Kangaroos are Slow

Most people who know us know that we love animals more than people, especially when the animals are snugly.  It is no surprise then that we chose to participate in the Zoo Run Run, a 5k put on by the Nashville Zoo.

Here is Lia and myself posing with Twigga the Giraffe.  You can tell it is before the race, because I am still standing.

We all know that Lia secretly aspires to become a donkey one day, but since a donkey was not available to play with, Lia decided to become friends with a miniature horse instead.  Also, look carefully at this picture and see how many zebra print items of clothing you can find. It is only a tad bit disturbing.

The Champ is here!  Champ is the mascot for Monroe Carrell Jr. Childrens Hospital at Vanderbilt.  Go Dores!

The run was exceptionally fun, especially considering that running is really just socially acceptable torture.  They had free food, juice and beer after the race and we got a ton of sweet swag such as band aids, small towels and t-shirts.  The actual race went right through the middle of the zoo, so we got to hop next to kangaroos, wave back at elephants, growl at tigers and the adults even got to peek behind the bamboo at the breeding area for giant ant eaters (just kidding.. they wouldn't let me.)

This was an exciting day for me for a couple reasons.  The first is that I've never run an organized race before.  For most of my life I haven't felt the need to work really hard to end up where I started. Now that Lia has suddenly become a super hardcore runner, I've felt the need to show my acceptance of her condition by getting my toes wet with an easy race.  I believe my husbandly obligations have been met in full, so I have permanently returned to the couch.

The second and probably more significant reason that Saturday was such a big day for me is because with the completion of that 5k, I accomplished my final short term goal.  I set a ton of goals for myself to measure my progress towards being awesome, and running a 5k in 30 minutes was my last remaining item before I rolled on to stage 2 of Plan Perfect.

In the interest of full disclosure, I technically ran it in 31:14, but that doesn't account for the rotation of the earth and the fact that we had to run by super awesome animal exhibits, which was actually really distracting.  I kid you not, Lia would point and yell whenever we ran by something cool.  The adults were annoyed by her antics, but the children and myself appreciated the heads up.  I would have run right by the lynx if it wasn't for her yelling and pointing... and if I missed the lynx, why even go?

So I am going to go ahead and count this run as a win.. so I've run a 5k in a moderately competitive time for a non-runner, I've created my own company and brought it to profitability, and I've gotten a good score on the GMAT (standardized test for business school.)  Now I am on to my next three goals, which are getting a Masters in Business Administration, buying a house (for us, not another investment property), and finally being skinny enough to look like I belong next to my super hot wife.  It'll be a few years before any of those are possible.

Now I know at least half of you are asking... WHAT ABOUT THE DOODLE?  The answer there is that the doodle is not a goal, but rather a tool that the Lord has provided us to keep up our cheer and good spirits as we work hard to build a better life.  As long as we have Pippa, adversity does not stand a chance.

Now that I've got a rhythm going with these posts, I'm going to start reaching back in time to provide some updates on the past.  I think next week I'll cover Christmas with my family.  Here is a teaser pic to show you why you don't wanna miss it...

Misguided Efforts

So I can't seem to look anywhere in the news these days without seeing something relating to gun control.  I realize that the knee jerk reaction of Sandy Hook is to try to "do something," but it is beginning to look like that "something" might be a very misguided and dangerous elimination of our rights.  Most of you know where I stand on guns - I'm for 'em - but I also want to make sure you understand why.  I've decided to just lay out all of my thoughts that have led me to my conclusion.

Owning guns is a right guaranteed us by the Second Amendment, not to hunt, not to shoot recreationally, not to protect our families from bad people, but to give us as individuals the power and ability to withstand and fight against tyranny.  Americans who cannot imagine a revolution tend to be incredibly arrogant and poor students of history.  The human experience is defined by those in power becoming increasingly more corrupt until they are straight up mean and nasty to those under their authority, and then big wars break out which reset the game and you start again with a new soon-to-be-corrupted authority figure taking power.

