One of many reasons I'm glad I know Jesus...

So I had an interesting experience in customer relations today; there was a guy for whom we guttered a very large hay shed that was a very aggressive, foul-mouthed, belligerent fellow who complained greatly about everyone involved in the process of building his shed. I was a little worried about working for someone who so easily found fault in apparently everyone that walks onto his farm, but as the cold winter waxes on, I become less picky.
Anyway, we gutter his building last week, and then I send him a bill. He calls Tuesday and wants to talk to me, right? He tells Marcine that she wont do, he HAS to talk to Dan, so she leaves me the message. I'm very busy, and it's quite easy to duck returning his phone call, even though she tells me that he sounded irate-maybe because he sounded irate. Generally, I have a policy about not being a coward when it comes to belligerent jerks on the phone, but I did have a lot of irons in the fire at the time (more on that in an upcoming blog, I hope- "Can You Smell The Bacon?") Anyway, I didn't call him back yesterday; so he is persistent; he calls again when I wasn't in the office. So, defeated, I call him back this morning and he really opened up on me right off the bat:
Him: (I'm doing a lot of editing out of very obscene language here-even if it doesn't look like it) "You don't answer phone calls worth a ****, do you?"
Me: "Very sorry, Ive been quite busy, sir"
Him: "You know, dumb-***, you could give the phone to yer secretary and and she could punch the numbers for you if you ain't smart enough to figure it out on yer own..."
Me: (pinking up considerably) "yes, she's quite clever enough for that-she's a big help"
Him: "Everyone else in the world likes to call you and complain about how crappy your work is and I'm no different so I wanted you to listen to me for a bit while I tell you how it is..."
Me: (quite red by now, I'm sure -and I can actually see my own pulse in little shock-waves around my peripheral vision, not to mention how well I can hear it in my ears) "What can I do for you today, sir?"
Him: "My wife asked me what I thought about the gutter job you did for me and I'm gonna tell you the same blankity-blank thing I told my blankity-blank wife: Since day one of this whole building process, I feel like every contractor out here has lied to me, tried to cheat me, and just done crappy work in general and I am just sick and tired of taking it!!!"
Me: (to myself: "Lord help me not say something I will instantly, soonly, or eventually regret" but out loud:) "YES?"
Him: "until you guys came out here and did your guttering... that's the first time I felt like someone did what they said they would, how they said they would, when they said they would!"
Me: "Um..."
Him: "You there?"
Me: "Um, yes... And?
Him: "that's all I wanted to say; Bye" -Click

By this time I was left holding a phone without a connection with a pulse at about 200 and all kinds of adrenaline and a red face still to boot. Its easy to laugh about now, but that old Vietnam vet/farmer knew just exactly how far to push me, apparently; cause he took me right to the edge, then yanked me back again. I think of how things might have wound up if I went ahead and spoke my mind from the start, but whatever.

Here are a few words from Solomon that we have been studying:

"...I know that it will be well for those who fear God, and fear Him openly" http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ec%208:12&version=NASB, which is the only reason for me to hold my tongue, since for a while I figured that there was no way I was going to get paid.

and even though that may not have been it his point exactly, it held true in this one case for me.
Oh, and by the way; don't get the idea that I think i am a righteous man who never sins ... Ec 7:20: "Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins".
It just happened to work out this time that I thought of the verse: Ec 7:9: "Do not be eager in your heart to be angry, For anger resides in the bosom of fools."

The point is this: in my own life, I definitely see the immediate positive aspect of being a believer, because I tried it without; and it wasn't pretty.

Note: My wife suspects that all the quiet hours on a tractor causes farmers to dream up ways to irritate gutter guys. I drove all the way to 4 miles north of Lyons to "remeasure" an estimate because his calculations were different than mine. He was right... it saved him $7.00, and cost me an extra $50.00 worth of gas. I wanna be a farmer when I grow up...

Stu-Jack (as we call him, for some unknown reason) is always looking for the answers to life's persistent questions... I'm sure that with his dizzying intellect and analytical mind, he'll be a great philosopher some day, no doubt teaching ethics in some Ivy League college. Either that, or he will just grow up to be construction trash like his daddy.

on fecklessness...

so there is this old joke it goes like this (most of you have heard it, I'm sure, but it does bear a point):

Small town cafe, same crowd sitting around every day, and a regular brings in a friend from out of town. Everyone is sitting around talking, when someone speaks up and says loudly, "Number 27!" Everyone laughs uproariously. The stranger looks perplexed. Pretty soon someone else speaks up and says, "Number 104!" Again, everyone laughs. Finally the stranger asks his friend who is a local what the deal is. He replies: "The jokes around here are so old that we just give them numbers, so it saves a lot of time telling them. Everybody knows the joke by the number". The out-of-towner thinks he will give it a shot. He calls out, "number 87!" All you can hear are crickets chirping; no one laughs. He whispers, "is #87 not a very funny joke?" His embarrassed friend replies, "Its not the joke; its how you tell it!"

