A Quick "To Do" List

Since I have had so much time to think lately, I have pondered the questions around relationships. Whether you be male or female you are given a capacity for love and being loved. Lots of times I have found the biggest problems on this subject comes out of our own mouths and sometimes actions. We men especially need some help in this area. So I have comprised a do and do not list for those that may be challenged in this area. Thanks to my wife, Nita, who contributed to this post. This list is now in its complete form. :)

Do: Tell your lady that you enjoy her cooking and that you always look forward to what she prepares.

Don't: Tell your lady that the fork tasted better than the meal and not to fix that again. (Been there and done that. Big mistake!!)

Do: Compliment them on how they look when you are going out somewhere for dinner or out on the town.

Don't: ask...."Are you wearing that again?!! We need to get you some clothes!"

You also need to strike the word "fat" from your vocabulary. No words like "hefty", "big boned" or the term "very healthy." Try not to use these words at all. Everyone's life will be much better.

Do: Get creative and maybe come up with a little poem or note to be romantic now and then.

Don't: Give them this poem:

A peach is a peach
and a plum is a plum
but what is a kiss
without a tongue.

This will produce the best or worst results. Just depends on timing and mood. Trust me. :)

Do: Offer to take out the trash without being told to.

Don't: Ask her to take out the trash while you have a tv remote in your hand.

Do: Try to be helpful in the household chores paying attention to how she wants things done.

Don't: Tell her that you are out of shirts and she is getting behind on the job!

Little side note here. I believe when I got married some of my brain fell out between the altar and the car. I used to be able to find everything in my wardrobe. Now there are days when I can't find my clothes without yelling "Honey! Have you seen my socks?" The only way around this is to help with some of the domestic chores and try to put them away yourself. Remind yourself that you became brain damaged between the altar and the car. I speak as a bare foot man writing this.

Do: Notice the things she looks at in the stores. Especially jewelry, favorite scents and that sort of thing. Sneak away, get it gift wrapped and surprise her with it. Paying special attention to birthdays and anniversaries.

Don't: Mention how much an item cost or how much trouble it was to get. Nothing like....."I could have bought the entire mine for that!!" or "I thought of you when I saw that cheap thing." Never ever use the words "cheap" or "Pawn Shop" in the conversation. :)

Do: Realize that little things mean a lot. It doesn't cost a lot of money to notice what colors she wears most often or to write her a little love note and stick it somewhere she's bound to find it. A thank you note stuck under the dirty socks and underwear on the floor will be something she never forgets.

Don't: Mess it up by getting too wordy. That just seems fake. Keep it simple and sweet.

Do: Really pay attention when she talks to you. If you listen and show her by your actions that you did, she will love you for it.

Don't: Assume you know everything she would have told you if you really didn't listen. It will bite you in the end if you do.

Trust me guys!! I am trying to help you here! You may ask have I done anything on the "don't" list? Yes I have. Still do from time to time but I am learning as I go. In the end, it is all worth it. There is no substitute for having that special someone in your life and it is as much up to you as it is her to be aware of the little things. Treat all people kindly but treat the lady in your life special. :) You will benefit the most. I am sure there are other things that could be added here. Please feel free to comment and give any suggestions you may have!  Now where is that remote?

How I Spent My Vacation

Hi everyone!! Guess who? :) It has been a while and I am glad to be back on schedule now. I am glad to be doing this again because I have missed it terribly. I have missed all of you!! :) I would like to say the reasons I took a leave were all resolved but alas, they are not. Still, running away isn't helping so I have decided to return. Blogs tend to be filled with lots of things and in my case, very personal things that are close to my heart. I also tend to wear that heart on my sleeve. This post is no exception. When I stopped writing, I was truly discouraged. Now I hate to be a negative person and I didn't want that to carry over and just bring everyone down with me. I would rather be like an old hound dog that goes away by himself to lick my wounds.

I wonder if all of us come to a point in our lives that are like the crossroads. You know, a place in your life where you feel like you have to make life altering decisions and wonder what all you have done to this point has meant. I am at that place right now. Being out of work gives you time to think. I think some of that is needed but too much of anything is a bad thing. Some of my family and friends say I am going through a mid-life crisis. I shunned that idea at first but now think that may be just the case. Anyway, that was the reason for my departure. While I have been gone I have buried myself in my job hunt and my Facebook account. Some of that has been good and some of it not so good. I have met a lot of people there that are very special to me though. I consider them friends in the true sense of the word. I also consider the regulars of this blog my friends. Being away has given me some ideas for some new posts which I will start to work on soon. I don't know how frequent I will be at posting but I have decided to try and stick with it this time. Good or bad it will be what it is.

