Has It Really Been That Long?

Posted by wcrowlandksr on October 19, 2017
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This evening, I had a late night bit of work to do and while waiting, I found myself looking at the map of the world.  I’ve been to a few places as you may know by reading the blog here but I haven’t written much lately.  Sometimes I think the writing was a phase but then here I am again.  It’s been 6 years since took the first steps towards going to the middle east and doing something I never thought I would do.  Now, all that time has passed and I can look back and see how it was a good thing to get out there and do something that has helped me see the world in a different light.

Since the early days of getting out of debt, I’ve stayed out.  Life is just better without having bills hanging overhead.  The business of living has a cost that’s kind of built in but that is part of the human condition.  There’s generally no free lunch and if you aren’t paying for it, someone else is.  Remember that the next time you think that someone owes you something that you did not work for.  If it’s free to you, it’s a gift.

This last spring and summer were fantastic.  It made up for the very wet winter we had and if this evening’s wet weather is any indicator, we are in for another great summer next year.  I have firewood for the winter, the pantry has food in it and I think we are ready to better weather this years winter…debt free and planning for the future.

 

Small Footprints With Great Big Accomplishments

Posted by wcrowlandksr on March 29, 2017
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It’s been a while….again.  Life has a way of whisking you away from what you want to do sometimes and I’ve been away living and learning new things.  I have been thinking about how much cold rain I am so very tired of having dropped on my head these recent days when so much of the rest of the country is beginning to enjoy the newness of spring.  It’s been feeling like I live in a rain-soaked moss-pit and frankly I’m tired of it.  It’s been depressing!

In the last few years I have had a chance to really look around me and see just how much stuff I have accumulated those times when I might be able to use it or wear it again or build something out of it.  The “it” is stuff.  Clothing, shoes, gadgets, raw materials like metal and wood and so on.  I have collected such items for one reason or another but it’s never been about simply having the thing but it has been about what I could do with it.  At one time I was trying to outfit my shop to be able to share it with family but there just hasn’t been any interest and I’ve come to the conclusion that aside from the one time I did help my father fix a wheel bearing in a pinch, there’s not been any interest it at all.  Sadly I somehow left the impression that I was about owning the things rather than being able to share the things with those I cared about.  It was supposed to be about the experience and not the stuff…I failed in my plan to be able to share what I was doing because I guess it came off as showing off when it was really about wanting to share experiences of doing things together and helping family with little things like oil changes and so on.  Now I just do that stuff when I need to and it’s not the same anymore.

I’m beginning to look at doing things outside of the home more and enjoying the experiences of seeing more of the world.  I’m finding that the “things” are while still useful, also weight when it comes to being more mobile.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s always a need for the person who has the ability to build or fix things but life is less about that these days and more about being light and compact.  Small footprints with great big accomplishments seems to be the goal.  We’ve moved from creating much of anything unless it’s somehow connected to a computer somewhere and typically the creation is about how to capture or present information in another exciting way with new angles and electronic connections to other information for deeper reference or research.  We can ask our talking internet household spy infotainment gadget what the weather is going to be for the day and what traffic looks like on our way to the office and for fun, we can ask that same device to make the sounds of a kitten or tell us where the daily earthquakes have happened.   More to come…soon.

Automation displaces workers

Posted by wcrowlandksr on November 2, 2016
Posted in: General Ramblings. Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I have had a drive to write.  Today, that’s a little different.  This comes as a result of looking at some things that I just cannot ignore anymore.

This has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with laziness and greed.  We invent things and automate processes to do the remedial tasks that we really don’t want to do or we implement them to save time and money.  There will come a point where the automation and machines will be able to do most of the “work” that we humans are currently doing.  When that happens I question how we will be able to earn a living if the jobs have been taken over by machines and automatic processes.

There was a time when you called a business and the company you were calling had employed someone to take your call.  That person had the ability to listen to your reason for calling and help you get in touch with someone who could assist you.  These days, you are repeatedly pushed away from speaking to someone and often the message you receive  while you are attempting to get help tries to steer you to a company web site that is often poorly designed to take your information and leave you with the hope that maybe you will be contacted by a real live person who might  be able to help you.

