You just never really never know what’s going to happen next.  And sometimes it’s a good thing.

I was reminded of that fact twice this week as I overstressed about some project deadlines of mine.  Honestly, I am old enough to know better than this, to remember that it’s not so much the situation as it is our attitude about it.

I apparently needed some repeat lessons, because Wednesday, I was wearing myself out with work and unnecessary concern, until about 3:30 PM.  Then I realized there was another meeting to attend. 

It was to meet U.S. Senator Bill Nelson with some of my associates, who were going to explain our business to him.  I almost didn’t attend, because I’m not much taken by people’s titles or grand station in life.  But at the last minute I went, telling myself I needed some kind of mental change of pace. 

And I met the senator – who, I was surprised to learn, was also a former astronaut.  And I got to talk to him for a minute or so, and then watch him as he asked questions and carefully listened to, and comprehended, the answers.

And I liked him and was kind of surprised by the effect of the whole scene.  It had dislodged my brains in a positive way and I walked out of the meeting feeling good.  Gone were my earlier concerns.  And as I headed to my car, I thought, introspectively, “You just never know what’s going to happen next.  Here I walked into work this morning way to full of myself and my problems, and then the day ended by meeting a senator.”

But some of us are slow learners.

Because Thursday morning I was back at it again, stressing more than ever and pumping hard through the tasks of the project to beat the deadline.  Around 4:30, with many major items accomplished I felt a bit better, and decided to leave at 5:00.

Walking out the office, I saw a group of people, about twenty or so, hanging around expectantly like they were waiting for something to happen.

I hadn’t gotten halfway to my car when I heard a noise in the sky and saw the space shuttle Discovery belching a stream of flame as it rocketed up into space.

And I kind of stood there in wonder, watching it for a minute or two until it passed out of sight behind a cloud.

Brains dislodged once more and shaken out of their self centered rut, I felt good again.  Because I had come to work that day all full of my projects and problems, and the day ended with an unexpected rocket launch.

Driving home, as I looked at the sky, I noticed streams of light coming down, the ones that almost look like light curtains.  As a photographer, I know these as God rays.  They were magnificent, and at that moment, I swear I would not have been surprised if a white dove had flown out of them and rested on my shoulder.  I even made a comical remark to myself to this effect.

Because you just never know what will happen next.

The events and contrast I just described for you are rather trivial in the grand scheme of things, but this all works in life too, you know.   Maybe you are going through a bad patch in your life right now and you’re all full of your problems and stressing over them full time.  That’s understandable because it happens to us all from time to time.

But eventually something good is going to happen.  Probability dictates it.  So you should remind yourself of this from time to time.  It could happen in the next minute, or tomorrow, or next week.  You just really never know.

So do everything you can to improve your situation, and then when you can’t think of anything else you can possibly do, I have just one more for you.

And that is to stay in the game.

Because you just never know what will happen next, and sometimes, it’s a good thing.

Have a nice day – J. Daniel

I’m not exactly sure how it happened but Monday, February 22, was National Margarita Day and I missed it. 

I hope this isn’t some latent manifestation of procrastinational tendencies of mine coming to the fore – because, while procrastination can truly be an art form, applying it to national margarita day is, well, simply irresponsible.

Worse yet, we did some research here at WoodChips Central, and found that it’s not even listed on our new WoodChips calendars.  Given that we have all the real COOL holidays (and the old boring ones too) like Talk Like A Pirate Day, Belly Laugh Day, etc., and forty more, this seemed like a pretty serious oversight.

So we formed a committee to take care of this problem and make sure it gets on the calendar – eventually.

But enough about that (because it seems like work) since further research uncovered a couple of important facts, one useful and one quite alarming.

We were deeply saddened to see that some people actually searched Google to find out how to celebrate National Margarita Day.  I hate to be Captain Obvious here, but … ummm … how about drink a bunch of margaritas.  Also, of course, eat a lot of salsa and chips as a safety measure.  These a basic food groups found in any household.

Salsa and chips have been scientifically proven to totally neutralize the harmful effects of tequila, without interfering with its beneficial behavioral and mood altering qualities, i.e. (tendency to wear lampshades, dance on tables, leave messages on your friends answering machines in a disguised voice stating you are from the IRS and would like to discuss their BIG tax problem as soon as possible).

We also found a simple 1-2-3 recipe for margaritas which is 1) One part lime juice 2) Two parts Triple Sec and 3) Three parts Tequila.  The simplicity of the recipe is appreciated after having mixed and consumed a few of the awesome brews.  And also, for the purist in the audience, using Key limes adds a special touch, although, after a couple, this doesn’t matter so much.

For the really advanced, you can make a purple margarita (pictured above), a true J. Daniel WoodChips original creation.  Simply throw a handful of frozen blueberries in the shaker with all the other ingredients. 

