Random randomness

   I didn't get to do a Friday post last week because blogspot was down.  Anyway, this will probably be my last post for a few weeks while I am on vacation.  It is way early in the morning because I am working the graveyard shift on overtime for some inexplicable reason as it seems I have no actual work to do here.  Oh well, Just means that I spent the night here staring at my computer doing not much of anything.  My mind is staarting to wander and I can't really think of anything worthwhile to say.  I am also finding I am having trouble hitting the darn keys in the right order.  I have already hit the backspace key a few dozen times to correct digital dislexia, you know, where you are typing so fast you manage to swap the order of two letters due to speed or stupidity.  Currently, it is a combonation of the two.  Oh well.  Have fun and remember what it is you are doing.  See you in a few weeks.

Another random post of nothing.

    As the trip to Italy gets closer, I realize I have a lot to do to get ready.  My wife and I need to pack our bags to make sure we can fit everything and make sure we have everything we need.  We also need to make copies of our important documents, write out what we plan to do, and figure out how we are getting to the shuttle at 0730.  We need to make sure there are enough groceries in the house and that mom is comfortable with how everything works.  We need to hit the bank to get the cash out so we have cash for the trip.  The list just keeps growing.  The good news is that in one week we will be on our way, ready or not.  I am so looking forward to it.  I can't wait.  My wife talks about it at least once a day and we are both so amped up that we are having trouble sleeping.

   On another note.  Last night the boys were horrible.  We put them to bed and I had to go in their room 4 times to tell them to go to bed.  Tonight, when they get home, I am going to try something different.  I am going to put them to work around the house until bed time.  Maybe they will be so worn out they will actually sleep.  I am working out a list of work they can do.  If the weather is nice enough, I think I will have them weed the front yard and maybe the back.  I will work it out. 

   I just wonder what I will be making for supper tonight.  it completely depends on what my lovely wife gets out of the freezer.  We'll see.  Anyway, I really don't have much else to say.  I will try to be a bit more energetic tomorrow and write something deep and profound.  Have a wonderful day.

What, me Worry?

   Yesterday was a good day.  I ended up playing games with my boys.  The best was when I got to watch my 5 year old beat my 9 year old at checkers.  He was so excited that he left the board alone until he had a chance to re enact the winning play for everyone.  It was awesome.  I love being able to teach my sons new games and watching them excel at them.  I also love the fact that my boys get along and play well together (most of the time anyway). 

    This week has been going incredibly slow.  Maybe it's because I go on leave next Monday and head for Italy next Thursday.  The great thing is I get time with my wife.  There are so many things to be thankful for.  I find I have very few worries.  When I do get them, they tend to fade away rapidly when I think about them a bit.  I find that worry, by itself, does no good.  When I look at what I worry about, I realize that the worry is based on things that I either have no control over or that can be easily avoided or minimized by what I have already done.  Either way, they are nothing worth worrying about.  Really, what do I have to worry about?  I have the love of my wife and children (which I wholly reciprocate).  I have my needs covered.  I know that no matter what happens, a way will be found to get through it. 

         Why worry about what might happen?  Why dwell on things that may never happen?  The only thing you can do is plan for what will happen.  And the only future event of which we can be assured, is death.  No one knows when it will happen, but it will come to us all.  So we plan for it.  I have life insurance and thus my family will be taken care of.  I have a will, and thus my material things will be passed on.  Other than that, we can try to plan for the possible.  Save some money back in case of lean times, plan for vacations, maybe save for your kids education. 

        I am not advocating ignoring facts and going hog wild (I.E. spending everything you have and taking on massive amounts of debt), but not worrying about every little thing.  What this means is, when a worry crops up, you address it and place it in its place.  If it is something you have no control over, recognize it and ignore it.  If you can do something about it, take action.  For instance, if you start worrying that you may not have enough money for gas, set aside an appropriate amount and it is taken care of.  If you find yourself worrying that you may be on the list to get laid off, take action.  Become that stellar performer and make yourself what you need to be to stay.  If you happen to be in one of those jobs that is of the "last hired first fired" sorts, start looking for another job that will take care of you.  Do it right, but take action.  Action stops worry.  Worry is a spectator sport.  If you are watching events occur, you worry about how they affect you.  If you are actively involved in directing them, you don't have time to worry about them and you can sleep at night knowing that you are doing all you can for a favorable outcome. 

