Saturday, April 19, 2008

A Problem Solver

A Problem Solver. My grandfather, my father, myself and my son are all very good at solving problems. Just my son and I are left now in this 4+ generation of very good problem solvers. We are all (except my son) of the old school of rugged individualists of the kind that settled this country between 1800 and today. Since I am descended from American colonists that arrived from Europe in 1720, hundreds of my ancestors settled this country during the 1800s so that there are thousands and thousands of us now in the 20th and 21st century all over America and the world now.

The colonist byword was "prepare for the worst but hope for the best". This is what I was taught too. Always be ready for anything anytime. So preparedness both psychologically and physically is very important at all times both waking and sleeping.

I can remember on night about 1991 when I heard a terrible screaming in my house in Mt. Shasta. I jumped up running out of a dead sleep into the kitchen to find my wife with our semi feral tomcat's teeth sunk through my wife's hand. I opened the window that had come down on the cats tail and broken it when it jumped through the open window on a hot summer night and knocked loose the prop. The screaming cat and screaming wife separated and the cat ran out of the house again. I then quickly threw up in the kitchen sink from running out of a dead sleep and then quickly tended to my wife's hand. Luckily the cat hadn't broken any bones or cut tendons clear through but had only nicked several. So with a few stitches she was eventually okay. The cat returned in about 3 days very chagrined to have wounded his mealticket. But she forgave our tomcat that time. That's the true pioneer way, even in your sleep you always have to be ready.

My biggest fault in life appears to be that I tend not to be a plodder. I'm instead a great problem solver in the moment and always an idea man. What this means in real time is that someone like me tends to be rich or poor in any given moment. Presently, I've been pretty well okay the last about 14 or 15 years and hopefully well positioned because of having parents and grandparents who lived(survived) the great depression. The story of my grandfather burying 25,000 dollars in the front yard of his house really gives me the willies today because of how precarious the banking situation is today worldwide. In the past banks worldwide weren't so interdependant until globalization interlocked almost all banking systems worldwide like today. So if one big system like the US goes down they all might. This is not good.

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