Vehicle names

do you name your vehicles? Does your truck have a name? I know, it's a bit weird, but there are some rules for it. I don't think my wife's generic 2004 PlastiVan needs a name. It's too new and has no soul. My truck is from 1994...almost old enough but it has never developed a name. Now my Jeep...oh, yeah. It's from 1985 which doesn't automatically mean it has a name. It's also strange...only 2700 or so Jeep CJ-10a's were ever built so it's unique. And it has a name. We refer to the Jeep as The Little Green Wart. Because of it's ugliness and all. Now the bike is new. It's a 2002 Royal Enfield Bullet 500. But the way they have been making them hasn't changed much since 1955. Because of that it's old enough to have a name. It's also classic looking which is the nice way to say old. Being from British origin is part of how it was named and the fact it has only one cylinder gives it the other part. The bike is now Chuffy the Thumper. Chuffed is a British term for being excited and thumper is a term for a single-cylinder bike.

Scatology

is the study of the waste material from various critters. Last night upon arriving at home, there appeared to be sheep poop on the driveway. Now since our sheep are locked in the pasture it was puzzling to see that there. I grabbed my boy and he confirmed it looked like sheep stuff to him as well, but my wife told us we both had lost our minds.

Well, this morning we found that the sheep could get out! Towards the back we had a fencing opportunity and they walked through it, across the neighbor's field towards the front and had to be herded back. So it appears yesterday, on their own, they walked out, pooped on the driveway and then walked all the way back in!

And you thought knowing scat had no real purpose!

Mowing the lawn

wow, that is fun to say!

Mowing the lawn

nice! It's been years without a lawn and now we finally have one again. Mowed on Saturday and mowed again last night. It's just getting started so we have to mow it high and wait a couple days to lower the mower and give it another cut. This is fun for now. I'm sure it'll be old by the weekend and I'll be happy to have my boy out there mowing but for now, it is fun to have a lawn!

The brain is working better

I am excited to be coming down on my meds again. The back is beginning to feel better and I get to come down on the meds. The trip to downtown SLC was a bit harder on me because of the time sitting, but coming down on meds is great! Now my brain is working better. I was able to do some work the way I remember doing it. It's been a tough time trying to do my job with all the meds in my system but now that I'm back down to an even smaller dose the ol' melon is working well again!

The machine

One of the things we do at work in the morning is the Jeopardy calendar. It runs like the Jeopardy TV show. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are normal Jeopardy. Thursday, Friday, Saturday are double jeopardy and Sundays are final Jeopardy. We keep track of the scores each month and see who is the winner.

I have a buddy working in New York City these days who calls in every week or so to catch up on Jeopardy. There are days when he annoys me to no end because of the amount of worthless information in his brain! Here's the actual conversation with him today:

Final Jeopardy - "World Leaders"
I'll wager it all
"In 1973, he led a military junta that overthrew Salvador Allende, and then governed Chile for the next sixteen years"
"Oh! Pinochet" he says, without so much as a pause

Poe-Pourri - $400 "One of the title objects in this Poe story had a 'terrifically wide sweep (some thirty feet of more)'"
"Pendulum"

Poe-Pourri - $1200 "This ominous bird perched on a bust of Pallas Athena 'just above my chamber door'"
"Raven," he said smugly. Now on these he usually interrupts me but he actually allowed me to ask the whole question

Poe-Pourri - $2000 "This detective appears in 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'"
Ahh, I think, this is taking a while...maybe he won't get the $2000 question. "I'm going to have to go with Dupin," he says. Which, of course, is the right answer.

Okay, Final Jeopardy is "Films of the 1950s" and none of the rest of us think you will get this right.
"All right, then I'll wager everything"
"This film featuring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier was the first major film to use rock and roll music on the soundtrack"
"How can I not get this right? 'Blackboard Jungle' was a famous movie!"

I comfort myself knowing my brain isn't filled with all that worthless information! But I just wish I could get some of the Final Jeopardys right!

Sated

My Springtime lust has been sated for now. I have a new-to-me 2002 Royal Enfield Bullet 500 with 5100 on the odometer. I'll have to get an actual picture of mine, but until then, this is like mine.

