Between the two of us, we didn’t have a single clue how to make chili.

Our appetites not to be deterred, I knew just who to ask. (Google, of course!) My main goal was to find out just what defines chili. Now I am not much of a recipe-follower; instead, I like to understand exactly what I’m doing and why. That way, I can freestyle when I want to or need to.

So I Googled ‘chili’ and examined a whole bunch of recipes. You wouldn’t believe some of the things people put in their chili. Anyways, from looking at all the recipes, I found a number of common elements:

• Meat
• Beans
• Tomatoes or Tomato Sauce
• Onion
• Chili Powder

Of course there are all sorts of variants; some leave out the meat or beans, but most recipes include both. Most included the onion. Some recipes had a list of ingredients as long as my arm. Judging by the sheer variety of chili recipes, I figured it’s pretty hard to go wrong, so I made a batch of “basic chili” using only the ingredients I listed above.

Here’s the ratios I used: 1 pound of (browned) ground beef, 2 cans of beans, 1 can of crushed tomatoes, and a half an onion, chopped up.

From that base, I just seasoned to taste with chili powder and left it to simmer 1-2 hours until suppertime. And boy, it was darn good. I never dreamed a good meal (with a Tupperware vat full of leftovers in the fridge) would be so easy to make, either. At least not legitimately, and by ‘legitimately’ I mean ‘without a microwave’.

In the future, I’ll be able to experiment from this base, refining the recipe until I can make world dominating chili. You heard it here first.

I hope you readers weren’t terribly bored by my chili-related ramblings. If so, complain, and I’ll find a more interesting topic next time.

My wife and I therefore decided to host a cookout Monday here at our new home. Folks started showing up at about 2 in the afternoon, and stayed until about 2 in the morning. A wonderful day!

When mealtime came, everyone was of course most helpful in the kitchen. I’ve been a stage manager for about six years, so when it comes to big group projects like that, I’m generally the take-charge type, giving everyone assignments and making sure everyone has what they need.

Naturally, everyone was in and out of the refrigerator all day and all night…I’d estimate the door was opened no less than 150 times Monday. I understand that there is no actual mechanical connection between the door of a refrigerator and the guts that actually make it run, but I believe all that action broke our refrigerator’s poor little cold heart.

Death In The Family

Throughout the evening, people kept checking the freezer for ice, but it seemed like the water in the ice trays just didn’t want to freeze!

The next morning, as I was working (in my home office) my wife came in to let me know that nothing in our refrigerator is cold. The fridge was dead. We had figured that this refrigerator was on its last legs, so we’d been planning to replace it, but we were hoping to wait at least until the New Year. Alas.

I had an old mini-fridge from college out in the garage, so I hauled it into the kitchen and plugged it in and we loaded everything that could fit into it.

So I called into work and told them I was taking the day off, then we went shopping for refrigerators and bought a nice one, one of those side-by-side models with a water filter and a spout in the door.

Replacement

Unfortunately, this came at a pretty bad time as far as buying a replacement goes. I’ve just started paying tuition, and while we can afford it, we don’t have a lot of surplus after that and living expenses.

If you’ve ever heard of Dave Ramsey, you’ll know he gives great amounts of applied common sense in the form of financial advice to his audience via books, seminars, and his radio show. In regards to taking control of your finances, you’ll know the first thing he advises his audience do is to set aside $1000 in an (easily accessible) emergency fund in the bank. After then becoming debt-free, you are to add to it until your emergency fund can cover three to six months of living expenses.

I am in the middle of this third step, building the emergency fund from the original $1000 seed up to the 3-6 month expense coverage. As this was an emergency, I withdrew from the emergency fund to buy the new fridge. Across the next couple paychecks I get, I’ll put the same amount back into the emergency fund.

You have no idea how nice it is to be able to handle a moderately significant financial ‘crisis’ like this without breaking a sweat. We’re not financially hurting, and we don’t have to live on rice and beans for the next three months because of this. We didn’t have to put it on a credit card and pay it back at 29% interest or whatever the going scam is these days. That feeling is awesome.

A Word of Advice: If you don’t have an emergency fund like this, start one. You have no idea how good it will make you feel to have it when you need it. And believe me (and anyone else with sense), sooner or later, you will need it.

Also, if you don’t know Dave Ramsey or his financial advice, I can’t recommend his book Financial Peace enough. Buy it, borrow it, check it out from the library, or swipe a friend’s copy, but read it.

I got a ticket for an expired tag about a month ago (on a holiday, of course). Generally, I’ll just pay the ticket and be done with it, because it normally costs under $100 to make it go away.

