Life and Times of a Lansing Lugnut

Movie Night at the Geer's

2008-03-30T00:16:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2008-03-26T02:41:00.002-04:00

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

2007-04-02T00:46:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-02T00:22:00.000-04:00

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

2006-12-18T01:50:00.001-05:00

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

2006-12-18T01:19:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-18T00:40:00.001-05:00

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

2006-09-06T00:10:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-14T23:02:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-07T00:07:00.000-04:00

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??

Blow Back

2006-08-06T23:46:00.000-04:00

I recently posted about The Most Incredible Day I had at work last week. You may recall as the day drew to a close I felt good about our response to the days events and thought we had handled ourselves in a professional manner in the face of a chaotic situation. Turns out not everyone saw it that way.

Late in the afternoon the following day, I went down to our shop to get some parts. As I came around the corner I found one of the Physical Plant managers standing by the shop door waiting for me. He didn't look very happy and said he wanted to "talk" to me. Anticipating what he had to say, I recounted an abbreviated version of what had transpired the day before, suspecting he didn't know some key facts about what all happened. I got the impression he didn't hear a word I said. He very intent on delivering his message, that we are prohibited from having any contact with "his" equipment under any circumstances. He proceeded to give examples of the damage I could have done by putting the domestic water pumps into hand and further pointed out it took longer for his staff to " ... undo what you did than to fix the problem they came to fix in the first place". Which I took as a not so subtle hint that I'm ignorant when to comes to how their equipment functions. He also asked if the two departments I work for willing to pay for all the costs related to any damage these potential mistakes could have caused. This all took me so by surprise I didn't mount much of a defense for myself or our departments need to get the equipment online as quickly as possible that day. I also didn't mention the significant delays on the part of his staff which directly resulted in out equipment shutting down. This on purpose, as I didn't want to get into a finger pointing exercise, as I'm confident the various trades arrived as quickly as they could.

I see us as having acted as first responders, or mechanical paramedics if you will, and thought we performed that role very capably. Their response to our efforts, as delivered by him that afternoon, while having elements of merit, seemed to me wildly exaggerated and counterproductive. In effect, destroying a partnership we've aimed to nurture for the past several years. It also deeply hurtful to me, implying I don't know what I'm doing, with constant references to me "playing" and "tinkering" with their equipment.

After he left I felt furious inside and wanted to quit. Knowing this a rash thing to do I kept the conversation to myself and went straight home after work. I tried listening to my favorite news shows, but it a useless exercise as the conversation and various iterations of "what I should have said" rolled through my mind over and over. Eventually I put on some Jonny Quest episodes and calmed down enough to go to bed. The next couple days I asked 3 or 4 friends inside and outside the University for advice and ultimately decided to talk to my boss's boss about what happened.

To my surprise, she more or less agreed with the Physical Plant's view, that the departments didn't want to incur liability for any mistakes that could potentially occur. After more discussion, she agreed to make a call to the man who spoke to me to see if we could work out a less restrictive arrangement, as the current arrangement completely ties out hands if any Physical Plant equipment goes down for any reason, even under emergency situations. I'm hoping calmer heads will prevail and we can come to a consensus which allows us to have a first responder role, while still allowing the Physical Plant folks to feel they have full control over their equipment.

So "What's the point?" you may ask, other than sharing my frustrating experience with the world. Well, now that I've had a chance to reflect on all this some more I'm excited to see how much better I've handled this situation than I would have in the past. I believe this primarily the fruits of the counseling I've gone to for the past several years, starting to gain the ability to make friendships and most importantly, making a conscious effort to allow the Holy Spirit to work inside of me. Not that I claim to have mastered the art of listening to the Spirit in all situations, but it's so exciting to look back and realize, "That thought didn't come from me, that was a Holy Spirit thing!".

In the past, I would have acted on my first impulse to quit. In the immediate aftermath of our "conversation", some verses in Proverbs crossed my mind reminding me it never pays to act so rashly. Also, through various experiences over the past 10 years or so I've learned to feel anger inside of me when it's first welling up, rather than having it come out in a rage as it did in my youth. Part of this process realizing that Jesus and other biblical figures got angry on multiple occasions, so the anger in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing. It's our response to it and the underlying beliefs inside of us that lead us to feel the anger in the first place that really count. In this instance, I also took the time to seek counsel, and limited the number of people I shared this incident with in detail. Although in retrospect, I did on a couple of occasions slip into what Noel talked about a while back, "sharing" to make me look good rather than to truly seek advice or better the situation.

I've also considered whether I should try to write the man who came to "talk" with me a thoughtful e-mail outlining my concerns over the long term ramifications of this edict he handed down and the way he treated me that day. This seems a biblical way to go, although I do feel a bit tied down in that this isn't strictly a personal issue between him and myself, but also involves many other people. As a result, I'm not so sure if writing an e-mail on my own such a good idea, perhaps better to leave this to my boss's boss.

My First Yard Sale

2006-07-24T23:05:00.000-04:00

As part of decluttering the house I've had boxes of stuff in my dining and living rooms awaiting the day our neighborhood did another block sale. We didn't exactly have another block sale, but both of my neighbors asked me if I would do a yard sale with them. Are you kidding!!

I took Thursday and Friday off from work to prepare and man my tables since the sale Friday and Saturday. As it turned out I couldn't take Friday off and worked on work stuff Thursday morning which goofed things up some, but in the end I got 80% of my stuff out onto the tables.

Thankfully about 50% of it sold. After giving my neighbor who watched all my stuff Fri., and part of Sat. while I brought more stuff out, $20 for her trouble; I cleared $74.75 on the whole thing.

We put some of the big items out on the curb to see if anyone would take them and boxed the remaining stuff up for Goodwill. On Sunday while loading up the van for the Goodwill run, a woman pulled up in front. She had trouble walking so we asked her if she needed any help. She wanted my mom's old porta potty. My mom very big and needed an extra wide model. She only used it a few times and it still looked like new, but all these years I could never find anyone who wanted it. Turns out while at church this particular Sunday morning another rather heavy woman got up and said she needed a porta potty and booster seat. This woman, on a whim, came down our street and lo and behold what did she find! Way to go Holy Spirit!! After a bit of moving stuff around we fit everything into her car and she sped down the street praising God's name for bringing her friend the very thing she needed. I praise God for getting the porta potty, booster seat and accessories out of my dining room and into a good home.

The Most Incredible Day

2006-07-24T22:20:00.000-04:00

I'm still intending to update everyone on why I've haven't posted in so long, but in the mean time I had the most incredible day today at work.

Arrived a bit before 11A and got on the phone with a vendor. The fire alarm went off, I asked my boss if it a drill. I swear he said "Yes". I continue with the call, he comes back in and says I need to go out with everyone else. As I go out I smell steam coming out of the main mechanical room. Open the door and find the room filled with steam and an electrician for the steam tunnel project saying he needs to get down the tunnel, but the way blocked by the steam. I look back in the room and see our main steam safety relief valve venting full tilt.

I go upstairs and call in the steam emergency and contact the fire coordinator via our FRS radios. Evidently someone thought the steam coming out of the roof vent smoke and called the fire dept. so they on the way.

I go back down and see no one from the Physical Plant has arrived. Now the whole hall filled with steam too. This has happened before, although not in quite such dramatic fashion so I run into the shop to grab a pipe wrench. With the electrician in tow we charge into the mechanical room to shut off the main steam valve. Steam still coming out, so we shut off the secondary line as well. No more steam, but water pouring out like crazy from somewhere up by the ceiling. I can't see a thing, my glasses fogged up so bad. We eventually realize one sprinkler head going off because the room got so hot with all the steam. By now the University plumbers arriving and set about the task of shutting down the sprinkler system. The firemen show up as well and demand we turn off a major electrical panel under the streaming sprinkler head. We turn off the panel which in turn shuts down a whole slew of major mechanical systems in our building. Lets see, domestic water, compressed air, temperature control compressed air, air conditioning pumps, pure water system, you get the idea.

