When it rains...

So many good pictures of the wedding...man, that was fun.

We had storms last night...we moved about 110 gallons of water from the basement. Luckily, it is all on one wall and it should be really easy to fix due to the pinpointed nature of it. I could hear it coming down the wall on that spot. Several times a crack in the wall was spicketing horizontal water out of it and onto the floor. The place is really messy now. Yuck.

The double-yuck is Zoar. Did you realize that if you work for a non-profit that your employeer does NOT have to pay into unemployment? There is no safety net for you at all. Zoar council is making things difficult. I am not sure why either. They are doing well financially, have just lost or are losing almost half their staff, and they don't HAVE to do this.
Zoar council even went as far as to tell us "you know that health insurance that we were going to continue for your family until the end of next month...we will take it away in 9 days instead." We had to have a sit down meeting about why leaving the family in a state where we were uninsured was unacceptable. They did extend insurance for a month, but apparently you have to fight for everything when it comes to Zoar commitees.
Even though severance is the ONLY form of unemployment we can get, they absolutely will not offer severance for over a month (BTW, this is shorter than my corporate job would have paid, and corporate jobs offer unemployment on top of that) so we are not sure what we are going to do about finances...it sure isn't pretty. I am extremely disappointed that a place that we thought showed love and friendship elects officials who refuse (after many requests) to take care of its own church family. Because this area of employment is not regulated, the council can technically make up whatever they want to, but it surprises me at how they allow themselves to be driven by money to the point of creating a situation that is unreasonable and unjust. I guess this sort of thing happens all of the time--especially at traditional churches. I thought Zoar was bigger and more loving that that, but I guess they value money like most institutions. I keep going back to the fact that they hardly even seem to care about the stability of our family needs, yet they (we, at the time) elected themselves as place that values family.

Then I think "we aren't the first to have this happen." Our Church is built upon the teachings of a rabbi whose Jewish church rejected him. They did so for money, politics, and jealousy. Neither the church nor the Roman government offered a safety net (to put it lightly).

Our lives will go on and our ministries will go on too. We will just have to seek a place that is honest and that has integrity. I think Anne and I will be attending council at any church before we think of getting serious with them. Foundations are important.

Likewise, we will be getting a triple-inspection of the basement walls if we ever move into a new house (no plans yet to do so though).

Wow, this past weekend was fun. I loved the wedding, the people, the surrounding activities, and the great joy that everyone had. It was even fun playing Catchphrase until 2am (or whenever that was).

Things are looking busier and busier all the time. I have a neglected lawn, a dissertation that needs a substantial amount of new material inserted/worked in and my summer projects are not even getting a glance of work. What happened to the idea of lazy summer days? I have every weekend planned out through late July.

Catching up

Sorry for the long gap between the last post and this post. It has been hard to get to the point where I can write.

One issue is that the computer broke. It is sort of fixed, and I am writing this on it. I have to replace my RAID card (again) because it cannot even support a single drive with stability anymore. I am looking in to some different ways to do backup because this one doesn't seem ready for my computer yet. If the interface were better and the card were more stable then it would make sense. Anyway, I am single-driving it now.

We went to the zoo. It was fantastic. Joel loved the aquarium. Right about when we took this photo I thought that he was about to jump through the glass he was so happy and excited.

Party. It was nice seeing everyone who was around.

Church. We are still transitioning out of Zoar. We went to Adat Adonnai because it had the makings of being really cool. We are interested in a church that bucks tradition in order to better understand what we believe and how we are to live. Adat is a "messianic synagogue," but turned out to be a charismatic church (with all of the stereotypical charismatic fixings) that was led by a pastor who grew up Jewish and decided to use the heritage as a talking point...a lot. They also use a Jewish/translated Jewish litergy for SOME of the service. It makes more sense than the litergy we used at Zoar, though it was a little odd feeling at first. It was actually a socially supporting (and very accepting) group and they were very much into studying scripture and sharing their lives. Unfortunately, I don't think it clicked right with us. That, and it is really far away to attend with any regularity. I would like to attend Jewish festivals there though.

Illin'. Joel got the cocksackie virus (not a big deal--almost all kids get it). He was so tired and hungry that he did not let Anne sleep much for about a week. Thus Anne got sick with some sort of flu/fever. I picked up some bits of this too.

I need to get to work. Later.