Last night, instead of youth group I took everyone over to the Daily Grind for a round on us. We have been hitting things pretty hard for the last couple of months and I promised everyone a little bit of a break. I was going to do a roundtable talk, but it was 7:45 before everyone was served (they only have one person working that late at night) and there was no way I was going to try to talk over ice grinding in the blender and all the other bizarre noises coming from the kitchen area. So we just goofed off. I'm sure I will hear about it. So what's new.

I did something Tuesday I have only done one other time in three years: I completely forgot that there was a deacon's meeting. It didn't occur to me until I was talking to another of the deacons at church last night. He mentioned something about "last night's meeting" and it hit me. I have to admit that I rather enjoyed the month off. The amount of effort it takes to show up for these meetings probably has a lot to do with what I posted on Monday. It's hard to meet with a group of people to talk about ministry when you don't really feel any commonality of goals with them.

The debate in my mind obviously continues. I don't know if it is just my typical "5-year itch" (until my current job, I have never stayed with anything for more than five years) or if there is something more going on. I don't want to leave the church we are at, but I am finding it harder and harder to find reasons to stay.

Well, I'm need to get back to work.

I think this is the longest I have gone without making an entry since I started this thing. It has just been crazy and if I have five minutes to get on the internet, my connection is down. Wireless has its advantages, but reliability isn't one of them.

Last week was mostly getting ready for our newest addition to the family. Nestina spent her first night in our house on Thursday. She went with my wife and I to my immediate family's Christmas on Friday morning, then the three of us went home for a little Christmas with just the three of us. Debbie and I drove down to her mom's house Friday night and stayed until Sunday morning. It was good to see everyone. Nestina spent Christmas at her mom's place. Her and a friend stayed at our place Saturday night, so of course there were all sorts of strange power problems that I have never had. They were able to get things working well enough to keep the heat going through the night and we left for home early Sunday. I still don't know what started the entire failure cascade, but I changed one setting on the inverter and checked everything out. It all looked good to me and I was able to fire up the generator Monday morning with no problems. I guess the house was just mad we left it alone on Christmas...

This will be a slow, boring week at work. Large chunks of the medical center are off for the week between Christmas and New Years, so any attempts to get anything done results in a voice mail message or a Groupwise auto-reply that states the person you need to contact is out of the office having fun, while you are a lifeless smuck for being at work. So I'm blogging instead of working.

We don't really have any plans for this weekend, other than working on the house. The church is having its annual New Years "bash." We will likely attend, and I'm encouraging the teens to attend as well. We'll leave the old people in the gym and we can go into the youth room and play loud music and act goofy. Besides, I'd like to have someone to talk to. I find I have less and less to say to the majority of the adults in the church. I'm not sure why that is. I feel I've become more of a spectator than a participant.

It's becoming more and more apparent to me that I am not where I belong, church-wise. I have no idea where I do belong, but I am certain of where I don't belong. Even with the deep theological disagreements I have with the Roman Catholic Church, I felt more at home in Christmas Mass (I know, that's redundant) with Debbie's family Saturday that I do at our current church. Maybe it is all just a phase, or maybe it is just me, but this has been building for some time. There is so much I would like to do, yet at every turn I feel constrained and boxed in.

Maybe the New Year is a time to strike out in a new direction; cut ourselves loose from our current congregation and go it alone for a while. I would like to stay where we are while starting something new, but I am sure that would be a no-go with our current church. There is simply no way I would be allowed to stay on in any leadership capacity while doing what would amount to a church plant. Unless that church plant was a GARB church, of course, but then I would be right back in the box that I am currently in.

I guess I don't know what to do at this point. I'm just thinking out loud.

The Honda is back in business after a trip into town with it. I don't feel too bad; the shop I bought it from took a good half hour to figure out what was wrong with it. It was nothing major, but it was the sort of workmanship problem that Japanese companies are not supposed to have. The problem was a combination of the extreme cold (5 below zero) and a sticky reset button. I now know what to look for and the fix is pretty simple. I'm leaving the spare generator right where it is, just in case.

I also need to fill up all the gas cans today. We burned through this batch in pretty short order. We are getting just about zero from the solar panels right now. One of the windmills would be doing great things right now, but they don't work well sitting in a box in the garage. I was going to spend the money next summer to buy the other 800 watts of panels, but I might just set up one of our windmills instead. It would be great to do both, but I don't think we can scrounge up enough cash for that.

Well, I have to make some phone calls and check my work e-mail.

Crazy week end and weekend.

I picked up Nestina after school Thursday and we spent the evening in Traverse City. We once again covered a lot of ground and talked through the transition to her living here. The exact timing is still being worked out, but it still looks as if she will be with us before Christmas.

