50 things about me

1. I believe in Valor, Kindness, Diplomacy and Passion and lament that all of these seem to be in short supply in our society today.
2. I prefer driving with the windows down, most of the time.
3. The panorama of changing seasons is rejuvenating to my soul.
4. I love to cook and to set a table before my family and friends.
5. My cross country (mostly, I missed the middle part) bicycle trip in 1986 was a seminal event in my life.
6. I'm grateful to have lived in multiple countries and moved so many times in my life.
7. Travel is fatal to pride, prejudice and bigotry is my favorite quote, Mark Twain.
8. I believe that a good motto for business is, "Make it easy for the customer to give you their money."
9. If you see me running, I'm being chased.
10. Given a spectrum from 0 to 100, with 0 being no debt and a complete absence of goods and 100 being bankrupt with every imaginable luxury item, I would prefer to be in the low single digits, debt to me is like a weight around my neck, it saddens me to also see our entire country being in such a rush to burden future generations with societal debt.
11. The changing of the leave in the Northeastern United States is a national treasure.
12. I believe I will visit the only state I haven't been to yet, with my wife someday, Alaska.
13. My nature is to be helpful, confrontation does not come easily for me, although I wish it were not quite so unfamiliar.
14. For as long as I can remember I've only had one Best Friend at a time.
15. Creativity, for me, ranks unusually high in my personal Pavlov's scale, generally just after food and shelter, sometimes trumping even them.
16. Atlas Shrugged was my favorite book, I've recommended it to many, a few have actually read it.
17. I believe that Canada, as a country, often lives up to some of the ideals of decency, tolerance, love of nature and fraternity that I wish were more in evidence in my own country.
18. I believe that some kind of devine providence orchestrated the collective wisdom of the founding fathers on my country and that our Constitution, as originally written, has been a guarantor of many liberties and that these liberties are being aggressively chipped away at by well meaning but naive and misguided persons.
19. I'm very proud of all of my sons, for different reasons.
20. I have taken hundreds of flights and trips in my life, and hope to take hundreds more.
21. It annoys me when people stand in front of scenery all rigid and take their pictures very stoically I almost always prefer unposed candid pictures.
22. I believe SPREZZATURA is a dying art.
23. I believe that graduating seniors in the US should at least be able to pass the same test that folks have to gain citizenship.
24. Civics and Geography are disciplines that are frequently bypassed in current curriculums.
25. It frustrates me that so little guidance is given to students about the perils of money management, or lack thereof.
26. I intend to make a giant sized Monopoly game for my family's amusement.
27. I'd like to sky dive someday.
28. I prefer Big Dogs over Little Dogs.
29. I believe that dogs have owners and that cats have staff.
30. I enjoy the iron sharpening iron dynamic of Hubdub.com.
31. Although I can be persuasive and have spent years in sales related jobs, I find more inner peace from creating things.
32. I believe in cheering for your team when they do something well and shutting up when the opponent fumbles or stumbles independent of anything your team did.
33. I believe that evil does exist in the world and some absolutes do exist.
34. I believe the definition of decency is doing the right thing, when no one is looking.
35. This is the best explanation of faith I know...A daughter asks her father, "Daddy, what is faith?" He takes her to the stairs leading to the cellar, leaves her on the top stoop, turns out the light overhead and tells her, jump into my arms." She does. That's faith.
36. I believe that there is little, if anything, truly random in our lives.
37. I believe that I've made many grave errors in judgement in my life and although plausible, I prefer to try instead to learn from them, rather than dwell in them.
38. It took me years to appreciate and understand two things my grandfather told me... Sincerity is the key, once you can fake that, you've got it made. And Pick your rut, you'll be in it for the next 20 years.
39. I like to visit restaurants I already enjoy, but dine on new dishes.
40. I appreciate that my parents gave me such a strong, biblical name.
41. I regret not having more of my original family closer in proximity to where I live.
42. I've collected sand from dozens of beaches around the world.
43. I can name over 500 different distinct colors.
44. Someday I will publish a deck of Travel Bingo Cards.
45. I believe that every generation believes THEY are in the end times, as do I, now.
46. I am skeptical of a large portion of reported news that I hear, I prefer to try and discern truth myself and to spot trends.
47. I believe that a woman sending a man to a paint store for a particular shade is a recipe for disaster.
48. I celebrate the differences between genders and I bristle at the tendency to try and blur these imbedded differences.
49. Although I don't believe that clothes make the man, per se, I also see the truth in the counsel from ZZ Top that, Every Girl's Crazy 'Bout a Sharp Dressed Man.
50. I'm surprised that I could bang out this list of 50 things without a lot of thought and I'd like to go on record as saying that it was done at random, late at night without any particular sense of ranking.