Now before anyone gets too concerned about me I just want to say that I still have a lot of nice things in my life. I just was concentrating on the negative too much. The job situation has not improved for me but I am not the only one in that boat at this time. Its really rough out there right now. You just about have to be in the right place at the right time and the market is flooded with younger and nicer looking applicants than myself. I Know that every dog has their day and I will have mine eventually. Just have to find the right place. For now, you are stuck with me. :) I have some computer posts I want to share and some on social networking as well. I still have a support system in place, a roof over my head, food to eat. As far as a job? Well three out of four is pretty doggone good!! :) You all take care and I will catch you on the flip side!!

Hiatus

I know it has been a while since I posted anything here. I am sorry about that. I really do enjoy doing this an I have missed it. I have missed all of you. :)

Sometimes one's life gets complicated due to work or health or the lack thereof in my case. I have had a lot to say over the past few months and I still have more I want to share. I still consider myself young (at heart anyway) and look forward to life. Any post I would have made in the past few weeks would have been a downer post. Mostly due to my state of mind and I did not want to share those kinds of thoughts. "If you don't have anything good to say, well, don't say it." I was taught this from youth and while it may not be completely true in all cases, it is hard to let go of things we are taught as children. It is not my desire to make my bad day your bad day.

I will be on hiatus from this blog until at least Labor Day. I hope this will give me the time I need to recharge my batteries, so to speak. Lots of things to sort out and plans I have to make. I want you all to know that you mean very much to me and this is a difficult choice. The interaction I have had with you has helped me during a difficult time in my life and your comments and friendship mean a lot to me. It would be rude of me to not let you know I was going to be gone and why. I plan to make my best effort to my other blog, which I have neglected also. I don't plan to take a hiatus from that but the posts will be less frequent unless I am otherwise directed. The purpose there is far too important for me to neglect.

You can still contact me during this time though the comments or email. I may even be on AIM. :) Hard to shut me up completely. :) My email address and AIM screen name is on my blogger profile. See you all later.

How does your garden grow?

I have received at least two questions on the alternative gardening method that I was going to try this year. Today I will try to answer those questions. This has been a fun year to garden because of this experimentation. Let me start from the beginning. In March, my wife sent me an email that had a link in it to hay bale gardening. Yes, I still have hay fever. :) I don't know if any of you have ever heard of this before but it was an interesting subject to me. I always had a fascination with things that were unconventional and just plain odd. :) I told my wife that we would have to come up with some hay bales which was something that I just don't carry around in my hip pocket. Through a friend of ours who has some horses, we were able to come up with 8 bales of hay. I thought that would be good enough to carry out the experiment. Two of the bales were packed loosely so I ended up with six that I could use. I laid down some black plastic and put my bales over the top of them in a double row. Why did I put down the plastic? The short answer is that my wife told me to. :) She said she read somewhere that it would help hold the moisture in the bales longer. I angled the last two because I wanted too. :)



Now by the book, you are supposed to water the bales (it takes a lot of water) and add ammonium nitrate to them daily. Now of course I didn't do this. I watered them a little and put regular fertilizer on them and watered them down heavy to make it soak in. Ammonium nitrate is the better way to go. It is a regulated chemical and you will have to sign for it if you use it. This is the same stuff that those nut cases used to bomb the Federal building in Oklahoma City a few years back. That is why you have to sign for it. You can find it at a farmer supply type place. You could call around in your area and probably find it without too much trouble. Like I said, it is the better alternative for this type of gardening. You add the fertilizer and water daily for a week. I really think that a week and a half to two weeks would be better. The fertilizer generates heat like you would get in a compost pile. The heat has to dissipate so that you won't kill your plants.



