Days Gone By

Here's a link to The Old Meeting Hall by Dick Warwick. My Beloved read it to me out of a farming lifestyle book she is reading at the moment. This really captures the feel of what we and our friends are looking into for future living arrangements.

Confessing Her Shortcomings

So, I work second shift at a country club as a personal trainer/evening fitness manager. This means that I get home rather late, especially since I often ride a bicycle back and forth. Therefore, as a family we have arranged our schedule so that mornings are our main time together and the children are in bed before I get home.

This has, unfortunately, cut down on the number of times I get to come in the door to "I get first hug!" This is a shame as that particular argument between my children is VERY gratifying to the daddy ego. It is best for our sanity, though; a full night's sleep for the children and some mommy and daddy alone time go a long way to maintaining at least the semblance of a right mind.

My Darling Daughter, however, sleeps in the room closest to the front door and often hears me come in which brings her creeping from her bed for a quick hug that the boys miss out on. A couple of nights ago I told my daughter in a fondly exasperated tone, after yet another sneaky, late night hug, that the point of having her in bed before I get home was that she get to sleep at that time. She peered shyly up at me from under her long strands of hair and said, "Yeah, I'm not so good at that."

Treating Symptoms a Losing Endeavor

If you only treat the symptom you'll never cure the underlying problem, and the symptoms will just return again and again.


The above is a paraphrase/summation of a bit of wisdom my father taught me as I was growing up. He had to repeat it a time or two because I was a young idealist bent on saving the world and quite convinced I had the PLAN. He would calmly talk me through to the logical conclusion of whatever my latest PLAN happened to be thereby showing me I had, once again, not thought it through.


This concept is nicely demonstrated in the old adage, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."

Its antithesis, however, can be found in the rallying cry, "There ought to be a law!" It seems that, or some variation thereof, is all I ever hear anyone say anymore.

• I lost my job; we need to make a law to take care of me.
• Someone offended me; there should be law.
• That private business lets people smoke near me; we've got to fix that.
• Those bikers are getting hit, going to the hospital and driving up insurance prices; helmet law!
• ...and so on.

I'd like to insert here a completely impractical wish. I would love for everyone who wants a piece of quick fix legislation enacted which is designed to save him/her from the vagaries of fate or the consequences of his/her own actions to have to attach to it another bill designed to help some other poor slob with his/her individual problem such that providing for the second bill would have direct negative consequences on the proponent of the first bill.

If everyone had to take a personal hit each time he/she tried to hit up everyone else for his/her own solution I wonder how long it would take before folks quit running to Uncle Sam for a hand out and started finding other more personally responsible solutions to their own problems.

A Wisch-a-what? Wischism Defined

A Wischism.

During my stint in the military folks got tired of saying my full last name. So they just called me Wisch. If I could have used it on official documents we all would have been happy.

At any rate I've decided to carve my own little piece out of the world wide web where I will share those things I find worth sharing. These may include amusing things the kids said or did on a given day. Since I'm a personal trainer they may include exercise tips. They may simply be some tidbit concerning one of my various hobbies and interests from Dungeons and Dragons to The Fair Tax. Interspersed throughout one may find the occasional rant about the state of affairs in the world today delivered from a staunchly conservative Christian homeschooler. And by 'occasional' I mean 'more often to be found than anything else'.

So, family, friends and anyone else who stumbles along and finds the atmosphere in here agreeable (or enticingly disagreeable) pull up a chair, grab a Wischism and dig in. Respond as suits you. I prefer polite, though occasinally heated, debate rather than insults and I'll be respectful if you will. If you won't I may send some of my more redneck friends around to visit you, like me they don't think much of gun control and have the hardware to prove it.