Bacon hung by the chimney with care

I do not want you to be stuck in a cynical mood, allowing the outside world to raise your blood pressure higher than holiday treats do normally, so read this post after you read Camels, Eye of Needle, Etc.

There are many good things going on in the world, we may just have to work a little bit harder to find them because they are not self-promoting actions. My friend and fellow TFA corps member James Bacon - Ladies, he looks as good as the real stuff tastes - is raising money to take our kids from Chicot County, Arkansas to Washington, DC, to expose them to the greater possibility within our nation. It is my hope that a trip like this will be life-changing and ignite a desire to learn and grow in those young men and women who are surrounded by hopeless elements. I applaud him for taking the intiative to organize a trip, because so often we, the general population, have great ideas that we never act on. Here's to you Bacon and your elves for acting on it. If you would like to learn more and donate, click here.

Enjoy your family, be merry, open gifts, share stories, love each other, have yourself a merry little Christmas night, and help this Bacon out if you can. Look at that face.

Hopeful Sunday

60 Minutes just did a profile on Pete Carroll, USC Head Football Coach, and his involvement in leading inner-city youth peace initiatives. He meets with former gang members in the middle of the night to offer hope.

Hope is a powerful notion. We elect presidents based on hope. We seek mentors and leaders who instill hope. We want someone to say that they believe in us, that we are capable of greatness. Too often, we listen to the doubters, those who stop trying and seek to convince others of a failed, dismal reality.

I am a rat of the Pied Piper of those promising a vision and a hope. I don't even care about the cheese, just place the belief of a slice at the end. I want a real, practical hope, and the persistence bolstering courage. This is why I like Wendy Kopp, TFA Founder, Caroline Rhee, DC School Chancellor, Vaclev Havel, John Selph, my fellow TFA alumni and corps members, the show Secret Millionaire showing selfless people in impoverished areas, dad-gum tear-jerker Extreme Home Makeover, Liberty Mutual commercials, and thousands of others working to make the world better. The success of these people and their causes comes from their ability to inspire, the trickle-down, pay-it-forward notion of helping others and seeing Good come alive and change lives.

We are closing in on 2009 and a chance to begin again. Burdens of yesterday should stay in yesterday's grave. Allow yourself the chance to reevaluate priorities. The easiest way to stop selfishness is to give. Melts away like butter.

Three bottles of wine

Again, I apologize for not writing as much. I have been on that search for a job. Of course, 100% commission hires these days. Why the H-E- double hockey stocks not?

I will be working for Aflac, taking orders from the duck. I have discovered throughout this process that companies hire via paradox. They want experience but no employer offers experience. Therefore they hire someone but no one.

So tonight ended up as a date night, "When Harry Met Sally" and bride to be has fallen asleep on the couch. I noticed Crystal has a swing and the 80's seem like a great time to live in New York. That's all for now, I wanted the loyal readers to have something. Thank you loyal reader.

Honey-Do List

Self-reliant. Independent. Individual. Call me "Old-fashioned," but I like these attributes. They remind me of what Man, or Woman, is supposed to be. Life being a relationship between you and the Creator, without government interference. Why am I discussing these topics today? Because I hooked up a washer and dryer.

True, it may not seem like such a large accomplishment, but I tally it in the point-for-Chilly column. You, dear reader, may point out that I did not build the washer and dryer. I performed no mining, smelting, or assembling, on such claims I concede. I did, however, hook the duo up.

After spending multiple hours, and multiple dollars, at the laundry mat over the past several months, we lucked into a washer and dryer. Bride to be was thankful as was I. It was an older set, so a little know-how was needed to hook them up. Plus, trying to save money here, I had a buddy with a truck help move them and then I was left to set up the arrangement.