I water these things daily unless it rains. I water them heavily because they have no way to hold on to large amounts of water. After the initial fertilizing, I fertilize with something like Miracle-Gro once a week. Now these are the results down below after a few weeks. I am growing yellow squash, tomatoes, eggplant, and pepper. Next year I think this would make a wonderful way to grow bush beans without having to bend over so far. That will take quite a few bales. I think an herb garden would be wonderful grown this way. You would just want to start the seedlings somewhere else first. This is a test, it is only a test. :) If you would like to know more about this subject from an expert you should check this link. This man lives in the same county I do but I do not know him personally. His videos are the most informative that I have found on the subject. If you want to do this right, it will be worth checking the videos out. My results are just OK. I think that is because I didn't do it exactly like it was supposed to be done. Going against the grain seems to be a weakness of mine. I've already started seedlings for the second wave of plants I will use after these are spent. I plan to do this until first frost. That's pretty much it and I wish you all a happy growing season! :)

Summer hunting season

I am still in the midst of a job search right now.  Not a lot has happened since I last wrote about this.  I have altered some of my techniques though.  I only try to make in person contacts now.  No more of this calling around stuff.  Online applications are not something that I am doing right now.  I find them to be long and tedious.  They are demoralizing to me.  I carry a copy of my resume´ with me and a list of my references.  If a company is not taking applications, I ask will they accept a copy of my resume´.  Most of the time they will but what I want to talk about today is the interview and the parts of the resume´.

As of yet, I haven't had the first call back for an interview.  This is a first for me.  I have been in the workforce since I was 16 years old and it just feels so foreign to me to be out of work so long.  Now I haven't started worrying about this because in my heart of hearts I believe that something will turn up.  It may not be just what I was looking for but it will be something to pay the bills so to speak.  Now the resume´ writing has changed a little since I first learned to write one.  There is this part called the "objective" and that seems a little odd to me.  My objective is to get a job!  Now I can't put that on there can I?  It just doesn't sound professional.  So you have to come up with a sugar coated way to say the same thing.  This to me is stupid.  Now you know why I hate politics.  Things that should be so simple are made to be so complicated.  I think I will omit this.  The work history and education areas are OK I suppose.  I don't give more information than I have to there though because I want to explain more of this in an interview.  I just have where I worked and what I did and the hire dates.  I only go back 10 years unless the information from a past job is pertinent to the job I am applying for.  Employers generally only keep records 7 years or so on you.  Many times if you have been away for longer than that, they won't have a record of your employment.  This does vary from company to company and they may remember you anyway, but don't count on it.  Another part of my resume´ is references.  Work and personal references to be exact.  Now I will only furnish this on a separate sheet upon request.  I appreciate all of the people that said that I could use their personal information to help me to gain employment.  I don't hand that information out to just anyone and certainly not like giving away a free coupon or something.  I have a friend in a nearby city that is a manager of a company.  There is a special paper that you can buy just to print a resume´ on.  It usually is heavy milled and has a watermark on it if you hold it to the light.  My friend will hold the resume´ up to the light and if the watermark is upside down, he throws the thing in the trash!  He won't even look at the content.  I haven't told him, but I think it is stupid to let a potentially good employee slip through your fingers just because of a watermark.  I don't use this special paper anyhow. :)  Call me a maverick.  I may be an unemployed maverick, but a maverick, nonetheless. :)

If I can get to the interview, life will be good.  Interviews don't intimidate me because I can usually talk my way into a job.  The person interviewing is just a person like me and that is how I have always looked at it.  You have to have all of your ducks in a row when you go in there though.  Nothing really in my past that would hinder me so I am confident when I get to this part.  It is just getting to the interview that is driving me nuts right now.  Now I know some of you are going through the same thing and you all have a few different techniques that you use.  Perhaps we could compare notes and give each other a few pointers.  Anything to pass the time. :)  Hopefully, the next time I post about this will be about how I got the job!  I'll definitely post that when it happens! :)

Grandpa's Farm

Here in the South it is common to find family farms.  They are quickly becoming a past way of life.  It is difficult for many of them to make enough money from farming and they are simply going away.  Now and then you will meet someone that is good at it and you can tell that farming is in their blood.  I believe some people were just born to do certain things.  My grandpa was born to be a farmer.  When I was young you could find him out in the fields on his tractor or using a hoe to cultivate crops.  I am not talking about a garden, I am talking about 60 acres.  He worked it for the most part by himself without any help.  Sometimes my dad or my uncles would help.  My Granny would always be working too but that is a story for later.  Grandpa usually liked to do things by himself.  He loved the work he did on the farm.   He would raise watermelons, cantaloupes, and cotton.  Cotton was still a money crop in the late 60's and early 70's in South Carolina.  When I was in the first grade I would come home from school and pick cotton for money.  He paid me 3 cents a pound. :)  Do you have any idea how long it takes for a 7 year old to pick a pound of cotton?  It takes quite a while.  I think my friend and myself were able to get $2.75 to split between us one week.  That was a good week for me. :)  Well, in 1968 it was pretty good. 

