Eats, Shoots and Leaves

My ideal book is both fun and educational.  This classic does both well. This fantastic little book has helped me immensely; especially in the days before Grammarly!  Those rules of grammar were overwhelming to me. Truss makes learning those rules fun and entertaining. So if you don't own one already get one now: its a must for your library.


FROM AMAZON:

Punctuation play at its finest!

Illuminating the comical confusion the lowly comma can cause, this new edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves uses lively, subversive illustrations to show how misplacing or leaving out a comma can change the meaning of a sentence completely.

https://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Commas-Difference/dp/0399244913

Integrity wins every time

I had an issue with my tire guys this week let me tell you about it.

I  was heading out to a networking meeting Tuesday morning when I backed over my fence that had fallen. As soon as I felt it, I knew that I had backed over the nails side up.  Sure enough, the low-pressure indicator came on less than a block away.  Fortunately, the tire store is less than a mile away from my home. I went right there, and they confirmed my tire had been punctured. My tires carry a warranty, and it was covered.  While they were replacing it, the service person came to me and said the lugs nuts were defective and needed replacing.  He showed me a website that said Ford's lug nuts had issues. He told me to take the old ones to Ford, and they would give me a refund.  He says it happens all the time.  Well after the tire replacement I went to my Ford dealer, and they said they never heard of such a thing. I went home to print out the article they guy showed me, but when I Google searched it I found that was a year old and in the meantime, the class action suit against Ford's lug nuts had been thrown of court a few months ago.

I returned to the tire store and confronted the service guy.  He said well he was only saying that they were hard to work with and there were issues and folks had gotten credit at dealerships.  Very vague and anecdotal.   He offered me a 50% refund. No way. Well, I confronted him in front of many customers there, and his manager came over and settled the dispute by giving me the full refund on the lug nuts. He did tell me that there was a chance these lugs nuts expanded and became hard to work on.  I told him that if that had been explained to me, I wouldn't have any issues or complaints.

The bottom line is if the guy said they might cause issues when I am out on the road trying to change them myself I would have gladly paid the $40 for the new lug nuts. But his deception hurt the reputation fo his company and made him a liar and a thief.  Was it worth it?

Tom and Tiger

I am not a fan of the New England Patriots and always preferred Phil over Tiger. But here we are in 2019 and they both captured the big prize. Brady at 41 years of age and Tiger at 43. The stories of both men's excellence in their fields is something to be admired even if you're not a fan.

Excellence and the drive to win cannot be taught. It may be caught. Chuck Noll's Steelers, Casey Stengle's Yankees, and John Wooden's UCLA Bruins come to mind as well

The pursuit of excellence is rare these days. Mediocrity and socialism are the diseases of our time.

A brain trapped

We have been living and caring for my mother-in-law who is 92 and has severe dementia. She does the crossword puzzle every day and the word search but she resets her brain every 5 minutes and asked where she's going to eat what she's gonna do and where she's at.It's been quite a 4 week study of the brain how it reacts to short term memory and long term memory.

After experiencing this and observingit, I'm going continue to doing a lot of brain games on my apps to keep my own brain healthy and take some vitamins.

Both my wife and I said we don't want to live in that state, but we don't know of any other ethical alternative.

Her husband comes home tomorrow from rehab. We can leave them in assisted living and return home.

We may be moving here to be closer to them in the final years.

Life in the slow lane

The last blog I wrote was on Monday, May 11th. I was sitting down finishing my blog when we got a call that my 93 father-in-law had a stroke. They live in Kansas City so my wife and I had to hurry and pack everything and drive up that night from DFW.  He has a 92 year old wife with dementia. We had someone stay with her until we could get there. We packed as much as we could for an indeterminate amount of time and knowing that it's a 9 hour drive we couldn't just rush back for anything we need to pick up.
We have all the provisions that we need we've done well.

While he recovered from his stroke we moved the in-laws from the independent living part of the building to an assisted living part. We accomplished this while he was in rehab and in the hospital.  We also got to celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary in rehab.

I don't anticipate too many folks will have 70th wedding anniversaries in the future considering the millennial generations attitude regarding commitment.

So we are staying and their apartment in the assisted living building we have some air mattresses and they have a second bedroom and a second bathroom so that made it tolerable.

In the last month living with all the elderly and infirmed people  in a place where time seems to have come to a halt, it makes you ponder values of your life and re-evaluate your life.

We have been so jerked out of our routines at home we felt that we were in some sort of freefall.  I keep singing in my head the song, " Time Keeps on Slippin Slippin into the Future".

But since we are a virtual company we had to learn to deal with things on the fly and it's a good lesson for us.