Movie Night at the Geer's

A couple at my church puts on a free dinner every Wednesday night which I've gone to for a couple years now. Sometimes 40 people pack into their modest sized house, other times 10. Along the way I've come to know the Geer's. First the son, Dan and later the dad, Rich. Both are big movie nuts. I like movies a lot too, which gave us common ground to strike up conversations. Rich also a walking Bible encyclopedia and inevitably winds up getting involved in the most fascinating conversations which I do my best to listen in on.

A few months ago Dan invited me to come over to their place for his recently unveiled Sunday movie night. It didn't take long for him to discover I'd never seen Frankenstein, Dracula or much of anything before the 1970's. Well this had to change!! So for the past few months we've gone on a 50's and older sci-fi/horror marathon featuring a B movie to start out and then a classic to finish things off. We've gone through all the Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man and Invisible Man movies, several old German silent films (fascinating), a bunch of Vincent Price horror films and a generous selection of 50's sci-fi. Sometimes the horror films a bit much and I have trouble sleeping afterwards, but all in all movie night the highlight of my week.

Three weeks ago Dan surprised us with a change in format. Now we are going to start off with two X-Files episodes, with the goal of seeing them all in order (complete with the movie and the Lone Gunman between seasons 5/6 and 8/9 respectively) over the next 2 1/2 to 3 years. I always liked the X-Files, but for various reasons rarely got to watch it, so this a real treat! Since the X-Files episodes are relatively short, we still have time to watch a full length movie before our normal 10P stopping time rolls around.

Of course it not just the movies. The Geer's are great fun to hang out with and make me feel like I'm part of an extended family. I've always thought Dan a cool guy and now I get to hang out with him on a regular basis, ditto for Alex who almost always comes over later in the evening and of course I can't forget Rich, his brother James ... and Carol ...

Dans' mom Carol has a tragic pre-operative accident a few years ago that left her in a vegetative state. Thanks to Rich's tireless efforts, she's improved to where she clearly follows movements in the room, makes noises and can blink in response to questions. Most recently her feet have started to relax a bit. Rich brings Carol from her nursing home most every movie night so she can hang out with the rest of the family. No small feat, as it involves a 30 min. drive each way and loading/unloading her from the full size van donated to the family by several friends. I still marvel when I stop to think about it.

Speaking of marveling, we spend movie night in front of a 50 something inch plasma screen TV. Paying for Carol's care has pretty much wiped out the Geer's financially (believe if or not, you're on your own when something like this happens, the hospital hasn't paid a dime for her post-accident care and her insurance stopping paying when she left the hospital), so you might wonder how did they come up with the money for this? Well, Dan graduated from college a couple years ago. When the family came home from the ceremony guess what they found sitting in the front hallway ... pretty cool.

Almost a year to the day ...

Hi Eric and fellow blog readers,

I know I haven't had much of an online presence, but didn't realize it quite this bad. Almost one year since my last post. Wow. I suppose this it how people feel when they sit down to put together their Christmas letters.

After several years of denial I finally decided to try living the way my body likes to live. I've always had a tendency to get up around 10A and go to bed at around 2A if my schedule didn't force me to a different routine, but it always seemed I should strive for early to bed, early to rise, ... So far the experiment working well, so I'm going to stick with it.

Things in the train world continue to develop. I've come to realize I really like the electronics side of the hobby and am having great fun getting the signals at our club up and running. I'm also helping a friend here in Lansing get his signals working. He hosts something every April called the Annual ProTrak Weekend and I hope to have his signals working in time. Of course unexpected problems are complicating matters, but I think we can work them out.

I spent _way_ too much on train stuff around Christmas time and am still debating what to do about it. I could sell some of it, but I like it; yet I don't really use it that much, since as mentioned above, I spend most of my time on the electronics side.

I haven't had much of a chance to focus on this problem since around Christmas time things at work became crazy busy. It turns out I'm playing a part in helping prepare the building I work in for our role in the Bio-Fuels Initiative, announced earlier this year by the federal government. This the real deal and we need to make several fairly major infrastructure improvements to pave the way for the substantial amounts of new equipment arriving in support of this venture. Some of the work complete, but some other critical projects still in process. I'm hoping towards the middle of April things will start to return to normal.

My church in the process of building a new and badly needed auditorium. I just watched a progress video and see it really coming along. For a while now I've "tele-churched", listening to the sermons on streaming audio and doing my giving via the handy online site they set up a couple years ago. I have mixed feeling about this, as I do participate in a small group of sorts (organized around food and socializing with no formal structure) through which I've made several friends.Yet I still wonder if I'm kidding myself. Most older folks in my life more or less think "I've stopping going to church" and have a look of horror on their face. While friends closer to my age or younger don't see it as a problem and a few even go so far as to say they think what I'm doing pretty cool.

