Black Friday

Today is Black Friday, and Monday is Cyber Monday. The busiest shopping days of the year according to the news. I remember, as a kid, going with my father to shop for mom’s Christmas gift on Christmas eve. It always struck me that a gift for mom seemed to be an after-thought. I know that many years, his gift was exchanged after Christmas. He couldn’t be upset considering how much thought he put into it. I suspect this is why I start thinking about Christmas gifts in October. Perhaps it is a little bit of an over-reaction. 

Candi and I stopped exchanging gifts years ago. If we need or want something, we buy it and don’t wait for a holiday. If we haven’t thought of it, we likely don’t want or need it. Our kids give us a gift list, normally Amazon or they get a gift certificate. The grandchildren are getting older, and it is difficult to know what they want. I came up with a solution this year. Since we will be there over Christmas, they will have a small gift under the tree, and we are giving them a shopping trip after Christmas. They will know what they got for Christmas, and we can take them to get what they wanted but did not get. We will see how it works. One reason I thought of this was that one year, I got a blanket for Christmas from my Grandparents. I don’t remember what I wanted that year, but I know that as a ten-year-old, it definitely was not a blanket. What I want for this Christmas and Christmases future is to make shared memories.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving is a time for large meals with family and friends. Do you have turkey, or ham or both? What type of dressing, cornbread or bread? Do you have cranberries, jello from the can, homemade cranberries, cranberry-orange, or some other traditional cranberry recipe? Do you have the traditional (thanks to Campbell’s soup) green bean casserole? Are you one that must have a mac and cheese dish? Do you fix potatoes, sweet potato or white potato mashed or baked, or both? What about pie, pecan or pumpkin or both? Just think of the time to prepare the feast and then how fast it disappears. Do you think that leftovers are the best part of Thanksgiving dinner? Turkey or ham sandwiches are great the next day.

This year, we went totally unconventional for Thanksgiving. There are just the two of us. Friends celebrate with their family and our family is many miles away. Yesterday, I smoked a rack of ribs. One rib is already gone to a taste test. Charro beans, potato salad, and broccoli finish out the dinner. And of course, no meal is complete without Blue Bell ice cream.

With the storms crossing the country, we hope that everyone’s loved ones are safe and warm and home for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving memories

We were remembering Thanksgivings past. Our first Thanksgiving after our wedding, we lived about 250 miles away, and both mothers insisted we eat Thanksgiving dinner with them. Think about how full you feel after one Thanksgiving dinner, and then multiply that by two. We did that again the next year. The third-year, we told our mothers that we would eat Thanksgiving dinner with one family and Chrismas dinner with the other. It was up to them to get together and negotiate where we would eat for Thanksgiving and Christmas. If they could not agree, we would not come for either holiday. That worked. It could have had something to do with the fact that by then, we had the first grandchild in either family. After another three years, we moved over 800 miles away, had two more kids and going home for the holidays was next to impossible. The next time we went away for Thanksgiving was to my grandfather’s. A twelve-hour drive. We did that for about 12 years. Our children still remember their great grandfather. We are glad that we allowed the kids to make those memories. They still talk about it at Thanksgiving time. Great-Granpa passed 24 years ago, but they still remember him.

Holiday Shopping

OMG! How does anyone survive shopping during the holidays? We are not even to Thanksgiving and the following infamous Black Friday sales. People are driving crazy. Oh, I was supposed to stop at that red light? What speed limit? You want me to signal abrupt lane changes? The only place that was not crazy was the liquor store. Just wait until tomorrow, the day before Thanksgiving. We needed to stop at the grocery store — what a zoo. Two people slammed into my shopping cart, and they were store employees that were pulling groceries for pickup orders. Do they really have to do this during the busiest times of the day? I am done. I am not shopping until late in January, well, maybe the middle of January when I go back to school. The only way I will shop is online and for delivery. Thank goodness for free delivery. Maybe I will take the pledge, no shopping unless online, forever. Even my significant other has learned not to take me shopping. Shopping is a gender thing. Males, needing something, walk into a store, find what they need, and leave. Females can shop for hours and never buy anything. It is a mystery!

Great Break

We are working to move everything out of the Ohana so that the contractor coming today will be able to visualize what he needs to do. There is a lot of stuff in the Ohana. I have wisely tried to stay out of the way and let my better half make all the decisions. Not an easy thing to do, but I mostly succeeded and only got yelled at a couple of times. Only a little more work to finish tomorrow. It was time for a reward, a trip to Blue Bell. Their triple chocolate is outstanding. It is not available in the grocery stores, only in ice cream parlors. Are there any of those left? It is available at Blue Bell in the tasting room. You cannot beat a cup of the best ice cream in the country for only $1. An older Blue Bell add said, “We eat all we can and sell the rest.” If you ever make it through Brenham, Blue Bell is a mandatory stop. I hope I do something good tomorrow to earn another trip to Blue Bell. Almost enough to be good until Christmas.