This has become that standard here in America and it’s always shocking to place a call and actually get a real live person to answer your call without an electronic fence that asks you to navigate your way through a dozen options in order to ultimately end up leaving a message in a black hole somewhere…never to be returned.

There are many people who have been displaced by such systems and there will be many more who will be as the trend continues.  Let’s look at trucking for example.  There are many trucks on the road at any given time with one or two employed drivers in the cab.  They are trained to be truck drivers and have the skills required to do the job.

Enter the self driving truck for example.  For now there’s a person in the truck that babysits the system but eventually as that technology improves, there won’t be a need for the babysitter in the cab and another group of workers jobs will be lost to automation and robotic controls.

How about the Amazon Echo?  It’s got some really cool voice recognition technology but what if that technology is used to take your order at a fast food joint?  One more displaced set of workers?  I’m not suggesting that we stop advancing the development of technologies but I would be more concerned about the rate we are displacing workers with no training outside of the area they are no longer needed.  It’s like we are developing tools and replacing people at a rate that is somewhat dangerous and these are lower level jobs.  The IT industry is doing similar things.  They want one person who can deploy hundreds of servers in minutes and they require less workers to do it.  There’s self healing code and self repairing systems already in place.

At some point if we displace enough workers and there’s little left for humans to do, who will be able to afford the services offered by these companies who have automated their workers out of a job?  At what point do the people stop purchasing goods and services because they simply cannot afford them anymore?  At what point do we stop and look around and discover that we are becoming less capable of doing much of anything other than babysitting a machine that will eventually replace us?

 

So I’m sitting at a nice restaraunt…

Posted by wcrowlandksr on August 25, 2016
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Well…Nice is a relevant term.  It’s decent.  I blasted through a beer and wings for lunch.  Awaiting a second beer and a bit of desert.  As I sit and listen to the music, I am reminded of the outside world I have been disconnected from lately.  It’s not hyper active in the place but reasonable.

I had some time to recall the life I lived in Kuwait and that this place exists there as well.  Today is a scorcher and the memories came back for a while.  It was pleasant and not overwhelming but I also found myself missing those times.  A big part of that comes from being out of work currently. It’s normal to be reflective when life slows you down for a while.   

I’m ready to go back to work bit I just can’t seem to hurry the process.   

The Honeymoon

Posted by wcrowlandksr on July 8, 2016
Posted in: General Ramblings, Walk Of Life. Leave a comment

I’m laying in a bed next to my new wife in a hut over the water in Bora Bora as I write this entry.  It’s beautiful here.  She is resting peacefully.  We wanted to go someplace that looked like a screen saver but someplace where we could truly relax.  We found that here in Bora Bora.  It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in the world.  The pace of life is what you make of it and the warm weather helps you almost forget that you need to eat…ever.  When you do have dinner, it’s minimal and yet truly delicious, at least here on the island resort.  Warm weather definatley slows your interest in food.  How I long for more summer weather back home and the continuation of such varieties in tastes of an excellent meal.

Today we went on an marine reef adventure trip.  We snorkeled with the sea-life and it was at some points, like swimming in an aquarium.  We feed the fish right out of our hands and I have some great videos and pictures to share soon.  My new bride was having trouble in the water and wanted to wait out the first stop in the boat but the guide was very good at convincing her to stay in the water.  She got to see a real live manta ray for the first time ever!  Even though I missed it, I was more happy for her to get to see it than anything.  She lit up like an excited kid when she saw it.  That made me happy.  I watched five eagle rays in a school swimming around and video captured them.  That was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  Later we swam near “the drop-off” in a reef full of some amazingly colored fish, clams and corals.  If you’ve ever seen Finding Nemo, it was a lot like the reef scenes in that movie.

There’s so many things I want to remember of this trip and share most but not all of it with you, it is after all, a honeymoon vacation.

I may post more when my Internet connection is better as this is being written from a hut over the water in the south Pacific.

