… the blog hosting company suggest this as an alternate name:
I suppose I really should start washing dogs – it would contribute more to society than my blogging.
You know you’ve chosen a horrible name for your blog when…
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The poor get poorer
Nick DiNardo is a fellow parent of Walnut Hills High School kids. Our sons played on the same junior high soccer team, and our daughter participated in the Ultimate Frisbee club that he leads/coaches.
Nick’s day job is Managing Attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio. He was featured in a Cincinnati Enquirer special section a couple of Sundays ago. The Enquirer is doing a four-part series on the lingering effects of the Great Recession, and it’s well worth the reading investment. You quickly realize how the economic collapse of a decade ago created an even greater divide between the haves and the have nots, and how the cards are stacked against the poor.
The article that featured Nick is about payday lenders. After reading it, the term usury comes to mind.
The article is a great example of how hard it is for the poor (including the working poor) to keep their heads above water. All it takes is a single, solitary, unexpected expense — an urgent care visit or car breakdown — to crush you.
Most payday loan customers are poor, earning about $30,000 a year. Most pay exorbitant fees and interest rates that have run as high as 590%. And most don’t read the fine print, which can be unforgiving.
Cincinnati Enquirer article
Read the article to find out how a working single mom wound up paying $3,878 for an $800 loan. And she’d still be on the hamster wheel if not for Nick’s intervention.
Payday lending may not be illegal, but it sure as heck is unethical.
DiNardo hopes the new Ohio law regulating the loans will mean fewer cases like hers in the future, but he’s not sure. While mortgage rates go for 3.5% and car loans hover around 5%, poor people without access to credit will still turn to payday lenders for help.
And when they do, even under the new law, they’ll pay interest rates and fees as high as 60%.Cincinnati Enquirer article
In DiNardo’s world, this is progress.
It’s not “just business”…. and it’s not anywhere close to being just.
The Marty Party ends today
Marty Brennaman, who has been the Cincinnati Reds play-by-play radio announcer for the past 46 seasons, will step away from the mic following this afternoon’s “titanic struggle” (that’s a Marty-ism) with the Milwaukee Brewers.
When I was 6, my family moved from New Jersey to Arkansas… sparing me the ignominy of being one of those obnoxious fans of the Yankees or Mets. With no geographic allegiance to a particular team, I was an MLB free agent fan.
In those pre-cable dark ages of the early 70s, all we had was the NBC Game of the Week (Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek and Joe Garagiola) and the radio. I quickly latched onto the Cincinnati Reds, also known as The Big Red Machine. Rose, Bench, Morgan, Perez, Concepcion, Geronimo… they were my heroes.
The Reds flagship radio station was — and still is — 700 WLW-AM, a 50,000 clear channel station. The station’s signal covered dozens of states at night, including Arkansas. So I would tune in nearly every game. Marty joined in 1974 (replacing Al Michaels), teaming up with former teenage major league pitcher Joe Nuxhall.
Marty & Joe were the soundtrack to my baseball life. Marty’s signature victory cry of “… and this one belongs to the Reds!” has been the source of thousands of smiles over my lifetime.
Marty’s last call is today. They’re giving away transistor radios to kids who attend, which is certainly anachronistic in the streaming media/smartphone era, but it’s totally fitting for the generation that grew up with him.
I can’t attend the game (don’t you hate it when work gets in the way of play?), but I’ll be sure to tune in for one last party with Marty.
Will the (pizza) circle be unbroken
Our daughter Leah started her first real job Monday. She’s working at Ramundo’s Pizzeria. It’s a family-owned small business, but it looms large within the dubbatrubba family.
Our oldest, Gabriel (age 19) has been working there since the location in our neighborhood opened two and a half years ago. Son #2 Peter also started working there when he was 16. Now he’s away at college, but Leah (who turned 16 in June) slid right into his old slot, working the sandwich/salad bar. She didn’t even have to interview – her older brothers’ work ethic got her a free pass.
Gabriel has moved up the food chain (pizza chain?), starting as part of the pizza-making crew, then doing deliveries (which pays better), and now he’s the night manager a couple times a week, working around his class schedule at the University of Cincinnati.
The owner is super nice. The pay is good… the freedom it affords our kids is even better. Gas money for the car. Yet another guitar for Gabriel, some Doc Martens for Leah, and funding for a Robinhood investment account for Peter (dude doesn’t buy stuff… he still has every nickel he ever made).
But it’s not about the cash, really. It’s learning to show up when you’re supposed to, working hard when you’re there, treating customers with courtesy and respect, getting along with your co-workers, earning promotions through your efforts. All the habits they’re forming now that will serve them well, well beyond when they’re serving pizzas.
It’s said that small businesses are the lifeblood of a community, and the American economy. I’ll raise a toast to that! (Craft beer buckets available at Ramundo’s for the incredibly low price of five cans for $15…)
We come bearing gifts
The purpose of life is to discover your gift.
David Viscott – Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations, 1993
The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
My gift is goofball writing. You’re welcome.
Speaking of giving it away, if you have a friend who might enjoy my random brain droppings, please share a link to dubbatrubba.com with them. Thanks.
According to my WordPress dashboard, this is Post #677. I’ve still got a long way to go to get to the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell cites as the benchmark for mastery of a craft. My “gift” is a work in progress.