I originally stopping going in person because, while my current church home an awesome place which clearly has a life changing effect on a lot of people, musically it just never clicked for me and I found myself anxiously waiting for things to get around to the message. I also sat alone every week, since I'm in my 40's and most everyone else in their 20's. Lately with things so crazy I really cherish having the time to stay at home and get stuff done.

With my new circle of friends, the sitting alone thing no longer an issue, and my church now has roughly 6 different bands that play on a rotating schedule, so I'm becoming more inclined to give going in person again a try again. Besides the last time I went, Noel's brand new iPhone picked on my Motorola Q and it wants to have a rematch :-) Actually my Q crashed several months ago because I didn't have my memory card setup right and I lost all the cool stuff I'd setup on it, so Noel's phone would still win, at least for now. Did I mention I finally bit the bullet and sprung for one of those cool PDA type phones? Oops ... Well its great, I should have done it sooner.

Folks often ask me how my cat Oreo is doing. In a word, terrific! I've never had a pet before and he's better than I ever imagined. I'll really miss him when the inevitable day comes that nature takes its course, but in the mean time I'm thankful that God brought such a wonderful animal into my life. For the first couple years he always liked to lay along side my leg, but in the last few months he's turned into a lap cat and loves to hop right up if the laptop not in the way.

Oh, I suppose this post wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention Smallville. My friend Dan puts on a movie night every Sunday. For the last several months we've watched 50's sci-fi and old horror flicks. I think I've become Dan's "project" and he's set out to familiarize me with all the old classics and well as a goodly selection of B movies such as Plan 9 from Outer Space. Lately he's taken a new twist and we're aiming to go through all the X-Files episodes over the next few years. We are on episode 4 so far and I'm loving every minute. "Hey, I thought you said something about Smalleville ...", oh ya, right ... Dan's dad and sister love Smalleville. It always sounded a bit hokey to me, but one night after movie night his sister and her fiancee sat down to watch an episode and I became hooked. They have all 6 seasons on DVD and I'm about ready to start on season 4. A lot of things about Clark's character touch me deeply inside and I often find myself in tears. I've thought about things I haven't thought about in a long time. Its painful to watch how Clark often can't bring himself to say things that need to be said and I've realized I often do the same and have aimed to work on this, with some success I might add. I look forward to seeing how the characters develop in season 4.

I see it getting past 2:30A so time to sign off. Till next time, Steve

Finding a Sustainable Course in Life

As I look back on the past 20 years or so I see a trend. I start to get caught up on things I need to do, then something comes up that side tracks me, then I get back on course but starting farther back than where I had left off. As a result I never seem to actually get ahead, but slowly find myself falling farther and farther behind.

I see folks at work like this, their offices stacked from floor to ceiling with papers, journals, etc. Each time you walk by the piles slowly growing until there just a path to the desk and one place to sit. I don't want to live like this and earlier in life didn't do so.

A while back I gave some thought to my typical week and it hit me - I'm out till 10 or 11P four days a week and gone at least one day out of the weekend. Little wonder things on the home front never seem to improve. I've noticed folks at work who seem to stay on top of things generally stay focused and say No if someone tries to dump more work on them than they can handle. I tend to say Yes more than I should, one of the main reasons I'm out of the house so much. In an effort to form a more sustainable course, for the last 6 months or so I've focused on staying home more, especially on the weekends when I seem to get the most done. This starting to bear fruit, with little signs of progress here an there.

Currently the living room floor covered with tools as I'm consolidating and sorting through all my hand tools. Over time I had built up a hodge podge of tool boxes and trays. A real mess. Now the tools are finding their way into two, 3 drawer portable chests I bought. This will also make it much easier to tote them along when needed. In the dinning room I've set up a filing system and am tackling a pile at a time. A couple weeks ago everything on the coffee table tossed or filed as appropriate. Now I'm tackling the tax piles. All the returns in folders by year and I'm ready to jump into this year's taxes. About a month ago I tackled the couch and pushed through the backlog of mail that had built up. Now my cat and I have lots of room.

I trust once I have things at home on more of an even keel it won't take so much time to keep things in order and this will allow me to focus a bit more outwardly again.

