Day Two, Box Twenty

The packing continues, we’ve created a lot of garbage in this moving process.
Sometimes you don’t realize that you’ve been storing, holding onto or keeping refuge just plain trash.
And sometimes you realize that you had assigned sentimental value to things that you should throw away anyway.
For example, I’ve got a bag of hats that are great, or I should say were great.
These are hats that really need to be sorted, some to be thrown away, and a few to be kept for play hats (for Abby and kin)… and amazingly a few hats worth getting out and using.
I had my black hat from Jr. High in that bag, it was stained with sweat, discolored from sitting in the sun in the back of one of my cars and probably smelled, if we were to try to smell it.

I’m sure that Abby will look fabulous in my top hat, though it will most likely fall right over her face.
And I’m also sure she’ll love the jesters hat and the (train) engineers hat.
Jessica’s straw hat from her 21st birthday will be kept as well.
We’ll try to take some pictures of Abby with them on soon and then I’ll throw them up online here.

This reminds me that we should most likely clean house personally as well – keeping our relationship with Christ where it should be.
Make sure you’re not out of fellowship with Him.
On the other hand, if you are out of fellowship with Him, then reconciliation is really, really easy.
That’s what I love about my Saviour, He’s not concerned with my statistical average, as if I can sin too much so as to put me out of His grace.
Saving grace from God isn’t grace if it isn’t complete, and perfect.

Our packing here isn’t complete, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t perfect 🙂
We’re making good headway, and if you know anyone who’s interested in buying a used Dodge Stratus that runs well, let me know!

Resting in Him,

Randy “Mover & Shaker” Peterman

P.S. – Happy Leap Day! Oh, and I’m sure they won’t see this, but Happy Anniversary to P.J. and Sherri Lewis! Oh, and apologies to most everyone else who has anniversaries that I forget to mention or call on, or send a card – if their anniversary wasn’t so unique I’d surely forget it.

Packing Our Things

Today we started packing our things at the apartment.
It’s kind of weird.
As much as I like to dislike our apartment management’s approach to things, as much as I hate the Sunday pile of trash next to the dumpster that is over-full, as much as I hate hearing our neighbor upstairs dropping large objects at 3:00 AM, I think I’ll sort of miss the place.
I’ll also not miss a lot of other things, like trying to find a parking spot late one night because all of the paid cover parking is empty, but the uncovered parking is packed full.
I’ll not miss a gated community with gates that work most of the time, if you exclude the first month and a half that we rented here, the last week, and mornings between 6:30 and 8:30 and Evening between 4:30 and 6:40.
I’ll not miss hearing our neighbors next door playing their goofy rock albums with the baselines that are the same three notes over and over and over and over and over, well you get the point.

However, I will probably miss our neighbor Lynn, from across the breeze way knocking on the door asking questions about her computer – I’m glad she asked, it was one of our few conversations together.
I’ll miss Greg, our neighbor downstairs (below Lynn), and his dog Diamond – Greg would always try to get Diamond to do a trick to please Abigail.
I’ll miss watching the four latino kids throwing fake punches at each other in the commons like they were Mighty Morphine Powder Strangers.
I’ll miss the odd memories of our first neighbors downstairs just abandoning their stuff downstairs, presumably to flee the country after 9-11 (very suspicious behavior there well before 9-11).

However, the boxes are here now sitting in the living room, Barnes & Noble logos emblazoned on them.
And the tape and scissors are out along with our little notebook that contains the box number and the corresponding description of what’s in the box and the room it should go in it.
And Abby is already keen on the idea of climbing onto the boxes.
She like the concept of climbing now.
In fact I had to pull her down off of the second level of boxes three times this evening while packing so she didn’t pull a Fay Wray [reference to King Kong fall – in case you didn’t know what that was about].

Anyway, it is happening… and I’m glad that we’ve got some sense of direction, it makes life a little easier to operate in.

Resting in Him,

Randy Peterman

Man Breasts

I don’t know that I’ll be able to buy anything off of eBay for a while.
Last night while interupting the show I was watching the also were able to gross me out at the same time.
I was already annoyed that they were trying to disrupt my train of thought (the show) but then they add man breasts to the picture.
Literally.