About 15 minutes later the water stopped coming out of the sprinkler head revealing the full extent of what happened. The whole room covered with water and the electrical panel very wet, at least on the outside. The firemen allow folks back into our now crippled building with no water on the 4th and 5th floors due to the lack of water pressure and the main ventilation systems shutting down due to the lack of compressed air to run the controls. The plumbers set about replacing the sprinkler head while I await the arrival of a university electrician to OK turning the panel back on. While waiting, my boss informs me our cooling tower in the penthouse has gone down due to the lack of water pressure. It will run for an hour or so, before all the water evaporates away, which in turn greatly diminishes it's cooling ability. Well an hour plus had passed by now, so we needed to shut down over 100 walk-in coolers and freezers throughout the building which rely on the cooling tower.

Eventually an electrician comes over and sets about verifying the panel dry enough to turn back on. It looks OK, so he throws the switch and we start turning the vital pumps, etc. back on one at a time. At this point we come to realize the computer control panel which runs everything in the room completely drenched inside so none of the equipment coming on even after we restore power to it. We bring the pumps, etc. online using manual overrides while a fellow from the HVAC shop tries to tenderly dry up the water on the circuit boards with paper towels.

By about 2P or so we have everything back up and running, but the computer controls a lost cause now giving off a distinct burnt electrical smell. The pump guys come by later and get all worked up about us running the pumps manually. So we were supposed to leave the building without water, coolers, freezers and A/C for whole rest of the day and night, because they don't like to run stuff on manual?!?

I spent the rest of the day vacuuming up all the water and keeping an eye on the system pressures and the odorous computer control cabinet. Part of the computer controls did eventually recover, but we didn't have confidence in them and left the pumps running on hand overnight on reduced speed to insure no problems develop. We will see tomorrow if they are able to get the computer cabinet up and running again.

When I left at 6:30P or so my pants and shoes still wet, but I felt good that we had conducted ourselves well under very chaotic circumstances. For the most part the folks from the physical plant also said we did a good job, especially in terms of taking the initiative to turn off the runaway steam system before it caused any more damage to the equipment.

Earth to Stevo

2006-05-29T23:16:00.000-04:00

Much has occurred the past couple months. As a result life has taken on a new rhythm. I'm getting up sooner, around 8A and as a result I'm going to bed sooner 11P - Midnight. I'm generally more productive in the morning so this a good thing.

I have much to tell, but am also a slow writer, so instead of knocking myself out writing up one long post I'm going to try breaking down all the recent happenings into a group of smaller posts. Stay tuned.

Winding down

2006-03-09T01:32:00.000-05:00

I went to the train show today. As usual I spent more than I intended, but did OK. I did find the two Conrail SD40 locos I mentioned in my last post, along with one of their CP Rail stable mates. These locos are made by Kato, one of the better brands. They cost about 50% more than the cheaper brands, but run like a watch and are very reliable. To my mind they strike a good balance between quality/features and cost. Rick (the guy I buy a lot of my stuff from), somehow managed to get his hands on several brand new Conrail locos even though they haven't made them for at least 3 - 4 years, the boxes look like they came out of the factory yesterday. On the other hand the CP Rail box looks 4 years old, even though the loco inside still new. I also picked up one more BN loco, a GP35 #2521. These are smaller diesels widely used for branch line and yard service. I already have two very similar GP30's made by another company, but am discovering they aren't so reliable. I've had to repair both once so far and am currently working on one for the second time. Hopefully the Kato GP35 will work out better. If so, I will seek out it's sister the #2522 during future shows. I originally intended to buy just the two Conrail's, but decided since the other two Kato's are so hard to find that I should pick them up while the opportunity presents itself. Yes, I more than likely could find them on eBay (where I've purchased about 1/2 my locos to date) at a later date, but this way I could touch and see the product and didn't have to mess around with shipping.

To my surprise I found some very nice Cargill vegetable oil and corn syrup tankers. I also bought an assortment of covered hoppers and a couple flat car kits (w/ real wooden floors! Curious to see how they go together. Kits are becoming less and less common with the availability of cheap labor in China). I saw some container cars I liked, but decided to hold off on buying them, trusting they will still have them in the fall. You may recall, one of the big goals today to try to finish up the grain and coal unit trains I mentioned in my last post. I found one more coal car, so the coal car collection will nicely fill one tub with 16 cars total. All said and done I wound up with 18 of the Canadian grain cars. One vendor had 5 of the cars left and offered a special price if I took them all. This won't pose a problem since I have some American grain cars too, so I'm already using two tubs. Something about reaching these two milestones has helped me to feel more relaxed tonight.

After getting back and making up some dinner I sat down and watched a movie. Something I haven't done for a good month or more. Tonight's pick - Antitrust. I don't suppose it will go down in history as one of the world's greatest movies, but I like the friendship shown between the four guys involved in the startup company at the beginning. How many people do you know who would go out on a limb like that for you?

Laundry list

2006-03-05T01:33:00.000-05:00

I've noticed my blog reads like a journal. I sometimes wonder if this makes me a bit shallow compared the likes of Noel, Dan and Frank who seem to effortlessly compose beautiful posts on various issues of faith and life. I've got some ideas of topics I could try expounding on, but for now another laundry list post.

Oreo and Mindy continue to do well. They fight once or twice a day, then act like long lost friends the balance of the time. They both sleep on the bed with me at night and compete for my attention when I'm sitting on the couch. I sometimes cry when I think about how much joy they bring to my life, they are both precious gifts.

Things at the train club are going great guns. Everyone seems to like me and I greatly look forward to Thursday nights. I faced a bit of a dilemma when the Chair of the Nominating Committee informed me that the membership nominated me for 4 out of 5 officer positions. It felt strange, I've can't think of another time in my life where a group of people has held such a high regard for me and my capabilities. It also gave me pause that this could all go to my head. I'm not opposed to serving in this capacity at some point, but after much thought decided it not wise to take on anymore right now. I believe I mentioned a few posts ago I agreed to chair the Train Show Committee, and I'm also chairing the Electrical and Maintenance of Way (track and rolling stock maintenance) Committees. I decided this plenty, since I'm still in the midst of getting the house back into shape. Thankfully, our club has a very capable group of people running it right now, all of which won reelection at our recent business meeting.

Recently, I've learned more about the intricacies of routing power to switches and have worked on making our main yard fully functional. Very gratifying to see the pleased looks on peoples faces during our recent Open House when they could run trains through all the yard siding tracks. Evidently these haven't worked for a long time. I've also worked on restoring power to the tracks by our coal mine and diesel engine servicing facility. Next the Holy Grail, getting the roundhouse and turntable up and running.

This the time of year when several of the big train shows come around. I've gone to one and am going to another one this weekend. I'm eager to get a basic collection of cars/engines built up for the railroads I like to model, esp. after seeing the positive reaction from our guests during our Open House last month. This testing my ability to hold the line on spending (ie - not rack up credit card debt). After my disaster last Fall, I've taken several measures to help. One, take along a calculator (Thanks Tyler). Two, make a list. Three, set an overall budget figure before leaving the house.

