Chris​Hubbs​.com

I hate waiting. I really do. I’m impatient. It’s not a quality I’m proud of; it’s a fault that needs corrected. (“Lord, give me patience… and please hurry!”)

It’s worse when I have things I’m waiting for and impatient to get. In my current case, I’m waiting for two things. First, the Qwest DSL hookup information, which I had been anticipating last week Thursday. They promise it will get here today. It better. Second, my (second) refurbished iPod. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the guy at Best Buy remembered to put it into the system promptly; some time this week UPS should deliver another refurb; hopefully it has less problems than the last one did.

So for now I sit and wait, knowing that patience is a virtue that should be cultivated. I’m trying to learn.

This place has been full of links lately and very short on actual posts. Partly that’s been due to some network difficulties, partly that’s just been due to my own laziness. So finally I’ve got my blog reconfigured so I can get to it all the time, and now it’s time to write something.

Becky was remarking last night on how funny we are with our scheduling. If we have our whole week scheduled full with stuff, we go crazy. It’s just too much. We have to have a couple of nights on the calendar kept open just for us as a family. That being said, when we have nights free on the calendar, we are unlikely to just stay home; more often we’re out doing something as a family. (Maybe this’ll change a little more now that spring is here and there is more outside work to be done?)

Take last night, for instance. We had the night free, so what did we do? Head to Coralville to the mall. Becky needed some summer clothes, so we spent a few hours, found a bunch of stuff for her, ate some supper there, and got home way past the girls’ bedtime. But it was a good night. Now morning has just come a little early. :-)

I’ve got a bunch of travel coming up in the next week. Friday afternoon I’m driving to Omaha to see Andy Osenga play a concert. I’m planning to just drive back after the show, so it’ll be a lot of hours on the road, but still definitely worth it.

Then Monday I’m headed out on a trip for work to Salt Lake City, and will be there until Wednesday night. Then with Friday off (Good Friday), we’re heading up to Wisconsin to visit my folks for Easter weekend. So yeah, it’ll be nice to finally be back home after all that. So far April isn’t booked up too much… dunno how long that’ll last. :-)

Having thus caught up on the trivial business of my life, I’ll sign off.

As I updated my 2007 reading list yesterday, I became convicted about how many novels of dubious quality I’ve read (23 books in 75 days!) and how short my time in the Scripture has been lately. As such, I am making this resolution: for the next month (March 20 - April 20), I am going to restrict my reading to just the Bible. I want to read it in broad pieces, to try to pick up the sweep of the grand story of God’s work.

I don’t know how far I’ll get in just a month, but I have a feeling it’ll be a ways. So don’t expect any reading page updates for a while. I don’t think it’ll be a great loss. :-)

I’ve complained enough about bad customer service here on the blog (see: the OfficeMax debacle of a couple years ago) that I want to make sure I say something about really good service when it happens.

When I was in DC last week, I hit a shopping mall one night to wander around and pick up something for the girls. While I was in there, I ran across Paradise Pens, a neat little store specializing in, well, pens. They had everything from basic ballpoint to pens costing nearly $2000. I wandered in and struck up a conversation with a very friendly store manager. I mentioned an interest in fountain pens (I’ve often been curious, but never been to a store that sold them), and she took 20 minutes and showed me some different pens, let me try them out, answered my questions. Excellent service. I ended up buying a low-end fountain pen, cost about $40.

When I got back to the hotel and opened the pen, I found one issue: the pen cap, which is supposed to screw onto the pen body, was just a bit oversized. The cap wouldn’t screw on, it just slipped off. Well, that isn’t so good. I used a little bit of tape I had along to shim out the screw so it would hold, but that wasn’t a good long-term solution. And I didn’t have time to get back to the mall to return it.

Finally earlier this week I sent an email to the info address on the Paradise Pen website. After a couple of days I had no response, so I forwarded the email again. Who knows, maybe they are bad at checking email. Finally this afternoon I just decided to call the toll-free number they offered. So far, the service hadn’t been so good, huh?

I called the number, dialed the extension, and the phone was answered by a real person. She said her name was Carrie. I said “hi, my name is Chris Hubbs, and I…” and she started to tell me my story, that I live in Iowa and bought a pen in DC and the cap was too big. I was stunned. “So you got my email, I guess.” Yes, she said, she’d gotten both of them, and was surprised that the store hadn’t gotten back to me yet. I went and checked my email, and found that a message had just arrived from the store. The manager of the DC store was letting me know that they were sending me a new pen and a postage-paid envelope to return the faulty one.