That being said, in order to give consent and therefore power to this Republic, we must also be able to withdraw consent.  In order to maintain a credible threat of withdrawing consent, the American people must maintain the ability to stand up for themselves as an individual and a collective unit, and the right to bear arms is essential to maintaining that capability.

While I will admit that America is making a good run of things over the past 150 years (time since the last revolution,) it is foolish to think that "things are different now" than they have been for the past thousands of years.  Go talk to someone who lost their shirt investing in the tech bubble about how stupid a statement that is.  Things can fall apart quickly, and don't give up your rights easily today out of a perception that they are no longer necessary.  Men fought and died for those rights for a reason.. and probably a dang good one.

Something that I keep seeing people do is mixing mass shootings in with your everyday gangland gun crime.  In my mind, these are two completely different issues.  Gun crime on the streets cannot be further regulated, it can only be better enforced.  It is already illegal for felons to own guns, and it is also illegal to shoot other people because you don't like them.  That doesn't stop the crime, seeing as criminals are defined by their lack of adherence to the laws.  The proposed solution is to further regulate the law abiding citizens in hopes that one day... what?  There are so many guns out there, and guns have no discernible shelf life if maintained properly, so the idea of drying up the supply is just pretty foolish and would require legal residents to run out of guns literally centuries before the bad guys do.

Fixing gun crime through regulating law abiding citizens is a non-starter.  Look at Chicago for example.  Incredibly tough gun laws seem to be working out great for them.

As for mass killings, those are so much more complex and troubling than merely someone getting a hold of a gun.  These are mental health tragedies that happen all over the world and manifest themselves in so many different ways.  From mass stabbings in China to suicide bombers in the Middle East, when people want to hurt others, they find a way.  There needs to be much more of a focus on helping those who have those twisted thoughts and feelings, rather than simply trying to make guns, explosives and knives not exist anymore.

As terrible as these shootings have been, they are individual and isolated incidents within a country that is almost the size of Europe.  With a population of more than 300 million, there are always going to be exceptions.  It is tragic when there is an exception that harms a lot of innocent people, but you need to be very careful when you use a sample size of 4 or 5 people to develop policy that will impact hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens. 

I know that correcting our culture to be more inclusive and supportive of everyone is a much more difficult task, but really that is how you are going to stop angry, lonely people from ever reaching the point of lashing out.  Hopefully we don't use gun control as a pat on the back or check box so that we can feel like we've done a good and noble thing before we go back to living our self absorbed lives and pretending the real problems in this country don't exist.

The next thing I want to hit on is all the talk I hear about "Assault Weapons."  This is when people show how little they know about the guns they are trying to regulate.  So what makes an Assault Weapon more dangerous than a hunting weapon?  Is it the fact that it is black?  Is it because it has an adjustable stock?  Made of synthetic materials that are more corrosion resistant? Maybe it is the pistol grip?  Anyway, fully-automatic military style weapons are already illegal.  What is available on the civilian market is a basic semi-automatic rifle that is unlucky enough to look cool/menacing, depending on whether or not you like action movies  Those scary looking guns are identical in all functional measures to all of the non-scary looking ones.  They fire one good old fashion bullet each time you pull the trigger.

When we begin regulating purely based on cosmetics, a Pandora's box is opened legislatively that could very easily lead to a greater and greater restriction of our freedoms.  When something as arbitrary as adjustable stocks is used as a criteria to ban weapons, it opens the door for more and more types of weapons to be banned based on any little feature that is deemed too militaristic, such as having a barrel or a trigger... since military weapons all seem to have those too.

