Rick Nier...Woo!

I am more than halfway through the last year of dropping one of my children off at school. It's my eighth grade daughter, for anyone keeping track of my family.  See, next year she will be at the high school, and her brother will drive her. He says that it's not cool for seniors to drive their freshman sister to school, but I bet it's cooler than being dropped off by your mom in a minivan.  So rather than groan about this daily responsibility, I've been reminiscing about what the drop-off line used to look like, way back in elementary school. Once our children were about halfway through their elementary years, the drop-off line became a test of patience.  Do you know which group you do not want to get caught behind in the parent drop-off line at an elementary school? The kindergartners. These little ones are barely able to walk, but now we put them in the high-pressure situation of trying to unbuckle their seat-belt, grab their backpack (which might be as tall as they a...

As parents, we've all been there. We tell our child to do something and they ask why. Everyone knows what words are about to come out of the parent's mouth.  Because I said so .  We can debate forever if that reasoning should be sufficient or not. The fact is we say it. I say it, and then I preach to my kids about respect and obedience and when I was a perfect child.  So why do the kids ask for a reason? Why do the teenagers bore us with their litany of reasons of how we're old, our ideas are outdated, we're short and not that good at basketball? Yeah, my teenagers have found some specific talking points in their arguments to try and get me to let them have their way.  Why do they think they're so smart? Actually, I'm trying to get my children to write a book. (Cue sarcastic music so you know I'm about to spew a heavy dose.) If they would give me time to grab a pen and some paper, I could jot down some of their pearls of wisdom. They mak...

All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for coaxing, relaxing, sharing and making people feel good about themselves.  You don't remember Paul writing that to Timothy? Me neither. But by the way people act in church, one might assume this is what we believe about scripture. We all like using a scripture verse to prove something we already believe. But when one is used against us and our personally held, but not well thought out, convictions, then we begin to squirm. Actually, we do more than squirm. We cry out. We blame. We point fingers. We shoot the messenger. There must be something wrong with the other, because otherwise I might have to look inward. How dare that pastor try to teach me something new? Doesn't he realize that might cause me to change? And when those same scriptures are used to rebuke me? Get off your high horse pastor! We can be friends, but not if you're going to meddle in my personal affairs. If I wanted to be corrected, I'd go see ...

I'm looking at different children's curriculum resources for our children's ministry programs. It's not a task I enjoy. I sit on my youth ministry mountain and look down and make many assumptions about the things that happen in children's ministries. I have so very many thoughts while swimming through an ocean of options.  First of all, why are there so many options. Are you telling me children's classes are more than some kind of juice, a box of goldfish and a song with motions? Why do we even need a book to tell us how to do this? Should there really be crafts? If the church thinks this stuff is so important, they should invest in a hallway of refrigerators for all of this art to go on.  Why do all the advertisements for these resources show happy adults down on the floor with puppets and glue sticks and well-behaved children? If I used their curriculum, would my classrooms be magically transformed? Then we get to the curriculum itself. It...

It's almost a New Year and I'm gifting you with the best of what I got from this year. Apparently I'm volatile during the winter, because the Best of January was also a rant. But the traffic doesn't lie. Here is the best from February, my rant about Ketchup.

Well, 2013 is almost out the door. Will you be resting the final days of this calendar year? Probably not and neither will I. That's why I won't bore you with new stories. I'll let you play catch up until after the New Year begins. But I'll make it easy on you. I'll select one of my posts from each month, likely the one that received the most traffic.  It's my Christmas gift to you....more of me! Here is January's post, a rant about tooth fairies.

Is it just me, or do other people kind of freak out when driving through towns with multiple wind farms? I'm not talking about one or two wind turbines. I'm talking about a small Indiana town with at least fifty. I'm not sure I believe in the power of wind, first of all. If it were really effective, my children could eliminate my electric bill in no time. Seriously! There is so much nonsensical talking going on in my home that I will discover a way to plug them in and bottle some of this energy. Ok, no I won't. But if I really believed in the power of wind, I would so try. But let's face it, wind is much less reliable than the magic holes into which I plug all my stuff. Hot air doesn't do any good coming out of your mouth, so it doesn't do any good in large quantities either. What I think is the sight of unseemly large metal knives cutting through the air gives me the distinct feeling that a scary movie is about to take place. Especially when there i...