 

 

Pay off those debts, free yourself and live well and within your means

Posted by wcrowlandksr on May 31, 2016
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After almost 6 years, this month I will only have a house payment!  No car payments, no credit card payments, no monthly installments.  Zip, Nadda, Zero, Zilch!  It’s awesome!  The car payment was the last non-mortgage bill I have been working on for way too long but it is finished.  I would never have bought the car if I had known what I have learned over the last 6 years but it’s a solid reliable car.  I just didn’t NEED it. I really WANTED it.  That’s the problem we all to often have.  We WANT something but really can’t afford it with a single payment so we sign up to be a slave to the lender for such things.  No more for me ever again please and thank you.
I have posted many entries here and have shared my thoughts on being debt free as well as a few other things.  I have also taken a few hits for it.  I guess I just have a strong conviction to tell the readers here that it’s truly possible to ditch debt and live better.  If I didn’t say anything about it, believed I knew the truth and never shared it, what kind of conviction is that really?  Do we think “it means so much to me and I am so convinced that I will not tell anyone about it”?  Hardly, I truly want to share the fact that by following some basic principles, you can be free of debt and it will help you live with less stress and you can enjoy what life has to offer just a little bit easier. 
The principles are simple, biblical and factual.  Don’t be a slave to any lender because they will own you in some fashion.  Don’t think that having more crap in your life is going to make you happy.  It’s just stuff and while it may be useful and fun for a while, it’s not going to bring joy.

Pay off those debts, free yourself and live well and within your means.   
                   

Changes

Posted by wcrowlandksr on March 31, 2016
Posted in: General Ramblings, Perspectives, Walk Of Life. Leave a comment

It’s been a while.   I’ve been wrapped up in a cocoon of a job that I loved.   Almost 2 years in fact.  I knew things were not going swimmingly well at levels beyond my paygrade but I decided to keep going to work until they told me to stop.  Well, that day came and they told me to stop.  I kind of saw it coming but after all my talk and work of getting out of debt, it wasn’t as painful as it could have been.  I tried to share some of those learned experiences with my colleagues and I can only hope it did not fall on deaf ears.
That’s where the lesson is friends.  You can’t be prepared for every single thing that will happen unexpectedly in your life but you can be ready at a more generalized level to better weather out the storms that WILL eventually come your way.
It’s not fun to find yourself out of work but it’s worse when the bills pile up on your doorstep at the same time. 
Be ready when these hard times come.  Know that sometimes things are not falling apart but rather into place.
If you are a colleague who has just experienced something like this recently, know that I wish you the best possible outcome.
If you are a casual reader of the blog, let this be a lesson to you.  Life has the ability to throw a wicked curve ball your way.  Be ready when it comes.

No Debt and Gardening

Posted by wcrowlandksr on March 1, 2016
Posted in: General Ramblings, Plant life, The Yard. Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I wrote about having no debt.  I have paid everything off with the exception of a lingering vehicle payment and a house payment.  The vehicleis almost done…a couple months and then the house debt is next.  After that, it’s all about saving.  I may be redundant in writing about such things but I digress.  The one thing I should have never bought was a new vehicle.  It’s been the last of the debt albatross I have been working on ridding myself of for a long time.  It wasn’t worth the cost and I’d not do it again.  I will say though, when I do drive it, the grin that returns has made it much less painful…still don’t do it if you are deciding for yourself on taking on a car payment.  It’s not worth the cost.  If you must purchase a vehicle, save, negotiate a far better deal and pay cash.  You will save tons of money.  Trust me.

It’s been almost four years since I started on this journey and it seems like yesterday.  I still remember the days of living  in the middle east and working some crazy hours to get this debt paid off.  The journey has been hard but well worth the return.  I don’t cringe when checking the mailbox these days because of yet another bill and the feeling of not being a slave to the lenders has been remarkable.  I don’t really care about a credit score since it’s really just a measure of how good you are at being in debt anyway.  I have been blessed greatly and tasked with being a good steward of the money I have been entrusted with.
Another thought that comes to mind is excess material goods that only weigh you down when they serve no purpose but to consume your time and resources with zero reward.  It’s one thing to stash things that can be given away when you find the need but another to not let go of something because it cost you so much to buy or is rare or you always wanted one.  Trust me on this, I have bought and built shelves and stored crap in my life for years that I ultimately threw away because I never did need whatever it was I was hanging onto.  I still struggle with this but the quest for clearing out such stuff continues with success, it’s just slow.  It’s not a hoarders mentality but more of a creative mindset that says I can do this with that so I will save it for when I can get around to doing this with that.  The reality is I can throw this IN that…where this=”junk” and that”=dumpster”.  Ha Ha.
Oddly enough, I used to watch my father plant trees and play with growing plants as a hobby.  I guess he figured something out about such things.  I am now trying my hand in such ventures.
I have found that to plant something that grows long after we are gone from this earth has some satisfying qualities and I think I will figure out what that is eventually.  I am beginning to plant things around my house and see what comes of it.  The house already had a start and now it’s time to recover it after years of neglect.  I think that gardening a little bit will be a good hobby to look into.