Preparation

I have the opportunity to teach on Sunday. I really enjoy those times when I get to teach, but I am really slow at putting a message together! I have been working on it in fits and starts for a couple of weeks, but with it due on Sunday it was time to buckle down. I took Monday and Tuesday off work to get this message done and it has come together quite nicely. There will be a couple of videos for it...one to start us out and another to finish. The last video towards the end was tough. I need to read an article so the video makes sense and the first time through I broke down bawling so much my wife couldn't understand what I was saying! So I have practiced reading it five or six times and I can get through it now without breaking down. The big test will be Sunday...I hope to be able to read it without breaking down!

Spring lust

Ah, as Spring is upon us a man's thoughts turn to...bikes!

I miss my motorcycle. I have owned quite a few over the years. I started back in 1988 or 1989 with an old early 70s Honda 350 2-stroke. That was the first bike I put down as well as my first bike ever! I moved from that to a larger Suzuki 450 bike that had a computer problem that required it be tapped on the left side occasionally to get it going again. I then purchased my first Harley Davidson...a 1962 XLH. That thing was truly a basket case. They left it out in the rain with no spark plugs, so water fouled the inside of the cylinders and I took parts home in boxes. That took some years to rebuild but it turned out beautiful. Black with yellow scallops an a 1000cc package...nice bike. Unfortunately, I grew over those years into a size too big for a Sportster! So I sold that one off and purchased a 1974 Harley Davidson FXE. I also purchased a bunch of parts to upgrade it but I was too busy riding it to bother tearing down for the upgrades...until one day on my way home with the front highway peg fell off! Yep, just as I turned up my street to go home the entire peg snapped off my bike. Well, that was the impetus I needed to tear down and rebuilt that. Years and years and years and three kids later I finally got that bike put back together. Rode it for a bit and then was forced to sell it off to use the funds elsewhere. Since then I have been looking at various rides and I want a Harley Davidson Road King Classic...or one of the new V-Rods. I'm still wondering about that. But I can't afford either right now.

One smart thing my wife and I have done is purchase our vehicles with cash. This is why I drive older vehicles that might require a bit of futzing about to keep running. We could make payments on a nicer rig, but we just have decided not to do that. That means no new bikes for me and really I can't afford even a Harley at this time. But I really want a bike to ride around during Spring/Summer/Fall time here in Utah so I have been looking. A Sportster is out of reach, but maybe a Suzuki S40 or a Royal Enfield. Both are single cylinder bikes so they make a neat thumping sound. I'm looking now...maybe a bike is soon in the garage!

I've been lawned!

Yesterday, my connection group, my ward and some neighbors all collaborated to install a lawn for me! This has been an ongoing project of getting sprinklers installed, smoothing dirt, fixing the pump, installing curb and a lot of sweat on the weeds, but as of 1100 yesterday, it was done. We've been lawned! Thanks, all!

A suggestion to pastors

Pastors, I read your blogs and I listen to the podcasts. I've even been to a conference or two! I know that when we stand up on a Sunday and speak to our congregations the number one thing we would all like to see is the people going away from church living out a life that glorifies Christ from Monday through Saturday rather than making Sunday the only day God gets a nod from them. I've heard pastors speak on cultural relevance. Leaders in the church talk about engaging culture and being connected to cultural so people will listen.

May I make a suggestion? Get a job.

I know it's difficult to do all the work you do for church in the time you have. I realize you are busy and people have crises in their lives that you may be needed for, but if you really want to understand culture take a job for three months rather than attending any conferences in that time period. XXXChurch.com does a podcast called Dirty Little Secrets and in episode 55 found here on the right side they interview a pastor who wanted to see how he could be a follower of Jesus in the world and still do a horrible job. So he polled around for a bit looking for a bad job and eventually took the job of a cable bill collector. He went around to people who were delinquent on their cable bills to get the funds from them or terminate their cable service. He didn't run around with bibles and tracts but rather just loved people where they were and did his job. He found that people were everywhere that needed love and began to really understand what it meant by engaging culture.

