Bob and Debbie Conroy - Enjoying the Journey Together!

Our immediate gratification, consumption-driven culture never ceases to amaze me. Apparently, somebody has statistics to show that a good marriage is built on a solid foundation of debt. Oh, and they are in the loan business. " Big hat, no cattle " is a scenario for a doomed marriage .

You can never save enough on a want to rationalize the purchase on price alone. What does the early bird do with all of those worms? Happiness takes effort and without effort the default is misery. Isolation and apathy are poor substitutes for contentment. When making plans the best tactic is to be flexible. If a task is not worth a 100% effort then give it none. Proficiency at prioritization is a prerequisite for progress. When in doubt use logic instead of emotion. Faith can be more powerful than logic but it comes with a price. Show me a broke person and I’ll show you a person without a life plan that has poor budgeting skills and a victim’s mentality. Our ability to rationalize a poor decision is both a virtue and a curse.

While driving on 1-35 I noticed Pyro City Fireworks in Eagleville, MO. It is a gas station that sells BBQ in the front and a fireworks store in the back.  They do have a no-smoking sign on the building. I hope people pay attention to it!

A “near miss” is actually a hit. Defining oneself by the type and brand of alcohol consumed is an example of effective marketing meeting low self-esteem. Everyone I follow on Facebook that is a runner eventually gets a serious injury–do they not notice the correlation? Atoms do not actually touch each other as their electrons repel each other and this force increases exponentially as the distance between them decreases. So when you sit in a chair you actually levitating above it- just not very high. It is your ability to transform your dreams into goals, and your focus on them, that will determine your happiness in life.

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...