At Home On Piety Hill

For my summer vacation, Denise and I are spending a long weekend with her brother, sisters and their families in South Lake Tahoe. Last night I scouted out a spot to “camp out” with all my gear and relax, doing what I like to do on a vacation — study The Apocalypse, write to our family in Uganda, people watch, read some news and blog. So, here I am at Alpen Sierra Mountain Roasted. It’s a very hospitable coffee hut with the following amenities:

• The coffee is good. I would rate it an 8 on a scale from 1-10 with Flour Garden being a 1 and Java John’s right up there around a 9. I don’t know if I could really give anything a “10″, because that would be perfect.
• The view is nice… there’s someone’s log home right across busy Hwy 50 (see photo)
• They have free high-speed WIFI access.
• The moment I walked in, I was greeted by the winsome face of a G4 iMac, which demonstrates the establishment has style (see photo)
• The place has a nice ambience and the baristas (hip lingo for sales associates) are friendly and helpful.
• A guy chased his son in the front door, calling him by name: “Sequoia!”
• A young, GAP accessorized woman walked through the door announcing to the person on the other end of her cell phone (21st century version of a string with two tin cans at either end), “I just got out of the car and I’m going in.”
• Some decent reggae… this could be a plus or a minus, depending upon the artist

Ah, yes… vacation in paradise South Lake Tahoe. So, what am I doing blogging on vacation in “God’s Country?” Well, this is what I like to do. Donna and Brian went off mountain biking and I really enjoyed that before my little misfortune. Now, the nerve damage to my right arm (and a little in the left, too) gets too painful with the jarring to the front fork and handlebars.

Well, then how about tennis? I literally loved tennis… it’s the closest thing to playing linebacker I’ve ever found. “Watch the eyes,” like you would watch a quarterback; nine times out of ten, where the eyes go, that’s where the ball will go. I also enjoyed sending the ball deep and then charging the net and set-up… just like looking for the running back to come through the line… all adrenaline and all raw reaction… no time for thinking. Anyway, I can barely hold the racket now and, with my shoulder muscle wasted, my backhand is non-existent.

Okay, so how about fishing? I actually got into fishing to be social with my buddies from work in Nevada City in the 1980s. I really enjoyed that. I like the strategy and skills… particularly using lures and feeling the spinners reach that perfect frequency, which tells a trout: “Hey, I’m a little fish and I’m running scared!” But, fishing requires patience and an expensive license. So, that’s one of about 100 hobbies I’ve tried and abandoned over a lifetime.

When you get to be my age it’s a good idea to narrow your focus and make the best of what you’ve got, especially when you’re on vacation. Right now, that’s studying The Apocalypse, writing to our families in Uganda, people watching, reading some news and blogging.

I found this site linked at Pyromaniac and I was immediately smitten with Keith Drury’s essay, I’m a Camp Meeting Reenactor - are you?

I have a college buddy, Ken O’vell who is a Civil war reenactor. He spends summer weekends dressed up like a Union soldier and shoots his musket as he and others reenact old Civil war battles. As for me, I’m a Camp Meeting reenactor. Most every summer since I’ve been a lad I attend camp meeting services and get to experience camp meetings pretty based on the pattern of the 1800s. Camp Meetings are just a hair over 200 years old and their history is rich and informative. Actually experiencing an Old Fashioned Camp Meeting tells me more about who my denomination is than reading about a 1700’s up tight Anglican cleric, John Wesley. So I like camp meeting reenactments.

This guy is a published writer, but I’m captivated by his witty posts and good-natured pokes at the pop Christian culture on his blog. For example, take point # 7 from his emancipation proclamation of July 28, 2005 - I’m tired of being young— I’m gonna’ start being an old man today:

7. I’m gonna’ laugh more and take things less seriously. Everybody in the church is too serious—even young people. As a young man I’ve taken myself far too seriously and acted at times like the church was about to collapse. As an old man I now know that the church will survive all kinds of things. I’ve seen it survive past “emergencies” like holy laughter, WWJD, KJV-RSV, the Church Growth movement and the Prayer of Jabez so I now know it will make it through Purpose-Driven pot-holders. It survived Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tammy Faye so I know it will survive Brian McLaren, Rob Bell and Joel Osteen. And in the interest of being lighter I plan to make fun of things more and poke fun at people—especially Baptists and Nazarenes, who are my most frequent readers. Actually I think I’ll poke fun at people in the exact order of my readership. In fact I may have to make fun of lots of my own past writing too—I was far to serious a writer as a young man.