Giving up an old friend of sorts

A couple posts ago I relayed my adventures installing Norton AV 2007 and Ghost 10.0. Ever since my computer has slowed down markedly and further more I discovered the Ghost Recovery Disk won't boot on my machine. After doing some forum searches it turns out the Nvidia video drivers on the Norton disk not compatible with a lot of older cards, evidently mine included.

Last year I looked at the ZoneAlarm Security Suite, but passed it by after seeing on the ZA support forum the legions of folks who couldn't get it to run properly. I took another look and discovered things greatly improved. I noted they also offer a simpler product, ZA w/ AV for a very reasonable $20, with the option to try it out for a 15 day free trial. I ended up buying the ZA w/ AV which now uses the Kaspersky AV engine, CNET's current editors choice for AV software. More than the $0.01 I paid for the Norton combo, but my computer usable again. At work they use NOD32 which also gets great reviews, but I didn't pick up on this until after I'd bought the ZA package. We'll see how it goes and I can always give NOD32 a try if things don't work out as hoped.

For my backup software I'm giving Acronis True Image Home 10.0 a try. It seemed to work well during the 15 day free trial, so I bought a copy from Newegg today. We'll see how it works in the long run.

I'm thinking I need to give more thought to replacing my 4 year old laptop. It a top of the line Toshiba multi-media machine in it's day, but it seems the 1.7GHZ Pentium M starting to show it's age. I upgraded to 1GB of RAM a year ago, which helped, but it seems most modern software designed assuming more under the hood than my machine has to offer.

Loosing a four legged friend, literally

Many of you know I have two cats, Oreo and Mindy. Both missions of mercy. Oreo peeing all over his owners apartment after she got married and Mindy the casualty of her owner moving to a place that wouldn't take pets.

Oreo the first cat I took in. I always liked him when I came to visit his owner and he seemed to like me as well. I think he's beautiful, with his black fur and little white mustache. Hence the name his original owner gave him. He's also a big cat weighing in at around 12 lbs or so. When I first brought him home and he hid behind the furnace and wouldn't come out for 3 days I started to wonder if I had made a mistake. The evening of the 3rd day I went downstairs and sat on the basement floor for about 15 minutes and he finally came out. I carried him upstairs and we've gotten along great ever since.

About a year later another friend quite desperate to find a new home for his girl cat Mindy. The only thing in his life remaining from a very bitter divorce. Oreo didn't take well to Mindy's arrival, they pretty much fought every day, especially over who would get to hop up on the bed with me at night. Over time I came to like Mindy a lot as well. She a very affectionate cat, purred if you just looked at her and much more impulsive than Oreo who thinks everything through almost to a fault.

So every day for the past year or so when I came home from work both cats waiting by the door at the top of the steps for me, that is until about two months ago. On this day only Oreo waiting. After an hour or so went by and no sign of Mindy I searched the house. No sign of her anywhere. To this day I have no idea what happened. I didn't see her run out, and she never showed any signs of wanting to go out, yet no trace of her inside and no smell to date.

Oreo seems very happy with the new order of things and has gone back to his relaxed self. He always seemed on edge when I had the two of them. Still, I miss Mindy and cried when I came across a picture of her while going through some pictures I had taken with my new camera ... oh ya, note to self, you never did a post about the camera, gotta work on that.

So if you're out there somewhere Mindy I hope you found yourself a good home and you enjoyed your time with me and Oreo while it lasted. I miss you and I think on some level Oreo misses you too.

Persuing Ghosts and Viruses

On the day after Thanksgiving I wondered if I should try to hit the stores to pick up a couple things. The day before while at a family gathering I saw everyone looking through the ad inserts in the local paper. They all especially interested in what the big electronics stores had to offer. Curious to see what tactics they using this year to lure folks into the stores at the wee hours of the morning I took a peek myself.

To my surprise I saw something that interested me. Best Buy offering Photoshop Elements 5.0 for $50. No rebates, not some stripped down version, the real thing for $50. Yet I wondered, and noted the fine print under the price, I read the following "Minimum of 10 items per store". 10 items per store!!! Hmmmm.

The next day I got up around 9A and wondered if I should go see if they still had any left. After eating breakfast it occurred to me to check the Best Buy website. Sure enough they had it for sale there as well, and only $4 shipping, so I snagged a copy. Never even had to leave the house!

