Archive for August, 2006

Mission Statement

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

A blog with a Mission Statement?  What kind of pretentious ass am I, anyway?  Am I so egotistical that I think folks will flock to my site to read my writings?  

Duh, no.  My main purpose is to document long bits of consumer research I do, in case I ever need them again, or so other folks looking to buy the same type of thing can save some time.  I’ll also put in trip reports after interesting vacations so friends and family can pretend to read it–although it’s more likely that I’ll use it to remember what we did when I’m old and grey (in about 2 years). 

Truth be told, I will probably also spout off a bit about topics near and dear to my heart–petroleum reduction, behavior, dessert, partisan politics–that I hate to drone on about at parties, but I want to make sure my thoughts are available just in case I ever run into somebody who cares.  OK, so that’s pretty unlikely.  But I tend to feel better after organizing my thoughts and writing them down, so I’m going to do it anyway.

In short, this blog is pretty much just for me.  If somebody else happens to gain something from it, that’s great! 

Iceland is cool

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

In June, we took a trip to Iceland.

Why Iceland?  Well, as you can probably imagine, it’s not very hot.  At 300k people on an island the size of Kentucky, we didn’t expect it would be crowded.  We are anti-social weather weenies, so it seemed that it would serve us well.  We were also interested in the geothermal features, and were looking for something a little out of the ordinary. (more…)

My new Insight (the car, that is)

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

It seems like we have a lot of cars around here.

But the camper van is really just for camping duties and for hauling things that don’t fit in the other cars (so it at least helps by just being there–it allows us to buy smaller cars for everyday usage).  It gets really bad mpg and is very hard to park, so we don’t like to drive it regularly. (more…)

About

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Chad Schwitters lives in Redmond, Washington with his wife, Carrie, and children Drew and Kyla.  They used to have two rabbits, but they died.

He enjoys reading about behavior, thinking about ethics, looking at cars (no, not sports cars–he really likes boring practical cars) and eating too much dessert.

He doesn’t have the perseverance to be a scientist, the creativity to be an artist, the drive to be in business, the duplicity to be a politician, the experience for a trade, the talent to be a performer, or the skill to be an athlete.  He tends to overanalyze things and talk about them too much; so engineer, juror and armchair pundit are pretty much his only options.