James Woosley’s Blog

Last Monday night I had the honor of being the guest auctioneer at a meeting for Heather’s weight-loss group. She’s the president this year, so who could turn her down?

It was a lot of fun. I didn’t do the whole bada-bada-bada auctioneer thing, but kept it lively and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Though it would have been quite different had there been real money on the line! Everyone had earned Monopoly money all year for losing weight and other good deeds.

But just because the money was fake doesn’t mean they didn’t duke it out over a few items! Some were upping the bids on purpose, just to spend the other’s money.

Sadly, there will soon come a day when silly auctions with Monopoly money will be as foreign as 8-tracks and LPs. Seems Parker Brothers signed a deal with Visa, and the game will no longer have cash but debit cards and card reader. Nothing wrong with debit cards (unlike the evils of credit cards). But with Visa branding, kids playing Monopoly will grow up thinking “Live Can’t Exist Without Visa”.

I often played the banker and it was a great exercise in basic math. Think of all the teenagers working fast food in the next ten years who won’t be able to make change? Er, never mind…it’s already like that.

Then there’s the fun alternative games you can play with the cash. Anyone pay fees and fines into the middle of the board and use the Free Parking space as the lottery? That’s one of my favorite parts of the game, and soon it’ll be history.

I guess I’m getting to be a bit of a curmudgeon (even at 32).

I’ve been way too busy lately, and thus fallen behind on my promise of 40 posts by Christmas. I’m not giving up yet though! I’m starting to write when I’m offline and will post them later.

Just don’t say that too loud in the airport.

It was inevitable. No amount of reasoning would hold her back. All my logic and emotion didn’t matter. When Heather’s on a mission, she gets what she wants.

On Saturday, after visiting several locations, she picked Jack. Jack is a scruffy little mutt of a puppy, part German Sheppard and part everything else.

He’s small. He’s cute. But he still whines at night and goes on the floor.

Heather had to walk him outside in the rain the other night.

Chaos continues in the animal kingdom known as our home.

So why is he named Jack and what is his full name?

Why? The previous week she had found a Black Lab/Golden Retriever mix puppy (for a visual think Black Retriever). That weekend she asked me what I was going to get her for Christmas. Without thinking, I said coal. She had already been thinking of naming the dog Coal, so she saw it as a sign!

Thinking of continuing the Christmas season theme, I suggested Jack Frost. Our daughter Anna turned it into Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp’s character from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

I’m more in tune with Jack Bauer from Fox’s 24 (returning January 14th!).

I used to spend a few weeks every summer when I was a teenager with my grandparents in Missouri. My grandmother and I were always close, and though she graduated high school the same year as my mother (she dropped out the first time around), she and I shared a love for books and learning.

We often listened to Rush Limbaugh and discussed politics, economics and other topics that most find boring. One year she found a photocopy of a small pamphlet she’d gotten from a credit union decades before. It took years for me to discover its origins (thanks Google!), but now I know and I’m sharing it with you.

Read it. Chew on it. Digest it. It may just change the way you see your job, your money, your work, your Social Security payments…

1) Nothing in our material world can come from nowhere or go nowhere, nor can it be free; everything in our economic life has a source, a destination and a cost that must be paid.

2) Government is never a source of goods. Everything produced is produced by the people, and everything that government gives to the people, it must first take from the people.

3) The only valuable money that government has to spend is the money taxed or borrowed out of the people’s earnings. When government decides to spend more than it has thus received, that extra unearned money is created out of thin air, through the banks, and, when spent, takes on value only by reducing the value of all money, savings and insurance.

4) In our modern exchange economy, all payroll and employment come from customers, and the only worth-while job security is customer security; if there are no customers, there can be no payroll and no jobs.

5) Customer security can be achieved by the worker only when he cooperates with management in doing the things that win and hold customers. Job security, therefore, is a partnership problem that can be solved only in a spirit of understanding and cooperation.

6) Because wages are the principal cost of everything, widespread wage increases, without corresponding increases in production, simply increase the cost of every-body’s living.

7) The greatest good for the greatest number means, in its material sense, the greatest goods for the greatest number which, in turn, means the greatest productivity per worker.

8) All productivity is based on three factors: 1) natural resources, whose form, place and condition are changed by the expenditure of 2) human energy (both muscular and mental), with the aid of 3) tools.

