a prelude to black history month

coretta scott king, wife of dr. martin luther king, has passed away only a couple of weeks after our country's rememberance of her late husband's birthday. my condolences go out to the family, but what a life she lived! the years fighting for civil rights with martin and the nearly 40 years after his assassination that she has carried on his legacy.

coincidentally, today also would have been jackie robinson's birthday.

weekend

friday nite we had planned for lindsay to pick us up a couple of new sandwiches from kfc, but our kfc didn't have them yet so we got some old standby chicken sandwiches. after jake went to bed, i played ea mvp baseball for the first time in a month or so and it was a bunch of fun. i tried to watch the second disc of baseball, but i fell asleep after only getting into it a bit.

saturday morning we went to wal-mart to do some grocery shopping. dad is coming to visit next weekend so we had to a get a few extra things as well. while in the store, jake ate a banana and a lunchable - basically his entire lunch. when we got home, we had that organic version butternut squash soup like we had last weekend and it was still yummy good. i'm getting a little more interested in cooking and eating delicious home-cooked stuff so while at the store i got a couple more spices to add to my olive oil mixture for bread dipping. i hope it's not too bad for me because i've started having it with almost every dinner.

after jake got up from his nap, we went for a long walk around the neighborhood in the 55-60 degree weather. jake rode in his car and the wind was a bit cold on the walk back to the house. for dinner, lindsay made a homemade version of cheeseburger mac that was really good. there hasn't seemed to be much on tv this weekend so after lindsay fell asleep, i was able to finish that second disc of baseball. on a whim i had made some coffee and it kept me up later than i had wished. i spent the time looking at some css tutorials for my site update and looking at this fictional fantasy baseball team of which i'm the gm. here's a little history i wrote up on them - they are based on a real team from the old pcl.

sunday morning was restful with a cup of coffee and my current book while jake watched some sesame street. church was good with a third part in a three part series on friendship, relationships, and community. those weren't the three parts - the three parts focused on the increased levels of those topics. lunch was a delicious cheesy rice chicken and i spent the afternoon working on the website in lieu of a nap. dinner was loaded baked potatoes with tuna (surprisingly good) and an evening of abc tv shows (well, desperate housewives was a rerun so we skipped it).

small site update

i updated the layout a bit. i found the little problem that was causing ie to display the site differently than firefox - the calendar in the sidebar was spreading out too far. this allowed me to change the top graphic to one that is thinner and spreads across the entire top of the site for an exact pixel length. i changed the background color from a pale yellow to a light blue and i finally added a navigation bar that i've been wanting to design for a long time. i did it all with hand-coded css.

one neat thing about the navigation bar is that i used accesskeys so you can hit alt+1 for the first button, alt+2 for the second button, and so forth. pretty cool. i also copied the navigation bar to all the archive templates so every archive page should have the same graphic and navigation bar at the top.

also, as discussed the other day, i turned the writings thing into a blog post with a category of writings and the button at the top links to that category archive. same thing with the videos except those were already posts. putting that stuff at the top allowed me to remove that section from the left sidebar which i then reorganized a bit by breaking it down into more labels.

new tivo remote

jake played with the living room tivo remote one day 2-3 weeks ago and it hasn't been seen since. it can't evaporate and i haven't really emptied the toy box, but it isn't just laying around. last nite i remembered that i still had 5,000 tivo reward points for my dad signing up a year ago. the initial plan was to get 3 more people to sign up on my recommendation and get an ipod with a tivo logo etched in the back for only 20,000 points (5,000 points per person that signs up). well, i haven't found anyone else in over a year and i got an ipod for my birthday last month. so i checked the reward point prices for items and a 20gb ipod is 37,500 points now!! i'd have to get 7 more people to sign up! needless to say, i felt no sadness at cutting my losses and getting this sweet replacement tivo remote:

docs up

ok the writing samples section is up and running. i can't really add comments to the page - that is, i don't really know how since comments are related to particular post numbers and i just created the page. i had thought of simply making the page a post and then linking to the post's archive page (making it a post would allow comments), but it just seems weird to have that as a page in the middle of blog posts (or does it?). of course, i could always predate it to october 2002 or something and still link to the archive page. please - take a look and give me your thoughts.

