Considering the powerful job they have to do and the conditions they often have to work in, car batteries often effortlessly and thanklessly provide a function many of us couldn’t do without.
Except when they don’t start.
Because someone left the headlights on all night.
Oops.
Did I do that?
I’m not purposely trying to quote Steve Urkel, but I’ll admit I left my headlights on this week, draining my battery of all its power. After coming home from an evening class at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, I parked my vehicle in the garage and promptly got out without turning them off.
To come up with an excuse, I’ll blame my error on the fact my other vehicle has automatic headlights. I assumed these would turn off automatically also.
They didn’t, leaving me with a vehicle that wouldn’t start in the morning.
Fortunately my wife had just left for work and was able to come back and get me. If she hadn’t been around, I would have been working from home, which is hard to do when everything I need to do my job was on my computer at my office.
I’ve only had car battery problems twice in my life, and the first time probably shouldn’t count since the problem wasn’t actually the battery but the starter. I was young and inexperienced with even less car mechanic knowledge, so I assumed my car wasn’t starting because the battery was dead. After purchasing a new battery, figuring out how to change it and then trying with no luck to start it, I learned a good lesson: make sure the battery is dead first.
It was a good lesson, as I’ve had starters go out twice since then. Knowing the battery was fine, I was able to address the actual problem without unnecessarily buying a new battery. And when I encountered a legitimate battery problem two years ago after returning from a week-long trip to Florida, I knew it could be resolved with jumper cables rather than purchasing a new one.
I was told a little later by a mechanic I would need a new battery soon, as it only had a 30 percent life left in it. Two years later, I’ve finally used that remaining 30 percent, through a big fault of my own. Who knows how long it may have lasted had I not oopsed?
Usually when I have vehicle problems, I tend to curse the problem and the vehicle. But I’m not now. I’m praising all the car batteries I have ever had. They have been especially good to me over the years, especially when the temperatures have dropped well below zero. My grandmother told me a little praise can go a long way. I’m hoping this means I’ll never have to replace or jump another car battery again.
****
Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 27, 2012.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
Getting braces removed calls for a William Wallace ‘Freedom’ shout
I sort of relived this week the scene in “Braveheart” where Mel Gibson’s William Wallace character has his intestines removed by his captors in hopes he’ll confess his sins, except I didn’t have my intestines removed, I wasn’t being tortured and nobody was trying to get me to confess my sins.
But I was lying down and I did have something extracted, and when it was done I wanted to yell “Freedom,” much like Wallace actually did do during the scene.
My moment of almost mirroring “Braveheart” took place Monday when the braces I’ve been wearing for the past year and a half were removed, returning freedom to my mouth.
Wearing braces for the past 18 months has been a chore. I’ve been limited in the foods I can eat, although I haven’t always followed some of those limitations as popcorn will never leave my diet.
Braces also occasionally hurt. When they shifted my teeth around, my lips and inner mouth often had to adjust to sharp edges piercing into their soft tissues, often making me whine to my wife. And she’ll admit that I’m usually pretty good about sucking up any pain and not complaining about it.
They also gave me trouble when I tried to pronounce certain big words. In a class at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, I often was faced with many big words, some containing many “s” sounds that often tangled with my braces. Fortunately my professor understood my difficulty, as she also had braces as an adult.
Adult braces are worth these costs, though, especially when you had a gap between your front teeth that could have fit the Titanic. I feared smiling in public, scared the draft coming from the gap as my mouth went in an upward motion would knock whomever I was smiling at down. That’s probably not a good way to meet someone.
My wife is now saying I can’t stop smiling, and that I look like the Cheshire Cat – devious and mischievous looking. I can understand, as I’m not quite sure how to smile properly yet. Right now my teeth-showing smile is a cross between Tom Cruise’s perfect smile and Charles Manson’s bug-eyed serial-killer smile. I’ll call it a Charles Cruise smile.
I’ll keep trying to get the Tom Cruise smile. I have the rest of my life to gladly practice.
****
Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 20, 2012.
But I was lying down and I did have something extracted, and when it was done I wanted to yell “Freedom,” much like Wallace actually did do during the scene.
My moment of almost mirroring “Braveheart” took place Monday when the braces I’ve been wearing for the past year and a half were removed, returning freedom to my mouth.
Wearing braces for the past 18 months has been a chore. I’ve been limited in the foods I can eat, although I haven’t always followed some of those limitations as popcorn will never leave my diet.
Braces also occasionally hurt. When they shifted my teeth around, my lips and inner mouth often had to adjust to sharp edges piercing into their soft tissues, often making me whine to my wife. And she’ll admit that I’m usually pretty good about sucking up any pain and not complaining about it.
They also gave me trouble when I tried to pronounce certain big words. In a class at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, I often was faced with many big words, some containing many “s” sounds that often tangled with my braces. Fortunately my professor understood my difficulty, as she also had braces as an adult.
Adult braces are worth these costs, though, especially when you had a gap between your front teeth that could have fit the Titanic. I feared smiling in public, scared the draft coming from the gap as my mouth went in an upward motion would knock whomever I was smiling at down. That’s probably not a good way to meet someone.
