• We have high temperatures in the 50’s forecast for this week. Incredibly thankful for spring to be making an appearance.
• Stayed up too late watching the Oscars last night. Have watched only two of the films nominated across all categories: District 9 and Star Trek. One of these days I’ll catch up on some of the others. Very little time for watching movies these days.
• Star Trek is the last movie I’ve watched in a theater. Before that I think it was The Dark Knight the year before. At least that gives us lots of choices to watch on DVD.
• Three day work week for me this week. Then on Thursday we road trip to Indiana. Becky and the girls will drop me off in Indianapolis where I’ll hang out/ride along with Andy Osenga for a couple days while he plays some house shows.
• Becky and the girls will head up an hour north of Indy to visit some friends who moved there from CR last year. Everyone is pretty darn excited about it.
• Have the details lined up for Andy O to play a “house show” at Brewed Awakenings in CR on Monday, April 19th. Hope to get the “official” confirmation from Andy this week so I can start publicity in earnest.

…but right now isn’t it. After getting, by Becky’s measurement, 11 inches of rain in the past 48 hours, our basement once again began taking on water. Looks like I should’ve bumped that sump pump higher up the priority list. Once again I am thankful for neighbors on both sides who are willing to loan out their Shop Vacs. I am happy this year to have one shop vac that has a garden hose attachment so I don’t have to carry it out to dump it.

It’s currently 1:45 on Friday morning or so, and the Shop Vacs have been running continuously since around 4:20 Thursday afternoon. The water is slowing down some now, I’m only having to go down and do some sopping up of puddles about every thirty minutes. The rest of the time I can just sit here and listen to the shop vacs run. You are never so ready for silence as you are after listening to three shop vacs run continuously for nine hours. Except for maybe after ten or eleven hours.

So far I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts, watched two episodes of Arrested Development on Hulu, started a book, and annoyed anyone who was on Twitter to listen to my posts. If the water gets down to where I only need to check on it every hour, I’m going to try to take some naps. Until then I guess I’ll just hang out and drink another Diet Pepsi. I had already planned to take Friday off of work; I didn’t plan to spend it this way, though. There’ll be plenty of cleanup to do tomorrow.

As my Twitter stream revealed over the weekend, it turned out to be a busy weekend, but not quite in the ways we had anticipated.

Becky has been wishing for a new refrigerator for a while now – something newer, bigger, and, well, if it had ice and water in the door, that’d be awesome. So Friday afternoon someone at work posted a fridge for sale that seemed to fit the bill. Lightly used, newer, 40% bigger than our current one, and yeah, ice and water in the door. At a good price.

So Saturday morning we drove down to take a look at it. The fridge was in great shape, a good deal, but there was one minor issue: the thing was one inch too tall to fit underneath the cabinet in the kitchen. We thought on it for a while, looked at some other refrigerators at Lowe’s and Sears, and realized that anything we ended up getting that was much bigger than our existing fridge would be too tall. So, after looking a bit at the small cabinet over the fridge, we decided to rip it out.

For not being the carpenter/handyman in the family, it came out pretty quickly and easily. I did manage to poke one small hole in the plaster, but it can be patched. I saved all the trim for reuse, and in the end we don’t lose much usable storage space. That was step one.

Step two was to figure out how to move the new-to-use fridge up from Swisher to our place in Hiawatha. I put a plea out on Twitter and Facebook and got a response from a friend who could borrow a truck (thanks, Bridget!). It took checking three places before I found a utility dolly to rent, but finally it all came together and Sunday afternoon we moved in our new refrigerator.

Steps three and four can be given a little more time. Step three is to get the water line hooked up. Hopefully I can get that done today. Step four means we need to get the plaster patched, get the trim put back up, and get things painted. I’ll post a few pictures when I get a chance.

So it wasn’t the way I expected to spend my weekend, but I was able to put some tasks off and it worked out well. Now I just have to get the lawn mowed before we start losing small children in that jungle.

