Stuff I Learned Yesterday

Our winters are really fairly mild here in the Sooner state. We get 2 or 3 decent snow falls each season that will keep the kids out of school for a few days. The worst days are when we get ice instead of snow. Back in 2009 we were projected to keep a whopper of a storm. Not only was it projected to be a whopper, it was projected to hit on Christmas Eve. Back then my commute was about 30 miles each way and it took between 35 and 40 minutes. A bad day might be 45 or 50 minutes. A really bad day would take an hour. Read More...

Today I want to share a story that took place during the winter of my junior year of high school. I was the editor for the school yearbook and I also served as a photographer. I’ve mentioned before that I spent a lot of time outside of school with the yearbook teacher, because we traveled a lot to sporting events and venturing off to the city I now live in so that we could have access to a dark room to develop film. Read More...

Today is the Friday Forum!! In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a contribution from Geoff. You can participate in Friday Forum by visiting our Feedback Page or calling our voice feedback line at 304-837-2278. Read More...

Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Mandy Wichert. I think mangos are better than candy and I believe, if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living! In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I’m talking about the best Valentine’s Day ever and how your experience can be shaped by taking on a […]

I remember when my son was born. Like most new parents, no matter how prepared you think you are, when you're holding your newborn child in your arms for the first time you get that nudging fear that you are responsible for everything in this child's life for many, many years ahead. It can be overwhelming. Read More...

Kari and I got married in 1999 and bought our first house in 2002. We’d been living in Wichita Falls, Texas for a year. We spent the first year in an apartment and when I lease was up we decided it was time to buy a place of our own. Had we known that we’d only live in the house for one year we wouldn’t have made that choice, but at the time it looked like we’d be residing in Wichita Falls for several years. It was a 3 bedroom house that had been built in the 1950’s, wiped out by a tornado in the 1970’s and then rebuilt. It had a big window in the living room and french doors in the dining room that let in a lot of natural light. The french doors opened up to a covered patio and a large size yard with a swing set and storage shed. Read More...

As I teased on last Friday’s episode, today’s episode is going to take a look back at the episode I released last Tuesday entitled, “When Laughing is No Laughing Matter.” The truth is, it’s an episode that I almost didn’t release. In fact, both of the episodes I did last week almost didn’t get released. I almost didn’t release Monday’s episode (Can You Keep a Secret) because I didn’t want to further infringe upon the promise that I had made (and broken) to my friend. I went back and forth for weeks in my mind as I talked myself into recording it and then talked myself out of recording it. Obviously I finally settled on recording it, but I changed the the name of my friend and left out a few details. In the end, the story held true to what happened, while still protecting the people involved. It was a lesson that I felt would provide value and needed to be shared. Read More...

Today is the Friday Forum!! In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share contributions from Bonita and Justina. You can participate in Friday Forum by visiting our Feedback Page or calling our voice feedback line at 304-837-2278. Read More...

I remember in 1996 when we first got the internet in my home. Of course, it was nothing like today. Many of you can remember receiving the AOL discs in the mail, popping them into the CD drive, loading them up for the first time, and waiting for that agonizingly long dial-up ring tone. I'm sure that many of you, like me, have that tone endlessly etched in your head. Read More...

The mind is an amazing machine. It loves routines. It loves efficiency. It loves repetitive tasks that it can do over and over. That's how you can accomplish so many tasks throughout your day without really thinking about them. Some call it multitasking. However, when you break out and veer away of those routines you are in effect, giving your mind a stressful workout. This requires more concentration, more energy and more time, which can be mentally exhausting. Your mind prefers the repetitive tasks that allow it to refuel and get ready for the next time you break from your routines. Read More...

When I was 24 years old I took over the store manager position of a bookstore in Texas. I was responsible for not only managing nearly a million dollars in inventory, but the staff of about 30 people. As anyone who has been in management can tell you, managing people is by far the harder part of the job. By that time I had worked for the company for 6 years and had spent the previous 10 months specifically training to run my own store. Still, I was not fully prepared to for the job when I accepted it. Honestly though, I think it’s one of those jobs where you can never be fully prepared until you actually do it and get real world on the job training. Read More...

I spent nearly 19 years working for a bookstore chain. You can imagine the number of people that I worked with during that time. Fortunately, most of them were really great. I spent just over half of those years working on the frontline of the chain at several of our stores. Like many companies, there was a disconnect between those that worked in the stores, and those that worked at the corporate office. While I worked at the store, it was pretty common to hear comments from my co-workers about how clueless the corporate people were. In fact, when I eventually got a job at the corporate office, one of my co-workers at the store gave me the board game Clue as a going away present, so that I would never find myself clueless at my new job at the corporate office. Read More...

Today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday is a Friday Flashback. Friday Flashback episodes feature some of the most popular episodes of Stuff I Learned Yesterday. Today we hear one of the episodes that has received the most listener feedback, Stuff I Learned Yesterday Episode 102- A Teacher and a Storyteller. Read More...

A little over one week ago, my house was pristine. The floor was mopped and vacuumed, the countertops and sinks glistened and every stray belonging and piece of laundry had found its home. I took a deep breath, looking around and felt so proud of what I had accomplished. Then, my family came home. The weather was cold and we stayed inside most of the weekend. I picked up a few stray things here and there, and continued to cook. Then, I rested. I noticed that things were getting a little messier but thought I’d be able to get to it later. I loaded the dishwasher up and set it to run, but after that, the business of life caught up with me. Pretty soon, the clean house I’d been so proud of had vanished and now the task of cleaning at all seems daunting, because I’m already so far behind! I was almost paralyzed into doing nothing because the mountain of mess was just too hard to tackle, especially while it continued to grow! Read More...

I'm going to lay my geek card right down in front of you now and tell you that I am a huge Dungeons & Dragons fan. In fact, my resume has Dungeon Master listed under interests and hobbies, I'm not kidding. I actually landed a job interview once because the HR person was curious and wanted to ask me about it. I realized at the interview that the job wasn't for me and backed out so I don't know if he would have hired me or not. Read More...