the best laid plans of mice and men

the useless sign

last week i discovered that our outdoor church signs have been made meaningless by the darkness. as many of you know tapestry meets at night. it makes for a wonderful sunday and our signs work great during daylight savings time. during daylight savings time it’s very well lite at 6 p.m. and is usually still daylight when we get out at 7:15 p.m. but that’s not true when daylight saving time ends. tonight sunset was at 4:19 p.m. in stevens point. this means that our non-lighted outdoor signs are useless. pam told me about this situation two weeks ago (i’m usually inside getting things ready and don’t get to see the signs) and then i noticed it on my own last week. the signs were not visible at all.

then i had what i thought was a brilliant idea. i determined that we could use a gobo projector to shoot a sign on the school wall. it would be visible, portable, cool, and decently inexpensive (i’m all about the cheap aspect). the gobo projector will take a few weeks to get to us but it will be here soon. to tide us over i thought of the tripod flashlights you can buy. i remember these from their commercial with an alien using one to fix its spaceship (sometimes advertising does work). i realized i could get two of these and project light onto our street sign so it would be visible. i thought it was brilliant.

then the snow came.

the snow trashed my wonderful idea. 15 minutes before the worship assembly the sign was completely covered in snow. it was very well lite snow but it was still snow. if you were real close to the sign you could make out what it said but if you were more than 20’ away all you saw was a well lite placard of snow. i felt a little like crying in defeat.

free dryer

hey if anyone who reads my blog needs a dryer then i have a bargain for you. when we moved to point 15 months ago we had an electric dryer. the problem was that our new home was rigged for a gas dryer. since we wanted to move to high-capacity, more efficient washers and dryers anyway, we decided to take the money we would have spent in rigging an electric connection for our old dryer and put it into a demo high capacity/ efficient dryer. unfortunately that means our old dryer has sat in the garage waiting for me to do something with it. poor sad little dryer. not being used. sitting in a dark corner by itself. no purpose or meaning in life other than holding some fishing supplies on its lid. makes a tear come to one’s eye.

so here’s what i’m going to do with the dryer. if anyone who reads my blog needs a dryer then you are welcome to have it but you have to buy me a cup of coffee. that’s right there is no getting around the cup of coffee (unless of course you’re too busy at the moment and then the cup of coffee is completely optional). pam and i would rather a friend who has a need gets this thing. so email me.

if no one want this thing (which was functioning perfectly last time i used it) then i’ll probably just put it up on craigslist and try to sell it for $50 or so.

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