Jeff Blogs

From an early age I was told I was not quite normal. That seems like kind of a harsh thing to tell a kid especially if you are that kid’s parents. The thing was, I thought that was a good thing so I grew up thinking that not being normal was actually a good trait to have. I can’t really explain why but I just seem to have the ability of piecing things together slightly different than other people. In some ways this has been a great thing. I have a knack of looking at something from a different perspective and providing an observation that might otherwise go unnoticed. On the other hand this can sometimes get me in trouble or at least into an area that is uncharted and pretty weird. The invention of the computer and more specifically the Internet hasn’t helped at all; in fact it has made matters worse. Now I have a lot more information at my disposal I tend to put it together in rather unique ways. Take e-mail for example. Like many of you I get up each day and check my email and find out that more than half of my in-box has been filled with SPAM. Usually at this moment I take a severe detour to begin trying to understand why unwanted email was named after a canned meat product but I’ll spare you from that and try to get right to the point. Unlike most people, I don’t just immediately start deleting these unwanted messages. Instead I read each one. I blame my mother for this. She always said that if someone is willing to take the time to send you a letter you should at least have the common courtesy of reading it and acknowledging them. So for some unknown reason I started replying to SPAM and what I found is that those people really don’t want you to reply because they never respond back or if they do it is usually to ask me to quit emailing them. That seems a little messed up don’t you think? Today I got an email and I thought maybe I would share it with you.

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We returned from our trip to Utah-Idaho on Friday but today is officially the last day of vacation. All of the bags have been unpacked and tomorrow we return to the daily grind. As I woke this morning I just laid in bed staring at the ceiling. Well actually I laid there staring at the ceiling fan that was spinning attempting to keep the house a few degrees cooler sparing his friend the air conditioning unit. Sometimes I feel kind of pathetic to think about what amuses me. I laid there looking up forcing my eyes first to focus on a single ceiling fan blade to see if I could follow it all the way through a single rotation. Then I reached for the remote and changed the speed of the ceiling fan to see if I could still keep track of the ceiling fan blade. Before long Trina woke up and snatched the remote from my hand and switched it back to the slowest speed. As she rolled over to go back to sleep she made some comment about how I needed to get up and quit playing with stuff so she could get some rest. I wasn’t quite ready though. I laid there sans-remote wondering if it would be possible for me to somehow automate the ceiling fan and control its speed via the computer. I have no idea why I would do that since I could not think of any possible benefit to being able to control the upstairs ceiling fan from the computer that is located downstairs. Still it would be an interesting experiment. I briefly considered discussing the possibility with Trina but based upon her breathing patterns and the snoring going on she probably was not laying there contemplating the same things I was. Come to think of it, there is probably no one on the planet who is right now lying in bed contemplating the same things I am. Maybe Trina is right, maybe I am one of a kind and not in a good way.

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I should learn never to open my mouth. First it would mean a lot fewer nights spent sleeping on the couch. Second I would probably find myself in a lot fewer weird and unusual situations. In this particular context I would have had a much easier day and I wouldn’t be in nearly as much pain. A few days ago I noted that Trina and Whitney had left town leaving Tiffany, Dakota, and me at home to fend for ourselves. I also noted that part of the challenge that I had was to find something for Dakota to do so that he was not so bored. Yeah, that was a really bad thing to say. No sooner had I written that then the entire universe started to crumble around me. Ok, maybe not the whole universe, just that little piece that Trina left me in charge of during her absence.

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This week the price of crude oil reached another all-time high which in turn means that we will be paying more for fuel in the coming weeks. This has not been anything new, this upward spiral in energy prices has been going on for some time. As a result we are now seeing gas prices above the $4 gallon. Where it once cost me $25 to fill the Honda it now takes $60 to do it. And don’t even get me started on what it costs to fill Trina’s Suburban; I about have to take out a second mortgage to get gas. The thing about it is that I understand why prices are the way they are. The cost of crude oil is up. This means that every process or processor downstream of a barrel of oil will see their costs increase hence they pass those costs on to the next step until finally the consumer bears the brunt of the increase. I may not like it but at least that makes sense and I would expect that to happen.

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It’s funny how we seem to take things for granted that just work. You never think about it, you just kind of expect that stuff works the way it is supposed to. Take for example the light switch. If you walk into a dark room you reach for the light switch. You just assume that when you flip it then the lights will go on. If for some inexplicable reason the lights don’t come on you immediately think it is a personal problem. You check to make sure you flipped the right switch or that you flipped it in the right direction. If the light continues to be difficult and not work you then begin looking for a replacement light bulb since that has to be the problem. It is only after exhausting these efforts that you finally conclude that perhaps there is a malfunction with the electrical infrastructure. Why is that? I think it is because we have become so accustomed to the fact that we have energy on demand that we are shocked when we find that is not the case. I remember as a kid growing up in Idaho, it seemed like the power went out every week. It probably wasn’t that often but it sure seemed like it. In that environment you never took electricity for granted. You were just grateful when you had power. Since that time the electrical grid has become much more stable and my expectations are much greater that the power is always on.

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