Dylan Allen

David Bailey, Terrance Bailey & Jeff Martin

It has been quite some time since I last posted so I thought I’d provide a recap of recent events.

I got laid off on April 27 and have been unsuccessful at finding another steady job since then.  I have been teaching a guitar class, and had a gig recently.  I got a lot done around the house that I would have otherwise not had time for so that’s a good deal.  I have spent a lot of time working on web sites so I’ll tell you about those.

Our Reflejos Flamencos web site had a makeover and is now running wordpress.  I figured this would make it a lot easier to keep it up to date as new gigs come up.  July 19 we will be at the PAC with the Tulsa Guitar Society’s Guitars Gone Wild concert.  Our summer classes start June 13th, and we are adding a Sevillanas dance class that is designed for couples dancing.

I started an e-commerce site for my father-in-law’s manufacturing business that has come a long way but still so far from ready to go live.  It will be nice if I can get that monkey off my back soon, but I have had plenty of other things to distract me from working on it.

Such as my Grandma’s web site.  She owns a realty business in Henryetta, OK and needs a new web site.  She had one, but then she sold her business to Century 21, and then decided she didn’t like the way they ran things so she took it back, and her old web site is already gone, so she is having me make it for her.  I just have some example text in place as I am writing this blog but I am planning to go to Henryetta and sit with her and get all the info up that she wants.  It is a fun project.

The story I have that I am most excited about is what I did on Sunday afternoon.  (now to preface the story) David and Judy Bailey are a married couple who recently started coming to Agora and both play in the band with me.  David on guitar and Judy on cello.  They are both fantastic musicians, but that isn’t what this story is about.  These are some of the best people I have ever met.  A couple weekends each month they go downtown in Tulsa and bring food to homeless people there and then just hang out with them.  It is not uncommon for people to bring food to the homeless, but most groups that I know of don’t just hang out and get to know the homeless people.  And before long we have to stop calling them homeless because these people are our friends.  They have names, stories, feelings, dreams.  Just like me.

I say we, but I have only joined them once which was Sunday afternoon.  They go downtown with two other families who they have known for quite some time.  They all decided that they were going to grill out at Newblock Park which is the closest park to the Library (which is where most of these people hang out).  Lexi and I came along to help out, and the whole experience was probably better for me than it was for anyone that we fed that day.

They somehow got ahold of a big van and we went to the library with the big van, a mini fan, and me in Lexi’s CR-V.  They had never tried this before so we didn’t know what to expect.  We walked into the courtyard and just started inviting the people to come cook out with us and told them we could load them up in our cars and give them a ride.  We went back to the park without an empty seat in any vehicle and then made two more trips after that.

I was suprised to see how polite and grateful our guests were.  No one failed to ask politely for anything or say thank you.  I was also suprised at how they treated one another.  The first group sat down in the shade of a big tree which was also where we sat the ice chests with drinks.  I wondered at first if that would cause a traffic jam as more groups arrived, but those sitting around the ice chests would call out what kind of drinks were in each chest and pass the drinks down to whoever wanted it.

I could tell you more stories and observations like that, but I think they really just point out my ignorant presumptions.  What I took away from this is that they are real people and I have been blessed with too much not to help these people out.  They were so grateful and thanked the group who came out to feed them repeatedly.  It was just one meal but it meant something to them.  I went home to my kitchen full of food and felt like a jerk afterwards.  I am not saying I am going to give away all my possesions and live on the streets, but I have never really done much to help out humans who weren’t myself, and especially not people who couldn’t give me anything in return.

Lexi and I plan to join David and Judy and their friends more often.  I think their plan is to go downtown and hang out every 1st & 3rd Sunday afternoon around 4:00pm.  If you are interested in joining us, let me know.

I have a few thoughts to share today that are a little heavier than my general posts.  I am going to venture into the realm of economics.  I studied economics in college so my interest in the subject was destined to spill out into this blog; I just never planned on it.  My economical inspiration comes from something I read in Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence.  He discusses the problem of the baby boom generation’s inevitable retirement and the effects it will have on the US economy.  He also poses a couple of remedies to that problem that are related to, as you may have guessed, the US education system and immigration of skilled labor.  Let me first say that these problems are being overshadowed by the current recession.  The foundation of the baby boom problem is the reduction in the work force due to retirement and at the moment we don’t have enough jobs to go around.  I believe that the recession will force many baby boomers to work a few more years than they expected, (My 401k certainly has not done well lately) but I believe the problem will resurface in the next decade.

The baby boomers started retiring last year, and we have several years of this to come.  Due to the decline in the birthrate in the US for the preceding generation, it is estimated that we will not have enough skilled laborers to replace them.  The income disparity of skilled to unskilled laborers has increased over the recent years and Greenspan sees this as evidence that the demand for skilled laborers is growing faster than the supply.  We are therefore not producing enough skilled laborers to even the playing field.  To remedy this situation he speaks of two vital factors.  The first is education.

I was amazed to read that students coming out of our public education system (high school) have worse math skills than in past decades.  This may be due to the fact that those who are teaching them also have poorer math skills than in times past.  All public school teachers are taught how to teach, but they are not always so educated in the actual subjects that they are teaching.  We see the inverse of this problem in colleges.  The professors may have an incredible understanding of their subject but have a difficult time breaking it down to a level that your average high school graduate can understand.  I am speaking from experience here, and although my experience is limited, I do not think it is much of a stretch to say that both of these situations are common.