Friday was work and snowplowing at the church. I got home around 11pm. I will certainly be glad when the regular snow plow guy gets back from his vacation in the Caribbean.

Saturday, I picked up a new generator. The one we were using was getting cranky. It was supposed to be for the cabin anyway, so I dropped that one off for a complete mechanical check-out and dropped $4K on a twin-cylinder, water-cooled Honda. Very quiet. In fact you can stand right next to it when it is running and have a conversation at normal volume. Nice. The rest of Saturday was spent getting that set up and running, then working on homework, house stuff, and a lesson for Sunday.

Sunday started at 5am plowing the church parking lot again. I was also the church taxi driver. I picked up four people on the way to church the second time Sunday morning. Afterwards was dropping them all back off, with a brief stop at Burger King for lunch with everyone. Then back to the church for more plowing, to my parents to plow them out, and finally to actually plow my own road and driveways. Then back to church for evening service (only two people to pick up this time). Debbie finally made her way north and met us in the church parking lot. We told her it was all her fault for the below-zero temps because she has spent the last week in 80-plus degree weather. We had Communion and I was serving. I had wanted to sit with Debbie and our "kids," but I ended up being one of the servers. It will be nice when I get off the deacon board and can go back to a semi-normal existence. Afterwards, I dropped people off while Debbie went home to unpack. We sat up late trying to compress the last ten days into a couple hours.

Monday morning started badly. Our brand new $4K, twin-cylinder, water-cooled generator refused to start. I was outside at 4am dragging one of the old generators out of the garage and getting it hooked up and running. I am working from home so I can keep an eye on it and also try to figure out what is wrong with the Honda. I dragged the thing inside thinking that enough moisture had gotten into the fuel system while it was being shipped around the country to freeze up something in the carburetor, but no joy. Now I have to find someone who can help be drag the thing up into the truck and haul it back.

This whole thing brings up something I've been really wondering lately: are there any competent people left in the world? My parents have been fighting with every person that sends them a bill over charges that they never made, double billing, and lost payments. Everybody they know is going through the same thing. I have a virtual junk yard out here full of poorly-designed and poorly-manufactured products. Are we to the point where nothing more complex than a hammer can be purchased with any reasonable assurance that it will work more than once?

Anyway, I need to go off in search of a strong back and a weak mind. Too bad the youth group kids all live in Kalkaska and don't have cars...

Later.

It's been a while since I put anything up here, so I thought I had better update everyone. Sunday was the Christmas program at the church, which meant that Saturday morning was the dress rehearsal. Of course, Debbie is on her cruise and I'm on my own this week, so naturally I was late and forgot that it was a real dress rehearsal and showed up in jeans and a polo shirt. At least my shirt was green, so I kinda matched...

Anyway, the dress rehearsal went as most of them do: poorly. I went home for a bit, then left to pick up a truck load of kids for the Mall Crawl. This year, we ended up not having anything special for the teens to do. We usually have them look for things or find the heaviest thing they can buy for $5 or some such. This year, we just let them wander around; all the leaders have a thousand things going on in their personal lives so the youth group has been getting short shrift. Unfortunate, but unavoidable.

Sunday was the Christmas program in the morning. It went pretty well. There were a couple technical glitches and such, but overall it was good. One of our teens had a speaking part that she thinks she did horrible on, and everyone else thought she did great. So it goes. As a fellow perfectionist, I understand where she is coming from. Sunday afternoon was all about snow removal. I had to get the ballast in my truck and put the plow on. The only problem I ran into was that some of my ballast was missing. I use six two-foot cement trailer pads for my weight and there were only four piled next to the garage. The only thing I can figure is that when we had our new porch steps added on and the railing put up on the deck, the crew must have used two of them to set the porch steps. In any case, I headed into Kalkaska to meet with one of our teens and her mom (more on that in a second), then plowed snow all afternoon, right through evening service (with a short break to sneak in and watch one of our former teens and her dad get baptized), then dinner with my parents, and finally home.

Monday was a half day of work, then a quick trip to the hardware to replace my missing ballast, followed by ten hours of snow plowing at my parents and home. I tried to do some homework, but I fell asleep after about an hour. Yesterday was work and homework.

Did I mention that we have some snow? We now have snow. Not too much (less than a foot) and if the weather liars are right most of it will be gone over the next couple of days. But we now have snow.