another item of note - i got my plane ticket for my first class session down in orlando, fl on feb. 24th (1-7pm with dinner following). i waited too long to order the plane ticket and there was nary a seat coming back to town on sunday evening. thus, i'm having to come back sunday morning which means i'll only get to go to the nationals spring training practice on that saturday (02/25). it's better than nothing, but i had dreamed for more - including the world baseball classic matchup on march 7th between the dominican republic (incredible offensive lineup) vs. venezuala (awesome pitching, some good hitters). the other meeting for my class is april 21st and work is paying for that one since i've never been down to our orlando campus (this class is off campus at a retreat center).

stable krispies

... or something. anyways, both the blog and the gallery are stable. i'm in the process of adding a ton of pictures to the gallery and i'm at 490 so far. this will make me excited to take more photos - a secret hobby / joy of mine. as such, check out this photo project i did for a class in the fall of 2003.

also, i'm in the process of adding some writing samples on the left sidebar under the 'resources' heading. i had kg convert some into pdfs nearly 2 years ago and i've yet to ever put them up. these are some of my favorite, but maybe i can find some more.

we don't have any firm plans for the weekend so we'll see what we can get into...

old documents

I hadn't even read these in a while until now, but I've been meaning to upload them for a couple of years.

My Calling - as written in the summer of 2002

I allude to a call to counseling and this past fall I discerned that this would simply take place as an emphasis in ministry within a church setting as opposed to having some kind of private practice while also a pastor. Too many possibly conflicts of interest and too much extra schooling for a gift with which I feel the Lord has already blessed me.

What happens to those who never hear the Gospel?
A look at the exclusivity of religions and an age old question.

My final paper for a class entitled Kingdom, Church, and World. Quite possibly my favorite paper of mine. Ever.

The Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Eras
A primer on these eras and how they affect matters of faith.

A sermon on the incarnation that I wrote this past fall for a doctrine class.

A Baptism service I wrote for a class.

A Holy Communion service I wrote for a class and have used before.

A worship service that I wrote for a class including a sermon I actually preached.

A worship service using video, music, and drama as dreamed up in a final team project for a class.

frosted flakes

it looks like gallery2 is a bit flaky on our server. i'm trying to get it back up - i'm sorry if this is your first attempt to view my new picture gallery. (other than that, i just like frosted flakes.)

this weekend we pretty much just took it easy. on friday nite, we met at applebee's after i had to work a bit late and after lindsay was able to get to town from work pretty quickly. we caught up on some tivo after jake went to bed.

on saturday, we went out to the hamburg area to look in some shops for jake. he gets bigger slower now that he's almost two, but he needed some new clothes. i popped into barnes and noble looking for anything by roger angell and they didn't have anything. however, i came out with ball four by boulton which was the next highest on my baseball reading list. on our last stop before home, we went to a wild oats store (like trader joe's) and we got some neat stuff including a pasta for sunday dinner and a micro-brewed cream soda mmmm. when we got home we had gotten two netflix so we watched major league while we worked out (ugh... yes, january brings new things into everyone's lives, doesn't it?).

on sunday, we both were beginning working in new avenues for ministry at church. lindsay had her first day keeping nursery and she'll probably be in there about once a month. hopefully it will be better in the future because she spent the whole time just watching jake and her helper left after a few minutes. i, along with 4 others, was trained on the mediashout system we use for our songs and sermon on the projector. it's supposed to be better than powerpoint for this and i'm looking forward to running it every 3rd or 4th sunday. after church, we made the whole wheat rotini portablla marinara and it was pretty good (i'm having it for lunch today too!). jake took a nap for 3-3.5 hours which is unusual lately as he usually just sleeps for a couple of hours. during that time, i was able to watch almost all of the first disc of ken burns' landmark 10 disc baseball documentary. for dinner, we had an organic version of the delicious butternut squash soup. it was a little sweeter than the campbell's gold select version, but it was really good in its own right. we watched our 3 hours of abc shows as we fell asleep.