I hope you enjoy Keith’s stuff. Also, I added a few things to the left column today.

Well, it appears that BlogThis! is working again, now that I have the latest version of Firefox. I’ll have to try it with Safari. I even found an old blog post I had begun back in July, finished it and published it today. I hope Dan and Sadie like it.

No, what better way to innaugurate this feature than by reporting this tidbit of good news. It looks as if folks are finally starting to see that Newsweek and TIME are not news magazines, produced by journalists, but tabloids publishing editorials disquised as news.

Newsweek Drops Issue, Cites Poor Ad Sales @ Media Buyer Planner: “Newsweek Drops Issue, Cites Poor Ad Sales

Due to low ad pages during late summer, Newsweek is trimming the number of issues it publishes by one, opting for a double issue dated Aug. 29-Sept. 5, Mediaweek reports.

Through July 19, Newsweek’s ad pages have fallen 15.6 percent this year, to 970. It’s not alone. A lack of spending in the technology and automotive sectors has hurt the whole newsweekly category with ad pages falling 10.5 percent, to 6,332 through July 19.”

Let’s see…

I’m ecstatic!!! My Blogger Dashboard is working in Firefox 1.0.6! I can Save As Draft again. I can’t wait to BlogThis! I’ve been without my favorite blogging tools for months. This can only mean one thing… tons of posts! I like to BlogThis! or begin posts and save them as drafts. Without this feature, I have to sit down and write / edit the entire post at one time. This discourages me from taking on any serious stuff. Hmmm. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Anyway, here goes.

My friend, Ian, is a power blogger. He can juggle three at once, while tending to a squad of Marines. Big salute!

• What A World
• Ian’s Exodus
• Well, In My Opinion…

P.S. Isn’t Ian a great name? If Emma had been a boy, she would have been Ian.

It’s Time for a Blog Break
¿Que Paso Blondie?
Awareness Never Fed A Starving Child
Emma Spreads Her Wings

It’s Time for a Blog Break
Okay, so I’ve just about finished Mounce’s commentary on Revelation, got my notes ready for Tuesday and took a trip to Remnant Books to round out my studies: John Walvoord’s commentary from the dispensational perspective, James Ramsey’s postmillennial commentary from The Geneva Series and Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond, edited by Darrell Bock.

I also answered a bunch of eMail… Denise and I repaired our window… I got a haircut at the Gentlemen’s Quarters in Grass Valley.

I think the photo above captures the simple joy of blogging… it’s nearly bed time, the heavy lifting has been done, the Powerbook is behaving properly and a large home brewed decaf latte´awaits me.

¿Que Paso Blondie?
I’m listening to Beck’s Guero and it’s taking me back to my roots: a surfer growing up in barrio South Whittier. The title tune captures the sounds and vibe of Brooklyn Avenue in East Los Angeles, then effortlessly transitions into Girl, an electronica surf tune with Beach Boy vocals and a bottleneck guitar solo, which would certainly measure up to Brian Wilson’s discriminating standards. Camille’s favorite is the funky Heck Yes and it is definitely the most danceable tune. Hey, ese! I’m stoked!

Awareness Never Fed A Starving Child
“I don’t think the awareness thing is working,” said Sue Kim, a 22-year-old student, in Philadelphia. “There’s going to be a lot of drunk people and what are they going to remember?”

Truer words were never spoken, yet expect to hear a lot of caterwauling and calls for the Group of Eight to forgive third world debt. If you want to know what to do about Africa, I’m afraid you may have to take a trip and see how the folks there do things. The Live 8 is a nice sentiment, but I think Sue Kim nailed it.

Emma Spreads Her Wings

Well, in about a week, Emma will take off for North Carolina. She will be going there to establish residency at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, along with her miniature roommate, who shall remain anonymous. Here’s a photo of her diminutive pal:

They are a real pair. I say her roommate is miniature, because Emma is the smallest of our children by at least a half a foot and her roommate is a tad tinier. They remind me of a couple of elderly ladies and I told them that if they could just get some nylons to bunch up down at their ankles, they would look like fugitives from the convalescent home. They like the same “little ol’ lady” activities and seem to compliment each other quite well. They thought my observation was accurate, so they call themselves “the golden girls.”