The big news. I've mentioned a couple times that we were busy with stuff that I didn't want to talk about at the time. Well, now is the time. Sunday, I met with one of our teens and her mom to hammer out some of the details, but the bottom line is that we are guardians of a seventeen-year-old girl. Her name is Nestina and she is a senior at Kalkaska High School. You will hopefully start seeing some posts from her on this site very soon. She will be moving in with us while the Kalkaska schools are out on break for Christmas. I'll try to get a picture of us posted here as soon as I can get her stand still long enough. In the meantime, everyone say "Hi" to the newest addition to the Frost household. I would also ask that you pray for all three of us as we work through the transition. As you all know, Debbie and I have a great deal of child-rearing experience that we are bringing to the table. To make it even more interesting, Nestina has been on her own for some time and will have to get used to the one thing that every teenager loves: Rules. So, again, please pray for all of us. A lot. And often.

In any case, if posts get a little sporadic here, you now know why.

Another day of work, then shopping, home, cleaning, organizing, filing, etc. I can almost see the top of my desk. I still have a pile to work through, plus two more on the floor and one on the foot stool. I don't have any idea where this crap comes from; I think the piles have started mating.

Youth group went ok last night. One new face, but still missing some that should be there. I had a chance yesterday to have some fairly long one-on-one conversations with several people which is always good. I wish I had more time to do that. I also met a parent, which is something else I wish I had more time to do. Ah well.

Tomorrow is just work, then Settlers of Catan night with all the church guys. This is one of the few men-only things we have at the church. I've never been able to go before and I have never played the game either, so this should be interesting.

Nothing much interesting going on in the world, which is most likely the result of inattention on my part.

That's it; it is way past my bedtime.

I am supposed to be working, but this was too good to leave until later.

Where I work, we use GEAC software for HR, GL and AP. Most of their support, for which we pay tens of thousands of dollars a year, is through their web page. Among other things, they post what they call solutions. Sometimes these are updates or bulletins for tax code updates, or they are just tips or ideas that may be useful. Our HR support person was browsing through all the new solutions and came up with this gem (I'd give a direct link, but it requires a user ID and password):

Topic: How to print an attachment [to a solution] without downloading it.

Resolution: "...download the file to your PC and print from there."

For this, we pay money.

Actually it isn't as bad as I made it out to be. You can print directly from their web if you use IE, if you have ActiveX running (almost no one in the corporate world does; it is nothing but a wide open path for malware), and if your PC recognizes the file extension, then you can print, otherwise, you have to download it to be able to print it. The problem is that with all those caveats, no IT shop sophisticated enough to be using GEAC is going to be able to use their solution.

Another day of work and homework. It poured down rain all day today. Good thing it was rain or we would be up to our necks in snow. On my way home, the rain did change to snow, but I doubt much will stick as the temps are still above freezing. As much as I hate damp weather, as long as it doesn't pile up, I don't have to plow it.

Here are some things you can do to annoy everyone during their Christmas shopping:

1. Get 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in people's carts when they aren't looking.
2. Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.
3. Make a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the rest rooms.
4. Walk up to an employee and tell him/her in an official tone, "Code 3 in housewares" and see what happens.
5. Go the Service Desk and ask to put a bag of M & M's on layaway.
6. Move a "CAUTION - WET FLOOR" sign to a carpeted area.
7. Set up a tent in the camping department and tell other shoppers you'll invite them in if they'll bring pillows from the bedding department.
8. When a clerk asks if they can help you, begin to cry and ask, "Why can't you people just leave me alone?"
9. Look right into the security camera; use it as a mirror, and pick your nose.
10. While handling guns in the hunting department, ask the clerk if he knows where the anti-depressants are.
11. Dart around the store suspiciously loudly humming the "Mission Impossible" theme.
12. In the auto department, practice your "Madonna look" using different size funnels.
13. Hide in a clothing rack and when people browse through, say "PICK ME!"
14. When an announcement comes over the loud speaker, assume the fetal position and scream "NO! NO! It's those voices again!!!!"

    (And last, but not least!)

15. Go into a fitting room and shut the door and wait a while; and then yell very loudly, "There is no toilet paper in here!"

I would advise only doing these in a store you never plan to enter again.

Here is a story that explains why any teacher with enough competence to get a job elsewhere almost always will. You can always tell when a stupid man is doing something he knows is stupid: he will always claim to be "just doing my job." Way to go, Fire Marshal Bill. I'm sure Susanna Robinson will leap right back into teaching at a public school when her 90 days in jail are over.

And while we are on the subject of the miserable prisons we call schools, here is something that I have been saying for 20 years. Computers in the classroom do not magically make every student above average. They are a tool that has a place, but first you have to be able to read to get any educational benefit from them. One would think that would be obvious, but one would be wrong.

This article almost reads like satire in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Some of the ideas here can only be described as frightening. I get nervous around tortured logic; this guy has it locked in an iron maiden.

