Life, Church, Family, Technology, and the occasional “et al”

25 years is a fairly long time.

It’s longer than most of the members of MySpace have been alive.

It’s longer than the Web has existed.

It’s as long as I have been married.  Wow!  Of course that’s not my fault…

I can think of several people to blame for that one, starting with my parents.  They set lofty expectations, and backed it up with their own example of working together through several years and the joys and difficulties that come with them.  Their example will hit 54 years on thursday.

I can lay some more on other friends and family members that have provided examples for us to watch and learn from.

I can lay some of the blame on our children for providing us with years of new experiences.

But mostly I think the responsibility falls on Merrill, who has put up with my quirks, helped me fix some of my faults, and refused to give up on me and us. 

 Thank you, Merrill, for the first 25 years.  I wonder what God has in store for the future, but I’m glad you’ll be with me to find out.

We’ve been painting walls (um…. make that “wall”) this weekend, which involved removing the banister from the stairs in our living room, moving the tv, entertianment center, and four bookshelves of DVDs, applying 3 coats of paint (1 primer, 2 actual color) and various other stuff.

Five more days until Jacob graduates.  Yikes.

Eleven weeks until he goes to college.

Panic time is nearly here!

 

Check me out!

I’m trying out a new blogging tool to be used with Wordpress called Performancing for Firefox.  As the name implies, this is a Firefox browser plugin.  We’ll see how well it works…

FiOS is coming to my house! The order has been placed, and on October 4th our reasonably fast (128k/768k ADSL) line will be swapped out for a “quite snappy” FiOS line with 2000k upload and 15,000k download capability. I just have to get some power over to that side of the garage, and a Cat5 cable from there to the computer area.

Eat my dust, you cable-modem users…

Here’s an interesting camp situation. http://www.newsreview.info/article/20050815/NEWS/108150065/-1/rss02 We used to have problems with barfing campers, but since we got exposed to “Nurse Marian’s Rules for Happy Campers” (Wash your hands! Wash your hands! Wash your Hands!) about 10 years ago, we have been much better. I guess that I’d never considered calling poison control just because my 10 year old was hurling. I also suspect that the News-Review was a little short on news yesterday.

I seem to have a lot of loose ends hanging around. Most of them are things that I should have written down before, but didn’t (for some reason).

• Finish Cherie’s computer (so that I can start rebuilding her old one)
• Call Cingular to find out about the data charges on the phone
• Find out when the EasyStreet bill is due, so I can switch our Internet stuff around
• Set up an Imap account for Merrill on kanine …nevermind…
• plant those plants that have been sitting outside for a week two weeks
• plant the clematis to grow on the fence
• contact Sean T. about using the TCC wireless network
• back up the home computers
• Set up Rick S. for using the TCC wireless net (for the auction)
• Check on the antivirus update status for all TCC machines

I’m sure there’s more. And I’m sure that I need to get the whole list out of my head in order to trust that I’m working on the right thing. Right now, though, I just want to have less things on the list. Bah…

Here’s a project that’s both useful and a fashion statement at the same time! The folks at 3M have provided instructions on how to make a duct tape wallet, complete with credit card holders. [via LifeHacks]

Last Sunday our 5th grade Sunday School lesson was on “forgiveness”. As sections of scripture go, the story of David and Bathsheba is not one of the easiest to explain, but the teacher’s guide suggested that I tell the story from David’s point of view.This turned out to be very powerful both for me and for the class.

Speaking as David, I covered the whole story from rooftop voyeur to grieving father, covering all the messy details and wrapping it up with a discussion of God’s amazing forgiveness. At least one of the kids was able to recall both the main point and the details later.

There were several ideas presented, including “forgiveness doesn’t mean there are no consequences”, and “hiding a problem is not the same as fixing it”. This could become one of my new favorite lessons. God is good!

My dad has recently been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. This is unusual for a non-smoker, but there are plenty of examples - lots of stories of second-hand smoke, asbestos exposure, other chemicals. One of the leading suspects in Dad’s case is his colon cancer that he had a few years ago.

Yuck…

I hate this.

I hate the disease. For what it’s worth, I’ve got our three desktop machines using all of their spare cycles running on the cancer project from grid.org. Those folks are burning over 100 CPU YEARS per day just to find likely matches between drugs and proteins on cancer cells. It’s not fast enough yet.

I hate not knowing. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m having to face mortality and the end of an aspect of my comfortable existence and my not being in control. I’ve been told that bright, intelligent, sensitive people can freak themselves out faster and more thoroughly than anyone else, simply because they can imagine more worst-case scenarios per hour than anyone should. I find myself shifting between imagining the worst, avoiding the problem, feeling wonderfully supported by family, friends, and prayer, and feeling guilty about not handling this the right way (whatever that is!).

I hate having to give up my self-sufficient pride and embrace the humility that comes from needing the support and prayers of others. I’ve been trained for years to be the stable, supportive, strong, caring, wise one, and now I have to learn to let others hold me up.

I even hate how selfish this entry sounds, now that I read through it.

The postXing software looks like it will work well with WordPress. 
I’m giving it a try now.  We’ll see.

Paint.net looks pretty good as a replacement for the basic (or not-so-basic) image editing user - and it’s free!

I’m posting this from the new version of w.Bloggar. Give it a try.

1. Caffeine is good, but sleep is better


2. When looking at colleges, pay attention to the food service


3. It’s harder to mix up small groups than large groups


4. When you doze off on rides at Disneyland, be sure to wake up before you get your picture taken


5. A couch and some conversation with friends is very nice


6. There are some things about college life that I miss greatly


7. Thick fog is a pain to drive through (especially when your eyes get tired from all the autofocus activity!)


8. Watching people grow up is priceless.

The marching band season this year has been a blur. Jacob’s school (Southridge High) has consistently come in close to (but not on) the top of the heap. Last week they ended up in what was essentially a three-way tie, with the top three bands clustered within 0.25 points (out of 100). We’ll see how things go tomorrow, but with two schools from eastern Washington in the mix, we will just have to wait and see.

Time to go pack food and warm clothing. It’s going to be a long day in the stands of Autzen Stadium.

I was reminded that as of today, I have worked at Tektronix for 20 years! Considering the fact that Tek is now 1/5 of the size that it was when I started, it’s kind of amazing that I’m still there.

Well, things went smoothly today. The service was focused on the topic “Forget Not His Benefits” and was set up with a lot of music surrounding three fairly short devotions on the promises of God. Simple and effective. Not as dramatic as Ryan had this morning, but very fitting.

I replaced the old D-link wireless router due to it needing more and more resets. I just want my equipment to work. The replacement is a Netgear wireless router with 802.11g support. That will make my connection a bit quicker to the laptop from work. It seems to be working nicely (so far!)