Ed Icionsub

We were talking about how people all have different symptoms of OCD, most to a small degree and some, like the character played in Monk on TV, have them at a very high level. I do feel bad for people who have to deal with high levels of OCD on a daily basis. They must have a difficult time finding contentment or peace in their lives.

One of the things that I do compulsively is to collect coupons. I must feel like throwing away a coupon is throwing away money. But I don’t have a good system for keeping track of the coupons and I rarely have them with me when I have the opportunity to use them.

Today I went through a stack of coupons that have been coming in the mail and in the Sunday newspaper. Some of them expired way back in June and even May of this year. It bothered me greatly to crumple up the expired ones and toss them away. I feel like they were lost opportunities.

So many companies are cutting back on benefits, that I decided to look very closely at my own benefits package and see if I am covered as well as I hoped when I accepted this job. The one thing that seems to be lacking is the life insurance part of the package. The life insurance is only my annual salary doubled. That is not much money to leave your spouse and dependents. And the policy through my employer will terminate if I am laid off or leave the company for any reason.

That got me interested in buying a separate term life insurance policy to take care of my family if anything happens to me. These days, we can’t count on our employers for more than the next paycheck. So to take care of my family, I need to think outside of the box.

The front page of Yahoo has an alert that Johnson and Johnson  is recalling their Tylenol for infants and children. It is just about every flavor and every type of the Tylenol, including the multi symptom and allergy products.

The sad thing is that American had a huge let down on the Tylenol brand years ago when there was tampering. Now they are facing a big recall on the infants and children’s products due to manufacturing problems. It will be hard for Americans to trust this brand if there are any reported illnesses or deaths as a result of the tainted products being used. I hope that does not happen, for the sake of American families and for the sake of the brand.

Just found out that Willie Nelson will be here in Nashville in November. That is pretty far off for me to make plans, but I would really like to see Willie in a live concert again. I might buy a couple of tickets if I can get good seats, and if something comes up that I can’t make it, then I’m sure that I will be able to sell them at the office to someone who wants to go.

One of the coolest things about the iPhone is that there are thousands of applications being developed and released for the phone that are easy to use, easy to find, and very affordable. For example, this very cool game that I heard about called, Parablox, was designed by a guy named Wolfgang Bartelme, and you can download the game for just 99 cents. The game is bright and colorful, easy to learn but challenging to master. It is very addictive and a great way to de-stress when you are stuck waiting in line for the drive up bank window, or sitting in a doctors office waiting room, or any of another dozen situations where you have a few minutes to wait and can distract yourself with a quick game or two on your iPhone.

Sometimes I think it would be fun to compete for high score against friends, like I do with other games in social media sites. Or maybe I could come up with a fun game myself and get someone who knows how to do the programming work with me to design a multiplayer iPhone game platform and make it available for download like Bartelme did with his game. I would like the satisfaction of knowing that people were having a little break from their waiting times with a game that I designed.