Last weekend we took a weekend trip to Branson Missouri. I had last went here, to Silver Dollar City, when I was 2 or 3 years old. All I remember is riding the glass elevator and staying in a hotel room. Maybe I remember being in a cave, or I later saw a picture of a cave and recreated some false memory of it. Regardless, it was the last time my family went on any sort of vacation, ever, with Dad. I guess that’s one reason that I love to get away now, because it was such a rare treat to go anywhere when I was growing up. When my uncle Jack took mom and myself to St Louis when I was 11, it was such a life changing experience. I’ll have to do a separate post about it sometime.

So Branson…I had such range anxiety for the Tesla because there’s no supercharger in Branson. I knew we would make it to Springfield MO ok (with charging stops in Hannibal and Osage Beach). I was worried that, according to A Better Route Planner, if we charged to 90% in Springfield that we would only have 60% to last us all weekend in Branson. It’s an hour drive from Springfield to Branson so it wouldn’t make any sense to drive back to the supercharger when the battery was low. I also had never used a third-party charger before. I’d heard horror stories of these chargers being broken, and even if they did work, it was only Level 2 charger, roughly equivalent to what we have at home. I was seriously contemplating taking the truck on this trip even though that means that we would have to strap down the luggage in the bed.

We left Friday morning at 7am so that we would definitely make it to the Airbnb and the Dolly Parton Stampede in time. The drive from home to Hannibal was brutal on the battery level in the car. I charged to 97% at home and we made to the supercharger at Casey’s in Hannibal with only like 38%. That didn’t bode well for the rest of the trip but looking at the stats I see that about 10% of the use was for preheating the battery so that it would charge faster in Hannibal. The other major chunk was from me driving 85mph and going across a strong crosswind. The next drive from Hannibal to Osage Beach was much better. The air temperature was warmer and the wind was less forceful. The battery usage behaved as expected during that trip.

Going to the charger in Springfield was painless as well. We went to the station and it was half-full, which is a lot of use for Tesla’s stations. I got a notice on the app that charging was limited to 80% because it was a high-use station. That’s easily defeatable by sliding the charge level back up. I set the level to 90% and we all went to eat at a Tropical Cafe smoothie shop.

The smoothies and wraps were great. In fact, Laina and I were talking about how franchisee operations work and what it would take to open one of these stores. The charging level was awesome too. I set the level to 97% because it was charging so fast. We took off and the navigator said we would arrive at the Airbnb (14 miles past Branson) with 80% battery. And sure enough that’s what we had when we arrived. I was super happy with the battery level and that alleviated my anxiety for the whole trip.

The condo we stayed at was in a beautiful part of the state, surrounded by hills with the Silver Dollar City roller coaster off in the distance. It was a small couple of rooms but had high ceilings. There were two bathrooms and enough beds or couches for everyone.

We unpacked and got ready for the Stampede show. It was great entertainment and great food as well. Horses, pigs, chickens, buffaloes, all sort of different animals were trotted out. We noticed how White all the visitors were, in fact, the whole town was full of Whiteness. There was no one on the billboards except Whites. After the show I explained to Laina that this town, entertainment and food were the culture of my people lol.

Back home, around midnight, Elsa came into our room crying because her ear hurt so bad. We thought it was infected, or she got water in it or something. We later learned that she had fluid trapped behind her eardrums. The canal into her sinuses was blocked. So she was quiet and suffering most of the weekend, which was unfortunate for her.

Saturday we drove into an outlet mall area for some retail therapy (after an energetic morning hike). They had level 2 charging there for the car, so I thought this would be a good time to see what it’s all about. The mall area was packed. I found an empty EV charging spot, backed in, got out the J1772 adapter and started charging. It was no cost, which was cool. The charge was 48 amps, about 9kw which was excellent, better than what I had at home and much better than I expected. We went to the stores, I got a pair of Giannis Nike’s after clearing it with my family that they wouldn’t look goofy on a 47 year old guy. It was at this area that I saw a ton of Teslas and other EVs, and plenty of other non-White people. Branson didn’t seem so homogenous after all.