Their commercial started out as all of their recent ad campain bits do, a
person in an ‘ordinary situation’ starts singing a well known show tune
melody but with words that somehow convey happiness, stuff and more stuff
– all bought on eBay.
This time a large black man is standing behind two white men in an elevator – which is pure racialism.
Keeping the black man down – that’s not right!
But then, they put the black man down further by having him squeeze out from behind the two men, run out of the elevator and dance.
That is where I wanted to get up and leave the room.
Man breasts began to flap.

Because he was so large and because of camera and lighting angles his chest flapped as he danced and whirled.
It was hard for me to watch, and when he stepped back in behind the white men back at the end of the commercial I was ready for a commercial break, or at least to break from seeing that commercial.
I suppose that the only consolation is that he wasn’t wearing $2,000,000.00 diamond encrusted shoes.
They’re doing that for the oscars this year 🙁

Randy “Whiner” Peterman

PS, this isn’t intended to be a rant on ‘fat people’, ‘overweight’, the ‘obese’ or men with man breasts, but just plain poor marketing and bad camera work. A different outfit may have minimized the jiggling, but that was not taken into consideration.

Why We’re Moving to Colorado

As people have learned we’re moving to Colorado they’ve naturally asked what has motivated this decision.
Rather than explain it as many times as I’m asked I thought I’d write this, which may (or may not) help people understand.
I’d like to first explain that our motivation is not in a normal money, job kind of move that is typical in many moving situations.
And, as is often the theme of this site, it is rooted in our faith in Jesus Christ.

We moved to Texas so that we could grow spiritually and learn God’s Word in seminary.
The thing that motivated us then is the same thing now.
We want to do what is best for our family in respect to our development as Christians.
This is not popular and may lend some to think, “Religious nuts.”
Maybe nuts, but hopefully not too religious 😉

The church, Holly Hills Bible Church”, is an incredible church where like minded brothers and sisters gather together.
We have not been able to find a church that is near our house in Texas that we agree with doctrinally (in layman’s terms we disagree with the way they teach the Bible, or apply the principles, even if their doctrinal statement looks good on paper), and that has been hard.
It has been like a spiritual drought for over two years.
There are good churches in some parts of the metroplex, but there is also a second reason: family.

Family is tough for us, since we’ve had Abigail it has been a lot harder to go visit family, as well as being more expensive to do so.
By moving to Denver we’ll remove one long travel to see grandparents and have a good church home.
On top of that Frontier Airlines runs really good specials for round trip tickets so we’ll most likely be able to visit the other grandparents and aunts and uncles more often.
These two reasons are the major parts of our decision.

This may or may not make sense to all and I do welcome questions, but I do hope that this helps fill in some of the details.

Resting in Him,

Randy Peterman

The Big CO

So yesterday my boss sent out a message here at work announcing that we’re moving to Colorado.
Within minutes I was chatting with 4 people with a fifth person knocking at my office door and getting lots of email.
It was a surprise announcement for most of the staff I’m sure.
Alt-N rocks and I’ll be glad to continue working for them as a consultant because I believe in our programs and the staff here.
We make a pretty mean mail server.

The move is coming up pretty quick, this morning I dropped Linda off at the airport and realized that we’ve got a little over a month to pack up before Jessica leaves (she’s going ahead of me).
We’ll be in Austin for 5 days while I go to SXSW, and so that cuts nearly a week off from things.
I’m hoping that Abby will not be too much of a busy-body while we are packing, I don’t want her to get hurt, or to make a worse mess.

The Passion

I was thinking on the way to work this morning how hypocritical the public is being about this new movie on the life of Christ (which I haven’t seen yet).
There are folks screaming their heads off that this is bigoted in some way or another.
Idiots.
Turn off your TV’s.
Don’t watch any movies.
Turn off the radio.
Stop reading my blog, the rest of the web and the news paper.
Put your books down.
All of those mediums can potentially carry anti-Semitic material.
All of those mediums can potentially carry messages of hate, murder and deceit.

If you’ve ever seen The Italian Job, Entrapment, The Cat in the Hat then you’ve seen movies about deceit and thievery – all from the perspective of the better bad guy.
In other words, unless you’re going to really clean up Hollywood and become truly innocent in your actions, don’t get all hissy about a historical epic.
One that is documented well.
I don’t think I recall seeing anyone out in the streets about Gladiator because of incest (not actually presented, but implied).
People were not on the TV talking about how, “Hobbits are the only characters in Middle-Earth that can endure the ring. That is so bigoted. And why didn’t female Hobbitses {gollum} carry our precious?”

