Headed Out, West Coast Edition

I’m sitting in the airport terminal at Cedar Rapids as the plane that is supposed to take me to Chicago is unloading its prior passengers.   From there it’s off to Seattle.  If all goes well I should be there by 8 PM Seattle time.   I’m making this whole trip in order to be in person to make a twenty-minute presentation for a customer.   Such fun.  But it will allow some time tomorrow afternoon for some sightseeing in Seattle before heading back home early Tuesday morning.  I’m bringing the good camera; hopefully I’ll have some good pictures to share once I get back.

New Orleans: Music and all that Jazz

One of the things that was high on my list of things to do while in New Orleans a few weeks ago was to find someplace with live music. New Orleans is all about jazz and blues, after all. It was pretty wild to walk through the French Quarter and think that guys who are jazz heroes of mine like Harry Connick, Jr. and the Marsalis family spent time playing in the clubs on those streets. So very cool.

I headed around the Quarter rather early in the evening, which unfortunately cut down my number of opportunities to hear the live music. Most of it started later - 8 or 9 PM. However, I did hear a very good older band at a little bar that I am thinking was called something about the Society for the Preservation of Jazz; I can’t find a link on a quick Google search to back me up. They played pretty good standard New Orleans jazz, but they were old-timers; nary a dark hair in the bunch - all grey.

As I headed back to my hotel, I ran into a group of about a dozen teenagers playing on the corner of Canal and Bourbon Streets. They were mostly brass instruments with a couple saxophones thrown in for good measure and a rockin’ percussion section. And they were smokin’ hot. My little video clip here really doesn’t do them justice, and I’m bummed that I didn’t think to start recording them until just near the end of their set.

It’s fun to think that one of these kids may be a jazz star of some upcoming year. While New Orleans took a massive hit from Hurricane Katrina, it sounded to me like she still couldn’t kill the music.

A real post - sort of

So most of the recent posts here have been just links to other stuff. Sorry about that. Have been doing lots of reading lately, not so much writing. Most of my writing posts here have been of merely the logistical bullet-list variety. Today I have a random assortment that isn’t entirely logistical, but is in a bullet-list; maybe there’s something you’ll want to comment on, though.

[Voice in my head: “you fool, you just fell victim to one of the classic blunders!…” which is blogging about blogging… desperate, I know. Humor me.]

So, in no particular order:

  • I still owe everybody a post on music in New Orleans. If I ever remember to up a little video to YouTube, I’ll write the post.
  • Have you ever choked yourself by having saliva “go down the wrong pipe”? It just happened to me. Weird.
  • I have lately been listening to a series of lectures by Don Carson on the book of Revelation. (You can download them here.) The amillenial viewpoint has always been a mystery to me (being raised a good dispensationalist and all), but Carson, along with a few things I’ve heard from N. T. Wright, has given me the most reasonable case yet for that position. In a lot of ways it seems to make more sense. Anybody got a book recommendation that might help me think through it some more?
  • I’ll be traveling to Seattle in a couple weeks for an industry committee meeting. Gonna meet up with my old college roommate while I’m there. Should be fun.
  • Immediately after I get back from the committee meeting I’ll be preaching during our Sunday service at Noelridge. Still trying to decide on a text.
  • Sorry, Geof, I already have a web project lined up for my trip to Seattle. It doesn’t have anything to do with any Square Pegs. :-)
  • Last but not least, congrats to my internet friend Dan who is getting married this weekend!

I told you it’d be random.

Update, one too good to pass up:

  • I just watched my wife beat on a peppermint candy with her cell phone.  Hilarious.

New Orleans Impressions

Got back from last week’s trip to New Orleans early on Friday morning. This was my first time in New Orleans, so it was interesting to see an area that I had heretofore only read about and seen on TV. I had a mix of impressions from the city.

The first night I was there I took a walk from my hotel over to the French Quarter. I mean, that’s the place in New Orleans you’re supposed to visit, right? It was only about a mile walk. On the way I passed a rather large Harrah’s casino which I understand to be new development since Katrina two years ago. Didn’t go in, but wow, that thing was big.

IMG_5333The near edge of the French Quarter was Canal Street. It is big, glitzy, lots of neon and expensive shops. It reminded me a little bit of Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It’s a big wide street that includes tracks for the streetcars. Once you walk up it for several blocks, you get to Bourbon Street. This is the one you always hear about during Mardi Gras, right? So I figured it’s worth a visit.

