Category: personal

pam is flying on delta soon and while looking on the website for their latest baggage policies she discovered that they have guidelines concerning monkeys as service animals. how cool is that? i have a good friend who has a wonderful service dog (yoshi is amazing and bart ain’t bad either) but i’ve never known anyone with a service monkey. i kind of want one.

we don’t eat out a lot compared to many of our friends. we eat our own home cooked food most of the time.  however when we do eat out we tend to be creatures of habit. we like local restaurants. this goes for all of the places we eat – from nice restaurants and fast food places – we like local. we tend to eat at the same local places over and over again. some of these are CHRIStian’s bistro, green tea oriental, el patron tex-mex, and marvin’s.

today pam and i both had busy days so we decided to order supper from marvin’s. thursday night is the GCB (garlic cheeseburger) special night at marvin’s. mhmmmm! a GCB, cheese fries, and a drink. that’s tasty eating. the wonderful thing about marvin’s (besides the GCB) is that they deliver. that’s part of their thing, they like to say that they will deliver anywhere. the problem with delivery right now is that because of painting our house we do not presently have any house numbers. therefore, pam spent 10 minutes on the phone explaining how to get to our house. the guy who took our order said that it would probably be about 45 minutes before we would get out food.

15 minutes later our food arrived. marvin’s is typically pretty fast but this was much faster than normal, especially since they are based in stevens point. pam asked the delivery guy how he had gotten here so fast, assuming it would lead to some death defying store of speeding down division street (we love death defying stories). instead, his response was that as soon as they started explaining where the order was supposed to go he realized it was the “house of hounds” and knew exactly where it was. that’s right he has labeled us the “house of hounds.” the delivery guy even knew that one of the hounds must be out back while he was there. he was right, montana was at the moment.

we only order from marvin’s once every 8 weeks or so but we have a nickname. WE’RE THE HOUSE OF HOUNDS AND THIS THRILLS ME! i love our community.

when we moved to wisconsin we were blessed with wonderful neighbors. we’ve actually been very blessed in our lives with our neighbors. we had great neighbors in missouri, louisiana, and now wisconsin (the only exception possibly being our first house in baton rouge which was in a VERY transitory neighborhood and thus during our 10 months there we were never really sure who our neighbors were). anyhow, when we were moving form baton rouge one of our big concerns was whether we would have good neighbors again or not. we were actually told from the guy we were buying the house from that all the neighbors kept to themselves and he didn’t really know anyone. this kind of crushed us but we soon found out that it was a mistake. turns out that the guy we bought our house form was the one who stuck to himself. all the other neighbors knew each other and quickly welcomed us to town. we have fallen in love with our neighborhood here in plover. the people we live around are a ton of fun to talk with.

when we started to paint our house, being neighborly, pam sent an email to some of our nieghbors asking for their advice concerning what colors they thought would look good on our house. the photo below is the color combination that we received from bill and debbie. needless to say we didn’t go with their advice :). I think everyone else is pretty thankful for that.

the forecast says that it is going to be warm this weekend and since it is probably the last weekend of 2010 that will actually be warm in wisconsin this means that i get to paint our home during it. woohoo! the above photo is what the outside of our home presently looks like. the three photos below are the colors we are considering. if you want to help select the colors you are more than welcome to throw your vote in. of course, you are also welcome to help with a brush if you would like to. i’ll be doing this all weekend so just drop in and grab a brush.

SIDE NOTE – as i mentioned a couple of weeks ago tapestry had to move from our single half-sheet bulletin to a folded bulletin. i’ve been putting quotes on the cover and i’m pretty pumped about this week’s quote. it is from deitrich bonhoeffer. here it is.

one act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

oh how i love bonhoeffer!