I had to change a three prong wire on the dryer to a four-prong. You might not even know what I'm talking about, thus all the more reason to be proud of my accomplishment. On the back of the dryer, there is a flap of metal closed by a screw. You unscrew the screw to find the wiring, where you have to connect the wires from the cord. Then, you have to ground the green wire with the white wire in the middle section. That's right, the middle section. The Georgia Bulldogs wires, red and black, can go on either side of the white wire. Plug it in without shocking yourself and success, a working dryer blowing Sahara winds all across you towels.

Then onto the washer, where you connect the tubes to the spigots for hot and cold. The hardest thing is remembering which spigot feeds the hot water and which spigot holds the cold, energy saving water. Check, the hardest thing is screwing in old tubes and getting sprayed in the face, not once, but twice, then emptying drain water onto your Nikes. Self-discovery leads to a trip to Lowe's, where you buy new tubes and then hook them up. Currently, I am running my first load.
I won't bore you with the details of what channel lock pliers are, how to lift with your legs, and which friend to select.

For a completely different topic, here are a few random thoughts.

I think we should go back to hanging pirates. I wonder what a sect of militant gays looks like. The government is a mess. ( I watched CSPAN yesterday and they were discussing speculators getting home loans with no intent of repaying them.) If you give a mouse a cookie, or billions of dollars, they are going to ask for some milk. Last, did the druids invent the snuggie, a fleece blanket with sleeves? Fun for the whole family!

Fresh Socks

Bride to be asked me to stop. "Stop what, Chilly?" you might ask. I would respond, "Driving my El Camino to Negativetown."

In elementary school, to encourage high self-esteem, the administration decided to adopt the Positive Action Kids message. We sang a song during Positive Action assemblies that went something like this,

I am a positive, positive action kid.
That's what I am, that's how I live.

We repeated the lines like the song that never ends, it went on and on my friends. Being clever fourth and fifth graders we changed the lyrics to "negative action kids" in our first stab at rebellion. Boy, did we get 'em. Even our teachers couldn't harness enough willpower to restrain their criticisms and apparent agreement with our sentiments of the fluff program. We may have been forced to sing the song, but we were still gunning for heads while playing dodgeball on the playground.

As part of this effort, a "Peer Helper" group was formed. The intent was to create a positive support network of cool kids for ugly kids and loners. We were the ones designed to make sure no one felt left out, to suck up all the meanness of preadolescence and perform comment alchemy. Whereas, a normal mean little kid might say, "Why do you smell like goat droppings?," our job was to turn that into a compliment like, "He must be jealous of how close to nature you live in an otherwise materialistic world." The school counselor, a sweet lady with Alps worth of dandruff, led us. We met in a third grade classroom and sat in tiny chairs and felt superior to the Safety Patrol. After no one obeyed their neon Safety Stripe, they could come talk to us about how that made them feel.

Recently, Ive found myself arguing with the tv. Sometimes it has a political bent. Obama to create 2 million jobs. Yeah, how, with a savior wand? Other times, I try to surpass importance. Explosive crash on I-75. Great, now I have to find an alternative route. Lately, I've been surly towards fantastical commercials and television. A dog knows the family secret to baked beans and can tell us at home without the owner hearing. Hey dog, your owner is right next to you and he has ears. Jack Bauer takes four shots to kill three terrorists. Nice job, I thought you were supposed to be better than a Chuck Norris-Hercules crossbreed.

She said stop to all of this ridiculous complaining and talking to people who can't hear me. They don't care if I disagree. She doesn't care to hear about it either. Despite raising my voice several decibel levels, the glass on the tv remains impregnable and everything I fight against is prerecorded. I was not being positive.

This morning I asked for a fresh start. I ran for the first time in a month. I asked the Lord for a positive attitude. I asked to see the good in life and not be a critic. Lo and behold, I began to see things differently. Hey, it stopped raining. My Fantasy Football team will win this week. My foot feels better. My hair is not falling out when I take a shower so maybe I don't have male pattern baldness. These Frosted Flakes taste delicious.

I'm trying, and of all weeks to reflect on the good, the warm, fuzzy, new sock feeling, this is the one.