Later in the day it hit me I should check for any deals on the new Norton AntiVirus as my subscription about ready to expire and it often cheaper to buy the new version than pay for a subscription renewal. After looking around I found CompUSA offering NAV 2007 and Ghost 10.0 in a bundle for 1 cent. That's right, 1 cent, AFTER rebates. Hmmm, don't much care for rebates, but for 1 cent ... I looked at the rebate forms and they seemed straight forward. Still I wondered, I ate lunch and went back to the site. Yup, everything looked on the up and up, so I proceeded to place the order. When I got to the end I noticed the ship date had changed from 1-2 days to 3-4 weeks. What's this? The rebate only good for one month, what if it really does take 3-4 weeks for it to come or this just a glitch in CompUSA's software as the site running very slow due to the rush in traffic. I decided to go ahead with order and clicked the complete button.

15 minutes later I checked again and saw the bundle listed as Sold Out. Oh boy, what did I do? Perhaps I shouldn't have eaten lunch first?? I decided they would more than likely send out all the bundles as one big group, so I should see it within a week. Thankfully, that exactly what happened and I soon had the bundle sitting on my living room couch ready for installation.

I've heard all the horror stories of Norton product installations going bad, but have never experienced any personally. This all about to change. To make a long story short, installing the two products ended up taking over 6 hours to complete, but thankfully they work very well once properly installed. No damage to my computer for the experience either, just a protracted installation process do to Symantec failing to mention the new NAV2007 incompatible with several popular pieces of software which I happen to use. Turns out after poking around several forums on the web for a while, this not totally true, so I continued with the installation despite dire warnings to the contrary from the NAV2007 installer. Also I wound up having go through the entire installation process twice because Ghost didn't get registered properly the first time around, turns out you should install Ghost first, but they fail to mention this in the installation instructions supplied with the products.

As an aside, this bundle takes the prize for strangest product packing of the year. Each product comes in it's normal box, with the bundle shrink wrapped together, or so it seems. Once you pull off the shrink wrap you discover the two boxes attached to each other with double sided foam tape and simply will not come apart. Not handy for storing the boxes away if you need the Proof of Purchase down the road.

Want an excuse to stay up late some night this week? Go pick up for yourself the NAV2007/Ghost 10.0 bundle and start the install around 10P.

Coming up for air

After a posting dry spell as long as the one I've just had what does one say? Kind of like when you suddenly stop doing things with a friend you saw all the time and bump into them at the store months later. The unspoken questions linger around the ensuing conversation, but rarely get asked outright, "Did I do something?", "You don't like me anymore?", "What really happened?". I suppose we really don't want to know as honest answers could potentially speak volumes about the core of our being which hurt too much or on the other hand we might find out their kid joined a traveling hockey team and they spend 3 days a week on the road plus weekends. The risk of the former happening enough to keep us from going down this road in the first place, so we end up talking about, work, the weather, ... and go back to shopping.

In this case I've gone through a period where life's events swept over me and engulfed me in the stream. No, I didn't wind up in the hospital or anything like that, but a lot of stuff happened all at once. I haven't spent much time at home over the past few months, something my cat reminds me of frequently. Blogging an intense activity for me as I'm a slow writer so a post of any length takes hours to create. Over the past few months I've generated lots of e-mails/newsletters of sorts which have taken away the time I normally would use to write up posts.

I often wonder when I look at folks like Noel who I suspect packs much into a day than I do, yet puts up a good 2 or 3 posts a day if I'm not pushing myself hard enough. Yet, it's where I find myself. I imagine if I got a closer look at Noel's, Dan's, ... lives in detail I'd see they have areas they struggle in that aren't an issue for me. It just happens that regular blogging something I struggle to do, but something they evidently find no problem to work into their lives.

Hopefully those who do follow my blog will forgive me for not being more like them in this area.

Life on the Treadmill

Ever feel like you're going as fast as you can and still can't keep up? Life has felt this way for me for a long while now. Over the past several years I've cut back on the number of activities I do, but still find myself falling behind on many fronts. This wears on a person after a while. Sometimes I wonder if I've allowed myself to get stuck in a rut or if I just had gotten behind on so many things that I grossly underestimated how long it would take to get caught up.

As I look around me I can see where I've made progress on the house, yet so much left to sort through and organize, recycle, toss, give away or put aside for the next garage sale.

In my enthusiasm for getting involved in model trains I bought a bunch of engines and rail cars, as I've posted on in the past. Now I realize I WAY over did it and should sell a good portion of it. Hmmm, sounds like another project. Surely an example of how buying a bunch of things, more often than not, doesn't bring happiness or fulfillment; just more troubles as you have to take care of and deal with it all.

