Challenge Question

So I have a question.  Is it worse to have regrets over something you've done or live a life afraid of doing something you'll regret?

What do you think?

Get Over Yourself

I’ll admit up front that I hate failure and I hate to lose, even more I hate public embarrassment, in fact I’ve spent a considerable amount of energy in my life time making sure that I don’t embarrass myself. I’ll also admit I’ve had moments where I have found a small amount of pleasure in other people’s failure (There’s actually a term for this, it’s called schadenfreude). But herein lies the problem. We’ve forgotten the blessing of extreme public humiliation and failure. By Extreme Public Humiliation I mean really, really, stinking it up, hanging your dirty laundry out for all to see.


Until you’ve sucked it up BIG TIME, in ways you can’t cover up, and lived to tell about it you just might never give yourself the FREEDOM to RISK. As long as you are afraid of failure you may hold back your success. If you’ve not given yourself the freedom to risk, you will probably never be and do all you could be and do.

Until you give yourself permission to strike out, get the shot blocked or throw the interception you’ll never give yourself the opportunity to swing for the fence, risk taking a shot on goal, or throwing for the end-zone.

In raising my four boys we’ve tried hard to instill in them a winning spirit, and a love for competition, but we’ve never said, “losing isn’t an option” because it is, in fact it’s something we need to be really good at because it’s going to happen more than we like. So don’t let fear of failure keep you from giving it the old college try. After all, if you can’t lose then you also can’t win, and you’ll never really know the sweetness of overcoming defeat and the thrill of victory.

I used to hate dancing because I knew I wasn’t any good at it. How could I be, I had never danced. Since I wasn’t about to take lessons the only way to get good at it was to GET OVER MYSELF in public. The up side of this is that everyone’s enjoyment level really goes up when really suckalicious dancers lets it all hang out in public. Once your over yourself you can bask in the freedom of freedom. Janis Joplin said, Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” Imagine the freedom that comes from surviving utter humility, the upward possibilities that follow utter failure!!!

With this in mind I want you all to go out early this year and increase your suck factor. Regularly engage in things at which you’ll completely embarrass yourself. Risk failure by swinging for the fence. If you need some help with this regularly read President Roosevelt’s, The Man in the Arena”.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Name Game

Dear Blog Reader,

First, thanks so much for taking an interest in reading my poor musings.  It's kind of fun to share my experiences and you are all an encouragment to me.

The name Dawg Gone It, evolved and made it through the blog software, meaning no else wanted the name. It has nostaligic significance and reflects my steel building company name which is Red Dog Steel named after our Big Red Rodesian Ridgeback, but was never a first choice.

Now I need your help in choosing a name that is memorable and easy, but isn't in use.  It has to be memorable and spell-able.

Help me out please. Suggest a name in the comments section.

As I final thought I am considering "Adventure Pub".  A pub is a traditional meeting place for sharing community and communication. It's not so much a "bar" as we in America think of pubs. Anyway, please give me your thoughts.

Life Quotes

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."  Novelist - John Le Carre'

"More men have gotten lost sitting behind their desk than ever did venturing out."  Amateur philosopher and bloggist - T.S. Reynolds

"I see my path before me, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it." - Rosalia de Castro

"Life is either a great adventure or nothing." -Helen Keller

Women you shouldn't kiss

It was my second trip to Afghanistan, almost two years after Bush had declared the major confrontation over. My travel bud and I were delivering about 2 million dollars worth of stuff to needy people in Afghanistan; ultrasound machines, school supplies, blankets, Y2K rations no one needed, an ambulance, that kind of stuff.

I should have known better but as I think back I had a bad pattern of kissing girls I should have stayed far from, but this one was different. This one could get you killed.

The first was a girl who lived about ten miles away from my house. I cut school, rode my bike ten miles, kissed her in the middle of the road when she got off the bus and road home before my parents got home from work. I spent the next week trying to hide from her at school by swapping jackets with my friends so she couldn’t spot me.

I guess when travelling one should bone up on local customs, but then what could possibly go wrong; one big white guy in the middle of Afghanistan.

As we met with the Minister of Health, a woman by the way, for the handing over of the ambulance and ultrasounds it was to be a big media event. I got in line with the rest of my group to meet the MoH. The three people in front of me greeted her with a Holy Kiss. Trying to be hip to the culture and adopting something I’d learned from watching my wife’s high society friends I also greeted her with a peck on the cheek. I didn’t realize I was the first man in the group. Can you say “Taboo”

Someone should have told me you can’t kiss the women in Muslim countries. Maybe the Burka’s and face veils should have given me a clue.

