Rainey Blogs on Some Days

When my wife’s grandparents were in early seventies, my wife and I were in college in Southern Missouri and they came with my wife’s parents to visit us from Southern Illinois and stayed overnight in a hotel. This was the first time in their lives they had ever not been at home to go to bed at night in their own bed. Ever. First time. Let me repeat: they had not been away from home for one night in their lives. No vacations to the Grand Canyon, no overnight trips to the Grand Ole Opry, and no traveling so far from home that they couldn't get home by bedtime. I thought it was one of the craziest things I had ever heard at the time.  Now I don’t think it is so crazy. As I get older, I find that I like being home, keeping an eye on things, and seeing who is coming and going in the neighborhood.  I work from home at least two days a week and this has only made me appreciate being at home more. When I’m home, I can take a look and see if my roof missing any shingles. I can tell you...

Today, I am feeling “off” in an “everything is fine but I still don’t feel right kind of way.” It went on for a few days until I finally became so desperate that I needed to go and sit on a boulder next to the constant roar of the swooshing brook at Flat Rock Brook Nature Center. I'm trying to let the sounds of the water drown out all of the oppressive thoughts in my head. Sometimes it takes a while. This is the view of where I station myself, and I think the video captures the sound. (I know some people use this kind of soundscape for sleeping, but I use it today to combat oppressive thoughts.) However, one unoppressive thought is conflicting with the rest in my head, a quote I used in the class I'm teaching this semester: “A man whose hands are full of parcels cannot receive a gift. " C. S. Lewis Lewis said this about spiritual dryness, and I guess this is a good description of where I am right now: spiritually dry. And my hands are full of parcels, which resonates wi...

We were given a choice whether or not those of us who were having a milestone service year wanted to speak on Founders Day in our department meeting. Since the one consistent feedback I have gotten during my entire 25-year career at UPS was that I don’t speak up enough in meetings, I thought I would make up for the whole thing here today. No one intends to have a long career at UPS. You come to work at UPS as a temporary thing while you are planning your life. Those plans do not include UPS. We come for the benefits, the tuition assistance, the non-standard hours that don’t interfere with classes or our other real jobs. Parents don’t envision their kids growing up and working for UPS. I think these are just the basic realities of life. I worked the majority of my career in Information Services Learning & Development or Corp HR Learning & Development. I would have never lasted 25 years had I been in Operations. I know exactly how long I would have lasted in Operations had I wo...

This is my story of how I was locked out of my Google account for nearly two months because of a two-factor authentication (2FA) password reset attempt that I could not successfully complete. If you have a Google Voice number as your 2FA number, change it immediately! You will also be in the same basic situation if you lose your cellphone and access to your text messages.  It took 57 days to resolve this issue.  FIFTY-SEVEN DAYS! Here's what happened. The Beginning: A Mindless Password Reset Attempt February 2. I am a remote worker using my laptop and receive a Windows update that prevents me from using the Edge browser I normally use on my work laptop. I decided to log in to my Gmail account using the Chrome browser (the first time on this particular device) after several months of using the Microsoft Edge browser, where my password was stored. I wanted to use the time during the update to check my personal email, but I couldn’t remember my password, so I thought I would just...

 I’ve been a practicing Christian my entire adult life, and one would think that would result in a certain level of proficiency in certain practices such as what often occurs when one plays golf, tennis, or does various other activities on a regular basis. Prayer is not like this for me though. Prayer is like whack-a-mole. As soon as I knock down a mole that pops up--some sort of obstacle to my praying--another mole rises in its place. "Whack-a-mole" is exactly how I would describe my prayer life, a daily whacking away at things that prevent prayer.

I took some time to think about the many things that I am thankful for. Here are a few that came to mind. 1. We attended an Army football game at West Point in October. Marcia lost her driver’s license while there. A few days later, we received an express envelope with the license. A woman who is an attorney in Houston, TX, found the license at the game, took it back to Houston, and sent it to us. 2. The four seasons of the year--Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall--teach me so much about the changes of life as I watch them unfold throughout a calendar year. 3. The opportunity to visit Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Malta on a cruise with my family. 4. Free public restrooms, which is not the norm in Europe. 5. The Saturday morning  Wall Street Journal , which I can read at a leisurely pace on the weekend. 6. The two cups of coffee I enjoy drinking every morning to start the day, and for Jerry’s Gourmet Market that sells my favorite (Lavazza) coffee at $2.99 along with a perpetual ...

And do you feel scared, I do But I won't stop and falter And if we threw it all away Things can only get better --Howard Jones, "Things Can Only Get Better," 1985. My youngest daughter recently got her driver's license. Since this is the third child to get a license, besides the parents' experiences at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), you'd think I would be an expert by now on how to navigate the DMV. But the place of which I once said, “All of the ineptitude of the entire world converges at the DMV” is always a challenge, and my trips there are just far enough apart in time that I can never exactly remember what is supposed to happen or what the process is. The first decision is always to figure out which parent will take time off of work to go to the DMV with the child. Since a school principal trumps every other job in the world, I am always the one selected to go to the DMV, even though I am the so-called head of the house. I was also s...