Keep Your Head Up Sport.

The Republican Party is doing some good ol' soul searching. The only thing left is to hire Stuart Smalley to come in and motivate us, except that he is currently in a runoff as a Democrat for the Senate in Minnesota. The WSJ has about 72 opinion pieces (more like 3 out of 10) today from Republicans saying what we need to do to reclaim the spot as leader in America. They all say the same thing: we got away from our principles, we need to return to our principles, and would it hurt us to have a little diversity.

On another topic, I enjoyed shooting my shotgun this weekend. Liberals and conservatives had a good time shooting guns together, and not at each other either. Bride to be even managed to knock down some skeet. Makes me proud.

I'm studying for the Series 7 and learning about being a financial planner so not much interesting has gone on. I did go in an Apple store last night and it was cool and high tech. I had no idea what to do with all the colors, sounds, and international crowd ready to do battle against the "I'm a pc" folks. I had a dream last night involving bride to be working at an ice cream store, a conversation with Jim Martin, and a buffalo pinning me down. Then during the dream, whoever was with me reminded me that I could do whatever I wanted, and so I made the buffalo disappear so that I could get up.

Hope you enjoyed this little diversion and if you feel down just say to yourself, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me! "

I swerved to miss him, but the little guy wasn't fast enough

Happy Halloween! I'm dressing up as a dead squirrel because I am prepared for the Republicans to get run over in the coming elections. (Ouch, zing, this hurts to say.)

I have a question for ladies out there. How can you dominate the household with such ease? I somehow watched 43 minutes of Deal or No Deal the other night as Tomorrow Rodriguez won a million dollars. What did I have every intention of watching? The final three innings of the World Series.

Three innings, not even. The Phils won without having to bat in the bottom of the ninth. Somewhere, somehow, bride-to-be has developed a flight response to baseball. There is no fight. She just leaves the room, akin to the "She's washing her hair" response you sometimes got when trying to call upon a young lady. I don't know if the response was developed in the delta where my team lost 34 games in a row over two years by very large margins and she saw the effects of the beatings on my battered psyche, or if it started at some point in her childhood when she was forced to watch horrific baseball - extended innings due to walks, errors, domination by the opposing team, various player anatomy adjustments - the likes of which will scar any potential fan, and repressed the memory. It doesn't matter. I get similar responses to action movies and CSPAN. True, I'm one of 56 Americans who enjoy watching CSPAN so maybe that shouldn't count, but I do change the channel when she's around. (That's right, talk to me Anthony Corrado of the Brookings Institute about the State of the Presidential Election.)

However, and guys will agree, we will sit though anything in hopes of making our ladies happy. When they are happy, we are happy. Hence, the success of the Dr. Pepper commercial where the dutiful boyfriend buys tampons and other testicle questioning acts until she takes tries to take his drink. You learn this at a young age from your father when he backs up every suggestion your mother throws out. (Yes it is 75 degrees, but your mom wants you to put on your sweater because she is cold. No, you can't jump off the roof into the pool even though it would be super-awesome.) I awoke to this fact of life when I found myself watching Dirty Dancing one Saturday morning, and despite Patrick Swayze hip thrusting and pelvis driving, I dutifully watched alongside my future bride. She may have envisioned summer escapades with strangely-gifted sensitive dancers while we were watching, but she was happy and I was there as her only option. It was a choice, and in January, I commit to a life of those choices, and I can handle it.

I have not yet succumbed to Steel Magnolias or The Cutting Edge, and I will hold out as long as possible, opting for Chuck Norris, Bloodsport, MonsterQuest, and nine hours of football, until I inevitably fold when she pushes the envelope, offering me baked goods and cold beer in exchange for my manhood. When that time comes, I will season my manhood with cumin and oregano, saute it in EVOO, sprinkle it with pepper, and serve it as an appetizer to an evening of settling down in matching penguin print pj's.