The Oxford word of the year is selfie . There are so many things wrong with that sentence, where to begin? How about the fact that Oxford even has a word of the year. Seriously, what's this all about? Do the words campaign for votes? Do they give speeches? If they give speeches, do they get extra points for using previous words of the year? Will the previous word of the year present the award? You might be wondering how many more questions I could possibly have along this line of thinking? Oh, I have a few more? If a word becomes scandalous, can it lose the award? Will the runner-up step in and carry out the duties of the word of the year? Has there ever been scandal about how a word rose to victory? So many questions. But I must admit being surprised about a word like selfie winning this. After all, I hear Oxford and I assume a panel of college profs with cigars and suit coats with the elbow patches. I imagine a group of people who know words that no one else uses, much l...

I have a couple of theories... Either there is one really big cricket sitting outside our bedroom window. But he's like the really big 12 year old boy, the kind that has facial hair already, but hasn't yet hit puberty. So his voice is really high. It could possibly be a pre-pubescent cricket that's just big for his age. Or... It's a whole Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir of crickets, all waiting for the conductor to drop his baton so they can chirp at the same time. This choir of crickets is so well trained that they sound as one. Either way, it's loud and it disrupts my sleep. Of course, I'm sure if I were to go outside and somehow manage to locate the source, I would find just a few crickets. But isn't it interesting how small things can add up to big things in our lives. A small sliver under a fingernail, a small scratch on a DVD, a small nail in your tire. They are all small, but good luck concentrating on anything else until you get the situation r...

Dear July, I am going to get right to the point and express my disappointment in you. I don't think I ask for much from you, but I have come to expect one thing. That one thing is simple. Just like Ricky Vaughn in the timeless classic Major League , just bring the heat. It hasn't seemed to have been a problem for you in the past. I have always known July to be hot, with a ridiculous amount of t's. Granted, I grew up in Florida, so all year long, save for two weeks in January, were really hot. But that's beside the point. I have grown to love July, because it meant never having to convince my wife that the air conditioner should be on and that fresh air is overrated. You might ask yourself, July, what is causing this disdain to rise up now? I'll tell you. When I, towards the end of April, planned out my summer calendar, I planned a mid-July trip to a water park. It didn't matter which day I picked, or so I thought. Just pick a day in July and the only thi...

Every week can't be a great week. I think we can all agree on that.  After all, most weeks start with Mondays, a weekly reminder that bills must be paid and they won't pay themselves. But since I take Mondays off, don't even get me started on Tuesdays. While everyone else has resigned themselves to the fact that the work week is young, I'm just settling in to the fact that people won't pay me to stay at home.  Wednesdays are a normally long day where the weekend is still too far off, yet at the same time beginning to dash your hopes of finishing any weekly to-do list. Thursdays get the shaft for no other reason than they aren't Friday. And Friday? Well, Friday is like a long climb up what you assume will be the greatest roller coaster of a weekend ever. But, come to find out, only a kiddie slide was waiting for you after all that anticipation.  All of that to say, some weeks aren't great. I say this because we have to find the little things in ...

A while I ago I ranted about the speed of ketchup . You probably figured I got that out of my system and was done pointing my ire at the ketchup industry. I know they hoped so. But I'm not. After all, they don't just put ketchup in bottles now, do they? Nope. When you want to be somewhere and feel less like home, they give you these travel packages of ketchup. Think fast food. Fast being the key word. You're at the fast food restaurant for speed and convenience. It's not for your health. It can't be for your health. So when it comes to ketchup distribution, speed and convenience should also be of primary concern. This, of course, is why they don't use the bottle. Most packets have a perforation. This saves you time in knowing not only where to tear, but in being able to tear. But I have seen an increasing number of ketchup packets that have no pre-perforated tearing point. This must not be tolerated. Ketchup packets that have no perforated ripping poi...

I'm going to go ahead and put this idea out there, knowing it will make someone else rich. I have no protection or patent on this idea. I just want to help people. That's what I do. Allow me to paint you a picture. You're in your vehicle and you have a reason to get somebody's attention. Wouldn't it be nice if you had some way of doing so? Before you mock and assume your superiority, please know I am not talking of simply a car horn. I am talking about a Vehicle Voice Magnifying System. Think about this...we have thousands of words in the English language to display our thoughts and emotions. One does not have to settle for saying they feel good or sad or ' grunt '.  So why limit ourselves to a mere honk while on the road? We're not geese and, aside from that whole teamwork-flying-V thing they have going, there's nothing about geese for us to be jealous. It's annoying when people honk their car horns. You have no idea who they are hon...

