Life's Seasons

There's an old saying along the lines of, "Youth is wasted on the young."

I suppose that is somewhat true. When we think about the seasons of our lives we often don't even realize that we are living in the spring and summer of life until we have passed on to autumn. Likewise, we often miss out on much of the beauty of autumn because we are reflecting back on the spring and summer, or dreading the coming winter.

Somehow we always seem to be looking back or looking ahead without taking the time to look around.

I don't deny that I'm in the autumn of my life. The carefree days of my youth are well behind me; the days I have left certainly fewer than the days already spent.

I'm okay with that.

My hope is that I will be able to look around and enjoy the beauty that is the changing of the seasons - this period of transition between the sunny, energetic days of the past and the approaching subdued tones of the winter.

Things tend to move at a slower pace in the winter. Our lives are no exception. I watch the actions and antics of young people and catch myself wondering how long I would spend in bed - or the hospital - after attempting to copy them. Of course, with the coming of winter there also (hopefully) comes wisdom to know better than to even try.

There are some who fight the approaching winter with a vengeance; hoping somehow to hold off, or at least hide, the effects of the seasons. I'm sure we all know at least one person like that; the person who whether through medical interventions or clothing selections or hair manipulation or whatever seeks to give the outward appearance that they are still living out the carefree days of summer.

I don't want to hold off the changing seasons. I have earned each and every one of the gray hairs I see in the mirror each morning. Each gray hair brings with it a reminder to enjoy the day and all it brings. I want to embrace the life God has given me here and now no matter how many days I may have left.

Sometimes the little things are big things.

Overall, I really don't think I'm that hard of a person to please.

Now I freely admit that I tend to be a rather picky eater (Diane would argue my modification of picky with rather, but it's my blog so I'm keeping it as a rather picky eater.)

Okay, I also tend to be slightly OCD about my shirts being starched a certain way and always wearing shoes when I am awake and maybe just a touch of OCD tendencies appear in my insistence to have structure in EVERYTHING in my life.

Other than that, though, I'm really not a hard person to please.

Really.

One of my pet peeves (I only have about 3,000 of them) has to do with my tools being where they belong so I can find them the next time I need to use them. Through the couple of decades that we have lived in our home, the basement and garage became a catch all - causing virtually every attempt to find a particular tool to be an exercise in futility and frustration.

Maybe that's just a little thing to most people; but, to me, it was a very big thing.

I got the bug last fall to tackle the garage and basement so I could (once and for all) get things organized so we could find needed items without having to set a GPS waypoint to find our way back from the jungle the storage areas had become. Thus started a carefully choreographed process of organizing and cleaning. I started on the garage one Saturday morning; moving everything from the garage onto the driveway. I assembled some shelves and started the process of bringing things in and putting them away.

This could only go so far, of course, because there were some items in the garage that had to go to the basement; which wasn't ready to receive anything, yet. We got the garage to a semi-finished state so I could turn my attention to the basement. This created another conundrum because I could only get so far with the cleaning and organization down there before coming up with a way to get rid of some stuff.

After much hemming and hawing about how to handle some stuff, we finally got the basement cleaned and installed more shelving down there to allow me to shift my focus to my ultimate goal of getting my workbench cleaned off and organized once and for all. This finally became possible because Joseph, Matthew and Shelley got together and gave me thirty-two beautiful square feet of pegboard, a whole collection of hooks and tool holders in various sizes and a Menard's gift card that I can use to add more goodies to the collection! It's much easier to know what I need when I can see what I have.

I spent a couple of evenings last week running wires and moving light fixtures around to better light up the basement.

Then came Saturday...

Matthew and I hung the furring strips on the concrete wall and fastened the pegboard.

Then I got started on figuring out just where I want to hang all of my tools. I'm sure the configuration will change at least a couple of times before I settle on a final layout, but at least it's a start! I have printed out labels for all of my tools that I will affix to the pegboard where each tool is to hang once I settle on a final configuration. That will make it very easy to determine what is missing when a tool is "borrowed" and not returned to its proper place. It will also make it very easy for whomever "borrowed" the tool to make sure it gets back into the correct place when they finish using it and are diligent about returning it to its proper place.

The next step is moving my table saw down there to complete the workshop.

It may seem like a little thing to you that my tools are now organized, but to me, it is a very, very big thing.

You see; sometimes the little things are big things...

Mulligan!!!

I suppose everyone has a collection of moments in their life for which that they wish they could just call a mulligan and start over.

