Aren Cambre's Blog

Last night, I was unanimously* elected to a third term as president of Lake Park Estates Neighborhood Association, Inc.

That quarterly meeting went well: I did little talking. I had people lined up for each of these tasks:

• Community policing representative from our local police substation (arranged by our crime watch chair)
• Discussion of Volunteers In Patrol program initiative by our crime watch chair
• Discussion of a nascent crime camera committee by its chair
• Report on our membership drive by our treasurer (we’re at 33% of the neighborhood, the highest I have ever seen it since I lived here!)
• Running the election (two people I appointed at the last minute)
• Room arrangements made by our VP
• Snacks arranged by our Welcome Committee chairwoman

It was a well oiled machine for a small neighborhood association.

I know that the “textbook answer” to leadership is to help people be motivated to take on projects. However, when talking about small volunteer organizations, translating that into practice is an art. Small nonprofits have scarce resources and limited zones of success (too many parties to please), and we compete for volunteer attention. In other words, you have to provide an unusual amount of motivation and direction to achieve success.

I wrote “art” because leadership techniques vary wildly depending on personalities, the organization’s mission, community support, etc.

I really appreciate people who are given direction and take off with it. At the meeting, I recognized three people who did a fantastic job:

• A lady who started a pet watch program from scratch.
• A lady who revived a defunct welcome committee.
• Our treasurer who provided exceptional support for our membership drive.

The award is sincere but has a farscial title: YOU WILL RESPECT MY AUTHORITY. Here’s what it looked like:

The reference is from a South Park episode named Chickenlover. I did a bad imitation of Cartman’s “authority” line, making a fool of myself. The attendees enjoyed it even though most didn’t get it.

*One person wrote in Cartman for president but scratched it out and voted for me. Oh, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I was the only nominee for president.

For a few days this week, I’ve commuted 20.8 miles from work to Plano.

We had to vacate our home because the wood floors are being refinished; this is the last step of the restoration from the ceiling collapse. A long wood-floored hallway connects all rooms, so there’s no way we could avoid walking on it.

Commuting is for the birds. Even though this commute is moderate by modern standards, it was 220% more miles and 150% more time than my regular drive to work. And because it is on a freeway, I get to experience maddening random slowdowns as traffic unpredictably oscillates between freeflow and congestion. And yes, this happens even with good following distances and right lane travel, Steve Blow! (link)

So let’s see, I could commute and get a larger house and lower crime in exchange for:

• No scenery.
• No trees.
• Maddening daily commute.
• Loss of an hour of my awake time every workday.
• Boring neighborhood.
• No character.

No, thank you.

In the old Beavis and Butt-head cartoons, Beavis becomes Cornholio when he eats lots of sugar. Example:

On Easter Sunday, I break my Lent fast. I will drown myself in sweets. I may become the Great Cornholio. (How’s that for introducing a spiritual exercise?)

Some interpret the Lent fast to exclude Sundays because those are feast days. I decided to fast straight through without stopping. Dessert and candy and explicitly sweet stuff haven’t passed my lips since Shrove Tuesday.

I recall a poignant study on grace from a few years ago. It showed how a rigid, rule-bound religious group was transformed by an infusion of grace.

I could see a valid argument that failing to observe sanctioned Lent fast breaks may be an example of a grace-less, rule-bound, spiritually rigid exercise.

However, I also considered what I am giving up: stuff that my body doesn’t need. Stuff that isn’t in any way essential to my life. Stuff on which I should have no dependence. As much as I love my Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream, I am better off for skipping it for these 6.5 weeks.

Even though giving up sweet junk foods is a common Protestant form of Lent fast, it’s really such a light fast that I can have a fully grace-ful Sundays without it.

So I held my Lent fast straight, not giving it up.

As an average American, I life a life full of material comforts that even the richest from 2000 years ago could only imagine. I realize that this trivial fast is nothing, absolutely nothing compared to temptation Jesus faced in the wilderness. But it still gives me a glimpse, and for that I am thankful.

Did you know I am a stamp collector? I started when I lived in Groves, TX in the late ’80s. I routinely biked to the post office for the latest stamps. Sometimes the postmaster would spot me change if I came up short. (I abused this privilege, so he stopped after a couple of times.)

