It snowed here last night.  This morning, I had already scooped the driveway and had just pushed the last drift off the front porch when I heard it… the heavy scraping of the snowplow. I was done.  And then I wasn’t. It took me as much time and energy to open the mountain of heavy ice at the mouth of the driveway as it had the whole thing.

Every day there are a lots of snowplows, big and little, throwing mountains of icy snow in the driveways of our lives.  Don’t get discouraged.  When you get snowed under, if you can smile and start again you are capable of remarkable things.  Just keep digging.  Just keep going.  Just keep doing.

photo by ww3billard

Success consists of going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. ~ Sir Winston Churchill

In the early 1970′s, a couple of high school friends named Paul and Bill started a company called Traf-O-Data.  At the time, cities were using pneumatic traffic counters to count the number of vehicles passing by — essentially a hose strung across the road that puffed air into a device that punched holes onto a roll of paper.  These punches were then hand-tabulated.  Basically a huge pain in the patoot.

So Paul and Bill had an idea: (more…)

Our friends have a thirteen year-old daughter who wants another snake.  She owns two snakes and a collection of lizards, frogs and turtles.  She wants to be a herpetologist.  If you’re not well-versed on rare biological science careers, herpetology is the study of amphibians and reptiles.  At thirteen, she is quite certain she wants to devote her professional life to crawling creatures.  And her parents completely support this dream (though they’re not sure about that third snake).

It’s not always so.  Sometimes it’s hard to support our kids’ dreams.  Maybe their dreams are embarrassing to us (talk to a father whose son dreams of becoming a nurse or ballet dancer).  Maybe their dreams are “too big” — and we don’t want to see them fail and get hurt.  Maybe their dreams mean moving far away from home.  Maybe their dreams just don’t fit our dreams for them.  But be careful; notice that all of these complaints are we-centric.

It’s not about us. As parents, it’s tempting to broadcast our dreams onto our children. It’s tempting to put our dreams ahead of theirs. But it never works. They either pursue their dream anyway and resent you for your lack of support, or they pursue your dream to please you and resent you for stealing their freedom to choose.  In either case, everybody loses.  Better to simply support them on the way to their own dreams.

Artwork by Brad Sneed from Following Featherbottom.

If you want to know how to make the world’s best cranberry sherbet, you’re in luck. Read on. But the real discussion here is about tradition.  I’m just using cranberry sherbet as a pretext to talk about it. (more…)