The Rambling Insomniac

Earlier this week, an Illinois delegate for Barrack Obama was asked to step down after making some comments to a couple of neighbor kids (view the story here). Turns out that the kids, who were black, were climbing on a neighbor’s magnolia tree. The now ex-delegate, has stated that she felt they were harming the tree, and that she worried they would actually harm themselves. She then made a comment to the kids that the tree is not there for kids to be climbing on like “monkeys”. And for saying this, she lost her delegate position, and was issued a fine for disorderly conduct.

While I can certainly see how the use of the word “monkey” could be considered racist or politically incorrect in certain situations, I don’t believe this woman should have been chastised for what she said. I mean really, since when is calling a couple of kids climbing in a tree “monkeys” wrong? I call my kids monkeys all the time when they are climbing on stuff. It’s just a natural thing an adult would say to kids.

As I started thinking about this whole monkey comment situation, it made me realize that there are millions of things we say every day that could be considered politically incorrect, but only if taken in the wrong context. Are we safe to say these things….

Monkey bars
White-tailed deer
Snow White
Crackerjack
Yellow cake
Yellow-fin tuna
Chinese food
Black crappie
Black licorice
Blackened anything
Indian corn
Red beans and rice
Red wine
White wine
Polish sausage
German Potato salad
Vegetable tray
Blind Robins
Spanish rice

I think you get my point, and I’m sure you could easily add to this list.

Personally, I’m sick and tired of all the “politically correct” pressure that American society is putting on us. Will we soon be so afraid of what to not say that we won’t even talk to one another? C’mon Americans…lighten up and quit being so sensitive!

Summer will be here soon, and that means its time for fresh, sweet corn. I think we’ll all be safe to stop at a roadside stand and buy a dozen ears of “bicolor sweet corn”. Well maybe not, as I’m sure someone could find something wrong with even that.

G’Night G’Town

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.  ~George Aiken

As I stand here, atop a mountain, I gaze into the vastness before me with not only excitement, but also a great sense of uncertainty. My hike of life has led me here. It has taken many years to climb this mountain, and I have experienced much of what life has to offer along the way.

When I began my hike as an infant, the trails were well marked and very worn. These trails led me through beautiful pastures, each filled with new creations and objects of beauty that helped shape my appreciation for life itself. There were always helping hands there for me in the event I crawled off the trail, and higher powers assured me that I would not get lost.

As I then grew into childhood, the hike became more challenging. Along the way, I learned the “rules” that one must follow to gain the respect of elders. If others did not teach these to me, there were plenty of signs to help guide me down the proper trails. The same helping hands remained, but they were not as grasping and controlling as they had earlier been, which allowed me freedom to venture down the trail on my own. This newly granted freedom began to give me a sense of self and independence that would become crucial to me in my later years.

Then as I came into my teenage years, a sense of wonder and rebellion came about me. Before long, areas off the well-marked trails became much more appealing to me. And while the areas off of the trail were steeper and usually rougher to traverse, my youth brought with it an undying amount of vigor and energy. As I explored these areas off the trail, seeking new adventures and mysteries, those same helping hands remained. But now, the hands knew to let me run, as it was important that I learn how to get along and find my way back to the trail on my own. This not only helped me gain confidence in myself, but also allowed me to begin to shape the person I would grow up to be in my adult years.

Once into adulthood, I arrived at the base of the mountain. Suddenly the trail ended, and there were no signs to point me in the right direction. Only the experiences from my hike thus far told me to continue the journey, climbing higher, not sure of what I was seeking, but determined to find it nonetheless. Friends, lovers, heartaches, careers, mortgages, children and many other of life’s challenges began to make the load I was carrying heavier, but they also made me stronger along the way. As I did in my teenage years, I stayed away from the heavily beaten trails, as I’ve always found it more adventuresome and exciting to go where others had not. These have been the years that have brought me the most enjoyment along my hike, and although I took many wrong turns along the way, I have no regrets.

