Category: random thoughts

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.

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.

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.�”

while true my last entry just wasn’t much fun. therefore to make up for this i decided i would post a couple of cool links. they are:

http://www.electronicorphanage.com/neen/demo/clinger.swf – a really freaky floating dude – he just follows your mouse around. for some reason he reminds me of a 70’s, multicolored jason.
http://www.starterupsteve.com/swf/wireframe.html – kind of a slumped-over medical puppet. imagine a sad skeleton with movable wires attached to it’s (notice the politically correct gendar nuetral reference) skeletal structure.

i leave in a few minutes to go do the funeral of tommy (the man I mentioned a few entries back). He’s been dying for the past two weeks and wednesday morning he past away. he died with his wife holding his hand an a good friend right besides him. within 30 minutes after his death their house was swarmed with relatives and friends, i know because I made it over there while many of them were there. they were given two weeks in which to say “good-bye”, tell old stories, and comfort each other by remembering tommy’s life. while i don’t really want to die as young as tommy did (he was in his late fifties) i do think that if you have to go that�s the way to go.

of course, his death is much easier for them to handle because they know it’s not the end of the road. i’ve been around the deaths of enough non-believers to know that pain and frustration. the worry about what’s next. i’ve been asked “where is he” and all i�ve been able to say is that those who trust JESUS CHRIST as their LORD are with HIM. of course, in those situations i was fairly sure that JESUS was not the deceased LORD, but i wasn�t going to tell them that. I just stated the facts and let them take care of the rest. i hate funerals like that. of course, tommy’s will be different. i know where he stands and he stands with JESUS.

scripture says . . .

Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord�s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

why is it that there are always plenty of good reasons to buy something before you buy it and then once you have paid good money for the item and walked out of the store all those reasons disappear?

this morning i had to go to that most hallowed store “best buy” to purchase some minidisks for recording the view on wednesday nights. while i was there i decided i would look for a usb drive. now for the non-computer literate in the audience a usb drive is a 2 to 3 inch long device that you plug into your computer, transfer files to, and then use the drive to take those files to another computer. i actually have a need for one of these devices. while i was looking at the simple, cheap 128 megabyte usb drives my eye caught the fancy packaging of a creative labs nomad mp3 player/usb drive. this device is a godsend that will transform the world. it slices, dices, and will start your car on cold mornings so that it will be warm and toasty for you when you get into it. actually it is just a usb drive that will play mp3 files into headphones as well as transfer files from one computer to the next. oh yeah, there is one more thing that the nomad does that a simple usb drive doesn’t . . . it costs the buyer a lot more money to purchase.

anyhow, the packaging on the nomad was bright and cheery while the usb drive’s box was gray. the box of the nomad made great promises of how the nomad would not only play my mp3 files but would also change my life. the usb drive box just said it would hold 128 megabytes of info. the nomad’s package had a really cool looking guy on the cover, whose image shouted out to me “if you have a nomad you will be spiffy!” (and i want to be “spiffy”) the usb drive�s box said “pny” (who would name their company “pny”?).

suddenly the cost of the nomad didn’t matter anymore. i was convinced that the nomad would change all that i do at church, transform my family life, and maybe even fix the clicking cv joints on my 1993 mazda protege. i would be multimedia enhanced. no longer would i simply transfer files from one computer to another. no, i would do it with a soundtrack playing in the background. youth would look at me and want to follow JESUS all because i have a nomad. this was a “must have” device and i was a “gonna get it” buyer.

of course, all the reasons disappeared after i walked out the front door of the store. now i’m simply convinced that i paid too much u.s. currency for a usb drive with a fancy case and earphones that get all tangled up. i wonder how stores do that to people? it convinces me that we live in a society that is sick with consumerism and that i need to struggle against the sickness within my own life. pardon me now, i’ve got to untangle the earphones again.

sunday morning bright and early i was driving to church to get ready for the our normal sunday services. i took my usual route, which brings me to the stop of confederate and tiger bend. i had to stay there for a little while because surprisingly the traffic was actually bad at 7:20 a.m. while i was waiting there i saw a blur out of the corner of my right eye. before i could see what the movement of color was i heard a loud, metalic boink and realized that the front passenger side door of the mazda had just been hit by something about the size of a baseball. i pulled up my emergency brake and bent over the center console to see what had hit my car. on the side of the road beside my protege i saw an adult dove drunk from the impact of it’s flight into my auto. it stood there dazed and wobblely but apparently not permanently harmed from the incident.

the weird thing is that he hit my bright red door, not the window. i’ve seen birds fly into windows before. their little brains can’t comprehend that there might be something hard in the clear space of a window frame. i’ve also seen birds fly into moving cars, mistakenly thinking that the space were they were flying would remain empty of other objects. this bird however flew into the door of my bright, red, stopped car. there’s no way it could have thought there was nothing there and i didn’t drive into it. i looked all around and i couldn’t find anything that might have been chasing the bird and caused it to mistakenly fly into a stopped vehicle. so the only theories i can come up with for this happening are:

1. this dove was a weird genetic cross between a bull and a dove. this would result in a dove that likes to ram it�s head into things and is enraged by the color red. thus charging my car.

2. this dove was blind. it probably flew around with a small cane trying to detect what was in front of it. it merely got going to fast and couldn�t stop when it found my vehicle with it’s cane.

3. this dove hates foreign cars. it’s probably been charging into every mazda, honda, and toyota it can find.

4. the dove made some bad financial decisions on wall street, lost everything on wall street, and was trying to end it’s life. a permanent solution to very temporary problems. not a good choice, but then again neither is speeding when you are blind.

5. this dove is just plain stupid and will probably be cat food before the week is finished.

unfortunately i didn’t think to stop and do tests on the punch drunk bird. if i had i probably could have narrowed these theories down to the correct one.

i love chili dogs. there is simply nothing as good as a greasy chili dog. in fact they taste so good that it seems impossible for them to actually be bad for me.

this is the sad part about living in baton rouge (a town that i love living in). baton rouge has some of the best food in the world, except for a really good chili dog. a good chili dog usually comes from a dive, hole in the wall, failed health inspection type of restaurant. now there are several places around town, but they all seem to serve seafood or cajun food. you would think that some local business would realize that we don’t have a chili dog worth diddly squat and then jump on it. nope. it just doesn’t seem to happen. i would set up such a restaurant but i suffer form a distinct fear or failure and bankruptcy. i fear that starting such a restaurant would ultimately lead towards my kids have to beg on the street. that’s why i just sit here and type about how there aren’t any good chili dogs in town. i find complaining much easier to do than actually trying to correct a problem.