TreeLicious! — And also another health move in that blueberries have lots of anti-oxidants, and I think these make you lose weight or something.

Anyhow, without belaboring the point too much more, we feel like we kinda blew it on this one.  So our plan is to mix up a bunch of margaritas this weekend and make up for it. 

So if you missed the big holiday, this might be a good excuse, I mean idea, for you too.

Cheers!

Wasting away in Orlandoville – J. Daniel

P.S.  Seems strange that my spellchecker didn’t recognize the word Orlandoville – clearly Information Technology has a long way to go yet.

Todays post is all about our free 2011 WoodChips calendars.  They’ve been quite a hit around the office. 

And no wonder.  Besides having all the conventional holidays, they have the really COOL holidays, like Talk Like A Pirate Day, Belly Laugh Day, Fat Tuesday (of course) and even International WoodChips Day – which just happens to coincide with Arbor Day and Earth Day — go figure. 

Also, they feature BIG TYPE for some of us (not mentioning any names here) whos arms aren’t long enough to read things these days.  The last thing I expected as I got older was that my arms would get shorter.  Life is just chock full of surprises. 

Oh, so some of you may be wondering why the 2011 calendars are coming out in late February perhaps.  I’ll explain that more in next weeks edition.  Our feature article and cartoon will be On Being Human — Rationalization and Procrastination.  That is, if I get around to doing it (chuckle). 

Back to the calendars — there are four for you to choose from.  Each one has a different WoodChips cartoon.  Shown below are the four cartoon choices. 

So get your free WoodChips calendars now.  Personally, I wouldn’t want to go through the year and forget something as important as Talk Like A Pirate Day.

 Have a nice day (aaarrrgh) – J. Daniel

Yesterday a big news item was about Natalie Munroe, a teacher, who posted comments on her blog about some of her students.  The posts were anonymous, that is to say, the students were not named.  None the less, some of her comments were considered rather mean, and this has created quite a stir.

Natalie, who is a 30-year-old teacher at Central Bucks East High School in Doyleston, Pa., described some of her students as “out of control, rude, lazy, disengaged whiners,” even calling one of them a “complete and utter jerk in all ways.” Perhaps the most dramatic of all her posts was when she said, “There’s no other way to say this, I hate your kid.  Although academically okay your child has no other redeeming qualities.”

That seems pretty harsh, although I can sympathize to the extent that no doubt it can be very frustrating teaching and dealing with over a hundred students.  Probability says you’re going to have to deal with some that just aren’t the most pleasant.

And I get that most of her eighty-nine posts, at least sixty of them, had nothing to do with her students.  So it probably does feel like much of this was taken out of context.  But that’s just the news media, always zeroing in on the dramatic to increase ratings.

Natalie doesn’t think she did anything wrong, stating that it was a private blog that only her husband and eleven other people knew about.  Okay – I get that too.  I’ve become a little uneasy over the past few years with all the blog police and how that might relate to our freedom of speech.

Still, I think it’s more a function of good leadership in this case.  In the educational world, the teacher is a leader.  And good leaders wouldn’t make these kinds of comments about their organizations in any way that might get back to them, although I’m sure much of this goes on.

So it’s probably not a good idea to blog about you “organization,” particularly these days, unless it’s full of praise.

So Natalie, I totally support your right to vent – I’m sure I would if I was in your situation.  Maybe just do this in private e-mails to you trusted friends.

Or better yet, chill out over a glass of wine with your husband after hours, and tell him what the little hellions were up to this week.

What do you think about Natalie’s blog?  Click the blog title and tell us your opinion in the comment box that appears below.

Have a nice day – J. Daniel

So everyone is all hip with technology and texting messages to each other these days and feeling like they’re doing something new.

But there are few new ideas under the sun, really.  A little known fact is the older generation had message texting too.  It was called the teletype, and current texting messages remind me of it because we could send stuff with just letters and no pictures too.

True, it was a primordial time when Studebakers roamed the woods, and you could understand the words of popular songs, which were actually more than one word and chord played over and over at twelve thousand decibels — but for sure — we had text messaging.

It’s not a new thing at all.

We called it the teletype.  Same thing as text messaging really.

So if you’re over forty, or fifty, or whatever, and you want to take a trip down memory lane, or show off our generation’s technology to a younger generation, you really want to click here to see this demo.

True, we didn’t have all the abbreviations for phrases — I mean, BCNU was about it — but we’ll leave a little for the younger generation.

Still, it does make you kind of swell up with pride, doesn’t it!

Have a proud day – J. Daniel

P.S. The belt clip-on case was a bit of a BI%CH, but no need to point that out if nobody asks, if you get my drift.

Soooo … you’re getting down to the wire on getting a Valentines Day card.  Actually, if you were planning on mailing it, I’m sad to say, you may be too late.