Which brings me to my point this morning. I was in the boys' room the other morning as Isaiah was doing his daily "chores" which pretty much consist of cleaning up his room. He asked me if I had chores when I was a boy, and I told him that I did. He says "did you have to clean up your room?" I told him no, and as I was gathering my thoughts about how to best describe all the terrible hardships of the gruesome chores that I was required to do, (nearly from birth, of course) and how to describe the burden of carrying up to 30 5 gallon buckets heaping with feed to the calves, morning and night, every day, mostly in the dark, he interrupted my thoughts and said, "Oh, well if you did have to clean up your room when you were boy, I bet it would have been a really, really, really, REALLY big room, with lots of toys, so it would have been REALLY hard, huh, dad?"

Apparently, he has heard some semblance of the tale of my youth. He really took the wind out of my sails, I just said "yup" and left it at that... from now on, I'll just refer to the story of my chores as "Story #1"

dallas

So Wifey and I went to Dallas a week or so ago for a long weekend to celebrate our 10th anniversary, and to see friends Jeremy and Grace Goering. We had a great time, but I have to say that the highlight of the trip wasn't eating out at fun new places, nor was it seeing old friends, nor was it any of the many exciting things that people generally do in Dallas; it was seeing the quite flustered faces of ALL the employees of the quite swanky hotel (the Stoneleigh Hotel) we stayed at, where the valet parking is mandatory (snobs) when they finally broke down and admitted that they could not find my truck keys. Aaaa-hahahahaha!

I had no idea that this place had the mandatory valet service when I booked it through expedia; using my credit card miles, nor was I aware that they would charge me 21.00 a night for the privilege of not having to walk 20' outside the hotel and open my own door. Money well spent, I'm sure. But after I casually dropped it to the hotel manager that the poor chumps couldn't find my keys, (I wish I had video of the blank look, the widening of the eyes, then the flush coming to his cheeks) he solicitously offered us a ride, then a hotel car, then to buy us breakfast at the also very swanky restaurant, and then tore off to presumably chew some butt, vowing "to bring in the guys working late last night and search through every vehicle, one by one" . We gracefully accepted breakfast; (even the wait-staff at breakfast were profusely apologizing, as if they personally felt guilty) that's all we were gonna go do anyway, and the short way of finishing the story is that they finally found them- 2 hours later! And man, were there some red faces! I wasn't mad, I wasn't even upset- they knocked off 2 nights of the Valet charges, we got a free $50.00 breakfast, and I wasn't ever even worried that one of the night shift valets decided to make off with my '07 GMC pickup, rather than steal one of the many Mercedes, Caddies, or Bentleys.

They never did tell me where they had been, or what happened to them; even when I directly asked, but I did put my hand on the shoulder of the guy who lost my keys and asked kinda quiet like: "So level with me- what kind of tip does it take to get my keys back the next morning?" I had to rub it in just a little... Here are a few pictures of some fun we had:

The Girlz: doin' what they love most- LOOKING at stuff

Uncle Dan and Cutie-Cakes-Caris

Brynn admiring an original Mary Cassat painting, one of her favorite artists; we have several of these at our house (um, rather prints, actually, of course)

i'mmmm baaaackkkkk!

For those of you who knew that we were gone, we're back now. If you didn't know that we were gone, we loaded up truck and camper trailer and went to Colorado Springs for a long weekend and also to Denver for me to get LASICs surgery, since it is less than half the price that the monopoly of Greene vision charges in Wichita. Anyway, after watching the hot-air balloon races early this morning, and driving about 9 hours (in 1.5 hour intervals between shouts of "Daddy I got to go potty BAAADDDD!") my fixed eyeballs are about shot, so this may be the shortest blog ever... Goodnight!
P.S. everything went well, but I did dislike the snapping and crackling of the lasers, followed by the smell of burning flesh. Other than that, it was a piece of cake. I do have to tell that they gave me a stuffed animal in the shape of a pig to hold during the surgery, and I asked the surgeon if it was kosher, 'cause I was an Orthodox Jew. After about 5 seconds of awkward silence, I chickened out and told him I was kidding. He breathed a sigh of relief and told me that he at least had it dry-cleaned weekly, but was unsure if that qualified as kosher; so since it was Friday, I threw it on the floor; its getting washed anyway, right?

one last Ozark Adventure posting

I really waffled back and forth about using this, but I really can't help myself, maybe the realization that I am now "socially disadvantaged" made me do it, but this is gonna be a real short one. I just can't figure it out; I've never seen anything like this in Kansas. Maybe the culling process was out of order at the Missouri Department of Tags, or maybe unlike here at the Reno County Courthouse, someone actually has something of a sense of humor.

