Posts by maxwell

14

Are you happy with your last salary increase?

by BeelzeDub in

jw
friends

working in the it industry pay increases have been historicly good.

this weeks computerword www.computerworld.com has an piece on the salary squeeze.

for my job the average increase nationwide is 2%.

maxwell

I am content with my raise as long as it keeps up with the cost of living. In the past I have compared the percentage of my raise with the percentage that my rent goes up when it is time to renew the lease. The last percentage of the last cost of living increase in my job did not keep up with the increase in my rent. However, I did move to nicer apartment where the rent was even more than they were going to increase the rent at the apartment I was in at the beginning of the year. At my original apartment they were doing a 12% increase in rent and promising another 12% increase next year as a result of remodeling deal with the city housing agency. Although my new apartment has higher rent, I don't expect 12% rent increases.

Only one year since I've been here did I have a rent increase lower than the cost of living increase. However, averaging promotional salary increases and cost of living increases over the 4 years I've been on my own and comparing that with the average increase in my rent, the salary has increased enough to keep up with the rent increase. So overall I am satisfied, although a little concerned about what may happen when I hit the ceiling on the pay scale at my place of employment. I don't anticipate such a steep rise in rent at the next lease renewal. I am eventually thinking about buying myself a place, but that certainly does not stabilize housing costs. I'll have to worry about less predictable maintenance costs and property taxes then.

20

Did you ever wonder how you'd look with...

by JH in

jw
friends

did you ever wonder how you would look with a shaved head?

did you ever shave your head, or do you think you would look nice that way?

i wouldn't dare.....probably it wouldn't suit me well.. did you ever consider doing it?.

maxwell

Not sure how good or bad I look, but I keep my hair very low for maintenance purposes. Even if my head isn't shaped the right way for it, I figure this is better than struggling to maintain a full head of hair. I use clippers to cut it as low as possible which leaves only very small amount on my head. I once used a razor to actually cut it all off. I thought it was ok at first. However, I think a number of factors led to a really bad case of razor bumps on my head. It looked very gross like some kind of disease, especially in the back of my head. I think it was partly the condition of my scalp, partly the fact that the razor wasn't as sharp as it could have been and wasn't designed for the head, and partly because I probably didn't clean the area properly, but I'll never do that again. I just use clippers to get it as low as possible.

41

Att: ex-Elders and Their Kids: Did You Really Have a Regular Family Study?

by Room 215 in

jw
friends

friends, this is a sort of poll, directed mainly at -- but not limited to --ex-elders, their wives and kids.

it was my impression that, with the possible exception of meaningful personal prayer, the other aspect of the idealized, exemplary jw lifestyle that was portrayed at the assemblies and at meetings-- the regular, weekly family bible study -- was the one most neglected.

it seemed to be something the ``other" spiritual family did and the one thing we constantly agreed we ``needed to work on.".

maxwell

My dad was an elder till my mid teens and we only missed the family study on very rare occasions. Yes we actually had the study. And on a few occasions when my dad wasn't able to be there my mom conducted it. I was required to be there and actually kind of liked it till maybe the last year or two that I was at home. I was at home till I was 22. Some of my earliest memories are of studying the pink Great Teacher's book before we were old enough to read. I was four and I had two younger sisters 3 and 2 at the time. I'm not sure I remember every book we went through, but I know we did the old red youth book, the blue Young People Ask book, the red Live Forever book, the United in Worship book, the Greatest Man book and we studied the Watchtower lessons in our family study for some period of time. And beyond that, when we got older we were expected to do some preparation for the family study. Not necessarily underline answers and look up every scripture, but at least read ahead of where we had stopped the previous week. And do you remember those examples on the convention programs where the children were given reports or assignments to do for the next study. We actually did that few times. We had the family study almost every week like clockwork. I had JW dogma pounded into me. If I never pick up a Bible again in my life, I'm sure there's things I'll remember till I die.

I never really had much of an idea what other families were doing in that regard. I do know that sometimes when I went to visit my cousins and my aunt, their single mother, that sometimes I sat in with them on their family study.