Is Sunday a day of rest?

I always heard that Sunday is a day of rest. In whose life is that even slightly true? We are cleaning everything out of our ohana (the place where family and friends live when they come to visit.) It is complete with a mini-kitchen and has a bathroom just outside the door. Why move everything out? Everything is moving out because it has not yet been remodeled. It is the only part of the house that is the same as when we moved in. I think this part is essentially the same as when the house was built in 1978. The only thing we know that was changed in the last 41 years was the carpet. My spouse, of almost 50 years, has decided it is time to remodel, which was energized by part of the acoustical ceiling starting to come loose and fall down. We have a contractor coming to look at it tomorrow, and she wants to show him a clean slate to work on. In between, I managed to complete syllabi for next semester. I think it is time to have a beer and continue on the projects tomorrow.

It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Remember Mr. Rogers? I remember my children watching him. If you are too young to remember him, see the movie with Tom Hanks playing Fred Rogers. We need more kind people. We need people to be supportive of others. We need people to tell others, “yes, you can.” We need people that can work with others even though they don’t agree on some issues.  Yes, that is a strange word called compromise. It hardly seems to exist in this country anymore. (Although the House Judiciary Committee voted two to one in favor of decriminalizing marijuana at the Federal level.) Syracuse University has been in the news because of the hate that exists on campus. Racial epithets, swasticas, religious hate make the students feel afraid. Yesterday morning on my way to Max Donuts, I passed a house that had three flagpoles in the front yard. One had an American Flag. One had a Texas Flag. One had a white supremacist flag. I would not have recognized it if I had not seen it on the news about several white supremacist rallies, or was it during one of the president’s rallies. I live in Texas, which is a very conservative state. Still, it was startling to see such a blatant and public demonstration of a desire to discriminate.

House impeachment inquiry

I normally try to stay away from politics, but with everything going on in Washington, it is difficult, especially with the degree of misinformation coming out of the representatives sitting on the Security Committee. What they are conducting is an inquiry. I would compare it to a grand jury investigation. Next, the committee needs to decide if they are going to write articles of impeachment. If they do, it then goes to the Judiciary Committee. They are free to drop the matter, or they can finalize the articles and send it to the House for a vote. If the house votes for the articles of impeachment, they go to the Senate for a trial. Hey, Jim Jordan, it is only at that time that there is a trial. This process is laid out in the Constitution of the United States of America. 

I do enjoy watching the late-night comedian-hosts comment on the day’s testimony. Jimmy Kimmel made a comment that made me think. He said something like the Republicans are going to have to decide if they are Republicans or Americans. If I were running for congress against an incumbent Republican that had voted against the articles of impeachment, I would be pounding him with that, over, and over, and over. It really seems like the Republicans are afraid of Trump and his base. Like they are afraid to have an independent thought. Which comes down to, the house will vote on the articles of impeachment along party lines and send them to the Senate. The Senate will vote against impeachment, again along party lines. Why did we send these people to Congress to do nothing? I think we should change all of them out, maybe for a group that will vote for term limits for Representatives and Senators.

End of the semester

Yesterday was the last day of teaching for the Fall semester. Today I travel home to Texas for Thanksgiving. Officially the university has classes Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. I don’t and never have had classes that week. The university has finally heard what many of us have been saying. Next year everyone gets the entire week off. Thanksgiving is so late this year that we only have one week after Thanksgiving before finals. I use one class day to review for finals and then give the students the option of taking the final during dead-week or during the time the university schedules for finals. I started doing this last year. The students like having the choice, and it might have even helped my course evaluations. It is a seven and a half-hour drive from Stillwater to home. I will be returning on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Saturday after Thanksgiving is the annual Oklahoma State – Oklahoma football game (referred to as Bedlam) in Stillwater this year. The game is always sold out with as many more as fit in the stadium, continuing to tailgate. I never go out on football weekends because driving is too hazardous, and every place in town is a zoo.

More ways to protect yourself on the Internet.