I walk in. I get what I want. I pay for what I want. I walk out. That is the ideal order of things for me. When I'm not shopping with my wife, that is a possibility. But there's been something new going on that has prevented my solo shopping trips from being so swift and succinct. Apparently I am so desired that ladies at the check out counters ask me for my phone number and email address. I guess that's why they call it the check out counter. Alas, since I am a happily married guy, I'm not sure I need to be giving out all this information just so I can purchase a tube of toothpaste. Maybe I don't want all your emails telling me of another made-up female holiday for which my wife would be extremely grateful if I bought her tubs of lotion. I'm looking at you, Bath & Body Works! Just like in every other area of life, I would appreciate jumping through less hoops and just give me the good price. I shouldn't need a card or a code or a swirling blu...

Yes, sometimes I have to get some things off my chest. Like John McClane in any Die Hard movie, if there was someone else to do the job, I would let them do it. But. There's. Not. So I am doing what nobody else will, hopefully signalling the clarion call to bring this mad world back to some semblance of normalcy and intelligence. I recently found the following: An article in Time.com noted that ketchup flows out of a glass bottle at a rate of .028 miles per hour. That's slower than a Galapagos tortoise, which, according to the San Diego Zoo, zips along at a blazing 0.16 miles per hour, or almost six times faster than ketchup. But impatiently tapping your ketchup bottle soon might be a thing of the past. Dave Smith, a PhD candidate at MIT, and a team of MIT mechanical engineers and nano-technologists have offered a posible solution to this ketchup flow problem. After months of research, Smith and his team developed LiquiGlide, which they define as a "kind of stru...

Pardon my French, but I don't know any. I'm not exactly sure why the French seem to be so unpopular. I imagine politics has something to do with it. I'd love to go back in history and find out how they rank among most hated countries. That would be a fun study. The French versus the Romans or the Huns or the Philistines.  The only French I know and use is sacre bleu . It feels like a mix between something religious and something involving salad dressing. But I looked it up. It's normally associated with saying oh my gosh in English. I say it simply because it's one of the only things I can say with a French accent. And what better way to sound snooty than to use a French accent? But I actually have a problem. It's p ardoning your French before you swear. Do the French all speak like this? Are they all a bunch of potty-mouths? And if so, are they all pardoning their language before they even speak up? Is this like hello  for them?  French-speaking per...

I have begun a new series where I rage against the injustices in life that others simply won't get behind. While they are busy fighting things like world hunger and gun control, I'm going to reveal things that I think we could all agree on. So far, I've tackled the Christmas spirit and the Tooth Fairy. Today, I tackle sporting events. From about November through February is one of my favorite times of year. It's not the snowy weather and lack of sunlight that I enjoy. But as long as I'm going to be stuck inside, I might as well enjoy some sporting events. My preference is turning to the NBA and the NFL. You can have your amateur athletes if you like, but I want my sports heroes to be overpaid babies who have all but forgotten the fundamentals of the game.  But there's something worse than the athletes. It's the commentators. Specifically it's w hen the analysts start voting on the shot (or play) of the game with 8 minutes left in the game. I know it...

Last week I began a new series, this one focused on the many things wrong with our world. You can read about the first one here . But you won't find me ranting about the government or gun control here. There's plenty of people yelling about that. I'm going to find the causes that no celebrity is taking the time to get behind. This week, it's the tooth fairy! Yeah, you read that right. What is the deal with the tooth fairy? Parents come up with a story of this fairy who hands out quarters for teeth. And some of you reading this are part of a serious problem with inflation, as my kids think we have a tooth fairy giving them the shaft since all their friends are getting $5 per tooth. Are you kidding me? But my real problem isn't with the money. The real problem is where we place the tooth. Where should we put the tooth? Underneath the head of the sleeping child whom you are trying not to wake?!?? Whose idea was this? I fight every night to get these wiggly...

Christmas is past. The New Year has begun. If you're into celebrating everything, then Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are also in your rear view mirror. But one holiday I'd like to celebrate all year long here on the blog is Festivus. Any self-respecting Seinfeld fan will remember this made up holiday, in which the Costanzas gave up the trappings of Christmas and put up a Festivus Pole instead of a tree. They also had the airing of grievances , a special time when people told each other what they really thought. It is in that spirit that I introduce a new series to my blog. I will rant, I will rave, I will tell you exactly what I think. Some topics will be serious, the others perhaps not so much. Hopefully you will be able to tell the difference before you post a comment that could leave me weeping bitterly. To get us started, and since we're just now leaving the holidays, let's meet the first topic I'd like to go all rage against the machine on. It's Christmas. S...