I'm sure there are a lot of Denver Broncos fans who would make that call on this year's Super Bowl.

I'm sure Blues goalie Jon Casey would have loved to have "done over" that one shot from Steve Yzerman in the second overtime of a game seven playoff game against the Wings in 1996.

There are a lot of things I, too, wish I could just "do over."

I suppose my biggest mulligan wish would be that I had just enjoyed my boys more when they were young. I'm not a "kid person." Don't get me wrong - I loved my boys dearly from the moment they were born - even before they were born - but I didn't really "enjoy" them when they were small.

Diane has always been a baby/little kid person. She continues to work with the infants and toddlers at church to get her weekly fix of little ones while she patiently waits for a grandchild to dote over at some point in the future.

Me, though, not so much. I couldn't wait for the boys to get old enough to carry on "normal" conversations and do other "normal" things.

As a result, I missed out on a lot.

I didn't "enjoy" the moments as they played out.

I lived through them and, in some cases, endured them, but I didn't really "enjoy" them.

There are times when I look back on those days and wish I could just call a mulligan and try it all over again.

That chance is gone forever and now I look back from my middle aged years with regret.

Thanks for the job, Mr. Dierdorf!

While many of my high school friends went to work at various fast food restaurants, I was lucky enough to be hired at the Sears store in Chesterfield Mall. I was hired as seasonal help leading into the Christmas season in 1977. I remember asking the HR person who interviewed me if there was any chance that I could stay on after Christmas; only to be told that the store was already above the corporate quota for part time workers and I would be let go after Christmas. I figured that working for three months was better than not working at all, so I jumped at the job offer she made.

I went through a couple of weeks of training before learning that I was being assigned to the sporting goods department. It was a dream come true! Sears' sporting goods department at that time featured the standard baseball, football and basketball equipment, but it also had guns, hunting supplies, fishing supplies, pool tables and the recently introduced video game systems. The store added a display of ping pong tables and pool tables for the Christmas season.

It was there that I met Dan Dierdorf.

We had a small storeroom and locked gun room in the back of the department where we stored our jackets and personal belongings while we worked. I was cutting through the department to put my jacket away when I passed what had to be the largest human being I had ever encountered. He politely stopped me as I walked past and asked if I worked in the department. I immediately recognized him as Dan Dierdorf, an offensive lineman for the St. Louis Cardinals Football Team. I told him I would put my jacket in back and be right back with him.

Upon my return, Mr. Dierdorf told me he was interested in getting a pool table for his family for Christmas. I was able to answer all of his questions about the various models we offered (good thing I listened during my training sessions in the department), and he ultimately selected one of our slate-topped models. We took care of all of the necessary paperwork for the sale and delivery and he went on his way.

That transaction, though, contributed to me being allowed to keep my job.

Christmas came, and went, and all of the other seasonal help was gradually dropped from the schedule over the next several weeks, but my name continued to appear. I wasn't going to complain, of course, because it meant I still had a job. I kept quiet about it; hoping that my manager simply forgot that I, too, had been hired as seasonal help and was supposed to be let go once the seasonal rush was over. I finally worked up the courage to ask after several more weeks passed, only to be told that the store manager had given her permission to keep me on as a permanent part time employee.

Why?

Well probably not because of my dashing good looks or charming personality; although I'm sure that was a contributing factor.

No, I was kept on partly because I had the highest per-hour sales of any part timer in the entire store each month since I had been hired. My manager had apparently determined that I could sell pretty much anything to anyone. It didn't hurt, of course that I was passionate about the products in the sporting goods department. It also didn't hurt that I would go in to work pretty much any time the HR department called to see if I would be willing to cover a shift in another department for someone who had called in sick or just if a department found themselves short staffed.

I kept that job until I quit to head off to college, and I kept up my sales numbers and my willingness to cover shifts in any department at a moment's notice. Through the years I worked in hardware, paint, men's clothing, televisions, catalog fulfillment, the bike shop, deliveries and candy counter, among other things.

While Dan Dierdorf never gave another thought, I'm sure, to the sixteen year old kid who had helped him purchase a pool table; I always remembered him fondly as the guy whose big ticket purchase contributed to me keeping a seasonal job for several years.

Thanks for the job, Mr. Dierdorf!

Maiden Names

I freely admit that, as a guy, I have it easy in so many ways. The tiniest things earn us big points - like remembering to put the toilet seat down - why women don't just check if the seat is up or down before sitting down is beyond me, but that's a topic for another time - or remembering to take off my wet shoes in the mudroom before I plod through the kitchen.