Do you know anyone that lives in Africa? Probably not. Don’t send any information to that person that asks for your help getting money out of Nigeria or any other country. Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ&feature=youtu.be. Don’t click on a link in any email. No legitimate company will ever send you a link. If you get a request from a friend to send them money, be very wary. They might have gotten hacked, and someone is spoofing their email. Spoofing means that the sender’s email address is legitimate, but the request is not. One of the latest is called whaling. Someone will spoof a CEO’s address by hacking the CEO’s kid or wife and sending the CEO a pdf, perhaps a request for approval for a school trip. When the CEO clicks on the pdf, they have been hacked. The hacker then sends accounting a request for a money transfer from one account to an outside account. The person in accounting just does as asked most of the time; after all, it was from the CEO. Companies have lost millions of dollars to this type of attack.

I always tell my students never to leave their computers logged in and unattended. Also, don’t write down your password on a sticky note and put it on the computer screen or the underside of the keyboard (see the previous post about passwords). Don’t leave your computer logged in when you leave your office or any public place, like the library. This semester I suggested that if they walked through the administration building at lunchtime, they could get into the university system through several computers. A couple of them did that and were successful. Don’t think that I will mention that in the future. Password protect and encrypt all of your devices, your computer, your tablet, your phone, your modem, your router, everything.

Are you safe on the Internet?

Short answer: No, of course not. If someone with very good hacking skills specifically targets you, you’re hacked. However, that is very unlikely to happen. You are most likely to get hacked by a bot that someone broadcast across the internet. But it is really easy to protect yourself by doing a couple of things. First, make sure that auto-update is turned on. This will make sure that you have the latest security patches. The Experian hack happened because they were one patch behind. The second is to have strong passwords. Use passwords with upper and lower case letters, numbers, symbols, and more than ten characters long. Use a different password for every site that requires a password. Why should you use different passwords? Let’s suppose you use the same password for your Target account and your bank. When Target hot hacked, the hackers also got access to your bank account. Do not extend that kind of trust to anyone. I currently have 57 different passwords. Do I memorize all 57? Of course not. I only memorize one. I have a password safe app on my phone. That is the only password I need to remember. And the app is free. There are several other things you can do to help protect yourself. I will talk about those in another post. Oh yes, one last word about passwords, never, never share them with anyone.

More retirement thoughts

After I was downsized, I did some consulting. I realized to succeed as a consultant, I needed more education. I went back to school for an MBA at Texas Tech. After the MBA, I just kept going and got my Ph.D. in Management Information Systems. Teaching at the university level seemed like a good gig. A month off at Christmas, and Summers off. I am currently on my third university and have found a home. I am what is called Professor of Practice or the older term clinical faculty. That means no tenure, but little to no pressure to publish in high ranking journals. Yes, age discrimination is alive and well at the university level.

I teach three face-to-face classes and one online class. I worked with my colleagues to revise the curriculum, so it is relevant to our students. I have about 800 students this semester. My class is a core class, which means that all business students take it. Large sections make teaching more like performance art. I never thought I would like it, but I love it. It is very rewarding when students return, and thank you and tell you how much they use the things you taught them. Will I ever retire from teaching? If I do, it will be a move to a new career. I am thinking about travel writing. Or maybe teaching English in a foreign country (although some parts of this country could use an English teacher.) Or maybe flameworking glass. For me, there is no such thing as retirement, only career change.

Ready for retirement?

I have and have had a number of colleagues that are considering retirement. I always ask them, “are you ready for the next 20 to 30 years of your life?” I have an Excel assignment in my class related to retirement, which to some, might seem strange to teach to college freshmen and sophomores. Joe starts saving $250 per month for retirement at age 24 and saves for 13 years. He then stops saving but leaves the money in his retirement account. Harry starts saving for retirement at age 35 and also saves $250 per month. Both get 7% interest over their lifetimes. Who has the most money at age 65? It is for several lessons. First is the power of compound interest. Second is the need to start saving for retirement early. I talk about the value of an employer 401K. The third is about the idea that we will have many careers in our lifetimes. This leads back to the first question I asked, “what are you going to do with the next 20 to 30 years of your life?” I would like to hear your comments, especially if you are retired or getting close to retirement. I will post more thoughts about this in later posts.

IOT

IOT or the internet of things refers to all of the devices we have connected to the internet. We have doorbells that can call us when someone is at the door. We have thermostats that can recognize when we leave and adjust the temperature to an away level. We have cameras that can monitor our homes and alert us to break-ins. We can open our home doors and raise our garage doors from our cell phones over the internet. I have a friend that has his washer and dryer connected to his intranet to let him know when it is time to move the laundry. (If you do not know the difference between intranet, internet, and Internet, that will be a subject for another post.) We have our televisions connected to the Internet so we can stream video. You can get an internet-connected watch that will monitor your heart rate and/or EKG. You can get a device that will measure your EKG, connect with your phone, and the app will send the EKG to your cardiologist. You can get connected insoles for your shoes that are heated to keep your feet warm while monitoring and reporting on how you walk, run, or cycle. Are our brains internet connected through all of our connected devices? We text rather than talk. Is this progress?