The battery charged back up to 90%. We got some frozen custard and drove around town. Then we went home and got ready for the 7:30 show for the Heygoods. Again, this was a massively entertaining show featuring lasers, light-up banjos, automated recliners driving around, beach balls in the crowd, an upside-down guitar player, upside-down tap dancing, a harp, plenty of fiddles, text messaging, and basically a whole cornucopia of redneck-ified family bluegrass brought into the 21st century. Their social media aspect was impressive; lots of ways to engage and spend money with them.

Both shows we saw fit in nicely with the atmosphere that Branson projects. They both ended with songs about America, with plenty of flags and patriotism. But it’s the good kind of patriotism that I grew up with, just a kind of passive, feel-good love for our awesome country. There was none of this zero-sum, jingoistic, MAGA weaponized “patriotism” that you see today, the kind where you have to put down another group in order to prove how patriotic you are.

Sunday morning we drove to Hurts Donuts and waited in line for like an hour for delicious donuts, definitely worth it. I don’t see the inflation rate going down anytime soon when I’m in situations like this. People still have lots and lots of money to spend on things like gourmet donuts.

Then we drove up to Springfield to eat at Lambert’s Cafe home of the “throwed” rolls. Should be “thrown” rolls, but this is Missoura after all. The food and portions were both great at this place. The hour-and-a-half long wait was great as well. You know, people love the experience of eating. Who would have thunk it. Then we made the long trek home.

All in all it was a great adventure and experience. We plan on going back to Branson again, this time to spend 4-5 days there to do more of the activities around there. I look forward to returning to my ancestral homeland lol.

My wife and kids surprised me a gift the other day. It’s the retro Lego space ship, like what I had when I was a kid. I love it!

They got it on clearance for $56, which is about half the retail price of $100. Inflation is crazy, folks. For years I’ve mentally tracked the price of legos per brick, which was about $0.10 per brick for the Star Wars and Harry Potter sets, and less for the non-branded (non-franchised? I can’t think of that word) sets. Now it’s more.

This Space Explorer set is 1254 pieces @ $100. So about 8 cents per brick. The brand new Pirate Snub Fighter from The Mandalorian is 285 pieces @ $34.99, which is over 12 cents per brick.

I think Legos are still worth the price. We get a lot of enjoyment out of building and displaying them. I’m sure they used to be relatively cheaper back when no other company could make Lego-compatible sets. But since that was overturned 20-some years ago there’s been a lot of cheaper competitors and knockoffs come out. I think Lego took the high road and gave up competing on price. They let the low end companies have the cheap looking sets while they focused their brand on high end and highly imaginative sets.

Alexa, play “Awesome Song” by AwesomeBand.

Playing “Awesome Song” by AwesomeBand, 2023 remix.

Alexa, play the original Awesome Song. I don’t want to hear the remix.

Playing “Awesome Song” by AwesomeBand.

Alexa, this is crappy rerecording of Awesome Song that the band did to get out of paying royalties to their music company. You can tell because the singer sucks. He can’t hit the high notes that he could sing 30 years ago. Plus the guitars and drums all sound wrong. Play the original recording of Awesome Song.

Playing “Awesome Song” by AwesomeBand, 2012 live in concert.

Alexa, I don’t want to hear the live version. Play the original album version of Awesome Song.

Playing “Awesome Song” by Foo Fighters.

Alexa, I don’t want to hear the cover version of Awesome Song. I want to hear the original AwesomeBand version.

Playing “Awesome Song” by AwesomeBand.

Alexa, this is the song from their greatest hits record. Play Awesome Song and show the artwork from the original album.

Playing “Awesome Song” by AwesomeBand, from the original recording done 30 years ago.

Alexa, stop. I’m just going for a walk instead.

Got my Bootsy Figure from Super7. Now Cliff has someone to jam out with!

Back in 2012 I got a vasectomy. The doctor told me afterwards that my plumbing would be clear after 25 “expressions.”

“25 times?” I said. “Wow, do you think they make an advent calendar for that?”

#truestory

We all went to Jacksonville tonight to see the Ant-Man Quantumania movie. Basically it was an excuse for Emma to have a chaperoned date with her boyfriend.

Despite really liking the previous Ant-Man movie I found this new one to be flat. It had no heart. It was a shell of a movie, like it was AI generated but had no warmth or human touch to it. I didn’t care if any of the characters lived or died, which is a sign of a crappy movie to me.

