He Can Be Taught

Many of us were taught while growing up that if you're carrying a sharp object and you drop it, let it fall. It's great practical advice, you know.

Among the accessories available (I adore alliteration) for the drain snakes I sell are retrieving tools. They are sharp and typically pointed objects. They have to be, so that they may puncture and burrow into a blockage in a drain and retrieve it. 

A year or so back I was carrying not one but two of them into a customer's office. And I dropped both. And I tried to catch them. 

It was like a juggling act which had gone off the rails. There I was trying to corral those two retrievers, each bouncing off my hands one to the other, and each time digging a barb into my palms. "Oh, ah, oh, ow," I repeated many times over trying desperately to grab them. Of course, they ended up hitting the floor anyway.

Why I had two handkerchiefs I don't know (usually only having one) but it was fortunate that day. I had to wrap them around my hands driving home, hoping the bleeding would stop by the time I got there. Tiny puncture wounds take awhile to seal.

The moral of the story, in case you - as I - didn't get the lesson originally: if you drop a sharp object, let it fall.

Grandpa Joe's Money Advice

I've said before that me Grandpa Joe, for whatever faults he had, did have some good ideas. One was when he told me Pops, as Pops had then just paid off his mortgage, that he he ought to put the amount he had been paying on his mortgage away every month afterwards. He had already been budgeting it, so without the monthly bill he should use it to create savings. "I always regretted that I didn't take his advice," me Pops lamented more than once.

I'm trying in my own little way to take Joe's advice to heart. I cancelled my second phone line about a year and a half ago, but the next month after began putting the 'cell phone' money back. It was, just like Joe reflected, a thing I was in the habit of doing it anyway. It was only a matter of, so to speak, paying myself instead of the phone people.

I have a little money in the sock now that is steadily accumulating. If I can stay disciplined about it, it'll be a tidy sum in the next few years.

Grandpa did have his moments, to be sure.