As soon as I kissed her I knew something was wrong. She squealed and giggled like a school girl and her and her little group of school yard friends ran away. I felt like Georgy Porgy. Meanwhile really big guys started confiscating video cameras from all the networks.

Oh well, somewhere in our mission statement we mention spreading “Peace and Understanding” amongst people groups. I guess they have a better understanding of the big guy from America.

Mosquitos SUCK!!!

As a follow up to my last Blog which took a look at the funny side of me getting malaria I thought I'd take a more serious look at malaria so we remember the 1 million people a year who die from it.  For those of you wanting to get a nice case of malaria, maybe this can be used to help you out also.

Every traveler should have a basic knowledge of malaria and diseases prevalent in the areas in which they will be travelling. The easiest way to do this is to tell your doctor where you will be going. The doctor can access the CDC website and find out what kinds of shots you should get before you head out. This should be done well enough in advance so you don’t board the plane and then break out in an allergic reaction to the shot you just received. Also some shots need to be taken in a series so plan ahead.


On top of that you need to know that Malaria pills do not guarantee that you won’t get malaria, they only make it less likely. Also the malaria medicine has to be appropriate to the strain of malaria in the area in which you are going to travel. You can’t just use the pills from your last trip or barrow a friends left over pills unless you are going back to the same place.

All of this is pretty basic info – now I want to give you some facts on malaria that are not only shocking, but true. These facts and more can be found on the RBM website at www.rollbackmalaria.org

Only the facts…

• Malaria's transferred from person to person via a mosquito bite.

• Only female mosquitos transmit malaria. The female has whiskers.

• Not all female mosquito’s carry malaria.



• The vast majority of malaria deaths occur in Sub-Sahara Africa.

• Malaria costs Africa more than $12 Billion in lost GDP yearly.

• Malaria is responsible for over 1 million deaths a year.

• Malaria is Africa’s number one killer of children under five.

• Malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds.

• Malaria accounts for one in five of all childhood deaths in Africa.

• African children have 1.6 – 5.4 episodes of malaria per year.

• 40% of the world’s children live in malaria-endemic countries.

• Malaria causes poverty, poverty opens the door for malaria.



• Mosquito Nets can prevent a half million death per year.

• The cost of a treated mosquito net is about $1.70.

• The cost to re-treat a net for a year is about $0.60

FACT: For $2.00 you can buy a mosquito net for a child in Africa and reduce work and school loss and even save a life. So do something today. Go on line to your favorite charity and see if they have a mosquito net purchasing program. If they don’t, make a donation to Assist International at www.assistinternational.org and earmark it for mosquito nets.

The key to the casual traveler is to know the symptoms and check in with your doctor if you come down with any of them within 9–14 days of possible exposure to Malaria. Symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting and other flu like symptoms. Knowing this shouldn’t keep you from getting out there and living life.

Now that's Malariaous

The first thing you need to know about Malaria is that most doctors in the U.S. have never come across a case of malaria, so you’ll pretty much be on your own as far as diagnosing it.

The second thing you need to know about Malaria is that it isn’t a sexually transmitted disease, unless of course you consider swapping bodily fluids with a mosquito, sex. Evidently some of my wife’s friends missed this point when they sent her their condolences and in hushed tones ask, “How are you doing with all of this.”

When I came down with Malaria "from sharing a dirty mosquito" in Northern Uganda I had no idea what the symptoms really were or that it would take two weeks to feel the effects, which in my travel world was a short eternity ago. Because I was travelling to Africa so frequently I had quit taking the preventative drug because at some point the danger of living on the drugs out ways the risk of Malaria. Where I went wrong was in not knowing the symptoms.

The first flu like symptoms hit me late on a Friday night after a returning from my oldest son’s high school football game to a yard and trees draped in toilet paper. My wife and I decided it was better to clean it up for him than to wait for the dew to set in and make a real mess. In the middle of cleaning I started complaining about chills and not feeling good, which solicited from my wife our family mantra, “Buck up and quit being a wimp”.

The second round of symptoms struck the next morning, but since being a wimp was already ruled out by my wife I set off for the Sierra foothills with my youngest son to go fishing. Something I had promised to do. By time I got home I tumbled into bed shaking like a leaf.

Round three hit the next morning as we were headed out the door to church. To this I received the, “If that’s the kind of dad you want to be go ahead and stay home” speech. I stayed home. Not that I wanted to be that kind of dad, but no one wants a sweating, chilling, shaking, man sharing a pew with them and I certainly didn’t want to be there in my condition.