yum

a crisp morning around 54 degrees in short sleeves and a travel mug of hot tea. as i was walking in to work, i realized it would've been a wonderful morning to sit and keep watching the sun rise. "keep watching?" you say? yes, interestingly, even though i get here a tad before 8, it's still been kind of dark lately. it could be the weather, but when we moved here nearly 7 months ago (it's been that long?!?), the sun didn't set until 9pm or later.

it's been a hectic week at work. one of our servers got infected with something and it's been a royal mess. i believe we're safe for the moment, but i'm on my guard.

i'm looking forward to a restful weekend and the realization that my winter break is nearing it's end and i haven't read nearly as much as i wanted to read. classes begin on feb. 6th so i guess i should see about my books, eh?

neglected to mention

i realized that i neglected to mention that my friend in kentucky, Peter, and his girlfriend jackie came over on saturday nite and hung out. we had make your own quesadillas, played with a shy jake for a bit before he went to bed, and played cards while getting to know each other better. fun times!

pictures!

we've got a new feature around here. i finally got gallery2 installed and will begin uploading more pictures soon. so far i just have all the pictures i've ever used in the blog uploaded. enjoy!

jake's new adventures

jake hasn't been seen on here in a while so here are two of the new things he's working on - the potty and the bike (with training wheels). we hadn't intended to really even try to do potty training for a while, but last week we asked him if he wanted to (we talk about it occasionally) and he got excited and hopped on! he's still not sure about it all yet and it'll still be a while before he gets it all probably.

jake got an elmo bike with training wheels for christmas and he really enjoys it. his feet can't reach the pedals or the ground, but he gets a kick out of me pushing him around the cul-de-sac. his helmet was purchased the day after christmas (safety first! and yes, he's already had a couple of tumbles!) and my washington nationals jacket there was one of my main christmas presents.

mlk day off

i'm sitting on the couch, watching movies, and watching the trees in the field behind our house sway like ents. i've had the day of to remember mlk, jr., but i spent most of the morning calling the pediatrician to try to get jake in for cough that's not getting better. after a while with no answer, i presumed they were closed for the day and called the town clinic to get jake an appt. there. the appt. was at 3:30 so i took jake over to his preschool for about 5 hours (well, we're payin' for it either way...).

while he was gone, i watched murderball and 61*. murderball is a documentary about quadraplegic wheelchair rugby - yes, rugby. they basically play bumper cars with the chairs while trying to get the rugby ball to the other end of a basketball court.

61* is the hbo movie directed by billy crystal recounting the story of the 1961 season where roger maris and mickey mantle chase babe ruth's record of 60 home runs in a 154 game season. i always thought the asterisk was a cultural thing where everyone held the babe in higher regard, but maris actually had an asterisk next to his record until 1991, six years after his death. the movie showed how a lot of the writers and almost all of the fans were behind mantle and didn't like maris - mainly for his stoic demeanor. maris and mantle were actually really good friends the whole time and maris invited mantle to live with him and another player in queens in order to help mantle avoid the nyc nightlife. the movie was really good and interestingly the guy that played maris (barry pepper) also played dale earnhardt, sr. in the espn movie '3' and the guy that played mantle (thomas jane) was the more laidback guy from sideways.

server change

well, we got all our blogs over to the new server with not too much downtime. the 3rd givens brother, b, is finally on board with us and his link on the left has been added.

happy new year's

standard post, but we just got back from my mom's in nashville this afternoon. the freedom of a laptop and wireless internet in the house is fun. one guess where i'm writing this from if i just said that.

we had a good weekend and rung in the new year with some family and friends playing some games and eating good food. i can't believe it's already time to go back to work tmrw (after a week off - my internal clock is a bit goofed). luckily, it shouldn't be that hard to get up since jake was waking us up at about 6am all weekend. mom lives near a starbucks (at the end of the street) so i was able to try out some varying combinations of venti vanilla/hazelnut/caramel latte. mmm.

enjoy whatever you resolved to do this year and try to enjoy your week at work ;-)