Inspiration

Thought of the day: you generally don't get where you want to go unless you want to go somewhere.  Really, have you ever gone out on a date with the super hot man / woman on Saturday night, having the greatest time and knowing in your heart you've met the person you will spend the rest of your life ( or statistically, the next ten years)  with? Well, that's a stretch, some have, some have not.  My point is you had to have wanted it. Else it would be categorized as kidnap (which seems oddly kidcentric, if you thought about it, who would want to steal a kid? If i were to grab someone, I'd grab an adult, typically there's a lot less complaining).

Wow. What a horrible start.

Anyways, you have to want something before you typically get it. Funny enough, we spend our youths "needing" things, but when we grow up can't figure out what the hell we want.

 So what do you want? Money, fame, stuff? Seriously, you are not in a bikini competing for the Miss America ribbon, so world peace is not a valid answer right now. Especially if you have kids. After a day of dealing with them, you are lucky if you remember to take the garbage out, so get away from the world peace stuff.

Someone is behind you

Thought of the day: someone is behind you. No really.  Someone is right behind you!  Please, by all means, turn around and look.  Ha! I'm assuming no one was behind you.  But you didn't know until you turned around, did you?  Well, that's the TOTD.

I have this syndrome.  It's called, "ICantStandBeingBehindPeopleitis".  Normally I don't admit that to people, but, well, there it is.  It's not that I have to be ahead of everyone.  I simply don't like being behind.  Really, what this means is I have no need to define myself by other people's actions (I came to this conclusion when I was driving one day trying to figure out if I was Mr. Testerone or if it was something else. I concluded it was something else, because I don't need people behind me which would have pointed to Mr. T.  I simply don't attend to other people who are plugging along in their own lives.  I'm happy in my own warm blanket of "stay the hell out of the way").

Mental Illness

Thought of the day: Mental illness is real. Not sure if some of you are aware. I recall a time where I was standing next to an officer who suggested that the more frequent spanking of a girl would correct her behavior after she was abandoned by both parents while she was 7 years old. The trauma from that event is real. The effects of the trauma are real. And the fact that the two people who are responsible for shaping this girl, by their actions, told her she was not worth the time of day really does play into the fact that she has turned into a hellion. You cannot hit self-esteem and self-worth into people. The officer is no longer employed as an officer, thank God. I've also heard someone say of another child that spanking would have corrected the behavior. Except the behavior was part of a frustrated reaction by a child in the autism spectrum. Really, you can't spank autism out of a child. Now this is not an anti-spanking TOTD, hooked on spanking worked for me! (Really, for the Greeks, aint one of us who didn't get the koutala). However, there is a time and place. The problem is if that is your only solution, you may be trying to spank a mental illness out of someone. 

The golden rule

Thought for the day: be excellent to each other. Seriously, it's the golden rule and the main theme in most of the worlds religions. Sad that it was expressed best by Bill S Preston, Esquire. Anyways, do it. Or you suck. Party on dudes!

Balance

Thought for the day: there is nothing wrong with professional foot care. Its a health issue, providing maintenance of an oft ignored appendage, stress relief, and cns (central nervous system) stimulation. Really, that has nothing to do with my thought though. I believe that balance is a natural principle. Just like gravity. It enacts a force upon you constantly. It does not, however stop you from going against it. You can use planes and jets to go against gravity. But you can only go up for so long (my analogy implies you stay within the atmosphere) until eventually, you lose thrust and gravity once again brings you back to neutral. The longer you go against gravity, the harder the equalizing is ( bigger crash)? So too with balance. We can go against balance and it takes effort. Eventually, our effort wanes and balance brings us crashing back to neutral. The farther from balanced you are, the harder the crash upon equalization. You can have what you want, but you must learn to get it in balance. Equalization could take from you those things you want most. Be it a marriage, ajob, your family, your friends. So, please, friends, find balance in your life. Find balance and then follow your dreams

Communication

Thought for the day: Communication is the most important thing between two people. More important than love, family, or friendship. Everything else can fall apart without communication and everything can be made better with communication. Communication must include not only saying something, but making sure the listener understands it. If you are simply talking without ensuring understanding, then you are not communicating. It is your responsibility as the communicator to ensure your words are understood.

