10 Useless Things in Order of Importance

  1. Calamari
  2. The Clapper
  3. Paper Chinese Take-out boxes
  4. The phrase “angels on the head of a needle”
  5. The Book of Norman
  6. Sensationalistic Media
  7. The Home Shopping Network
  8. Bright Spandex workout clothes from the 80’s
  9. Urinary Tract infections
  10. Robert Tilton

Top Five Movies I Saw At the Theater in 2009

  1. Up – tear jerker, but brilliant
  2. Star Trek – great plot, great acting, great special effects, great Leonard Nemoy work.
  3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatloaf – silly, but fun kids movie
  4. The Informat – This one is last place.  Don’t see it unless a moustached, fat, Matt Damon is your thing.  It is not my thing.

I haven’t seen five movies in the theater in one year in over a decade [newly wed in TX].

I just Killed a Bug

I spent much of the afternoon looking for a bug.  A bug I just sat down and killed after getting frustrated with Super Mario Brothers Wii.  I was so frustrated with the video game I needed to unwind.  I do this, apparently, by killing koopas that are in my kode.  Go figure.

The good news is that the bug is one of the last few bugs I have in this control and I’ll be able to move onto other bug killing tasks.  Dead bugs are good, ones that I don’t know about are the worst, and ones I know about drive me bonkers.  The good news is that as an exterminator I can take off that hat and become a creator.  I can create good, clean, new code that will be tested and reliable (hopefully).  This is the side of my job I like the most: creator.  When I create a bug, its on accident, when I create a feature, its exciting and I can’t wait to get back user feedback, change requests and generally improve the software.  I also like to make it faster and smaller.  This version is at least 10% smaller than past versions, and the good news is that its also faster because of it.

Good night, I’ve killed a bug, I’ve relaxed, and I’ve written a blog post.  That’s more than I can say about some nights.  Bowser, I’ll be back for you tomorrow.

Sledding

I did some AWESOME sledding this last weekend.  The awesomeness was in the fact that I forgot I wasn’t 17 and crashed into the snow.  Do you know what is under snow?  Solid ground that the snow has landed and accumulated on.  My shoulder still aches a bit from the crash, but the good news is that while I’m 15 years past 17, my kids still think I’m awesome for doing stupid stunts 🙂  Maturity indeed.

Lessons from This Last Week

This last few months has been topically about maturity for me.  It is not that I felt immature, but that I was thinking immaturely in some areas of my life.  A few weeks ago I posted the following quote on Twitter:

“We are not mature until we accept full responsibility for our choices.” – Chester McCalley

This quote has been running through my mind since hearing it.  I wrestle with responsibility because part of me is immature, I am still 14 in some parts of me (and not just the parts of me that like fart jokes).  I have been identifying some of those places with the help of the Holy Spirit and looking for opportunities to look at them from a heavenly perspective.  Not a perspective of “What can I fix to make me all better by myself?”  But more of the angle of, “What can I look at from a heavenly perspective?”  I’ve been trying to look at the consequences of my choices with the right attitude: I made the choice, I face the consequence.  But one of the things that came to bear on my mind was this last Tuesday when I got a speeding ticket.

I was driving Abby to the dentist and I was not paying attention to my speed.  I was not intentionally speeding, but I was also not intentionally driving the speed limit.  I looked over, saw the officer, glanced down, and saw I was going WAY too fast.  He turned on his lights, and I pulled over.  I knew I was speeding, I knew I was violating the law, and I knew it was my fault.  I knew I was responsible.  While I’m not proud of my having sped, I took the opportunity to love my little passenger (who was rather concerned for my interaction with the officer because she didn’t want me to go to jail) and explain to her that all the times I tell her, “think before you act,” were equally applicable to me.  I had not been thinking before I acted with my speed.  A lesson learned.

On top of this hefty lesson from my own life there, I was able to encourage the police office.  That’s right, I was encouraging the police officer who had given me a ticket.  I had said, “Merry Christmas,” to him.  He replied, “Merry Christmas.  I feel kinda dirty saying that after giving you this [ticket].”  I told him that he needn’t worry about giving me a ticket because he was just doing his job.  A job that needs doing.  I think he was shocked I wasn’t mad at him.  I think he was surprised that I was so positive about him doing his job.  This was an area where I could see maturity as a critical part of me looking at my mistake.  I’ve been awfully careful about my speed the rest of the week, and on top of that, I was thinking a lot more about how I should be representing adulthood to my family.

