Past Midway Ramblings on Business & Life

CategoryLife

Losing Our Childhood

When I was little, I had an assortment of plastic toy animals – farm animals, a few dinosaurs, a giraffe, an elephant, and some others odd characters… the usual gang of creatures a young child might enjoy. And I did. This motley crew became the bedrock of an imaginary world that could occupy my mind and engross me in solitary play for extended periods. I don’t recall the various adventures my...

What Game Are We Playing?

“Should I go for 3-of-a-kind or the full-house?” I thought aloud. I was home from college for Christmas break. Between semesters. Final exams behind me. Eight family members gathered around the kitchen table to play Yahtzee (the dice game) at my grandparents’ house. I sat on the end of the table, closest to the door. To me, Yahtzee was an exercise in statistical probabilities mixed with pure...

A Framework to Help Develop Your Criteria for a Spouse

This blog post has a purpose – to prompt young people to reflect on the qualities they aspire to find in a prospective life partner before they become entangled in love and feel they have found their future spouse. More than a decade ago, I meandered into an airport bookstore in Stockholm and, on a whim, purchased a book for my transatlantic flight. The book was titled Too Soon Old, Too Late...

The Imminent Transformation: How AI Will Revolutionize Industries and Reshape the Workforce

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the buzz lately, and rightly so. I suspect it’s a bigger deal than you think. AI isn’t just some fringe, hypothetical Star Trek tech for geeks and nerds to drool over. Not any longer. Prediction – AI technology will creep into every facet of modern culture and will completely transform vast industries such that we will not recognize them in 10 years, perhaps 5...

Physics and Life

I needed to test a new microphone. So, just to have something to say for the audio test, I began discussing potential & kinetic energy as a analogy to life… a thought I have been contemplating for more than a decade. I expected the idea would eventually be a written blog post, but I thought the initial rambling in the video was decent, so I just kept talking… for nearly 10 minutes. A...

My Father’s Eulogy

It is a strange thing to miss your own father’s funeral. Today is the second anniversary of my father’s death. He passed away while my family and I were in transit to visit family in Sweden. Mom waited until we had completed our first flight and were about to board our trans-Atlantic flight before telling me that Dad was nearing the end. Mom knew I would have stayed, had I known, and she wanted...

Why Inflation Feels Like It’s More Than Reported

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) came out for May 2022, showing 8.6% inflation over May 2021. “Experts” claimed this was higher than expected. For the rest of us, inflation feels higher than 8.6%, when we visit the grocery store, go to lunch, or fill up at the pump. In fact, it’s difficult to name a product we regularly purchase that’s ONLY up 8.6%. So, where’s the disconnect between what leaves...

Playing to Win

The kids and I used to wrestle on the living room floor when they were younger – when I was younger. All three were afforded the same wrestling opportunities, but Soren (my son) seemed to enjoy it more than his sisters. Boys sometimes have extra physical energy demanding an outlet. Because Soren was smaller than me, I wrestled with him down on my hands and knees. This enabled Soren to develop his...

Precious Time

Years ago, I was on the phone with a customer. During the conversation, we spoke briefly about our families, as sometimes happens, especially with long-term customers. “Do you have kids?” he asked. “I do. Three,” I replied. “How old are they?” “10, 7 & 4… girl, girl, boy.” “I remember when my son was four…,” his sentence trailed off as he began to reminisce of things that once were. Nostalgic...

More Than a Book

When we say an object is in the same place it was before, we mean, it hasn’t moved relative to some other things, but it is definitely not in the same exact place. In fact, nothing is ever in the same place it once was, including you. For Example, Let’s Find My Book Suppose I ask my lovely wife (Sofie), “Have you seen my book?” A seemingly simple question, to which she might reply, “It’s on the...

Dislocated Jaw

I play a pick-up soccer game with the neighborhood guys a few days per week. It’s one of my favorite activities and helps keep me in shape. A few months back, I kicked the ball to make a pass, but the ball ricocheted off another player’s knee and smacked me square on the chin. You might say I kicked the soccer ball into my own face. After a few seconds of brain fog, I recovered and continued to...

Refugees & Kindness to Strangers in Our Land

In the mid-1970’s, my mom helped care for a Cambodian refugee family in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The family had narrowly escaped the genocide of the communist Khmer Rouge regime, fleeing to the United States with the assistance of a Tulsa-based missionary couple returning from Cambodia. Almost 158,000 Cambodians entered the United States between 1975 and 1994. This family was part of the first wave...

Lost in Ukraine

For the past three Summers, I have traveled to Ukraine to visit my web developers. The first trip, my wife and oldest daughter traveled with me. The next Summer (2018), I went solo, and missed my wife’s keen sense of direction. Okay, I got lost. But for me, that’s not so unusual. I frequently misplace myself, even in familiar places. But this time, I was walking the streets of Kiev after...

Detained by the Police

I attended my 30-year high school reunion this past weekend in Tulsa, OK. After the reunion gathering concluded Saturday evening, I was walking to the parking garage where I parked my car (on the grounds of the Casino where the reunion was held). It was late… 2:45am to be exact. I had said my goodbyes to my classmates and had a final conversation with Brad Kallenberger before starting my walk...

Fun – Part 4 – The Importance of Memories & Imagined Futures

This is the fourth part in a four-part series. A brief recap… Post 1 – I discussed the three components of fun: Part 1 – Anticipating the fun (expecting the Future) Part 2 – Doing the fun (in the Present) Part 3 – Remembering the fun (looking back at our Past). Posts 2 & 3 – I developed and discussed the Totality of Fun, a framework of how we perceive Fun, and described how...

The Totality of Fun – Continued

This is the third part in a four-part series. My first post on this topic introduced the three component parts of fun. The second post in this series introduced the Totality of Fun and discussed Part 2 Fun in more detail. Today, I finish my thoughts on the Totality of Fun by elaborating on Part 1 and Part 3 Fun. I also highlight how all this leads into a particular dilemma with Alzheimer’s, a...

The Totality of Fun

This is the second installment in a four-post series. In my last post, I introduced the three component parts of fun: Part 1 – Anticipating the fun Part 2 – Doing the fun Part 3 – Remembering & Reminiscing about the fun …and promised next a discussion about The Totality of Fun, which follows, with numerous digressions (and regressions) along the way. In other words, this one...

Components of Fun

The prevalence of Alzheimer’s, including my own father’s, led me to think more about what it means to have fun and to enjoy life, topics I have pondered for decades. Outline Writing about this topic became considerably more involved than I had first anticipated, so I have divided it into three separate posts: Post 1 (today) introduces the component parts of fun and how we perceive them...

Flying Through Space on A Rock

The big picture is that we are flying through space on a large rock. And while here, as a species, we come and go, generation after generation like fruit flies in a biology lab. Individually, we are each completely unique, yet we have at least one thing in common. We all pass, having a total duration typically less than 100 summers, as defined by how our rock circles a much bigger rock that...

Past Midway Ramblings on Business & Life

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