2016 Goals and Milestones

Posted by wcrowlandksr on January 4, 2016
Posted in: Freedom, General Ramblings. Leave a comment
The new year calendar date of January 1st.  It’s a date on a calendar that marks the start of the next year and helps us keep track of cyclic events.. Birthdays, Holidays, Special occasions and sometimes smoke alarm battery change out dates.
It marks the beginning of a new calendar year and comes only once every 12 months or 52 weeks or 365 days depending on your preference of time tracking.  We often use this date as a marker of starting something new or stopping something old or the time when we make adjustments to our way of living.  I don’t make new years resolutions because they are easy to make and are easier to forget after the first or second time I fail trying to live up to the new years resolution(s) I set out to accomplish.
I find that it’s more productive to make small adjustments over the course of the entire year and reflect from time to time along the way to see just how far I have come.  The end of the year is a time when I look back and consider the whole year and what has changed.  For me, making new year’s resolutions is a way to feel good about something that I’m going to change but I’d rather enjoy the holiday season and once the afterglow wears off, it’s then that i find myself thinking about what I want to change or accomplish if even for just a short while.
I find it better to set small quantifiable goals that have measurable results.  If possible, I like to determine points along the way that are good indicators that I am making progress towards the intended goal.  Saying I’m going to loose a bunch of weight this next year doesn’t really have any way to be measured,  A bunch of weight could be 10 pounds or it could be 100.  This is the first place that one needs to decide just how much measurable weight they intend to shed.  There needs to be points along the way to show if progress is being made towards to goal.  This is the way to reach a goal and it doesn’t matter if you set it now or 4 months from now.  It’s an adjustment that you make along life’s journey.
If you get the chance to think about this and decide you want to set a reasonably attainable goal, think of something that you know you really can do and map out what that looks like along the way as well as the end result.  Take measurements, adjust your course to get there and if you have a setback, don’t wait until a year has passed before trying again.  It’s about adjustments as much as it is about the goal to get there.

Hanging Memories onto Objects

Posted by wcrowlandksr on December 30, 2015
Posted in: Living Your Best Life. Leave a comment

I am sentimental.  Family says I’m too much so.  I’m not sure I agree but I do think it can be easy to be capable of attaching too much sentimental memories to objects that take you back in time and allow you to relive the memory or event.  For me it’s typically a sweet memory or time that something good happened in my life and some random object came into my life as a result of the event.  Some people take pictures, some collect objects and some do both.  For example, I have party beads from a friend and I haven’t spoken to her in at least a year and I even question if they really are my friend anymore anyway.  BUT, handling those beads when I stumble across them in my collection of “memories” reminds me of when we were friends and spent time hanging out together.  It triggers happy thoughts if even for just a split second.  I have another couple of party bead sets from Las Vegas that I picked up when I went there for an event and while another friend didn’t have a direct part in my acquiring those goofy beads, she did help me  arrange my tickets to get there and back and those beads trigger happy thoughts of when we used to be friends before we fell out of contact.  It’s not about the objects but rather, it’s the memories.  It’s having an ability to connect objects to memories that were important at some point in my life.  The beads are just an example of of objects that have had important meanings attached to them.  The idea of throwing away the object is easy, it’s the idea that once that object is gone, the trigger for the good memories goes with it if I don’t have it to remind me anymore.  With the connections that are created between object and the good memory, it becomes painful to throw away what essentially is a good memory for no other reason than it’s taking up space.  Throwing away some meaningless object is like throwing away a good memory when it’s got one attached to it.  This is probably not as uncommon as one might think.   How to let go?…that’s the big question.