Possibly the coolest license plate ever!!!
Apr 30, 2008
Apr 26, 2008
The Waiting Place...
Waiting for a train to go
or bus to come or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a YES or NO
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting."
Apr 25, 2008
Nuclear Power & The Environment
I have liked Patrick Moore for a while now. I think for an environmentalist he seems to have a pretty level head and realistic attitude towards how we should balance energy needs and protecting the environment.
Greenpeace founder now backs nuclear power
Greenpeace founder now backs nuclear power
"Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says there is no proof global warming is caused by humans, but it is likely enough that the world should turn to nuclear power...." more >>
Apr 23, 2008
The Good News: I didn't cut my arm off
Welp, I survived another tree trimming season. Every spring I have to get out my chainsaw and take care of the jungle in our backyard and every year I am afraid of cutting off one of my own limbs. Last year while I was working in the backyard a neighbor two houses down was in his backyard using his chainsaw. I just happened to look over and see him cut off a branch and his later fall out from underneath him. I jumped up on one of the kids toys and yelled over to see if he was ok. I didn't hear an answer right away so I ran over to climb the fence when I saw his wife come out of the house and another guy who must have been with him frantically yell up to her to go get some towels. Now, any time someone is using a chain saw and there is an accident where someone yells "Go get a bunch of towels", that is not a good sign. Soon the paramedics arrived and he was taken to the emergency room. I never did find out what happened but the incident did nothing but confirm my fear for my chainsaw.
This year I just took care of some minor trimming myself and we hired a professional service to "lift the skirt", or whatever dirty metaphor it is called, on our 2 big maple trees. My goal is to be able to grow grass in our backyard. Right now all we have is dirt. you know the growing conditions are bad when even the weeds can't take root. If you remember, last year I planted grass and it came up nice until we got about 8 inches of rain in a month. It flooded the yard for too long and the grass died. Apparently swamp like conditions are not ideal for grass. This year I decided I would give it another try. I have a 2 fold approach. First, I realized that a raised garden bed along the back fence was working as a dam, so I removed the railroad ties and leveled the ground. Second, we trimmed the trees quit a bit yesterday morning and hopefully that will give the ground the sunlight that it needs.
It is amazing how hard it can be to recover just a small piece of land from years of neglect. It has taken us 3 Spring/Summers to finally have the backyard in what I would call respectable shape. Mostly it just needed A LOT of pruning and trimming. Even though I had already done a lot over the last 2 years, the entire ground was covered with branches when the trimmers were done. It took 2 of them at least 30 minutes just to load what they cut and the brush pile I already had onto their flatbed.
I hope to plant the grass in the next few days. I will keep you updated on the progress or lack thereof, but the weather doesn't look like it is going to make it easy for me.
This year I just took care of some minor trimming myself and we hired a professional service to "lift the skirt", or whatever dirty metaphor it is called, on our 2 big maple trees. My goal is to be able to grow grass in our backyard. Right now all we have is dirt. you know the growing conditions are bad when even the weeds can't take root. If you remember, last year I planted grass and it came up nice until we got about 8 inches of rain in a month. It flooded the yard for too long and the grass died. Apparently swamp like conditions are not ideal for grass. This year I decided I would give it another try. I have a 2 fold approach. First, I realized that a raised garden bed along the back fence was working as a dam, so I removed the railroad ties and leveled the ground. Second, we trimmed the trees quit a bit yesterday morning and hopefully that will give the ground the sunlight that it needs.
It is amazing how hard it can be to recover just a small piece of land from years of neglect. It has taken us 3 Spring/Summers to finally have the backyard in what I would call respectable shape. Mostly it just needed A LOT of pruning and trimming. Even though I had already done a lot over the last 2 years, the entire ground was covered with branches when the trimmers were done. It took 2 of them at least 30 minutes just to load what they cut and the brush pile I already had onto their flatbed.
I hope to plant the grass in the next few days. I will keep you updated on the progress or lack thereof, but the weather doesn't look like it is going to make it easy for me.
Water Fight After the Rain Tonight
"Ethan don't shoot me I have my camera!"
"Can you hold still for just 5 seconds so I can get a picture of you that isn't blurry."
Shooting the spider on the back of my car
Wishing he could run with the big boys
Apr 17, 2008
Virtual House Fire
Several months ago the processor on our computer went bad. The computer had lived a good life and was in need of being replaced anyway so then I finally had a good reason. I ordered the parts to build the new computer, but when I removed the hard drives I placed one of them on the desk with the intent of adding it to the new computer later. This was the drive that had all of our pictures and music on it. I am talking thousands of songs and tens of thousands of pictures! Then a magnet was accidentally set on top of the drive.
The drive was quite a mess. To make a long story short I was sort of able to recover most of the pictures and luckily I had all of the music and most of the pictures backed up elsewhere. I suppose we may never know for sure how much was lost. It was like a virtual house fire. One of the things that people fear most with a house fire, other than the loss of life, is losing those irreplacable things like family pictures.
