Bullet Points
- Addie didn’t sleep well last night. She’s getting a tight-ish cough, stuffy nose, ick. No fun.
- There’s been an owl somewhere near our bedroom window for the past few nights. That rascal hooted nearly all night.
- Read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in one long take last night. Chilling and bleak. Images that stick in your head.
- Result of all of the above: sleepy this morning. Very sleepy.
- It also may have something to do with all the CiCi’s Pizza I ate yesterday. I think I ate a piece too much.
- A long-ish day at work today.
- Tonight we’re going to see David Wilcox in concert here in CR. We’re going with some new friends of ours. Should be fun. Hope I stay awake.
- Church plant plans are moving right along. Looking like the start date might be the beginning of the year.
- Tonight will be my first night all week of just coming home from work and being home. Too many evening activities makes for a long week.
- Major weekend activity: tree trimming and collecting brush. Hiawatha picks up brush starting Monday.
- Waiting to hear whether or not I get a freelance website development job. Hoping I do.
- You know you’re short on sleep when the Diet Pepsi doesn’t really help things any.
- The new Iron and Wine album (The Shepherd’s Dog) is really good.
- The new Radiohead album is good as well. I don’t usually dig Radiohead, but the new album is quite accessible.
- Meebo (my browser-based chat client of choice) just released a Firefox plugin that’s actually pretty good. Not perfect yet, but beats having to keep extra FF windows open.
- Had a productive weekend; got the lawn mowed, some concrete patching done, led music at church.
- Miserable weekend as a sports fan: Cubs played terrible and got swept; Huskers got mauled by Mizzou; Hawkeyes ran into a freight train called Penn State. At least the NHL season is new, so Dallas can’t be too far out of it yet.
- I’m headed to Oklahoma City for training tomorrow. Can’t imagine it’ll be too exciting. Let’s just see if I can get somewhere on time this time. My recent luck with flights hasn’t been good. Flying United this time.
- Listening to the new album from Iron and Wine. It’s good.
- I am officially now a Company Designated Engineering Representative (DER) for the FAA. I have only partial approval authority at the moment; it’ll take time and experience to get full approval authority.
- It’s been a week now of just bringing a bottle of pop to work in the morning rather than filling my mug at the convenience store. It’s going OK. I have decided, though, that Coke Zero is too sweet for me - I like Diet Pepsi better.
- Airline travel can be a pain in the backside. After two canceled flights on Monday, flew to Seattle early Tuesday morning. Got to my committee meeting a couple of hours late.
- Kudos to the hotel (the Hilton Garden Inn in Renton) for being nicely setup for wi-fi access; seamless transitions between the meeting room, lobby, and bedroom.
- Got to see my college roommate Matt and his wife Abbie one evening. Had a good time catching up.
- Got to meet my partner-in-crime TK for some breakfast and Starbucks on Thursday morning. Also took a couple of cheesy pictures and some even cheesier video.
- Managed to leave a library book in my hotel room in Seattle. :-( They said they didn’t find anything, but I’m sure I left it there. I’ll call again today and see if it turned up.
- Finished the Harry Potter series while on the trip. The ending to Book 7 was almost perfect. The most I’ve enjoyed a series of books in a long, long time.
- Got home and had to mow the grass since it had been raining all week. It took twice a long as usual to mow. Ugh.
- Preached on Sunday morning. Audio available if you’re curious.
- Talked to my brother Ryan last night for a little while. He’s really having a tough time at the moment, wrestling with some tough decisions. Pray for him.
- Caedmon’s Call did their first show to release their new album, Overdressed, last night. There has been some seriously great liveblogging going on. (Go, Bryan!) What I wouldn’t give to have been there. At least it sounds like we’ll get a bootleg from the concert sometime soon.
- Laura turns three today! Happy birthday to my little sweetheart.
- New Orleans was pretty cool. I have a couple of blog posts floating around in my head, maybe I’ll have some time this weekend to write them out.
- Never trust the airline when they say “oh, everything will be delayed, so you’ll make your connection just fine.”
- Driving home 4 hours from Chicago is long, but it beats staying there overnight.
- I almost forgot the going-away lunch in my honor scheduled for today. That would’ve been embarrassing.
- I have pretty much successfully moved into my new building/cube/department. Such fun.
- We had three neighbors over for supper last night. It was quite a good time. And the pork loin that Becky did in the broiler was delicious.
- The trip for the weekend will be to Lowe’s for some blackjack for the roof and maybe a basin wrench.
- We got an estimate on our tree in the front yard last night. It’s developed a nasty split and if we don’t do something soon we may lose some or all of it. Sounds like we can get it cabled up and should be able to save most of it.
- Planning on just spending the weekend with the family. It will be nice to not have much to do.
- I’m teaching Sunday School and leading worship at church on Sunday. Already have the music planned, but still have to prepare for the class.
- Note to the FAA: planning a conference in New Orleans in July? Not such a bright idea. Ah well, I’ll sweat along with the rest of them.
- Got Harry Potter book 2 from the library yesterday. For some reason I got a LARGE PRINT copy. Ouch.
- Today is my last day in my current position at work - after eight years, it’s time for a change. Hoping it’s a good move.
