Bullet Points from the Weekend

  • 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.

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.

  • 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.

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.

  • 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.

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.