In comparison to the broad, upscale Canal Street, Bourbon Street is narrow and scuzzy. There is very little variety to the shops on the street; the basic repeating pattern is souvenir shop, beer joint, strip club, restaurant. There may be a few extra beer joints mixed in for good measure - it’s legal to have an open container on the street there, so there is a proliferation of lemonade-stand-type beer vendors. Eesh.

I did find some good food on Bourbon Street - the jambalaya from Remoulade was excellent (though the pecan pie left much to be desired). I almost bought one of their t-shirts (I was thinking the Craw Dad one) but finally decided that I already have too many t-shirts, I don’t need another one. Then I wandered up and down the street again looking for some good live music places. I found a couple, I’ll write specifically about the music in a separate blog post. So yeah, I visited Bourbon Street. Suffice it to say I wasn’t impressed. Seeing what it was like on an early Tuesday evening in the middle of summer, I can only imagine how much of a drunken orgy it is during Mardi Gras.

The last day of the trip I had a few hours before my flight so I drove east on I-10 towards Slidell and then up around Lake Ponchartrain and across the amazing Causeway (longest bridge in the world!) back to New Orleans. I was astonished at how much damage is still left from Hurricane Katrina. Even though it’s been two full years since Katrina hit, the devastation is still painfully evident. Not so much in New Orleans proper, but once you get out on I-10 towards Slidell… wow. You would think that repair activities would’ve focused on the areas around the interstate, but there is still so much damage… buildings boarded up, nice houses and apartments with tarps still over the roof; then you go past a field that obviously used to be mostly forest, and now it’s just a field of 8-foot-tall trunks with the tops twisted off. So sad. Two full years later, and still this much mess?

Before I finish this post, a word about the Causeway: amazing. Over 20 miles long. The visibility wasn’t great that afternoon (a storm was rolling in), so there was definitely some time in the middle of the bridge when you couldn’t see anything but water no matter which direction you looked. So cool.

So that was New Orleans. Next month: Seattle. Hoping to meet some old and new friends while I’m up there.

Bullet Points for a Friday

[Once again, thanks to dan for creating a good format to rip off.]

  • 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.

New Orleans: FAA SW DER Conference

Today through Thursday is the 2007 edition of the FAA’s SW/CEH DER Conference. You can follow the link if you really want to know more about it; basically it’s a technical conference for those of us who work with the FAA to approve aircraft equipment and software. Good times. This year, the conference is in New Orleans, LA. It’s my first time in New Orleans.

The trip was a bit of a pain; my flights were from Cedar Rapids to Dallas/Fort Worth, and then from DFW to New Orleans. The first leg of the flight left about 40 minutes late, but no worries, I had a long-ish layover at DFW. Well, that long-ish layover turned into a very long layover, because my flight to New Orleans, supposed to arrive in NOLA at 9:20 PM, didn’t leave DFW until 10:15 PM. It seems to be a recurring theme when I travel to these conferences; last year I was driving through downtown Atlanta at midnight to find the hotel, this year, through downtown New Orleans.

Day 1 of the conference is always rather boring; it’s a general session where we get updates on the progress of various industry committees and information on what the FAA’s doing. We got 45 minutes this morning on how they’re gonna be using some new tools to do more uniform safety analyses of aircraft programs…. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Tomorrow and Thursday are more interesting when there are topical break-out sessions.

I just finished lunch at Ugly Dog Saloon, recommended by Scott as the best BBQ in New Orleans. It was pretty tasty. Now I’m thinking I’m gonna skip the next couple committee updates and go walk through the Riverwalk area across the street. Tonight I’m meeting Scott and Jacob for dinner. Tomorrow night I guess I’ll go hit the French Quarter and try to hear some live music. Should be fun.

Bullet Points on a Friday

  • 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.

Drying out

It’s been a bit of a wet week here in eastern Iowa. We had storms starting Monday night through Tuesday, then again Wednesday morning and evening. My neighbor Jim told me yesterday that he measured something like 5 inches after the Monday/Tuesday storm. No big damage; the neighbors lost a small branch from their tree, that’s about it. However, the split in our tree in the front yard is much more noticeable now than it was a couple of weeks ago, so we’re gonna have a tree service come out and look at it to see what our options are. If the south side of the tree splits off, it’ll fall on the house, right on Laura’s room. Not good. So we will see. I’d hate to lose that tree, though.