It’s been kinda fun getting ready to send them off… we had supper to get to know “the in-laws.” Seriously, that’s what it was like and we really hit it off with them (I’ll keep them anonymous, as well). Denise will meet them all back in NC, where they will help the girls get settled in.

This week at my Post Office, my barn swallow babies were doing their Al Jolson routine… when mom and dad fly in to feed them, they all look up and open their mouths and it looks like a little Minstrel Show, with their little white beaks and dark heads. I call them my little “Al Jolsons.”

Well, Thursday the two older ones flew off and when I came in Friday morning, the last one was in the nest moving around nervously as mom stayed perched on the floodlight watching her. She would come up to the edge and flutter her little wings, lose her balance a little bit and then turn back around. This went on all day… I would check every half hour or so. Then, finally, she flew. She would land on the ground or the lower bushes and seemed a little uncertain about going higher. With each circle away from the nest, she went higher and higher, eventually landing on the telephone line or the tree across the street. But, she would always come back near the empty nest. I say “near,” because she would fly right up to it, then turn back away and land on something close by and look at the nest. It’s as if she wanted to return home, but knew it was time to go and be a grownup barn swallow.

I went out to watch her a number of times and talk to her (yes, I do talk to animals, even though they don’t understand a darn thing I’m saying). Then it struck me: This is a metaphor for Emma’s stage of life and our empty nest. The rest of the afternoon, I called the little barn swallow “Emma.” Later that day, she was on the wire outside with another swallow, chattering away just like our Emma does. Then, they would fly off in their little circular path and swoop down to puddles, drawn intuitively to the mud they will need to make their own nests. At the rate that little swallow is developing, I think she’ll figure out how to make a nest any day now: just like Emma and her miniature roommate will in North Carolina.

Why do I blog? There are a number of reasons, I suppose.

I was updating my Quotable Christian site and came across a quote which answers that question and may give you some insight into why I do whatever I do:

Our calling is to enjoy God as well as glorify Him. Real fulfillment relates to the purpose for which we were made, to be in reference to God, to be in personal relationship with Him, to be fulfilled by Him, and thus to have an affirmation of life. Christianity should never give any onlooker the right to conclude that Christianity believes in the negation of life. Christianity is able to make a real affirmation because we affirm that it is possible to be in personal relationship to the personal God who is there and who is the final environment of all He created. All else but God is dependent, but being in the image of God, man can be in personal relationship to that which is ultimate and has always been. We can be fulfilled in the highest level of our personality and in all the parts and portions of life… There is nothing Platonic in Christianity… The whole man is to be fulfilled; there is to be an affirmation of life that is filled with joy.

Francis A. Schaeffer

Death in the City (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press: 1969) 26

It’s been a couple of tough weeks and it’s great to be back in front of the Powerbook, typing away. I became inundated with work a couple of weeks ago and then got that horrendous “cold virus from heck” that had everyone’s noses rubbed raw and grumpy as all get out.

I’ve been testing out the “Blog This!” feature and found lots of silly articles to capture, but I was too pooped to post. So, there was a bit of a log jam, if you will, of posts (get it? posts? like fence posts? logs?) But, not today… not this weekend… No! I feel alive again! Read! Feast! Surfeit yourselves on this cornucopia of global news, off-beat opinion and just plain ol’ silliness! Of course, I will sneak in a few serious pieces, too.

With piles of debt from college loans and profligate living, things are desperate and I had to head down to the Brunswick area to see if I could rustle up some grub for Denise and I. As fate would have it, I was standing in the traffic at Sutton Way and a sweet young woman, Sadie, took me up on the offer.

Sadie has a blog and wanted to add some links, so we struck up a deal. Denise and I climbed into our fifteen-year-old jalopy and chugged down to the exclusive gated community where she and her partner, Dan, live with their two children. They are quite the fashionable family and we felt a little awkward at first. But, they made us feel right at home and they also made us chicken and dumplings. It was wonderful!