[NOT TO BE ANSWERED IN THE COMMENTS :)]

What is the biggest struggle you face when thinking of maturity?  Where do you need to have a mature perspective?  I don’t think that I am operating with blind spots until they’re shown me.  Do you mind having them shown?  How best do we talk to others about these areas in life (if it is even appropriate to do so)?

Four Year Old On Management

At breakfast Grandma said, “When we’re done eating we’re all going to work together to clean up the house.”  About 45 minutes later the 4 year old asks, “Why is grandpa on his computer instead of cleaning?  Is he the manager?”  I totally wish I could make this stuff up.

For the record grandpa did help with the cleaning.

On Being Herod the Not So Great

One of the things that’s fun about being part of a church body is that for some reason there tends to be a propensity for church plays around Christmas.  I don’t blame the Baptists, but I think that somewhere along the line, they got really good at bigger and bigger productions.  If Steven Spielberg wasn’t a Jew, he’d be a Baptist pastor of drama or some such thing.  I’m not here to talk about Baptists or Jews, but tonight I got to play the brief part of Herod.  I was asked to be Herod, the nasty ruler of the Jewish part of Rome who ordered lots of dead infants and children and generally was not a good guy.

It turns out that I’m too jovial and happy.  Herod was probably selfish, egotistical, and much more middle-eastern.  I’m probably selfish (but less so), egotistical (but less so), and I’m rather white and northern European.  Between those similarities and differences I can tell you that I pretty much did NOT embody the persona of Herod.  I could not pull off mean and angry.  Not a bit.  I was too much of a grinner [I was told].  I wasn’t even trying to grin, thinking about grinning, or even aware that I was grinning.  But apparently I grinned my face off.  Apparently the order to destroy all the males two and under was not convincing despite my best effort.

I’m totally OK with this.  I’m glad I failed at being nasty.  I will sleep well tonight knowing that I stink at being wicked and evil in an overt way.  Of course that means I’m probably just a quieter, more devious sort of bad guy, but we knew that already, too.  Ever since elementary school I was good at scheming bad things for others to do.  I rarely got in trouble because its hard to get caught when someone else is doing the dirty work.  I don’t blame the Baptists for this either.  Be stinky at being little Herods, its probably better for you anyway.

Filters & Feathers

I am not lying to you when I say I have bought a new filter for my shop-vac.  That’s right, I have a shop-vac with a new filter and I am ready to use it.  I am ready to make that filter wish it was never born.  It will be like so many washed up Hollywood starlettes wishing that it had stopped sniffing in the powder that I am about to rub off of my walls in an attempt to make them look nice.  The walls will be drywalls, but the shop-vac is a wet-dry shop-vac so I could in theory saturate the walls with water and the vacuum would still work!  Of course a house with saturated walls is not a house, its a home for Sponge Bob Squarepants.  Given the past owner’s penchant for hacks, shortcuts and setting up electrical situations that are sure to start a fire, I think I’ll keep the walls dry.

I’m trying to wrap up the wall work so that when my in-laws come next week for Christmas festivities we all enjoy time together and not working to wrap up the wall work.  In some countries this is unheard of, but mostly because they have not knocked the non-existent wall out from between their non-existent two rooms.  With that in mind, be like congress and stimulate someone’s economy like Cash for Clunkers, only because there are folks in need of chickens we’ll call it Cash for Cluckers.  Take some time to look around the World Vision site and buy a goat, some chickens, sheep, or even help fund a well.  I’d much rather have water be able to get into their lives through a well and have the problem of needing a wet-dry vac.

Speaking of which, does Dyson make a sand sucker?  Because I’m thinking in some of the places I’ve seen pictures of they need that.  Wait, they don’t have electricity… ZAP!!

R.I.P. Old Mr. Coffee

Our drip coffee maker, which I believe we purchased in late 2001 B.C. has finally made its last cup of coffee.  Its been next to the toaster for too long, and I think it rubbed off on it, so its toast, too.  We’ve purchased a new Mr. Coffee that does about 6 things that the old coffee maker doesn’t do, but they both have the same purpose: baking coffee.  All day long, slowly evaporating the liquid until there is a coffee cake at the bottom of the pot.  A cake you should never, ever eat.  But made of coffee.  At least the new guy will make my mother-in-law happy for about two seconds until she realizes that its inferior to the Bunn that she has at home.  The new coffee pot will probably make coffee in about 3-4 minutes while her Bunn has it ready before you finish thinking you’d like coffee.  It’s that fast.  R.I.Parts Mr. Coffee.  We won’t miss you since you’ve been replaced