Three guides I’ve sometimes tried to live by:
1. Think ahead — be ahead.
2. You’ll never have if you don’t save.
3. If it’s inevitable, do it now — whether it’s taking out the trash or going into bankruptcy.
Proof of Number 2, in my case. For a while the Navy withheld half my pay.
When I got the balance it was enough to start buying a house. Later, we sold the house to buy a weekly newspaper, which led to our buying three more papers and retirement..
Of course, you can’t depend on the Navy or government to withhold then give back.
As to Number 3, it took maybe 20 years of marriage before I realized most of what Hazel was asking me to do could be done in minutes.
– – – 0 – – –
I found a misplaced note to myself recently complaining about seeing a classroom teacher in blue jeans. That just ain’t right!
About that same time I took note at a restaurant that I was the only one not wearing blue jeans.
– – – 0 – – –
One of my former editors in Oxford moved to Alaska some decades ago. Linda Weld started a newspaper there, then yielded to doing 350,000 traveler’s guides a year.
She called to tell me she’s writing a book about the 1898 gold rush in Alaska. She read enough of it to me to make me anxious to read it.
One of teasers was of the thousands of rushers who came to Copper River Canyon, a huge, practically uninhabited area north of Valdez. The canyon was formed by a glacier, that when melted, left sand.
There is no gold in sand, but these greedy gold seekers didn’t know that. They also didn’t know there were no horses or roads.
And, Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward listed their need for flour, bacon, saccarine and more, so much they couldn’t possibly carry it. Many, many died of scurvy, etc.
– – – 0 – – –
? Political observation: It’s amazing what liars can hope to make us believe.
? My grilled steak tasted bad recently. I concluded my grill is too close to the garage, and I mistook the WD40 for the Lawrys.
? Remember when we’d put the postage stamp on the envelope, meaning, ‘I love you!?
? Every day millions of people buy lottery tickets hoping to become some of the one percent who pay 90 percent of the taxes.
– – – 0 – – –
Now for the rules (5) that I promised in the headline:
1. Money cannot buy happiness, but it’s more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes than on a bicycle
2. Forgive your enemies, but remember the buggers? names.
3. Help someone when they are in trouble, and they will remember you when they’re in trouble again.
4. Many people are alive only because it is illegal to shoot them.
5. Alcohol does not solve any problems, but then again, neither does milk.