Tag Archives: life

Never Stop Thinking

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I think of an experiment to test a theory.

As I age, I find that my mind often wanders into different directions, normally unbidden. I think it’s because I have very little in the way of distractions in my home: I live alone and I don’t have a TV going all the time. This gives me time to think — and sometimes I think about unusual things.

The Science of Hot Coffee

This morning, I thought about why it was so important for me to warm my coffee cup before brewing coffee into it and why it was equally important to get the metal teaspoon I use to add sugar and stir out of that cup as quickly as possible. It all has to do with temperature: keeping that coffee hot as long as possible so I could enjoy it at my own pace before it got cold.

The warmed coffee cup is pretty obvious — we’ve all had the experience of putting a salad on a dish still hot from the dishwasher. The salad touching the plate isn’t as cold as the salad that isn’t. This is why they chill salad plates (and forks) at good restaurants. It follows that putting something hot into a cold vessel will do the same. I guarantee you’ve experienced this yourself. I know only one other person who takes the time to warm his coffee cup before putting coffee in it.

(And yes, I know a lot of folks don’t give a damn about what they likely consider a minuscule temperature change. But I do.)

But the spoon? Why is it so important for me to remove the spoon quickly?

This morning I thought a little about that. I’d always assumed that the stainless steel teaspoon would act as a heat sink. One end is in the hot coffee and the other is in the relatively cool kitchen. The heat from the coffee would heat up the spoon, which was made of metal — an excellent conductor of heat — and that heat would travel up the spoon handle to its end. The handle, which was constantly being warmed by the coffee would be constantly cooled by room temperature. That heat energy that is lost would have to come from somewhere: the coffee.

This is something I’ve always assumed. It makes sense to me. But this morning, for some reason, I wondered if I was right. And then I came up with an experiment to test my theory.

The Scientific Method


Scientific Method diagram by Wikipedia user Efbrazil used via CC 4.0 license.

I was in fifth grade when I learned about the scientific method. That was a long time ago and, not being a scientist or in any way involved in lab work my entire life, you’d think I’d forget it. But some things just stick with me. I think the scientific method stuck with me because it made sense logically — and I’m definitely a logical thinker.

Don’t worry — I won’t go into the scientific method in detail here. I’ll just focus on this diagram, which shows all steps to the method. The important concept to take away from this is that it starts with a question you might want answered and then goes through the process of coming up with a possible answer (hypothesis) and testing that answer (experiment). If the results (analyzed data) support the hypothesis, you might be done; if they don’t, then you’re definitely not done. In either case, you’d likely explore other hypotheses, going through the process again (and again and again, if necessary) until you either couldn’t get an answer — i.e., the experiment results simply do not support any hypothesis — or you were confident that one of your hypotheses was correct.

When I thought up an experiment to test my theory about a stainless steel teaspoon as a heat sink, I realized I was using the scientific method. In real life — not in a lab, not as a scientist. It was a great example about how some of the stuff we learn in school that we don’t think we’ll ever use in life does become relevant every once in a while.

Want to see the process for my experiment? Here are the first four steps:

  1. Observation/Question – More of a question: does coffee get cold faster if you leave a teaspoon in it?
  2. Research Topic Area – Well, understanding what a heat sink is is probably important to forming a hypothesis.
  3. Hypothesis – Yes, coffee does get cold faster if I leave a stainless steel teaspoon in it than if I don’t. (This would not apply to a plastic teaspoon since plastic is a poorer conductor of heat than metal.)
  4. Experiment – Take two identical cups. Add an equal amount of boiling water to each cup. Put a room temperature teaspoon inside one cup. Take temperature readings every 5 to 10 minutes to see if the one with the teaspoon gets cold faster. (You could expand the experiment to include three cups and put a plastic teaspoon in the third to test the hypotheses that plastic teaspoons would not have an effect.)

