Category: misc.

Andrew’s Notebook

This weekend Lisa and I were at Hartland Christian Camp. We had a great time with the regional Mennonite community, and were privileged to attend a concert by The Sons of the San Joaquin and Timothy Johnson. The concert was held in a gym, immediately following a full-course dinner. After the concert, everyone in the room pitched in to clean up (without being asked). The dinner was cleaned up and all the chairs and tables put away within about 7 minutes. I was amazed. It’s a real testament to the Mennonite service ethic. I watched in amazement, thinking that this is how old-fashioned barn-raisings must happen.

We had coffee with some friends last night. They recently adopted 3 kids from the Ukraine, and the kids are working hard to understand everything around them. One of the kids recently told his mom that he couldn’t go to Sunday school without some money. When she asked why, he told her he needs to be able to pay for attendance. The offering bucket, he thought, was the price of attendance.

Found this video this morning on Google video. Enjoy!

Apology for my choice of browsers

Hey, Shinnfans. I just today took a look at this blog using the Internet Explorer web browser, and I realized that it looks terrible. Is this the blog’s fault? Nope. It’s the browser’s fault. You see, Microsoft’s default browsing program, Internet Explorer, does not support the web standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C.

Instead of Internet Explorer, I strongly recommend that you use a standards-compliant (and in every way superior) browser, Firefox. This first thing you’ll notice is that our blog looks a heckuva lot better in Firefox. As an added bonus, you can easily increase the size of the text on almost any web page in Firefox by holding down the ‘ctrl’ button and scrolling up or down with a scrolling mouse. That’s a usability feature that Microsoft just can’t match!

Click here for a preview of our blog in Firefox.

What I’m drinking now

Cold coffee (half-caf from this morning), soy milk, and chocolate syrup with coffee ice cubes. It’s kind of like a poor hippie’s sweet afternoon pickup on a hot day.

It’s hot

I walked outside today, and my skin all burned off.  That was my first clue that it’s too hot for normal human beings to live here.  I ran back inside.  While I was washing my crusty burnt skin off in the kitchen sink, Lisa was sitting in the living room watching television.  I overhead the weather guy say that the temperature outside wouldn’t dip below 100 degrees (fahrenheit) for the next 20 straight days.  That’s when I started beliving in Global Warming.  Then Al Gore showed up at my door step (How did he know so quickly when I started believing in Global Warming?!  Damn NSA!) and my day started getting wierd.  He was wearing an obnoxiously loud Hawaiian shirt and some of that neon green sunblock stuff on his nose.  Boy, were his legs white!  He had pet penguins toddling along after him.  3 of them.  He wanted me to come with him, but wouldn’t say where.  He stretched out his hands, and in one hand there was a blue pill, while the other held a red pill.  But it wasn’t a pill, it was an Easter egg.  And the pills didn’t have anything to do with where he wanted me to go.  He just said that the blue one was Nyquil (he had a cold) and the Easter Egg was a present.  Al doesn’t like to show up at people’s houses empty-handed.

So he asked me again if I’d go with him.  The front door was still open, and I peeked around it to see the world outside.  All of a sudden……..SPLAT!  An egg fell out of the sky and landed on the walkway in front of my house.  It cooked right away (like your brain on drugs), and I knew it was too hot to go outside.  Not even if Al covered me with his water-gun.  I was still smarting from losing all of my skin, and who knows what Al Gore keeps in his water gun!  Or how clean it is.

He pleaded with me, and said I could use his snorkel.  That’s when I got really suspicious.  I couldn’t see any snorkel, and I don’t know if people without skin can legally use snorkels, anyway.  I began to think that it was all a setup.  That’s when Lisa shook me, and I said, “Ouch!” because it should hurt if someone shakes you and you don’t have any shoulder-skin.  But it didn’t hurt, and I wondered why.  I was still wondering when I opened my eyes.  “Honey…. Andrew…,” she said.  “We’d better get up.  I heard it’s going to be hot today.”  I just groaned and roilled back to my pillow.  Not again!

Comments fixed

I know, the comments have been broken since we got the pretty new look for our blog.  They work now, though!  (Thanks for alerting me to the problem, Jon.)  Read the other post from tonight, and if you’re interested (judging by the comments), I’ll tell you all about my new obsession.  Or you can just guess at it, which may be more fun.

Finally

Finished the story.  I hope it was all you were wishing for!  Anybody care to interpret the story for the rest of us?

I know…

The pictures aren’t working right now.  I’m trying to fix it.  I’ll let you know when it works.

My Weekend in Pictures

You should know the drill by now. Click on a picture, and it pops up all wowie-zowie (that’s a tecnical term). Hover over the photo on the right side, and you should see an arrow that will let you scroll to the next one. Enjoy!

A Story Without Dialogue

He asked her again, and this time she couldn’t say no. It was that look in his eyes. A hoping, longing look that she’d seen there as long as she could remember. So they bought it. It came with smoky glass, shiny leather seats, and a little hat for each of them.

They weren’t well-off by anyone’s reckoning. Most months they lived hand-to-mouth, and once in a while he would bring a bonus home from his low-level sales job. It was one of these bonuses that prompted the question.

When she said yes, the next thing she didn’t say was, “What are people going to think?” She already knew the answer, anyway. Her father was furious. She could have predicted his every word, but she didn’t dare repeat them to James. This was his dream, and the only thing he’d ever wanted for himself in their 10 years of marriage. It didn’t matter to her that it didn’t make any sense. She’d never seen him so happy.

They would take turns driving. That’s where the little hats came in. The one driving would wear the hat, and the other one would sit in the back. Sometimes they would both sit up front, and he’d play with the buttons and dials. She wanted to ask him to stop, but she bit her tongue. She didn’t want to spoil any part of his dream.

But other people weren’t so kind. Everywhere they’d drive, people would stare at them. Family events were always a bit tense after they bought it, even if all the kids in the extended family thought it was really cool. They were still blind to the economic realities of owning such a thing.

He took care of it as well as his abilities allowed. He didn’t know a thing about repairing engines, and his detailing skills were far from professional. But he was faithful to wash it every Saturday morning in its permanent spot on the left side of the driveway. He even built a crude carport for it, since it wouldn’t fit in the garage. He also carefully fashioned directional covers for the sprinklers on that side of the lawn. “Would want to water-spot the gold and maroon paint job,” he thought.

Someone want to continue the story?