My wife is now saying I can’t stop smiling, and that I look like the Cheshire Cat – devious and mischievous looking. I can understand, as I’m not quite sure how to smile properly yet. Right now my teeth-showing smile is a cross between Tom Cruise’s perfect smile and Charles Manson’s bug-eyed serial-killer smile. I’ll call it a Charles Cruise smile.
I’ll keep trying to get the Tom Cruise smile. I have the rest of my life to gladly practice.
****
Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 20, 2012.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Community Weight Race is good challenge for wannabe Oprahs and Jareds
Oprah and Jared better look out, as a new weight-loss guru is coming to town.
Actually it’s me, and I’m already in town and I’m definitely not a weight-loss guru. But I hope to be as I’m all registered for Ministry Health Care’s fifth annual Community Weight Race. I intend to tell people about my progress, as well as my team’s progress, throughout the four-month challenge, much like Oprah Winfrey used to talk about her own weight loss during the era of her daily show and Jared Fogle still talks about his weight loss by eating subs at Subway.
Weigh-in was held earlier this week, and I came in at 260 pounds with a 46.5-inch waist. I’ll admit I’m fat, but compared to me two years ago when I weighed 315 pounds, I’m in much better shape. In fact, for the past two years I have run and exercised regularly, and have no health problems except a head that is balding.
To put my stats in better perspective, I am 6’4” and have always been a bigger person. I weighed 280 pounds when I got married eight years ago, and throughout my first three years of college more than 15 years ago I hovered around 270.
The summer between my junior and senior year I decided I had had enough of being big. I watched everything I ate, refusing to put anything bad in my mouth, and I started running. Many of my friends in high school were cross country runners and I often listened to them talk about the freedom they felt when they were on roads and trails. I wanted to experience that freedom myself.
At first, I walked more than I ran as my lungs could only handle so much. Within a few weeks I was running more than walking and I began to understand the freedom my friends had talked about. By the middle of the summer, I could often get into the “zone,” a feeling runners can get in which the body forgets it’s running and the mind focuses on other things.
I shed the weight like water and soon was down to 217 pounds. I’d never get lower than that, as a busy senior year took some of my focus away from careful eating and regular exercise. I graduated from college weighing 230 pounds and maintained that weight for about a year. It gradually started going up again, and before I realized it, I was my old self again, someone whom I did not want to be.
And then I became a new person, someone even bigger and someone I definitely did not want to be. A busy family life and work schedule were excuses I used to keep the focus away from caring about myself. It wasn’t until my father-in-law told my wife that I seemed rather winded after doing some mildly involved tasks that I realized I was completely out of shape.
Losing weight has been much more difficult this time around than it was previously. I’m older so my metabolism isn’t the same, and I don’t have the time I had before to concentrate on the weight-loss task.
But it has been slowly coming off over the last two years. I started running again, and I try to make better choices on what I eat. My biggest problem is I like to eat. Food and I were meant to be together, and my stomach demands this. My issue then is making my stomach demand food that is healthy and better for me.
I plan on focusing on this during the Weight Race. While I’ll also look at exercising more and better during the challenge, I know I’ll benefit more by changing my dietary habits. This will mean less eating out, less snacks and smaller portions.
Presenting my progress to the public will motivate me to follow through on this endeavor. It will motivate me the same way I expect it to motivate my other team members (and whom I’m still finding) who I will also follow through a series of articles covering the Weight Race. These articles will start in next week’s issue. Oprah and Jared better watch out.
****
Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 13, 2012.
Actually it’s me, and I’m already in town and I’m definitely not a weight-loss guru. But I hope to be as I’m all registered for Ministry Health Care’s fifth annual Community Weight Race. I intend to tell people about my progress, as well as my team’s progress, throughout the four-month challenge, much like Oprah Winfrey used to talk about her own weight loss during the era of her daily show and Jared Fogle still talks about his weight loss by eating subs at Subway.
Weigh-in was held earlier this week, and I came in at 260 pounds with a 46.5-inch waist. I’ll admit I’m fat, but compared to me two years ago when I weighed 315 pounds, I’m in much better shape. In fact, for the past two years I have run and exercised regularly, and have no health problems except a head that is balding.
To put my stats in better perspective, I am 6’4” and have always been a bigger person. I weighed 280 pounds when I got married eight years ago, and throughout my first three years of college more than 15 years ago I hovered around 270.
The summer between my junior and senior year I decided I had had enough of being big. I watched everything I ate, refusing to put anything bad in my mouth, and I started running. Many of my friends in high school were cross country runners and I often listened to them talk about the freedom they felt when they were on roads and trails. I wanted to experience that freedom myself.
At first, I walked more than I ran as my lungs could only handle so much. Within a few weeks I was running more than walking and I began to understand the freedom my friends had talked about. By the middle of the summer, I could often get into the “zone,” a feeling runners can get in which the body forgets it’s running and the mind focuses on other things.
I shed the weight like water and soon was down to 217 pounds. I’d never get lower than that, as a busy senior year took some of my focus away from careful eating and regular exercise. I graduated from college weighing 230 pounds and maintained that weight for about a year. It gradually started going up again, and before I realized it, I was my old self again, someone whom I did not want to be.