The other day, as I prepared for my 30-minute commute to my office, I let Spotify pick a playlist for me and off I went to work. You may remember in recent years, I commuted in an older car , a 2002 Mercury Sable with a few quirks that made life interesting. But now I have a 2016 Honda Accord with Bluetooth. It starts all of the time, doesn’t break down and require towing, and this means I have to look for other forms of excitement while commuting. This newer car also meant my music went from cassettes/CDs to Spotify Bluetooth in a remarkably short time, so I’m sticking my hand deep into the musical candy jar each day with Spotify (yes, I heard about it from my children). On this chilly April morning, a few songs into my Daily Mix 1 playlist, Robert Plant , the former lead singer of Led Zeppelin , came on singing the lyric, “Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . I heard the voice of Jesus say, Satan, your kingdom must come down.” I had list...

O ne of the questions I don't really like to answer comes on most Mondays at work. “How was your weekend?” The question might come from a co-worker or a former coworker or maybe even a complete stranger. This past week, I called our tech support hotline on Monday about a situation I’ve been having where people inside my company cannot call me from a work number. I let it go for as long as I could because it was really great for a while, but I finally needed to get it resolved. The tech had to get some other departments involved, and while we were waiting for them to get on the call, this otherwise total stranger I’ve never talked to before in my entire life popped the big question: “So how was your weekend?” I gave a vague answer and then pivoted out of it back to the support issue I was having. (I’ve watched far too many politicians answer questions for the past two years on Face the Nation , so now, like they always do, I use the pivot in my conversations.) This resistance to ...

My Grandma Rainey always used a couple of anachronisms that now make sense to me as I've gotten older. She'd say my dad was born on “Armistice Day,” referring to Veterans Day when they disputed about his birth date because she insisted that his birth certificate actually listed the wrong date for his birth. (She ultimately went and had the birth certificate legally corrected to win the argument. He was born on Armistice Day!) And on this Memorial Day weekend, I now remember that she always used the term “Decoration Day,” which was the name for Memorial Day until she was 50 years old. That’s actually not a crazy thing to say, but I remember thinking it was at the time. Growing up in my house, we had an icebox to keep the food cold, but it actually wasn’t an icebox. It was a refrigerator, but the old names for things sometimes take a while to be discontinued from use. Somewhere along the way, I stopped using “icebox” but I do not remember when. All I know is that I think we o...

Created using my Android tablet and tiny keyboard, hunched over looking out indirectly at the sun rising over the golf course in Leesurg , FL. My tablet now has a keyboard that I got for Christmas. Much smaller, not so easy to type or even press the space key because the space bar is so much smaller. I will inevitably end up fat-fingering the keys. But I can also use voice to overcome some of these typing faux paus . It really is a great time to be alive, except that I am spending so much to time with devices rather than people I love. Or spending time with people through devices I love rather than spending time with them directly. So I guess we are victims of our own devices. It is the end of another year. I should be setting goals to 2017 but I probably won't. I am by nature a laissez-faire kind of guy. Everything I learned about planning and organization I learned in the corporate world, an alternate universe where people work and do things that they do not do in their home...

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Annie Dillard, The Writing Life I have to admit something: I am obsessed by the passage of time. It is a constant presence in my life, as if I have some allergy that results in irritation or an itchiness that I must constantly attend to. I am constantly paying attention to the passage of time. I have no idea how this happened. Here's an example: I do not really want to be celebrated on my birthday like so many do. I prefer to take the day off from work and contemplate, not be rushed, sip the coffee slowly in the morning, sit by a stream for a little while, anything but be glad that I am another year older. The changing of seasons, say from summer to autumn, is also an emotional experience for me because I see it as a kind of dying, an ending to something that is now being lost. I wish I could see the new season as a new beginning, but I do not. I focus on ...

Like most people, I have a morning routine. If any of this routine is interrupted, my day is ruined. Here’s the routine: I get up when I get up. I do not use an alarm. If I go to bed early, I get up early. If I go to bed late, I get up a little later. This is very simple. If I’m driving to the Midwest and have to leave at 3 a.m., I use an alarm. Otherwise, I get up when I get up. The next thing I do in the morning is go downstairs and start the coffee. When I make the coffee, I hate when I find the grinds from the day before in the metal filter . This is very disturbing to me and makes me angry, but my anger lasts only a moment. After I dump the grinds in the garbage and rinse out the filter, I am back on track. I can put the new coffee grinds in the filter, fill up the water to the 9-cup line for the three of us drinking coffee, turn on the coffee pot and away we go. By the way, I have never had a coffee pot with a timer that I can set to start up at a certain time so the coffee is...