Some of the more exotic stamps, such as postage due, official mail stamps, or just stuff that went beyond the local post office’s inventory, had to be ordered through the USPS‘s Philatelic Catalog. This catalog was neat: all stamps would be ordered at face value. The purchaser filled out a computer-read form. Shipping was reasonable. They would even cut you special portions of sheets, like plate blocks, if you ordered enough stamps.

A rare treat was a philatelic window. These were special USPS stores in certain metro areas. Catering to collectors, their stamp offerings were much more comprehensive than found at standard counters.

The only philatelic window I experienced was when my grandmother brought me to Dallas’s goofy Olla Podrida Mall. It had a large post office in the rear which had the Dallas-area’s philatelic stamp window. This post office stayed open for years after the mall closed; I recall the philatelic window being near the hallway leading to the main part of the mall.

In the 1990s, the USPS began churning out stamps much more rapidly. Additionally, the USPS phased in self-adhesive stamps that could not be separated, necessitating purchases of an entire sheet at a time. The post office would not sell just one self-adhesive stamp as it would damage the adjacent stamps. Fortunately, these days, self-adhesive stamps are separable from adjacent stamps.

Here’s one of the first self-adhesive types:

Instead of being able to get one 25 cent stamp, I had to buy an entire $3 sheet. (Those tabs at the top are my homemade stamp album tabs. They are still useful this day.)

All these factors combined forced me to stop collecting new stamps in the early 1990s. But I have a nice 3 cent stamp section. More on this later.

Another turnoff was when I discovered my evil, arch-conservative leanings. Besides wanting to starve kids, tax the poor, subsidize millionaires, and deny health care to the working class, I became skeptical of the USPS.

Purchasing stamps without intent of using them voices unbridled affection of an inefficient, union-controlled, money-losing, make-work bureaucracy whose stamp subjects are carefully chosen to maximize political correctness. Don’t believe me? Look at the qualifications of the members of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee; almost all are democrats, academics, or former bureaucrats.

These days, if I buy a new stamp, it is because I like it, not because I am a pinhead mindlessly collecting all possible samples of this bureaucracy’s effluence.

Back to my stamp collecting days: I had a Linn’s Stamp News subscription. A couple of times, I managed to get a letter to the editor published.

Linn’s Stamp News was a fascinating cover-to-cover read the first year, but it felt progressively more silly the longer I was subscribed. I think I finally dropped my subscription in the early ’90s.

I still have all my supplies: stamp tongs, watermarking solvent, hinges, Prinz stamp mounts, perforation gauge, etc.

For a time, I could get supplies for cheap from Dwight March Enterprises. Dwight ran a stamp supply business alternately out of a small warehouse near Lombardy Ln. in Dallas or his north Dallas home.

He got in trouble with manufacturers because he sold their stuff too cheaply. Apparently they forced vendors to sell at no less than a specific price.

The manufacturers pressured Linn’s Stamp News and possibly other stamp publications to keep his ads out of their publication.

I used the H. E. Harris Liberty stamp album. For some reason it felt better than the Scott album that my brother had. (In retrospect, there wasn’t much real difference.)

Here’s the cover of my album:

And here’s my brother’s album, which I happen to have on hand:

The insides of our albums are pretty similar; mine is somewhat better filled out than his.

My oldest stamp is Scott #11:

It’s from 1853 and is probably worth a dollar, if I’m lucky.

Yeah, that’s it! A measly dollar.

See these stamps?

I might get 10 cents for each of these unused 3 cent stamps on a good day.

I have pages and pages of unused 3 cent stamps like this.

Not long before he died, my grandfather gave me a nice quantity of unused plate blocks and plate strips, mostly from the 70s.

They don’t seem to be worth much more than face value! Actually, face value may be lucky: eBay completed auctions consistently show large lots of unused plate blocks selling for below face value!

My favorite stamps are the definitives. Brief tutor: definitives are the utilitarian stamps that provide all the goofy face values. They are typically printed for years straight. The other type, commemoratives, are the everyday stamps honoring people, events, or things that regularly rotate out.

Here’s a page of Liberty Issue definitives:

More definitives, the Great Americans series from the 1980s:

In assembling my collection, I got my father to bring me to stamp shows from time to time. They were often at hotels 5-10 miles from my house. One time my father brought us to an Adam’s Mark hotel in west Houston; that was a huge treat for my brothers and me.