And then I became a new person, someone even bigger and someone I definitely did not want to be. A busy family life and work schedule were excuses I used to keep the focus away from caring about myself. It wasn’t until my father-in-law told my wife that I seemed rather winded after doing some mildly involved tasks that I realized I was completely out of shape.
Losing weight has been much more difficult this time around than it was previously. I’m older so my metabolism isn’t the same, and I don’t have the time I had before to concentrate on the weight-loss task.
But it has been slowly coming off over the last two years. I started running again, and I try to make better choices on what I eat. My biggest problem is I like to eat. Food and I were meant to be together, and my stomach demands this. My issue then is making my stomach demand food that is healthy and better for me.
I plan on focusing on this during the Weight Race. While I’ll also look at exercising more and better during the challenge, I know I’ll benefit more by changing my dietary habits. This will mean less eating out, less snacks and smaller portions.
Presenting my progress to the public will motivate me to follow through on this endeavor. It will motivate me the same way I expect it to motivate my other team members (and whom I’m still finding) who I will also follow through a series of articles covering the Weight Race. These articles will start in next week’s issue. Oprah and Jared better watch out.
****
Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 13, 2012.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Legos can be object of love/hate relationship with parents
Other people with small children probably understand my love/hate relationship with Legos, the little building bricks of many youngsters’ lives.
I love them because, bottom line, they are fun. Playing with them somehow unleashes an inner creativity many other toys don’t provide. One can build spaceships, temples and giant robots – all of which can be used to battle each other or as a setting for other toys.
As a child, I had a bucket of Legos that lasted through numerous other toy fads. They served as my G.I. Joes, Transformers and Star Wars figures when I didn’t have the actual product, and they were involved in many pretend futuristic wars.
I can’t recall what happened to that red bucket of Legos, but they’ll always remain in my memory.
My 6-year-old son, Braden, has a similar fascination with Legos, one which his parents, grandparents and other relatives have been more than happy to help him with by keeping the supply well stocked.
And by well stocked I mean thousands of Lego pieces, well more than any one child really needs. His Indiana Jones-themed room could be opened as a mini-Legoland if the company ever wanted to open a Stevens Point branch.
We’ve been to two Legolands – the one at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and the one at the Mall of America in Minnesota. Both were cool places to visit, especially since they had some awesome giant Lego displays that must have taken thousands of hours to complete and hundreds of thousands of Legos to make.
The Stevens Point Legoland isn’t nearly as cool, though, as it’s a mess, which brings me to my hate for Legos: they hurt when you step on them with bare feet. This happens to me daily because Legos are something Braden is always playing with, and leaving on the floor for me to step on.
After spending an entire day over the New Year’s holiday helping Braden put together some of the Lego sets he received for Christmas, I spent the next entire day helping him to organize all of his Legos that aren’t part of a set into a Lego organizer his grandfather got for him as a present.
The organizer worked well, as it allowed us to separate the Legos by color. That seemed the easier way to categorize them, as separating them by type would have taken a week or more.
We completely filled the organizer, which technically means we don’t need to buy any more Legos. I’m sure we will, as there’s too much to love about them and too many battles to be fought using them.
****
Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 6, 2012.
I love them because, bottom line, they are fun. Playing with them somehow unleashes an inner creativity many other toys don’t provide. One can build spaceships, temples and giant robots – all of which can be used to battle each other or as a setting for other toys.
As a child, I had a bucket of Legos that lasted through numerous other toy fads. They served as my G.I. Joes, Transformers and Star Wars figures when I didn’t have the actual product, and they were involved in many pretend futuristic wars.
I can’t recall what happened to that red bucket of Legos, but they’ll always remain in my memory.
My 6-year-old son, Braden, has a similar fascination with Legos, one which his parents, grandparents and other relatives have been more than happy to help him with by keeping the supply well stocked.
And by well stocked I mean thousands of Lego pieces, well more than any one child really needs. His Indiana Jones-themed room could be opened as a mini-Legoland if the company ever wanted to open a Stevens Point branch.
We’ve been to two Legolands – the one at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and the one at the Mall of America in Minnesota. Both were cool places to visit, especially since they had some awesome giant Lego displays that must have taken thousands of hours to complete and hundreds of thousands of Legos to make.
The Stevens Point Legoland isn’t nearly as cool, though, as it’s a mess, which brings me to my hate for Legos: they hurt when you step on them with bare feet. This happens to me daily because Legos are something Braden is always playing with, and leaving on the floor for me to step on.
After spending an entire day over the New Year’s holiday helping Braden put together some of the Lego sets he received for Christmas, I spent the next entire day helping him to organize all of his Legos that aren’t part of a set into a Lego organizer his grandfather got for him as a present.
The organizer worked well, as it allowed us to separate the Legos by color. That seemed the easier way to categorize them, as separating them by type would have taken a week or more.
We completely filled the organizer, which technically means we don’t need to buy any more Legos. I’m sure we will, as there’s too much to love about them and too many battles to be fought using them.
****
Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 6, 2012.
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