No worries, mate.  You can send our free WoodChips TreeCard (e-card) pictured above and it will arrive instantly.  Outside of showing a fun, forest twist on Valentines day, it just might keep you out of the doghouse, or at least get you parole.

So go ahead and send it — you can add a personalized message made just for that special person you are thinking about.

To send your Valentines Day Tree-Card click here. Or you can click on the TreeCards menu button at the top of this page.

Have a nice day and don’t forget to do this, I’m trying to help you out here – J. Daniel

P.S.  I’d be sure and buy some flowers ad chocolates too.  Flowers for the heart, and, well, when it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

In a recent scientific breakthrough chicken feathers have been discovered to have important properties to help solve our energy crisis and other big problems we face.

It turns out that chicken feathers can absorb a great deal of hydrogen.  Hydrogen has long been considered the ideal fuel of the future because it is pollution free and part of a natural cycle.

A natural cycle works kind of like this.  For example, if you burn hydrogen in your car, the exhaust is H₂O, which is water.  You drink the water and then I’m not exactly clear what happens but it gets returned to nature and a miracle happens and it’s hydrogen again.  So, the physics may be a little loose here but you get the picture of a cycle – AND all natural – which is ALWAYS good … except poison ivy maybe.

Why is it important that chicken feathers absorb a lot of hydrogen?  Because hydrogen is not a very dense gas, so in its uncompressed state you need a gas tank bigger than an SUV just to go one mile – actually, kind of like an SUV, come to think of it.

So to increase hydrogen’s density and usefulness, you have a choice.  You can compress it, freeze it, or put it in chicken feathers you stuffed into your car’s gas tank.  I think the choice is obvious, but for those requiring an explanation – here goes.

Imagine in your mind the fiery explosion of the Hindenburg dirigible, then imagine how much more explosive it would have been if the hydrogen had been compressed to hundreds of pounds of pressure.  Now imagine the same thing in your gas tank and then you have a small accident that causes your car to blow up planet earth.  Okay, so no good on the compression method.

Also, freezing hydrogen just takes way too much energy, so what are you left with?

Chicken feathers in your gas tank (I told you this was obvious).

Well, not exactly.  There are actually three absorption material choices you can have in your gas tank.  They are 1) carbon nanotubes – $5,500,000 per car, 2) metal hydrides – $30,000 per car or 3) chicken feathers – $200 per car.

Chicken feathers, you say.    Okay, so where are we going to get all those chicken feathers?

Well, it turns out there are about 4 billion pounds of them produced worldwide each year as a waste byproduct of the big chicken processors.  This is great.  Now we get to recycle some of this waste and reduce pollution in the process.  Here’s another one of those virtuous cycles that goes from chicken genocide to feathers to Detroit to gas tanks to used cars to junk yards and back to chickens.  I may have missed a couple of steps here but you get the point.

Of course, not everyone is happy with this great discovery. The Middle East is all up in arms over the whole concept, but then, the Middle East is always up in arms about something.  Recently, Saddam Whatever issued a fatwa against the godless infidel chickens who were trying to break the oil to greenhouse gas CO₂ cycle (not a virtuous cycle) by saying that chickens should be killed and eaten.

Someone pointed out that humans have been doing this for millions of years already, but the point was largely ignored.

Also, now that chicken feathers have been recognized as a major world resource, other uses for them are being discovered.  One of these is for recyclable electronic circuit boards made from natural soy bean oil and chicken feathers, but that’s not all that interesting so enough said.

However, another new use is for chicken feather charcoal.  Now we’re talking something important – bar-be-cue!   I can just imagine what it would be like to grill with chicken feather briquettes.  Here’s a sample scene from a typical chicken feather bar-be-cue…

Elmer:  Hey Maple, how’s that grilled filet mignon and lobster tail?

Maple:  Great, Elmer.  Tastes like chicken.

Elmer:  Awesome.  Have another brew.

So, to pull it (pullet, heh, heh) all together now,  the special absorption/barbeque features of chicken feathers are going to help us with our water needs, fuel, food preparation, reduce pollution, stop global warming and free us from the oil tyranny of the Middle East.

That’s pretty big doin’s, folks.  Looks like chicken feathers are going to save the world!

Have a nice day – J. Daniel

P.S. Be sure and share this discovery with your friends.  Maybe ask them what experiences they’ve had with chicken feathers?  Or hydrogen?  Could be a nice ice-breaker at a party.   Be prepared for strange answers.

Afterword: So, I bet you think I was making this up (chuckle).  Actually, the discovery is with carbonized chicken feathers.  Yeah, you got it, burnt chicken feathers.  Sweet!  You can view interesting articles on this recent discovery at …

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227145.600-chicken-feathers-could-make-cheap-hydrogen-store.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/toasted-chicken-feathers-make-better-hydrogen-tanks-fuel-cells