Hobbs, Day 2
Wow. This picture has not been altered, nor have the names in this article been changed to protect the innocent. Sam and my twin nephews captured this runaway tumbleweed in the prairie beside Carolyn’s folks’ house.
Found a nice coffee shop at Hastings yesterday to read and study and answered the phones at Hunter Plumbing yesterday afternoon for Caro’s mom so she could go home and spend time with the plethora of grandkids at the house. Of course, that meant I wasn’t at the house with the plethora of grandchildren. Hmmmm.
This a.m., I’m at Pacific Rim, another nice coffee shop that also has Wifi, but it’s playing the most annoying techno-vomit music I’ve ever heard. I’ve gotten to listen to the young guy behind the counter complain about the owners under his breath to all the regulars who come in. Joy.
On the other hand, things are great here. We’re doing Christmas tonight, and it should be lots of fun watching the kids shred packages while the adults betray each other playing Dirty Santa. Each year is a steady reminder of aging. I remember when Carolyn and I were only dating, and everyone in Hobbs regarded me with wonder and amazement. Now my kids are the oldest grandkids, and there are no teenagers running around anymore. All but Carolyn’s 22 year-old brother have gotten married and had their own kids. A new generation is running around. In fact, Jeff (Caro’s brother) was younger than our son Sam is now when I first started coming to New Mexico… I’m old. Sniff.
Here’s a thought I’m meditating on after reading Matthew 7 this a.m. What in the world was Jesus talking about when He told people,
“Do not give dogs what is sacred;
do not throw your pearls to pigs.
If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.”
Sound off in the comments about your take on this.
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Update on the James ossuary
For many of you in tune and in tech, this will be old news. However, for others of you, it will be new or an update. Were you aware that the burial box that was found in Israel in 2002 and declared to be James’ ossuary is still being debated as to its authenticity?
There is an excellent article detailing the ongoing saga at Wikipedia. However, as I read it, I began to come to some conclusions about the Israeli Antiquities Authority (who have now claimed it as a modern forgery). Primary among my thoughts is simply this: why would modern Jewish authorities be any different from ancient Jewish leaders? They simply cannot acknowledge the existence and reality of Jesus. Therefore, they must claim the ossuary as a fake.
On the other hand, it may indeed be a forgery. However, something smells fishy in the whole thing. There are a host of other experts aligned on the side of its authenticity. Yet the IAA apparently continues to parade its own line of experts that defend its position.
What in the world brought me to this story at this time? Well, I’m reading Elders and Leaders, and there is a footnote in it related to the ossuary, so my curiosity was provoked, and I had to do a quick Google on it.
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Arriving in Hobbs
We arrived in Hobbs today and celebrated Carolyn and my birthdays with her family. Hers is the 24th, and mine is January 5. Before the sun set, I took my twin five year-old nephews and Sam “hunting” in the prairie located out back.
During supper, we were talking about “church,” and Carolyn’s folks related that their church, Taylor Memorial Baptist, had just undergone an extensive renovation. As part of the renovation, their hymnals were removed. Sam perked up from his table, and in mid-bite said, “What’s a hymnal?”
Suffice it to say that he has little to no remembrance of his time in a traditional church. Times are a’changin.’
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On the road again
Just can’t wait to get on the road again
The life I love is making music with my friends
Oh, I can’t wait to get on the road again.
We’re at a LaQuinta in Weatherford, Texas tonight, heading to Hobbs, New Mexico to have Christmas with Caro’s folks. We stopped in Texarkana to eat at Chili’s, and then Caro took over the driving responsibilities. Thank goodness there were no EMP blasts anywhere between there and Dallas, or the kids would have been at a loss. Sam played with his PSP; Adelyn watched movies and listened to music on her iPod nano; Caro had my iPod connected to her cranium. Me, I was engrossed in George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords.
I hope to be able to post some pics and updates from the flatlands. More later!
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Do computers hold their value?
Well, some Macs do… Read to believe. (By the way, I have a Mac SE with a carrying case, for sale for $25,000…)
Pictures need to be seen to be believed; the original box and all manuals were included in this auction. This early 1980s 1mhz Apple II+ originally sold for $1,200. Adjusted for inflation that would be $3,000 today meaning that over the last 25 years despite being outpaced several thousand times in mhz you’d have only lost 50% of your investment.
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Oooo. Things on my 2007 Christmas list…
Not that I have any hope of getting this for next Christmas, but it’s just so stinking cool… Read about it by clicking the image.
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Merry Christmas!
This is what happens with a camera and a family waiting on their order at Sonic on Christmas Eve eve.
