I mispell things!
all of us in the youth office (along with lauren g. & laura p.) were working on “the view” for tomorrow night (the first official night for our new sixth graders) when jessica & jonathan broke out into grooving. i’m not sure i will be able to sleep tonight because of the nightmares of their dancing.
jonny baker mentioned on his blog home’s trinity worship service. i wish i had seen it before we did our service on the trinity.
SIDE NOTE – if you are involved in creating, directing, and/or organizing times that lead to people worshiping GOD then you should actively read jonny baker’s blog. he regularly creates and find the most amazing stuff.
as i have mentioned before i’m going to the simple way in philadelphia for a week in october – something i am very excited about. to add to the adventure of the trip i thought i would travel to philly by greyhound bus. i haven’t taken a commercial passenger bus on a long trip since i was a kid and i thought it would be fun to take one. i knew it would take a good bit longer than an airplane or train (36 six hour each way). still i assumed that i would meet a ton of people on the trip and it would surly produce some excellent stories. pam wasn’t very keen on the idea but she loves me and loves my adventures so i was pretty sure i could convince her to give in.
the problem occurred when i actually looked at making a reservation. to travel from baton rouge to philadelphia via greyhound bus actually costs more than it would cost for me to fly to philadelphia and rent a car or take a taxi to the simply way. it was going to cost $270 to travel by bus versus $215 to travel by air. i was amazed. how can greyhound survive when it actually costs more to travel in a less comfortable manner? this is where my cheap side kicks in. i simply can’t justify to myself paying more to travel by bus.
i guess greyhound is making allot of money off delivering packages.
one of the things i love about bloglines is that everyday it sends me a weather forecast for the next seven days. i don’t remember today’s forecast saying that during the 9:30 a.m. worship/sunday school hour it would blow down a large oak branch on two cars in the church parking lot but it did say that it would rain. i guess that’s a good enough forecast. how would you like to walk out of church and see that your car had just been crushed by a random falling oak branch?
yesterday i commented on it raining and me desiring for it to continue. well i received my wish and then some. it’s been cloudy since yesterday afternoon and this morning during our 9:30 a.m. worship service/sunday school hour it cut lose. it began to storm and continued to storm throughout the hour. in fact, it rained so hard that it knocked down a large limb from one of the oak trees in the church parking lot right on top of two cars. thankfully nobody was in the cars.
when the second worship/sunday school hour ended and people were transferring to the next worhip/sunday school hour it was still raining hard. of course, nobody had brought an umbrella because the weather men & women had been saying it was going to rain for a week. so everyone who came into our 11 a.m. sunday school class was soaked. it was quite a site and made for a good bit of laughter. i like laughter.
it’s finally raining here in baton rouge, louisiana and it’s about time. i need some heat relief. it’s been in the mid-to-high 90’s all week. hopefully the rain will last for a few days and keep cloud cover over my fair city. it would be nice to have a few days of my air conditioner not running constantly.
SIDE NOTE – did you know that the non-electric version of air conditioning was developed in persia thousands of years ago? you can read about it here.
friday night pam and i went out to eat at tsunami which is on top of the shaw center. the restaurant was much hipper than i am suitable for. basically, i am not what you would describe as a hip person. i’m not real sure what the term for the opposite of hip is (nerd, geek, loser, etc.) but whatever it is that’s what i am. of course, my wife, pam, is the opposite of me. she’s amazing and everyone knows it. case in point take our adventure at tsunami. we went there last night and asked how long the wait would be (i had called earlier in the day to make reservations and was told that they use half of the restaurant’s tables for reservations and all of those tables were booked up until the first week of june). the hostess told us that the wait for a table would be one and a half hours to one hour and forty-five minutes.
at least that was their answer until they saw pam (who was looking quite good as always). when they saw her one of the other hostesses quickly walked over to us and said they would fix us a table immediately. i kid you not. our wait for a table went from almost two hours to 30 seconds. that’s what happens when you hang out with an incredible looking woman, who is working on her doctorate, is a domestic goddess, and can quilt. so i sat down with my hip wife and ate a wonderful meal. i like being married to a woman that gets tables quickly.
by the way, the picture above is of the hulk roll (a sushi roll composed of various things). we received the above two pieces of the hulk roll when our sushi chef made them for us as a gift. again, i’m sure this happened because i was with the best looking woman there.
back in january pam and i “adopted” two lsu students from india. we have sam and bajji over to the house every so often and go and do things with them every now and then. they’re allot of fun and we both love learning about india from them. last night they wanted to cook an authentic indian meal for us. they came over to the house and made chicken curry, some type of flat bread, eggs scrambled, and a few other snacks. even though our kids didn’t think much of the meal pam and i thought it was amazing.
sunday sam and bajji are setting up a cricket game to teach me how to play. i’ve always wanted to play but simply can’t figure out the rules. i’ve read the bbc’s description of the rules and it still doesn’t make any sense to me. sam and bajji say that you have to play to understand the game and thus they’re going to teach me sunday afternoon. i can’t wait.
the ONE campaign is the u.s. version of “make poverty history” (which is the u.k. version of the ONE campaign). basically this is a grassroots effort to push our government for fighting for economic justice concerning the poorest of the poor within our world. this translates to the u.s. government moving towards an additional one percent of it’s budget (roughly 25 billion) being directed towards helping honest governments overcome extreme poverty and health issues and using legal means to fight against the corpution in other governments that diverts resources away from these needs.
here’s what an additional one percent of the use budget would be able to do:
pretty impressive what an additional one percent will do huh?
the irony is that the u.s. and the other g8 countries have already agreed to the u.n. millenium goals that are behind the ONE campaign’s desire. the “millenium goals” were setup with the u.n. to cut extreme poverty in half by the year 2015. the problem is that we are all way behind on reaching these goals.
so here’s why i’m writing this.
i was standing in front of the vending machines in the church family life center foyer and i found hooters potato chips in the church vending machines. what’s up with that? i think it’s pretty funny.
i actually have strange feelings on hooters:
so basically , while i think the restaurant is no big deal i still think the idea of treating women as objects is awful.