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Twenty years ago, I got my Eagle Scout

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Twenty years ago, I got my Eagle Scout 🦅

It’s hard to imagine that it was 20 years ago this autumn that I finished up my Eagle Project and all the required merit badges. Time sure goes by quickly.

I was involved with scouts from the era of Cub Scouts through Boy Scouts, I got my Arrow of Light badge as a Cub Scout, Eagle Scout badge and even did the ordeal to get my Order of the Arrow. I served as Assistant Scoutmaster for a while and a Merit Badge counselor for five different merit badges.

So I had quite a bit of experience with Boy Scouts.

I often think of Boy Scouts of teaching me more what not to do in the woods then what to do. There was many weekends days of hauling heavy aluminum pots in the woods and boiling pasta over smokey fires we dug out of the snow bank. Those constantly finckey propane lanterns and stoves, the charred bread and cakes we made in the reflector ovens.

When I started camping on my own, I went with all liquid fuel stoves, electric lights from the inverter on my truck rather than use a camp lantern. I camped under a truck cap, it was years before I bought a tent. Bungee cords rather than tyranny of tying ropes. Even the meals were different than camping in Scouts – much more fresh foods from the cooler. I never stayed in state campgrounds. Maybe it was my rebellious twenties more than anything else.

I probably can’t think of the skills and values that I learned in scouts but there was many, and when my rebellious twenties faded into my 30s, I started to tie more taught line hitches and ultimately bought more propane applications and started cooking more in the camp oven, which is a variation on the reflector oven. I even tent camped from time to time.

Scouts taught me to value the woods, to pick a good campsite, pack appropriately and lightly when backpacking and day hiking. To find firewood and build a fire in the most adverse conditions. To not fear the wilderness but be prepared for adverse conditions. To navigate the woods and not become more than temporarily disoriented. To respect but enjoy the wilderness.

6 Ways to Build a Roth Retirement Nest Egg

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6 Ways to Build a Roth Retirement Nest Egg

uilding up a Roth nest egg can pay off in spades for retirees. Money in a Roth IRA grows tax-free, and the account doesn’t have required minimum distributions—so you withdraw the money only when you need it. Withdrawals are also tax-free, so they don’t trigger other consequences. Roth withdrawals don’t count in the calculations for taxing Social Security benefits or determining Medicare premium surcharges, for instance. Roths “give retirees a lot of flexibility,” says Gil Charney, director of the Tax Institute at H&R Block, “and some control over their tax liability.”

But there isn’t just one route to getting money into a Roth. You can take a variety of paths to reach tax-free nirvana—some more well-known than others. We’ll provide you the map, so you can choose which routes might best serve your situation.

Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors?

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Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors?

This is a really good article about statistics.
 
People are living longer now on average -- not because medicine is doing all that much to prolong people at advanced age -- but because so many fewer children die from preventable diseases. If you die at age 5, you have a zero percent chance of making it to age 50.
 
And always, remember if you have made it 35 years old, you are much more likely to live to 50 years old, then if you currently are 18 years old. Time is a self-reinforcing, trends in motion tend to remain the same. Math and statistics is weird like that.

Playing with hair styles

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One of the great things about the Coronavirus PAUSE is it gives us all a chance to play with our hair styles without awkward changes being that apparent outside of zoom. I’m impressed how much side burns have grown in!