LLA - The Ladybug Liberation Army

I like to think that my youngest daughter is just following a calling. Which at this point is the rescue of wayward ladybugs.

The other day we were at a park tossing a ball back and forth. I frequently had to stop as she herded some newly spotted ladybug out of harms way. And at school, she checks the classroom's fancy bug house first thing in the morning to make sure there are no ladybugs stuck inside. She confided to me that along with another girl she has been freeing them outside. Oh my, she has co-conspirators...

occasionally a ladybug will find its way into our house. She will coax it onto her hand for relocation outside. Her determination is strong. Ladybugs are not bugs to be squashed. A ladybug death is a sad event. But earwig and other crawlers are "Ewwwww!". Yucky bugs are left to daddy - the spider and other creepy bug wrangler.

If years from now you hear that my daughter is the ringleader of a notorious activist group ... well, it all started here.

The Commute

Some years ago I worked with a gentleman who was dropped off at work every morning and picked up every evening by his wife. He never had a car at work. During a conversation, he mentioned that she spent the day at home and didn't work. I raised a question, "Don't you drive?". He grinned a big grin as he told me that his wife dropped him off and picked him up because together they could use the carpool lane (also called a commuter lane or ride sharing), which was much faster getting to and from work than driving alone...

I can fully understand his reasoning. He had found a way to get to work quicker and with less stress. By having his wife make the trip so that together they could use the carpool lane. Not exactly the intent of "carpooling". Which brings me to my point.

Carpool lanes don't work. Carpool lanes are a fraudulent deceit. Especially around here.

The purpose of carpool lanes is supposedly to encourage carpooling. This means having multiple people who would normally drive alone share their commutes in a single vehicle. This would reduce traffic congestion by reducing the number of drivers and vehicles on the road. In principle, everyone agrees this is a good idea.

In my colleague's case, he used it as a chauffeur lane. He actually doubled his contribution to traffic. Likewise, I'm sure taxi and other professional drivers are happy to use the carpool lane for expediency with their passengers.

I use the carpool lane when I take my kids to school in the morning. Am I reducing the number of cars on the road? Not at all. As I watch other cars in the carpool lane, I see many with one adult shuttling kid(s). And so, we use it as a kidpool lane. Carpool moms love this. Wow! There is actually a benefit to having the kids in the car.

I also see many cases of a single person in a car buzzing along watching for police. So it is a "scofflaw watching for a traffic fine" lane. There are even amusing cases locally of people getting caught using lifelike dummies or mannequins in the passenger seats of their car.

And I admittedly see many vehicles with 2 or more people of driving age. But this begs the question. How many of them are actually driving together to reduce traffic? Which of them wouldn't be carpooling otherwise? Granted there must be a few legitimate corpoolers, but from my observations and experience I would have to argue that they are in the minority. I see many work crews, construction, and professional service vehicles that would normally have more than one person.

There are just too many reasons not to carpool. Convenience, privacy, flexibility, control, and security to name some. So the idea of carpooling has a lot of good intent, but in practice becomes "what everyone else should do".

Carpool lanes are a fraudulent deceit because the expense of creating and maintaining them was justified as a way to reduce traffic by getting more people to drive fewer cars. This has not happened to any notable degree. Instead, it makes a lane of traffic unavailable to the vast majority of drivers, increasing traffic congestion in the remaining lanes. Something that was justified as a way to reduce traffic congestion actually increases it? Yep.

On a somewhat positive note, it does reward those who do carpool, along with the chauffeurs, shuttle-parents, work crews, and all the scofflaws who aren't caught...

Parenting 101

Every morning I have a cup of coffee. I use a French Coffee Press which means I boil some water in a teapot, pour it into a glass cylinder along with some ground coffee, and then use a fancy screened widget to push the mud down so I can pour out ...my coffee...

So, every morning I put the teapot on the stove to heat. About a week ago, after the teapot started to whistle, I asked my eldest daughter to turn off the stove.

Now, my wife and I had taught our daughters that the stove was dangerous. They don't touch it. It isn't to be played with. It is dangerous ... and so my daughter had no idea how to turn it off.

With that came the realization that we had been delinquent as parents. It would be OK for them to not know how to turn it on, but they certainly needed to know how to turn the stove off.

So I held a short class in how to turn the stove off. They each got a turn to do it.

It seems like such a simple thing to make any fuss over, until you realize it isn't about working a stove. It is about understanding stove safety. Being prepared for the possible danger. Knowing what to do. Sheltering them from the stove only prevented that safety.

So now, when the teapot starts whistling the girls rush in to ask me if they can turn it off. OK, so long as they're careful.

...being too sheltered from the dangerous often means not being prepared to face the dangerous...

The Cutesy Files

I take care of getting the kids up, ready and to school in the morning. My wife leaves for work before they get up, leaving me to face that challenge alone. And as part of our routine I give the kids a quick breakfast and prepare their lunches. They love bagels in the morning for breakfast. Cut in half, toasted and slathered with cream cheese. Or with butter or jelly in a pinch.

So one morning, after putting a bagel in the toaster I start making sandwiches. My littlest one comes to me and says "Daddy. I don't want the crust. Please cut it off". "What?" I spouted "I thought you liked crust..." And then the other one chimed in asking if I would remove her crust too...

The great crust dilemma. I had heard of it. Now I was facing it. All it takes is one crust shirker at school, and the other kids get infected...

Fortunately, the toaster popped the bagel. I told them "If you don't like crust, then you don't like bagels". They paused in thought and I continued "Look at the bagel. It has crust all the way around. If you don't like crust, then you can't like bagels". Well, that led to a reversal of thinking. They decided it would be better to have their sandwiches with crust.

Saved by the bagel...

Take a Trip to Another World

A colleague who does business in China recently expressed how difficult it is to find gifts for his Chinese business clients. So much here in the US says "Made in China" on it.

Travel abroad is a wonderful thing. If you take the time to look around the world and set aside your preconceived ideas and biases, you really can get glimpses into other worlds.

Years ago I delivered a training class in China to go along with some expensive hardware they bought for one of their institutes. It helped that all of the Engineers I was training were foreign educated. Mostly in US colleges. And it helped that I had plenty of free time to tour and observe.

This was in Chungdu China. Located about as central in China as you can get. The last stop before Tibet.

When I first arrived at the institute, I noticed a group of men and women with hammers and chisels working on a section of the sidewalk. I looked inquisitive enough that my host let me know that they were taking out a section of the sidewalk to put in a driveway for the institute parking lot. They had been working for about a week and were about halfway done. He must have known my thoughts, because he added that in China, it was more important to keep the people employed then it was to get the job done quickly. This was food for thought. So whereas in the US we would have a couple guys watching another guy with a jackhammer or backhoe take out the drive in about half a day, in China they kept six people with hammers, chisels, and a wheelbarrow chipping away at it for two weeks or more.

But then, their lifestyle didn't have all the encumbrances we take for granted. Even the well-to-do engineers didn't have cars. No payments, no insurance ... no overhead. They rode bicycles. They didn't have to pay to support the idle unemployed. Their expectations of life were different. And their outlooks. The pace of their lives and the way they interacted was notably different. It was truly another world. And it is tough to be a fair judge of what is better or worse when your bias comes from your own.

Are the Chinese stealing our jobs? Or are they just more willing and able to do them for less?

There are two ways to be rich: make more - desire less