Weekend update Jan 2006

Well I’ve been a slacker lately as far as meaningful posts go… don’t know how this one will rate.

We had a nice weekend. Stayed home Friday night and crashed. Laura wasn’t feeling too good Friday night; she started coughing and got herself so worked up that then she threw up. I don’t know if, as a parent, you ever totally get used to being vomited on; however, I’m certainly getting practice at it, if not totally comfortable with it. :-) She finally got to sleep and slept well, though, so that’s a blessing.

Played church league basketball Saturday and won in double overtime. We were playing a team we totally had overmatched, so we played easy, slacked off. Of course that meant that when it was time to close it out and play seriously, we weren’t ready to do so… so we ended up in 2OT. At least we won… it’s only our second win of the year.

Got a new washing machine delivered on Saturday, too. Our old one was starting to die, and we have intermittent problems with water backup on the drain pipe for the washer. We got a new front-loader that uses only half the water that the old one did. It’s also amazingly quiet. I think it’ll prove to be a good investment.

Sunday we had a pleasant surprise - my mom stopped by on her way home from Omaha. She had been there on sad business (her step-brother is dying), but it was good to get to see her anyway. We took her out for a late lunch and had some yummy mexican food that I had been craving for a while… I know, now I sound like the pregnant one. ;-) After mom took off, we crashed, watched the Bears get beat in the playoffs, and audited giving receipts so I can get them sent out this week.

Now it’s Monday and I’m back at work, reviewing TSO deviations and waiting for the FeedLounge beta to go public so I can sign up. That’ll probably be worth another blog post in itself. :-)

making things

Occasionally when I walk through our building here at work to get to the cafeteria, I walk past some work areas where we have people making things. They probably have a fancy word for it, fabrication or some such. But it is cool. This one little work area I walk past, they have 4 or 5 pegboards full of some sort of little tool bits. I don’t know what they are - they may be cutting bits or burning bits or something I’ve never seen before. But there’s hundreds of them, all hanging there neatly organized and ready to use. And there on the benches are pieces of plastic and metal that people are working on. Cutting, shaping, joining.

My job is much more abstract. I write software. That means I sit and type things into a computer, and trust the computer to translate those words into more abstract code. When you get down to it, this stuff is just little 0s and 1s encoded as magnetic fields on a computer disk. Then I go down to the lab, and squirt those little magnetic fields into a very expensive piece of computing equipment, which causes pictures to come up on a screen once we squirt some more data (electrical impulses) into the back of the equipment. It’s fantastic. It’s complex. At times, it’s very cool - we can accomplish very complicated things very quickly and efficiently. But at times, it feels a bit empty; there’s nothing real solid I can point to at the end of the day and say “I made that”. The constant abstraction makes it that much more meaningful for me to walk the halls and see real things being made.

I don’t know what it is about the way we’re wired, but I, for one, occasionally need to see, feel, hold real stuff. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m a big geek, I love technology, I could explain our flight displays to you from the processor and hardware all the way up through the application software, and every level in between. But there are times when I just need to get my hands on something real. We bought a new washing machine last night, and I need to build a pedestal for it. Maybe this weekend I can go out and do some building myself.

getting things done

No, Geof, I haven’t read the book, and this isn’t about the book. However, it has been nice lately to get some things done.

I’ve had the Noelridge Park Church website sitting incomplete for several months now. I just needed to get some photos taken, but had never gotten it done. I got the pictures taken and sent them in on Monday. Soon we will be updated and ready to go. Phew!

In addition, tonight I will be getting things scheduled such that I have the first of what will be regular weeks off from leading the worship team. I need the break. I’m very thankful to the Lord for bringing in other musicians who can share the load.

There have been a bunch of other little things recently that haven’t been big notable items, but just things that have been on the waiting list for a while and now are getting completed. It’s a good feeling. It’s also probably timely; come the beginning of March I’ll have other things to keep me busy. :-)

BookJournal: Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange LandI was on the prowl for some sci-fi to read last time I was at the library. They are courteous enough to have the sci-fi genre split out into its own section, so browsing the shelves is a fairly straightforward means of finding some new sci-fi to read. (I will confess to scratching my head at the inclusion of the whole Left Behind series in the sci-fi section, but that’s neither here nor there.) My browsing led me to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, with cover boasting that it was “original and un-cut for the first time”. I skimmed the flyleaf and it seemed like I might possibly be interested in the story, so I borrowed the book and brought it home.

Stranger in a Strange Land seemed to me to be two different stories, only tangentially related. The first story, nearly the first half of the book, concerns Michael, the Man from Mars; he is the child of two human Martian explorers. They died when he was a small child and then he was raised by Martians. As the story begins Michael has just returned to earth and must deal with an unfamiliar world filled with people looking to take advantage of him. It’s a fairly imaginative fish-out-of-water story.