I've always liked the Burlington Northern's Green/Black color scheme. I also like the CP Rail Red Multimark scheme, as well as the Canadian National North American scheme. Fortunately, these railroads have long standing working relationships with each other so I can mix and match between them. The CP and BN move a lot of coal and grain, so I'm making up coal and grain unit trains (strings of matching cars). The tubs I'm using to store my cars hold 16 each, so this the number I'm aiming for. I had originally planned on 20 cars, but on our club layout a 16 car train looks quite long, so I think this number will prove adequate. Of course, they run regular trains too, so I'm buying a variety of box cars, tankers and covered hoppers, as these make up the majority of trains I see go by. I'm also picking up a smattering of gondolas, flat cars and cabooses (kids love these) which offer possibilities for carrying all kinds of unique loads. During the Open House, between running my trains and loaning out some locos for others to run their trains, I ran out of locos. I'm sticking with the better brands, and they only make so many of a given road name, so I'm running out of possibilities. I always liked the Conrail blue scheme, and you can match Conrail up with most anything, so I'm thinking about picking up a couple of those. We'll see if I come across any at the show.

At work the big cooling tower project moving ahead. After months of meetings and $20,00 or so in engineering fees we wound up with virtually the exact same setup we started with. Very frustrating, but we are making the best of it. The final plans did include a few genuine improvements over the original installation, but fail to address our biggest issue, water intrusion during heavy rains, in a way that gives us confidence. I never got the impression the designers took our proposed solutions seriously, since none of us possess engineering degrees.

You may recall last year I started working on plans for improving the air conditioning in the offices in our building. After getting about 90% of the design work done, the project bogged down, and has remained stalled for months on my kitchen table. With tax time coming up I need my kitchen table back, so I'm devoting Fridays to getting the last 10% finished up. I have about 20 more rooms I need to finish to come up with the final design, so far I've completed about 8 of them.

I've bought a ton more tubs and have continued to organize the basement. All my electrical and plumbing stuff now has a happy home. I tore out the last set of nasty wooden shelves and have a new metal shelf out of the box ready to put up. Some smaller clear tubs they sell at Menard's work perfect for my train cars. My prototype used cardboard dividers. The final version uses kiddy foam. It comes in 2, 3 and 6 mm thicknesses and all kinds of cool colors. I picked up a rolling cutter/cutting mat kit so I could make nice straight cuts along with a variety pack of the foam. It's working out great. Per the variety pack I ended up with Green = Boxcars, Red = Grain cars, Black = Coal cars, Blue = Covered Hoppers, Yellow = Container cars, White = Flat cars, Gondolas, Tankers and Cabooses, Tan = We'll see.

You can see a lot going on around the house and in life in general. These days I'm feeling much better, like I'm not stuck in neutral anymore, although not out of the woods by any means. Not that we ever are I suppose, but getting the house back into shape will free me up to devote my energies to more outwardly oriented activities; which I'm looking forward to, as I don't perceive God intending the house to act as a weight, but rather as a blessing and center of operations if you will to expedite my gifts in serving others.

Start of a new era?

2006-02-05T23:58:00.000-05:00

The model train club I'm part of meets in an old train depot. The building roughly 16 x 40 feet with a full basement. We use the basement for a meeting rm., small workshop, furnace rm. and a spot for the fridge/microwave by the stairs. The upstairs has a small entrance area and the layout itself. The layout about 16 x 30, a good size space, but quite small for a club size layout. For years the club has eyed building a pole barn behind the depot to allow us to build a larger layout and restore the depot to it's original condition. We put on a large model train show each year (we sold 400 tables last year) and put most of the proceeds into a building fund.

A few months ago we received an offer to become part of a new museum complex in downtown Lansing. Lansing doesn't have a real museum per se, more a bunch of small buildings down by the riverfront housing a variety of organizations. They want to combine forces and build one nice building. Someone in the consortium came to our train show, liked what they saw, and suggested to the group they invite us to participate; believing an operating model train layout would help draw folks into the museum. As you might guess, this would represent a huge change of course for our club and it has taken a few months to come to grips with it.

The museum folks have ambitious plans and needed a commitment from us soon, so we had a membership meeting this past week to decide what to do. I've prayed about this for a while now, not having a clear line of thinking pro or con in my mind. To my astonishment everyone quickly came to the conclusion this a great opportunity for the club and we voted to participate, asking for 6000 sq. ft. of space. This will give us plenty of room for a huge layout, proper workshop, dispatch area and room to spare for future expansion or rotating exhibits on various topics.

This will take our club to the next level. It will require a large time investment from all of us to help raise the funds for the new building, build the new layout and then man it during museum operating hours. We've looked into other clubs that have similar arrangements and they seem to work out well, but they do find it hard to man the layout during the day. We are going to take a hard look at the various automation options available today, thinking this will allow us to run with a two man crew vs. the 5 to 6 man crews the other clubs need to run their older layouts. With these commitments comes the opportunity to operate in a facility far nicer than anything we could afford to build on our own and a much more visible presence in the community. We've always desired to do more in terms of an educational component, but didn't have the space to do so. The museum will have a common set of meeting rooms available, which should open up all kinds of possibilities to do workshops and the like to help newcomers feel more comfortable with the hobby.

The backers of the new museum hope to have it built and operating by the year 2010. We'll see how it goes, the next year should give us a good idea whether the vision gains traction or fades into nothing.

A burst of energy

2006-02-05T23:24:00.000-05:00

The many readers of my blog have flooded me with requests wanting to know how the meeting turned out (well, OK, I got one e-mail :-). Invariably when I allow myself to worry about something I eventually discover I need not have bothered. Sometimes, if I'm running late for an appointment I'll get anxious while driving. 9 times out of 10 it turns out the person I'm meeting arrives after I do. My recent meeting no exception. At the start of the meeting, someone asked how my trip went. I said I didn't end up going and mentioned the two reasons I outlined in my previous post. Everyone nodded and we went on with meeting, simple as that.

After the meeting I had an opportunity to meet with the lead engineer one on one for about an hour. We communicated much better in this setting and I felt we accomplished a lot. He's become much more engaged as has the consulting engineer. Between the two meetings we've had as a group over the past week a lot if ideas got thrown around to save money on the project without compromising our main goals. We also secured some more funding, bringing our budget up to $240,000. Between some judicious cuts and a more adequate budget it looks like the project going to turn out fine. We'll see for sure this coming week when the revised cost estimates and design come back.

I used to do a lot of side work for people. Mostly electrical work, but I also delved into plumbing, furnace repair and major appliance repair when called for. At the peak of my depression I had a couple jobs going at once in a city about an hour away, where I stayed and went to church every Saturday - Monday. When I moved my life back to Lansing I barely got all my stuff back home, let alone organize it in any way. So it has sat in a pile of cardboard boxes in the basement ever since. You may recall several months ago I put up a bunch of shelves in the basement. My ultimate goal to use these shelves for organizing all this stuff. During my vacation I focused first on the electrical stuff, then moved on to plumbing. It took the whole week to organize everything and put it into the clear tubs I bought. I also bought small organizers in various sizes with movable dividers (Thank you Meijer fishing department!!) to organize all the misc. small items. All said and done the electrical stuff took up about 9 tubs and the plumbing 5 tubs, along with about 7 of the small organizers. This took me till Friday night. Sat. I rested and watched part of Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. Sunday I had a burst of energy and set about taking advantage of the newly opened up floor space. My dad had kept two 55 gal. barrels made out of a heavy cardboard. I sawed these up into pieces and broke down all the unneeded cardboard boxes I had saved for doing the basement. This opened up space to set out pallets to keep the big tubs off the floor. I'm using these for packing supplies and my empty train car/loco boxes. Now when I come down the basement stairs I can see the floor and have room to walk around.