That’s as far as I got. I thought up the experiment but I didn’t do it. It simply isn’t that important to me to know, one way or the other, if I’m right. But it might make a nice at-home experiment for home-schooled kids if you happen to know any. Science is important — and heat sinks are a part of our every day life — they’re inside every computer we own.

Why Blog about It?

Why am I blogging about this? Well, I think I surprised myself this morning by my train of thought and where it led me. I wanted to share that with other folks who might find themselves consumed with things that prevent them from thinking for themselves.

All for clicks and likes

Let me take a moment to mention how outside pressures, especially from social media, get people to do things just for clicks and likes. Just this morning, I read another gender reveal tragedy story — too many gender reveals exist solely to impress others with their outrageousness. People are dying because a blog post that went viral has convinced people to make their own viral moment centered around the gender of their unborn child. Are we really that dumb? That 15 minutes of fame can put lives at risk?

This is an extreme, of course, but think about the not-so-smart things you’ve done to impress your friends and others over the years. Those “watch this” moments. Ever think of why you were really doing them? Or what the consequences could have been if what you did backfired? Is it really that important to impress others?

How about impressing yourself instead?

Every day, we’re faced with a barrage of inputs from family, friends, strangers, advertisers, and the news media. Direct conversation, text, and email; social media posts by people with their own agenda; print, audio, and video advertisements on billboards, in magazines, and everywhere online and on television; network and cable news broadcasters. Too much of that input is trying to fill your head with someone else’s thoughts and ideas and manipulate your opinions. If you follow politics at all, you know exactly what I mean. It’s hard to have a moment to yourself, a time to just think based on verifiable facts and to form your own ideas and opinions.

I do this a lot. Yes, I spend a lot too much time on Twitter but that’s the only social media I allow access to my brain. (Seriously folks, #DeleteFacebook.) And even then, I’m careful about who I follow. I don’t want a diet of political nonsense from either side so I tend to avoid accounts that post just politics. Instead, I try to get tweets from fellow thinkers — or at least from folks who have a life that doesn’t revolve around cable news and the latest political/celebrity scandal. And when I’m not on Twitter — which really is most of the time — I keep active and work on ways to make my life fulfilling.

I think therefore I am. If you can’t think for yourself, do you really exist?

Anyway, does leaving a stainless steel teaspoon in your coffee make it cool faster? If you do the experiment, let me know.

On Home Ownership

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I become a real homeowner for the second time in my life.


I got this letter in the mail yesterday after making a final lump sum payment on what I’d always thought of as my “mortgage.” (Technically it was a land loan; I never had a mortgage on this home.)

On July 14, 2022, I officially became a mortgage-free home owner for the second time in my life. That’s the date of the letter from my bank confirming that the lump sum payment I’d sent in June had paid off the balance of my land loan.

I bought the land nearly nine years ago, the day after my divorce was finalized. It was a long story and crazy process that you can read about in a blog post I wrote about it. It wasn’t a cheap lot, but the view from those 10 acres made it worth every penny. I’m generally a debt-adverse person, so I put 50% down on it and borrowed the rest. The owner financed until I could get my paperwork in order and get a loan about a year later with Northwest Farm Credit, a company that specializes in farm loans. My lot, zoned Rural Residential, met the criteria for lending. The terms were a fixed rate for the first 7 years, adjustable annually after that, with a balloon payment at the end of 10 years.

Amortization was based on 30 years, keeping the monthly payments low; for the first 7 years, my monthly payments were just $501. I kicked in an extra $500 toward the principal every month for at least 3/4 of the months over those 7 years. The goal was to pay down the principal quickly so I wouldn’t get hit with the kind of huge balloon payment the bank estimated. When the first interest rate adjustment came, my monthly payment dropped to less than $300/month. I honestly don’t know the exact amount because I kept paying the $1001/month that I’d been paying. Now I was kicking in more than $700/month to principal only.