Now you don't have to be a cable guy or even work for money. You can get involved with a shelter or soup kitchen. Maybe you volunteer at a teen pregnancy crisis center. Make sure you work somewhere that is outside the normal church world and see if it doesn't give you a better perspective just being a servant for a while.

Wants and needs

I'm not sure I've talked about this before on the blog...the idea of wants and needs. People tend to use the two words interchangeably and they are generally not. A need is, in my mind, required to continue to function. Air is a need, food is a need, water is a need and so on. A want is what we desire. While a person needs food, having pizza for that food is a want. A lot of time folk don't understand this. They come to the church looking to have their needs met when in reality they have wants to be met and they get frustrated when that is pointed out to them. For example, the person who comes to the church saying they need food, but when something was offered to them, they insisted they needed Golden Corral. That is incorrect, they want to go to Golden Corral, but they really just need food. One that has happened a few times is people coming to the church in a time of financial crisis. Now I am not unsympathetic but it has taken years and years generally for these people to get into this position of financial crisis and a lot of time the first time I have met this person is when they show up looking for somebody to pay their bills. What is needed is some help with handling finances which we have people trained and qualified to do. What they want is somebody to pay their bills for them for this month...which doesn't help them out next month. I don't think people always realize that the church has bills to pay as well and the money the church uses for those bills doesn't drop out of the sky but rather is given in donations from those who attend. Additionally, those in leadership have an obligation to be stewards of what they are put in charge of. Sometimes that means meals are purchased or cars are fixed or bills are paid. But sometimes it means the answer is no. That's the hardest answer to give to somebody who is in a crisis, but sometimes people need to be allowed to fall down on their own. They can know we're available if they want to talk or learn about budgeting, but we just don't always have the funds available to meet their want or we don't think it's a wise choice. That's a good question to ask the next time something comes up...is this a need or is it a want. We want to help the truly needy and sometimes that means the wanty are going to suffer.

Seeing God

It's my belief that God is everywhere. I think if we look intently enough we can see God's hand in a number of things. Now you may say "sure, God is omnipresent, I get that" but do we really? I hear missionaries say things like "...taking God to the people" but they aren't taking God anywhere are they? If they can take God somewhere, he must be a small god to be moved around by humans like that. I really see their role as helping people to open their eyes and see their circumstances differently. God is everywhere with us and we need to just look to see him.

I saw God's hand very early this morning in a computer. Yeah, I know, it's kind of nerdy, but hang in here with me. One of the computers for RCC broke. For some reason, all of the laptops purchased at this one point of time have been breaking on me and of course they are out of warranty. Well, this one is uber important. It contains all the financial information for the church...AND the nice people where we purchased our laptops from gave some garbage information on how to back it up so the last time it was backed up was 22 May 2006...yep over a year ago. So I picked up the computer when it went down and began messing with it. You see, the password for the financial information wasn't taking. The rest of the computer seemed to work properly, but it wouldn't let us in to the financial information. Putzing around with it got me nowhere and a couple other anomalous items came up. Things just weren't quite right. Now it does run anti-virus software. I enjoy Kim Komando's radio show and took some of her advise using Grisoft software's AVG and I made sure it was up to date and checked the machine...no problem. Uh oh, now we're really in trouble there are no viruses on it. So I pull out the hard drive (all the information) and put it into a different computer...still can't get to anything.

Just as an aside here. If you are reading this and don't understand all the steps, that's okay. These are the things we computer nerds do to fix your computer. There's really no secret handshake or some "fix" button we press. I realize it seems almost like magic when we get your computer to do something you have been trying to get it to do for the last few hours but there really is nothing more to it than a little knowledge and a lack of fear of the consequences.

So there is no magic button for me to press and we're in trouble, so I use the OS to check the hard drive for problems. That requires a reboot, it checks, fixes something and it works!!! That is when I saw God's hand. You see, it is now very early in the morning, and I am really stressing out that the information is lost. The disk check usually runs automatically when something may be wrong, so it is unusual for a scheduled check to fix anything, but sure enough it worked. God is everywhere and we just need to look for Him to find Him.

Keep an eye open, He may just be in your computer the next time it doesn't do what you want!