Yes, these are images from our house in Hurst, TX, just outside Fort Worth.  Nope, not from Vermont, I promise.

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions.  If anything is worth starting next month or next year, it’s worth starting now.  Besides, I know myself well enough to know that after a few days or weeks I’m going to wonder why I even thought I’d do such-and-such in the first place.

So, this year, not so much a resolution as a goal:  I will endeavor not to buy a vehicle in 2010.

In 2007, our Nissan Maxima got crashed and totaled, making it necessary to purchase another car.  We decided on a 1999 BMW 323i, which turned out to be a rotten deal.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we made a mistake purchasing it, because you can’t see the future and you don’t know what you don’t know, but it sure ended up all wrong.  After two $1000+ repairs, and another impending one, in 8 months, we cut our losses in 2008 and got our 2005 Nissan Altima.  It’s been great.

Then in 2009, our old 1997 Altima had enough engine wear that it was going to cost more than it was worth to fix, so we went car shopping again, settling on a 2007 Mazda6.

So, with the Mazda purchase, we are hopeful that our car buying is done for a long time.  We’re hoping for 10 years.  Maybe in 2019 we’ll have to start shopping for vehicles again, so, hopefully no blog posts or news articles regarding vehicle purchases till then.

I found a fun activity – making a fountain of sparks in your home office. It’s fun and easy. Here are step-by-step instructions:

Tools Needed:

• New battery for APC BackUPS 1250
• crescent wrench
• pliers

Procedure:

1. With the old battery taken out of the UPS, connect the negative cable to the negative terminal of the new battery, finger-tight.
2. Tap the positive cable to the positive terminal a few times.  It will spark slightly once or twice.
3. When no more sparking occurs, tighten down the screw and nut on the positive terminal, finger-tight.
4. Adjust the crescent wrench to the size of the nut and hold the nut in place with the wrench.
5. With the pliers, grab the head of the screw and begin to tighten it
6. This is where the fun begins: keeping the wrench on the nut on the positive terminal, rotate toward the negative terminal until the side of the wrench just touches.
7. Pull your hand quickly away as soon as the sparks start to fly.  If you do it right, the wrench will stick, lodged in between the two terminals as sparks shoot out like a fountain.
8. When you’ve had enough of a show, take the pliers and smack the wrench to dislodge it.  This may take more than one blow.
9. There will be flames in a couple spots on the plastic of the battery casing.  Blow them out.
10. Turn the fan on in the room before your wife comes home to clear out the burning plastic smell.

That’s it!  Your own Fountain O’ Sparks in 10 easy steps!  Inspect the wrench to see that the steel has melted and burned the sliding portion of the wrench.  Inspect the negative terminal to ensure that the nut has been welded to the screw.

*Disclaimer: don’t ever do this. Ever.

I just filled in the last blank hole in my collection of uncirculated Franklin Half Dollars.  I’ve been collecting coins in some capacity since I was about 10 years old.  I don’t know how it started, but I remember my grandpa had several Peace Dollars and Morgan Dollars, and my brother and I started snapping pocket change into Whitman folders whenever we’d come across a year/mint we didn’t already have.  My parents would take us to a local coin shop where we’d spend a buck or two on some Wheat Cents or Buffalo Nickels.  When the big bucks started rolling in from the increased allowance and lawn mowing business in the early 1980s, I can remember spending upwards of $5.00 on a single coin like a VG Wheat Cent from the 1920s or Walking Liberty Half Dollar from the 1940s.  I even spend $24 on an 1841 Seated Liberty Half Dollar minted in New Orleans.

Fast forward to 1999, when, of course, the State Quarter program likely had something to do with my increased interest in building my collection – I started getting every year’s Silver Proof Set and many older uncirculated Wheat Cents.

In the early 2000s, I decided to go ahead and make a push to complete the set of uncirculated Franklin Halves for several reasons.  I already had many of them, some cheaper ones in uncirculated condition, so I was closer to a complete set of these than to anything else.  The collection is relatively small – they were only minted between 1948 and 1963, and some years don’t have mint marks. They are relatively inexpensive, with no key dates being so rare as to command exorbitant prices — uncirculated specimens from any year and mint can be gotten for less than $50 each.

So after upgrading some I had in lower grades to uncirculated and filling in some dates I didn’t yet have, the last one I needed was the elusive 1949.  It was easy enough to find one at local coin shops over the years, but getting one in the right grade at the right price was not so easy – but being patient finally paid off and the last piece fell into place in January.