This weekend I took down the last set of the old nasty wooden shelves that came with the house. In their place I will put up another bulk storage rack. I plan to use this one for excess kitchen stuff that won't fit in my cabinets (like mixing bowls and the like), as my kitchen only has four base cabinets and two upper cabinets. As well as automotive tools and supplies, hardware items, etc. Many of these items are currently cluttering up my dining rm., so this will go a long way towards making the main living area more livable.

If you saw my basement now you would see it's split into two halves by a block wall. When you come down the stairs you first see the washer, dryer and a set of shelves with cleaning/cat stuff. Down at the far end you see two bulk storage racks, with the opening into the "root cellar" in between. Going into the other half you'd see 3 more of the bulk storage racks at the near end and the pallets I mentioned set up in the middle of the room across from the furnace. At the far end a pile of cardboard boxes and a table covered with paint cans. This end represents the last mile so to speak. I need to get my furnace/appliance parts into tubs, organize the hardware stuff (combining my stuff with the stuff worth saving off those old wooden shelves), figure out a good way to store the few pieces of lumber I held onto and dispose of any paint that has gone bad. Finishing these tasks will make the basement organization system complete and allow my to turn my attention to the 1st and 2nd floors. Having the basement done will allow me to bring additional items down there, and merge them into the appropriate tubs as I come across them, rather than dumping them on the floor or onto a pile.

Every action causes an equal an opposite reaction

2006-01-25T02:10:00.000-05:00

We are replacing a major piece of equipment at work. It's called a cooling tower and roughly 100 walk in coolers, freezers and environmental growth chambers in the building I work in depend on this piece of equipment. It has run 24/7 virtually non-stop for 2o years. The unit itself works very well, but it's always had a tendency to suck water into the building when running on high speed during a driving rain storm. This caused by a poorly designed air intake plenum that forces the air to come in along the bottom of a large louver on the side of our building. Louvers are normally sized assuming even air flow across the entire face, not just along the bottom 25%. When the water comes in we wind up with about two bucket fulls in the 5th floor hallway, quite a problem when it happens.

These towers have an expected life of about 20 years, so ours due. As part of the replacement process we brought up this water intrusion problem and asked about going with a stainless steel tower this time, thinking it might last longer. We have had several meetings over the past few months about all this and it's become increasing clear the folks in charge of the project don't have much interest in pursuing these issues. They just want to replace the tower in kind and move on to the next job. We've wound up having to do our own research into the pluses and minuses of SS vs. galvanized steel tower construction and draw up our own plan of how to redesign the air intake, as each successive drawing kept showing replacing the air intake plenum with the current configuration. All this time we made it a point that we have $179,000 available for this project and need to stay within this budget. We also face a time constraint as major road construction outside our building will make crane access impossible after April 1st.

About a 2 weeks ago the project engineers and the prospective contractor showed up unannounced in the morning to go over potential cuts. I work in the afternoon and missed the whole thing as did my boss, since they couldn't find him until the very end of the meeting. Last week we found out the project coming in at $300,000 and we need to schedule a meeting right away to go over cuts. Keep in mind it's almost February and you don't just walk into Home Depot and pick up a cooling tower.

This all coming at a very bad time in relation to my plans to go the AHR Expo and take some time off to work on the house. By the time the end of the week approached this took it's toll on me and I lost my fire for going to the show. I also sat down and looked at my finances over the weekend and realized I really should stay home and save my money for taxes coming up in a couple months. I've struggled with feelings of guilt since the upcoming tower meeting set up to work around my "vacation", yet my change of plans too late to make rescheduling the meeting any sooner practical. Also, this whole tower process very emotionally draining for me in general. My superiors clearly value my input into the process and my participation, where my direct boss sees it as meddling more or less and clearly doesn't like it when I work on sketches, make phone calls, etc. This puts me in a very awkward position where I don't feel I can operate the way I normally would. Given the importance of this project I would have focused on it, actively researched some of the key issues, made phone calls to keep abreast of progress, etc. Instead it's gravitated into the back of my mind resulting in me not paying as close attention to it as I feel I ought to have, and I think the project has suffered, in as far as my more active involvement might have brought some of these issues to the fore sooner.

We do have a "pre-meeting" for the tower project this Thursday which I said I would come in for. I'll feel better once I see how folks react to the fact I didn't end up going to the show after all. I know it's not rational, yet down inside I'm afraid they will get upset with me about this. It's weighing on me more as Thursday draws closer. This all playing on a hurt deep inside of me, yet I'm not quite sure it's source or why it's so strong, but I do know I've felt these feelings before. Perhaps this situation will help bring more of it into the light.

As I mentioned, I've stayed home this week and am working on the basement. It's scaring me a bit how long it's taking to go through what I've gone through so far, but I'm very pleased with how the parts I've completed have turned out. More on this in my upcoming posts.

Back into the routine

2006-01-16T02:25:00.000-05:00

Life falling back into it's pre-holiday routine, but some changes on the horizon. I talked with Steve and Cheryl who lead our home group on Monday night about my easing out of the group. Turns out they have thought about going to a bi-weekly format anyway. This would free up Monday night every other week, yet keep me in touch. We will talk about it more as a group tonight.

Next week I'm going to Chicago for the Air Conditioning Heating and Refrigeration Expo. They have it in Chicago every three years which works out great for me. I stay at one of the Extended Stay Hotels, this time Studio Plus, so I can cook my own meals for breakfast and dinner.Saves a lot of money over eating out every meal for three days. I'm going to take the whole week off so I can stay at home when I get back and work on the basement. Sure would feel good to get another room into the shape. The basement key, as several items on the upper floors belong down there in the first place.

We finished overhauling a major piece of equipment at work between Christmas and New Years. After New Years the factory rep. came over to do a start up with us. It normally takes about an hour, he stayed until 9P and we still didn't get everything done. Nothing major, just lots and lots of little things we needed to iron out. The unit cools a poor man's supercomputer of sorts housed in our building. The humidifier portion hasn't worked in years so the room bone dry and prone to static electricity build up. We got all the humidifier problems fixed, now just a problem with one of the cooling circuits remains. My boss looking into it as he does 99% of the refrigeration work, where I do most of the electrical side of things.

Now that I own my own locomotives and rail cars I'm contributing to an overcrowding problem in our clubs main yard. To help alleviate this I've tried to find an inexpensive way to store my cars under the layout when I'm not running a train. My first idea a bust, but idea number two shows much more promise. I found some Rubbermaid tubs at Menards that fit the cars perfectly. For the prototype I put cardboard in the bottom and cut up cardboard dividers to place between each car. I set the cars belly up side by side, then laid in another piece of cardboard to support a second layer of cars. Turns out a tub holds about 16 50/60' box cars, which works out nicely. For the next generation I'm going to look into different foam options for making the dividers and to cover the cardboard. Some members concerned over time the roughness of the cardboard by itself will rub the paint off the sides of the cars. Especially if I ever transport them this way.

One room transformed, eight more to go

2006-01-03T00:04:00.000-05:00

Today I continued getting my bedroom into shape.

When my dad moved into the new house he built for himself and my step mom, he left behind a lot of stuff they didn't need in their new place. I initially (going on 7 years ago now) went through the house and emptied every drawer and closet onto the floor in neat piles. This way I figured I could tell what I had on my hands and start grouping like items together. My mom had put things into the drawers in seemingly random fashion. In one drawer I first came across a layer of old greeting cards, under that my old school report cards and under that a bunch of my mom's personal papers. I dove into this before I became depressed and still had a lot of energy. I had found a new home for or thrown out about half the stuff when my slow slide into severe depression started. Everything in the house has sat in suspended animation ever since. Just this last year I'm starting to make progress and am picking up where I left off.