     There are many benefits to this philosophy.  I continually am told that I don't look near as old as I am (I was told this weekend that I looked about 25ish, I am 36).  Some of it maybe genetics, but I also attribute it to my philosophy on worry.  I used to say it was because I don't care.  That was a lie.  I do care, I just don't waste my time with worry.  Think about it.  If you ware worrying, you tend to scowl and frown.  This action builds wrinkles and also can affect your health.  I used to get heartburn a lot.  Since I embraced this philosophy totally (I get to thank my wife for making it possible), I found that I don't get heartburn near as much.  It is just so wonderful a feeling knowing that I do what I can to mitigate the worry.

    There is a couple of downsides though.  The first is that you tend to smile a lot.  This annoys other people.  You get comments that may be embarrassing or otherwise.  You also get categorized as a fool sometimes.  It can be perceived that you don't understand the world or how to live properly.  This means people may or may not trust you based on the perception that you don't care.  I don't understand how care and worry are synonymous, but that seems to be the perception.  Apparently, if you don't worry about it, you don't care about it.  I believe the opposite, if you worry about it, you aren't caring for it.  As I mentioned earlier, worry is a passive verb, there is no action involved in worry (wringing of hands doesn't count).  Care, on the other hand, requires an action verb.  If you care for something, you must take action to ensure its health.  So how can you be inactive (worry) and care for something?  Think on it.  Try it and see how it affects your life.

Thoughts on evolution and faith.

     There are so many things that go through my head on any given day that I sometimes have trouble choosing a topic to go with.  Today, I think I will go with one that has been tearing at me for a while.  I have several atheist friends on facebook who are rather verbose in there anti-religion stance.  One even went so far as to call Christians, "narrow minded, bigoted, hypocrites."  It bugs me that this is his opinion.  I can see his point of view with some of the posts from some of his other supposed Christian friends though.  I just wish people would spend a few minutes and think about what they are saying before they say it.  I allow things to go as they will and let my friends lead the conversation for the simple fact that if I attack first, which is what bringing up contentious subjects seems like, then they are less likely to listen.  I am waiting on many topics.  As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been reading Lee Strobel's series of books.  I have finished "A Case for Christ" and "A Case for Faith" and am now reading "A Case for a Creator."  They are all wonderful books and use genuine facts and quotes to answer many of the tougher questions about Christianity.
  
      The current book has been a real eye opener as far as evolution goes.  All I gotta say is I now admire the faith someone has to believe in evolution.  If Christians had that much faith in God, we would be unstoppable.  Of the "facts" of evolution discussed in just the first 2 chapters, many have been debunked since before the 60s.  The sad part is, many textbooks still tout them as facts.  I am not done with the book, in fact the current chapter is about how science and religion are not opposites or even separate, but can lift each other up.  I encourage any of my atheist friends who are reading this to actually do some research and look up the truth behind the "facts" of evolution.  If you still feel that evolution is a fact, we can discuss it by sharing our facts and what we find.  I will not say that I am an expert, but I have my research, which is why I say do your own as it is easy to claim other people's research is tainted when you haven't looked at the subject yourself.  I also ask that we concentrate on the evolution discussion first as attacking another theory is not a defense for the original theory.

      That being said, I had a wonderful weekend.  The Sunday service was awesome and motivating.  I know I have areas in my life that I need to improve upon and I will work on it.  I was able to cook breakfast and dinner for my wife and mother in law.  As I mentioned on my last post, my wife already has her Mother's Day gift.  Amazingly enough, we had a wonderful day in spite of the rain.  Have a wonderful day and I look forward to any comments.

Mother's Day and other thoughts

      So it's Friday.  This weekend should be interesting.  With my mother in law in town, we will be celebrating mothers day and enjoying a night out.  I am looking forward to it.  We still have no clue what we are going to do tomorrow, but I suppose we will figure it out.  The good news is, I am done with my friends bathroom project.  We finished the plumbing and major part of the walls.  All that is left for him to do is the finishing (trim, drywall, etc.).  I am so relieved.  This afternoon, I may end up helping a friend move depending on when I get off of work.  But enough about my day and weekend.

      With the death of Osama Bin Laden, I am having mixed feelings.  As a Christian, I know I should not take delight in someones death.  I feel I should have some sadness at the death of another human being.  I have delved into the Bible and found that, while the old testament advocates the death penalty in many cases (stoning is a death penalty), the new testament is ominously quiet on it.  As I read more deeply I find that the overarching theme of the new testament is forgiveness and redemption and this is contrary to the death penalty. 

      On the other side, as an American, I am supposed to be happy that justice is served.  I am supposed to celebrate that the architect of so much death and destruction is dead.  I am happy that it is over, but am I happy he is dead?  I just don't know.  I don't know if I can truly keep from being happy about this or if I can truly feel remorse over his death.  I am so confused on it.  I think I need to talk to someone.  Maybe I'll talk to pastor Paul about it Sunday.