If Cold Mountain is art then lets let The Passion be art.
Unless of course The Passion is about truth.
Unless of course Jesus did really die on the cross to pay for the sins of the world – giving salvation to those who would receive it.
Then we can really talk.
Otherwise – lets all just move on and wait for The Incredibles to come out.

Resting in Jesus,

Randy “Impassioned” Peterman

Friday’s Forays

Dallas World Aquarium

Yesterday afternoon we went to the Dallas World Aquarium.
This is my favorite thing in Dallas because it has Sea Dragons.
Sea Dragons are an amazing kind of animal, and if I could I’d have one as a pet.
I’d actually have a lot as pets if I could because they’re very endangered.

The Cheesecake Factory

After the aquarium we went to the Cheesecake Factory.
Which is a good place to go if you want to suffer from lengthy indecision.
I think they’ve got hundreds of menu items to choose from.
I finally picked the peppered shrimp and contributed to the over-fishing of the world’s oceans.
It was a tasty meal, but now I live with guilt that tiny crustaceans all over the world hate me.

Abby, like a shrimp scavenged and ate from Linda and Jessica’s plate, and since my shrimp would have hurt her mouth or caused her gastro-intestinal pane, we passed on feeding it to her.
Linda and Jessica got pork chops which Linda had been raving about like a pork chop nut.
They liked the pork chops, which was good.
They also really liked the Toblerone Cheesecake that they ordered.
Jessica said it was the bets cheesecake flavor that she’d ordered there.

After a noon-dinner at the Cheesecake Factory we went to The Container Store.
This is a store filled completely with things you most likely never needed but really want.
You can box up and organize all of the things that Clean Sweep would make you get rid of.
I bought a really neat measuring cup.

At Barnes & Noble we looked at various books (Surprise!) and I bought a book on Mozilla Rapid Application Development (Amazon).
Then, Abby had a potty – which needed to be taken care of lest the store ask us to leave.
Linda kindly changed it, and then we left and went to yet another book store: Half Price Books.

After the books we ventured back home in the post-rush-hour traffic and then played Cribbage after Abby went to bed.

Resting in Him,

Randy “Busy Guy” Peterman

Diet Coke With Lime

So I tried this beverage.
It is poorly named.
It should have been named Diet Coke that tastes like Sprite.
It is not lime, it is Sprite (more like a soda suicide, where you mix different sodas to create new flavors).
That being said I finished it because I wanted to have some sort of libation.

We went to the zoo today for over 4 hours and Abby was great.
In fact most of today she was excellent.
This evening after we put her to bed she woke up and cried because we were laughing loudly whilst playing cribbage and I went into her room, gave her her plug, rocked her in her rocking chair and she fell back to sleep in less than two minutes.
What a precious girl!

Resting in Him,

Randy “Monkey’s Uncle” Peterman

All Better Now

OK, I got the server moved over, the database information moved over, and now, if all goes well my old data from the old account should be deleted.
Small children in third world countries will not be able to eat because of… Oh, well they’ll be able to eat because people contribute to organizations that help them. However, my site is up, and if all goes well I’ll be able to help them too – with more than just mentioning www.givetwice.org.

Resting in Him,

Randy “Philanthropist” Peterman

New Server

Not that you’ll notice much, but my site’s on a new server now.
As soon as I get the database all moved over, it’ll be even quicker.
The new server offers me more room.
How much more room?
5 Megabytes.
Not a lot, but more.
How much am I using right now?
15 Megabytes – mostly from pictures and old files I should probably dump.

You probably don’t care about this, but I thought I’d let you know in case there was a disruption of service.

Resting in Him,

Randy “Server Hopper” Peterman

Hot Kool-aid

No, I’m not referring to stolen kids drinks.
In fact, I’m not even referring to Kool-aid.
I’m referring to tea.
Fruity tea that would make some British tea drinkers spew their strong, strip the paint off of your car, tea out their nose.
Tea with honey in it.
Not just some honey, but probably more than you would normally put in your tea.

You see, when you put a lot of honey in a cup of hot water, let a tea bag soak in the honey water you get a warm drink that is quite tasty and would probably pass as punch if you let it cool down.
I love it.
Tony likes chocolate milk, his wife Erin likes Dr. Pepper.
Jessica’s cousin Amanda lives on Dr. Pepper.
Me, I seem to like hot Kool-aid.
I’m sorry, but I just had to get that out in the open.

Resting in Him,

Randy “Spot of Tea” Peterman