And that ought to be enough. I am off to work on my paper. And to figure out what I am going to do tomorrow for youth group. I need to have something to teach the kiddies.

Another crazy weekend. Friday I had to take my truck into the garage after work to have the snow tires put on. Then I picked up Debbie at her work and drove back into Traverse City to shop for wedding presents. Saturday was the wedding: one of the guys in my college study group was getting married down in Fremont. So we drove down there for the afternoon, then got home late Saturday night. Sunday was the typical Sunday. The church Christmas program is next week, so that is heating up. Debbie was feeling crummy Sunday afternoon, so I did Sunday evening service by myself. I wouldn't have bothered, but I had choir practice.

Today was just work and homework.

And Fred Reed has another column that people should (but won't) pay attention to.

And it's past bed time.

Sorry for the lack of posting folks. It seems like every time I have a minute to write something, the phone rings, or Blogger is down, or my internet connection is going wanky, or something. Anyway.

Since my last post, not a whole lot has happened. I've been dealing with a lot of issues that I can't really go into right now (and a lot that I will never go into on a blog...) but it has involved me being places other than home. Tuesday was a Deacons' meeting, which is always fun. We were trying to set the budget for next year, but we had a lot of year left at the end of the money. Non-profits are so much fun. Wednesday night I only had two teens show up, but we got into some good conversations anyway. Tonight, I am supposed to be working on a paper, but I'm blogging instead. So sue me. Anyway.

I thought this article was pretty funny, although I am sure most of the humor-impaired from both of the major parties won't think so. I think part of the process of becoming a party hack is to have any sense of humor surgically removed.

Good news: Day by Day is back!! I find his point of view balances out Doonesbury very nicely. When family issues forced the author of Day by Day to suspend publication for a time, I started feeling rather lopsided.

And this is important and written by someone who is qualified to speak on the issue of intelligence gathering. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone in DC is listening. Ah well. With any luck, we will muddle on until I can get into a financial position to disappear some place in the Caribbean and live out my last days in blissful ignorance.

Other than that, not much going on, it seems.

I am supposed to be working on a college paper, but I just noticed that I hadn't posted in a while.

Wednesday night went OK; we only had three people show up, all female. So I was the only guy in the house. We sort of goofed off for a while, then realized that it was 5am. It was snowing and (obviously) dark, so everyone just crashed here for a couple hours. I had to drive one of the girls home, so I led the other two out to the highway so they wouldn't get turned around. Of course that meant that Thursday was spent sleeping, resting, and napping until it was time to go to my parents for Thanksgiving dinner. I ate too much, of course, then fell asleep in a chair. Then we went home and went to bed. It has been a long time since I pulled an all-nighter; they don't work as well when you are 40. Friday was just working around the house. The ground was good and wet from all the snow, so I decided to pack down all the fresh dirt in the driveway. I spent about three hours in my truck driving back and forth over the drive, parking areas, etc. I also trimmed up the trees around the propane cylinders to make it easier to keep the snow cleared from around them. Then I spent about twelve hours buying the latest version of Quicken and loading all our account information into it. It isn't going to work quite like I had hoped, but it will make bill tracking a lot easier.

Today has been another day of chores. We've painted more of the floor on the main floor and the storage area upstairs. Once that dries, we can rearrange and start on the floors in the master suite. Once all the floors are painted, I think we will finally be able to get a handle on the dust problem in here. Right now, just walking across the room raises a cloud of drywall dust. I put the closet organizer up in one of the main floor closets. I messed it up some, as usual, but it will work. You would think after all the closets I've done with this stuff that I would know how the system works. You would think wrong. Every closet I do, it's something. This one was pretty obvious, but didn't have anything to do with how well it will work. It just looks stupid because anyone can see that I used the wrong parts. But it is up and it works.

I was going to start clearing all the debris off our porches, but it is pouring down rain right now. The weather has been crazy: Wednesday we got a lot of snow, then more on Thursday. Yesterday, it started warming up, and today all the snow is gone and it is raining. Not that I'm complaining or anything. I don't have to plow the liquid stuff.

Well, I need to get back to my paper.

I found several interesting things while I blew through my normal morning web browsing. First up is an article on WorldNetDaily about the NBA riot. I haven't said anything about it up to this point because I have a hard time thinking of anything I could care less about than a bunch of spoiled millionaires who play a game for a living mixing it up with a bunch of morally defective fans. I'm not even sure what all the fuss is about. The NHL routinely hires guys specifically to start fights during hockey games, so what is so horrible about the NBA looking for a little of the action? I have no interest in "professional" sports and could care less what happens to anyone involved in this. I do think the point of the article is interesting. The article walks a pretty thin line; we all know what you cannot say and who you cannot say it about.

