Author: Chris Souther

Chris joined the Air Force out of high school. After four years of supporting communications for the Department of Defense, the White House, and stations around the world, he left the military and moved to Atlanta. For the next six years, Chris continued working in the telecom field, eventually traveling around the country teaching companies like MCI, Nortel Networks, and Cabletron, how to do what he did.

When the dot.com crash happened, upon recommendation from his wife, Chris re-enrolled in school and earned his B.S. in Communications (PR & Marketing).

Since then, he was worked in network security, healthcare, banking and finance (and FinTech), general high tech (AI/ML, Cloud, IoT), and most recently, application development fields. Now, with more than 15 years of both Marketing and Communications under his belt, he helps organizations grow their business through the proper application of marketing, communications, and content.

And he blogs on the side. It keeps him sane.

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Life in these United States

Who you gonna call?

halloween I didn’t do anything overtly mean when I was a kid, but like all kids, I did my share of tricks. One of our perennial favorites was knocking on people’s doors and then running away. I don’t know what was so funny about it, but we sure laughed our butts off when the homeowner would come look outside and get mad.

Last night, we had just finished dinner, I had cleaned up the dishes and I had just gotten the boys rounded up and naked for bathtime, when I looked out our front window and saw someone on the front porch. It was an adult woman with blonde hair. My first thought was that it was my adopted mom. She frequently travels back and forth through Atlanta without bothering to stop by, and I figured she might be coming through and leaving something for the boys. But, the vehicle at the top of the driveway was a red SUV, which I know she doesn’t have.

I sort of hovered out of sight to see what this person was doing on my front porch and then watched as she rang the doorbell and then took off running. She hopped in her car and took off.

I was like, “What the hell?”

After telling the naked boys to sit tight, I went down and opened the door to find a trick or treat bucket of goodies on the front porch.

Apparently, we’d been “Ghosted.” This was our first experience with it, but if you have older kids then you’re probably ahead of me. Basically, it’s a combination of a Blog Meme, A Random Act of Kindness, and a childhood prank, all rolled into one.

What you get when you’re ghosted:

  • A paper picture of a Ghost. You can print it off the Internet here
  • Some Halloween candy, in a trick or treat bucket, or any other kind of container; it’s your choice
  • A poem thingy and instructions for carrying on with the “Ghosting”

The rules are as follows:

  • You have to post, somewhere on your house, the printed Ghost. This supposedly keeps other “Ghosts” away from your home (and I suspect it keeps others from Ghosting you again).
  • You have to give the same “Ghosting” to two others that you know
  • You are supposed to sneak up to their house and carry out the ghosting without being seen

It’s pretty simple, and apparently pretty exciting since MLI told everyone he saw this morning about it.

But I’m wondering, how is someone with small children supposed to pull this off? I mean, it’s impossible to quickly run from someone’s house, get the kids strapped back into the car and drive off without being seen. Which I suppose, is exactly why the person I saw, was an adult doing this without her kids! HA!

–

Categories
Dad Blogs DIY Family Life in these United States

Cuz, losing a 2nd cousin this past week wasn’t enough

grand canyon I really just want to cry. I want to curl up in bed and watch old re-runs of Family Ties until all my troubles go away. I want to drink really vile manly drinks with names like Rusty Nail and Beer Buster until I can’t think straight. I want to try some safe new drug that doesn’t jack me up, but rather knocks me out until my savings account has reached some astronomically large amount to where what’s bugging me, doesn’t bug me anymore because I’ll have the means to fix it.

What’s that?

Oh. Sorry…a little history for those of you at home. Basically, I’m losing my backyard to erosion.

And we’re not talking about a little erosion here, we’re talking about foundation exposing, trees falling off the side of the cliff erosion. All to the tune of $25 thousand to fix erosion. That’s what I’m stressing over.

When we bought this house two years ago, a tornado had just finished ripping through the backyard. And while everyone else left their downed trees to be reclaimed by nature, the previous owner of our house opted to clean it all up.

It looked great. It gave us a bit of a backyard down at the bottom where it leveled out; we’ll take it! SOLD!
Unfortunately, it also took away all the trees and mulch that were holding the hill in place. And now I am left with the REAL aftermath.

I’ve had three “experts” in to qualify the problem and propose a fix. And even in “this economy,” where you’d think you could catch a break on labor costs, here’s what I’ve gotten:

Option #1

  • “You need a retaining wall about “head high.”  A retaining wall “head high” means one about 7′ tall and about 100′ wide. The materials alone come out to around $8 grand, and then you add on the labor costs and you’re hitting about $15K.

Option #2

  • “For the money, unless you just want to spend $16K, I would just come in here with a drip irrigation system and plant the shit out of it. I mean, plants all over it.”  This would run me about $9K

Now, “if money weren’t an object” the optimum solution would be a two-tier retaining wall system with the plants, but since money IS an object, I have NO FRIGGIN IDEA WHAT TO DO!

But do you see my quandry? What if I spend $9K on plants and it doesn’t fix the problem? I mean, that’s a butt-load of money to put on something that “might” work. The contractor is pretty confident it will, but…I don’t share his optimism.

I keep thinking, “OK, you put up a 7′ retaining wall and you’ve at least got SOMETHING. I mean, if I suddenly fell off the hill, at least the wall would catch me right? Has a Juniper bush  ever stopped a person from falling off a hill? I don’t think so.”

Oh, also part of the problem is that we don’t HAVE the money to do this, but we don’t really have a choice. We HAVE to do this. Only, which one do you do? Do you go the less expensive route and hope it works, or do you go the more expensive route and hope it works? Or, do you bite the bullet and do them both figuring, “Hey, if one is good, then two should be even better?”