49

Are you a music person?

by FlyingHighNow in

jw
friends

my ex jw exhusband didn't care much about music.

he preferred the natural sounds of life to music.

i have a coworker who doesn't listen to music: she doesn't like it.

maxwell

I love music. I'm a music person. Perhaps not a very skilled musician, but I own a student line Yamaha alto saxophone and a Yamaha P-120 digital piano, not the best but a fair digital piano. I'm not a particularly emotional person and I don't express emotions well verbally. But I think music is a much better medium for expressing such abstract things for anyone. I wish music had a higher priority in schools. I have a Panasonic boombox in my bedroom and an Aiwa stero with tape deck and 3 cd changer in my living room and few other smaller portable music players. I have an old Sony radio w/tapedeck at work and of course, I can play cd's on my computer there. I play music while working often.

53

OMG They are doing commercials now!?

by flower in

jw
friends

i just finished watching martha stewart and after it went off there was a set of commercials before the news came on and i swear i just saw a commercial from the christian congregation of jehovahs' witnesses!.

it was about raising your children with knowledge and love.

it showed a teen girl on the internet in a chat room with a person who had become her best friend and wanted to meet her in person and they said something like if it seems too good to be true it is..'love builds happy familys' was the slogan or something.. .

maxwell

I've caught this commercial a couple of times. I think someone else mentioned it on this forum a while ago and pointed to the jw-media site at least once before, so I saw it on their media site first and was surprised when I first saw it on tv. Both times it was late in the evening. I definitely think it was an overkill for the dangers of the Internet. Definitely there are some predators out there, but the implication was that everyone your child chats with on the Internet is some old creepy guy trying to meet up with kids. And although I have no contact with pre-teens or teens on the Internet in chatrooms, I can't believe most of them use so many silly chat acronyms. My wife, who is still a JW, was watching the second time I saw the PSA. She couldn't believe it was the JW at first either. But I told her the same commercial is on their website.

67

Question for the gentlemen.....

by Surreptitious in

what brand of laundry detergent do you like to use?

maxwell

Phatom Stranger said,

the Wall Street Journal had an article a year or two ago saying that no one in the US reads the manual on their washer, and if we did it right, such as putting the soap in first, into the water, and then putting the clothes in, we would have cleaner clothes.

That is interesting. I noticed the comments about powder leaving streaks on clothes. That has happened with me a few times when I forgot to put the powder in first and just threw it in on top of the clothes. I live in an apartment and in all three of the apartments I've lived in, the laundry room washers have instructions directing you to put the soap in first, load the clothes, then start the washer. As long as I do it in that order, I have no problems, no streaking.

I also do some stuff in the kitchen sometimes that results in edible material, run the vacuum sometimes, and clean the bathroom most weeks. But it really isn't that big of a deal. I did it all before I was married, just as many other men do now and have done before when they live alone.

69

Just curious...

by kj in

how many of you were actually brought into the jws by someone at your door?

how many were born in or brought in by family?.

kj

maxwell

born in 3rd generation through my father's side. mother came in late teens before meeting and marrying my father. Mother's mother, my grandmother, came in shortly after my mother and a couple of my mother's sisters.

17

Loaded words

by Odrade in

i know this subject has been done before, but.... some words we used as jws have a different meaning to us, even now.

encourage, truth, witness, apostate, worldly... .

so how did those words get so loaded?

maxwell

I'm not sure that I have an emotional response to words that have a special meaning to JW. But it is true, that sometimes the definition specific to JW still comes up in my mind when I hear the word. I could be listening to the news and if they say witness when talking about a court case, the first definition triggered is the old JW definition (and then I think about southern Baptist churches and a preacher hollering "Can I get a witness to testify?!!?"). With some words, I have to conciously pick the correct definition. Since I was raised as a JW, some words initially entered my vocabulary with the JW specific definition. So for some words, I've just had to pick up a dictionary and read the generic definition and try to reorient myself.

67

Question for the gentlemen.....

by Surreptitious in

what brand of laundry detergent do you like to use?

maxwell

Side stepping the "big jugs" and "load" pun.

Surreptitious,

I use the powder detergent. No particular reason. My mom always used powder so when I moved out, I always used powder, except once a few weeks ago. We forgot to buy our regular detergent on grocery day. It was laundry day and I didn't fell like going out and we had this plastic bottle of liquid detergent somebody gave us when we got married almost 3 years ago. It finally got some use. I didn't notice a difference, but I'm not particularly observant about those things, as long as its clean.

Yes this guy does laundry. Sometimes the wife does it. Sometimes me.

67

Question for the gentlemen.....

by Surreptitious in

what brand of laundry detergent do you like to use?

maxwell

Tide