A couple years after my dad moved out I started moving into my mom and dad's old bedroom since it's bigger and faces the front of the house. I never quite got my clothes moved though, so I've lived split between the two rooms for the better part of 5 years now. I had taken a peek in my parents bedroom closest and have kept the door closed ever since, a pretty scary sight in there. Our house has strange bedroom closets. They are about 10 feet long, but have one standard sized door down towards one end, making 2/3 of the closet pretty worthless. My dad had added high and low rods in their closet at each end so you could put four additional racks of clothes up. Only problem, the front normal height rods in the way so they never touched the clothes on the back rods. When my dad moved out, he and my step mom got rid of some of the clothes, but not all of them. Those remaining clothes haven't moved for 38 years I'd guess, that is until today.

I've spent the last couple days assembling the cubes and putting up shelves. Because of the odd closets, I decided to try putting all my clothes in the cubes, like you see at the store when you go shopping for pants. So far, I've moved about 1/2 my shirts, all my pants, socks and underwear. I'll move the rest once I order some more of the cube divider clips so I can split more of them in two. I couldn't use all the parts for the "cat" shelf in front of the window and realized today the remaining parts would make a nice stand for my laundry baskets, pretty cool. Today I finished getting everything off the floor I had pulled out of the hall closet and my dads old dresser 7 years ago and vacuumed the whole room. Now I could open the closet door again, the last step in reclaiming the bedroom.

I found it as I recalled, all horizontal surfaces covered in a thick coat of dust, covering the floor, baseboards, rods and top of all the remaining clothes, even the light bulb, just like you see in the movies. I went in with the vacuum first to get up the worst of it and then started pulling the clothes out. My mom all my life weighed over 200 pounds, but my aunts always told me she actually quite skinny until she had me. Indeed she was. My mom also a very simple dresser all the time I remember. This clearly not the case before she became a mom. I found some very sharp looking outfits (50's and 60's vintage), sized I'd guess for a 140 pound person. Once I got all the clothes out I separated them from the hangers and put the clothes in garbage bags for when the next textile recycling day comes up. I put the hangers into two piles, plain metal hangers go to the local dry cleaners, all the other odd birds into the trash. I vacuumed the whole closet from the top down, including the walls and the light bulb and removed the rods. Now I have some boxes in one end, my ironing board leaning up in the other and a shelf centered in front of the door for extra bedding type stuff.

The bedroom about 95% complete now, just have a few things that need to go in other rooms, but this will have to wait until those rooms ready to take them. In the mean time they are safely tucked away on the new shelves awaiting their final destinations. I also got the shelf put up in front of the dining rm. window. Looks even nicer than I imagined it would. Of course, I had to move the stuff occupying the floor in that room into the living rm. to make space.

Like I said one room down, eight to go. The other two bedrooms (0% complete), dining rm. (30%), sun room (50%), living rm. (50%), kitchen (70%), basement (40%) and attic (70%, one of the first things I did 7 years ago was take over 150 cardboard boxes from our attic to the recycling center).

The basement my next area of focus, as it will open up space for various items on the other floors that belong down there. A couple years ago I took down one set of the nasty wooden shelves a previous owner had built to make room for metal bulk storage racks. With the help of a friend, I also removed 30 or so grocery bags full of pine branches my dad had kept along with 100 or so newspaper logs and a wall full of larger pine limbs. Last year I bought several light duty bulk storage racks from Menards and set them up. I've also bought a supply of clear plastic tubs. A couple months ago I consolidated all my Christmas, phone, audio, PA/DJ, video and networking stuff in addition to my extension cords into these tubs. Now I'm working on electrical stuff, lubricants and misc. hardware type stuff. I used to do a lot of electrical work on the side for folks. It had gotten spread out into 20 or so cardboard boxes. Looks like it will consolidate into about 3 tubs, plus some cardboard boxes for the bulkier items. Once I complete this I can throw out the unused cardboard boxes that have stacked up, remove the last set of nasty wooden shelves, cut up the two 50 gal drums my dad used for trash years ago and probably buy one more bulk storage rack.

A new plan

2006-01-02T01:45:00.000-05:00

In our last episode Stevo planned to go see a friend at work play drums at a local night club for New Years Eve ...

I ended up doing something much better, but first a story ...

The Geer family at our church experienced nothing short of a tragedy about 6 months ago. Carol, the mom, went in for a very routine abdominal surgery. She had a severe reaction to the muscle relaxant used as part of the anesthesia process. Her heart stopped for 18 minutes, leaving her in a coma and the doctors saying she would never recover. The family not content with this made arrangements for a regime of hyperbaric oxygen treatments down in Florida. A few weeks after starting the treatments hurricane Wilma came roaring through, cutting off power to the facility for almost a month. Despite the interruption, the treatments did wonders and she's now considered conscious and alert. She's clearly aware of her surroundings, shows emotions, follows all activity in the room with her eyes and even tries to talk. Unfortunately she still can't move her extremities to any extent and her muscles have atrophied as a result. To add insult to injury the insurance companies won't cover the treatments, considered "experimental", won't pay for nursing home care until she's moved into a "participating" facility, all of which in our three county area have year long waiting lists and Medicaid has rejected their application. This has resulted in a crushing financial blow to the family, so their friends have put on two fundraising dinner/auctions over the past few months to help "Meet the Need", raising about $30,000 or so. Seems like a lot, but I'm guessing the family has experienced at least $60,000 in out of pocket expenses at this point, so they are really hurting on all levels. Financial, emotional and spiritual.

I'm not able to make a dent in their financial situation, but I do have a spare 19" TV. Ironically enough, my grandmother used this very same set in this very same nursing home some 20 years ago. Dan, the son, has a spare DVD player and a huge movie collection. So he's going to fix Carol up with her favorite movies to help pass the time when the family at school and work and provide visual stimulation. I got to know Rich, the dad, a bit better while we set up the TV and rearranged some of the furniture. Sometime the next couple days I'm going to take over a set of shelves as well, so they have a place to put up some pictures and such. Right now the room only has a small dresser, one of those rolling tables and a chair. This the first time I had ever met Carol. Indeed she did look alert, studying this newcomer for a long while and clearly experiencing a lot of thoughts running through her mind.

I attended the second of the Meet the Need dinners. Afterwards, while helping tidy things up, Rich and Dan invited me to spend New Years Eve with them. They go every year to a friends house who doesn't mind seeing a few new faces turn up at the door. The friends house right near the place my folks church having their New Years party. I called up my folks and made the arrangements. In the end I went to my folks party from 7 - 8:30P, went over to the Geer party till about 10P. Went back to pick up my folks and took them home. Returned to the Geer party just in time to see the ball drop. The friends house really cool and the basement full of all the toys one would want. HDTV, pool table, air hockey table and one of those basket ball things. I'm not much good at sports but one of the guys, Brad, really got into the basket ball thing. I started watching and he eventually convinced me to give it a try. I never got over 51, but still had a fun time. Even though he much better, he got 136 one time, he never did make fun of me. When I got home I realized how much this meant to me. Most of my previous competitive sports experiences not so good. Brad goes to Hope along with his brother Brian. I hope I'll run into them again some day.

To my total surprise I also got invited to a third New Year's Party. One of the guys from my model train club invited me to come over to his place. He and his wife decided to throw a New Year's bash at the last minute. It turned out I couldn't squeeze it in with everything else going on, but it gave me a lift to think he'd go to the trouble to call me up and invite me. Hopefully the next time they throw a party the timing will work out better.

