All About Focus

Thomas train has taken over the house.  Cannon wakes up in the morning and often the first words out of his mouth are, "Watch, Thomas Train."  We have a television in our house but no cable, dish or antenna.  it should be a great mystery as to where the boy gets his addiction to TV.  But it isn't.  He gets it from his dad. 

I think if I lived in a time before radio, I would sit around in the evening and watch bugs crawl around.  Jill would be asking me to put the boy to bed and I would be lost in the beetle's intense struggle to find a crack in the floor wide enough to escape through.  Jill's voice would rise louder as she repeated herself for the third time.  My jaw would open slightly as my focus had to become intense enough to drive out the surrounding noise.  This would continue  until Jill's boot heel would end the beetle's struggle and bring me back to the world at hand.

Another Storm Another Story

Four tornadoes, wind gusts up to 140 miles an hour and enough rain in 15 minutes to make Stockton and Truman merge into one big lake. I have been spending time answering phone calls tonight, and if I believed everything people have heard from so and so, I would be grabbing my faimly and heading for the Rocky Mountains. Taking outage calls at a utility is a lot like playing that telephone game we used to do in youth group, without the deteration into discussion of someone's underwear.

One thing you can believe is that people are without power. We wish they knew we believed them the first time. By the third or fourth time they call, it just seems like they are more lonely than anything.

I would have more sympathy for them but it is about 83 degrees outside, reruns are on television and it is still light out. They should be thankful we are pushing them to enjoy the outdoors except, you know, for those people who are now a part of Truckton Lake.

Floods, Friends, and Fools

Anyone who used to live in El Dorado or has been here enough to know what the spring usually looks like needs to click this link.  An amazing amount of water came down in a short amount of time and teamed up with some unfinished drainage work to wreak havoc on our little burg.  Jill had to circle the town to get to our house as a nearby creek overflowed.  Of course our basement was not unaffected, but we have long since learned not to leave valuable items down there. 

I have succumbed to peer pressure and started a facebook page recently.  It paid huge dividends this week when it helped me reconnect with one of my best friends.  Before this happened, however, I was already sold on the app because it is allowing me to play chess with some of my friends.  I am currently playing four games with four friends.  I know that there are hundreds of places you can play on the Internet, but I like the slow pace of facebook games.  I lost many games on Yahoo solely because their program did not refresh the board in a timely manner. This is not an issue with ChessPro.  If you want a game, look me up.

April Fools Day seemed like a bigger deal to people this year than it has in the past.  A lot of media people, friends and locals wanted to get in on the act.  My favorite:  the Pardon the Interruption guys opened their show by announcing that the NCAA was going to replay the last 16 seconds of the Kansas-Davidson because a key player had fouled out and this was not caught by the officials.  I listened to it the next morning and not thinking about April 1st anymore, bought in completely.

In case anyone did not know: my wife is awesome. Do you know what she chose to do for Mother's Day?  Go to a Royals game.  It is family fun day and we will all be able to go down on the field.  Past experience says that some player will probably hand Cannon a baseball.  I think Jill is mostly in favor of this because they are giving free pink T-shirts to the first 10,000 mothers.   It is kind of amazing what she will do for a free T-shirt.   And speaking of the Royals; they just completed the sweep of the Detroit Tigers.  They are off to their best start since 2003.  Some of you will remember that as the "Believe" year.   Others will not know what I am talking about.  This is not it.

Bonus Wednesday 04/01

I was very excited as I was checking my e-mail to learn of a new service g-mail is offering.  If you don't have a g-mail account, I think this is reason enough to get one.


For more information click here.