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.

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Dad Blogs Family

Chef Ramsey…psshh…You Don’t Scare Me!

Gingerbread houseI love watching “Hell’s Kitchen.” Having worked in numerous kitchens growing up, and myself having a love of cooking, I get my kicks watching Ramsey bring tears to grown men’s eyes. Granted, most of these contestants were handpicked by studio directors, no doubt under the watchful gaze of a psychiatrist, for maximum hysterics value, but it’s still fun to watch regardless.

Plus, after having lived under the tyranny of multiple drill instructors for six weeks, Chef Ramsey’s tirades pale in comparison to that of “Master Sargent Aleman” (oh ye of the state trooper hat and the gritted teeth) whose very gaze was enough to loosen the sphincters of many an 18-year-old recruit.

But it’s almost a shame really what Hell’s Kitchen has done to the art and joy of cooking. Admittedly, cooking in a high-pressure restaurant is far different from cooking for the enjoyment of it at home, but the show does little to depict the beauty of the ingredients, the smell of seared steak and onions, and the joy one gets from perfectly plating up an entire meal at the same time and delivering it to the table hot and delicious.

Which, come to think of it, is kind of like what having kids does to one’s joy of cooking.

I used to LOVE to cook, and on the rare occasion that I get to do it without a 15-month-old clinging to my leg and crying as I’m trying to one-handedly flip something in the frypan, I still enjoy the heck out of it.

But like Hell’s Kitchen, having kids means doing away with dinners that simmer patiently for an hour on the stove; instead, cooking has become this frenzied, “What can I cook that we’ll ALL enjoy” event that leaves me frustrated and dejected. In that respect, I’d take a restaurant full of parents who cook for their family, over a bunch of well-trained culinary students, to staff my kitchen any day! With these seasoned family chefs, I know that what I’m going to get may not have the freshest herbs, or the most mouth-watering Ahi Tuna available at the market that day, but you can bet that whatever we cook, it’s not gonna be raw, at the very least palatable, and by golly, if it’s rice, we’ll call it rice, NOT Risotto!

Course…there’s not much difference between Ramsey’s ranting and my kids hollering after they’ve left the table, but at least on Hell’s Kitchen, the diners are generally shielded from the noise. And on more than one occasion, as I’m trying to finish that last bite of some unusually tasty treat that I was able to prepare, as the kids come running up to me asking me something completely banal like, “Do you know why Superman wears red boots?” I’ve been very tempted to quote Chef Ramsey and say, “Pi** off!”

I’m pretty sure CareerMom would hang me up by my testicles if I said that, so I just play along nicely. Ramsey should have to cook with kids running around in the kitchen. I think it would mellow him out a bit.

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Dad Blogs Family

Remember, the Meme you save, may be your own!

caution signB ikini over at Pantsfreesia (also a lady whom I work with in a remote kinda way) tagged me for a meme, I suspect largely because I’ve been a bit of a bummer lately and the goings on at work didn’t help and I figure she knows I needed a diversion.

Now, I’ve never “memed” in my life–that I know of–and though I had an idea what a meme was, I had to look it up. It seems there are rules to this memeing and so I’m going to give it my best shot and see what happens.

This particular Meme originated from Mommy Needs Therapy and has made its way down to my proverbial neck of the Internet. The idea is to write a six-word memoir of your life.

Egad! Six words? Folks, I’ve never summed anything up in my life in less than 20 words (er…except maybe that time when my motorcycle went skidding out of control on some pinestraw and I could see a big tree coming up quickly on my left side and I couldn’t do anything about it. I think I uttered two very succinct words then, “Oh” and “SHI*!”)

In addition to the six-word memoir, here are the other rules:
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  • Write your own six word memoir.
  • Post it to your blog including a visual illustration if you would like.
  • Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogsphere
  • Tag 5 more blogs with links
  • Don’t forget to leave a comment in the tagged blogs with an invitation to play

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So, without further ado, here’s my memoir:

…*sigh*…this is difficult….”Satisfactory goals, unsatisfactorily met, looking forward”

I realize this sounds horribly egocentric, but after all, it’s my memoir, not my eulogy. I hope my eulogy is significantly more upbeat, being delivered by my uber-successful children and a wife who didn’t spend her best years helping me get up out of my chair because I over-extended myself.

Duty done, now I’m passing this along.

TAG! The following people are IT:

– Trisha over at TrishaTruly
– Leighton over at My Best Investments
– BirdPress
– Father of Five (cuz dude, with that many kids, I KNOW you’ve got a memoir waiting in the wings!)
– Allison at That’s What She Blogged

There now…all done!

Oh, and don’t forget that there’s a Woot!-off going on today!

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Dad Blogs

A Prayer of Thanks

I dodged a layoff yesterday. A lot of good people, doing good jobs were “let go.”
Honestly, considering what my job has become, I don’t know why I was kept.
Today is one of those days when I am mindful of a God that keeps his eye out for me and my family.

