Business
Hi everybody. I want to talk to you about life today. I heard from a good friend last night who I hadn’t talked to in a while. All through our twenties he never quite had the coordination or ability to play sports that the rest of us did, and then in his 40’s he was diagnosed with a rare, degenerative disease that explained what had been going on all of that time. And speaking with him last night, he told me that he was now having another issue, this time with his vision. Soon he is going to be traveling to Salt Lake City to see a specialist to rule out a different syndrome. As I get to my late 40’s, I have been thinking about my parents some more recently. My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer when she was 53 and died when she was 58. Ironically, this episode is coming out on her birthday. My father was diagnosed with renal cancer when he was 62 and died when he was 67. Both of them were heavy smokers, and both drank hard liquor nightly, for most of their lives. I don’t smoke or drink more than the occasional beer, and I am hoping that is the difference maker that will allow me to outlive my parents average length of life of 62.5 years. This has been on my mind over the past couple of years, and it has definitely been influencing life decisions. As an example, I had a very good friend reach out to my wife and I recently and invite our family to join hers on a cruise in 2022. As you all know, taking a vacation away from your farm is difficult enough, but this cruise leaves out of Miami and lasts for seven days. In the lower 48 you cannot get further from Kuna, Idaho then Miami, Florida. So, in and of itself this will be a difficult vacation for us to go on. In addition to that, Autumm and I ruled out cruises as vacations years ago. We went on one together in 2006 to the “Mexican Riviera”. I really enjoyed it, she did not. It was the second cruise that each of us had ever gone on, and we decided that we would look at other vacations options in our life. However, in light of my thinking about life and the fact that we all have an “off button” that God can press at any time I went to Autumm and asked her to make an exception and go on this cruise. The me of 5 years ago might have passed on this opportunity, thinking we will have time to spend with these friends at some other time in the future. However, the me of today doesn’t take that for granted and realizes that getting to spend that much time visiting and catching up with close friends is a rare gift, and knew that this was an opportunity that might not come again. Worse yet, it was the type of opportunity that I could see myself looking back on as an elderly or terminally ill person and wishing that I had done. I made up my mind to not have this particular regret when I reached one of those two stages of life. Back to my friend who now has the issue with his vision, he has always eaten better than me, exercised more and stayed more trim. Yet, he has had an abundance of health issues that have limited his ability to do the things that we used to love doing together, like playing sports and hiking. I don’t live as hard of a lifestyle as my parents, but I definitely could eat better, exercise more regularly and cut out the diet sodas. So, on one hand my decisions are being impacted by my parent’s early deaths and on the other I know how fortunate I am when I see what my friend has been going through and how it has limited his life. I do quite a bit of my computer work at a coffee shop called the Latte’ Da in Kuna. There is something about the hustle and bustle and background noise that helps me to focus better than if I were sitting in my quiet studio at my house. So this morning I got all the irrigation set, did a bit of feeding and gave bottles to our four kids who are still on the bottle. Then I fed the dogs and cats, took a shower and hopped on my motorcycle and rode into town.