October

First professional job – 17th – 1980
First child born - 15th – 1985
First solo flight – 12th – 1997 
First Pastorate – 1st – 2004

Climbing over the passenger seat

There are three reasons I get in my van through the passenger door and climb over the seat and in to the driver seat.  They are:

1. The key doesn’t work in the driver’s side door.
2. The snow pile is on the driver’s side.
3. It reminds of when I was a pilot!

Top 10 reasons I blog

10 – It pays so well
9 – It teaches me html
8 – It helps me practice counting down from 10
7 - It’s better than watching TV
6 - It makes people think I’m cool
5 - It keeps me from working on more important things
4 - People have been askin
3 - It reinforces the illusion that the whole world cares
2 - It makes me look for something funny in my life
1 – It makes it easier for the editor of the church newsletter to find material

Quirky?

far-out: informal terms; strikingly unconventional
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

That’s not so bad, I suppose.

Our Moms are gone

I spoke at the Nursing Home last Sunday.  I’ve spoken there many times over the last 5 years, and there is one patient who has been there her whole life – I think she is in her 60’s now.  She was born with severe cerebral palsy, and I rarely ever saw here without her Mom there too.  They both sang all the songs and were so gracious.  But, alas, last week the daughter was alone.  I learned from one of the nurses that her mother had died last fall after spending a few weeks as a patient in the same Nursing Home after some kind of physical setback.  I couldn’t get the story from the daughter – I couldn’t understand her words, but we understood each other, I think.

After the worship service, she was the last to be taken back to her room.  I stayed with her.  We’ve got a lot in common.

Classy Post!

I’m writing this post while in class.  Someone somewhere thinks it is a good idea for students to give presentations to the class, so for 3 out of the 15 (3) hours class times in this course this semester, we all get to sit here and listen to one another and what we’re trying to learn, while the prof. who already knows it all sits silently writing notes.  I understand the need for participation, etc., and I’m sure I learned some extra things while preparing for my presentation, but I don’t think it was worth missing 9+ hours of Doctoral level content.

I wonder if the prof.  is posting during class too?

Perfectly Timed Contradictions

I used a shoe lace to tie my strap on the end of my guitar back in the mid 70’s.

Today at church, before we started the musical portion of our time together, I was talking about a hectic pace in life, and our need to slow down and experience “a pause” once in awhile.  At that precise moment, the shoe lace holding my guitar broke – after over 30 years of faithful service.  I was able to catch the guitar before it hit the ground – but it was still a perfectly timed contradiction to every aspect of the mood and content that I was trying to communicate.

A couple of weeks before that, I was in a particularly heavy and solemn portion of my message when someone’s mobile computing device said, “You’ve got email!”  It brought down the house.

Only God is cool enough to engineer such perfect moments!

Riddle…

What is hard to pick up but never a burden to carry?

Hello? Hello? Gurgle.. gurgle

I leaned over to help my little boy finish going to the bathroom and my cell phone slipped out of my shirt pocket and in to the pot.

At least now I have a good reason to have a bad signal.

It looks great!

I just had to comb things over a little bit here and there, and the tree looks great!