I visit MSN.com several times a day to 1.) look at the red numbers at the right side of the screen signifying how much the stock market is going down, interesting and not-upsetting to me now since I have had almost nothing invested in the stock market for the past few months, and 2.) briefly glancing at the headlines to see if there’s anything interesting.

I happened upon an article that describes, from somewhat-credible psychological and scientific sources, what I’ve been stewing on for years but lacked the authority to proclaim: you’re probably doing yourself more harm than good by trying to be too darn clean.  The writer outlines the dangers of what she describes as the Cult of Clean.

Three main trains of thought stick out to me:

One: From a physiological standpoint, people worry too much about being so sanitary and need to relax and just accept the fact that germs are a part of life and appreciate the role of dirty stuff in the world.  And all through the middle of the article there’s a sweeping commentary on the irrational “dreams of disinfection” being tied to us being too affluent, disconnected socially, wanting to avoid risk, and too bent on trying to be “in control”.  My personal favorite is the subtle reference to advertisers convincing you more and more that you should be dissatisfied with your state of cleanliness and buy their stuff to fix this problem.

Two: The pursuit of purity undermines the immune system.  If you lack exposure to the things that will build up your immune system, you’ll be more prone to develop problems like asthma and allergies.  Seriously, if you’re as old as I am (which isn’t old – if you grew up in the 1980s), you remember a time when there was no such thing as warning labels about peanut allergies (specifically addressed in this article) on food products.

Three: There are just some great quotes.  Take AmeriCares’ Ella Gudwin: “The whole world is covered in a small film of fecal matter. Just get used to it.”  And my favorite from Harvard Medical School’s Lynn Bry: “We have an irrational fear of germs and dirt… I fully advocate appropriate hygiene and cleanliness. Don’t suck on your fingers after you cut open a chicken. But you don’t need to scrub yourself until you’re sore.”

So, do yourself a favor – wrestle with your dog, scrub around in the dirt some, and enjoy life with the germs.

Ginger was drying clothes last weekend… checked the dryness, needed to let them go longer, pushed the Start button, and… nothing! So immediately our thoughts went to the worst-case scenario: spending money (yuck!) on a dryer, and the painful process of trying to find one that just dries clothes without having all kinds of electronic computer-controlled features.

Then our thoughts turned to the best-case scenario – flip a tripped breaker. We went to the breaker box in the garage and noticed the one labeled “Dryer” was tripped, over to the “off” side and showing orange. It’s nice when the breakers are labeled! But this day it wasn’t going to be so easy – never before have I seen a breaker that just wouldn’t go back to “on”, but this one just wouldn’t. Repeated flips over and back just wouldn’t ever get it back to “on”, so we were stuck. Being the troubleshooter that I am and wanting to explore all possibilities, we even unplugged the dryer just in case there was a short in it or its cord that immediately tripped the breaker whenever it wound try to come on… but nope, the problem was really at the breaker box.

We let the problem lie for a couple days, contemplating calling an electrician because I didn’t want to get fried by touching all those scary wires in the wrong way. After bringing up our problem amongst our respective coworkers, both Ginger and I had people suggest it was a bad breaker; I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a breaker “breaking” or “going bad”, but that seemed to be the case here.

I unscrewed the panel surrounding the breaker box, exposing the assembly that houses the individual breakers and all the bare wires running into them – it looked like each breaker was a small cartridge-like thingy that could be removed easily enough. But I sure didn’t want to go digging around in there with my bare hands or a screwdriver without doing a little more research.

A guy at my work confirmed what I was thinking: I could turn off the “Main Principal” breaker , cutting power to all the breakers below, rendering them harmless. Then I could touch anything below without sending sparks flying. The idea was to disconnect the wires to the breaker, remove it, go to The Home Depot and buy an exact match, install the new one, reconnect the wires, flip the “Main Principal” back on, and have the dryer and everything else electrical still work, all without killing myself or burning the house down.

Back at the house… a borrowed volt meter confirmed that turning of the Main Principal indeed killed power to all those below it. I was able to unscrew the fittings into which the red and black wires ran, then basically snap out the offending breaker. I made a 10-minute trip to The Home Depot and bought its exact match replacement, a QO 30amp double pole breaker (no, I don’t know what any of that means) for $15.47.