Next up is another reason why government schools are just a bad idea. It is now considered unconstitutional in California (where else?) to hand out copies of The Declaration of Independence to students because it refers to God. When reading this article, pay attention to the sub-text. The teacher was a Christian and open about her faith. The school has been engaged in an overt campaign of intimidation and harassment directed specifically at her. I've said it a hundred times and I will say it again: the government of the United States (or any other government) is not the friend of Christianity regardless of the religious beliefs of the individuals who happen to be in power today. Government in general, and our government in particular, is the enemy. Wake up, already!!

Here is one that is sure to cheer everyone up. Take your pick: high inflation or high interest rates? And not just slightly higher; way higher. I'll be the ultimate pessimist and guess that inaction and half-measures will give us both. In case anyone wants to argue that can't happen, I have two words for you: Jimmy Carter. Don't tell me it can't happen; I lived through double-digit inflation and double-digit home mortgage interest rates. The difference this time around is that nearly everyone has a variable rate mortgage, so it won't just be new home buyers that get bit. Everyone will get slapped with both higher prices and higher house payments. If you are in a position to pay cash for real estate, I would recommend holding off. I expect to see a lot of really cheap real estate for sale soon.

Yesterday we had a youth leaders meeting after work, so our exciting lives consisted of that and coming home to drag more wood in the house and get it stained. The crew is here this morning working on putting up the porch railing. They won't get done today, but we will have some idea of what the railing will look like by the end of today.

I need to get cleaned up and head over to the high school, then from there to work. We are having some the teens over tonight because there isn't church tonight. We haven't really cleaned anything up in a while, so the place is more or less trashed. I'll probably sneak out of work early so I can put some order in things before everyone shows up.

Well, I got to get going.

Busy weekend as usual. Friday night, Debbie and I went out to a local restaurant for dinner, then just crashed at home. We were just plain lazy Saturday, and did it feel good. I could have sworn that I was supposed to be at the church for something, but I couldn't shake loose what it was. I knew I wasn't on praise team, and I didn't have special music until next week. So I didn't go into Kalkaska. So of course, I was supposed to be there because there had been a switch on the special music schedule and the trio I was singing with was on for this week not next week. But it didn't matter ultimately, because another member of the trio wasn't there either.

What all that bought us was some time to ourselves and some time to work on cleaning, organizing, and staining wood for the porch railings. I didn't get much done because a lot of the wood was still wet from being outside even though it have been in the house for a couple days. I did what I could, took a short break, then cleaned up to go over to my parents house for a small party for my 40th birthday. Or so I thought. There were over 30 people stuffed into my parents place for dinner, gifts, and cake and ice cream. They even got in touch with some of the teens from the youth group who were also there. I tried to look happy and grateful and all, but I just don't do well in those circumstances. I'm not real into a bunch of people and fuss all centered around me. It's not that I don't appreciate it and all, and I truely am grateful for the time and effort that was put into planning and cards and gifts and such. I just have a hard time showing it. But in any case I survived. Some of the teens even got me something that either means they are really getting at least some of the things I'm trying to teach them, or they just got lucky. I'll take option one for the ego boost and not ask any fool questions.

Sunday, we only had morning service followed by Thanksgiving dinner. We went straight home and slept until 7pm, which meant I was up until 2am staining wood and reading before I was tired enough for bed. I managed to drag myself out of the house in reasonable time this morning, so I won't be here at work for half the night. Tonight is more staining and hopefully working on my paper. I also need to call a bunch of people today. We decided that since there wasn't church Wednesday night because of Thanksgiving, we would have a bunch of people over for pizza and stupid movies. Given the weather forcast, we will end up getting hit with an ice storm and we will have 20 people staying the night at our house.

On the internet front, Fred Reed has another column about visiting our nation's capital. We have become a nation afraid of everything. We fear our children, our schools, our streets, our technology, our bosses. Frank Herbert was right: fear is the mind killer.

A bit on Yasser Arafat. The money quote:

But the late PLO chief was more than "a bit of a rogue". He was a monster: a man with the blood of thousands on his hands, who never cared to wash them. A man who led a whole people, the Palestinian Arabs whom he ruled as feudal lord, into a pit of hopeless squalor.

A monster that is now paying for what he did. Hell is never a comfortable topic of conversation, and I am not one of those Bible-thumpers that seem to get some sort of thrill out of condeming endless masses to eternal torment. But I don't think I can deal with a reality that wouldn't have Arafat spending eternity roasting on a spit. That anyone would travel to his funeral for any reason other than spiting on his corpse is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Time to head for home.

