Life of Brian

I culled from 101 Theme Thursday (now called Thursday Challenge) photo submissions from the couple years I was an active participant and picked 20 favorites. They are now in yet another gallery. Still to come, my best of PhotoFriday & Phototime Tuesday entries in their own galleries as well. I’m not sure about Lensday Wednesday, because I was just starting to do it when gave up the photo memes cold-turkey I only have 17 entries total. Maybe I can get the top 5 or 10 in a gallery.

Added a Washington DC gallery today. It is pictures from Donna and my 3-day trip to the nation’s capital back in March of this year.

I’m going to start working on making galleries for the all the photo memes I used to do before burning out. These will take longer and I’m not going to post every one. Theme Thursday and Photo Friday I did nearly every week for a little over two years, that means over a 100 photos and I know not all of them were winners. I’m thinking maybe what I consider the best 25 or 30 will be all I include from those two. Phototime Tuesday ran for about a year and a half and I had just started doing Lensday Wednesday, so those pools and consequentially the galleries will be smaller.

That was how it was presented to us in an all employee meeting yesterday.

First the bad news, our company will not be giving a General Wage Increase (hourly) or a Merit Increase (salary) for all of 2006. Second the great news, they will now offer a profit sharing plan. And to kick it off we will be included in the company wide 2005 profit sharing. On November 15th an amount of approximately 4.78% of your base salary will be deposited in an account setup for you you use at retirement.

The great news was only great if you were not already living from paycheck to paycheck and really counted on that 3% raise for this year. Fortunately this probably is only a small percentage of employees.

For Donna and I it is doubly great as we will both get a nice little sum in our accounts. This will be in addition to our current 401k where we are tucking aside 15% pre-tax for our retirement. Our 401k is invested in a plan that adjusts automatically as we move towards retirement, slightly higher risk funds now that will slowly change to more conservative funds the closer we get to the “golden years.” This profit sharing stuff is kind of found money and I think we will plop it down in the most aggressive fund we can find. If it tanks, pffft, who cares, we already have Social Security, the meager retirement fund the company already has and that 401k to fall back on (God willing and the creek don’t rise.)

We have been after a 401k match for years and the whole we are a “cost center” and we must stay competitive thing had worn thin a long time ago. Every quarterly communication meeting, every yearly state of the company meeting and every bi-annual corporate opinion survey the first question asked was always, “When are we going to get a 401k match?” The first answer to the question, “What is the one thing that you would change about ASCO is?” “401k match.” More than a few folks have left the company and in their exit interview when asked why, the answer was, that’s right, the new place offers a matching 401k.

A couple of things aligned to make this happen. One of which was the company had a really good year (thanks to all of you who bought our valves.) Another was we saved a bunch on money on medical insurance by switching to BCBS of Alabama. The no pay raises for a year thing certainly helped a bunch. So big thanks to company management for pulling this off, we finally get a 401k match, even if it is variable from year to year (historically it has been around 5% for the last 5 years) and it is called Profit Sharing. When you stop and think about it, they did go the extra mile for the people too, a 401k match would have been cheaper on them because not every one participates in the voluntary savings program. With the profit sharing everybody gets a slice of the pie, even if they don’t want it.

I have read a couple of his books before and they are laugh out loud funny. Today at the used book store Donna unearthed one of his from 2000 that I remember reading about, but never got around to actually reading the book. From Bill Bryson’s “In a Sunburned Country:”

“It’s all right,” she giggled. “It’s dead.”

We peered cautiously at the little object on her fingertip, a telltale red hourglass shape on its shiny back. It seemed unlikely that something so small could deliver instant agony, but make no mistake, a single nip from a redback’s malicious jaws can result within minutes in “frenzied twitching, a profuse flow of body fluids, and in the absence of prompt medical attention, possible death.” Or so the literature reports.

“You probably won’t see any redback’s out there,” Sonja reassured us. “Snakes are much more of a problem.”

This intelligence was received with four raised eyebrows and expressions that said, “Go on.”

She nodded. “Common brown, western taipan, western puff pastry, yellow-backed lockjaw, eastern groin groper, dodge viper…” I don’t remember what she said exactly, but it was a long list. “But don’t worry,” she continued. “Most snakes don’t want to hurt you. If you’re out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes.”

This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I have ever been given.

That is how I wish my words came out.