SIDE SIDE NOTE – it’s time for us to start gearing up for advent conspiracy – a way we have joined with many other churches in celebrating the birth of our LORD. it would be awesome to push the limits of how we celebrate CHRISTmas a little further than last year – when we bought a $5,000 well.

recently i have developed a habit of losing things while i run. thankfully i have also acquire an uncanny ability to find the things that i have lost. i’ve lost my cell phone a couple of times while running on some of our amazing trails. each time i was sure that i would never find my phone again and each time a mile or two into rerunning the route i found my phone. tonight while riding my bike back from my ride i lost my shorts. i know this sounds strange so i will explain. i wear a biker pad to protect my butt while i ride but i don’t like running in it. so i wear it when i ride my bike to where ever i am running, take it off and place on running short for my run, and then swap back to biker shorts and the pad for my bike ride home. i usually just store the running shorts on my bike rack.

today while riding back home from a run my running shorts apparently blew off my bike rack. i was sure i wouldn’t find them and considered not even going back for them but realized i had placed a $20 in the inside storage pocket awhile back. i didn’t really want to loose the shorts but i definitely didn’t want to loose the $20. so i drove along my route looking at the side of the road the whole time. it was getting dark and the shorts are gray so i was sure that i wouldn’t find them. this is when my new ability came in. i found the shorts about 2 miles away from the house.

while i’m not a big fan of loosing things when i run, i am very glad that i consistently find them when i turn back.

over the past week i have driven to and from new orleans (school), chicago (to pick up claudia), and  merriville, indiana (to drop off claudia). i’ve driven around 4,000 miles in the past 9 days. that may be nothing for many long haul truck drivers but it is pretty signigicant for me. i love driving long trips but i have to tell you that i’m really tired of driving. some of this is probably the fact that i am also fighting through a cold. argh! i’m tired and ready to stay home for awhile.

my typical requirements for driving long distances are: 1) diet coke, 2) sunflower seeds, 3) audiobooks, and 4) podcasts. my sodium levels are probably off the charts at the moment considering the number of seeds and diet cokes that i have consumed (at least 4 pounds of sunflower seeds during these 9 days). the biggest problem with the sunflower seeds are that they tear the inside of my cheek up when i eat a lot of them. the salt make my cheek swell up like a chipmunk. i finished a few audiobooks during my trip – 1) “snoop ” – a psychological study of predicting personality based on possessions, and 2) “paul of dune ” – a “dune” sequel that i liked because i am a scifi geek. both of them were pretty interesting. i couldn’t tell you all the podcasts i went through but i will say that “wait, wait don’t tell me” and “this american life” always keep me awake.

thankfully i don’t have to travel anywhere outside of wisconsin for the rest of the year. 🙂

SIDE NOTE – GO PACK!

a few years ago i changed the way i use powerpoint during messages. the reason for this was twofold: 1) watching ted talks presentations and being amazed by how good they are, and 2) beginning to read gary reynold’s blog presentation zen. both of these sources taught me that i had been using my powerpoint slides as a crutch for my speaking and rather than helping me spread the message of the gospel they were detracting from it. these speakers taught me that presentation slides can be very helpful when they are simple and visual. most of the people in any venue can read the information on your slides faster than you can speak it so if your powerpoint has a ton of bullet points on it and most of your information you might as well sit down and shut up because the audience can simply read the information for themselves. reynolds suggests only putting up visuals that will reinforce what you are saying. words, quotes, pictures, images, etc. are great things to help make your message stronger.

the speakers at ted talks are some of the best examples of this. these speakers not only typically have fascinating ideas (fascinating even when i disagree with their conclusions) they also almost always do a remarkable job of presenting those ideas. that is part of the shame of many churches – we claim to have the most important message in the world and then do an absolutely lousy job of presenting that message.

anyhow these two sources caused me i swap to a much more visual style of preaching a few years ago. i prefer it and i think those that are a part of tapestry do to. if you would like an example here is my powerpoint presentation for this past week’s message. simple, visual stuff.

today i ran across a post that gary reynolds wrote a few weeks ago. it is comparing the star wars death star attack meeting from the movie with the way it might be done now. it is a great way of making the point that simple slides are much more effective. who knows what would have happened if the movie’s meeting had involved the above powerpoint slide. the star wars universe could have been destroyed because all the pilots would have been too bored to remember what to shot and luke might not have used the force. 🙂

if you ever use microsoft expression web to update a website that also has a wordpress blog on it you should be aware of it asking you if you want it to delete any files that are not a part of the expression website. i tell you this because i was asked such a question while updating the tapestry website. i told it sure it could delete those extra files and then discovered that the extra files were my wordpress blog.

that’s why the look of the blog has changed. i accidentally deleted all the wordpress blog files. thankfully the blog database was not deleted so i didn’t lose any of my posts. i did however lose all my formatting.