Malaria symptoms hit every ten to twelve hours. In between you start feeling good like you’re whipping the flu, so you get up, shower, shave and try to forge on. Then it hits you again.

Round four struck as we were preparing to go to another sporting event for one of my four boys, I can’t remember which one or what sport because by now I wasn’t right in the head. Again choosing to be “one of those dad’s” I stayed home.

In our family if you’re sick don’t expect chicken soup to be delivered to your room anytime soon. You just get banished to your room and if by some chance you prove to be strong enough to rejoin the pack, then more power to you.

On day four, in between rounds of sweating and freezing I drug myself to the office to answer emails before setting out to driving 450 miles to San Diego. My colleagues took one look at me, which was one more look than my family had given me, and sent me home.

At home I argued that the drive south would do me good and I would probably complete my recovery “from the flu” somewhere between Bakersfield and Castaic. I was seriously not thinking right. I had also convinced myself that the reason my pee was bright orange was because I was living entirely on orange Gatorade in an attempt to flush this nasty flu from my system. (A point not lost by my friends who later delivered a huge jug to my hospital room) My wife sent me to bed with the words, “You don’t look to good”. Evidently she finally looked at me. This got her thinking and researching which is her specialty.

Next thing I knew I was being rushed to the hospital by her while being briefed that I had every symptom of Malaria except “coma and death come quickly”.

The hospital was another problem. No matter how many times we told them I had Malaria they refused to believe us and placed the both of us in an isolated room deep in the bowels of the hospital with a big vent to suck out all of our germs. This was just to occupy us while they called the CDC who still checks on me periodically. They wouldn’t even feed us they just stuck the food outside the door and ran. They even had the audacity to tell me after tests that they had ruled out malaria.

By coincidence (God’s way of working anonymously) there was a Ghanaian doctor in the hospital that had trained in one of the hospitals I had been working at in Kumasi, Ghana. When they finally brought him to see me (This I remember as well as I remember the hallucinations of cockroaches dressed in nurse outfits), he looked at me from the door way and said, “You have Malaria. I’ll get you fixed up in no time.”

If you’re one of those who thinks there are too many foreign doctors and nurses you might want to think again. Sooner or later you may come down with something that only they can recognize. Thank God for foreign doctors.

Which Way Does Your Toilet Swirl?

You’ve heard it said that “Life is a journey, not a destination”. Accepting this as true then it stands to reason that what makes for a rich life is where the journey takes you and who you meet along the way. Under the heading of “Along the Way”, if you are ever crossing Uganda, say from Entebbe, Kampala, or Jinja towards Rwanda, perhaps to visit the gorillas near the border, safari at Queen Elizabeth Park or camp on an island in Lake Bunyoni you’ll happen across a place in the town of Equator called the Aid Child Café. (www.aidchild.org)

The Aid Child Café serves some of the best Muzungu (White Guy) food you’ll find in Africa, with brown sugar muffins the size of your head, real latte’s to help wash it down, veggie wraps and chipati chips with Mexican guacamole. And you’ll know you’re on the right path because of the entertaining roads signs starting about a 100 meters before getting there. Signs like, “That’s alright, that’s ok, use your credit card and let daddy pay.”

The founders and staff of AidChild live out the words of Robert Louis Stevenson when he wrote, “So long as we are loved by others, we are indispensable, and no (one) is useless (when they) have a friend.” The café is designed to provide a revenue stream for their work of supporting and rescuing AID's orphans, so stop by and load up. Besides they have the only clean sit down toilet you’ll find for another 100 miles.

Speaking of toilets and equatorial lines, since the café sits astraddle the equator you can answer once and for all the question, “Do toilets swirl in opposite directions on opposite sides of the equator?” To make it simple and clean and conducive to sharing with  friends there at the border are three tractor disks with a hole in the center. If you pour water in the disk in the Northern Hemisphere it will indeed swirl in the opposite direction of the disk in the Southern Hemi. And guess what. On the equator, it drains straight down. No swirly at all. Amazing. What that would do to a good flush I'm not sure.

So if you think you’ve arrived in life, hook a “Uey”, and head out for the AidChild Café. It’ll do everyone some good.  And BTW, say "HI" to Ann for me.

The Journey

I've never been much of a poetry guy, but one day my wife brought home one of those little coffee table books, the kind they sell at the check out line. It was titled Ten Poems To Change Your Life.  A pretty over rated claim for a $14 book with ten random poems, but then who doesn't want to change at least a part of their life now and then, so I picked it up and read.

