Famous Reindeer Education Enterprises, LLC

08/14/2024

08/14/2024

Getting ready for Art Near Speed Park, Heritage Days, and a flurry of holiday shows. And more to come in next few weeks!

07/29/2024

As a risk management professional, I get annoyed by hearing politicians, police, victims, etc., saying we need a law, investigation, procedure, policy, etc., to make sure "this never happens again." Everything that happens has happened before and will happen again regardless of what we humans do. Risk managers plan to minimize the likelihood of occurrence and to mitigate the impact of those events not prevented. Let's get real and address problems to minimize likelihoods of occurrence and severity of events instead of making empty promises that can never be kept. If you think laws prevent stuff from happening, try driving at the legal speed limit on our highways and count the cars that whiz by you.

07/22/2024

two new books in final stages of publishing: Three Stones, stories of trails and trail markers, and The Owls, stories of young Scouts hooting and howling their way through the forest.

05/26/2024

Hmmmm

05/20/2024

Today, I watched a red VW convertible pull up next to me in a parking lot. The top and the windows were down. The driver got out of the car and locked the doors. I hope she didn't leave the keys in the vehicle.

05/16/2024

Grading an exam on use of financial statements in risk management: I'm going to report the test-taker who wrote "may result in erroneous errors" to the Department of Redundancy Department.

05/14/2024

Don't marry a seismologist. They're always finding faults.

05/13/2024

I think I might have created a new word. I can't find it in any dictionary.
Retrologic: the process of thinking how to get out of the mess you created in the first place by not fully thinking it through.

05/07/2024

From 1975 through 2005, I worked in multi-story buildings. A few were three floors, and one was 45 floors. I have been in buildings like the World Trade Center (110 floors), the Woolworth building (60 floors), Sears (now Willis) Tower (110 floors), the John Hancock (95 floors), and the like. Never until today was I stuck in an elevator, and that was on the basement level.
I entered the elevator from the lower level, finding three women already in the car. I assumed they had gotten onto a down elevator when they wanted to go up to the second or third floor because they didn't exit. I pushed 1 and the door closed. We had lift-off, and about two second later, the car shuddered and we dropped about 100 feet (or so it seemed -- it had to be only about a foot or less). One woman screamed, one said, "Oh, I don't like this," and the other stood with a frightened look on her face. I smiled and said, "This is just like in the movies. And now," I said as I pointed up, "Tom Cruise is going to drop down from the ceiling and rescue us." One of them laughed. Now, I could have done something stupid like clutch my chest and gasp then fall to the floor, hoping one of them would give me mouth to mouth respiration, but all of them were middle-aged, not nubile teenagers. I could have said, "We're all going to die," like one of the passengers on a plane I was on said when the captain announced we had to make an emergency landing and we should ignore the fire trucks lining the runway because they are there out of an abundance of caution. Instead, I pressed the emergency call button and spoke to a 911-type operator who wanted to know what my emergency was. After following his instructions to press the open-door button for five seconds (and after one of the women told me to press the other button), he asked what happened and I told him that the lights indicated the final destinations (the term frightens me) of 1, 2 and 3 floors were now off. Then the door opened and the emergency was over. I didn't get on TV or a medal or nothing.

05/06/2024

I'm grading a risk analysis exam, and one question asked was "Define the Empirical Rule." The best answer so far is "The Empire makes the rule and those who don't follow it are skewed."

04/19/2024

Installment 10, the last one.

Lesson 10

"Stop whining! That spider's more afraid of you than you are if it. Cripes, Richard, look how small it is and how big you are!" Dad had said when he was relegated to putting me to bed while Mom was helping care for her mother following major surgery. I stared with my two eyes at the huge arthropod clinging to the ceiling a mere ten feet away from me, the ambient light in my room reflecting off the eight eyes of the spider as it stared back at me to size me up for a possible meal. We stared at each other until I fell asleep. That night I dreamed of a gigantic spider crawling over me, wrapping me in its silk, and dragging me off to feed its unholy hatchlings in the webbed nest tucked tightly in the corner of the ceiling. The next morning, I awoke. The spider was not guarding its nest. I rubbed my face, and found my lip was swollen and it itched. I looked in the mirror on my dresser only to find that there was a smear of something that I hoped was snot on my cheek, but upon closer inspection, I realized snot, even snot generated after playing in a dusty haymow, didn't have eight legs sticking out of it.

The valuable lesson learned was that if you gaze into the abyss long enough, the abyss will gaze back at you, particularly if the abyss is a big hairy spider.