Anyway, you should have seen the hubbub in the pickup when I saw this in front of me, desperately trying to claw the camera out while staying on the road. I would stand in line all day if I thought I could get this tag: it was my nickname from my family for most of my formative years (might explain a lot) So here it is:

Important Farm News

I got a letter the other day, from the evil, yet saucy bureaucracy of the United States Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) stating that my "farm (#12841) has base acres that might possibly allow you to enroll into the CCC-509, Direct and Counter-Cyclical Program (DCP Contract or Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program for FY 2009."

Sounds rather stimulating doesn't it? I have absolute no idea what they were talking about, but I eventually gathered that there was a possibility that if my crop did poorly enough (what crop? Did the satellite photos really show how badly my potatoes did this year? That raises all kinds of questions in my mind!) that apparently I am eligible for loans, grants, etc., apparently to subsidize my poor potato crop.
Then it went though a long list of reasons why I was NOT eligible for these. Toward the bottom of the paper where it gave examples of allowances for the exemptions from the disqualifications of counter-cyclical payments, or average crop revenue election payments. Still quite bewildered, but trying to (probably out of sheer self-loathing) figure out what they are getting at, I finally realize that I don't qualify for any of this stuff.

However at the very bottom of the paper it states that I do qualify "if the farm is owned by either of the following:

• Limited resource farmer or rancher


• Socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher

Being a woman with 50% ownership interest in the land now meets the socially disadvantaged requirement."

Now THAT caught my attention! Sorry to bore everyone to tears with all this bureau-speak excuse for a language, but I was quite disheartened to hear the bad news that I was married to someone (and thereby being implicated as well; as I own half of this farmlet) who is "socially disadvantaged." I was instantly discontent about my relationship with my wife.

You see, the more I got to know the woman who was to be my future wife, the more convinced I was that I was indeed marrying "up." I knew she was full of cultural interests, art, classical music, and was in general one of the most creative people I knew, whereas I pretty much know how to swing a hammer. You see, I thought that I was really getting something special; real grade A, top shelf, quality spousal material here, and then I get this letter saying that my farmlet is demeaned into some sort of a 50-percentile, 2nd-best pariah, just because my poor decision-making process led me to make the poor choice to marry a-a-a- WOMAN! Sooo socially disadvantaged! And for her to drag me and our farm down with it! I am so embarrassed...

You must consider what this has done to my world view. We used to hold hands in public, and walk side by side; but today as we walked across the street today from our office to our bank, I caught myself edging away from her as I noticed people's stares. I admit it is a little intimidating being in public when married to someone on such a list.

I have a dilemma, however. How I can I get myself free of this "being disadvantaged"? I'm sure I'm like everyone else, I just want a level playing field, I don't want anymore disadvantages than the next guy, so what are my options? I guess one option would be a same sex marriage, but I'm pretty sure that would still put me on the same list, even if it were of interest to me and it were a viable option in Kansas. I guess my only option is to break the news to her that she is socially disadvantaged and send her packing.

I guess what I really need to know is the definition of "socially disadvantaged". I am assuming that if being a woman qualifies you, then being any type of minority also qualifies you, even though women make up 154,135,120 out of the 304,059,724 people that inhabit the US, making up nearly 51% majority of our population. Then, if you figure in the fact that there are 242,639,242 of these 304,059,724 that call themselves "white" and that 49% of them are most likely males that leaves 118,893,228. Since there is only 230,117,876 out of the original 304,059,724 that are actually considered adults (just over 75%) we will just guess at there being roughly 89,169,921 adult white males in the US. Then, if I have the good sense to leave my socially disadvantaged wife, so as to not handicap my little farmlet, and noting that 82% of adult men are married (presumably to a socially disadvantaged woman, thereby dooming whatever business they are in) that leaves me in a group of 16,050,585 of single adult white males which would put me in one of the smallest and therefore presumably most socially disadvantaged brackets in the 2008 population estimates, save a few other socially disadvantaged minorities, so I might be back in the same boat, anyway.

Anyway, I hope you haven't been bored out of your gourd listening to all this, but the long and short of it is that I'm really dreading telling my beautiful, creative, and much cultured wife that she is at a real social disadvantage to her lout of a belching, farting, ignorant husband. Somehow I'm not sure she'll be convinced anyway, despite what the USDA tells us. I'm just guessing that she'll just smile and make little affirming sounds to let me know that I did a good job in being able to read the mail...

FYI: all of the actual data came from the US census website, and most of it came from this page:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=PEP_2008_EST_DP1&-geo_id=D&-ds_name=D&-_lang=en