Buried in the book is a short poem by Mary Oliver that spoke so deeply to my wife and I that it actually changed our lives. I share it with you. If it speaks to you like it did to us good. If not, hang on to it and some day it will give you the courage to start the  journey you've been putting off too long.

The Journey

"One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life that you could save."

Someone once said, "Only those who risk going too far will really know how far they could go."  I like to say, and I'm sure I stole it from someone so long ago I think its mine, "If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space." And so I leave you with the words of one of my best travelling buddies who often asks, but only rhetorically, "What could possibly go wrong?"

The Journey to Blogville

As a habitual traveler to out of the way places I've been told repeatedly that I need to jounal or write about the strange places I find myself in and the sometimes stranger people I meet along the way. To this point I  haven't wanted to be like someone showing you pictures from their family vacation.

Now with  the up tide of Blogging and people having the freedom to  log on and read when and where they feel like it I've decided to start writing. One of the good things about blogging  is that it can be kind of free form without deadlines or publishers, it can go with the mood of the day. So read freely and I hope you enjoy.

The occcurance that pushed me over the top was the  guy I  wrote about in my 10/14 blog. The guy who poured water in my isle seat so he could have it, forcing me to take his middle seat. Originally I was going to write about travel, but it seemed to restrictive and limited only to those thinking about travel. In reality though life is a journey, as we know, not a destination.

A journey so grand that we'll be exploring it until the day we die. A journey we travel in large part alone, while sharing its commonality and crossing paths with each other.  A journey with hills, mountains, and then really steep places. A jouney with slopes, downhills, drop offs and cliffs. A journey of Lombard streets,dangerous intersections and cul de sacs.

A journey we should try and share.

So tonight I want to make a couple of recommendations. One, read Psalms 23 it shines a great light on the journey of life. and secondly, if you think you might be in a cul de sac, read a book called, "The Dip" by Seth Godin. It's an extremely short read. My wife read it to me on a drive from Bend, OR to Ripon, CA and we finished it by time we got to LaPine about 20 miles after starting it.  Mind you I am a very quick listener.

In a future blog I'll share with you the most incredible Psalms 23 adventure I have ever had. It took place in Afghanistan shortly after President Bush declared Victory.  Hey wait!!!  Aren't we still fighting there?

I thought I knew all the tricks

So I thought I new all the tricks of travel. Having flown over a million miles in the last couple of years, I've developed a small arsenal of tricks to make travel more comfortable. For example I've discovered that the aisle seat and the window seat in the emergency exit row are sat in on every flight, because of the extra leg room. As a result those cushions are smashed flat.

If by good fortune you get assigned an emergency exit row, it is imperative that you get on early enough to pull the seat cushion, which of course you know is removable because it can be used as a floatation device in the "unlikely" event of a water landing, and replace it with a middle cushion from a less desirable row.

These kinds of tricks make the flight more comfortable, and more exciting. The game is to see if you can get the seat cushion swapped without getting busted by the flight attendant, or reported for being a terrorist doing something funny to the seat.

So today I'm flying from San Diego to San Francisco and I get on early to claim some overhead space and settle into my coveted aisle seat. Just as the flight is filling some clown comes down the aisle carrying a plastic cup of water sans the lid. I'm thinking, "what kind of idiot carries a cup of water on the plane when you have all that carry on luggage to cram into the over head space". Well, its the kind of idiot that is seated in the middle seat beside me, that's what kind of idiot carries water onto the plane. As you know it takes a considerable amount of negotiations and contortions just to get you and your stuff on the plane.

So I'm watching this water carrying clown eyeballing my row and inwardly pleading with the travel gods that "this cup might pass me", when the Goof stops and indicates that he has been assigned the middle seat. As I get out of my seat so he can pass he "accidentally" pours some of the water into my seat. There it is, a standing puddle, in the middle of my seat. I'm slack jawed as I consider the options. It is then that he turns to me and says,"Would you like my middle seat. I'll let you out during the flight if you need to walk around?" Of course I'll need to walk around, I'm crammed in the middle seat!

I thought I'd seen it all.

As I cram myself into his dry center seat I take only a small satisfaction in knowing he has to sit in a puddle of water. Of course once he had soaked up the water with his 501's I informed him that I wanted my seat back.

Of course the other option, if I hadn't been so dumbfounded would have been to switch seat cushions so he could enjoy his wet pants in the middle of the row where he belonged.

From now on, when assigned a middle seat, I'm carrying a cup of water on the plane.