It was super-easy to snap the new breaker into place and reconnect the wires. Now the moment of truth: flipping the Main Principal back on. It would be a good thing for the dryer to work again; better would be for all of the lights and appliances to still work; best would be to have no sparks or fires or injuries. Success! Everything electrical in the house works like a champ, and I even got it done in time for the SmartUPS in the office to keep all of the computer and network stuff running on battery power while the power was off. And we didn’t have to mess with scheduling with (or paying for) an electrician – it only took $16.75 and some patience, effort, and a little courage.

I recently received an interesting e-mail, full of information about the state of the world’s economy and cultural demographics, and was asked if I could verify any of the information in it. You see, on occasion, I and others rush off to snopes.com to verify the authenticity of forwards of forwards of forwards of messages claiming such things as Barack Hussein Obama’s ties to radical Islam, a tiger mother nursing orphaned piglets, etc. In this case, the e-mail turned out to be an op-ed piece by Herbert Meyer, describing worldwide economic and cultural trends, how they came about, and, more or less prompting us to think about what lies ahead and what it means for us.

I started to respond, more to the method of delivery than to the content of the article, coining the term “e-mail stewardship” in the process, and decided that I would put into practice what I was going to preach in my response. So here it is:

It took me 19 seconds to find something decently Google-searchable in the message – chosing the strings “WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON” and “FOUR MAJOR TRANSFORMATIONS” out of the introduction of the article – and find several web sites that published this article:

• http://www.impactlab.com/2008/05/10/what-in-the-world-is-going-on/
• http://www.superfactory.com/articles/general/meyer-what-in-the-world-is-going-on.html
• http://digg.com/world_news/MUST_READ_Four_major_transformations_that_are_shaping_the_world
• …etc, including a PDF: http://www.dreckless.com/what_in_the_world_is_going_on.pdf

So, if I found this article worthwhile and wanted to pass it along to others who might also find it worthwhile, I would MUCH RATHER send them a little bitty e-mail with a link to the article on the web, rather than forward the whole ginormous glob of text, for several reasons:

• It reduces clutter in my e-mail box.
• It reduces clutter in the recipients’ e-mail boxes.
• If you forward an e-mail, you risk accidentally forwarding it as an attachment, which is just plain evil.
• If you forward an e-mail, you are likely sending along information that you don’t usually think about:
  a.) if headers are included, your recipients get the contact info of all of the people that got it when you got it, as well as the person you got it from. The previous sender might not want your recipient to know that he sent it to you. So if Dwight sends an e-mail to Michael and then Michael forwards it to Kevin, Kevin could know that Dwight was the previous sender, and even who sent it to Dwight, and even the other people who got it along with Dwight (including everyone’s e-mail addresses); Dwight and the other previous senders and recipients might not like that.
  b.) you’re sending along irrelevant information like people’s signatures, ‘this e-mail was scanned by hooby-jooby virus scanner’ messages, and ads that free e-mail services like Mail.com and Yahoo append to their messages.
• The web sites that publish this article took great pains to format it properly for viewing in a browser window, so it looks better and is much easier to read than a forward of a forward of a forward of an e-mail. You can’t win when it comes to forwarding e-mails. If you forward a message in plain text, the client reader chops up the lines. If you forward an HTML e-mail, you’re asking for trouble, as e-mail clients, especially web-based clients, are famous for butchering HTML e-mails (mangling fonts and colors, breaking images, etc.).
  Contrast this representation of the e-mail I got with one of the sites above.
• There is YET ANOTHER copy of THE SAME THING in the world. Wow, in 19 seconds, I already found four copies. How many more are there? Now, if 22 people send it on to 9 others who send it on to 11 others, then we have 33,962 copies of THE SAME THING scattered all over the world. I know, my math isn’t right – but you get the idea. No, the Internet is not getting full, but it’s an incredible waste of resources if millions of people store millions of copies of the same thing. I’m not saying this in the spirit of “greenness”, but in the spirit of efficiency.
• The content is more credible if it’s published on a credible Web site. Of course, we all know that just because something is on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true, but if it’s a real article on the BBC’s site, it’s just a little more credible than if it’s an undocumented post on Kazic Kymnaczykowicz’s blog, which is a little more credible than a forward of a forward of your Uncle Ivan’s e-mail that he got from that nice dude he bowls with. The people whom you alert to this inspiring content will think much more highly of you if your source is obviously credible rather than suspect.

So it all comes down to this: if you find some good information that your e-mail buddies would love to see, find as original a version of it as you can published online somewhere, check out its validity, and then send your buddies a link rather than a bloated e-mail. Your buddies and their buddies will thank you for your good E-mail Stewardship practices!