Friday, May 16, 2008

Fireplaces and Old Time Radio

My wife burned some Cd's for our trip to my Mom's place which takes about 3.5 hours. She chose some old time radio shows like a Family Home Theater production of Tom Sawyer. If you are familiar at all with these shows you know that most of them have been re-recorded off the old vinyl recordings from long ago. As we listened to the closing of the second story my 6 year old son piped up from the back seat with a question. He asked us why all these old shows had to have a fireplace in them and I immediately started to laugh because I knew exactly what he was talking about. Being a child of the new millennium he has never heard a CD that has those old pops and hisses from the days of vinyl. I love how his ears heard all that 'noise'.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Is It Today Already??

Sorry about yesterday. I was going to do a quick post before our Interloc meeting, but there were emails regarding the meeting that needed to be read first. Oh well, still not bad for a first effort.
It may be for the best anyway because I had the morning from hell yesterday. I just could not get my head into what I was doing and kept making silly errors. At least most of them were silly and only required a 45 minute round trip to rectify. Those were things like forgetting simple supplies which even now I cannot recall. I had to run all the way from McKinley Landing to Home Hardware in town and then I think the next trip was to the shop out near the airport. I finally went to put in the very last thing which was a toilet paper holder and instead of finding a stud and anchoring the thing solidly I used the toggle bolt that came with it. That was a seriously dumb move because as I went to attach the paper holder to the fitting on the wall, which required a diagonal push down and towards the wall, I pushed a little too hard and ripped the thing right out of the wall; toggle bolt and all.
Today I returned to the scene and did the appropriate patching and painting so that I could reattach the holder on the stud which was literally 1" away from where I attached it the first time. The patch looked awesome and my confidence in my abilities as a renovator where restored. Maybe I am a professional after all.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Choices

I'm back after a long absence from the blogger realm, but since I have been playing a lot of Scrabbulous I hope that I will be somewhat wordier. I have also touched on someone else's blog realm which is a chronicle of many journeys and is aptly titled Journeymama. This also sparked a desire to renter this place and hope that the few fans I have will forgive me.
The main reason that I have avoided this has been the time it takes and the effort to blow on the last dying embers of thought at the end of my day. I typically spend a large portion of this time in what Mark Gungor refers to as the nothing box, a place of male tranquility and the birthplace of things like "D'oh". Mmmmm, nothing box. From there it is hard to even access someone else's blog so I apologize for my lack of readership.
I am finding that much of my online and relational energy is spent talking about and discussing God stuff, not a bad thing in itself, and very little is given to day to day personal details or windows into my world. I'm not sure why I avoid this. I used to think that it was all just pointless, shallow drivel that people participated in to avoid the really deep stuff. This is where some of you may be seeing just how thick I can be. It has eluded me that these are curtainless windows into people's lives. Just like windows on a house they don't show everything inside the home because that is not what they are designed to do. They allow light to penetrate from without and give glimpses to those outside, not full access. In fact full access windows are usually on the more private ares of the home where only those who are invited will be able to see in; and they are usually looking back in after having stepped out.
This crashed in on me when I recently recieved an email from a friend overseas who just rambled on about the day to day stuff and I found it to be such a pleasant and pleasing experience. There was no real new information or big news that she was sharing and yet it all felt so important for the simple reason that it was real; real thoughts, real feelings and real experiences. It tapped me into what I have been missing for so long. It helped me realize that I have been peering out of my curtained windows into everyone else's homes like some cerebral peeping tom and not allowing anyone to see into me. That's sad. That's yesterday. That's gonna change.
I titled this post "Choices" because of what I was going to write and I think I will leave it that way even though I didn't write what I was going to because this is still all about choices. I choose to allow you in. I choose to let you know you are important to me. I choose to let you look past the adornment of intellectualism and see into the mundanity of who I am. You may choose to walk on by and look into some other house, but at least I give you the choice.
See you tomorrow.
P.S. Happy Mother's day