Desultory Thoughts

After 21 posts you would think that I would’ve mentioned my wife by now! Her name is Heather and she’s absolutely awesome! That’s why I married her almost 9 years ago. We’ll have our 9th anniversary in March.

Come to think of it, I mentioned my wife in a previous post entitled “Advertising Clutter”, the the post dealt more with her magazine than it did her. But she was my inspiration for that post, and don’t forget it!

She’s not only just a great wife, she’s a wonderful mom to our two beautiful children. I love her a lot. She was able to quit her job at LDS Hospital earlier this year and I’m reallyglad that she’s able to be a full-time Mom. I’m not only glad that she’s able to, I’m glad she WANTS to. There are some women that are able to stay home (in fact, sometimes it’s economically a wash that they go to work after paying the babysitter, paying for gas, insurance and car payment on a second car, paying more taxes because of the higher tax bracket, etc) but would rather go out and have a career. Of course, there are situations where it is necessary and I don’t speak of these situations. Several people at my work do it because they have to; usually single moms.

In the last seven months I haven’t seen too much by the way of nasty storms, although there have been some stronger winds than I’m used to. Last night what I’ve been waiting for finally came.

We got clobbered with more than a foot of snow! I nearly didn’t make it out of our neighborhood. The further north I drove, the better it got. When I got to Salt Lake where I work, there was nothing. The difference, as described in a Tooele Transcript Bulletin article, was not lake effect. The storm that rolled through just decided to linger over our fine city of Tooele. We’re supposed to be getting some more snow tomorrow night and into Saturday. How exciting!

The kids had fun in the snow today. They made snow angels, waded through the deep stuff and slid down the driveway on sleds. It’s the most snow Griffin or Sami have ever played in. They had fun playing with their friend, Logan. They also “helped” shovel the driveway, but the true heroes of shoveling were the Barths (our fine neighbors to the west of us) with their monster snow blower! They saved us all a lot of work.

I should note, however, that when the snowplows came by, they covered the sidewalk and the driveway again, and Heather (my awesome wife) did second clean-up.  And if you’ve ever shoveled the snowplow crud, you know it’s extra heavy.  So good job, Heather!

My wife and I were watching the Jazz [utahjazz.com] game together (who are on fire, by the way…although we’ll have to see because right now they’re down by 10 in the fourth quarter) and I was distracted by her ripping pages out of a magazine.

It turns out that she received Better Homes & Garden [bhg.com] in the mail today, and she was frustrated by the amount of ads she was having to delve through just in order to read the magazine. She wanted to see what would be left of the magazine if she got rid of the ads.

She started ripping out just the pages that had ads on the front and back. She found 25 pages that were pure ads, no magazine content whatsoever. She then started ripping out pages with ads on them and she found 60 pages. What was she left with? A mere 19 pages that didn’t have any ads at all!

This is just one example of the commercial world we live in. You can’t go anywhere without being exposed to it, whether in a magazine, TV, movies or even a basketball game. In fact, the Delta Center touts a brand new digital marquee that circles the entire upper deck. At first it was fascinating to see content swirl around seamlessly between connected marquee segments, but then it just got distracting. My wife felt the same way about the magazine.

I find myself ignoring it more and more and so do most people I talk to. Whether it’s TIVO that allows you to quickly forward through the commercials or reserved seating theatres that allow you to come in right at the start of the movie instead of sitting through all the commercials, people are getting fed up. But it doesn’t seem to deter the advertising agencies; which means that it must work! Will it ever stop?

A 21 year old college student decided to take advantage of the advertising craze and started a home page [milliondollarhomepage.com] made up entirely of ads. He sold the space at $1 per pixel, so the bigger the ad, the more it cost. He recently sold his last 1000 pixels for $38,100 on eBay! Pretty amazing. That’s actually pretty cheap as compared with the cost of advertisement on the upcoming Super Bowl. There is even a site [superbowl-ads.com] that’s dedicated to the Super Bowl commercials and they’ll even tell you how effective they were.

I’ll have to admit…just the other day I went out a bought a swiffer duster because I was impressed with how well the policeman in the commercial was dusting with it. I guess I’m a part of the problem!