Getting down to business

2005-12-31T02:17:00.000-05:00

As anyone who knows me well knows, I'm very keen to get my house back into presentable shape. Lately I've had more going on during the weekends which has brought progress to a standstill. So I've looked forward to the time off over Christmas and New Years (two, four day weekends in a row) to get down to business.

Over Christmas weekend between running errands and spending all Christmas day with family I hardly stepped foot in my own house. I found this incredibly frustrating, but after reflecting on it realized I shouldn't have counted on doing anything on the domestic front over that weekend.

So all week I've looked forward to tackling stuff New Year's weekend. Then the phone started ringing, one friend wants me to take him shopping for groceries and an exercise machine, my parents want me to drive them out to a nearby city for a New Years Eve party, another friend wants me to come see him for a day or two in another city. I quickly realized if I did all these things it would suck away the entire weekend before I knew it.

I've always had trouble saying no to people. Now days it's not quite so hard to say no, instead I struggle with my motives for saying no. Am I selfish to turn down my parents request to drive them? They are up in years and don't drive at night anymore.

Tonight while eating dinner with them I asked if anyone else from their church going to the party (one of their friends at church has organized and promoted this party for years). They said they hadn't heard. I asked if they would mind making some calls, since anyone coming from town would practically drive right by their house (they live right off the interstate). My dad said he didn't want to do that and forbid my step mom to make any calls. This struck me as odd and a bit over the top. With a bit more pressing my dad finally revealed he didn't want to rely on other people. If I didn't want to take them, they would stay home and watch TV, simple as that. My original plans for New Years Eve to go hear a band at a local club, one of the guys at work plays drums for the band and they are really good. I've tried to go see them live for over a year now, but it never seems to work out. I figured on staying for 2 or 3 hours and then coming home, so as not to tie up the entire night. If I take my folks to their New Years Party I will have to leave around 5:30P and won't get home till 1A or so.

I seems to me my folks do have other transportation options, but are refusing to avail themselves of them. I decided to stick with my original plans. The friend who wants to go shopping OK with doing it next weekend, he's already got the groceries it turns out. The friend who wants me to come down for a day or two? Well, I haven't hung out with him for over a year now, so I'm really torn about this. I would rather stay here and look towards the summer to get together. I said that last summer to. Hmmm.

I don't normally look at sale flyers and the like or go shopping without a specific need to do so. Any time I walk into a store I inevitably see something I've GOT to have, on sale of course. When these situations come up, I make it a habit to go home empty handed and see if I still remember a day or two later. 90% of the time I've forget about it, since I really didn't need it anyway.

This Christmas my parents had a "crisis" over the heater in their guest bedroom pooping out. My step mom would ask me about it every time she saw me, over a 2 week period, just petrified at the thought of a guest feeling cold while taking a shower. I ended up going to 5 different stores and spent about 10 - 12 hours of shopping trying to find a suitable heater for the job. The bathroom small, not a lot of room for one of those big utility things. Also thinking something with electronic buttons more shock resistant than direct wired switches and knobs. I eventually found a nice, tower style ceramic heater at Menards. Ended up buying 3 to get one good one, the other two vibrated excessively.

I also wound up with two pairs of gloves, two pairs of shoes, a new spring jacket, a heater for myself, ... and a bunch of new shelves for my house. Target having a sale on the kind I wanted. Never even knew they sold this kind, I had looked in the wrong part of the store before. The cool shelves in the Home Improvement department vs. the Storage and Furniture sections I had looked in before. Who would have thought.

Armed with shelves, today I worked on my bedroom. Bed, Bath and Beyond sells these cool wire cube storage units you can put together in any myriad of combinations. Only problem, they are always out when I go looking for them and they are expensive. Sam's Club sold them for while, then stopped. Wouldn't you know, Target has them too it turns out, for about 1/2 the price. I now have one wall more or less dedicated to the cubes, a small shelf in front of the window for my cat to sit on, a big shelf for, well, big things and a little shelf to act as a night stand by my bed. Before I had used a TV tray table for my night stand, had my clothes split between two bedrooms and my cat sat on top of a pile sleeping bags.

I'm quite excited about the cubes. I never really cared for dressers, you forget about 1/2 the stuff you put in them. With the cubes everything out in plain sight. One for everyday jeans, one for nice jeans, one for dress pants, another for shorts, ... you get the idea. Turns out you can get little clips which allow you to subdivide the cubes into smaller sections, but only in the specially marked boxes, and only enough to do two cubes. A web search eventually led me to the cube holy grail ; a site that sells: spare plastic connectors (the basic building block for the cubes), nicer clips to subdivide (the little shelves actually slide in and out) and the greatest thing of all, casters! Hurray!! Always puzzled me they didn't come with casters in the first place. All reasonably priced.

Tomorrow, I aim to finish up my bedroom and put a shelf up in front of the window in the dining rm. This the only place in the house plants will grow, currently they are sitting on cardboard boxes and are surrounded by stuff sitting on the floor. The shelf may not work out because of a huge return air register built into the floor under the window. I'm hoping the shelf I picked out wide enough to span the register so all the legs will sit on a solid surface. I need to get this ironed out tomorrow so I can still run over to Target and make any additional purchases/exchanges before the sale ends at 10P.

A post 9/11 moment

2005-12-24T00:23:00.000-05:00

While driving to work a few days ago I saw two state road workers in the median hunched over the base to one of those big overhead signs. They had their bright yellow vests on and a transit stand set up next to the base.

As I drove by the first thought that hit my mind, "Hmmm, wonder if they are two terrorists dressed up as road workers planting a bomb or loosening the bolts on that sign? Wonder what the surveying transit for? Sure seemed set up in a weird spot. Wait a second I didn't see a truck along the shoulder. Now what's up with that!?!"

Then a second thought struck me, "If I saw those two guys before 9/11 I would have said to myself. Man hope those guys are getting double time for having to work on a sign in this kind of weather. The snow looked knee deep along side that sign and it's kind of windy to. Bet those wrenches cold as ice even with gloves on. To top it all off they don't even give them a truck to go warm up in"

I continued driving to work and figured my mental gymnastics would make a fine post.

So ... did it take?

2005-12-18T21:43:00.000-05:00

Looks like we are about 3 weeks into the great get up earlier campaign. The first week I got up at 8:30A each day. By the end of the week I felt exhausted. As it happened, the weekend which followed unusually busy so I never fully bounced back and have spent the past couple weeks in recovery mode.

Over time I've come to realize my energy level goes in distinct cycles, I will feel very energetic for a week and then very tired for the next 2 or 3. This also has an effect on my hypoglycemia, when I'm in the tired part of the cycle my brain "fades" constantly, resulting in me eating constantly to maintain my ability to think and make rational decisions. When I'm in the more energetic part of the cycle my body more resilient, more like I remember it as a younger person.

Lately I've given thought to my schedule and how much I accomplish in a day. I look at people like my blog friend Noel and can't help but think I'm not making the mark. Let's look at a typical Stevo week.

Mon - Fri Up at 9:30A or so. Eat 1/2 bowl of cereal, check my e-mail, start making the rest of breakfast while listening to Diane Rehm. The whole make/eat breakfast and wash dishes cycle done by 11A or so. Take shower and get ready for work. Leave around noon to go to work. Eat lunch with guys on 5th floor, get back to shop around 1:30P. Eat "brain snack" around 3P. Work till 5:30 or 6P and then ...

Mon - Check in at local hobby shop, make sure club flyer rack full, then go to home group a couple blocks away. Aim to arrive around 6 to 6:15P. Eat dinner w/ Steve and Cheryl. Have home group. Get home around 10 - 10:30P. Check e-mail, read up on news of the day, listen to Marketplace while making up and eating evening brain snack, check Noel, Dan and Frank blogs. Go to bed around Midnight.