The movie had this whole micro universe with all these creatures and people already in it. Everyone and all the scenery just begged to be in awe, like it was supposed to be gorgeous. But without a compelling story or characters to tie it together it was empty.

I feel like Disney should just lay off making Marvel films for a while. Let that field go fallow and build up some nitrogen for a future planting.

I just finished reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. It was a Christmas present from my wife. At the time I thought it was another pop-psychology-business book so I wasn’t too excited to get it as a gift. I feel like I’ve ran the gamut through these types of books. But as I started reading it I realized that it was the author that Michael Lewis wrote his own book about. So I figured it must be good. Once again, my wife knows me better than I know myself. She got me a book that I ended up really liking. It’s definitely in my top 5 all time books.

The “Thinking…” book is basically a trip down experiments that expose how biased humans are. How we say we want one thing but in reality we choose something else. It’s a fascinating read on how the human mind is split into a intuitive, fast-thinking (but often wrong) brain that helped us survive and evolve. And then there’s the slower, deeper-processing brain that is lazy, but can be called upon to really investigate when needed. The author won a Nobel Prize for economics, despite himself being a psychologist.

This is the part that I really love, the economics. I love to think of myself as an armchair economist. I didn’t care one bit for finances or budgeting or economics until the Great Recession (and marriage) in 2009 forced me to rethink how I look at the world and how the world works. I was also spending 3 hours a day commuting to/from work, so I had plenty of time to listen to audiobooks. I devoured about anything I could get on economics and finances, which led me to philosophy, and then to my holy grail that integrated all of this – Behavioral Economics. You see, it’s just not enough to know the basics of economics and how resources are allocated and all of that. You need to dig deeper, to find out more than what the textbook rational actors do. You need to find out how humans really think and act in the real world. That’s what I find fascinating about behavioral economics. It’s info about info, it’s meta-data, it’s one step beyond.

Growing up I was always the smallest of any group. I was the youngest and smallest of my siblings, and I was the smallest/weakest of my friends group. It was through knowledge, curiosity and education that I felt powerful. My group of friends was a wonderful bunch – I still love them to this day. We all had a role and fit into it. There was the leader, the joker, and the brains. I tried really hard to be the brains, and to stay in that role. I guess you could say that this role made me a better person. It defined who I was, this kid who got good grades. I don’t know how much of this I was born with, versus how much of this was a personality I developed just to fit in. [I mean, think about. How awesome was my group of friends growing up? There was no peer pressure. We didn’t try to be “cool” or fit in or be like each other. We respected each other for who we were and didn’t try to change each other.]

But being the smallest meant that I had to be smart to have any sort of power. And not only did I need to have information, I had to have information that not a lot of other people had. I had to know weird facts and stuff like this, stuff that would set me apart from the normal information people had. And that’s why I love behavioral economics in my later life. Like, you can make good decisions if you know the basics of economics. But to be really good, you’ve got to know more than the basics. You have to go meta. So knowing how real people make decisions is fascinating to me, because I feel like I can make good financial decisions with this knowledge, and not only does knowledge = power, but money = power lol.

Dad died 7 years ago today. He would have been 87 years old. I doubt that he would be alive today even if he didn’t have cancer. 87 is just an old age for anyone.

Dad was a great man and a great father. Really in some ways he was like the grandfather I never had. He was already 40 by the time I was born. So by the time I really knew him as a parent he would have been in his late 40s. He had already raised two other kids by this point so he was “chill-parent” mode by the time I came around.

He pitched baseballs to me, which ingrained the love of baseball to me. I also think he taught me everything that he knows, because there was a point later in his life where he started repeating his stories. “We’ll, that’s it” I thought. “I’ve heard everything he has to say.”

He also instilled a work ethic in me. Dad was a construction laborer, which is about the most physically demanding job a person could have. He would drive 40 miles every morning just to spend 8 hours lifting building materials or running jackhammers. It took a toll on his body but our family never went without food or shelter.

There was time when he wasn’t so nice. Not like physically abusive or anything. I think he just got older and more tired of his job. I was kinda resentful of him, plus I was a typical moody teenager.

