It's a toddler recorder. Even if you don't have a toddler, you can appreciate the noble heartedness of this great uncle, concerned for the safe musical development of his extended family. 

The reason behind...

Today we had visitors come over for lunch after church.  It was very pleasant.  Ron and Pam came over along with Michelle.  With this being my wife's parents and sister, she was telling me how relaxed she was about the whole thing.  This was wonderful news, as there is usually a slightly stressful atmosphere surrounding the visit of my friends to the house.  We had a wonderful time, sharing chicken, salad and a marvelous rhubarb pie made by my mother in law.

However, that conversation in the car opened up a whole new level of understanding regarding what a visit is actually for.  For all these years I had thought that having friends over was an opportunity to eat together, talk together, and maybe even play some music together.  Not so, according to this new information I was able to pick up on between the lines of my wife's relaxed approach to having her own family over.  Normally she would be stressed out for days or even weeks over the arrival of our visitors.  And what would be the cause of this stress?  It was, of course, the real reason behind having visitors over.  Because the real reason is to show them how clean your bathroom is - even the downstairs one that no one ever uses anyway.

A Bathroom - Is it clean enough?

Mowing the grass

Today, we mowed the grass. Elisha helped. He had a good time and did about half the garden. 

Two Can Problems.

These two cans may look like ordinary cans of tomatoes.  And in a manner of speaking they are.  But in addition to being a source of antioxidants and countless other nutritional benefits, they were the source of both a conflict and, more importantly, an idea.

What was the problem?  Well, I had been sent on a special shopping mission by my wife.  We had just upgraded her phone to a smart phone, and I had shown her how to write a list on OneNote which she could then share with me.  So she wrote out a shopping list for Aldi which included both diced tomatoes and crushed tomatoes.  I downloaded it onto my smart phone and off I went, secure in the knowledge that with no old fashion paper shopping list to lose, I could be the man on the spot for her.

I went through the store ticking off all those thing that I had to buy.  Eggs, checked.  Baked Beans, Check.  Traditional spaghetti sauce, Check, and so on and so on.  I even got both types of tomatoes (or so I thought).  But the observant among you will notice the exact same thing that my wife noticed when I got home.  Diced tomatoes with Basil, Garlic and Oregano are not the same as crushed tomatoes.  Even if they were sitting right beside them on the shelf.

My fellow brothers of marriage-hood, I am sure you will know what I mean when I say "I heard about it" when I got home.  I didn't know quite how cruel and heartless I had been until I got home and Rachel noticed those two cans.  I didn't quite know how much of a failure I was, or how much disappointment I had caused, until I got home.  I hadn't understood how the years of frustration concerning my attention to shopping lists had built up, to be released by those two cans of diced tomatoes, until I got home.  But 5 minutes into my sweet wife's explanation of the difference between Diced Tomatoes with Basil, Garlic and Oregano and Crushed tomatoes, I had realised.  Oh yes.  I had definitely realised.

I begged for forgiveness, on my knees, much to the amusement of the kids.

So much for the conflict.  But what was your idea, I hear you cry?  Or rather, I hope you cry, cause I don't know if anyone pays much attention to this blog anyhow.  (If you like it you could always click on the follow button, or leaving a comment wouldn't hurt either)  Anyhow, in answer to my imagination of your pleas for my idea, here it is.  I think we should set up a shopping service for husbands.

We could call it "the lazy shopper" or "save your marriage shopping" or something similar.  I am open to suggestions.  The premise is very simple.  When a married man gets a shopping list from his wife, he would upload the list to the service, where a designated shopper would take that list to Aldi, or Target or Tescos, and shop in his usual manner.  By the way, this would be a male only service.  You'll see why in a few moments.

The male shopper would go through the list with the same care and attention to detail he would give to his own wife's shopping list.  I am estimating, on average, that 85 to 95% of the items will be correct, with a 5 to 15% margin of error.  The shopping service would then drop the bags of groceries off at the doorstep of the household involved, where the wife would unpack it.  And when the wrong can of tomatoes comes out of the bag, the man of the house has someone else to blame!

Can you not see the wonderful simplicity of this idea?  Instead of staring for hours on end at the unending variety of rolls of kitchen towels, knowing that whatever you choose will be wrong because the producer just redesigned their packaging, you can have someone else just throw something in the cart for you and you don't have to take the endless blame for getting MacVitties Full and Fluffy Super Absorbent Kitchen Wonder-Mops (TM) instead of MacVitties Full and Extra Fluffy Super Absorbent Kitchen Wonder-Mops (TM)!  How could you know that they were the ones with the Mauve accents around the top of the box instead of the purple accents?  You didn't choose it - It was the guy from the shopping service!

I anticipate that once this shopping service is set up, men everywhere will not longer fear the sight of a shopping list, be in on paper or on OneNote.  Hours of shopping time for the wife will be compacted into one quick phone call, and more time will be wasted on video games or cleaning the garage.

Let me know what you think!