Author: Robert

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i’ll wrestle you for it

my wife makes the best chicken noodle soup in the world. it’s true and i’ll wrestle you to death if you disagree with me. you might not think that chicken noodle soup is that big of a deal. of course, you would be wrong. homemade chicken noodle soup is better than the feeling you get after a sneeze that you struggled really hard with. it’s better than the feeling you get when you find the perfect parking spot that three other people just drove past. it’s better than a glass of ice cold water right after you finished cutting the lawn on a hot day. it’s that good, and pam’s is the best. i’ll wrestle you to death if you disagree. she made this soup tonight and i ate three bowls. it’ was really good.

i think that most of western society has neglected the joys of soup. there is simply nothing as good as homemade soup on a chili night. soup is the best of two worlds. it’s a warm drink to warm you up and a meal at the same time. i don’t really understand why everyone neglects soup. if they had a spoonful of pam’s chicken noodle soup those soup haters would change their minds. it’s the best soup in the world and if you disagree with me i’ll wrestle you to death.

btw, last night i had to drive two hours to percy quinn state park in mississippi for parkview church’s men’s retreat. i left baton rouge late because of the pbs homecoming and i didn’t get to the park until around 11. of course by then there weren’t any park rangers around. i tried calling everyone whose cell phone i knew to get them to tell me where in the park they were. no one answered so i drove around looking for cars that i knew. i didn’t see any. around 12:30 a.m. after driving around for 2 1/2 hours looking for them i decided that there was no way i was driving the 2 hours back to baton rouge and i could just find the in the morning. so i slept in my car. i haven’t done that in a while. it felt very transient. kind of cool. not sure why it felt so cool. that has to be something spiritual to it because it was just fun. of course, it would have been better with some of pam’s chicken noodle soup. it’s the best in the world and if you disagree with me i’ll wrestle you to death.

i found the guys this morning and the retreat was awesome.

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ouch #2

this afternoon i learned of another natural symbiotic relationship that yellow jackets have (for the first symbiotic relationship see the entry from [url=http://www.parkviewyouth.org/blog/?postid=5] August 23rd[/url]). today noah’s tiger cub den had a field trip to the bluebonnet swamp reserve to observe nature and to do a service project. the service project was picking up trash around the reserve. the observing of nature was watching the mass of yellow jackets swarm out of the area in which we were picking up trash.

we were walking around the pavement picking up small pieces of trash and trying to make the reserve look better. what we didn’t know is that yellow jackets have apparently not only made a bargain with bushes to protect them but they have also cut some type of deal with random pieces of trash. i’m not sure if the deal works for every piece or trash or not but i am sure that is works for tootsie roll wrappers. one of the kids there saw the wrapper and bent down to pick it up. at first i didn’t see what she was picking up, because if i had i would have screamed for her to stop. i have vast personal experience with yellow jackets and i am familiar with all the symbiotic relationships they have. therefore, i knew about the little known yellow jacket / tootsie roll wrapper deal. unfortunately she didn’t so she picked up the wrapper.

yellow jackets apparently really believe in keeping their promises because the second she picked up the wrapper they began to attack every breathing thing within 100 feet of the disturbed tootsie roll wrapper. if you think the thought of a 35 year old man running from yellow jackets is funny, just imagine six tiger cubs running away from the little beasts. it was chaos.

of course, the midst of all the action only two people were stung – 1) the girl who disturbed the tootsie roll wrapper, 2) me – the knower of all things yellow jacket. oh, i hate the little pests. i think i will begin killing all the yellow jackets i see. they can have a symbiotic relationship with my fly swatter.

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holiday inn

i bet by now the two people who actually read my blog think that i have given up on doing this. well don’t worry mom and dad (the only two who read this thing) i have not given up on it. i just took a small sabbatical from typing up the events of life (translation nothing funny was happening).

i’m through with my typing respite now and i have an entry that relates to a holiday inn express television commercial and a friend of mine�jim wallace, the parkview associate pastor of education. two sundays ago “the ring” (parkview’s college worship service) had a cd release for “the junkyard taboo,” the band for “the ring.” as a part of the whole release-fellowship thingy the waco hit sunday school class decided to give free food to the college students. it was a cool idea and all the students loved it.

