Archive for the Thought for the Weekend Category

And That’s a Humorous Holiday Wrap!

And That's a Humorous Holiday Wrap!

In my humble opinion, one of the greatest inventions of all time is the gift bag. My gift-wrapping looks about as good as my handwriting, which is to say, horrible. I’ll confess – I haven’t tried that hard, but when I do give it a whirl, I either cut too much paper or not enough, winding up with the dreaded gap. If I try to cover the gap, then I wind up with a taped up mess that looks like…well…my wrapping. When I can’t shop at stores that provide gift-wrapping service, I rely on

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What I Really Want This Christmas

What I Really Want This Christmas

It’s a season for giving, and as I pointed out in my post about GoFundMe success stories, we should try to give in some way every day of the year. I’ve also learned that asking is just as important as giving. You may remember a post about a Rejection Therapy exercise the Matchmaker Logistics team did a couple of years ago. (It’s worth re-reading just for the joke at the end!) The exercise can easily be summed up with this quote from Roger Ellerton, author of Win-Win Influence: “Ask for what you want! Give

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Thinking Like Al Capone

Last weekend, the Matchmaker Logistics team conducted its annual staff retreat followed by our Christmas Party. After a morning of learning and goal-setting for 2017, the team did a group activity – an escape room. If you haven’t heard of them, escape rooms are a hot new fad. Think of them as a video game come to life. It’s a real, live physical adventure game where the players are locked in a room. The challenge: use elements of the room to solve a series of puzzles and escape within a set time limit. Our

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Go Fund A Friend

As Mary pointed out on Monday, it’s been a week of dedicated days, including #GivingTuesday, the charitable season kick-off for holiday and end-of-year giving. The holidays bring out the best in us, but shouldn’t all days be days of thanks and days of giving? This got me thinking about one of my favorite sites to appear on the internet – GoFundMe. This website has literally changed the lives of thousands of people. It’s an easy-to-use platform where anyone can sign up and make a crowdfunding campaign, asking for donations from folks all over the

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Texts-giving

It was a tough election year, with divisive rhetoric and story after story that seemed to indicate that our United States is a country of people divided. I guess that’s why this Thanksgiving week I’m so very grateful to have stumbled upon a couple of stories about the kindness of strangers – different people from completely different walks of life who remind us that most of us out there are indeed generous, kindhearted people: When a grandmother tried to reach out to her grandchildren via text to inform them about her Thanksgiving plans, she

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Robot: Friend or Enemy?

Let’s get clear on one thing. The robots are coming. And there is no avoiding it. Personally, I like robots. (I feel it’s important for me to say so – they could be reading this right now!) Yet with Terminator, The Matrix, and that new show Westworld, it’s hard to feel completely comfortable about a future shared with robots. So many stories and mindsets revolve around the idea of robot overlords – merciless machines who feel no pain or emotion -coming to turn us into their minions! In Japan, robots are used in restaurant

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Shipping + Veterans= Home

As far as we’re concerned, today is one of the most important days of the year – Veteran’s Day, a day to honor veterans and thank them for their service. They are our family, our friends, and our heroes, and they deserve our gratitude not today, but every day. Meeting the needs of veterans as they return from fighting overseas is a challenge that many of us hold close to our hearts. After helping our country, servicemen and women often need our help integrating back into the society they fought so hard to protect.

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A Star-Studded PSA

Greetings Thought for the Weekend readers! In anticipation of the upcoming weekend, I felt it my civic duty to remind you of one of the most exciting events of each year, happening this Sunday. With the help of Cher, I bring you this very important Public Service Announcement: This Sunday, we get to ‘fall back’ into our beds for an extra hour of sleep! (I told you it was exciting….) If you can’t sleep in, you can spend your hour in other ways. Polls indicate that other than sleeping, the most popular ways to

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Getting Spooky With It

Halloween weekend is one of the best weekends of the year, if you ask me! Candy by the bucket, costume parties, incredible people-watching, and a great excuse to give everyone a good, fun, harmless scare. In preparation, last weekend my wife asked my daughter, Chloe, and I to go out and grab some Halloween decorations. I couldn’t believe my luck – carte blanche to let my inner Freddy Krueger out to play! Have you seen some of these modern Halloween decorations? Gone are the days of posterboard bats stuck to the wall, or a

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This Has Really Been Bugging Me….

The Human Fly. Spider-man. Mary Nicholas. The list of superheroes powered by bugs goes on and on. Well, okay – admittedly, we haven’t seen any changes in Mary since her run in with a wasp , but we’ve been monitoring her closely for any new wasp-like powers. I think the flying, stinging sort are on to us, because they came after me, too! Last month, on a Friday, I was doing some maintenance on my backyard pool in preparation for out-of-town visitors. I set the cleaning supplies down hard on a bench, just to

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