Something I miss by living in New Jersey is the opportunity to watch a storm blow through. Right now as I write this on Labor Day weekend, I am in Leesburg, Florida (near Orlando), sitting beside a screened in patio and pool at my father-in-law’s house. I am protected from the rain by an overhang. The rear of the house overlooks a cow pasture. Hues of dark and light gray clouds bulging with water are moving across the sky just above the pasture. The crackle of lightning and the subsequent thunder in the distance remind me once again about nature’s power as the wind hisses through the trees and drops of rain, at times heavy and at times light, make disappearing circles in the pool. There is a raw beauty I love in a storm. I am mostly unaware that I do not often get to watch storms. When I am in Florida, a rain or storm blows through nearly every afternoon, sometimes just taunting us with a threatening sky that does not deliver any rain, and at other times a downpour descends from the ...

Chris Rainey (MVTHS Class of 1982) has been nominated by himself to become a member of the MVTHS Sports Hall of Fame for outstanding lifetime achievement in athletics. Chris was a three-sport athlete in football, basketball, and baseball, despite having a writer’s body, contemplative outlook on life, running the 40-yard dash in 5.7 seconds, and only being able to throw a football 45-yards with a modest wind at his back. Despite all of these limitations, he burst onto the football scene in the fall of 1979 during his sophomore year, being promoted to varsity after starting quarterback Chris Berner retired following the opening game of the year to pursue other interests. Rainey led the Rams to a 4-1 record during his five starts that season and completed over 50% of his passes, despite not enough being old enough to have a driver’s license or even shave yet. He was also starting third baseman for the legendary 1982 Rams baseball team, which won the South Seven Conference that year but l...

Tomorrow, I am honored to be the guest at a special family-friendly event, sponsored by the LMS Home & School Scholastic Book Fair. I will read and discuss some of my work, and LMS teacher Eric Gugick will interview me about my writing life. Before or after the author chat, take a minute to check out the book fair, too. There will be merchandise for all and a raffle for the kids with 10 winners! Refreshments will be served. Wednesday, March 9, 7:00pm Leonia Middle School Book Fair doors open at 6:30; event begins at 7:00. I promise not to wear the shirt I'm wearing at this reading.

Somewhere in the past year I lost the will to write, the discipline to sit alone and let words roll down onto a lined, white steno pad page. This is not entirely true and I have had a few exceptions to this trend, but in general this thing—writing—that has brought me such joy and therapeutic pleasure has diminished. Maybe my “dark night of the soul” that lead me to write so profusely has concluded and I no longer need it. Maybe the aging process is creeping over into writing, and just as so many things diminish as the sun starts to set on our lives, maybe my writing is diminishing as well. During the past year I got an electronic tablet and the truth is that I now fritter so much more time away checking Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and the Internet that used to be devoted to other things like writing. So yes, I'd say Nicholas Carr was right: Google is making me stupid , another creative analog native neutered by the digital age. Despite the self-hatred and loathin...

I recently sat down and quickly came up with the ten books (and one article) that has affected me personally over my life (and that I can actually remember something about). Here they are. I think they reflect the arc of my life.  The list is in alphabetical order by author last name. Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains." The Atlantic Monthly (July-Aug 2008. Collins, Jim. Good to Great. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink. Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. Kushner, Lawrence. Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians. Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. Mintzberg, Henry. Managers Not MBAs. The NIV Study Bible.

I have spent most of the past twelve years commuting at least one hour a day: 30 minutes to work, and usually 40 minutes to return home. I have tried a number of things to avoid monotony, such as taking as many different routes as possible. I may be the only person in the world who uses a GPS to commute home from work because I try new routes and end up in unfamiliar places. To make the most of the commuting time, I have tried a number of things. I have listened to the Bible and prayed, although it seems a little irreverent to interrupt the prayer yelling at someone who has cut me off. I have listened to Christian radio, which means I have heard the song " I Could Only Imagine " over 5,000 times. I have listened to pop radio. I have listened to the music of my youth to somehow re-energize portions of the brain and keep my mind sharp. Sometimes, I switch back and forth between Christian and pop radio, alternating between joy and guilt. I have listened to talk radio and sports ...

A recent Saturday morning, Marcia and I had not even gotten out of bed and we had started a conversation about the Winter Olympics, which has sentimental value to us because our first baby's morning sickness period occurred during the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. And for some reason, during that conversation, I started rattling off the location of every Winter Olympics since 1980. I was a little uncertain about the order of Albertville ('92) and Lillehammer('94), but I later checked and found out I was correct. Even after nearly 30 years of marriage, this seemed to impress Marcia. I told her this was my gift, that I was Google before there was Google. I was the person who could produce reams of useless information just off the top of my head. For those of us with the gift, the smart phone—that disruptive technology—has all but displaced the Google-minded us. I'm now wondering why I was born in such a time as this. I'm also noticing that as I push age 50,...