So here I stand, atop this mountain, a man unto myself, and I gaze into the daunting wilderness that lies before me. To the left I see gentle, downward slopes that lead to succulent green pastures. To the right, I see much of the same; only the pastures are a bit different, but just as appealing. Straight ahead, I see some larger, more majestic peaks than the one I currently stand on. A thick mist and fog covers them, churning a sense of curiosity and excitement within me.

Which trail should I choose as I move forward into the second half of my hike of life? Should I take one of the trails that look easy, safe and appealing? Or should I venture into the unknown ruggedness that lies straight before me, not knowing what I’ll find? My instincts tell me to go straight ahead, but will this path be too difficult for me? What dangers would I face in my selfish quest to satiate my inquisitive nature? Will I regret my decision once I’ve gone too far?

These are life’s decisions, and we all make them every day we are on our hike. We each choose which trails we’ll follow, fully understanding that no one trail is either right or wrong. We simply choose the trails that are most comfortable to us and bring us the most happiness. And while I know that many others at my point in life would choose the gently sloping trails leading to greener pastures, my heart is pulling me somewhere else.

I must go now, for there is a break in the fog and I see a towering peak ahead that draws me to it. I know I won’t be alone, for there are many others like me that will choose to seek the same adventures along their hike of life. For those of you that choose to take the gently sloping trail, we wish you the best. We’ll all meet up in the same pasture at the end, and we’ll all have some great stories to tell.

G’Night G’Town!

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.  ~John Muir

- “Pot games” are played all night, with tons of money being bet on who’ll bowl the best scores that night.
- 5^th frame is “beer frame” and the bowler with the worst score that frame buys a round of drinks, much to his or her chagrin.
- If everyone gets a strike in a single frame except for one team member, that team member is usually chastised verbally, and must pay some sort of penalty for letting the rest of the team down. This humiliating event is referred to as being “hung”.
- Usually, the best bowler on the team bowls in the last spot referred to as “anchor”. "Usually" is the key word here, as it's not guarnteed that on any given night he'll be the best bowler.
- There will always be a waitress that comes around and brings your team drinks. What other sport does that happen to the participants in!?
- Bowling 6 strikes in a row will usually win you a free drink on the house. Note that I’ve mastered the fine art of bowling only 5 strikes in a row.
- A bowler’s dedication to the game can usually be measured by how many bowling balls he or she brings to the lanes. Any halfway decent bowler has AT LEAST two bowling balls. One is for strike shots, and the other is for picking up corner pins. Anything more than two balls is simply bragging.

I guess when you look at that list, you could draw a conclusion that league bowling is all about drinking and gambling. But the real reason any of us bowl is for the camaraderie and competition. My long-stay league has always been at Pioneer Bowl in Richfield, where I’ve bowled on the Thursday Night Men’s league for the better part of the past twenty years. That may seem like a long time, but many of the teams and bowlers on the league have been in place the entire time. We have a huge cast of characters on our league with names like; Zock, Fish, Philly, Woody, Little Jimmy, Tombo, Zak, Oz, Big Money, Fubu, Ferris, Hippity Hoppity, and Hollywood. Our league also has a two-headed man-whore we refer to as FrankenKurt. Although I only see them one night a week, there are a ton of guys on my league that I would call good friends.

So, while the USBC has pulled out of our area, Wisconsin bowling centers will continue to be filled with bowlers, gamblers, and friends every night of the week. I wonder what they do for fun in Arlington, Texas?

G’Night G’Town!

One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball.  ~Don Carter

Brett Favre – Go ahead and hate me for saying it, but I’m glad he’s finally hanging it up. I’m a HUGE Favre fan, and I truly believe he was one of the greatest to ever play the game. But you know what, there comes a time to hang it up, and it’s that time. I’d hate to see him come back and have another dismal season like he had in 2006 to end his career. Brett is a class act, and I’m much happier to see him go out on top.