Paying the Ticket

So last Tuesday, I went to the ‘Ticket Payment’ window in the Municipal Court building in downtown Jackson (a joy in itself). I had heard people gripe about this sort of thing before, so I was prepared for the ticket-window workers to be a bunch of grumps. To my surprise, the ladies who work at the ticket window are not only human beings, but they are kind, sweet ladies.

“Great!” I was thinking to myself. “This won’t be so bad at all! I’ll just pay these nice ladies and be off on my merry way!”

Not so. “That’ll be $192.50,” said the nice lady as she smiled at me. Come again? “$192.50. Would you like to see the judge about it?”

The Judge? Did that mean I was going to court? Did that make me a criminal? Was I under arrest?

“Um, I think I’ll just pay it.” I got out my checkbook and opened it, and started searching for my pen.

“Are you sure you don’t want to see the Judge instead? I could get you in tonight…you’d be the second person in line.”

She seemed to really think it would be a good idea if I went to see the judge. “I can’t really make it tonight, I have other commitments.” I found my pen.

“How about Thursday? I can get you in to see the Judge on Thursday at 3.” She wasn’t giving up! Maybe she knew something that I didn’t.

“Um, I’ve never been to court before. What would I tell him?”

“Just show your face. That may be all you need to do.” Really? I could just show my face and maybe get this $192.50 fine reduced? I guess it’s worth a shot, right?

“Okay, what time on Thursday again?”

“Be there at three. This building, room 127.”

Coming to Court

So Thursday came around and I was at the courthouse at 3. Now when I was there before, it was quiet and still, and there was no one around except the building entrance guards. So I naturally expected the same thing when I got there on Thursday. Of course, this was not the case.

The line to get inside the building wound through the lobby, out the front door, and down both sets of stairs onto the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. What on earth could all these people be here for?

I took my place in line and casually made conversation with the guy next to me. “You here for traffic court?” I asked. He was here for traffic court. All these people were. And I was at the back of the line.

It could be worse though, right? All I’d have to do is wait in line, then let the Judge call me, reduce my fine, and I’d be out of here. Right?

Not so. I stood and waited in the courtroom for two and a half hours. He didn’t call my name. Just as the ticket window was about to close, I stepped out of the courtroom and dashed to the ticket window to make sure the lady had indeed put me on the court’s schedule for today.

She had the day off. So I had another kind, sweet ticket window lady search the office for my ticket. “It’s not in here, sir, it must be in the courtroom,” she told me. Well, that’s good…it means I just have to keep waiting.

So I went back to the courtroom and waited more. After another hour, the court was all but empty.

“You were supposed to be here for court today, son?” a court officer asked me. “Yes sir,” I replied. He said, “Give me your copy of that ticket, and I’ll find our copy.”

Twenty minutes later, he came back. “I can’t find it.”

So the judge asked for my copy of the ticket, and called my name. I went and stood before him, as I’d seen several hundred others do when their names were called. “Chad Miller,” he said, “you’re dismissed. Time served.”

Meeting For Coffee

“Sure, I’ll meet you at Starbucks,” I told my sister. I hate coffee, but I really wanted to spend some time with her before her weedding. “Which one are you guys at?”

“Oh, the one up north, at 55 and 461,” she replied. “You know, over by Lowe’s.”

I had just been to that very shopping center earlier today, and I knew of no such establishment. “Oh…right. How do you get there again?”

“Well it’s right there, you know, over by Lowe’s.” Hadn’t she already told me that?

“You mean that little coffee stand out in the parking lot by Wal-Mart?”

“No, it’s a walk-in place. You get to it before you come to all those restaurants.”

Now we were getting somewhere. I continued my discussion with her, getting very detailed directions to the Starbucks where she was waiting, that I had no idea 5 minutes ago was there. But the directions just didn’t make sense.

“Sis, with the directions you give, it seems like the Starbucks should be taking up the same space as the Interstate exit. How on earth do I get there?

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. I get off the Interstate and turn right…”

“Oh! You’re coming from the Interstate?”

Where Are You Coming From?

Our miscommunication had a lot to do with the fact that I was physically coming from a different place than my sister thought. The directions she gave were great directions, and they would have easily got me where I needed to go, except for one thing. Her starting point and my starting point were different.

I’ve noticed this is a common source of miscommunication, not just when giving directions to a physical place but when communicating ideas in general. The vocabularies we use can have different meanings depending on where our listener is coming from, on what his or her perspective is.

I encourage you, the next time you feel like you’re having a hard time communicating something, take a little bit of time to consider this. Where are you coming from, and where is your listener coming from? What’s the difference, and how can you use this knowledge to bridge the communication gap?