Thankful Thursday: My Church Body

I have to be super-thankful for my church body.  I’ve missed three weeks in a row due to traveling and I miss many of the people there.  The people I don’t miss yet I probably should make an effort to get to know better 🙂  We moved to Denver to go to Holly Hills Bible Church (HHBC) and the body there has had its ups and downs as various events have taken place, but the teaching has remained consistent and the edification is amazing.

One guy particularly has encouraged me over and over: Norm.  Norm is in a wheelchair because he’s got some severe problem that has slowly caused him to lose muscle mass in his legs.  He’s in constant pain (though he is on pain medication) and yet he’s always got a smile and when we talk about our lives in Christ he’s just an encouraging brother.  Norm was in communications before the web and its been interesting at times to discuss his take on things having come from the print and media world before HTML.

Norm told me about going through trials and suffering in real life and about how one of the Sunday School classes he was in at HHBC encouraged him. Norm sees the trials and suffering as an opportunity to grow in his walk with Christ.  Yesterday he had some surgery on one of his eyes to attach his retina (again) to his eye so that it will work correctly.  He now has to sit facing down with his head for days as the retina and eye heal.  What an amazing brother in Christ to endure these things with such joy.

Thanks Holly Hills, and thanks Norm!

As an Intelligent Person You Should Read This

My buddy Trint posted an article about phishing on his normally humorous blog.  If you’re an intelligent person, and I know you are because you read this blog, go read it.  In case you missed it the link is http://www.surelyyourenotserious.com/blog/?p=538.  Read it.  If you know what phishing is already, you should tell others to read it.  Love your family and friends and complete strangers and make sure they know what this is.

Squid

Last night, before eating dinner – I ate a ring of squid.  Not the tentacles, those cause me some mental problems, but I did eat a ring of squid head.  Sure, the head bits are more like onion rings, but I ate my first squid (calamari).  Right now I predict my mother is slightly concerned, but there are other elements of my readership who are yawning wondering what took so long – and those elements are probably also sad that I didn’t eat the suction cup emblazoned tentacles.

Tough 🙂

Vascular

Today I was driving through the highways, streets and chutes of Ft. Worth thinking about how the arteries of the city are so easily clogged, the health of the city is weak at best.  One bad car becomes a clot.  It is as if the whole city were on the verge of needing the Emergency Room and we all pretend that it is OK.

I work from my home office 99.999% of the time, but when I have these short breaks into the world of “normal people’s lives” I realize how complex life gets just in transportation.  Congrats to those who manage to deal with a commute in a non-stressful state, you’ve achieved something rare 🙂

Pirates

Today while procuring halibut (which is an expensive piece of meat for tasting so mediocre sometimes – there are good & bad bits, but being on the ocean sure is better than fresh-frozen/fancy Halibut) I noticed that a gal behind me had painted on a mustache.  She was also wearing pirate clothing.  Everything inside of me came alive with this strange desire to riff on the weirdness.  I overheard her saying that she had just gotten done seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 3.  No matter how much I like a movie I just can’t get into the costumed theme myself.  The closest that I ever got was showing up the Back to the Future II in regular street clothes and Michael J. Fox was wearing similar clothing on the silver screen when he was in the ‘present.’  Of course there was that time I dressed up as a baby when Star Wars came out.  People thought I looked like Yoda because my cloth diapers were similar to his short little get-up.

Blue Shirts II

Today at Best Buy the emplyee at the checkstand didn’t like my question.   I had two memory chips in two different packages.  I asked why the previously opened chip package was four dollars more than the unopened package.  He was confused as to why I would wonder why that was.  It was simply that way.  It felt a bit stone age-like.  We’ll call the employee, whose name was I think Christopher, Thag.  Thag must have just gotten off of his smoke break wherein he was smoking large sequoia trees and checking out Olgatha who was in charge of stocking the store.  Her Cheetah-skin outfit was freshly tanned.  After I figured out he wasn’t going to help me get the opened chip for a discounted price I just bought the new chip.  As I swiped the credit card through the card reader he said, “The upside is that you can get the new chip cheaper than the used chip.”

Yeah, that’s not an upside, that’s a problem.

Skatelands

Today we went rollerskating with Jessica’s cousin’s family.  As we approached the window to pay the man behind the window grinned with heavily decaying teeth.  He knew it would be a big group.  He began counting in three dollar increments:

“Three, Six, Nine, Twelve, Fifteen, Sixteen, Twenty, Twenty-four.”

It was awkward to have him count with the wrong interval.  Of course my mathematical skillz can be fun, two.