Now that the big project I mentioned at work has wound down, I'm back to working my normal allotment of hours, 20 hours a week. During the time I worked 40 - 50 I felt a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the week with all I had accomplished. Now I feel overwhelmed, as my "to do" list grows faster then my ability to keep up with it. I've mentioned this to my bosses boss, who replied, "Join the club". She did suggest if I really thought this becoming a problem that I track what I do each week in order to make a case for going to 75% or 100% time down the road. Sounds like a good idea.

On the friend front I find myself torn between setting aside more time visit with my various friends, mostly in the Battle Creek area, vs. staying home to focus on house stuff. I'm always glad to see and do things with my friends, yet the house goes undone for yet another week.

I'm not one of those perfectionist types who can't stand a speck of dust in any corner. I just want to get my house into sufficient shape so I can have guests over without having to move stuff to make room for them to sit and have a suitable guest room to accommodate an occasional overnight guest.

Yet simple things like keeping up with the mail conspire against such a simple aim. How do people keep up with their mail??? I don't think I do anything over the top. I open the junk mail, shred anything with personal info. on it and put the rest into the recycle pile. I scan through my magazines and read the articles I find interesting. I aim to read newsletters from my missionary friends. Yet my pile slowly grows.

Do most folks just throw stuff out without even looking at it? Do they ever read the magazines they subscribe to? Do they read newsletters from friends, organizations they support and companies they do business with? Am I just a slow reader?? Do I spend too much time on the internet??

I want to get my life back into shape so I can do the things I used to do, like go on mission trips, help people out, etc. Yet it seems to happen at a glacier pace which I find incredibly frustrating. Makes me wonder if I've missed something somewhere about how to live life or how I've structured my own life that's dragging me down. Perhaps this what folks often refer to as a mid-life crisis?

Gettin on the Boat

I'm taking my friend Tom along with his friend Dorothy on a trip the next few days. Tom and I took the Lake Express from Muskegon to Milwaukee last year and he really liked it. So we are doing it again this year, except we will take the boat across and back. He's wanted to attend a service at Willow Creek for a long time, so we are going to check out the Wed. night service. Not sure how a 89 year old man will take to things Willow Creek style. Stay tuned. On Thursday we'll head east toward Rockford to visit my aunts, then Fri. we'll swing up towards Madison, WI to see the House on the Rock before heading to Milwaukee to catch the 7P boat back to jolly old Michigan. Fri. sounds like a pretty packed day, but I figure Tom and Dorothy will poop out after an hour or two at the House on the Rock, so I don't think it will feel as rushed as it may first appear. Judging from the website, one could easily spend a day at the House on the Rock and still not see everything. My aunts took my mom and myself to this place back in my elementary school days, I remember finding it fascinating, although I don't remember much of the house itself. As an alternate we may go see the Time Museum in Rockford, they have all kinds of old and unusual time pieces. I saw this place as well as little boy, also courtesy of my aunts.

While assembling the links for this post I came across some sad news. The Time Museum no longer exists!! Read the link for more info., a real loss as they had a very impressive collection. I've also discovered the boat we plan to take having mechanical problems so they have cancelled all crossings on the Wed. we plan to leave, but it still looks like we can take the boat for the return trip. Hmmm, will have to give Tom a call tomorrow and see if he wants to reschedule or simply drive down around Chicago instead to get to Willow Creek.

Jonny Quest, Scooby Doo and a cartoon quiz

As a kid I loved Jonny Quest and Scooby Doo. Unfortunately our local TV station seemed to play the same 5 Jonny Quest episodes over and over again, so over time I bored of it. Always did like Scooby though.

Recently I discovered the original Jonny Quest and Scooby Doo seasons out on DVD. I haven't had much interest in the TV on DVD craze, but decided these a must have for Stevo's collection. After reading a couple reviews, the Jonny Quest reviewer clearly devoted as he waxed on in amazing detail and referred to the first two seasons as "canon", it looked like the sets decent so I picked them up. Jonny Quest at Circuit City and Scooby Doo on eBay.

Jonny Quest good stuff indeed and includes a couple nice bonus features. Scooby Doo a bit formulalistic now that I'm older, but still fun to watch. Bonus features pretty much a bust, not nearly as classy as the Jonny Quest ones (interviews with the worlds most devoted Scooby fans!?!). Never noticed the laugh track as a kid.

Wonder if anyone remembers a few other shows: Sea Lab, The Land that Time Lost (or something like that) and a show in black and white with claymation characters. I remember my mom saying it made by the Catholic church and the episodes made originally without advertising, so they never quite fit into a standard time slot. As I remember it came on EARLY, and I also remember some of the episodes deeply affected me as a little boy. But what was it called??