I told Carrie that I had received the email, and that the solution was fine with me. She gave me her name, phone number, and extension, and told me in no uncertain terms that if anything wasn’t to my satisfaction, to call her directly. “I’m the one with the big stick,” she said. Wow, do I appreciate that attitude. I am looking forward to receiving my new pen and getting a chance to really use it. And I will now recommend Paradise Pens to anyone interested in buying a good pen.

It’s been a disorienting past ten days  or so; last weekend (10 days ago) we had the big storm, which meant church was canceled, which always really throws me off.  Then last week I was on travel, only in the office for a few hours on Friday.  So by Saturday night I had no real idea what day it was…  fortunately Becky reminded me that we would be going to church the next morning.

We had a bit of a backwards morning at church music-wise.  David Green, normally our bass player, was leading music from the piano.  He asked me to play bass with him.  So I hacked my way through it, and I think we managed OK.  A learning experience for both of us.

Now it’s Monday morning and I can look forward to a regular week at the office.   There are times I’m less than excited about coming in to work, but this week it’ll just be nice to have things back to normal.

I’m sure I’ve used that title before, but oh well. Seems like this place has been filled up with book reviews lately and not much else. Let’s see, what else should I talk about? The cold? The temperature display on my PC at the moment says it’s -9 degrees F outside. We’re supposed to get a heat wave by the weekend, though - up into the 20’s!

Life has pretty much settled down for now after the craziness of December and early January. One bit of fun is that we’re having our church talent show down at Central Park Presbyterian Church (a facility we’re talking about buying), and they have a nice pipe organ… so I got a request for some organ music. I’ve been working on Bach’s famous Tocatta & Fugue in D Minor for a couple of weeks now and have the keyboard parts learned pretty well… but I’m worried that the pedal parts will be my undoing. I’m headed over to the church tomorrow night to practice on the organ for a while. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s a total flop I’ll just pull out some piano fugues and play ’em on the organ… good enough. But still… a PIPE ORGAN! Too much fun.

Sometime while we were gone on our Christmas vacation, our local Krispy Kreme closed down. It opened back in 2000, is only two blocks from our house, and the smell of fresh donuts often wafted over to tantalize us. I have a love-hate relationship with Krispy Kreme donuts; when they’re fresh and warm, they’re a real treat. Once they’ve cooled to room temperature, they become a total sugar overload and I am no longer a real fan. But still, I’m sad to see them go.

The local Krispy Kreme franchise owner says that the distributing facilities elsewhere in the state can handle the Cedar Rapids area’s distribution needs, and Krispy Kreme donuts will still be available in many retail stores. So people can still get their fix if they really need it… but it won’t be the same as driving up to the store in the morning, the smell of donuts in the air, and being offered a free fresh hot glazed donut. Wow, those were good.

On the upside, the news story says they’re likely to open an Arby’s in the old Krispy Kreme building. That will make Becky very happy. :-)

“The usual?”

That’s the question that was posed to me this morning. Now, it was just at the local Quik Trip store that’s on the way to work, but still, it made me think a bit.

The details of me having a “usual” are unremarkable. I am in the habit of stopping at that QT every morning on the way to work sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 AM. I have an older 52 oz mug that I fill with Diet Pepsi from the fountain. I usually add a shot of cherry syrup to sweeten it a bit. They upped the price on me several months ago; it now costs $0.93 once the state of Iowa taxes it.

So this morning I didn’t have to say “refill” or “yeah, it’s pop” (apparently some folks refill a 52 oz mug with coffee! Yikes!) - as I walked up to the counter, the guy said “just the usual?” and I said “yep” and handed him a dollar. Actually, I set the dollar on the counter; he was already pulling my seven cents of change out of the cash drawer.

There’s a word I’m heading towards here with this story, and that word is community. Now sure, maybe it’s a stretch to say that the Quik Trip guy knowing what I usually get is community. (Maybe it’d be better for me if I wasn’t drinking 50 oz of Diet Pepsi a day!) But when you start having consistency in an area to the point where you and your habits are known, and people start responding to you as a person they recognize, rather than just some random human they have to deal with today? That’s the start of an opportunity for a relationship; one that builds community and provides opportunities to interact about more meaningful things.

My hope is two-fold. First, that I will be a part of a community long enough that people will know me and what I am about. Second, that what I am about will be more meaningful than large daily doses of liquefied caffeine.