Seriously, where’s the booze, cuz I could really use something stronger than my reality right now!

Categories
A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family

Childhood stories…then, and now

Some of my favorites books from my childhood were contained within a set my brother received in 1974, which I held onto and now claim as my own. They were titled, “The Bookshelf for Boys and Girls.”

In all, I believe my set included approximately ten books, on all manner of subjects, art, science, etc.; but, my favorites were the stories. These, along with another book of Fairy Tales, kept me reading whenever my brother would run off with his friends, or when I just needed some alone time.

Nursery Rhymes and Stories

We’ve recently started reading them to MLI, because his imagination is finally outgrowing Curious George and Dingo…sorry, I mean Diego. And he seems to like them a lot; although I had forgotten how violent some of them were.

Just last night, I was reading the story about the little Tin Soldier. You’ll recall, he only had one leg and he fell in love with a little paper ballerina. But, fate stole him away from her where he then rode a paper boat into the sewers, only to be eaten by a fish, and finally returned back home when someone in the house went to the local market and purchased the fish that ate him. Unfortunately, just as the Tin Soldier and his lady were to be reunited, the Tin Man was blown into the fire where he melted.

Yeah…I had gotten too far into the ending before I realized his fate. I had forgotten that, like many REAL fairy tales, the Tin Soldier was not to have a happy ending.

This got me to thinking about how parenting has changed and I was delighted to find, in the preface of the book titled, “Folk and Fairy Tales” from my set, a forward by one of the editors. It was delightfully candid (if a tad sexist), but I found the honesty of yesterday refreshing:

“Once upon a time parents had to bring up their children without graded reading plans. The children got either little sermons with the moral sticking out like a red flag or the fairy and folk tales that have come down to us from the feudal Middle Ages. Many children had these stories read to them, together with Mother Goose, while they were still in their perambulators.

Some of today’s psychologists shake their heads over the effect this literary diet may have had on the children too young to cope with such strong doses of morality and immortality.

But most children can stand a good deal more than adults think they can. Besides, some mothers have always been blessed with common sense. If they saw that some gruesome tale induced nightmares, they stopped reading it and made up, instead, little stories about ordinary children and animals within a child’s understanding.”

The normal healthy-minded child is not harmed by fairy tales, but it is unwise indeed to expose a child to them before he is emotionally ready to accept them as fantasy. The child whose life is generally satisfying and secure, and who is mature enough, will take the most gruesome fairy tales in his stride, as he does the blood-and-thunder shows he sees on television.”

Isn’t that great! Imagine, parents—not organizations or the government—deciding what is best for their children. Wow.

But see…a tad sexist…but not surprising considering the gender roles at play. I wonder what they would have thought about today’s video games?

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Charity, begins at home

Contribution Chart In the grand scheme of charity, I’m a fan of the “Teach a man to fish” mantra rather than being on the “Give a man a fish” side of things. This is not surprising considering my political views, but it goes deeper than that.

I’m just not a handout kinda guy. My folks didn’t pay for my college. My folks have never given me any money since I left home outside of small sums for birthday and Christmas gifts and when I was out of work for several months after a layoff, I didn’t file for unemployment (though if I had to do it all over again, I definitely would!)

Asking for stuff just isn’t in my genes. Now, if you want to just voluntarily GIVE me things, well now, that’s a completely different story. Please make your checks payable to…

This carries over to my charitable contributions as well. I have absolutely NO problem donating things to charity, and I also give money to church (ahem..*cough* *cough*…when we go).

CareerMom is just the opposite of me. She donates at work through United Way, and she was also once suckered into giving by some group that “gave” her some nifty return address labels. Now she gets no fewer than 8 or 9 charity requests by mail each week, most of which I toss in the recycle bin in the garage on my way in the door in the afternoon (I know, I know…I’m baaaad!)

I’m also not a huge fan of just giving money to a big organization, only to have half of it eaten up in administration costs, or having it go to some faraway place helping God knows whom, with God knows what.

That said, if everyone in the world were like me, it would probably be a pretty miserable place. So, I recognize my own shortcomings.

But regardless of your beliefs on the subject, the very idea of Charity, is that it should come from the heart. It shouldn’t be forced upon you because then, it’s not really Charity–it’s taxes.

With it getting near the holidays, charities are cranking up their efforts to get their piece of the pie this year and my company, like many across the country, have joined them in their efforts. I have no doubt that this is mostly just so Public Relations groups can tout how much money they’ve raised so that when next quarter’s earnings report comes out, perhaps folks will cut them a little slack.

Regardless, I’ve been ignoring the Employee Charitable Contribution Campaign e-mail for about a week now. I have not in the past, nor do I now, have a desire to have some charity automatically deduct money from my paycheck each month. So when I got another one this morning, I ignored it too.

Then, as I was sitting at my desk, my chat program popped up:

ECCC Chat

So, whether you donate or not, you’re supposed to “confidentially” respond whether or not you’re going to donate.
Fine, whatever.

I followed the link she enclosed and here’s what I had to fill out:

CCC registration

It’s not enough to say that you don’t want to donate, but they have to go about it in a way that makes you feel guilty about not doing so.

THIS, is what drives me away from it every year. It’s the tactics, as much as anything.

I truly do hate to sound all “bah Humbug’ish,” but this isn’t exactly the best time to be hitting people up for cash. But I do have an idea for my company and others who REALLY want to gen up Charity contributions:

You give me a guaranteed employment contract for the next calendar year, at my current or better salary and benefits, and I’ll donate.

How ’bout that?