• Slow-ish week turns into busy weekend. Lots of family in town, softball tournament, leading worship. Fun, but busy.
• Oh, the occasion for all the family visiting: Laura turns 5 on Monday. Hard to believe I’ve been a parent for five years now.
• No matter how cool the gong is on “The Great Gate of Kiev”, the solo piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition is far and away superior to the orchestrated version.
• Just when I think my homebrew DVR is all working and I’m ready to blog about it, something else isn’t working quite right. I’ll be installing the Windows 7 Release Candidate tonight.
• I’ve been flexing my web design muscles again a bit this week and it’s kinda fun.
• I’m down 7 or so pounds in the #20lbchallenge this month. This weekend’s meal plans will be a challenge to that accomplishment. (Two months to go!)
• Looks like I’ll have a quick trip to Ottawa, Ontario for business in a few weeks. Wish it were Toronto instead so I could meet up with Dan & Laura.
• I haven’t had the heart or inspiration to blog about politics lately.
• All the things that are on my mind re: God and church are things that need to be worked through first in our lives before they’re worked out on this blog.
• I reactivated the IntenseDebate commenting plugin – they’ve improved it a lot since last time I tried it. Now with Facebook and Twitter authentication! Leave a comment below and let me know what you’d like to have me blog about.

I think it really hit me when I saw the dirt bike. I hadn’t seen that dirt bike in years, but I remembered the story behind it. It had been bought cheap, fixed up in a garage, and when finally complete, was brought to a party at a friends’ house in the country. The owner rode it first, then handed the helmet to my wife. She proceeded to take it on a loop of the property, then lost control and ended up riding the thing directly into the corner of a limestone barn. Becky recovered within a couple of weeks from her spill, but when I saw the dirt bike sitting out waiting to be loaded into a moving trunk on Monday afternoon, I realized it had set for the last seven years with a bent rim waiting to be repaired.

On one hand you could say “come on, a bent rim, that’s an easy fix, why has it taken so long to fix it?”, and you’d be right. But having been friends with the owners of that bike for the past ten years, I know the stories of how life has intervened. Her chronic illness. His serious infection that cost him the vision in one eye. (No small thing for a pilot!) The business start-up. Later, the provision of a flying job. (Can you believe they let a one-eyed pilot fly 747s? I can.) The births of two delightful children. The struggles and joys of families, friends, church. I can very well understand why that dirt bike still has a bent rim. (On a side note: I wonder what projects I have sitting in the garage that still need completed…)

Monday afternoon I helped load the contents of these friends’ house into a long moving van. Assuming all went well yesterday, they drove the eight hours and arrived in Indiana where they are moving to be closer to family. With his gone-17-days-at-a-time work schedule, it makes sense for them, but we still hate to see them go.

Life has chapters, but there are no chapter titles. We can only turn the pages and see where this next chapter takes us. I look forward to an upcoming chapter that sees us visiting those friends in Indiana, and I have only one request for them: once you get the bike fixed, let somebody other than my wife ride it first.

Last Sunday we visited Noelridge Park Church for the morning service so Laura could participate in the AWANA recognition Sunday. (She’s been a regular there in Cubbies even though we’ve not been attending Noelridge for the past 18 months.) As we got ready to go Sunday morning, I noted to Becky that it was nearly ten years, to the day, since the first time we visited Noelridge, immediately after we moved to Iowa.

That was then…

Ten years. Nearly a third of our lives to this point. In one sense I look back and say “wow, time flies”; but in another sense I look back and remember all that we have lived through in those ten years, and it does, indeed, seem like a long time.

• Ten years ago we had been married less than a year, two kids moving across the country to an unfamiliar city and state. Now we’re both into our thirties, have three kids of our own, and Iowa feels a lot like home.
• In ten years we’ve been from an old rental farmhouse in the country that leaked heat like a sieve in the winter, to unintentionally renting a house in town from the most notorious landlord in Cedar Rapids, to owning our own place, to starting to wonder when/if we’ll outgrow our own place and have to look for something else.
• In ten years we’ve gone from being young newcomers at a church to being in and out of leadership, to then dreaming up and leading a church plant, and then finally being led away from the church plant to participate in a different church.
• In ten years we’ve gone from knowing no one here to having made a lot of friends. Then it’s just sad to see them go. We were sad to see the Majerle’s move to Minnesota five years ago, though we were glad we could buy their house. This summer, particularly, feels like the end of an era, with the Garner’s moving to Indiana and the Finley’s moving to Texas. I guess now we have new places to visit on vacations.
• In ten years Becky’s job description has changed from “CAD drafter at a stone quarry” to “wood shop worker” to “mom of one” to “mom of two” to “mom of three“. I’m pretty sure she likes her current job description best.
• In ten years my job description has been more consistent, changing only from “software engineer” to “software team lead” to “software certification specialist”. I’m hoping to make the certification thing a long-term gig. Hopefully this fall it’ll all come together.
• In ten years I’ve gone from being a smooth-cheeked youngster with plastered-down hair to slightly-less-plastered-down hair to a beard and shaved head. I’ve had this look going for three years now, and think I’ll be keeping it for a while. Sooner or later I won’t have to shave the head as much.
• In ten years Becky is still the beautiful woman who took my arm and came to Iowa sight-unseen. She’s still kicking butt on the softball field every summer, growing yummy stuff in the garden, keeping our household running smoothly, and making our home a place I always want to come home to, and never want to leave.