Thank you Lord.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Life in these United States

Memories of a Gen-Xer

custom van Every generation blames the one before…no wait…that’s a song.

Let’s try again:

About every 20 years, another generation is born. Or at least, that’s been the schedule up until couples decided they were making too much money and having too much fun by themselves to have kids. I guess now, a lot of people are waiting 30-35 years, so maybe the generation schedule is widening.

Anyway, what with my decrepitude rearing its ugly head again, I’ve been thinking more about getting old. But not in a morose kinda way, but more in a kinda, “How things have changed” kinda way. A few days ago, some of my more enlightened readers and I discussed a bit how parenting has changed and while there is fodder there for at least a week’s worth of blogs, I’m gonna give it a break for a bit.

So today, I’m offering my Top Five list of things that have changed since I was a child in the 70s and 80s. If you’d like to play along, feel free to offer up your top picks via a comment.

Here Goes! The TOP FIVE Things that Have Changed Since Gen-Xers were kids!

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5. Water used to cost .0000143 cents per gallon: Do you remember when you could turn on the Slip n’ Slide in the morning and the only thing that got you off the thing in the afternoon was either dinner, or someone sliding into an anthill, or catching a nipple on a hidden rock? These days, water is so scarce here in the Atlanta area that we can’t even wash our cars. I suspect that in certain demographics, this is causing quite a social uproar. I remember when the big thing was washing your car in the afternoon so you could go cruising for doughnuts chics later that night!

4. There are no quotable movies anymore!: Just this morning I heard part of “Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail” on my Sirius radio. It was the bit about burning witches, “…and so, if the witch weighs as much as a duck…then she must be made of wood!” It got me thinking about how movies today, while visually stunning, lack a certain wit that we all grew up with. I mean, how many different quotes can the average Gen-Xer offer from Star Wars, or CaddyShack or any of the National Lampoon series? Nowadays, the best kids can do is offer, “Lucky” (Napoleon Dynamite) or “Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye.” (Ok, that one is actually a GREAT movie, but it was really geared more towards us older folk rather than the kids)

3. Cars suck!: On more than one occasion, I’ve lamented the lack of customized vans today! Oh, do you remember those? We had a blue GMC something or other, with a beautiful airbrushed picture of an old sailboat out on the open sea painted on our van. It had a refrigerator, a huge raised bed in the back (it never occurred to me what that was probably used for when I was a kid), and the BEST! captain’s chairs you ever sat in. Oh, and the windows were tinted so dark, that even if they’d had seat belt laws back then, you could have flaunted them while parading around in your skivvies in the back while driving up I-10! Oh, the good old days!

2. Lack of open space: This is one of those things you hear quite frequently from Gen-X’ers; “When we were kids, mom used to kick us outta the house in the morning and we wouldn’t return till dinner time.” And this was when we were like six years old! Nowadays, if a six year old is seen walking around the neighborhood alone, you can count the minutes before Child Services is knocking on doors trying to figure out who to blame. The problem is not that the kids are out without their parents, its that they are out in plain sight! When we left the house, we disappeared man! We hit the woods, or the drainage tunnels, or the big fields with the massive water ditches. You could stand out on our deck and look out over the back of the neighborhood and all you’d see every now and then is a head pop up out of the sand, or a pine-cone bomb being lobbed towards the enemies’ fort!

And the #1 Change is:

1. Weekend activities expectations: Do you remember what you did on an “average” Saturday? I bet it was something like this:

  •  Get up before 8 a.m.
  •  Eat some cereal while watching some cartoons (but not too   many, “We have things to do young man!”)
  • Do chores for the next hour and a half
  • Eat lunch
  • Maybe go grocery shopping with mom, or get some new shoes. Or maybe dad had you hold the flashlight while he worked on the car, or in the attic or something
  • Free play time till dinner
  • Help mom cook dinner (well, I did this anyway)
  • Maybe watch a movie in front of the TV if dad is feeling magnanimous. A Disney special perhaps, or maybe “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” ( sponsored by: Mutual of Omaha, is people…you can count on, when the going’s rough…)
  • Do the dishes
  • Take a bath/ brush your teeth
  • Off to bed

Nowadays, by 7:30 a.m., my kids are asking, “What are we going to do today?”

What are we going to do? I want to say, “We’re going to catch up on all the daddy chores that we didn’t get done this week because we were too busy working in the day, and playing with you kids at night.” But what really happens is that we parents end up dragging our kids from one activity to the next in a vain attempt at wearing their little butts out so they’ll go to bed early, so that we parents can have a few minutes alone that doesn’t cost $15 p/hour in babysitting fees!

So this was probably waaaay too long of a post, but I hope you at least scanned for the good parts. And I’d love to hear your Top 5 or Top 10 changes. It’d be interesting to compare childhoods!