Tue - Grocery day or helping someone, usually my friend Tom go shopping. If groceries, get home around 7:30P or so. Put stuff away, make dinner, go through mail. If Tom, eat dinner, go shopping, get home 9 - 10P

Wed - Peterson's night, couple at my church which puts on a free meal every Wed. night. Really great folks. Jim, the husband, seems to genuinely look forward to seeing me each week, this means a lot to me. I've also made some new friends, Derek and Scotty, who live close by. We went to see Good Night and Good Luck together a couple weeks ago and grabbed some dinner afterwards, my first opportunity to do something with them outside of Wed. night. I look forward to more opportunities, they are great fun to hang out with. I usually head out around 9 - 10P and fill up at the gas station at the end of the street on the way home.

Thursday - Go home and make a quick dinner, then train club. For most of my life people have said I should take up a hobby. Last year I decided to give model railroading a try. I like it a lot. Get home around 11P.

Fri - Dinner with my folks and fixing stuff around their house. Get home around 9 - 10P. My dad likes me to stay and watch Law and Order reruns with him.

Sat and Sun - I try to stay home. I'll typically aim to go through my snail mail, respond to e-mails, put up a blog post or two, do laundry, take care of cat stuff and make some progress on getting the house back into shape. While preparing meals, eating and doing the dishes afterwards I listen to On the Media, Washington Week, Off the Record, Fresh Air and the message from Riverview. Inevitably something comes up that takes up most of Sat. - helping Tom, "crisis" at my folks house or a meeting to attend which leaves Sunday to focus on domestic stuff. Every other Sunday night devoted to talking with my friend Jason who I met in the Czech Republic several years ago while on a short term mission trip. He's in a tough spot in life right now, our conversations typically last 3 - 4 hours. We used to talk every Sunday, but that became too much, so we agreed to try every other week which works out a lot better. On the opposite Sunday I often watch a movie in the evening, one of my favorite times of the week.

I think I'm doing too much stuff. As you can see many weeks I'm not home at all in the evening. Feels like I'm on a treadmill. Mon. night the obvious night to cut out, since this the home group from my old church. However, I've become friends with the hosts, Steve and Cheryl, and have found myself hesitant to drop out of the group. I also get several free trade magazines via work which I like to read, but in reality I can't possibly get to all of them so they pile up. I've finally decided to cancel them except for my one absolute favorite, Engineered Systems, an awesome magazine about commercial HVAC systems. To me it's like a little treasure wrapped in glossy paper when it comes in the mail each month.

I originally thought by getting up earlier I could do stuff like go through my mail, read up on the news, put up blog posts, etc. in the morning when I'm fresh, thus taking the pressure off trying to do stuff when I get home at night when I'm not up to it anyway and freeing up the weekends for focusing on the house. Complicating this effort, I seem to function best on 9 - 10 hours of sleep, 9 or a bit less during the energetic part of my "cycle", closer to 10 during the down portion. Something I don't like to admit since many take it as a sign of laziness. I don't see it this way. If 8 hours the average people need, then it stands to reason that a goodly number of people will fall in the 7 hours bracket, others in the 9 hours bracket. Our culture takes great pride in getting by on as little sleep as possible so 7 hour people end up as hero's while 9 hour people regarded as slugs.

Food also plays a role in this. I have to eat constantly to keep my energy up, yet thankfully I don't gain any weight. As long as I can remember people have made fun of me for eating so much. 7 years or so ago, it hit me that maybe I did eat too much and I started to eat less, even though I still felt hungry. After a few months of this the hypoglycemia started rather suddenly and has never let up. You may wonder, "What's the big deal? So you get a little hungry.". It's hard to explain but in short, my brain will start to "fade", usually about 2 hours after a meal. It's almost a physical sensation with my brain activity slowing down and my muscles tensing up. If I don't stop and eat, my whole thought process comes to a halt. I can't remember stuff, I'll babble, I'll hook red wires to black wires, if I'm in a store I can't make a decision on what to buy ... you get the idea. It's hard to focus and get stuff done when you have to stop every 2 - 3 hours to eat. Whenever I go anywhere I have to take into consideration how long the trip and make sure to pack enough snacks and water to tide me over between meals.

I started the getting up earlier initiative during an "up" cycle, now that I'm in the "down" cycle I'm back to the 9:30 or so time again. We are going into the 3rd week of the down cycle, so I'm hopeful in another week I'll have more energy again and can resume the 8:30A goal.

Out to the Movies

2005-12-06T11:17:00.000-05:00

I haven't seen a movie in a theatre for some time, easily month's, but made up for it the past couple weeks.

First off I saw "Good Night and Good Luck", George Clooney's historical piece about Edward R. Murrow taking on McCarthy. It's all in black and white adding further to the feeling of going back in time to the early 50's. Superb acting combined with the compelling story line makes for a great movie. I went with some friends on Fri. afternoon over Thanksgiving weekend, the theatre completely full. We sat in the very back row. Hurray for stadium seating! Although not intended as a political piece, the parallels to events today pretty hard to miss. Especially the mostly unspoken, yet clearly evident, atmosphere of fear created by McCarthy and his tactics in those who didn't share his exact views.

A few days later I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. Having a lot of ground to cover it moves really fast. So much so I went to see it twice and still don't think I picked up on everything. I'll have plenty of chances to absorb it all when the DVD comes out. I identify a lot with the Harry character, feeling alone in the world and all, and have looked forward to each of the movies. It's fun to see how he and his friends are maturing and dealing with growing up. Lots more I could say, but suffice it to say I liked it a lot and will certainly add it to my DVD collection when it comes out.

Beginning of a New Era?

2005-11-28T23:06:00.000-05:00

For all my life, if I have nothing forcing me to get up sooner, I gravitate towards getting up around 9:30A and going to bed around Midnight to 1A. Since I start work at 1:30P I've run in this mode for a while now. Only problem, I don't get much done after 10P or so, mostly piddling away in front of the computer. When I do get up around 8 or 9A I'm always amazed with how much I get done during that extra hour or two in the morning.

This week I'm officially setting out to form a new routine of getting up around 8:30A. This morning a photo perfect start, did some laundry, sorted through a bunch of mail and paid a couple bills. So cool!!

We'll see how things are going after a couple weeks, that will really tell the story.

Steering an Iceberg

2005-11-06T23:41:00.000-05:00

This weekend I felt tired and a bit under siege since I've had so much going on the past couple weeks. I had a couple things I should have gone to, but stayed put to rest and try to get some things done around the house.

My friend Jason often urges me to purposely set a day aside to do nothing. I find it hard to do this since I'm most productive getting stuff done around the house during the weekend. It's so rewarding to actually see some change after a full weekend of organizing.

This weekend consisted mostly of busy work, so by the time Sunday night rolled around it didn't feel like I had done much. Never the less I decided to sit down and watch a movie. Garden State one of my favorites and I haven't watched it in a while, so it got the nod this evening. I love how the characters interact with each other. It also transports me through time as different parts of the movie remind of different times in life as well as current struggles. There about three spots where I become very emotional. Even though I know the parts are coming the same emotions come gurgling up just as strong as ever. Bet this telling me something, eh?