- Still no iPod. I’m hoping for today, but I’m just about tired of hoping.
- Did an insurance review with our agent yesterday. It’s always a bleak affair; her job is to suggest all the things that might go wrong that we should be covered for. Ugh.
- On the upside, Laura went to sleep at 7:30 last night. Earliest in a week.
- On the downside, she came into our room at 11 wanting to sleep in our bed, and pitched an hour-long fit when we made her sleep in her room.
- Ordered a hard drive enclosure from Newegg yesterday to give me someplace to put a 160 GB hard drive I now have free. While my total storage space will still be paltry in comparison to, say, Geof’s or Mark’s, it’ll still be nice to have more space.
- I’m not leading music at church this week, but I still am teaching Sunday School. Still gotta prepare.
- We got 3 tons of sand dumped on our driveway Friday afternoon; my back is now sore from moving two of those tons back to the girls' sandbox in the backyard with a wheelbarrow. The third ton was apparently unnecessary; sounds like the garden center gave us a bad number on how much sand was required. Still trying to decide what to do with the sand in the driveway. Anybody need a ton of sand?
- Satellite TV: so far, so good. The picture is crystal clear. Had one short (a few seconds) signal drop-out when a big storm came over, but in my book that’s acceptable.
- Satellite DVR: sure as heck isn’t TiVo. It’s nice to have a dual tuner so you can record one show while watching another one. However, I’m still trying to figure out how to get the darn thing to let me explicitly pick which tuner I want to record which show. Might have found it on the internet if not for…
- No internet all weekend. Note to Qwest: if you’re gonna promise hookup in three business days, make it happen. I signed up for DSL on Monday evening and got a confirmation email from them that night. I figured I was in good shape to have the DSL hooked up by the time the Dish guy came on Friday to install. On Saturday, still nothing from Qwest. As I was about to call them, they called me to confirm a service order to hook it up by… next Tuesday. So three business days ends up being more like five or six. Grrrr. But we survived.
- Busy Sunday. Led music. But we’re consolidating to one service for the summer, so that makes it easier. Amazingly easier. Also taught my first week of a Sunday School class on Christian Basics. Should be fun.
- Orlando, here we come. My employer has decided to send me to a “technology forum” put on by a microprocessor company. It appears to me that “technology forum” is code words for “wine and dine the engineers so they’ll buy our product.” It’s the last week in June, and we’re planning that Becky will come along on the trip. She’s just slightly excited.
- Sermon preparation. I will be in the pulpit Sunday at Noelridge. (I’ll try to remember to post audio next week for the 0.03% of you that are interested.) Secret sneak preview for my few NPC readers: Jethro. You can figure it out from there. Actually, you probably can’t. So you have to come and listen on Sunday. Ha!
- Jabber servers, MySQL, PHP. Set up a Jabber server on a machine here at work for a project this week. Used Wildfire, it went super-easy. Then learned enough PHP to generate web pages that display a given days' chat logs by pulling them out of the database. Good times.
- Arcade Fire. Been listening to their latest album Neon Bible this morning and I like it.
- “Get the picture.” With some unexpected funds coming in I am hoping to buy a digital SLR camera. I have my eye on a Nikon D70s, hoping to be able to order it next week.
- I ran 2 miles this morning. And actually ran the whole thing, didn’t walk at all. My time was 19:14, which isn’t awesome, but is tolerable. I’ll shoot for the 5k distance again tomorrow.
- I witnessed something last night at our church softball game (the last one of the season :-() which I had never witnessed before: the two umpires getting into a shouting match with each other. In our league, each team volunteers a player to ump the game before (or after) their own game. It’s usually very low-key. But the field ump made a call last night and the plate ump over-ruled him, and they got into it. Then towards the end of the game the plate ump ended the game and walked off the field, when the rule clearly states that we could’ve started the 7th inning. Grrrr… but it was a good game, we played well and won.
- Evening shows like this one make me wish I lived close to Nashville. The closest any of the Square Pegs will be getting to Iowa this year is when Andy P plays in Omaha and Lincoln, NE. Not close enough.
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Bullet points for a Monday #2
[As always, I am grateful to Daniel for this very useful format.]
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Most any update is better than none...
Bullet points for the weekend:
That was pretty random. Sorry.
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Bullet Points for a Monday Morning
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Bullet Points for a Monday
How can it have been a week since I last posted? Well, it has been busy. So in the spirit of “short updates are better than none”, here we go.
I’m now back in the office for six weeks before my next trip. It will be nice to settle into some sort of schedule.
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Bullet Points for a Friday
[Once again, thanks to dan for creating a good format to rip off.]
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Bullet Points on a Friday
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Bullet Points for Friday
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Bullet Points from the Weekend
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Stuff
Life has been crazy this week, keeping me from writing much in the way of a thoughtful post about anything. I will inadequately attempt to make up for this by providing some random bullets from my week.
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All sorts of wacky stuff
Or at least what counts for wacky in my world. I realize my life is pretty calm compared to some of the rest of you.
Well, I guess most of that wasn’t wacky. But it was stuff, though, you can’t deny it was stuff. One outta two isn’t bad.