Yesterday was my 40th birthday. We celebrated by carting all the cedar for our porch into the house to dry out and warm up in preparation for staining today and tomorrow. Then we watched Elf and Shrek 2. Elf was... not my kind of movie. That's the kindest thing I can say about it. None of it was funny; parts were just painful. Shrek 2 was good. Not as good as the original, but that is probably because the original was so unique at the time that no sequel could measure up. But it was still great, with a lot of laugh-until-you-snort spots. You knew the ending long before the end, but there were still some good twists getting there.

One thing I did notice; I don't know if it was because we have the original on VHS and watched the sequel on DVD, but I could swear the human characters were noticeably more realistic in Shrek 2. I stick by what I said after Shrek came out; within two or three iterations of Moore's law (3 to 5 years), human actors will not be needed, only voice actors. That's not to say that human actors will simply vanish, but they will no longer be necessary, as the audience won't know if they are watching an actor on film or a computer-generated animation. Or some combination, as in The Passion where subtle changes were made to actors' features (eye color being the the most notable; the world has seen enough blue-eyed Jesus's) to make them appear more Semitic. Expect to see more of this. Mark your calendars; by 2010 no one will be able to say for sure if what is on the screen is a film of human actors shot on some location, completely computer-generated animation, or a mix of those two in any imaginable ratio. Just remember, you heard it here first.

I try to not be negative about our public schools mainly because in the past, others have taken what I say as criticism of the students. But things like this just reinforce to me that public education in the United States is doomed. No one in such an environment for eight hours a day, five days a week for twelve years could have any hope of being able to cope in the real world. This is stupidity on stilts. Wearing an earring to school is OK, but putting an earring in while at school gets you a one-year suspension for having a weapon in school. I know our schools are run by emotionally fragile females on Prozac and fag "males," but this is so far over the top I don't think I can imagine myself as part of the same country that allows this crap to go on. Well, in fact, I know that I am not part of same country; I'm not sure I am part of the same planet. The inmates are running the asylum.

Enough.

I got body-slammed with the flu yesterday. I woke up not feeling too great, but didn't think much of it. I was about half-way to work when it really kicked in. I made it back home in spite of nearly blacking out on M-72, crawled into bed and slept until after 3pm. I was barely able to move the rest of the night. My fever broke around 11pm, so I was able to go to bed and actually sleep. Today I am doing better, but I still skipped out of work. I should be able to do youth group tonight. I only have a slight fever (which is more or less normal for me due to my allergies) and should feel fine once I take a hot shower.

We spent Saturday cleaning out all the junk in the living room so I can set up saw horses and stain the cedar for our deck railing. I have to get that done ASAP as the guys will be here some time in the next week to put up the railing. It will be nice to not have to worry about people falling off our porch.

Sunday was just Sunday; nothing special. Monday I worked on my New Testament Survey class. I'm up to the point of writing my first paper, which I was hoping to do this week, but being out of commission yesterday sort of shot that in the head. I may try to get to it tomorrow, but no guarantees.

John Ashcroft is gone and Arafat is dead. That made my week last week. And it looks like people continue to exit the Bush White House. I haven't been paying close enough attention to say if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Powell was the lone voice against the neocons; having him resign is not a good sign. But at least we got rid of Ashcroft before he declared himself god-emperor of the world.

Anyway, I need to clean up and get ready to head into town.

As if I didn't hit everyone with enough reading material for today, here is some more on the gay marriage issue. This has been my position all along. There were people back in the 1850's that said it was a bad idea to give control of marriage over to the government. The situation we are facing right now is exactly why. Instead of trying to use the same mechanism that wrecked both the family and our schools to solve the problems it created, it is well past time for churches to again take control of marriage and the family to take control of education.

Yesterday ended up being house organizing day. Since we moved into the house in January, we have had a lot of stuff just piled in the middle of the floor because there isn't any other place for it. We finally have all our book shelves in the house, so we cleaned, polished and started filling them up. The first thing I noticed is that we don't have enough of them. Two are almost completely filled with video tapes and DVD's. We are gradually replacing VHS tapes with DVD's which take up a lot less space, especially when you are dealing with collections. I can free up almost two full shelves just by getting Babylon 5 on DVD and selling the VHS tapes on E-Bay. There are some other tapes that I probably won't bother replacing with DVD's, but I'd like to transfer them to Divx or some other digital medium. That shouldn't be hard; there are numerous devices out there to hang off a USB port to do that with. In the meantime, between videos and CD's, we only have a bookshelf and a half for actual books. There are several boxes of those waiting for a home. The bottom line is that we lost track of time and didn't get to bed until well after midnight.