I kept up my end of the deal and added links to her blog. We ran into a little problem, though. Her ultra-stylish blog template employs GIFs for the headings, so I need to find the font, fire up Photoshop and tweak it just a bit more.

I’m tired… and, when I’m worn out, I can’t stand the thought of losing productive time. If I’m in pain, I will rent a film or do something creative like work in Photoshop or fine tune some HTML or CSS. I’ve found these to be the most effective pain management techniques. But, when I’m just plain tired, I’ll do busy work, like add links to the left column of the blog. I hope you like some of the new ones.

Oh, and even though it says to “Read more” down here, don’t believe it… there’s no more to read.

Expandable Post Summaries
I had a few minutes to work on some formatting for the blog and found this neat trick…You see, with this little hack on the Blogger template, I can create the illusion that I am becoming a better writer — saying more with less. The truth is, it entices the reader with a line or two and then lures them into another massive tome, sucking away more of their valuable time.

But, it does have an advantage… the reader can scan the main page to see if there’s anything remotely interesting and decide if they want to find amusement here or go do something valuable with their time, like save the world from catastrophic climate change. What do you think?

My first month of blogging has blown by and, I suppose, is archived. If you look at the column on your left, you will see that some new categories and links have been added and, if you click on those links, you will get a distorted picture of what I like… there’s just not enough time to get everything up and running that I want to. Anyways, I hope you find something you like over there!

Okay, so I’ve worked on the template and I’m liking the formatting… I added an up-to-date photo for my profile and a “cast of characters” over there in the left column, so I don’t have to explain who each member of the family is every time I mention them. I also added my favorite blogs, including my old friend Levi’s hip culturezoo.

Here’s the burning question: When you click on a link, do you prefer the page to open in a new window or do you like to use your “back” button/command?

With tabbed browsing here in modern browsers and Explorer soon to play catch-up, this may all be academic. But, I’m interested in your browsing habits… I’d like to make this a usable blog. Thanks for your participation - vote early and often.

I’ve just begun blogging and I can see that these posts are way too long… I’ll need to work on that.

It looks like I’m ready to roll. I’ve finished my first post, created my profile, set up some files on my domain to link to and I even tweeked the template just a bit.

This is a real load off of my shoulders… now I can relax a little, redesign my old sites, perhaps come up with a few other designs and settle down to learn PHP and MySQL. PHP looks like it should be pretty straightforward, but I ran into a roadblock with MySQL. I think that’s because (I hate to admit it), I am still ignorant when it comes to the inner workings of Macintosh OS X. Worse yet, I think MySQL is a service (or whatever you call it) of Apache, so this may take some brains. I’ve tried some online tutorials, but since I’m one of the few web enthusiasts over 28 years of age, I will probably benefit from one of those tomes of paper we legacy humans call “books.”

Addendum: I’m using Firefox for my browser and the spell check doesn’t seem to work. I’ll have to check on that.

Pronunciation: ‘prag-m&-”ti-z&m
Function: noun
1 : a practical approach to problems and affairs

Many years ago as a young man, I read very little, wrote even less and never dreamed I would write a journal of any sort, let alone a personal log on a space-age device like the computer I am tapping away on. That has all changed.

Now, I read a lot and I write even more!

So, I conceived a plan — a very pragmatic plan, really. Since I would never be published, I decided I would create a website and share my thoughts with anyone who may find them entertaining, enlightening, encouraging or exasperating (strange, but some people do find a certain level of satisfaction in exasperation).

A simple website was constructed in Claris Homepage and many visitors dropped by. The plan was going well until I decided I wanted more control and, so, I thought it only made sense to learn the art of web design. This may have been an error on my part and it certainly proved to be decidedly un-pragmatic. But, it’s too late now — I enjoy web design almost as much as I do writing. There’s an indescribable sense of satisfaction in putting your own thoughts and words on a page, introducing some graphical elements and manipulating them with CSS.

That brings me to this blog. It was supposed to be designed in WordPress and I intended to learn PHP/MySQL to exercise full control. But, I found that I am not prepared for that level of commitment yet. The dream of designing and implementing a beautiful, functional blog continues to live on and it will be realized, as time permits. But, I cannot bear to put off blogging and publishing a moment longer. So, the blog begins here… now.