Dogs and Coffee

Couple thoughts for today, firstly, dogs should not be aggressive in their pet seeking. If you want to be pet, stop hitting me. I realize that I am fostering your bad habits of hitting people by rewarding you with pets, but really. It's just bad form. And it's starting to hurt.


Today I have found the first pro in living in a 5th wheel over living in a house. And it's quite simple really. When I lived and worked in the 5th wheel, I could hear my coffee brew throughout my entire abode. Now, I set my coffee to brew and walk away, which is typical, however, I can't hear jack-poo from across the house. Now, I get my coffee when something brings me back to the kitchen and I see a full cup of coffee in the machine and realize that it belongs to me. This means that I never get hot cups of coffee anymore. However, if you've seen my (I'm trying to thinking of a good synonym for addiction, but nothing seems to work) of coffee, you already know that lukewarm coffee causes me no anxiety or disappointment. I am drinking it happily. :-)

Our tornado story

I don't have the energy to tell it again right now. So here you go. This is a story written by Susan Carey of the Wall Street Journal.

http://blogs.wsj.com/dispatch/2011/05/27/family-faces-black-wall-in-their-car/

Have at it!

Word to the CEO

The following is a letter I sent to CEO Alan Mulally of Ford / Mercury.

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Dear Mr. Mulally,

I wanted to write a letter to thank you for the care with which your company constructed our car, a 2007 Mercury Milan.

On May 22, 2011, my wife and I attended our daughter, Jeane's, graduation from high-school.  This was an event that we had hoped for, but feared wouldn't happen.  Jeane has Autism Spectrum Disorder, but is high functioning.  She is also the first child ( to our knowledge ) in the Missouri school system to be able to bring an Autism Server Dog, Athena, to a public school.  Needless to say, I was very proud when both Jeane and Athena crossed the stage wearing matching graduation hats.

On our way home, we decided to stop at McDonald's for a bite to eat, at which time we heard the tornado sirens start.  The employee at McDonald's offered to let us go inside the building, but as most of it was made of glass we attempted to drive home.  You see, we have tornado sirens which are set off several times a year with no tornado in sight.  So hearing it again, unfortunately, was not an alarm which indicated you have mere seconds to react.

Sunday was not the case, however.  We were 30 blocks from home and were heading West on 20th St. in Joplin, MO.  As we drove past Connecticut St., we were met with a black wall of nothing and hail so large that I'm surprised our windshield did not break.  I immediately did a u-turn and took refuge under a bank drive-through awning at a bank located at 20th and Connecticut St.  This allowed us to get out from the hail, but we did not expect what happened next.

The wind, which had been blustery and multi-directional immediately blew horizontally, carrying with it everything it touched.  It appeared to be a debris field that defied gravity, traveling sideways with no appearance of falling at all.  That was when my wife, my daughter, and I realized we were in the middle of the tornado.  The windows of our car broke out and debris entered our car.  At that time, we put our heads down and started to pray very, very loudly.  Athena, we thought, had been sucked out of the car, but we later found that she had thrown her body over my daughter to protect her.

We tried to keep our eyes closed, but were unable to keep from seeing horrendous sites, such as a lady's body hitting our car.

The event seemed to have lasted many minutes, but in all actuality, the tornado itself probably lasted about 30-60 seconds.  We continued to stay in the car for a few minutes after to avoid direct hail injuries, but eventually an anonymous teenager helped pry my daughter's and wife's doors open, while I crawled through my window.

At that point, I sent my wife, who had a protruding bone in her arm, daughter, and dog, to the hospital in a stranger's pickup truck. We later found out the hospital had also been destroyed by the tornado.

I stayed and started digging screaming people out of their homes.

The rest of our personal story you can read in the online copy of the Wall Street Journal.