I usually purchased specific stamps or small lots of unused stamps at these shows.

Over time, I assembled a lot of extras, which are now in a couple of stock books.

A stock book full of canceled (used) 3 cent stamps (utterly worthless):

Plate block definitives:

I think some of these may have a little value, especially that 20 cent plate block in the foreground on the bottom.

Transportation coil definitives:

Lots and lots of plate blocks:

I even have a small book with full sheets:

My grandfather was kind enough to give me a collection that probably came from his father. They are all used stamps, about half international, half domestic, and all virtually worthless. I’m trying to find a Scout or someone else who could use these stamps to earn a badge.

Where do I go from here?

To cut down on bulk, and to make sure I have a broad collection, I may sell off all my surplus stamps and plowing the money back into the core H. E. Harris album.

What’s my biggest lesson learned? Stamps are a terrible investment. eBay completed auctions make it all too clear that everyday stamps hardly appreciate, and when they do, it’s almost always below even insanely safe investments such as 30 year federal bonds.

As of December 2007, my doctorate coursework is done! I have completed 66 hours of graduate coursework, including the 30 hours earned for my Master of Science in Computer Science (they used up my doctorate electives).

“School’s out forever”? Not by a long shot!

If something happened and I needed to quit now, I could walk with a Master of Science in Engineering Management. As tempting as that sounds, I need to push on.

All that sits between me completing my Doctorate of Engineering in Engineering Management is the praxis. A praxis is a giant research project that’s equivalently difficult as four graduate courses. But before I do that, I still have to assemble my supervisory committee and passing a qualifying exam.

I will meet with my research adviser soon to discuss next steps.

When I attended Groves Middle School (PNGISD), I competed in mathematical tournaments sponsored by the Texas Math and Science Coaches Association and local schools. The pinnacle was Texas’s University Scholastic League‘s Elementary and Junior High Academics competition.

My specialty was Calculator Applications. The test’s 80 questions’ difficulties progressed through high school-level problems. Most problems were complicated arithmetic, but 2 out of every 10 questions were word problems.

My “secret” was I could rapidly translate the arithmetic into a series of keystrokes on my TI-60 calculator. I mastered the exact position of its buttons and its order of operations. I also has to use scientific notation as only three significant digits were usually allowed.

Another secret is my TI-60′s slight warp, possibly because of pocket storage. It wobbled while I slammed keys, distracting other students with its rhythmic rapping on the table. Some of these students were already distracted just seeing me work in hyper-spaz mode.

The last few word problems always gave me trouble. I could easily do arithmetic-style problems like finding the cosine of (34+41.6)/23. But if asked the local angle given the adjacent and hypotenuse of a right triangle, I could not figure it out.

One time my father sat me down at our Groves, TX dining room table and tried to teach me these geometric concepts. My 6th grade mind neither “got” nor was interested in those high school concepts.

Once I got all the way through the test, I would return to the beginning and rework problems.

I always did well at the local practice and TMSCA events. In fact, I was first place in the entire state for TMSCA Calculator Applications in 6th grade in 1989. I spanked the competition at a local TMSCA tournament. All local tournament first place winners’ tests got mailed to the state office which then compared winners to determine state titles. I remember being shocked when the Groves Middle School science teacher (whose name I cannot remember–never took her class) broke the news.

I never did as well at UIL events. At regional UIL tournaments in Dayton, sharp Asians from the Houston area edged me out.

I sometimes tried Number Sense and Science tests. I did reasonably well at Science but was not state-caliber. I did rather poorly at Numbersense, which is where you do challenging mental arithmetic without calculator assistance and without writing anything except an answer. (You were encouraged to use a pen.) I liked calculators; why bother with the silly mental arithmetic? (I still say the same despite having a Mathematics degree!)

Why did I write this article? It’s time for the trophies to go. They are taking up valuable closet space and haven’t seen daylight in 8½ years. I took pictures of all trophies individually, pried off the plaques, and placed the plaques them on a sheet of paper for long-term keeping.

Today was a “big game” for the Dallas Cowboys. Apparently they were one of 8 teams left in competition for the 2008 Super Bowl, but they screwed the pooch and lost.

Who cares?