     So my wife asked me what I was getting her for Mother's Day.  My response was simple.  I am taking her to Italy for 11 days and I flew her mother out here for Mother's day, what more does she want?  I may still get her flowers and a card, but maybe not.  Since she reads this, I won't say if or what I am doing if anything, she will just have to guess.  Ha ha, deal with it dear!  On that note, I will give my pondering on my mother.

    My mother was a wonderful woman.  Her life was cut short by cancer when I was just 13 and it meant my life was forever changed.  But this isn't about my life after her death, but before it.  It's about her and what she meant to me.  My mother was always calm.  With four boys of my own, I have no idea how she did it.  She was always smiling and courteous, even to those annoying door to door salesmen.  I believe she would have been an awesome diplomat.  She could get a Jehovah's witness to leave within minutes and make them feel good about leaving and happy to have met her.  She was also a hard worker.  The garden was hers.  She weeded it, watered it, and harvested it and it was a huge garden.  We always were able to can enough to last us until the following years crops came in.  She also cared for the animals.  She milked goats, fed chickens and hogs, and made sure we had what we needed.  She also taught us how to do all of that.  She wasn't the greatest cook in the world.  I have mentioned to many of you how she burned hard boiled eggs, the other side of that is, she was always trying to learn.  She actually was a pretty decent cook.  When she had the opportunity she did a decent job and was always trying to improve.  She also kept a relatively clean house.  I say relatively simply because, how clean can you keep a house with 4 kids and a husband that uses every level surface as a storage area.  Never mind that the house was 100 years old and had issues of its own.

     Simply put, my mother was a wonderful woman.  She cared so much for us kids, that as much as God wanted her with him, he gave us a 2 year transition period to figure out how to survive with her out of the house before he took her home.  I used to look at the 2 years she fought cancer as horrible years.  As the years go by, I look back and realize that while she was struggling with the sickness and was bedridden, we were learning how to do everything she did for us.  She directed us and was able to give us a smile, even as she was sick from the chemo.  When she passed, we were able to go on and keep up what she had done without much of an interruption.  Even though we all missed her terribly, we were able to continue on with life in no small part to her teaching us.  I never really thought about it, but even after she died, she continued to influence us.  The lessons she taught us and morals she instilled in us continued on to this day.  I am a better person because of her.  I see many of the same strengths in my wife now and am glad that I have her as my partner and better half (and I do mean better).  Thank you.  have a happy Mother's Day.

Pain, memories, and mobility: my first car.

     As I mentioned on Monday, this has been an interesting week.  Tuesday was an altogether horrid day.  I went to the doctor for my shoulder and he decided to try and "fix" it with a shot.  It was a mix of a numbing agent and steroids.  He told me it might hurt going in as he sometimes "bounces it off the bone."  I braced for the worse and didn't feel anything...until after he removed the needle.  It felt as though my shoulder had a baloon being blown up inside it.  Not so much painful as uncomfortable.  He then told me the numbing agent would take an hour or so to fully kick in and that he wanted me to keep track of the pain over the next couple of hours.  The pain didn't go away at all.  In fact, about 4 hours after the shot it started to slowly build.  By 6pm it felt as though someone was beating on my shoulder with a sledgehammer.  So, I think the numbing agent worked to mask the pain, but the pain intensified after the shot.  All I know is that my shoulder really hurt.

   That was Tuesday.  Yesterday, I got off work early (thus no post) to pick up the kids since Laura was in Seattle, picking up mom.  I mowed the yard including weed eating.  I then Trimmed the hedges and cleaned up the mess.  My shoulder ached, but nowhere near the pain of the day before.  Laura got home just as I finished the yard.  I then left to finish my friends bathroom.  That was going well, until about 10pm.  I was connecting a clamp to hold the shower head in place.  There was a lot of clamp to tighten so I used my drill to tighten it.  It was almost tightened when my hand suddenly protested.  That's when I discovered that I had managed to get my middle finger caught between the screw and the clamp.  I now have something to take my mind off of my shoulder.  The plumbing is done, now for the cosmetics.  Should be able to finish that tonight.