Dad had a stroke when I was a junior or senior in high school. It changed his personality literally overnight. He became this gentle grandfatherly type, one who tended to his garden and hobbies with a fervor. It was hard for me to be mad at him at this point because he had changed so much and became a different and nicer person. But I still carried this pocket of resentment towards him because he never apologized for his previous behavior.

When dad passed away I cried at his visitation. I probably looked at his body and cried for an hour. I was sad of course but I also knew that this would be the last time I cried for him. It was me just getting it all out of my system.

For the longest time I felt like an asshole son, carrying around all this resentment and underlying anger. Dad was a man who had done so much and sacrificed so much for me. Why was I such a bad kid for having any hate towards him? Then one day my own son (who was 8 or 9 at the time) was doing something super annoying. I thought “Jesus, was I this annoying when I was a kid?” I realized instantly that I was, in fact, that annoying. I also instantly sympathized with my father who had to put up with me lol. All my underlying anger and ill will went away.

So dad, wherever you are, I want you to know I love you.

We were driving around Macomb, looking at my alma mater. Jack mentioned that he got an ok grade on his math test. The Indian kid in his class did worse. I expressed my surprise at this fact, because I would have expected Indian/Asian kids to do much better than my run-of-mill American kid. The wife and kids were aghast at my statement that I thought the Indian kid should have straight A’s. I explained that I wasn’t being racist or stereotyping or any of that. It’s just a matter of economics. You see, our country is surrounded by two humungous oceans. If an Indian wants to come here to work and live, they need to either have the money or brains to do it. It’s not like they can just hop a train and be here in a couple of hours.

So if an Indian has the wherewithal to come here (not to mention the desire to escape whatever prior living conditions they had) then they’re going to make damn sure that their kids are getting the best education and best grades available. I would say that you don’t get to be a lazy American until you’re at least 3 generations in, lol.

We kept driving until we reached a road called Wigwam Hollow. I said “There. Now that’s a street named after Indians.” Again my family was shocked at this statement. I said to them basically that Native Americans are still named Indians to me. They always have been and always will be. Some day I will be dead and everyone who thinks the way I do will be dead as well. Then they will only be known as Native Americans.

The same school district that teaches my kids about Natives is the same exact one that taught me about Indians. I remember having to go in front of my preschool class and sing “Ten Little Indians.” I am a big baseball fan and most of my youth was collecting baseball cards, which included the Cleveland Indians. I watched the movie “Major League” a couple of times, which was about the Indians.

I told my family that if god came down and said “Tim, I will let you live an extra ten years if you call them Native Americans instead of Indians,” then I would be all about calling them Natives. But so far that hasn’t happened. I get to carry my beliefs to the grave. I do reserve the right to ingest new information and change my mind about all subjects but I don’t think I will change on this particular topic.

I told my kids that they have to call them Natives. I’m grandfathered in to the whole Indian thing but my kids aren’t. Jack thinks he can call the Cleveland ball team the Indians but I correct him and say he has to use the Guardians. He hasn’t been a baseball fan long enough to have the privilege of calling them Indians.

As I get older I don’t like the idea of my youth being gaslit away. You’re probably thinking “Wow Tim, way to make it all about you. The Natives are the ones who have been suffering all this time. You should listen to what they want.” This is a good point. I would never be so callous to call a Native person an Indian to their face. I don’t want to be rude. I think I’m more pissed at the idea of white people telling me what I should and shouldn’t say. Like, it’s not even about Indians/Natives themselves at this point.

Also I explained to my family that this whole Indian belief of mine is personal. I’m not going out in public advocating for a return to the name “Indian”. I don’t care. I know times and beliefs change, and no one can stop it. But this Indian thing is a souvenir from my past. It’s my own little remaining fight against The Man.

Growing up I remember my dad throwing around the N-word casually. I didn’t hate him for it. It was just part of his vocabulary growing up. Also it’s not like he said that word in anger. That would be different. Speaking of Dad, he died 7 years ago today. I’ll have to write a whole separate post about him.

“Here, try this!” says anyone as they hold food inches away from my mouth. “Try it, just try it!”. Ugh. Just let me stick your fingers in my mouth while you’re at it.