Sunday, August 22, 2010

Sunday Schooled - OWH and Panamera Have Nothing To Do With One Another - Or Do They?

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Another week of life lessons has passed and lest I forget all the nuggets I collected this week, they will  be collected here in Sunday Schooled. I like to start these posts with a quote from someone more learned than I am. Gives a bit of credibility to what I am about to say. I found that one above from OWH and I like it. It signifies intellectual growth and expansion. Good stuff. But I wanted to further expand my and my readers' knowledge by giving a bit of background on OWH. We all should know that he was a U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1902-1932), but I wanted to know a bit more. So I wiki'd him and find that he was a Jr. and OWH, Sr. was an author. That made me think...which one takes credit for the quote? My source did not specify from which Holmes the quote emanated. This may not bother you but it bothered me. In some things, I like to be precise. As with all unanswered life questions, I turned to Google for clarity. Google was not able to deliver. Seems all over the www. there is confusion about which Holmes, Sr. or Jr., had the new idea that was good enough to quote. But there seems to be more support that Jr. was the guy.

I think I can solve the mystery with simple logic. I believe Holmes, Sr. said it first, at home to young Holmes, Jr., trying to get him to do his homework.  And then Holmes, Jr. bandied about the saying a time or two during his tenure as Justice, probably not even realizing that his dad's wisdom had been planted in his subconscious all those years ago at the kitchen table. Holmes, Jr. being the more famous of the two, gets more credit than Dad. We all know we end up sounding just like our parents. So that's what happened with this one.

And that's just what I learned as I started to write this post. Seems you can't do anything without opening a can of worms.

But there is something else I learned this week. And this is really important stuff. I did not know until earlier this week that there exists a Porsche sedan. Until this week, when I thought of Porsche, I thought of this:


or these:


But since a Porsche sedan glided by my trembling minivan going at least 85mph but appeared to be floating on air (the Porsche not the van), my mind has forever been expanded. The dimensions of my mind now include this:


and this:



Unfortunately, the dimensions of my mind had to also get around this: $94,700. And around this: $500,000. The smaller amount is the price of the Porsche Panamera that slid past me like a ghost in yachting blue. The higher amount is the estimated cost of sending our two young sons to college starting in the year 2020.  The amount of oxygen in the room just decrease thricefold by my sharp gasping inhalation.

So once I exhale again and get my newly expanded mind back into its original container, I plan to look at our college savings plans, reassess our sons' unique attributes and begin a web search for scholarship opportunities in Lego building, science trivia and fart jokes. And in the spirit of OWH, Sr. I will remind our sons of the value of broader intellectual dimensions in hopes of greater scholarship chances than the aforementioned skills may provide.

4 comments:

  1. "scholarship opportunities in Lego building, science trivia and fart jokes." That's brilliant. I love it, too :) Good luck!

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  2. Why not studying in Finland where it's almost free? Living cost is high BUT not as much as total would be in US...
    SS greetings from Casablanca, Morocco!

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  3. So what have you decided to do? We are just now getting our acts together regarding college financial planning and would love to hear how you are maneuvering the maze. I hope it does NOT involve Finland!

    Mary Ann Wu

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Whaddaya think about that?