So to aid this situation we could focus on increasing the quality of education that we are giving our young people.  The goal is to produce a larger proportion of educated workers.  Along with supplying the demand for skilled labor and reducing the income disparity, this will create more value in the market place.  

Immigration is a hot topic.  In our economic struggles we definitely do not want foreigners coming in and stealing our jobs right?  Well I don’t exactly hold that view, and it is fine if you disagree with me.  Greenspan’s case for immigration is that by bringing in foreign skilled laborers, we will increase our domestic production capabilities, and we would rather have them do the work here and spend their money here than outsource our jobs where the money is sent out of our economy.  He explains this in a lot more words (Have you seen his book?  It’s huge!) so this is not the whole story.  I had never thought of it this way which seems ridiculous now that I think of it.  Aid a shrinking workforce by immigrating laborers.  What could be simpler?  I think most of the attention is given to the increasing number of retired people as opposed to the shrinking work force.  If we can draw in enough workers and business, whose tax dollars will go towards social security, then we won’t have as much of a problem. 

That is my take on the situation.  Now lets hear what you have to say about it.

I recently went on a health kick.  My wife went out of town for two weeks and I decided that I was going to accomplish two things: finish the kitchen remodel, and get in better shape.  I am pleased with the results of both and I felt like spilling my thoughts on the being healthy subject, as the kitchen remodel isn’t quite as interesting to me.  Although I do very much enjoy hanging out in my kitchen now.  

There are more diets and weight loss schemes out there than we have time to consider.  Some of them are just plain stupid, and others are harmless fads that are given quite a bit more attention than they deserve.  Other than that, there are a lot of healthy lifestyle type suggestions.  That is more of what I am interested in.  I am not one to just go with what the experts say because the experts tend to disagree with each other on a lot of things which in my mind makes their suggestions no better than my personal experience, atleast when it comes to my own decisions.  So I read some stuff, try some stuff, and then decide what I like and what gives me the results I am looking for.  

Unfortunately, we don’t really get observable results on a lot of important things.  My poor diet today may give me heart problems or cancer when I’m 55.  By the time I notice that, it will be too late.  So I have to go with expert advice on what is good for that kind of stuff.  Currently, I am eating a lot of spinach and fruit.  I hear those are good for a lot of things with the vitamins, antioxidants, iron, calcium and other good stuff, but I was amazed to find that eating too much spinach can give you kidney stones.  That is something I have no interest in, so I might cut back on the spinich.  I wonder how that all played out for Popeye?  

I also cut soda out of my diet and any other sugary beverage that isn’t some type of fruit juice.  I mean… wine is a kind of fruit juice right?  Okay so that is one indulgence I am giving myself, but it has some good stuff in it too.  I am also eating a little dark chocolate now and then.  I am only doing dark chocolate because it has more antioxidants, less sugar, and it also happens to taste better and I like to have it with red wine.  Even if that isn’t the healthiest way to go, I am not trying to be Captain America here.  I just want to be in decent shape and healthy enough to live for a while.  

I absolutely do not want to make myself miserable for the sake of my beach body.  I am not that vain and I really like good tasting food.  This is why I am allowing myself to eat whatever I want on the weekends.  I try to be disciplined during the week for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then finish the night with some dark chocolate and a glass of wine.  During the weekend, I eat like a champ.  From lunch on Friday to Lunch on Sunday anything goes, but Sunday night I get back into the healthy mode.  I am not really abusing my freedom on the weekend, I am just eating like I use to.  So I get to have a steak or a burger and maybe even some bacon.  Still no soda though, I am trying to stay away from that all the time.

The other aspect of my healthy kick is that I have been exercising more.  I try to go running 5 days a week, which may end up being 3 or 4 if I get too busy.  I also have been doing push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups, all things I can do from home so that I am more likely to actually do them.  If I try to go to the gym, I will get busy or lazy and end up not going very often.  I think that I have only been able to stick with this routine for the past 3 weeks because there is a light at the end of every tunnel (rewards on the weekend) and because I have noticed quick results.  When Lexi got home from her trip she said I looked taller, which obviously was not the case.  She later realized that it was because I was skinnier.  So apparently this routine is working for something.  I am going to stick with it for as long as I can.  I might ease up on the diet portion of it once I lose all of the weight that I care to get rid of.  At that point, I plan to start eating more food, and better tasting food, but I want to try my best to stick with healthier foods.

After a few weeks of this routine I finally bought batteries for our scale, so I didn’t actually weigh myself until a few days ago.  Over the weekend I fluctuated from 197 -202.  Dropping below 200 has been a goal of mine since the last time I was actually following an exercise routine.  So I finally made it.  My goal now is the get back to my weight from the summer after high school.  I weighed 186 lbs. at my weigh-in for the Brownfield Power Eastern Oklahoma Benchpress Competition.  I came in first in my weight division with 315 lbs.  I would like to be able to bench that much again, but for now I’ll focus on dropping the 15 pounds.  I’ll let you know when I get there,  I’m sure I’ll be very proud of myself… sorry.

This is the point where I ask you your opinion.  So what are your experiences with diets or exercises and do you think my plan is destined for failure?  I also wanted to give props to my friend Will Phillips whose success has been a motivating factor for me with my efforts.  He has come a long way on his weight loss battle.  From 440 to just above 300!  He’s a champ.