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Sad state of southern rural politics
I’m going to refrain from getting into the details of why I’m posting this, but you could probably surmise it from reading the entry here. It’s become more and more depressingly clear that in our small, rural south Arkansas town, political offices are to be had without much effort. For example, in our last election, only 1400 folks voted out of about 10,000 for mayor (and there were three people running); that’s 14%. Terrible. The incumbent was defeated for no good reason. The challengers in the race really had no good reason even to run.
I tried to interview the mayor-elect for MonticelloLive a while back, and he refused an interview (after initially telling me he would grant me one), saying that he was still “learning and growing.” Hmmm. He won the election in May, but as of October, he still had no ideas as to what his plans would be once he took office. How does one win election on a platform of complaints? Oh, sorry. We have only to look to our national politics to see duplication of results.
Anyway, Dilbert creator Scott Adams says it best in this cartoon:
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Did you get wet enough?
Wade Burleson has stirred up the waters again in an excellent post seeking to defend a biblical view of baptism from encroachments upon it by leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention. SBC churches need to wake up and reign in or replace these leaders that are very near imposing a Landmark-ish set of inflexible and unbiblical rules and procedures upon the denomination and its churches.
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25 most influential churches
It’s a stellar list, I’ll have to admit. However, how do you really measure influence? These churches are either huge or have been hyped. Most of them are strong churches. However, do you ever notice that it’s always churches in urban areas that our church growth-ers enjoy pointing to as “model” churches? Me, I think there is some dynamic ministry being done in rural areas by churches that refuse to succumb to “the way we were” and simply urge people toward “the way.” Of course, I’m not biased in the least. ;)
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Our little runaway
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Caro picked up the kids the other day, and apparently on the way home, Adelyn got crosswise with the family. She announced that she was “tired of being small,” entered the house, packed her suitcases and raincoat, and announced that she was running away.
Carolyn, being the insensitive parent, laughed hysterically from her study window as she watched Adelyn head down the driveway with her luggage. I was the the thoughtful parent and ran to get my trusty Treo to record a few moments from Sam’s bedroom window. You’ll notice that she got as far as the end of the driveway before she stopped, frozen in thought. I’m sure there was a holy hush outside as creation stilled itself for this solemn second-grader in her flight for freedom. Inside the house, however, Carolyn cackled like a banshee, and the Treo clicked away. After a few moments, she headed south. Down the side of the house to the patio. It was there that she set down her things, pulled a picture of the family that she’d packed in her luggage and placed it carefully on the patio table. Our cat, Smokey, dutifully guarded the thoughts of the-one-who-would-be-big. |
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Smart by association
So, my high school buddy, Mark, left a comment on one of the high school blog entries. We haven’t kept up. Shame on me. However, as I traced him down through his website, it dawns on me that he’s a lot smarter than I am. For one thing, he can program for the Mac. For another, he’s teaching in Frankfurt, Germany in April and people are paying a lot of money to be trained by him. Me? I’ll probably be sipping a sub-$1 coffee at Dad’s Place waiting for my ship to come in.
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90 second religion history lesson
Now if this isn’t the most education you’ve had in the shortest amount of time, I don’t know what is. Thanks to MapsofWar.
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MacHeist Is a Bundle of Joy
I got more than 10 excellent Mac programs for under $50 and donated to charity. Cool.
read more | digg story
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From thanks to Macs…
I was able to help out a friend and a great ministry over the weekend by loaning them my iBook G4 for some video editing. It’s a rather sneaky thing to do… loan someone a Mac. It produces eternal dissatisfaction in an abrupt way with the unenlightened computer existence they’ve been living heretofore.
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Buy Macbooks, iPods from Notes!
Just in time for the holidays and in stock!!!
I’ve still got four Macbooks and a number of iPod nano’s available in just about every color imaginable. As the days count down to Christmas, spread the word that I’ve got them here for cheaper than folks can run to Wal-Mart and get them (if any remain in stock!)
I’d be interested in hearing of your most coveted gadget-related want…
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Help us, please.
For reasons beyond my understanding, it appears that the University of Arkansas has offered Houston Nutt a contract extension through 2012. Oboy. Six more years of astonishing mediocrity.
ESPN.com reports that Nutt earns a base salary of $329,644 and has a total compensation package of $1.05 million annually — not including $412,000 per year in tax-deferred annuities that will be paid at a later date.
Nutt is just barely 60% in his nine seasons at Arkansas, 67-43. I like Houston as a person, but I think he needs to move on to other pastures so that Fayetteville can pursue excellence. Unfortunately, Arkansans just seem content to settle.
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Keys please
Many of you have asked, “Have you found your keys yet?”
For those of you who didn’t know. They were gone. Vanished. De nada.
It happened last Monday, a week ago, after I came home from speaking to a media class at Monticello Middle School. I naively walked into the house, expecting to find furniture and beds in the same spots as they were when I had left an hour before. Silly me. I forgot that I was married to Mrs. U-Haul. You see, Carolyn cannot coexist in a home if the furnishings are not rearranged, say, every other week.
