Help Wanted

There's nothing more dangerous than a man and his thoughts. I don't know a lot of men on a personal level, but the ones I do know like to think. If given the opportunity to ponder, we men can come up with some crazy ideas. I usually have a few times per week where I am forced to think. This will occur when I have a long drive, time on a mower or fishing. Logically, my summers are packed with deep thought. I am assuming the men who built America: John Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and etc spent a lot time cutting grass or fishing. Of course Henry Ford had many road trips.

My latest thought came while I was mowing. I thought it would be great to have a personal assistant. Not just "business" personal assistant, but a "life" personal assistant. How many times do you hear a song and want to write it down...cue Life Personal Assistant. Let's just call this person LPA. Need a grocery run or a few phone calls made? LPA is there. I am talking about a person that wakes you up in the morning, forces you to work out, do your devotion, provides breakfast and flat out checks your email. There has to be a few ground rules. First, LPA doesn't get involved with the kids or the Mrs. We can't get too lazy! LPA is a fill the gaps in life so time with family can be had.

Before you label me as lazy and effortless, my LPA's first and foremost responsibility would be to keep me on track and busy to succeed in the game of life. This leads me to my second ground rule: my LPA will make sure I spend time with the Lord, time with family, eat healthy, exercise and sacrifice time/money for those in need. My LPA allows me to get more done in life in a shorter amount of time. This may sound too "American," but I would embraced it and do it for good.

What would your LPA do?


God bless and thanks for reading

Bartering Wife

In case you are wondering, the picture is suppose to represent "bartering." Why bartering you ask? Well my wife has become the bartering machine. It took six plus years, but she finally has come to the "entrepreneurship" side and decided to start making some keesh...or cash for those of you wondering. I am not sure how this started, but Amanda spends more time on Craigslist than Pinterest...well not really, but you get the idea. Recently Amanda sold an electric powered car for $25!! So proud of my girl. There are great sites out there for moms. Facebook has a page just for moms to barter back and forth. It looks like the many fights we have had over "junk" around the house is starting to pay off for old hubby. Great job Amanda!!

God Bless and thanks for reading.

What happen to arriving early?

I try to go through life not worrying about pet peeves. I have many and at times can complain about them excessively. As I advance my professional work life, I have been blessed with the opportunity to manage people. Manage can be a loose term and I, at times, prefer to "lead" people, but that is another blog. Besides four way stop signs and those who throw cigarette butts on the ground, employees that either show up right on time or a little late drive me crazy. Remember the saying, and I might not have it correct, "Five minutes is on time, on time is late and late is unacceptable?" My college professor taught me this phrase and I do everything possible to follow it. Granted, there are times I show up late. Any of you with young children understand. When I am going to be late, a text or phone call is a must.

So if you are the individual that likes to show up right a starting time or even a little after, then you won't be an employee under my lead very long. If you are the employee that shows up 5 minutes early and asks what can be done, then we will get along very well.

God Bless and thanks for reading.

Summer's Official Fruit

We are only 3 weeks into the "nice weather" season and already our family has consumed three watermelons. We are watermelon extremist. Amanda and I love it and Emmett and Katelynn have followed suit. There is something about the fresh juicy hit of flavor that hits the sweet spot on a hot day. It's odd watermelon doesn't have a different name. Other fruits have a distinguishing name to them, but watermelon is a melon that is loaded with water, but flavor too...go figure.

Imagine being the person who discovered watermelon? According to Wikipedia, watermelon is native to southern Africa. What a day it must have been for the lucky chap that found this big green ball. Walks over to it, probably dropped it and then took a bite. The rest is history.

Hopefully this summer, you can join the Tracy's in watermelon enjoyment. We do about one a week and love every bite.

God Bless and thanks for reading.

Transparency Not Always a Good Thing

We have all been there. At a public restroom and life's demand to relieve thyself must be met. 99.9% of us would rather be in the comforts of our own home, but we have no choice. Now there are some public restrooms we can tolerate. Your local forth floor public library or maybe a nice Baptist church. But on the flip side there are public restrooms we wish to never encounter. Gus Town and Pump just outside the North Dakota border or the outhouse 12.3 hiking miles in at a State Park. Regardless of the destination, we cringe knowing what we are about to put our tooshes through.

I can tolerate the butt to plastic commitment, but there are two components of public restroom use I cannot stand. First, what is up with transparent toilet paper? If I can see through the toilet paper...that's not good!! This only means I use more and A LOT more. One day I would like to grab a roll and go to the managers desk and ask if they would put this in their own home. Second, how come the toilet paper dispenser has to be down by my ankles? Does your business serve a lot of hobbits? I can see the logic. If the dispenser is that low then the "consumer" can only pull down so much toilet paper. What really happens is that I pull 28 single sheets and eventually there is a large mess on the floor and a soon to be plugged up toilet.

Often times we get caught up in saving a penny here or a penny there and we forget about the customer. There are goods and services in life it doesn't pay to go cheap and toilet paper is high on the list. Let's throw in bread, underwear, diapers, shoes and steak for good measure.

All I ask is serve your customers well and take care of their tooshes!!

My wife requested I go back to some "funny" blog posts...here is my attempt. 

God Bless and thanks for reading.

A Crazy Meant To Be

The past few weeks have been crazy for the Tracy household. With the recent interest rates to borrow money so low and a persuasive realtor, Amanda and I decided to sell our home of 5 years. It's been a great starter home and will be for another young couple, but we were finding we had a few wants/needs on the list and found a home we hope will fill those gaps. In order to speed up the selling process, our realtor suggested upgrading the hardwood floors and adding an egress window downstairs (addition of a 4th bedroom). In return, the home value would go up and should appeal to more buyers.

Starting on a Wednesday, I started the hardwood floors and painting of living room walls. By Sunday, I was done and the photographer came on Monday. Tuesday morning the house went live and we had 12 showings over the next 36 hours. Wednesday evening the first offer came through and it was too good to pass. Oh yeah, we signed papers to buy our other home on Monday as well. It was a crazy week, but blessed in so many ways. Lots of family and friends helping along the way to make the process easy. The biggest blessing though didn't occur during the past week.

Two years ago, I was hired by the North Dakota Highway Patrol. As a family, we were moving to Grafton, ND. Our home was on the market for 3 months and didn't sell. You can probably argue the market had little demand, and this is true. The bigger blessing was from God. We believe God wanted us to stay in Fargo and continue our purpose within this community. We believe there are bigger things coming up for Amanda, the kids and myself and we are going to help others in many ways. Trying to sell our house during those 3 months was a very stressful time, but this time around God showed his awesome glory and we are so happy to move, yet stay in Fargo.

God's amazing power is so easy to see when the good times are good, but I think we grow as Christians immensely when we can recognize his glory during stressful times. We all know who those people are in our life. Aspire to be like them, because they are so fun to be around!!!

God bless and thanks reading.