   Now that we got that out of the way,  I will continue with what should have been yesterday's post.  Since I promised to have a happy post once a week, This will be it (albeit with a slow start).  It's amazing what the years do to childhood memories.  Things we once remember as horrifying, embarrassing, or just plain painful are transformed into lessons we learned, funny stories to share, or maybe even a fond memory.  I find this phenomenon quit interesting to say the least.  Take for instance my truck.  The first car I owned that I was able to drive was a Plymouth Arrow.  The reason I specified the able to drive part was that my first car was actually a AMC Pacer.  Dad drove it home and it never ran again, thus I never drove it.  Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with the Arrow, it is a small truck.  It was Plymouth's version of the Luv.  The reason you've probably never heard of it was that it was only around for a couple of years.  Turns out it was a Mitsubishi truck that was re-badged was a Plymouth.  All in all it was a decent truck.  Or would have been, if it hadn't been re-engineered by a previous owner.  Seems that the original motor gave up the ghost sometime in the 80's.  So the owner replaced it with a Mazda 4 cylinder.  Turns out, Mazda and Mitsubishi aren't really compatible.  So to make it fit, rubber bumpers about 2 inches thick were used to align the mounting holes.  Needless to say, the engine wasn't all that sturdily mounted.  The other side of this is that the mechanic (and I use the term loosely) that switched engines didn't know how to make the electrical cross over either since I didn't have a tachometer or a speedometer.  This made guessing my speed interesting.  I tended to just get up to 4th gear and put the pedal on the floor.  Since it had the approximate acceleration of a turtle on Valium, the only time I got to top speed was in a 5 mile stretch of highway between 2 towns.  It wasn't until I had been driving this way for almost a year that I was informed by a friend in school that that equated to about 90 mph downhill (he had to "get up to 120 to pass me").  I really loved that truck.  It was great until the day I discovered why rubber blocks do not make good engine mounts.

    I was out with a couple friends driving the back roads.  I was flying down a dirt road and managed to hit top speed (at the time I still didn't know what top speed was and we simply called it max RPM).  As we approached an intersection we were able to see we had it clear and wouldn't need to stop.  The intersection in question was on a hill.  To cross it you went up a hill, crossed the road and continued up the hill on the other side.  The road we were crossing was gravel and thus maintained...and level.  This meant that the road we were on abruptly stopped going up, went level, then started going up again.  At 90 mph you can probably guess what happened.  All I got to say is, yes, you can make a 4 cylinder small truck fly for the 50 - 60 feet it takes to cross the road.  Amazingly enough, we survived.  The truck wasn't happy about it though.  The aforementioned rubber blocks compressed as the engine bounced and drove the fan into the radiator.  The shifter, being more rigidly mounted, stayed in pretty much the same position as the transmission moved with the motor bending 2 shift rods and locking the truck in 1st.  It took me a few months to finally get the truck running again and on the road.  That doesn't mean it ran the same.  After that, it developed a "personality" and a bad one at that.  It would turn itself off at will, which is fun at 50 mph on the highway.  It would refuse to start for an hour then not shut off after you finally got it started.  All in all, just driving it was an adventure.

     Well, I hope that holds you off for a while.  I thank you for this trip, however painful it may be.  Have a wonderful day.

A messed up week, house cleaning

   Well, It's Monday.  This is being posted late, due to the fact that I am on duty.  In other words, I get no sleep and get to go home early.  But wait, I have a doctors appointment tomorrow morning at 1000.  Then I get to go home.  Oh, yeah, the mother in law arrives in town Wednesday, so I gotta help clean.  Oh well, another fun week ahead.  I love my mother in law and am looking forward to her arrival.  It's the whole charade we all do.  You know, the one where we spend 3 weeks cleaning and then when the guest arrives you act as though your house is always this clean.  You know and they know that this is probably the cleanest the house has been since the last time they visited, but you both pretend as though you have done nothing to your house in the last 10 years to clean it.  Everything just puts itself away.  The kids are so clean, we don't have to tell them to clean anything.  Yeah, right.  I can't tell you how tempting it is sometimes to leave the house as is and be honest.  "Hey, today was a good day, you can still see half of the couch.  Never mind the layer of dust on top of the book case.  As long as you don't touch it, you can breathe just fine.  And watch your step, teh kid's legos are everywhere.  But as you can see, the house is clearly clean...er than it usually is."  Just once, but then, I also like a happy wife.  This means I will be cleaning the house and acting as if I didn't when the guests arrive.  "Yes, the house is always this clean.  No, we didn't go out of our way to clean it for you.  The carpet is a lovely shade of green, we didn't know....oof...that you liked green." (note: the oof is due to the elbow one recieves when you are about to say something profoundly revealing, like "...that the carpet wasn't brown.")  Anyway, have a wonderful day.  And due to this weeks schedule, I probably won't be posting tomorrow.  Sorry, I like sleep and home more.