I walked into chaos in our bedroom. It looked like someone had set off a small explosive under our bed which had launched it about 5 feet into the middle of the room. Stuff was everywhere.
“Uh, what are you doing?” I asked fearfully, cold sweat beading up on my brow.
“Rearranging,” my bride smiled blissfully back at me.
“Oh,” I said.
And that was that. I was soon immersed (and I might add that I actually began to enjoy myself, but I am secure in my masculinity) in rearranging our entire bedroom. In the middle of of the mess, Carolyn pointed out with as much exaggeration as she could the toenail collection that had accumulated on the floor where the bed used to be. It was about 4-5 inches high.
“What is THAT?!” she demanded.
“Oh, that? It’s a, uh, collection of toenails. After I pick ‘em, I just drop them behind the bedrail. I figured that, uh, if we ever needed DNA samples for me… in case I get lost in the wilds or am kidnapped, that you will, uh, have something to give to forensics.”
Apparently that was NOT the appropriate answer. It was a rather fascinating sight. You could almost assemble an entire human with them. Ok, I digress.
Before all was said and done, we had moved our TV from one side of the room to the other. Therein lay the new challenge: how to get the cable wire across the room. After mulling it over, I decided to put my new, handy-dandy skills acquired from master installer Rick Hales to work and run new wire under the house.
Let me fast forward. The hours it took to drill holes, connect the wires, and put new ends on some of them, are inconsequential to how sore I was upon my exit from underneath the house. I had pulled my body the length of 14 football fields, it felt like, on my elbows. I was dirty, dusty, snotty, and exhausted. But I was successful. We had satellite TV signal where I wanted it.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized that I didn’t have my keys where I wanted them. For a long time (all day), I figured that they had been misplaced in the amazing mess of our Total Bedroom Makeover. In fact, I rather subtly suggested to Carolyn that she probably misplaced the keys in all her moving, and therefore, she needed to help her sweet husband find them. This innocent suggestion became more and more desperately repeated (in a wonderfully kind sort of way) over the course of the day. Finally, Carolyn blew up and said, “I HAVE NOT SEEN OR MOVED YOUR KEYS!!” I have no idea why she would have responded that way, but she did. Please pray for her anger management.
Anyway, let’s fast forward again. It’s now Wednesday afternoon. Two days since the TBM. Still no keys. I finally concluded that there was only one place they could be. Under the house. Why in the heck I had taken them under there, I have no idea. However, when Sam got home from school, I coaxed his nine-year old self under the house with me for another marathon crawl. And crawl we did. Everywhere we had been on Monday, we retraced. No keys to be found. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I have only one key to my Exterra, and I wasn’t quite ready for it to be simply an inert adornment in our carport.
Sam and I shed our muddy clothes (it rained Wednesday, so the dirt under the house was damp/muddy) on the back porch. As we reentered, I began my gentle suggestion routine to Carolyn again. Was she SURE, bless her heart, that she hadn’t seen my keys?! It’s quite amazing how much a person can communicate nonverbally, I might add.
In total defeat and despair, I began to retrace my search route throughout the house for the umpteenth time. After a few moments, I noticed something black peeking out underneath my dresser, between it and the wall. I had filed it away mentally as a cockroach in previous searches. Terminix had sprayed last week, and we were finding a few dead roaches here and there (I actually think that Mr. James just leaves those things lying around. My theory is that he has a bag full of roach corpses and after spraying, he plants a few around your house to make you think that the spray is working.)
As I stooped to kick the corpse out to where it could be disposed of, I experienced elation and frustration simultaneously. You guessed it. The black something was the end of my key ring sticking out from under the dresser. Unfortunately, Carolyn was standing right there at the moment of discovery, so there was no possible way of planting them somewhere and producing them later to prove that she had absent-mindedly moved them (not that I would dream of doing such a thing). My elation had no where to go. As I stood with the keys in my hand, there she was. I could not rejoice because she was so prompt with her response.
“Oh, are those your keys? Under YOUR dresser?”
“Uh, yes. Why yes they are,” I replied quietly.
She simply laughed and walked back into her office/study.
So next time you innocently ask me about my keys, please don’t be surprised when I stab you with them.
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Leave a comment, yo!
I love Shawn’s attempt to provoke more comments:
If my 98 year old grandfather – who just got email 6 months ago – can leave a meaningful comment on this blog, then any of you can.
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About
Notes from the Trail
The Personal Blog of Jeff Noble
Info: From the misty hills of Virginia, "Notes from the Trail" seeks to encourage you on your journey. Written by a graphic designer-pastor, this blog is a blend of humor, insight, and faith discovery.
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