Ran across this picture at random... Sometimes we change the daily schedule that is out on the church whiteboard. The informal rule is that you cannot add ink, you can only take away. Unfortunately, I think this one had a bit of ink added to change the "evangelism callers"--besides that, it is kosher. This has the best change ever, though from: "9:45 am - Annual meeting - festivities for children down in preschool area."

Hey, it is kind of funny in that childish kind of way, right? You know you would have done it too.

Progress in BG (taken this weekend in the downtown).

I was in BG to see another grad student who I care about leave. It is really sad to see person after person leave. It is inevitable, I guess...but it still makes me feel uncomfortable to be growing up so much. A year ago I was a grad student who had a lot of barbeques. Now I am employed, and have to count the minutes in the day, am looking to buy a house and have a baby on the way. I can only imagine that I will get gray hair starting next year. Actually, I am determined to not start acting old because it would be the easy thing to do. If you have any tips, let me know. That time machine I ordered off the internet didn't work--I was trying to go back to 1982.

I saw Colin R Clark for a bit today. He was in town for a family wedding and had a free morning (though there was not too much free time besides that). I felt a little bad because I was dead-feeling this morning, and should have been in a more springy mood when seeing a friend after long time of not seeing him. Anyway, it was cool to see Colin and I enjoyed hearing about his travels to Italy as well as just soaking in the CRC style for a bit. That whole conversation (and picture show) really made me want to go to see Europe.

In other news, I set the zoarlutheran.com site up to a different server and it appears to be working well (we will be sure once the DNS propogates). Now we have to figure out how to use 5 gigs of storage and 10gigs of daily transfer. I figure we could put some Zoar music up to start with. The ultimate goal is to have a site wherein the congregation can manage its own content (i.e. a dynamic site with boards, calendars, and such). I am still looking for a good mambo-like content management service (CMS) that would make this easy on me and the site users/administrators--if you know of a good CMS, let me know.

Colin gave me some good advice on organizing my photos, and I just redid the categorization I had used for them. Now if only there were descriptive labels on each of the photos so I could find what I want. I have 7,139 files in my photo directory right now, so this might take a while...

Questions of the week:
Do you take primarily film or digital pictures?
If digital, how do you organize them?
Also, about how many pictures have you taken in your lifetime?
(Daryl, I am especially curious about your responses, of course.)

The fetus got its first books from Grandma/pa Fillian, who are visiting this weekend.

It was weird to see the books that I had not seen since I was a kid and had read them personally. Part of me wants to say "come on, haven't words changed AT ALL in all those years?" Then I realize they haven't. At least not enough to want to teach kids the new ones. Anyway, we have been hanging out with Anne's parents and brother--we hadn't seen ma and ma Fillian since X-mas break. They are really excited to see that they will have a grandkid. I have no idea how they will survive being in the Atlanta area knowing that they have a grandkid up here.

I like this "getting to know people in interesting ways through blog comments" business. It is nice to know that I am about average for sort of knowing juggling and algebra, but not really being great at either. My next question to blog people is more of a meta-question/solication:
Are there any blog questions in particular that you would like for me to ask?

Casey under his car--a week and a few days ago. We replaced his radiator/hoses as well as trying to get the stupid exhaust to fit together properly.

I juggled three balls yesterday. I had never done that before. It was a weird feeling. Unfortunately, I learned with heavy bocce balls (which hurt your clavicle when they hit each other and bounce toward you)--and I only did it for two rotations worth--but I think it counts as having juggled.

Silly Saranga. He got Anne and me thinking about algebra. Anne has been going onto algebra websites and doing problems in her spare time. Today I actually had a problem at work that I had to express algebraically to make sense of...and, darn it, algebra worked! It was confusing, but it worked. Way to go, Sal. Keep spreading the constants and variables.

Quick survey (because I am curious if I am alone on these things):
1. Can you juggle?
2. Can you do algebra?

We played dominoes last night and it rocked. Too bad it took something like 4 hours to play a full 13-set game. Saranga brought over some dominoes because he had seen them in recent popular music videos (apparently it is trendy for "gangsta' rappers" to play dominoes). The problem is that I don't think that gangsta rappers would have the time or patience to finish a full game. Or maybe they don't play "Tijuana boxcars" (this is the only variation we played). Anyway, it was cool having Saranga over (as usual) and to see Nate again (as unusual).

Some big news here: Colin R Clark will be coming to town June 22-26. He is a dorm friend (though most of our common "dorm" friends have since left the area) from the undergrad BG days. He has since been an Italian and Northwestern US artist who specializes in printmaking and being cool. Plans, anyone (in addition to disc golfing, of course)?

Vehicle: $50. Parking for a weekend: $1000. 10 cases of Bud light: $80. Not remembering your NASCAR infield experience: priceless.

This is a scene from the "infield" at Charlotte. The stock cars were not the engineering feats...the things that fans drove to camp in/watch the race were! I saw these sorts of platforms on quite a few retired schoolbusses, full-size vans, and even on an old UPS truck.

Things are good. Work is getting to be much more fun (the puzzles I am asked to solve are getting to be more fun). Anyway, I wish there were more I could write. I am not sure what it would be, though. BTW, Saranga added that last line to my last post. But you had already guessed that, right?

This is the chart that Anne got from the midwife visit. The due date is January 11 and everything went really well. Isn't this thing cool?

I think Casey and I will be doing car stuff tomorrow. Saranga has been teaching us algebra. It rocks the second time through. Mostly because Saranga is so awesome!