The digital age we live in comes with pluses and minuses. The negative thing is that rather than taking a rare fire or flood to destroy 10 years of family memories it can take one simple little magnet. The advantage is that it is easy to have multiple copies of these digital items like music, pictures and documents. But of course you have to take the time to make sure you actually back them up. After lots of searching I think I have found a pretty good and inexpensive solution.
Its called iDrive. You install a small program to your computer, configure the settings and it backs up all of your files, and this part is important, to an off site location! You aren't just backing up files to another hard drive in your house, which is better than nothing, but still vulnerable to theft and fires, but you are backing up to a secure server located somewhere else. It uses 128 bit encryption both in trasmitting the data and in storage, you can access the backup from any computer with an internet connection and you can have 2 GB of storage for free! If you need more than that, it is less than $5 per month. A great deal if you ask me.
Remember it is not a question of if your hard drive fails it is just a matter of when. Keep in mind that most hard drives have a life of 2 to 5 years at the most. Please, please, please take my advice and make sure that you have some kind of backup system, it will save you a lot of frustration and heartache later on.
The drive was quite a mess. To make a long story short I was sort of able to recover most of the pictures and luckily I had all of the music and most of the pictures backed up elsewhere. I suppose we may never know for sure how much was lost. It was like a virtual house fire. One of the things that people fear most with a house fire, other than the loss of life, is losing those irreplacable things like family pictures.
The digital age we live in comes with pluses and minuses. The negative thing is that rather than taking a rare fire or flood to destroy 10 years of family memories it can take one simple little magnet. The advantage is that it is easy to have multiple copies of these digital items like music, pictures and documents. But of course you have to take the time to make sure you actually back them up. After lots of searching I think I have found a pretty good and inexpensive solution.
Its called iDrive. You install a small program to your computer, configure the settings and it backs up all of your files, and this part is important, to an off site location! You aren't just backing up files to another hard drive in your house, which is better than nothing, but still vulnerable to theft and fires, but you are backing up to a secure server located somewhere else. It uses 128 bit encryption both in trasmitting the data and in storage, you can access the backup from any computer with an internet connection and you can have 2 GB of storage for free! If you need more than that, it is less than $5 per month. A great deal if you ask me.Remember it is not a question of if your hard drive fails it is just a matter of when. Keep in mind that most hard drives have a life of 2 to 5 years at the most. Please, please, please take my advice and make sure that you have some kind of backup system, it will save you a lot of frustration and heartache later on.
Apr 15, 2008
The Big Three-Oh!
Well I completed my 30th year of breathing today. Of course such a monumental occasion makes one contemplative of their life. Hmmm... so let's see, professional things are good (maybe more on that later), family life is great. I have 3 perfect little boys, and I am in love with Jenny more than ever! Spiritually... that one is a bit tougher. Either I am closer to God than I have ever been or further than ever. To say that I have gone through a sort of spiritual paradigm shift over the last year and a half would be an understatement. While the essentials of my faith have stayed the same, I have taken a critical look at nearly all of the beliefs that I have embraced for the last 20 some years, and changed many of them to one degree or another. Some of these new beliefs have left me at odds with the majority of mainline Christianity.
At times this growth has been fun and exciting and other times it has been remarkably painful. Last night was one of the painful times. I meet with a group of Eastern Orthodox guys on Monday nights. As the only "Protestant" (I don't really like that term b/c I am not protesting anything) in the group they normally know what to expect from me. Of course I am not going to agree with praying to saints, venerating Mary, or submitting to the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy (limited though it may be), but last night I surprised them. Last night against my will, and better judgment, I espoused an idea that not only went against the Orthodox Church but most of evangelicalism today. And although all of these friends were earnest and polite in their discussion of this issue I still couldn't help but feeling beat up, defeated and heretical when I got home. It was bad enough that two of them had to call me directly afterward to make sure, first that I was okay and second, to further express their concern.
Even if I am very wrong, this could be a good experience, right? I once heard someone say that everyone should be involved in a heresy at one point or another in their life that is so great that they will forever be more forgiving and gracious to others (or something like that). Still it is hard to be in the minority. It is hard to have everyone around you think you are crazy. It is hard to not have the majority of Christian thought or Christian history to fall back on. There is great safety in numbers. On this point I envy my Orthodox friends. It seems very comforting to say "this is the way things have always been and greater men than I have already made a decision on this issue so who am I to question it."
I suppose in some small microscopic way this is how Peter and the Apostles felt when they declared that Christ had risen, or how Paul felt when he completely reversed course and started preaching the Gospel that he had persecuted, or Martin Luther when he nailed his points to the Church door. On the other hand this is probably how all of the "great" heretics of history felt too. Is the only thing that separated them from the great champions of the faith that they were wrong?
Anyway, I am going to try to forget about this for now and start enjoying my birthday, I have taken the day off work and we are going to go eat lunch now.
Have a happy tax day :-)
At times this growth has been fun and exciting and other times it has been remarkably painful. Last night was one of the painful times. I meet with a group of Eastern Orthodox guys on Monday nights. As the only "Protestant" (I don't really like that term b/c I am not protesting anything) in the group they normally know what to expect from me. Of course I am not going to agree with praying to saints, venerating Mary, or submitting to the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy (limited though it may be), but last night I surprised them. Last night against my will, and better judgment, I espoused an idea that not only went against the Orthodox Church but most of evangelicalism today. And although all of these friends were earnest and polite in their discussion of this issue I still couldn't help but feeling beat up, defeated and heretical when I got home. It was bad enough that two of them had to call me directly afterward to make sure, first that I was okay and second, to further express their concern.
Even if I am very wrong, this could be a good experience, right? I once heard someone say that everyone should be involved in a heresy at one point or another in their life that is so great that they will forever be more forgiving and gracious to others (or something like that). Still it is hard to be in the minority. It is hard to have everyone around you think you are crazy. It is hard to not have the majority of Christian thought or Christian history to fall back on. There is great safety in numbers. On this point I envy my Orthodox friends. It seems very comforting to say "this is the way things have always been and greater men than I have already made a decision on this issue so who am I to question it."
I suppose in some small microscopic way this is how Peter and the Apostles felt when they declared that Christ had risen, or how Paul felt when he completely reversed course and started preaching the Gospel that he had persecuted, or Martin Luther when he nailed his points to the Church door. On the other hand this is probably how all of the "great" heretics of history felt too. Is the only thing that separated them from the great champions of the faith that they were wrong?
Anyway, I am going to try to forget about this for now and start enjoying my birthday, I have taken the day off work and we are going to go eat lunch now.
Have a happy tax day :-)
Apr 13, 2008
Chucky Jesus?
This morning Jacob has been asking me to give him words to spell on paper. So we went through things like "run", "jump", "sun", etc... Then he rolled out some play dough and wanted to spell words with it. So I asked him if he could spell "Jesus". He asked if it had a "Z" in it and I explained to him how the letter "s" makes the "z" sound sometimes. As we were sounding out the word "Jesus" several times, Ethan said "Chucky Jesus". I looked at him and he said "I want to go to Chucky Jesus". At this point I realized that in 4 year old language "cheeses" and "Jesus" are pronounced virtually the same. So I asked him if he realized that it is "cheeses" not "Jesus", like what we eat on Pizza. He looked up at me and smiled with a sheepish smile that told me that all this time he thought his favorite place in the world to eat was "Chucky Jesus".
Apr 11, 2008
The Mirth Mobile
Only 10 hours left to to own an excellent piece of Wayne's World memorabilia.
Wayne's World AMC Pacer Up For Sale on Ebay
Wayne's World AMC Pacer Up For Sale on Ebay
"You are bidding on a 1976 Amc Pacer, this car is the coolest of the un-cool and the most famous pacer ever. This is a rare chance to own a real Paramount pictures built Wayne's World Pacer. This car was built by Paramount as a prop for the Paramount Kings Island ride, Stan Milenkos."
"Party on, Wayne", "Party on, Garth!"
Apr 8, 2008
Samuel Falling Asleep.
Samuel after a long hard day. He couldn't even stay awake to finish his pizza crust.
The Boys on Easter
Just catching up on some picture posts. These are hip shots (meaning that I wasn't looking through the lens so they are more candid b/c the boys weren't expecting it) taken on Easter day.
Apr 7, 2008
3 kids = Showoffs :-)
Funny, I don't feel like a showoff, but I thought this was an interesting article in the Washington Post. Reading about the snobby and neurotic lives of the "upper-middle class" is enough to make me agree with Obama's crazy ex-pastor about avoiding "middle-classness". I did enjoy the below quote from the article though.
Three Kids? You Showoffs.As for my husband and me, we hardly have unlimited resources, but we're still planning to go forth and multiply in the big city. The way we figure it, one day our children will be grateful for what we didn't give them -- and what we did for them instead.
Apr 2, 2008
My One Pet Peeve
I am normally a pretty laid back kind of guy. Not easily offended. In fact, you would typically have to go out of your way and put special effort into it in order to offend me. There is one thing that gets me every time though. Our email at work displays our names as "Last name,First name" so everyone glances at that and, without thinking, assumes that my last name is my first name so they call me that. I am cursed to be the man with 2 first names. When someone calls me by my last name, thinking it is my first name, it drives me crazy! I don't know why it bothers me so much. Of course I don't say anything to the offender, I just bottle it up inside and let them call me that over and over and over.
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