after the fellowship was through the class began to clean up the chairs and tables used during the event. steve, one of the class members was moving a stack of chairs when it suddenly fell on top of his left leg. i’m not sure if you’ve ever had a stack of chairs fall on your leg but from the sounds made by steve as a result of the chairs landing i would have to tell you that i would not recommend it. the result of the crash was the dislocation of steve�s left knee. not a pretty picture. lots of people rushed over to help him. one of those helpers was jim wallace. jim used to be a basketball coach and upon seeing steve�s dislocated knee he reached down and “popped” it back into place. of course, steve still needed medical treatment but at least his knee was no longer 6 inches away from being in the right spot. an ambulance was called to take steve to the hospital.

when the ambulance got to parkview steve told them what had happened and that jim had put his leg back into place. the paramedics turned to jim and asked “sir, are you a doctor?” without a second�s hesitation jim responded “no, but i did sleep in a holiday inn express last night.” 🙂

p.s. if you haven�t laughed at the humor of this you need to watch more commercials.

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dare to be stupid

How To Fly
� by Douglas Adams

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.

That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

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the test of fire

nothing funny today but a verse of scripture that has been stuck in my head for awhile.

12Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, 13each man�s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man�s work. 14If any man�s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. 15If any man�s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire. 1 Corinthians 3:12-15

have you done anything today that will survive being tested by fire? not sure about you but the have been quite a few days in which i’m not sure that i’ve done anything that would lst and be considered worthwhile. just want to encourage you, while i am also encouraging myself, to try to do something each day that will stand the test of fire.

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it’s chuckie therapy

some of ya’ll know that pam, my wife, is a speech pathologist. this means she has the incredible job of helping children and adults learn and sometimes re-learn how to communicate with the world around them. she does some fascinating stuff. awhile back she was telling me how certain individuals with various communication problems are able to communicate better with animals or puppets (for those who stutter or love someone who stutters you can relate this to the way so many people who stutter have a much more difficult time talking on the phone than they do talking in a one sided conversation face to face). the biggest problems they face are with talking with humans. because of this some therapist have started using animals and puppets with very young individuals to get them focused on learning to communicate. pam read about therapists who did their therapy through puppets and the children would communicate with the puppet and basically forget that what was going on was actually therapy – i know this sounds a little odd but if it helps a child to be able to talk and interact with his/her world then i am all for it.

being the great speech pathologist that she is pam decided to give this whole thing a try. she order a puppet and had two children picked for a trial run with the whole thing. the first test of the therapy was today and it met with less than stellar results. when pam started talking through the puppet it did not help her two subjects to communicatebetter. they did not find it easier to talk with the puppet than with pam. no! the puppets simply scared the crud out of both of her test subjects. instead of opening up to the world around them each child stared wide-eyed, slowly backed away form the puppet, and then hide in the corner of the room whimpering about the crazed little person that was coming after them. so much for puppet therapy. now these two poor kids have to go through psychotherapy to chase away the nightmares of the killer puppets within their speech therapy. chalk one up for modern science.

okay, here’s my disclaimer. pam is amazing at what she does. i can’t tell you the numbers of people who can now talk because of what GOD does through her. she blows me away. she just told me this story today and we both laughed about the humor of the puppets not only not helping but actually scaring the kids. she knows i put the story in the blog, so i’m not talking behind her back. she’s great … even is she does terrify small helpless children.

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it’s a great, big, stupid world.

today in our neighborhood the louisiana council for the blind was doing curbside pickup for contributions. pam and i have been saving stuff for a garage sale and just recently decided that we would never actually do the sale. this meant that we had a ton of stuff to move to the curb and that blind people all across the state of louisiana were going to love the terrell�s. we had great things like a working gas dryer, kitchen supplies, and the granddaddy of all contributions good quality children�s toys, including a red wagon in great shape. pam spent most of the morning taking stuff from our garage � it�s official pre-garage sale storage place � to the street for the blind to pick up. after getting most of the stuff to the curb she decided to take a break for awhile. after her rest she went outside only to find that senior adults from across shenedoah had descended on our pile of donations and were making off with all the goodies they could carry. one old man had stolen the wagon and had loaded with other prizes and was dashing down the street. pam chased after one guy and screamed �you�re stealing from the blind!�. he returned the stolen merchandise he had in his hands but she is fairly sure that he had already made another trip. she had to spend the rest of her afternoon �guarding� the donations to make sure that nobody but the louisiana council for the blind took the booty that was in our front yard. when people will steal from the blind it truly is a great, big, stupid world.

