5th Service

Last night, while my family and I were chilling at the house, my Arkansan bro and his wife were in MN at LWCC's 5th Service. Nate had the mic for the first half of the service, Jim had the second half.

Thanks to the Internet, we experienced 5th Service live in our living room last night. I have a HDMI cable running from the A/V station to the TV, which allowed us to watch it on the big screen.

It was awesome.

I expect to attend 5th Service more often; in my living room of course.

I understand some of my fellow Arkys watched last night too??

________________________________

Yankee

If you follow me on Twitter, you might know that last night at about 9:00, there were some minor explosions occurring in my neck of the woods. More precisely, my next door neighbor's 14 year old son and his friend were shooting off bottle rockets. Also at this exact moment, Jeremiah was trying to fall asleep.

I tweeted: "I've got kids next door shooting off bottle rockets. It's 9pm. Should I be 'that neighbor'?"
My Southern friend texted me: "YES!!!!!!! OWN those kids!! Take one for the North, man.
My super nice sister wrote: No don't be that neighbor. Remember when you were that age?
I tweeted once more: I'm about to go Yankee on these kids, lol. More like mwahahahaha lol.

I took both of their advice and immediately jolted to the garage to dig through one of my storage bins; you know, the one with bottle rockets in it?


I grabbed a pack of 12, my wind-proof lighter, and quietly sneaked outside. By the time my wife came outside, I had fired about 8 of those rockets over the fence and into the sky. It was awesome, but somewhat disappointing.

To be honest, deep down I was hoping they would fire some rockets back at me. It would have been a Civil War reenactment, except afterward I was planning to share Jesus with them. Unfortunately they had already gone inside by the time I was firing back.

Next time... :)

JJ Prays

This is a follow up post to the one I blogged this morning. Tonight when Sheena was putting this little man down to sleep, she led him in a sweet little prayer. Listen, and smile, my friends.

JJ Update

It's been a while since I posted the latest and the greatest of the J-ster. His vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds. If you tell him to say something, he will (at least attempt to). He repeats our prayers before meals, and the bedtime prayers too. It's so much fun to lie down with him and pray with him because he repeats it all and sometimes turns a three syllable word into six! A couple of other things:
- he knows mommy has a baby inside of her, but sometimes points north of where the baby really is.
- he's getting good at communicating what he wants, which is a wonderful thing
- enjoys sleeping with his monkey and two puppies (stuffed)
- if you ask him the color of something, there's about a 90% chance he will say green
- he now sleeps in a queen size bed (this will double as a guest room since our house is now getting fuller). No more crib!
- when laying down for bed, he will ask Mom "Bible?" or "morning?" which tells her which song to sing to him. The cute thing is that she will begin to sing his request and then he will change it "no Bible, morning" or vice versa.

Here he is modeling for Ralph Lauren :



And this was taken by Sheen after he insisted on making his own car out of play dough. This was his car that he made!

4/8/2009

(Long post ahead)
Pastor Susan preached a compelling message on April 8th on the subject of diligence. I took it to heart, and have been striving to be that at work; some days more than others. Diligence is a broad subject, and so is work ethic, but allow me to briefly combine the two for my case in point today.

My dad has taught his offspring very well on how to have a strong work ethic. I distinctly remember this lesson on painting jobs. When I moved to Arkansas and worked for my brother’s painting company, he also employed a strong work ethic. In the eight months I worked for him, I was 100% convinced that we were the best painters, but more importantly the hardest working painters in this state. He’s a “pusher” and because of it, successful in his field (amongst many other reasons, of course).

I work a white collar job. I could show up at work, mosey around like a turtle, put forth 20% effort and still keep my job. I know this, because I see it here often. Well, maybe 50% effort, bit still. If Nate had an employee that did not exert at least 90% effort every day, he’d fire their tail. All this to say: I am employing my painting work ethic in the office. Here’s what this means (Nate will appreciate this):

- Setting goals for the day before I get to the “job”
- Lining up tasks in order of importance and completing them in the most efficient fashion
- Constantly thinking about ‘what’s next’ and ‘what’s the fastest way to complete it’
- Working for the best interest of the company, looking for ways to make it more successful
- Not wasting any minutes of the day on stupid stuff. Although, there’s always room for fun and a little play :)

In summary, don’t be a slacker. This is easy to do if I am emotionally engaged in my work/career. If I am doing what I love, it comes naturally. But I’m not there yet. So I need to constantly remind myself of these things and push through it until I do get there.

