Mondays Missives

Poor boy exhausted himself trying to meet a deadline. Don't worry kid- it's all downhill from here.

• May have mentioned this before but, it's important to me that my house smells good. Friends of my children that have moved and we later get back in touch with and nieces and nephews when they get older have all said,"I loved coming to your house when I was younger- it always smelled so good!" I have no idea though why it's so important but, it's been true as long as I can remember.
• I've heard women comment on the fact that smells are more important to guys generally. I smell nearly everything I pick up- again I have no idea why. I don't remember seeing my dad or other males doing same when I was a child.
• I don't use the word kid in reference to children very often. I say child or children.
• My mom could make a peanut butter cookie that was soooo good your tongue would would slap your brains out trying to get at them when one came near your mouth. They were so good they'd make you want to slap your mama.
• Yeah, she made a pretty good cookie.
• Also chocolate cake with sour cream icing.
• Another blog this morning reminded me of a goofy old friend story: one of my college buds when we got to know each other well enough said,"Come here I've got something I want to show you." Inside his den, bedroom and and garage where containers of coins. 5 gallon buckets of quarters, coffee cans full of dimes, giant vases full of pennies- you just can not imagine. I said to him,"Dave, you need to get this out of here, and I mean like now. There must be 15,000 dollars worth of change here- I'm not walking around the knowledge of this waiting for someone to bonk you on the head for it and have me be one of the people the police come to." He said,"Yeah, some other people have said basically the same thing." This gave the situation a whole new urgency- he'd told a few others about it after dragging it all out of his storage a couple of days before. When we loaded it up the next morning it made the tires on his Toyota truck drag the underside of the bed. It took the bank two days to count it all using as I recall either two or three tellers. It took three trips to get it all to the bank. There was 16,500 dollars worth of change, he was 32 and had not spent a single penny of change since he was 8.
• That guy was an interesting character in a lot of ways. When he was 8 he decided he would be a millionaire by the time he was 30- (part of the reason for the change hoarding) and he bought his first rental property at the age of 12. He owned 37 rent houses when I met him after selling several off. The year he reached 30 he was worth a very cash flush nearly 2 million dollars. That same year his wife left him making realize how meaningless money can be without the things that really matter. I was a finance major at the time and honestly think hearing his take on life played an early role in why I'm a nurse now and not in banking or real estate etc. I haven't seen or heard from him in nearly 20 years even after trying to look him up a time or two.
• Maybe that moment in time was all we needed from each other.