A bunch of emphatically academically underachieving, philandering, self-centered criminals played a game with some other emphatically academically underachieving, philandering, self-centered criminals.

Why does that matter for me or my life?

“Supporting the team” won’t make me wiser, happier, weathier, closer to my family and friends, or healthier. There’s nothing in it for me or anyone–except for the mega rich players and team owners.

Yes, owners. Do we forget that this is a business, just like Exxon or Microsoft. Do you root for 3M or Monsanto? Absurd, right, because all the spoils go to stockholders? So why root for professional sports?

Is professional sports anything than a specious diversion from what really matters in life?

I remember some movie from the late ’80s or early ’90s that was about a ventriloquist and his dummy. I don’t remember the plot well, but there may have been a conflict between the dummy and the ventriloquist. I recall it being very family safe.

The final scene was the ventriloquist walking off from the performance hall with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up playing in the background. It may have been a made for TV movie.

What movie was this?

EDIT (1-21-09): The song may have been Together Forever, not Never Gonna Give You Up. Either way, a commenter has the answer: Ron Lucas’s Who’s in Charge Here? from 1983.

This morning, while driving on southbound Garland Road (TX 78) by White Rock Lake, I saw a careening, white Nissan Maxima headed the wrong way, barrelling down at me.

I could tell it was imminently going to swipe the Volvo wagon in front of me and was barrelling right at me from my left. So I jumped a curb and slammed on my brakes.

I ended up halfway on grass and halfway on a hike and bike trail:

(All pictures are from my cell phone and have poor color balance.)

Luckily, no runners were in my path! I took longer than the Volvo to stop because the grass was wet with dew. Thank God for antilock braking!

If you look closely, you’ll see a Toyota Highlander about 100 feet in front of me. It also had to jump the curb. I guess the lady in the Volvo wasn’t paying good attention; she could have avoided the crash if she got off the road, although I may have then run into her?

Here’s where I launched off the curb:

One of my left wheels did that.

I barely missed the careening Maxima.

Once I realized I was OK, I jumped out of my car and checked on the lady in the Volvo. She was dazed and just wanted out of her car. She couldn’t open her driver’s door:

Seeing that no immediate action was needed, I called 911. I had to ask her twice to shut off her engine as I was on the phone; she was too startled to remember to do that.

Fortunately, she was totally unharmed. Her dogs were also startled and unharmed:

The Maxima’s driver appeared to be in more trouble. As soon as I was comfortable that the Volvo lady was OK, I asked a bystander to help her with her dogs so she could get out. I then went to the Maxima.

The Maxima ended up doing a 180:

Plenty of people were attending to the guy by the time I got to him. At first, I thought his head was bleeding, but it turns out the guy’s rasta-style dreadlocks were hanging over his shoulder. He was shaking and in apparent mild shock. Bystanders were reassuring him. Since he looked OK, I didn’t interfere. His passenger compartment was intact:

He was complaining of foot pain. That wasn’t surprising given the impact location:

Anyone need a coil spring?

(It’s right in front of the car.)

I asked the guy in the green cap to wait for the ambulance and flag it down.

Based on the timestamps in the picture, I guess the fire truck didn’t arrive until about 5-6 minutes after the crash, and the ambulance was about 1 minute later. This surprised me since the fire station is just a mile away up the same road. But maybe that’s normal response time?

The paramedics got the guy on his feet, so I guess he was OK?

The only cop to show up was a traffic cop (in Dallas PD, they wear red epaulets), and he arrived roughly 10-12 minutes after the crash. That response time shocked the heck out of me.

The crash appeared to be caused by an unobservant motorist who had to make a last minute lane change to avoid a slow-moving or stopped truck. The unobservant driver swerved into the Maxima’s path. In avoiding the unobservant driver, the Maxima’s driver lost control and careened into oncoming traffic.

Since I didn’t witness this part, the cop didn’t need me to stick around. After making sure the Volvo lady didn’t need more help (the emergency personnel weren’t helping her as she was unhurt), I took off for my meeting, which was about creating a foundation for White Rock Lake Park. Incidentally, my car ended up in this very park!

Do Volvos automatically blink headlights when the airbag goes off? I am not sure that a driver could make headlights blink:

Got quoted again. (Again, press cancel when the print dialog comes up. People Newspapers’s site is pretty bad about facilitating direct links.)