Bob and Debbie Conroy - Enjoying the Journey Together!

I was picking up license plates for a new car in Adel, IA and noticed a sign on a building across the street. The sign was for a bar with the prosaic name Hideaway Lounge . It was a bar, i.e., a business where people make a profit off other people’s chemical dependency. But it was the other business that really caught my eye, a 24 hour crisis center. How ironic that a bar and a crisis center are co-located. It is an obvious symbiotic relationship but is it mutualism, commensalism or parasitism?  An additional irony is the address: 911.

Some of the things that make me stop and think “Really”: License plates with stickers in multiple places besides the lower left corner. People that refuse to get a computer or use the Internet. Parents with children with more alcohol than food in their cart. Graffiti. Broke people driving new cars and living in big houses. Sports fanatics that can recite sports score and stats but couldn’t name a single person in the Cabinet, their U. S. Congressman, state legislator or state senator. Rap music with profane and violent lyrics. Computer viruses. People that say, “Don’t judge” since good judgment is what keeps us safe. Why it is called Happy Hour? “Reality TV” since it is anything but real. National Public Radio. People that define themselves by a brand of beer or a sports team. Real estate developers that go broke to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in little old Des Moines. Rekha Basu and the Des Moines Register in general. Professional Sports...

Some just have to be told. Here are my current offerings in a continuing effort to come up with an original thought that might be quotable hundreds of years in the future:  The hardest thing to endure is an obvious truth that others have decided to ignore.  Beyond “Fight or Flight”, when faced with more options, a person tends to freeze. Dust and smoke in the atmosphere create beautiful sunsets and then attack your lungs while you sleep. A well-timed kind word is a precious gift. Just when you have things figured out, it doesn’t matter. Time spent with grandchildren is the big payoff. In a rational world, the self-treatment of depression and anxiety by abusing drugs would only appear in fiction novels and the movies. We build truths out of the bones of those that defy conventional wisdom. Suicide is the ultimate method of reducing one’s carbon footprint, anything short of that is some degree of grandstanding or self-delusion. Ignorance can be replaced with knowl...

The size of the universe is limited only by our ability to perceive it.  A coat of paint can hide an interesting story or two. The hypotenuse of a right triangle is occasionally very handy. Your green light is an impediment to others. Multiplying two imaginary numbers together always results in a negative number and that is fine by me. A word can convey complex concepts but it is made up of letters that individually mean nothing. Debt is a tool only used by a fool. In measuring a bargain it is not what you “saved” but what you spent that counts. Sometimes motorcycle maintenance is just motorcycle maintenance.  The antidote to a riddle is earned knowledge.  If only the good die young there are a lot of bad people in Florida. It is easy to adjust a goal to match the results – politicians do it all the time. It is the exceptions that define a process.

From the mind of Bob: An apple a day is over 40,000 Calories a year. If we are stardust, it is a good thing that it cools down before we use it. Considering all of the things that could have gone wrong today but did not, it has been a good day.  An exception to an exception is a rule and all rules are created this way.  Making hydrogen into helium is quite simple if you start with a few thousand billion tons of hydrogen.  Did Pascal ever bet on the horses? Even Shakespeare made typos and grammatical errors but his became the preferred version. A significant event can happen at any moment but it can take years to recognize it happened. The greatest gift to give your descendants is a legacy of honor and integrity. A consistent approach, while good for a pilot, will grind innovation into the ground. A day spent golfing is lost forever.

I have all of the equipment at the agency to record, edit and publish videos.  This includes backgrounds in several colors including green as well as a professional lighting system. Watch out YouTube, here come the Conroys! Next on the bucket list is getting my Amateur Radio license and setting up a broadcast studio.  The books have been ordered.  ( Update: I passed the test for my Amateur Radio Technician license on 11/14/2015!) I am KE0GSH.

Les barbares sont à la porte.   Get your act together Europe!