JCPenney’s – The new store opened on the Fall’s/Germantown border this past weekend. From what I hear, you couldn’t get near the place to park, and lines were 30 customers deep to buy stuff. Do people that live out in our neck of the woods just not get out enough, or what is the deal!? C’mon people, it’s just a department store. There are many more like it in Milwaukee. Some really cool ones too. Take a big risk and drive there sometime.

Weather Channel to sue Al Gore? – John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, wants to sue Al Gore to “finally put some light on the fraud of global warming”. Al Gore a fraud? C’mon, this is the guy that invented the Internet.

Avril Lavigne – Kohl’s has decided to sell the pop-singers line of teen clothing. I wonder if the masses will converge on Kohl’s when this happens as they did when JCPenney’s opened? My guess is “not”.

Daylight Savings, St. Patrick’s Day, Spring and Easter – Why are these all crammed into March this year? April is going to be a really boring month.

Dunkin’ Donuts – I wish someone would open one of these in Germantown.

U.S. Bowling Congress – If they move their headquarters out of Milwaukee, it will be a darn shame. Kudos to the Milwaukee 7 for at least getting them to delay their decision until they look closer at what Milwaukee has to offer. I mean really, we have beer and, well, um, ahhhhhhh…..a Fonzie statue!

101 Dalmatians? – No, actually it was 111 cats that were recently taken from a home in Cedarburg. You hear this story time and time again, but I’ll never truly understand what drives people to this extreme. I guess I shouldn’t complain anymore about my wife’s three cats running around our house.

G’Night G’Town!

I plan on living forever.  So far, so good.  ~Author Unknown

When I began blogging last year, I promised myself that I would stay away from discussing politics. There are plenty of other places on the web you can go and get political opinions, so why would you want mine? But with the Wisconsin primary now behind us, and a huge focus this election year on health care reform, I thought I would weigh in with my thoughts.

My thoughts are a simple form of deduction:

- America has Republican fatigue, so we will undoubtedly elect a Democrat into office.

- Every Democratic candidate wants to enact some form of health care reform.

- 40 million Americans don’t have health insurance, and 260 million Americans do.

- That means, that as one of the 260 million American’s who does have health insurance, I will be one of the ones that pays for this.

Well, I figure if I’m going to foot the bill, then I should have some say in how my money is going to be spent. Without getting into all the political hoo-rah-rah about the complexities and inequities of our health care system, I’d like my money to be spent on fixing a more practical health care problem. Have you ever noticed that every “walker” used by elderly or injured people has those raggedy, used tennis balls on the bottom of it’s legs? Well, that’s what I want my part of health care reform to look like. I mean c’mon, this is the 21^st century! I would think we could come up with something better than used tennis balls for the bottoms of walkers.

I can see the campaign slogan now – “Walkers without balls for all!”.

My name is Tom White, and I approve this message.

G’Night G’Town

My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass.  ~Leslie Grimutter

Last week, we had the exciting privilege of taking our 4-year-old daughter, Lyndsy, to her new school and getting her registered for kindergarten. She will be going to Plat Elementary School next fall, and we were given a tour of the school when we registered. Plat is an awesome “country” school, complete with a playground with woods nearby, hardwood floors inside and REAL chalkboards (the green ones).

As we were filling out Lyndsy’s registration paperwork, we were somewhat thrown by one of the questions that was asked. It read, “Please list your child’s strengths”. My wife and I looked at each other and sort of chuckled. I guess we could have listed things like “She’s colors in the lines pretty well”, or “She can rip a pretty mean fart” or “She usually eats all of her waffles”. I mean honestly, she is only 4 years old, and we’re not really sure what her strengths are yet.

We did end up putting down that she is very organized, and that she shows a lot of empathy to others. We also listed a couple other qualities we see as her “strengths”. It’s interesting that it took this school registration form for us to consider what our daughter’s strengths were at her young age. I have to admit that it sort of made me feel like a bad parent since I hadn’t considered that before. Oh well, I guess that is what parenting is all about.