Like I said, Grandpa would grow watermelons and cantaloupes as well.  There was this 20 acre field below the highway he would plant in watermelons almost every year.  Planting this type of crop near the road baffled me.  People would drive by and see this and of course some would stop and steal a watermelon.  High school kids were the most common culprit.  It was just a temptation that proved to be too hard to resist at times.  Grandpa knew every watermelon and cantaloupe that grew in his field.  He knew when someone had been there even if they had left no sign.  How he did this I do not know but he was never wrong about it.  One year there were these high school boys that would stop in the dead of night and not only steal but vandalize his stuff.  Grandpa would take a couple of boxes of shotgun shells and fill them with rock salt.  Sometimes he would just leave the bird shot in them.  He camped out in the middle of the field that night and waited.  Sure enough the kids came back and began to steal and vandalize his stuff again.  He could hear them talking about him mocking him and cussing him.  They didn't know that he was out there with them. :)  In our community everyone knew everyone else.  So these fellas were local and were calling him by name unaware that he was right behind them.  He jumped up and began firing.  Now in all honesty, from  the range he was shooting at, he couldn't have done much damage.  He didn't want to kill them.  He just wanted to teach them a lesson.  He did just that!  They jumped up screaming and hollering and got in their car and drove away.  The town doctor in Honea Path said that he picked shot out of their backsides all night long.  Even at that range he was a pretty good shot.  The town police were called and he told them that it was a county matter and for them to get off of his property.  They fussed a little but they did leave.  It was understood in those days that a farmer would protect his livelihood with force if necessary.  Grandpa never had those fellas steal his watermelons anymore.  He told me this story laughing so hard that tears filled his eyes.  My Grandpa was an interesting man to say the least.  He passed away in the mid 1990's at the age of 90.  I think about him often and smile.  One reason I smile is because of a question that I have.  Why did my Grandpa plant those watermelons so close to the road? ;)

Class Reunion

This year will mark the 30 year reunion of my high school class.  I really wish I were excited about this because I have not seen most of those folks since I left school.  However, I have mixed feelings about this.  I think everyone wishes they had been more successful in their career or perhaps had the perfect family.  Having good health at this age is always a plus.  You have a natural curiosity about what happened to the girl you were sweet on or the friend who had a plan to make a million dollars by age 25.  How many of us thought being 25 was old?  I know I did.  There were awkward moments too.  I remember when I got caught smoking on school grounds.  I knew I was in trouble but didn't see the need for all of the fuss they made over it.  After all, it was just a cigarette.  It was only a cigarette this particular time.  I didn't get into a fight in high school even though I came close a few times.  I had a problem with temper in grammar school and I got into a lot of fights.  After grammar school I told myself I wasn't going to fight in school anymore.  For the most part I was a good student. I did my work and if I applied myself there was a lot I could get done.  I wasn't a great student but I was solid  student. I still am.

Have you ever known someone from your school who you recall their face but you can't remember their name?  Someone who for the most part was quiet and seemed to fade into the background without being noticed?  In fact, if it were not for an old annual sitting around you wouldn't remember them at all?  That person was me.  Most of my friends were a year of two older or a year or two younger.  I connected with people who were not necessarily classmates.  The classmates I really cared for moved away during my high school years.  This was not their fault it was just the way things worked out.

Now I am 30 years older and have lived a lot of life.  I have lived much of it for the Lord who I love so much and have given my life to.  I have lived it for the family whom I am so devoted to.  I lived it for an industry which was pretty much run out of this country.  I have lived it the best I knew how to.  So I ask you today, what is success?  Is it only finances and a great amount of friends?  Is it just rising through the ranks in your career?  I think it is much more than that. I think success is to look back and not be willing to change a thing.  Success is such a deceptive topic.  Success is truly relative to the person.  So many things in life depend on circumstances that are beyond our control.  I haven't made my mind up completely if I will be going to this reunion.  I would like to see some of those people.  I know that none of us are the same person.  I know  I am not.  However,  there was a lot of hurt in those days too and the feelings from the ghost of high school past are the most haunting of all.  It brings up memories of things which happened in my life when my life wasn't good.  The reunion isn't until October so I still have a little time to mull over these thoughts and feelings I am having.  I will talk to the Lord about those feelings and then make up my mind.  I will let you know what I decide.