OMG!

I don’t often take time to watch the news as it is happening. Most of the time, I read about it later, and I am probably subjected to some kind of partisan drift depending on the news source. Today I watched Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch’s testimony in real-time. OMG. I could not believe that the president (notice lower case type) would attempt to bully her during her testimony. Have we really dropped so low that we can think this is alright? I do not know what we need to do to fix this country, but I know it needs to be fixed. Can we just be nice to each other? Can we say that I disagree with your position, but I defend your right to have it? Can we make compromises a good thing instead of my way or the highway? I don’t know if we as a nation can. I know that I will in all my interactions with collegues and students. I pledge to think about this in all my interpersonal interactions. How about you?

Retire outside the USA?

The USA has been getting more and more polarized and violent. We have had synagogue shootings, church shootings, school shootings, Walmart shootings to name just a few. We are one of the few “advanced nations” without universal healthcare. So, I did some research on the best places to retire. Costa Rica was at the top on most lists. I contacted a highly rated travel agent located in Costa Rica. (If you want to see Costa Rica without a tour group, give them a very high recommendation. Contact me for the name.) We arranged a tour using shared shuttles for transportation. We stayed at a surf camp in Tamarindo on the Pacific coast, Monteverde in the mountains, Arenal at the Volcano with hot springs, Puerta Viejo de Talamanca on the Carribean coast and two nights in San Jose on the way home. Costa Rica has many pluses, but also some minuses.

The country has free medical care, and retirees can join the system for a small monthly fee. We saw a protest march by government employees in San Jose. Even though the government employees make 70% more than private-sector employees, they were protesting the government’s attempts to control costs. Costa Rica needs infrastructure improvements. It wasn’t until 1949 that blacks were given citizenship. There are still racial problems, but not as bad as in the USA. They have a major immigration problem from people fleeing Venezuela and Nicaragua. Costa Rica has the highest percentage of immigrants of all the south and central American countries, which is putting a strain on the economy. The economy is based on tourism and agriculture. Like many countries, there is a substantial gap between the very rich and the rest of the population, which is growing. We really enjoyed our time in Costa Rica, but are not going to pack up and move there.

Public Impeachment Hearings Start Today. Does anyone care?

It is 51 weeks until the election for president, all representatives, and a third of the senate. Today is the first day of the open hearings on impeaching the White House bully, who attacks everyone who dares to disagree with him, calling them names, belittling them any way possible. Yet most polls say that 70% of potential voters have made up their minds about impeachment and question how many will even watch the hearing. It seems that the nation is the most polarized since the McCarthy era. The polls say that those that support the president will stand with him regardless of anything he does. I do not understand supporting a bully. It appears that most of the Republican house members and senators are afraid of the president and his supporters. This means that regardless of any impeachment in the House, the trial in the Senate is a foregone conclusion. There will be no conviction, and the bully remains until the next election. The race for the Democratic nomination for president is a joke. It reminds me of what Will Rogers said. "I'm not a member of any organized political party.... I'm a Democrat." Amazing how things stay the same. I doubt if any Democrat can bring the party together and get enough independent vote to get elected. I expect that we will have a dysfunctional government in Washington for at least five more years. Perhaps, even more dysfunctional than now. I keep thinking about moving out the Estados Unidos, but more on that tomorrow.

In the present or not?

I try to live in the present, seeing everything around me and experiencing the day. I don’t often succeed. Most of the time, we live between our ears and in our conscious mind worrying about so many things. We worry about what might happen and forget that the only place we can be is here, right now. We forget to project our conscious out away from our mind and take in all of the wonders around us. The kinetic sculpture I pass every time I go to class. Yesterday I stopped in front of the sculpture (titled Tai Chi) and was mesmerized as it danced with the wind. Leaves are blowing everywhere. You can see the structure of the trees. If only it were not so cold.

It just popped into my mind!

Do you have thoughts that just show up uninvited? It happens to me all of the time. Yesterday the name of a friend that I had not seen for several years showed up in my conscious mind. I emailed Robert. He is well and finishing his EdD. Then I thought of another friend I had not talked to in several years, probably because I met both at the same time, at my first university job. I asked Robert about her and found out she retired in 2016. I Googled her and found her obituary. She died in 2018. Now I will never see her again, and it makes me sad. We collaborated on several articles and received two best paper awards.