Got a late start this morning, obviously. Debbie met me at Ruby Tuesday's for dinner. I picked up a cheap PC from work; not too bad of a deal. It only has an 18G hard drive and 128M of RAM, so both of those will get upgraded. But I basically got a 1.6GHz P4, monitor, keyboard, and mouse for $150. I should be able to put some new parts into it, load it with Xandros and use it as a file server.

Tonight is budget night, so I have to go wrestle with Mamon.

For your edification:

From Jerry Pournelle's site:

The Marines are now doing what I thought they would do last April after the first uprising. It is unfortunate for everyone that they were called off before finishing the job last time. What we in the West think of as being reasonable is seen in the Middle East as weakness. I will still make the case that we ought not be in Iraq in the first place, but I think it is clear that, given we are there, we must not leave until we have thoroughly demonstrated to any nation thinking about harboring our enemies that this is not a good idea.

The entire notion of International Law -- it is probably better described as The Law of Nations -- was built around what was, when Grotius first proposed it in the early 1600's, a fairly novel idea: sovereignty. The notion of sovereignty had to be developed because prior to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 -- a treaty based in large part on Grotius' ideas even though he didn't quite live to see it -- the prevailing theory was more internationalist in scope, with adherents of the Papacy and Christendom on the one hand, and of a revival of the Roman Empire on the other, and during Grotius' lifetime at least, the Holy Roman Empire trying to be the embodiment of both.

International Law tried to deal with facts on the ground, in the modern terminology: there was no international enforcement mechanism, and there was no longer any international body to which all the Western nations -- the others didn't really count -- owed allegiance. The King of France was pretty well sovereign in his own domains, as was the King of England. The exact status of the different parts of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire were another matter. Note that the Papacy denounced the Treaty of Westphalia as utterly void, since it ended, even in theory, the notion of Papal supremacy over the Christian world. Note also that the United Nations pretends to the kind of suzerainty over the world that the Pope once claimed. Papal suzerainty ended at Lutzen when Gustavus Adolfus of Sweden showed that there was more than one Great Power, and the German states were not all subject to either Pope or Emperor. Had the Empire won, it would have stood to the Papacy as the United States does to the United Nations: a superpower able to enforce its will on much of the world, but subject to the Pope only in voluntary submission.

I bring all this up because the world is in much the same condition now as it was during the Thirty Years War. Calvinists in that time used the notion of Sovereignty to imprison or execute people like Grotius who believed in free _expression. Sovereignty allowed repressive regimes, and gave them a legal status, which both Catholics and Protestants were quick to make use of. The year 1648 is one of those dates to remember: not only did the Treaty of Westphalia change Europe forever (one of Hitler's avowed goals was to reverse that treaty) but the English killed their king and brought in Puritan rule to abolish Christmas and make Merrie England somber and pure. (Charles I was executed in January of what we now consider the year 1649, but in those times the year did not end on 31 December).

The world is now larger than Europe, and the United Nations isn't united as the Papacy had been. There is no universal agreement on anything including the status of women. The United States has explicitly repudiated the notion of sovereignty as regards nations that sponsor terrorism and harbor terrorist enemies of the West. The United Nations doesn't recognize that right.

Should we think of the US as Sweden had Gustavus Adolfus lived? Incidentally, it was Gustavus genius minister Oxenstern who appointed Grotius as Sweden's ambassador, in which guise he took part in negotiations that led to the Treaty of Westphalia.

And that's quite enough rambling. I am sure there are many holes in the above, which is merely a draft of speculative thoughts. I'll leave it as an example, although I am not quite sure of what. But to come back to the beginning, the US Marines are about to end the insurgency in Fallujah. The demonstration of what happens to those who sufficiently annoy the United States continues. It is not pretty, and many innocents will be killed; but then many innocents die when the terrorists do their work. I would have conducted the war on terror quite differently from President Bush, but given that we are in Iraq we have few choices now. This should have been done earlier. Better late than never.

One thing about Jerry's writting; I always have to spend two days chasing down all the historical references through Google.

And a case of credentialling gone wild. People worship paper, yet most of it is meaninless.

And I really have to go now.

I'm working from home with an internet connection that is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. I need to call these guys and find out what the problem is.

I found an article from England that discusses something that has always puzzled me. Why do "poor" people (Can obese people with homes, cars, indoor plumbing, TV's, refrigerators, video game consoles, $200 shoes, etc. really be called poor?) in the Western world throw trash everywhere? What does being poor have to do with being a slob? The author makes the differentiation between poverty and squalor. That certainly fits around here. There are a number of properties around us that are nothing but garbage dumps, yet the families buy two or three new snowmobiles every year.

I know I said enough of the election stuff, but here are a couple more articles that somebody ought to be thinking about. The first article discusses how we choose our presidents since the advent of TV campaigns. I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with ideology or policy.