But I’ll keep working. And I’ll keep giving it away.
Nature’s air conditioners
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
Joyce Kilmer
The Cincinnati Parks Foundation has a great program that offers free trees to city residents if they plant them in their front yards. Pretty up your plot and suck more carbon dioxide out of the air… win-win.
It’s called the Fall ReLeaf program, and you can request a tree (or trees) online. They have several varieties available, from small trees such as Serviceberry and Royal Raindrops Crabapple to towering ones like the Dawn Redwood and Northern Red Oak. And you don’t get some tiny twig of a tree that has a slim chance of surviving. The trees they dole out are typically a few years old and approximately five feet tall. As long as you plant them in the right place, they’ll thrive.
The Cincinnati Parks Foundation used to offer the program in the Spring, but realized that Fall is better for transplanting. Five of the trees in my own front yard are from this program – a Yoshino Cherry, a Black Plum, a Frontier Elm, a Queen Maple and a Kousa Dogwood.
There are so many environmental and social benefits to trees.
And they’re fun too… well, after the raking is over.
It’s a program I really dig. You will too!
Saved by the sun
Kudos to Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank for committing to renewable energy in a “yuuuge” way. As in 350,000 solar panels on 1,400 acres at a solar facility in North Carolina. (Read more here.)
This will allow Fifth Third to reach 100% renewable power, as part of RE100.
Companies in the commercial and industrial sector account for approximately two thirds of the world’s end-of-use of electricity. Switching this demand to renewables is transforming the global energy market and accelerating the transition to a clean economy.
I hope more companies get on board, and fast, as the glaciers melt and hurricanes, “100 year floods”, droughts and extreme temperatures increase across this globe we all share.
Solar isn’t just for corporations either. We have 23 panels on the roof of our house. Here’s how much juice we grabbed for free last month:
That’s roughly half of our electric usage. We installed the panels in September of 2017… we should reach full payback seven to ten years from now. We got an Ohio “green” loan with an interest rate of 1.35%. There’s a 30% tax credit on the cost of solar installation projects, too. (Hurry, it starts phasing out at the end of this year… thanks Agent Orange!)
few presidential administrations have been as antagonistic to clean energy as the Trump White House
Source: this Wired article – https://www.wired.com/story/a-tax-credit-fueled-the-solar-energy-boom-now-its-in-limbo/
There are a lot of empty spots across this country, where silver solar panels can co-exist with amber waves of grain under spacious skies. Let’s boost renewable energy projects, before we all get burned.
They grow up so fast…
In case you missed it: a youth football/cheer squad organization in a town just a few miles from Cincinnati was requiring kids as young as age seven to sell tickets in a gun raffle as a fundraiser. (Full story from cincinnati.com is here. All excerpts below are from that article.)
Absurd is absolutely right. Asinine.
Because the brave mom questioned the “wisdom” of such an event, the organization’s leaders allowed kids to opt out of selling tickets. However, the youth org is still raffling off the type of semi-automatic weapon of war that has been used in several mass shootings/killings. The Junior Lions need to raise funds to… wait for it… pay their insurance bill. Because youth football can be a bit dangerous, don’t ya know?
Kudos to Heather Chilton for trying to provide a sanity check in a country that desperately needs more of it.
Two far gone
Here’s a photo of our second child, Peter, taken just a short while ago:
And here’s a shot of him from yesterday:
We dropped him off at college, at Ohio University. Abandoned him, really, at the tender age of 18.
Our oldest goes to school in town, so Peter is the first one to be truly “away” at college. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive, but it seems light years away.
I know he’ll be fine; it’s the rest of us that I’m worried about. Peter is a “glue guy” as the sportscasters like to say. Easygoing, funny, gets along with everyone. A straight arrow. And more than happy to chauffeur his two younger siblings around. With him gone, the sibling dynamic will change, and the family fabric will be altered. We’ll all have to adjust to life sans Pedro.
I know it’s just the first in a series of goodbyes, of slowly but surely letting go… but that doesn’t make it any easier.
How many days until Parents Weekend?
Biking and breathing
“Just breathe.” It’s become a mantra in our multi-tasking, mile-a-minute society.
But if you have Cystic Fibrosis, it can be difficult just TO breathe.
Cystic fibrosis is a progressive, genetic disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits the ability to breathe over time.
https://www.cff.org/What-is-CF/About-Cystic-Fibrosis/
I don’t ride my bike as often as I used to, but I do participate in the Cystic Fibrosis Cycle for Life event in Cincinnati every fall. I’ll be riding a 32-mile route, which is no small feat for an old man with creaky knees pedaling a rusty (but trusty) bike.
Sure, my lungs will be burning a bit, especially on the hills. But that’s a not-so-subtle reminder of the challenges that folks with CF face on a daily basis. As I pedal, I’ll be thinking of the people I know who are affected by this disease: John’s daughter, Walter’s stepson, Paul’s niece and nephew…
I’m sure you know someone battling CF too. If you feel so inclined, I hope you’ll donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and support me in my ride. You can do so here:
http://fightcf.cff.org/site/TR/Cycle/42_Greater_Cincinnati_Cincinnati?px=2458867&pg=personal&fr_id=7574
If you can’t swing it, no worries. Either way, I know you’ll be rooting for me to ride like this:
Even though I’ll really look more like this:
