Cow Town Field Trip

A Flying Cow
...and you hate it when a bird poops on your windshield!

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 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 :-)

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".

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

"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!"

Samuel Meets Johanna

Johanna is Samuels new cousin.

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.

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.

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.

The End Of A Rope - Update

(Reference Here)

There has been an amazing turn of events for my friend at work who's wife has been very sick for the last year. She has started to recover! She is learning to walk with a walker, so she is regaining movement and feeling in the side of her body that wasn't working. She is also getting her memory back. They found a dead spot in her brain that might have been the cause of everything, but the brain is an amazing organ and is apparently working around the dead tissue and "re-wiring" itself. She still has a way to go before things are great but she is now at home with I believe minimal supervision during the day and over all things are looking up. Chris was able to go ahead and sell the house with just enough to pay of the mortgage and Realtor, but at least it didn't destroy his credit.

Chivalry, Anyone?

I have always believed in being polite and even chivalrous when it comes to the fairer sex but there is one thing that has always been kind of a gray area.  Of course when you are with a lady you open the door for her, that much is simple, and if a woman is right behind you, going into our out of a building you hold the door for them also... but how far does that courtesy extend?  If they are five feet behind you, yes get the door.  If they are ten feet behind you, yes get the door.  But what about 15 or 20 feet?  This happens all the time at my work and I still don't know what to do.  If I just open the door and walk through letting it close behind me I feel like a jerk, but if I stand there and hold it open, what always happens is the woman then feels rushed and has to hurry to get through the door so that they don't inconvenience you too much... and I end up feeling like a jerk.   It seems like a no win situation.

This is just one of the many moral dilemmas that face men on a daily basis.  Another would be should we put the toilet seat back down in a public bathroom?  My feeling is, if it is a male only bathroom leave the seat up but if it is for men or women put it down.
 

Lost and Found

Mason (our dog) slipped out of the house on Friday afternoon while my mom, sister and brother were here. He used to run away at every chance but about 2 years ago he spent a night in the dog pound and then stopped running away... until the last few weeks. He ran away twice 3 weeks ago but he had on his tag which had our address and phone number on it so people found him and brought him back. When he ran away on Friday Rachel was pretty upset but Jenny and I said someone will just bring him back like they always do. We didn't bother to go looking for him because that has never worked in the past. Later that night my stomach sank when I put the boys to bed and found his collar sitting on their dresser! No one would be bringing him back that night.

Rachel and I went looking for him for about a half hour with no luck. Then I came back and made the above missing poster and Jenny and I put about a dozen of them up along the nearest major road. All that was left was to sit around and wait.

The next day I saw him come trotting out of one of the bedrooms, where he had presumably just fallen asleep and not heard us call for him... but alas I awoke to find it only a dream.

The dog pound would open at 1:00 and we could call them then but thankfully right about 1:00 I got a phone call from someone that had found him and saw one of our posters at the same time. He was still out roaming the streets almost 24 hours later. They picked him up and brought him to our house within a minute of calling us. It was a big relief for the whole family.

Sorry it has been so long.

Here are some pictures from the zoo last Saturday.

Not sure why Rachel is not in this picture.