The second article is by someone I have not run across before, but may end up on my list of frequented sites. Bruce Bethke discusses the seven lessons that Democrats should learn from the presidential election. Note I said "should;" they won't. That is particularly true of Lesson 6. The Democratic party is owned heart and soul by the Roe v. Wade crowd, which means that the Democratic party is taking itself out of the gene pool. Compare the family size in a typical evangelical church (at least 2 children per couple with 4 or 5 not being uncommon) with the family size of a typical member of NOW. The evangelicals are simply out-breeding the radical liberals. Note this is also true for blacks; unless whites start having larger families, whites will become the minority group. Hispanics are gaining on blacks as the largest minority (and in fact may have already passed them) with a two-pronged approach; breeding and immigration. It is interesting to note that while both of these groups are typically thought of as Democratic voters, both groups are over-whelmingly opposed to abortion. Will they switch to the Republicans or will they eventually swing to one of the third parties or form their own?

Well, I need to get to work.

Not much to report today. I'm working at a little homework and thinking about what I am going to teach tomorrow. I may start on another video series. I'm certain the kids are tired of hearing me blab. It will be a bit of a break for me as well.

So our boring life is pretty boring. So boring, I was reading two-year-old columns over at Fred Reed's web site. There was one that caught my eye: the best line is "...I can't think of a better authority on children than 12,000 squalling lesbians who don't have any..." Love it.

That's pretty much it. The weather is still holding; no accumulated white stuff although it has tried on occasion over the last couple of days.

We survived my parents' 50th anniversary party Saturday. Barely. Friday, I decided there was just too much to do, so I took a half-day off work and Debbie, our Pastor's wife, and myself got the bulk of things set up Friday. Saturday, I was at the church before 8am directing traffic from the Iceman bike race. What was nice was that because I bothered to talk to the parking lot attendants at the middle and high schools, as soon as their lots were full, they came and parked cars in our lot so I could go inside and take care of things for the party. That was a huge relief for me, because the last heats of the race left about a half hour before the party started. The parking thing wasn't a problem at all; there was plenty of space left for all the people we had show up.

The party itself was just a blur. Lots of running around, trying to talk to people that we hadn't seen in years in some cases, keeping food flowing and all that. I got to play MC, which I hate doing, but it wasn't like anyone else in my family was going to grab a mic and start talking in front of 100 or so people. The music went well; one of the ladies from the church sang a song my mom likes, I sang two songs in a trio with two other guys from the church that I've sang with before, and I was able to get another guy that used to live in the Kalkaska area to come up. He was very close to my parents while he lived here. I wasn't sure if he was going to be able to make until he actually showed up, so I hadn't said anything to my parents and left it as a surprise. In all, I think it went OK, although we will all be eating left-overs until Christmas.

Sunday was recovery day. I'm still battling something; I had symptoms that usually signal the start of a sinus infection when I got up. I was on praise team, of course. I never sing unless I have some upper respiratory ailment or another. But I felt better during church, then slid downhill all afternoon. I should have stayed home rather than go back for evening service as I slept through the entire service. We got home, ate something, then watched part of a movie, then went to bed.

Monday started bad; my alarm either didn't go off (unlikely) or I shut it off in my sleep (far more likely). In any case, I was an hour late for work. The good part was I got a nice, friendly kiss from the dog in the truck next to mine when I stopped for my morning caffeine fix at the Rapid City BP. I usually don't mess with dogs in other vehicles other than to talk to them; dogs seem to get very territorial about their owners vehicles. Probably reflects the attitudes of their owners. In any case, this dog nearly climbed out of the truck, so I gave him a little scrit and got a good morning kiss in return. I was walking away before I noticed the owner was sitting in the truck laughing his head off... Anyway, as good as that was, it didn't help the day much. I left work early because I wasn't feeling well at all. I got home in time to remember I had an appointment to get the fuel filter changed on my truck. So back out in the cold for a couple more hours. But at least that is one job taken care of for winter. I'm now home typing this and about to start on homework.

If you have seen a chart that claims to show that all the states that voted for Bush have lower average IQ's than those that voted for Kerry, keep a couple things in mind: first, it is a hoax and there are dozens of sites that have already debunked it; second, Democrats claim that IQ doesn't measure anything significant and is racist, sexist, and anyone that puts any stock in IQ scores probably stomps baby kittens; third, this is just the sort of immature, elementary-school-level insult that cost the Democrats the election in the first place. In a way, I hope they keep this up for another four years. If they really focus, the next presidential election will be a Republican landslide.

Enough 2004 American politics already; I need to read about first-century, middle-east politics. Not much has changed in 2000 years...