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pick up for dr. dre

for the past 6 to 7 years i have been having a bit of fun whenever i have to give a name for food pick-up or anything else. many places that i go to eat require that you give a name with your food order so that they can then call you when your food is ready. one such place, and the place i ordered lunch from today, is “raisin cane’s”. i went there to pick up lunch and as is my custom i went inside to order my food (i’m not sure why but i really don’t like drive through windows). when the cashier at cane’s asked me for my name i decided to have my fun. for some reason i think it is hillarious to give a different name everytime i go into a place. i always try to say names that there’s a decent chance the people will know are fake. i’ve said collin powell, george stephanophilos, archie manning, johnny carson, etc. i’ve been hoping to really confuse a cashier one day, since i usually go to the same resturants all the time. of couse, nobody’s said anything yet. today when the cashier at cane’s asked for my name i was in a coat and tie and thought i would push the limits a little. i said “dre…that’s doctor dre.” i really figure this college kid would at least smirk at that but he didn’t even given me a facial twitch to at least indicate that he got the joke. no, he just wrote up my order (actually he typed it up on the screen).

i turned around and immediately saw a couple of older church members who said “hi”. i couldn’t remember their names and apparently they couldn’t remember mine either because they kept their distance and had that apprehensive look on their faces that said “oh i should know this guy’s name.” while i was standing there trying to remember their names the cashier who had taken my order shouted out “dre.” of course, i was too busy in thought to hear him. apparently he shouted it out again and then saw me. he walked over and said “dr. dre, your order is ready.” and handed me my meal. i thanked him and then looked to say goodbye to the church members. i waved at them and they waved back shouting “see ya’ next sunday dr. dre.” at this comment there were some pretty loud snikers in the resturant. i didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth about my name.

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jiffy green beans

tonight pam and i introduced our kids to the wonderful world of jiffy pop. just in case you haven�t enter this world yet i�ll describe jiffy pop to you. jiffy pop is cheap popcorn that has been wrapped in aluminum foil with a handle attached that you then shake over a stove eye for it to pop. when it pops the aluminum foil expands like a 12� metallic balloon. it�s really fun to watch but the popcorn inside it is not that great. i actually had not remembered how the popcorn tasted. i merely remembered from my own childhood how much fun it was to watch the aluminum foil expand. tonight after tasting the popcorn i realized that the aluminum foil is the trick and it was the only reason i every liked jiffy pop. turns out that nobody actually like jiffy pop for the taste. people eat it because it�s cool to watch the metal rise and because of the name jiffy. it is all just a gadget for getting rid of cheap, bad tasting pop corn.

now, i have an idea. if we can get kids to eat bad pop corn by wrapping it in expanding aluminum then why couldn�t we do it with other things? why not jiffy broccoli? or jiffy cauliflower? if we could get vegetables to expand within a metal wrap then kids would love to eat them. this would solve the age old problem of getting kids to eat their vegetables.

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yellow means “with it”

yesterday while driving to the doctors office i saw a very unusual sight. it was two guys walking on the sidewalk wearing the same clothes and backpacks. now some of you (the two people who actually read this thing) are probably thinking “that’s not so unusual, it’s just mormons going from house to house.” you would be right in thinking that they were mormons but you would be wrong in thinking that this was a common sight. you see the matching attire that they were wearing was not the typical white shirt, dark tie, and dark pants. no! they were wearing dark slacks and yellow pull-overs. you could still tell that they were mormons because they had their elder name tags on. i’m sure somewhere deep within the bowels of the mormon temple in salt lake city the mormon prophet gordon b. hinckley told the rest of the mormon bishops “let’s modernize our church�i know what we’ll do. we’ll make our college missionaries wear yellow pull-overs.”

of course, he is right. nothing says modern and “with it” like yellow pull-overs. when pam and i purchased our house a little less than two years ago everything was beige and old looking. we immediately painted two of the rooms different shades of yellow. now every one who enters the house comments on how modern and “with it” the house looks. they don’t know why it looks so spiffy, but i do. it’s the yellow.

gordon hinckley is a design genius. who would have thought modernization would be as simple as a yellow pull-over. our church struggles with how to reach and communicate to the postmodern generation and a world that stands in desperate need of hope. we debate over everything that we do that make sure that it communicates in modern understandable methods the age of truth of the gospel. little did we know that it was just a matter of swapping to the yellow pull-over. now i’ve got to figure out how to get everyone to wear on of those things. remember yellow means “with it.�”