This is where your part comes into it.  As we went back to the car the next day to retrieve what items we could, we had a chance to see the total destruction in that area.  The bank, whose awning we took shelter under, had been completely blown down, the vault being the only section still upright.  The awning had completely disappeared, and the ATM machines were completely missing.  The building on the other side of us was partially standing, but most of it was in a crumbled pile of rubble.  There was a truck that also took refuge under the awning, and was somewhat protected by the fallen bank.  Our car was protected by nothing.  We determined that the only reason we had not been picked up like the rest of the vehicles is because the short metal poles that protect the ATM machines from inattentive drivers stopped our car from being pushed sideways and subsequently lifted up.  The steel I-beam that supported the awning had fallen on our car and was lying on the ground about 15 feet from the car.  The Milan, which we had purchased this November previous, had been a dream car for us.  We had enjoyed driving it simply to drive it and had been so thankful that we found a car like this. As a reserve deputy, safety is also a major factor in a car for me.

The car was torn up, badly beaten, and filled with debris.  But it was still there.  My family was badly beaten and still covered in debris and glass, but was still there as well.  I know numerous angels were there to keep our car safe.  But I also know that were it not for the care, attention, and consideration with which the employees of Ford/Mercury designed and built our car, I would most likely no longer have a family.

This was the thought in my head as I had walked home through the destruction and discovered I had lost most of my personal property in the tornado.  None of that mattered in light of the situation we had been through.

I have my family and for that I thank you.

I would love to be able to thank each and every employee for helping my family on that day. I'm hoping you can help with that.

Sincerely,

John Tsangaris

5th wheel

Blog post - 5th wheel

So most of this will be in reverse chronological order, except for the posts that will be documenting the progression from now on, which will be standard chronological and the posts that will be completely out of order because I remembered something from my completely spotty memory.

Last week we decided to buy a 5th wheel.  We had considered it for quite a while since we wanted to eventually do a little traveling.  Of course, this was a "maybe next year" time frame.  Well, the tornado moved our time frame up a little.  Since our house had been condemned by the city and the insurance company is not really johnny-on-the-spot, we needed to find a semi-permanent location to rest our heads.  So we bought a 31' 1993 NuWay, Champagne Edition.  Still trying to figure out how it works.  The built in generator runs the air conditioner which is most important right now.  The fridge runs on both electric and LP.  I haven't filled up the LP tanks yet and I can't figure out how to get it to work on electric.  Oh well.  I'm hoping that the electric company will make use of the 14.5 foot a-frame tower I built in my yard so we could get temporary electricity.  It would be nice to be able to plug the 5th wheel (hereinafter known as the trailer) into an electric source that doesn't suck up $30 of gas every day.

Anyways, I know my trailer is now a city code violation because it not only goes past the sidewalk, but also extends out onto the road as well.  Considering the amount of garbage, debris, trees, etc, that was lined up on the roads, I didn't think they would mind too much at this point.  I'll move it once I can properly tear down what's left of my fence so I can park it in the back yard.

Word verification

I started this blog with the intention of describing my circumstance and feelings regarding the tornado.  When I created the blog itself, blogspot always has a word verification to ensure that a computer program is not automatically creating blogs. So.... the word I have to verify is... "unkill".   Seriously?

First tornado post, but not really

It is now two weeks and a day after the Joplin tornado and I'm finally starting to write about it.  Today is my first day back to work.  I'll be back filling some details and information.  I was hoping to start this sooner, but it's been hard to get back into a routine amidst all the turmoil.

As I drove in to work on my motorcycle (it's been a while since I've been able to ride) I saw a bird flopping on the road about a block from the office.  I dropped off my bike and told my wife ( we share an office space) that I was going to steal her car to go pick up the bird in a box to see if I could help it.  I really didn't have a choice.  It seems from one minute to the next I go from numb to the verge of tears; that every minute hangs on one obsessive task being completed after another, no matter how small or low priority, it becomes the highest priority.

And my highest priority was saving that bird.  I grabbed a file box and drove back.  I didn't seen the bird at first so I parked and walked around.  After finding nothing and assuming that it had flopped itself into the tall grass somewhere I started driving back.

That's when I saw it on the road where someone decided to end it's life with a tire.

I can't know whether it was malice or sympathy with which it's life was ended, but it tore at me more than it normally would have.  As of last night the death count rose to 141.  We lost three more people yesterday who succumbed to their wounds after two weeks.  At this point, it feels like every death is a needless death, even a dying birds death.  There could have been a more respectable death than under a tire.

I hope I can get back to life soon.  It feels like it has been permanently paused for the last two weeks with no sign of "normal" ever returning.