John’s Blog

posted by admin on Jan 1

Sharon tagged me. I’m supposed to share seven things you did not know about me. That’s kind of hard, because I don’t know who you are, and different people know different things. But here are seven things some people don’t know about me. Sorry, folks. There aren’t any earth-shattering secrets here.

1. I had an older sister who died before I was born. While I never knew her, that experience explains a lot about how my parents raised us. Children were never taken for granted and family was always the center of our lives.
2. I’m terrified of needles. I’ve turned down jobs because I don’t want to get the required TB test. I never understood why, when you have to have a blood test or shot, they wake you back up before taking the blood or administering the vaccination.
3. My handwriting is so bad that my 7th grade English teacher told me I either needed to become a doctor or learn how to type. Given my feeling about needles, I asked for (and received) a typewriter for Christmas.
4. When I was in eighth grade, I was identified as gifted and spent two weeks at Purdue University studying physics and biology. At one point, the physics teacher stopped mid-sentence. “Oh,” she said. “You guys don’t know trig, do you?” She stopped and explained trigonometry to us before moving on with the lesson. The whole experience convinced me that chemistry is impossible, because the most brilliant kids were up until the wee hours of the morning every night trying to understand it. Fortunately, I was in the slow kids’ class.
5. I met my wife online on March 27, 1990. She sent me email. I still have it.
6. When I applied to college, my major was English Education. Between the time when I was accepted and the time when school started, I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life reading bad writing. So I switched to math, and later added computer science.
7. When I was in Kindergarten, the teacher used to call the role every day. I can still name every kid in my kindergarten class in the order they were in her gradebook (alphabetically, with the new kids at the end). They are Kathy, Susan, Beth, Wendy, Katie, Phillip, Jared, Kristen, Tommy, Curt, Leslie, Scott, Karen, Glenn, Debbie, Paula, Cathy, Joanne, Paul, John, Bobby, Laurie, Rebecca, Jody, Raymond, Daryl, Randy, Ronnie, Amy, and Christine. Paul was my best friend, but he moved in the middle of first grade.

So, umm, there you are. I’m supposed to tag seven people. I’ll tag 29 instead. If you were in Miss Miller’s PM kindergarten class at West Blvd. Elementary School in 1976-77, consider yourself tagged

posted by admin on Sep 1

It’s Labor Day. It’s the end of the summer. School is back in session, and the schedules and routines are getting fuller by the day.

When I was a kid, school always started the Tuesday after Labor Day. So it was always our last day of freedom. I distinctly remember Labor Days from my elementary years. It was a lazy day. It was a day of no responsibilities. Usually, we’d watch the Jerry Lewis Telethon. We were never motivated to actually go out and try to raise money for MD or anything, but it was nice to see the local cutaways, when people in our local community would come on and make their pledges and donations.

For some reason, watching the telethon was synonymous with building card houses. I think we were bored with the show one year, and gathered up some old playing cards. We used to have bags full of them. We started building card houses on the floor. Sometimes, we’d make little villages. Sometimes, we’d just make one enormous multi-leveled structure. Inevitably, we’d run out of cards and have to go searching the house for more.

The cards didn’t have anything to do with Labor Day, of course, but I don’t recall ever doing that while watching any other shows. It was just one of those things that we did once, and then we remembered the next year, and did it again. After that, it was a tradition.

As this Labor Day approached, I decided that it, again, would be a day with no work done. It’s a day for hobbies and recreation. I’ve chosen to spend it making a nice brown ale that I should be able to enjoy later this fall. I don’t always goof off on Labor Day, but I think it might be a nice tradition to start.

I was also thinking about those houses of cards, and drawing mental parallels to the current economic conditions in the United States, the enormous budget deficit, the fact that we’re running out of young people to send to the middle east to die for oil, and the cost of that oil. I’ve been thinking about retirement costs — health care in particular. I’m not sure it’ll ever be possible to retire, because of the exponential growth in health care costs. Then there’s the real estate crisis, the mushrooming costs of higher education, and America’s increasing inability to innovate its way out of economic messes. We’re in for a bumpy ride.

But writing all those things down and trying to make sense of them would be work. And it’s Labor Day. I’m taking the day off.