I can only imagine the changes I’ll have to reflect on if I’m still writing on this blog or something like it ten years from now… teenaged kids, middle age… I can wait. But if the next ten years are as rich and full and wonderful as the past ten have been… I will (continue to) be a man most richly blessed.

This is now…

[Well, it's the latest I've got. We still haven't gotten a family photo taken since Katie was born.]

• Monday road trip to Nashville was awesome. Saw some friends, made some new ones, saw a great concert. (Geof recorded it and you can download MP3s.)
• Driving 1300 miles in two days will make you a little bit saddle sore.
• Work has been somewhere between ridiculously crazy and insanely crazy for the past couple of weeks. Looks like it’ll stay that way until the middle of May.
• I’ll be traveling to Toronto for work in a couple of weeks. Looking forward to finally meeting Dan and Laura in person.
• Listened to about 15 hours of D. A. Carson sermons/lectures on my road trip. That guy is an amazing teacher.
• At the moment I’m listening to Manchester Orchestra (which isn’t a symphony orchestra, Dad, it’s a rock band) and they’re pretty darn good.
• Guess it’s time to get back to work.

That’s the way my friend Steve used to describe it, and this week has been one of those weeks. Half my calendar at work has been meetings; each meeting seems to generate more tasks for me; the remaining non-meeting time doesn’t seem to be sufficient to complete the tasks at a rate that will bring me anywhere close to keeping up.

Help is on the way, though: a loaner laptop to help me get work done during meetings, and a minion junior engineer who can be responsible for some of my lower-priority-yet-still-time-consuming tasks. Next week is still meeting-heavy, but I have hope that my group and I are making progress.

On the home front, we were able to keep Katie asleep long enough last night for Becky and I to blow off some steam on the new Wii. So far we’ve only got the Wii Sports and Wii Fit, so we played a bunch of head-to-head sports. She quickly proved she could beat me at tennis, baseball, and golf. It’s some small comfort that I can still take her in bowling, though. One of these days I’m gonna pick up Mario Kart and then we’ll see who’s boss.

Now we approach Easter weekend, and it’s gonna be the most relaxed Easter weekend we’ve had since I don’t know when. Saturday is the 8th (!) annual egg hunt out in Stone City at the Berberich’s – will be so good to catch up with them. It’s been far too long.

I’ve got a post on music floating around in my head that I’m gonna try to get written this weekend, but until then, dear readers, be patient and put up with my automated link posts. Go read the articles if you’re bored – they’ve gotta be good before I’ll link ‘em.

Back in college, Dr. Batts suggested a cheap date: a trip to Walmart. His rationale? First, go through the food side of the store and eat the free samples, then, go back to the electronics department and watch whatever movie is playing on the TVs.

Well, 10 years ago I guess they still did have food samples and movies on the TVs at Walmart; now the samples are gone and the TVs run perpetual advertising. But last night we still managed a pretty fantastic cheap date.

Dinner for two + dessert + tip at a nice Italian restaurant: $1 after gift card.
Mario Kart on the Wii at Best Buy: free.
Mocha and Decaf Sumatra at Brewed Awakenings: free thanks to a credit on my account.

Three hours out with Becky on a beautiful March evening: priceless.

(Of course, a couple more experiences with Mario Kart on a Wii will pretty much convince me that we need to buy one… which has the potential make the total financial impact of the evening a little bit more expensive.)

We’ve gotten to that point in Becky’s pregnancy now where it’s just a waiting game. The calendar is clear; the in-laws are here (and planning to stay until after the baby is born), the bags are packed. Heck, we even made a trial run to the hospital on Thursday morning when we had a bit of a false alarm. So now we wait.

Last time when we were playing the waiting game we ended up buying a minivan. We’re still paying it off. I don’t think we’ll do anything quite so expensive this time, but we might at least take advantage of the free babysitting and go out to dinner or watch a movie or something. The weather is great this week so we’ll take lots of walks. And then we wait some more.

Actually, if the baby were born on Wednesday or so of this week the timing would be pretty great – nothing like having a built-in excuse to take vacation days from work during the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament. Not that basketball would be my, um, priority or anything.

I am slowly learning patience whether I like it or not.