Anyone else in this sailboat with me?

Testosterone Times 20

"The Well" put on an all guys wiffle ball event tonight. My buddy LP hosted the game and food at his house in his backyard, a perfect setup for some ball. I think we had around 18 men show up, which was ideal.

But when the sun quit shining, and the field grew dim, the game had to end. My team lost (barely) in the bottom of the 9th. This is when my genius brother says "let's go play some kickball..." (considering the local intermediate school track is lit)

we all agreed, piled into our vehicles, and jetted to the school. After all, my team needed to redeem ourselves of the loss, so of course we played same teams, and of course, we won. Follow that up with some full field sprint races, and you have yourself a guys event.

The end.
Good night.

Your First Man Job

Jeremiah,
Tonight you took a major step towards manhood, not by force, but by choice. You've grown up a lot in the last couple of months. Tonight, you chose to borrow my drill and my Phillips head screwdriver in an effort to help me tighten up the chair cushion. You got down n dirty, letting nothing hold you back, not even that sawdust the spilled onto the carpet after tapping a few new holes.


Best of all, when the job was complete and the sawdust vacuumed, you took it to another level; checking your work over for the next ten minutes.

Well, that's what it looked like anyways.. and that's what I told Mom. After all, brownie points were earned for the fixing of the chair alone, but there's no telling how many more points were earned by triple checking your work.

You little stud muffin.

Friday Devo

In the ongoing effort of iron sharpening iron, my colleagues (more like really good guy work friends) and I decided to start doing devotions. I felt like sharing today's from Shaylon:

1 Peter 5:8
"The great deceiver, more often than not, works under cover of darkness. As a skilled and experienced hunter, he patiently stalks his prey, invisible to them. His night vision is acute, his senses much sharper than ours. He sees us when we do not even know he is there!"
We as humans depend so much on our five senses, that we forget the things that exist beyond them. Daily we follow on our routines, from the morning rush to work, to the daily grind with co-workers, and our long-awaited freedom afterwards. All the while, creatures unseen lurk under our noses. They are not hiding for fear, but are watching perversely, and relishing with every mistake that we make.
Here Peter reminds us that we share this world with Spiritual things; and that every second is spent on a battlefield. How then can we be so conscious of germs, air, and time, yet spend so little effort worrying about what looks over our shoulders.
Do not forget the armor of God. You may be focused on getting to work on time, but Satan is focused on devouring your soul. Are you angry with a neighbor? Are you hurtful towards a stranger? Reevaluate your daily life, and remember that if you are not fighting for God, then you must be against him.

HSM

Apparently people of all ages want to be like the stars from High School Musical the movies, because when I was crusin to work yesterday I saw this dude with a custom license plate.


Click pic to see FABULUS
Seriously?

Camera with built in projector

Have you ever passed your digital camera around in order to show your friends or family some of your latest pictures or videos? Or maybe you tried to find that cumbersome cable that connects your camera to your tv? Well check this out. It's a camera that has a built in projector. It projects the images and videos that you took onto a wall, measuring as big as 40 inches. I'd like to think that this new technology will inspire other camera makers so that the competition gets so intense, that the prices drop dramatically, and of course the quality improves the same, although I'm not sure if I would buy one.

I would, however, buy a phone with this technology built into it, say for example this Samsung:

Saturday Recap

I had J all to myself on Saturday. It was cool too because he wanted to go golfing. I met up with a couple of friends and played nine holes. Random side note: golf sure beats video games.


Later that day we went to the park.


And wouldn't you know it, after the park Jeremiah wanted to go play golf again, so we were able to play 18 altogether. He would sit in the cart, hand me clubs, cheer for me, and tell me "job daddy" when I would get back in the cart after my shot. It was a good day.

It's y'all not ya'll nor yall

If you follow me on twitter, you know that I am putting a southern spin on my tweets, typically ending them in ya'll. But after a quick google to research that term, I realize I've been spelling it incorrectly. The proper way of spelling yall is: y'all, which officially abbreviates you all.

So the word works, and makes sense, just not when you direct it to a single person, y'all. :P

Life Size Robot

It's things like this that make me think into the future and wonder/guess what will be next. Check out this video of a life size robot that has incredible balance, and can even run. "He" is so realistic it is hard to believe he's not a real person.