The fact is, though, that we have a pretty good gig.

One big bonus is that I kept my last name. I had practiced my signature thousands of times as a kid so I would be ready to scribble my name at a moments notice when adoring Blues fans pressed me for an autograph. No one's ever asked for my autograph, but my signature is largely unchanged from my youth - it wasn't legible then and it isn't legible now.

Most women of my generation took on their husband's last name when they got married; forcing them to develop an entirely new autograph.

Then along came Facebook.

If anyone from my past wanted to look me up, all they had to do was type Scott Brader into a search engine and it would bring up a number of people named Scott Brader. It isn't all that hard to figure out which one is me based on the information available. For women, though, friends from their youth who may want to track them down on Facebook have no way of doing that without knowing their married name.

The solution? Simply list yourself on Facebook with both your maiden name and your married name.

Sounds like an easy fix, right?

Well it might be easy, but I will admit that it is one that gives me pause.

One of the most important bits of information an identity thief wants to know is your mother's maiden name. After all, many accounts use a person's email address or their first initial and last name or their entire name as their user id. Knowing that, it's not too hard to click the Forgot My Password link and answer the most common security question which is, of course, What is your mother's maiden name.

This creates the potential for a bit of a quandary. After all, if a woman wants to be found by her childhood friends, then Facebook pretty much requires that you list your name as First Name Maiden Name Last Name. Now the unscrupulous person looks up some potential targets on Facebook and sees that their mother is among their friends; or the mom's posts make it obvious that she's the mom. If she listed her name by the standard format; that unscrupulous person has the mother's maiden name.

Seems like a gigantic security hole to me; and certainly one that opens up a whole world of privacy issues.

I think Facebook needs to modify their personal information to allow people to enter their name in a First Name Maiden Name Last Name fashion that searches on any combination of those names while only displaying First Name Last Name on the news feeds.

Okay, so I'm an anal retentive, geeky sort of person who finds such tidbits of information to be fascinating. Maybe no one cares. Maybe it's not a big deal to anyone else.

But it seems like a big deal to me.

That's my rant for the day.

Keeping America Safe...

Victoria is a young lady Diane and I had in our church youth group. She is also one of my Facebook friends. I enjoy how Facebook allows me to follow the lives of some of the young people we have had the privilege of leading through the years. Victoria's recent posts serve as a reminder to me of the sacrifices many of America's young people make every day to make our lives better.

Victoria's parents were both in the military and Victoria and several of her siblings followed in their parents' footsteps and entered the military, as well. While she never puts enough detail in her posts to give away where she is going or has been, I have been able to surmise she has been deployed several times to regions that I am happy to avoid.

Many of her posts include inside jokes or comments that are completely lost on someone like me who has never served in our military. Many of her posts over the past year, though, have been a profound reminder of our service men and women's commitment to keeping America safe. One such post last week really touched my heart and has gnawed at my mind to the point that I decided I had to write about it.

Last week was Victoria's second wedding anniversary. She married another soldier. I have never met Anthony. I have watched Victoria's posts over the last year as she counted down the months, weeks and days until she could be with Anthony again. You see, for half of their married life, Anthony has been deployed.

I have no idea where Anthony's deployment has taken him other than to know that he is far from his bride. Oh, sure, today's technology lets them talk to each other from time to time and they can send messages back and forth in near real time. But it's not the same as being able to look into your loved one's eyes; to hold their hand; to feel their breath on your cheek or the beating of their heart as you embrace. No, Victoria and Anthony have had to forego those things that most of us take for granted every day because they are keeping America safe.

Victoria's posts over the past year have reminded me that the millions who serve, or who have served, have sacrificed much - many having given the ultimate sacrifice - all in the name of keeping America safe. While we collectively remember their service each year when Memorial Day or Veteran's Day rolls around; they serve 365 days per year. Victoria's posts about her anniversary passing with her husband many miles away just served to remind me that we need to be mindful of those who serve not just on their "special days" but each and every day as they set aside their personal lives and are separated from their families all in the interest of keeping America safe.

One Task At A Time

Sometimes it's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the seemingly endless list of things I need to accomplish. Whether at home or at work, it seems like my list of things to do grows at a rate exponentially proportional to the number of items I actually check off said list. Perhaps it's due to the fact that every task I undertake seems to reveal a number of other tasks that either must be done in order for me to complete my initial task, or tasks that now should be done to keep up with what was already done.

Just once I wish I could start - and subsequently finish - a task without a myriad of other tasks suddenly being added to my list.