With my June birthday coming up, I noticed that I owed less than $12K for the property. Rather than let my regular payments pay it off in just under one more year, I decided to make the payoff a birthday present for myself. So I wrote a big check, got a $14.90 refund for my overpayment, and received the letter saying the loan was paid off.

I’m a mortgage-free home owner.

The Money Stuff

Now if all this is gibberish to you and you’ve got one of those 30-year mortgages on your place, you might want to chat with an accountant or financial advisor about the possible benefit of paying extra toward the principal on that mortgage.

I remember my first mortgage with my future wasband. It was a 30-year term because that’s all we could afford when we bought our first home. We paid what was due — on average about $1200/month — every month for 11 years. When we sold after 11 years, we’d only contributed about $16K toward the principal — that’s after paying over $158K. Where had all that extra money gone? Mortgage interest, of course. Rates were a lot higher then, but still! We had a house but very little equity in it.

I think that experience is what woke me up to the realities of mortgages and home ownership. If you have a large loan and pay it over a long period of time, you’re likely to pay a lot of money in interest without increasing your equity in the home by very much. In that case, what’s the benefit of buying over renting? When you own a home, you’re responsible maintaining and repairing it. When you rent, you’re not. And when you’re paying 90% of your monthly mortgage payment toward interest instead of principal, it’s like paying rent without the benefit of a landlord to take care of the home.

Home ownership remains a goal of many people. It’s a great goal, but it’s not achievable unless you are able to maximize your downpayment, minimize your loan term, and pay down the principal as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you’re basically paying rent to a bank with the added expense of home maintenance, repairs, and property taxes.

When my future wasband and I sold that first home and moved to a new home in Arizona, we quickly refinanced to a 15-year loan term. Sure, the payments were bigger, but each payment applied more money to the loan principal. And with the lesson learned from our first home, I (the debt-adverse person in charge of household finances) would send additional principal payments for the loan to the bank a few times a year, when there was some spare cash in the household account. By doing so, we managed to pay off the loan in just over 11 years.

And that was the first time in my life that I was a mortgage-free home owner, at the age of 50 — although I was just half owner on that particular property.

My House

My house, of course, has been paid off since it was built. Because of the construction style of my home — post and beam construction — a building loan was not possible to get. So I had to pay cash as it was built.

On May 20, 2014, I began blogging about the construction of my new home in Malaga, WA. You can read all of these posts — and see the videos that go with many them — by clicking the new home construction tag.

Yeah, that was a challenge. Fortunately, my decent income and low cost of living rose to that challenge. I was living in my 36-foot fifth wheel, the “Mobile Mansion,” on my property at the time so there was no rent to pay and that likely saved a ton of money that could go toward construction.

I had the house built in stages starting on May 20, 2014: first the building shell and then the living space upstairs. I did a lot of the interior work myself: electricity, flooring (wood laminate and tile), and deck rails/floor. I subcontracted out to a framer and plumber and insulation/drywall/painting guys. I designed a custom kitchen with granite countertops at Home Depot and let their guys install it all. I bought my appliances at a Black Friday sale and, again, let them install. The place came together bit by bit over the course of two years. I wrote a lot of checks. But in the end, it was done and it was paid for.


The Great Room in my home. I really do love it here.

The Lecture

I know that what I’ve achieved is beyond the means of many people. I don’t want to say I’m “lucky” that I could do this because I truly believe that we make (most of) our luck. (And besides, I’ve had a bit of bad luck, too.) I’m not rich, but I do know how to work for a living and manage my money.

Living within my means is step 1 — and that’s the step most folks can’t seem to manage. They buy things they don’t need or can’t afford, relying on credit cards and loans to make it happen. Soon, every penny from every paycheck is spoken for and still some of them keep buying. They live in a world of never-ending debt by making minimum payments on every debt they owe. And then they complain that they’re broke.