Yesterday afternoon we worked on outside stuff; I cleaned out the gutters and checked out a couple spots on the roof that I think are leaking a little. I’ll be heading to Lowe’s in the next day or two to check out my options for sealing up the leaks. Oh, and they need to make gutter guard with a solid top; the mesh guards do no good at filtering out the leaves from the locust tree and all the little messes that the oak tree makes.

So that’s my homeowner’s report for the week. Still plenty to do on the house; my list of major things that’ll need done in the next 5 - 7 years is pretty long. But hey, it’s a good house, worth working on. God will provide as we have needs.

It happened again.

Yep. Four in a row now. What are the odds?

Dang, I had to ask that. Now I’m gonna have to calculate them.

Probability of a winner is 1 in 8. So the chances of me getting a winner with my first bottle was, well, 1 in 8, or 0.125.

Probability of a winner each time I get 2 bottles is [1 in 8] * 2, which is 1 in 4, or 0.25.

I’ve now gotten the initial winner plus three more winners in sequence. The odds of that, according to these back-of-the-envelope calculations, are 0.125 * 0.25 * 0.25 * 0.25 = 0.001953125, or to put it another way, 1 in 512.

Cool.

The Challenges and Blessings of Hospitality

Last week Becky and I had a discussion about, well, a bunch of things, but the one thing that came out of it was an agreement that we needed to be inviting people over more. We enjoy having folks over to share a meal, play games, and hang out, but we do it far too rarely. So we discussed for a while what day would work best for us, (if we want to be consistent, we’re gonna have to pick a day and stick to it), and came up with Sunday evenings. We don’t have any Sunday evening church activities, and, we concluded, but 5 PM on Sunday we’re usually bored anyway and looking for something to do, so why not have folks over for supper? Having thus planned, we invited two couples (+ kids) over, and started preparing for Sunday night.

Now, normally for something like this we’d do a lot of meal preparation and house cleaning on Saturday, leaving us time on Sunday to rest and relax before having visitors. (I do love my Sunday afternoons to crash.) But this past Saturday was a softball tournament that went from first thing in the morning until mid-afternoon, and then left us so tired we had no motivation to start cleaning. “We still have tomorrow to get ready” was our motto.

So Sunday afternoon rolled around and it was time to get ready. So we picked up toys, vacuumed, snapped green beans, made lasagna, did the dishes, put the leaves in the table, and next thing you know, it was 5 PM and our guests were arriving. So much for our theory that “we’re bored by 5 PM anyway…”! 5 PM showed up and we hadn’t sat down all afternoon. Well, not quite true. I sat down to rip a few sermon recordings to mp3 for the church website. But that was it.

We had a great time with our guests last night. We ate plenty of good food, finished up with some to-die-for homemade chocolate-mint ice cream, sat around and swapped stories about growing up in small towns, raising kids, and protecting our homes from late-night marauding insects, and laughed hilariously at this video of Ringo Starr visiting the studio as Andrew Peterson is recording his new album. Look for the cameo appearance by Chris Sligh (formerly of American Idol) and Ringo’s quick wit when Chris declares himself “more of a Paul man”. (Andy Gullahorn is a genius, I tell you! A genius!) Time flew by, and by the time folks were leaving to get kids to bed and prepare for the upcoming week, it was nearing 9 PM. It was a wonderful evening.

Now I know that our guests from last night pretty much all read my blog (hi Roy, Bridget, Dave, and Barb!), so I want to say this up front: we had a great time, and practicing hospitality this way is absolutely something we needed to do and to continue to do. However, yeah, it was a challenge. First of all, we need our Sunday rest, and it was pretty well lacking yesterday. I will also admit to being kinda frustrated yesterday when it became apparent about 3:30 that there was no way we were gonna have time to sit and crash before folks came. So we need to make sure that we use our Saturday more effectively next time. Becky and I also need to make sure that we communicate our expectations well; when I’m thinking and working towards one thing and she’s got something different in mind, and then the time crunch hits, well, it has the opportunity to not be a lot of fun. We’re still learning this communication thing after 9 years of marriage.

What I will conclude from the weekend, though:

We need to continue the hospitality. Dinners with friends are a lot of fun. Chocolate-mint ice cream can be really, really good. We need some time for Sunday rest. The Cubs still managed to win without me watching them. Sleep is sweet.

(Oh, and that Andy Gullahorn is a genius.)