The second half of the book departs from this exploration into a treatise on the 1960’s hippie ideals of uninhibited carnality, free love and open marriage. Michael (who possesses amazing cosmic powers, thanks to his understanding of the Martian language and Martian mind techniques) founds a “church” which is a multi-level scheme; novitiates are presented with a study of Martian and the mind techniques; it’s not until they reached the highest levels of the organization that they were brought into the sexual free-for-all. In the end, they are persecuted, they scatter to spread their “church” abroad, and Michael *poofs* himself back to Mars.

I was ready to put down the book about halfway through the second section; the story takes a turn for the worse at that point. It appears to me that Mr. Heinlein wanted to write his hippie treatise, and found that it was easiest to do in the guise of other-worldly values. Enter enlightened Martians telling us that the answer to all our troubles is a lot of free sex and some cool cosmic powers… ugh. Oh well, on to the next book.

worship team follow-up

So we did two services this morning after the great WT practice on Wednesday, and the services went really well, too. Nice to be back in the groove. I did an Andrew Peterson song for the offertory: Faith to be Strong. I think it was well-received.

worship team stuff

We had our first WT practice in about a month on Wednesday night. It was good to get back to it. I don’t know what was up on Wednesday, whether I turned the monitors up higher than usual, or what, but we sounded really good vocally. Harmonies were tight. Everybody sounded nice and even and balanced. What a nice sound. I’m looking forward to Sunday… hopefully we accomplish something similar then. Hate to leave your best stuff on the bullpen mound in warmups. But the glory goes to God either way.

One of the good things that’s come out of my sickness over Christmas and my efforts to weed out my schedule has been several people coming forward to help out with leading the worship team. For much of the six years I’ve led the team, it’s been hard to line someone up for just the occasional Sunday I had to be gone. (Just a few times a year!) But things are changing. One woman who has attended for a long while and has led worship other places in the past wanted to start participating. So we got her involved. Now the gal who volunteered at a moment’s notice when I was sick back in December has indicated she’d like to be available to fill in from time to time. And then earlier this week our bass player (a phenomenal all-around musician) said he’d really like to lead some services and he could do that playing either the bass or the piano. Praise God for his supply!

I distributed a WT schedule for the next two months that includes me having one Sunday off each month and another Sunday where we are more informal and don’t have a WT. (That was the pastor’s idea, not mine… but I don’t mind it.) We’ll see how it plays out, but I think this is the start of some easing off of my WT load… and that will be very nice.

baby names

OK, so Becky is due with kiddo #2 the first week of March. We’ve talked baby names a little bit, but really haven’t gotten anywhere. We had an easy time with kiddo #1… we got to Laura and both went “yeah, that’s it!”. We had semi-agreement on a boy’s name if she’d been a boy, but I wasn’t totally keen on the middle name.

So I figure, what the heck, I have readers, right? Leave me ideas. Any boys or girls name suggestions? No promises that we’ll use any of ’em, but if we do, I’ll have to send you a prize or something.

BookJournal: No Uncertain Terms

Well I just about have this one finished up so I’ll write about it now. William Safire, in addition to having been for many years the conservative political columnist for the New York Times, is also the author of the “On Language” column that ran in that paper on Sundays for many years. In “On Language”, Mr. Safire explored the origin of words and phrases, discusses usage and spelling, and generally addressed any other language-related topic that piqued his interest. No Uncertain Terms is a recent (perhaps the latest… I’m not quite certain) collection of those “On Language” columns, one of at least a dozen. I know I own at least one more of the set: In Love With Norma Loquendi.

Being a lover of words and turns of phrase, Safire’s columns fascinate me. ALmost better than the columns, though, are the responses he chooses to print. Many of his readers choose to write in, enough that he has given the various groups titles. There’s the “Gotcha! Gang”, which nails him on factual errors. (I was actually a member of this gang once several years ago.) Then there’s the “Squad Squad”, nailing redundancy at every turn. Safire often corresponds with professors of English, editors of dictionaries, and historians, which means that the level of learnedness is very high. Still, the writing is snappy, so the book stays fun, and rarely gets dull.

I doubt I’ll find and add all of Safire’s collections to my personal library, but I’ll be on the lookout for another volume or two. They are fun reading, the topics won’t get old, and they improve my grammar and usage.

well, it's official

I got the letter from the FAA today that officially notifies me that I will be a DER candidate pursuant to my attendance at an orientation seminar in February. Woohoo! It took about 7 months to get from “here’s my application” to “you’re approved”, but at least we’re there now.

back into the swing of things

Today I’m back at work after 11 days of holiday. I was just about ready to come back… I can only spend so much time away from routines before it starts to drive me crazy.

So I’m sitting at work today, but with some Christmas gifts to entertain me; right now I’m listening to (and quite enjoying) Jamie Cullum’s new album Catching Tales. It’s a nice mix of jazz and pop, very listenable. I also have listened through Switchfoot’s new album Nothing Is Sound, though it was a bit of a pain getting it onto my iPod with the copy protection Sony put in place on the CD. (Quick solution: rip the files with CDex, then import them into iTunes.)

Finally, the last bit of fun for now: Becky IM’d me from home a little while ago to let me know that my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0/Premiere Elements 2.0 came from Amazon today. Oh, the fun I will have photo and video editing…