9) Tools are the only one of these three factors that man can increase without limit, and tools come into being in a free society only when there is a reward for the temporary self-denial that people must practice in order to channel part of their earnings away from purchases that produce immediate comfort and pleasure, and into new tools of production. Proper payment for the use of tools is essential to their creation.

10) The productivity of the tools–that is, the efficiency of the human energy applied in connection with their use–has always been highest in a competitive society in which the economic decisions are made by millions of progress-seeking individuals, rather than a state-planned society in which those decisions are made by a handful of all-powerful people, regardless of how well-meaning, unselfish, sincere and intelligent those people may be.

Note: Click here for a related ad placed in MIT’s newspaper, The Tech in 1970.

I also passed a copy of it to Dave Ramsey when I first met him at a live event in Atlanta in Nov 2005, but if he read it and had an opinion on it, I’ll never know. (He didn’t mention it on the air.)

Warning: Sad content below:

I don’t even really know what to write, so I’ll just tell the story and be done with it.

Around 3:30 am this morning our Golden Retriever George was barking outside, so my wife Heather got up to let him and Max, our Pug, in for the night. A few minutes later she came back to the bedroom and told me that something was wrong with Max.

He didn’t come in with George. At first she thought he had gotten outside the fence, but then she found him. He was curled up and not moving, and his breathing was shallow.

We brought him in and laid him on a blanket on the couch. Then we noticed the blood around his rear end. Something very bad had happened.

She rushed him to an emergency vet, but the odds of helping him were slim. She made the decision to put him to sleep.

We still don’t know exactly what happened. The vet initially thought it was some kind of anemia or rat poison, but we just don’t know. They are sending some tissue and blood samples to be analyzed. George is fine so far, but a bit lonely now.

I wasn’t very close with Max. He was just three years old, and I’ve been on the road since we got him. We never really bonded. But Heather did. He was her little dog. He helped ease some of the pain when we lost a child due to a tubal pregnancy in 2002.

Max had a sweet personality, and he was George’s best friend. He was the little dog always dancing around his feet and nipping at his tail.

Max will be missed.

My wife and I adopted our son Ian last year from Taiwan. It’s been quite an adventure, and you can review the entire story here. Ian is now two and a half, but still not talking much (though he can scream and screech with the best of them).

We initially blamed the lack of words on the change in languages (we got him when he was ten months old). But as time went on, we suspected the problem was more complex. It didn’t seem to be learning disability as he is very clever and bright. I thought about autism for a bit, but that was quickly ruled out. It turns out he just can’t hear very well (which also explains the decibel levels he reaches in anger).

After many tests and doctors (the first of whom said the loss was severe), we now know for sure that he has a mild-to-moderate hearing loss in both ears. And on Wednesday he received his hearing aids.

He did great the first day, but since then he doesn’t want to wear them for very long. It’ll be quite an adjustment, but his doctor assures us that once he realizes that he can hear better with them, he’ll want to wear them.

His near future holds speech therapy and when he turns three, a special preschool to help him catchup developmentally. But he’ll be fine and once he does get caught-up, I think he’ll quickly get ahead. Of course, I’m a biased dad!

So what caused this hearing loss? We jokingly say he caused it himself by being so loud (it really is hard to believe!). But the likely cause is either genetics or the severe fever he had when he was a month old in Taiwan. It could be a combination, but we don’t really know.

The good news is that we’re able to help him where his birth family may not have been able to. But it’s not cheap. Almost no medical insurance covers hearing aids, and ours doesn’t cover the testing. The original doctors recommended aids costing $4-5000+ dollars. The new doctors (who specialize in children), were able to cut that in half.

And for all those Dave Ramsey/FPU types out there, no we didn’t have to put it on a credit card! I was afraid that was my only option for a while, but between stopping the debt snowball and the price cut, we were able to make it. Prayer really works! And as an extra blessing, the day before the appointment we got a check in the mail from our bank saying we had overpaid our escrow and were getting a $300 refund.

We messed up in September and bought a van we shouldn’t have (because we borrowed money). I regret that now, and have vowed it would the last time I borrow money (except for a modest mortgage if we ever move). Taking care of my family may be the only other exception. But God found a way for us not to have to do that this time. I’m hopeful that we’ll get out of debt and build up our savings enough that I never break that vow.

If all goes well in 2007 we’ll be debt free! And with the hearing aids and help, big sister Anna will have some competition when it comes to non-stop talking!