That’s not me. I learned my lesson about debt TWICE when I was in my twenties. The second time did the charm. Years later, I realized that the first step to financial security — especially in retirement years — is having a paid-for roof over your head. That’s what motivated me to get the house I owned with my wasband paid for. And that has definitely been on my mind over the past 10 years as I get ever closer to retirement age.

I’m 61 now and starting to think seriously about life in retirement. Getting that paid-for roof over my head was a good start on the things I need to do to achieve my retirement dreams.

Living in Beauty

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I realize yet again how fortunate I am to live in such a beautiful place.

It was a little over 10 years ago when I discovered the 10 acres of land where I’d build my home. I’d been doing wine tasting tours with my helicopter during cherry season, ferrying couples from a winery in Quincy to one in Malaga. Along the way, I took note of the road the winery was on. I liked its remoteness and the way it was so sparsely developed. I had friends in Quincy who owned land on the road and I called them to ask who their realtor was. To my surprise, they told me they’d decided to sell. I landed my helicopter out there for a closer look and decided I wanted to buy.


This picture dates back to June 10, 2012. I’m parked about where my driveway apron is today; my house would be built between the helicopter and the spot I shot the photo from.

I was still married at the time, but that didn’t last much longer. I showed the property to my future wasband when he came to Washington to discuss our upcoming divorce. He didn’t see the potential I saw — which was really not surprising. He was determined to end the marriage. That turned out to be a very good thing. I know from experience that if I had to compromise with him, I never would have built the home I really wanted — the home I live in now.

I started construction on May 20, 2014. I was living in my old fifth wheel trailer, the Mobile Mansion, on the site and made daily time-lapses that I combined into a movie — the construction folks still show it at home shows. As the general contractor, I learned a ton about building and did a lot of the work myself — I wired the whole place, laid down the flooring, and worked with friends to install doors and fixtures. Although I’m allowed to have two homes on my property, I knew this would be the one I lived in for a while, so I included everything I wanted: granite countertops, custom cabinets, and a soaking tub with views of the valley below. With plenty of large windows, decks on two sides, a 4-car garage, a large RV garage, a shop area, and the privacy I can’t live without, it was my dream home. I moved in in spring 2015.


This shot from June 9, 2017 shows my home from the road. I call it the Aerie because of the way it’s nestled on a shelf overlooking the Wenatchee Valley.


This shot from May 20, 2016 shows the side of my house facing the view of the valley. My living space is above the car garage, which is completely invisible from the road. The covered deck on this side of the house is where I hang out on cool afternoons and evenings. The cliffs behind my house, on the other side of the road, are home to bighorn sheep that occasionally come down and graze in the neighborhood.

I can’t quite express how much I love living here. I’ve always been a view person and I don’t think I could ask — or ever get — a better view than this one. Day or night, no matter what the weather is, there’s always something amazing to see outside my windows. I share ton of photos on Twitter — so many that I expect people to start complaining. Today is especially awesome, with my 10 acres full of lupine and other wildflowers waving wildly in the wind as the sun rose, revealing snow-capped peaks to the west.


I shot this photo this morning when I took my pups out for their morning pee. The sun’s first light was just touching the tops of the lupine and illuminating the hillsides down in Wenatchee.

I thought of the Navajo prayer, Walking in Beauty. It begins:

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again

Although the Navajo concept of walking in beauty goes far beyond the aesthetics of a nice view, I believe that finding and appreciating beauty in the things around us is the first step to achieving emotional and spiritual peace. I look out the window and I see the river, mountains, orchards, and sky and I feel overwhelmed sometimes by just how beautiful it all is. Even at night, when it turns into a sea of lights, it’s awe inspiring. How can I not just sit down and take it all in and let it calm my inner mind?

And I get to see this every day, every time I look out my windows.

I think that moving here and being able to build the home I really wanted was probably the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. The peace, privacy, and beauty of this place feeds me a simple diet of joy that makes the challenges of life part of my own formula for happiness.