Wayne Cimons, attorney and barn night enthusiast gave an in-depth presentation on Family Law, with particular emphasis on Marriage and Divorce. Coming from a decidedly pro-marriage perspective, Wayne explained the ins and outs (horrors?) of divorce law in New York State, covering issues such as alimony, child support, property distribution, selecting an attorney, and what one can expect in the courtroom. Noting how the overwhelming majority of divorce cases are initiated by women, he described the daunting challenges facing fathers in the process; or he has put it, “While there are usually negative ramifications for breaking a contract, marriage may be the only place where the person breaking the covenant not only can receive a financial windfall-but one that’s paid for by the abiding party!” Wayne shared his personal experience on the breakdown of his own marriage and the negative consequencs experienced by fathers and their children when a family is split apart-noting that kids from broken homes have a much higher propensity to underachive in school, partake in drugs, alcohol, and early sex, and having their own marriages fail. He remarked with sadness on how the culture is flooded with materials and attitudes encouraging divorce and how many marriage “counselors” assume that divorce is inevitable and even encourage it. However, Wayne cited with hope several pro-marriage resources providing useful tools for strenghtening marriages and emphasized that it was critical to constantly apply these tools before trouble brews. Such sites include, www.divorcebusting.com, www.smartmarriages.com, and www.marriagebuilders.com.
The Barn Blog 
Sorry I missed it guys, I was away on a business trip. I would have added my perspective as one of the few divorced (and remarried) men in this neighborhood. My divorce was fair compared to most others I know about. Both parties (my ex-wife and I) decided to hash things out together and not in front of a judge.
I give Wayne a lot of credit for being so open about his life with a group of beer-drinking, cigar-puffing dudes on a Friday night – the questions were tough but fair, though. I did think the conversation occasionally seemed a little tough on women in general (no reflection on Wayne’s own situation, of course) but it was interesting to see how the system works for some, and not for others. And his advice on picking lawyers was clearly priceless.
Felt a little strange later to sing “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand. Gonna down to shoot my old lady…” But such is the amazing confluence of topics at the barn!
The statistics say that more than half of marriages end in divorce. Yet in this group of over 20 men only 2 were divorced. So the odds seem much better here in Eastchester.
We are not as unsusal a group as we may like to believe. The 50% divorce rate, is a lifetime statistic. As in this is the chance a marriage will last a lifetime. Our group is probably in the 10 – 20 year range of marriage so the chances are much higher for us to be married than the say if we took the same poll with the same people in 20 years. Another interesting stat is that the yearly divorce rate is only about 3.5%
Using Ian Ayres professor at Yale’s statistical prediction tool and using conservaive numbers I found that the predicted rate of marriage suvival for our group was 80%. The informal poll put us at 90%. This is within the range of the statistical accuracy we would expect from a small sample such as ours.
See the calculator at:
http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-are-chances-your-marriage-will.html
These are the input Data Values that I put in:
Her Age at Time of Marriage = 25
Current Combined Years of Post-High School Education = 8
Number of Kids from This Marriage = 2.5
How Religious is the Couple? = 8
(On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being “the Pope”)
Combined Number of Divorces of Couple’s Parents = 0.05
Combined Previous Marriages = 0.05
The Anniversary (Years of Marriage) for Which to Calculate the Probability = 20
Also, I put in the numbers for Kristy and I and there is a 96% chance that we will still be married today and only a 6.7% we will reach our 40th year anniversary. So we have a lot of work to do to buck the trend.
14 out of 10 people do not understand statistics 😉
I’m currently running the latest version of GirlFriend and I’ve been having some problems lately. I’ve been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 forever as my primary application, and all the GirlFriend releases I’ve tried have always conflicted with it.
I hear that DrinkingBuddies won’t crash if GirlFriend is run in background mode and the sound is turned off. But I’m embarrassed to say I can’t find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them separately, and it works okay.
Girlfriend also seems to have a problem co-existing with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some sort of timing incompatibility.
I probably should have stayed with GirlFriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance from GirlFriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with GirlFriend 2.0. He said I probably didn’t have enough cache to run GirlFriend 2.0, and eventually it would require a Token Ring to run properly. He was right – as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself.
Shortly after that, I installed GirlFriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus anyway. I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while.
I very cautiously upgraded to GirlFriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also installed a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system.
I tried running GirlFriend 1.0 again with GirlFriend 4.0 still installed, but GirlFriend 4.0 has a feature I didn’t know about that automatically senses the presence of any other version of GirlFriend and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions.
The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of GirlFriend, it is written in some obscure language I can’t understand, much less reprogram. Frankly I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts. And I’ve never liked how GirlFriend is totally “object-oriented.”
A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don’t upgrade to Fiancee 1.0. So he did, but soon after that, he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a huge resource hog. It has taken up all his space, so he can’t load anything else.
One of the primary reasons he decided to go with Wife 1.0 was because it came bundled with FreeSexPlus.
Well, it turns out the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug-Ins he wanted to try. On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. Although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw which has an automatic pop-up feature he can’t turn off.
I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0, but he said he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won’t install anyway because of insufficient resources.
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