And I sure hope what we perceive as our daughters strengths today stick with her as she goes through the rest of her life. My guess is that they will, because in her Dad’s eyes, she is the world’s most perfect daughter.

G’Night G’Town!

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.  ~Stacia Tauscher

Years ago, before my wife Steph and I had kids, we had a running joke with our friends Tim and Debbie. Tim and Debbie shared a mutual “dislike” for crying and screaming babies with us. When we were out-on-the-town, we’d joke amongst ourselves that “They are playing our song” whenever we heard a crying baby.

Well, years later, Tim and Debbie are now the proud parents of their two boys, Joey and Michael, and Steph and I have our little beauties, Buck and Lyndsy. While having kids of your own certainly puts screaming and crying kids into perspective, I’d be lying if I said the noise of a whining kid has gotten any easier for me. Well, I guess it has a little, but crying to me is as bad as hearing fingernails scratched on a chalkboard.

Which brings me to our son Buck…bless his over rambunctious little self. You see, Buck has been quite the whiner since the day he was born. Don’t get me wrong or anything, Steph and I love him to death, but he literally hasn’t stopped crying in his three years on this planet! He was very colicky as an infant, and is just plainly a “cry-baby” now as a toddler. We’ve tried all the tricks to break his habits of whining, but not many work for long, so we simply give him our love and accept him for who he is.

Okay, I’m probably being a little harsh on the boy, as he doesn’t cry all the time. However, the poor little fella' came down with the flu this past weekend, and hasn’t stopped crying or whining for 6 days straight. Steph and I are doing our best to give each other breaks from his persistent wailing, but honestly, it’s been a long week. Luckily, it appears he is at the tail end of it, and we’ll soon have our little bundle of joy back.

Oops, got to run now, I think I hear them playing our song!

G’Night G’Town!

The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.  ~John Vance Cheney

People should realize we’re jerks just like them. ~ Bono

G'Night G'Town

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.  ~Sholem Asch

On Christmas Day, I spent an hour or so outside sledding with my daughter Lyndsy. We did this in our own front yard, which has no real slope to speak of. But with the hardened snow and ice combo that’s formed over the past few weeks, it made for some rather exciting sledding for a 4-year-old. Well, that is until her sled ran smack-dab into a tree. Now keep in mind, she couldn’t have been going any faster than 2–3mph when this happened, but to her, it was quite the dramatic and tragic event. This got me to thinking about how we all perceived things when we were little kids. As children, things always seemed so much more grandiose to us than they truly were.

Growing up in Colgate, my childhood friends and I named a hill by us “Killer Hill”, for it was the steepest, longest, meanest sledding hill in the entire world. It was the type of hill you never went sledding at alone, for fear that you might not make it home to Mommy for a comforting cup of hot cocoa. Even when we’d go sledding there as a group, we’d be sure to tell everyone along our way where we were going, as if to brag about the adventure we were about to undertake. Then as I began growing into my teenage years, I started realizing that almost everyone I knew had been to “Killer Hill”. Of course, this didn’t make any sense to me since none of these people grew up near me? But then I figured it out that every neighborhood and/or city in the Midwest had it’s own version of “Killer Hill”. Looking back, it strikes me as funny how each of us as teenagers would boastfully proclaim that our “Killer Hill” was the biggest and baddest sledding hill in the entire world.

In subsequent years, I’ve passed by my “Killer Hill” while snowmobiling, and I was quite surprised how small it actually was. It was nothing like the mean, child-eating menace I remembered it being as a kid. In fact, it was just a small, gently slopping hill that unceremoniously fed itself into a cow pasture. I guess this helps me understand why my daughter caused such a ruckus when her sled bumped into that tree on our front lawn. I wonder if next year, as she goes through her first year of school, she’ll describe our front yard as “Killer Hill” to all of her classmates?

G’Night G’Town!

While we try to teach our children all about life,
our children teach us what life is all about.
~Angela Schwindt