The single most terrifying part of the current bill is requiring legal gun owners to register their weapons, and I'll tell you why.  Before the government can take away all the guns, they need to find them.  No criminal is going to register their guns, so please tell me what purpose this will serve from a crime prevention perspective?  It may also seem far fetched now, but things change quickly.  Look at the world we lived in 60 years ago, and tell me that you could not imagine a gun confiscation within the next 60?  Forcing registration completely eliminates the purpose of the 2nd Amendment as described above.  It would also serve to make criminals out of a huge population of otherwise law abiding citizens, as I can promise you that entire states would refuse to comply with that kind of totalitarian ploy.

Strangely enough, I actually did not have any problem with Obama's executive actions.  I think some of them were actually great and will help, and I don't feel like my 2nd Amendment rights were violated at all.  Feinstein, however, is terrifying.  The law she is proposing would be the end of gun rights as we know them for law abiding citizens, and would not do a single thing to curb gun crime in this country.

I'll leave you with a few thoughts, with my hope being that we will think this through and not let emotion guide policy that impacts hundreds of millions of people and generations to come.

- Criminals will continue to not obey gun laws, regardless of how many more we add to the already very long list.  It would only penalize lawful citizens.
- "Assault Weapons" are no more lethal or dangerous than any other semi-automatic gun
- The 2nd Amendment is there to protect your ability to defend this great nation from any threats, regardless of where those threats originate.  Side-by-side shotguns aren't that great for this purpose.
- Murder rates are on a significant decline in the US, in both real and relative terms (except for Chi-town, of course)
- Read some international news outlets for a few days.  Guns are not the only way to carry out violent acts of terror or insanity.

Perspective

To start things off, blog posts will be shorter and less edited going forward.  When I try too hard to make every post epic, I end up never having time to write them and the product is no posts at all.

So that is how I want to start this post, with the fact that I am insanely busy and never have time to sit down and write out the many thoughts flying through my head.  I know that most people would rather be busy than bored, but when being busy only allows you to sleep 4 or 5 hours a night, being busy gets old very quickly.  Blame it on my southern tendencies or my desire to take on 1,000 new hobbies, but I have personally always viewed being busy as a bad thing.  Then today my pastor challenged me to try to see God more in my everyday life, and to make sure that I view trials from the correct perspective: with an attitude of gratitude.

My pastor, Pete, told a story today about how we all complain about traffic caused by road construction, but rarely are people grateful that we have such smooth and safe roads to travel on.  This review of perspective struck me, since I tend to be a very critical and not overly joyous person.  I always blame it on the fact that I'm a trained consultant, and that I spend 50 or 60 hours a week trying to find broken things that I can fix.  I've come to realize that is a cop out.

What I am struggling with now is the idea of being busy.  I hate it.  I want flexibility to do the things I want to do, I want to sleep in and spend hours playing with my dog in the middle of the day, but alas, my three jobs don't allow too much time.  Up until now I have viewed all of these jobs as burdens, but my goal now is to see these opportunities as the blessings that they are.  I have been blessed with not only a great full time job that allows me to provide for my family, but also the opportunity to build two businesses on the side with awesome people that allows me to pursue my passions in the long term.

Now anyone who has started a business knows what I am talking about.  It is a terrible endeavor for the rookie entrepreneur.  There is so much paperwork and so many regulations that normal people have never heard of, and you spend so much time doing non-value added work that it is easy to lose sight of the goal.  Changing my perspective to enjoy those tedious tasks seems like a fools errand, until I put it into a much broader perspective.  Not only am I blessed to have the intellectual and financial resources to start my own business, but I also am blessed to live in a country that allows me to own that business.  I am also blessed to live in an economy that, while seemingly eternally sluggish, still is able to reward hard work and good ideas.  There are millions of people who would do anything to be able to start a business doing what they love, and something tells me that they would not complain much about all the paper work, taxes and fees along the way.

My goal is to try to have a bit of a broader perspective on things before I complain in the future, so that I am able to see just how blessed I am.  And the fact that I feel like I am one of the most blessed people on earth is bound to make this that much more interesting of a task.  More to come on how awesome our life is, but feel free to read back in time to get an idea.