One of these moments when Sam and Largeman are burying Jelly the hamster. Sam says a few last words ending with something to the effect of "and I hope you liked me". This hits close to home for me. I'm good at fixing things and it seems people always find my phone number when they need something done, but aren't so quick to find it when looking for some company. After a while it gets pretty hard to miss. In recent years this situation has improved, but I still find it extremely difficult to feel connected to other people. One of the big struggles of my life. Well, back to the movie ... Depending on my mood when this scene rolls along, I'll either hit pause and let myself have a good cry, which helps me process the powerful memories/feelings that come rushing to the fore, or I'll let the movie continue playing and let the feelings dissipate after a few minutes. On a related note, for many years I couldn't listen to the theme music for Cheer's without feeling profoundly sad inside for the same reason, I didn't see myself as having a place where " ... everybody knows your name and everyone's glad you came ..."

In the last year or so it's hit me that the people at work seem to like me and see me as doing a good job. Times are tough for universities in Michigan, I'm a totally at will employee, the first to go if budgets come up short. Still they've kept me on. This has buoyed my confidence in myself. Lest you think I'm building my sense of self-worth around something as fleeting as a job, let me say I don't think I'm doing that. I do think I feel part of a team and am making a valuable contribution, something I haven't felt for a long time. I think it's a good thing and a healthy thing to build on the emotional energy this creates and use it as a springboard to get other parts of my life into order.

A few drops of oil

2005-10-31T00:26:00.000-05:00

You've probably noticed trains much on my mind these days. Now that I've got some locos that run I'm having fun getting them to run their best.

You've ever noticed while waiting at the light for a train to go by that they often have 2, 3 or more locos hitched together to pull long trains? They call this consisting. Model trains can do this to, it's just a bit of work to get them to all run at the same speed so they pull together. It helps if the locos the same model and brand. So with this in mind I've picked up 3 SD40-2's by Kato, one of the better brands. The SD40-2 one of the most popular locos ever made, they sold over 4000 of them, so from a prototypical point of view it makes sense to focus on this model. I like the looks of it to.

My two CP Rail SD40-2 little jack rabbits, while my Burlington Northern drags behind noticeably. I spent a fair amount of time slowing the CP Rail's down to match and then it occurred to me perhaps the BN just needs a little oil. I got out my precision oiler and lubed all the critical spots. Sure enough it much faster, not as fast, but fast enough to make the whole tweaking process much less tedious. All three of them now can run a lap around the layout and stay within a couple inches of each other, more than close enough to allow them to consist well together.

What's up?

2005-10-23T14:39:00.000-04:00

How kind of you to ask, well let's see ...

The battle over the couch continues. I remembered one of the cat sites I read mentioned a change of material can make a piece of furniture more or less inviting. I've noticed Mindy liked the feel of the sheet I had put over the couch, often running her paws over it. I took the sheet off and the peeing seems to have stopped. I say seems, since the couch still stinks, so it hard to tell. Even after a couple hits with the cat enzyme spray. Becoming more concerned about this I did the sensible thing and lifted up the cushions. Oh boy!! She had found the gap between the cushions and peed in there. Now I've got the cushions leaning up against the wall so I can give them the enzyme treatment top and bottom and have also thoroughly sprayed the innards of the couch. We'll see how it goes. This enzyme stuff getting expensive.

I've gotten decoders installed inside all my loco's now. The latest addition to the fleet, the Kato's, are like a watch. Just like everyone said, very smooth runners. I've taken a break from building stuff around the club and have focused on getting my loco's tuned up and helping rewire our main yard. It's coming along nicely and I'm looking forward to Thursday nights again. I've also taken time to read up on the details of how our club's DCC system works. Fascinating stuff. Now when people have questions I can help them out. I'm aiming to make up some posters to put up on the wall to answer the most common questions about how the particulars of the system work. My chance to get familiar with PowerPoint.

I mentioned in my last post about my yearly battle with the change of season. I'm happy to report I'm starting to feel better and am waking up a bit sooner again. We've had a bit more sun lately which has helped as well.

Things at work a bit strange the past few weeks. Usually we look at a piece of equipment, get some parts, fix it up and move on. Lately this process really dragged out so we've got lots of half finished projects hanging. We've also had more electronic problems. I can do some board level repairs, but am not a pro. One -80 deg. C freezer had a little control board go bad, company wants $660 for it! We decided to take the brute force approach and replace every IC chip on the board. All 10 of them. Total cost, about $8. With everything going on, I kept putting off placing the order for the chips. The professor getting impatient so I finally sat down and spent 1/2 hour typing in all the part numbers. Two days later the parts came. Hurray. What's this, they sent the wrong ones. Oh. Replacements coming this Monday. I've installed sockets for all the chips on the board, once they come, we'll plug'em in and see what happens. Hopefully we will have saved the professor $652. This project got me jumpstarted to finish up some other projects that had fallen off the radar screen. Will feel good to have them out of the way.

A couple at my church puts on a meal every Wed. night. Everyone welcome to come eat and stay as long or as little as they like. We usually have anywhere from 20 - 40 people in their modest sized house. It's a fun time. A couple weeks ago Dannie went to turn off the ceiling fan and wound up with the chain dangling in her hand. Jim went and got a new switch, but it didn't fit, so he asked if I'd take a look. What seemed like a simple thing, well ... not so simple. The switches look alike on the outside, but work totally different on the inside. It turns out easily 10 different styles available. Found a wonderful place on the web that sells just ceiling fan switches. Now Jim and Dannie's fan whole again.

Now for the story within a story. One of guys who's a regular on Wed. night lives near me. The switch didn't come on Tuesday like I had hoped, so all day Wed. at work I debated whether to drive home and see if it had arrived. Meaning I'd have to drive all the way across town twice, with no guarantee the switch had even come. I finally decided to make the drive and on the way over it occurred to me to give Derek a call and see if he'd want to ride over together. The sound of death answered the phone, Derek feeling really sick. He hadn't planned to come, since he rides a motorcycle normally, but thought he'd make it in the van OK. Cool, Derek's a great guy, everyone misses him when he can't make it. Turned out the switch did come, so I got to help Jim, Dannie and Derek out with one simple decision. You think maybe the Holy Spirit talking to me at work that day?

Honesty

2005-10-16T23:09:00.000-04:00

I've had a few situations come up over the past week that have gotten me to thinking about the whole topic of honesty.

I personally value friends who are straight up with me in a constructive sort of way vs. a backhanded hurtful kind of way. I struggle with how to achieve this balance within my sphere of friends and how to interact with folks who don't see things this way.

Last week I became part of a discussion about a fellow's dating habits. Every time he gets a girlfriend he spends every waking moment with her, in turn dumping his friends and other interests. Eventually, the relationship collapses under this weight and he's without a girlfriend for a while. Everyone has done this at some point in their life and most have learned the lesson to take things at a more measured pace when it comes to dating and friendship. Unfortunately, it seems he's not getting it and keeps making the same mistake over and over again.

I asked if anyone had actually talked with him about this and attempted to offer some friendly advice. They all shuddered at the thought and said, "Never! It's his life and his business. It's not for us to intrude into his life. Besides, even if we did, he wouldn't listen anyway". I wasn't suggesting that they try to run his life, just a tactful heart to heart on basic relationship skills. It seems to me, especially in parts of the New Testament, that scripture calls us to do this sort of thing with fellow believers. Yet, I think our cultural norms work against this, to the point that when we read the pertinent scriptures on this topic we just glance right over them.

Ever met someone who has a glaring social deficit, say poor hygiene? Everyone talks about them and usually avoids them. Does anyone ever stop and tenderly suggest to them that if they took a shower more often it would open up a new world to them? Are we really loving them by "giving them their space" or saying "I wouldn't want to hurt their feelings". I would venture no.

Once in college I had become depressed during the summer and fallen into the bad habit of not showering for 2 or 3 days at a stretch. Our campus group met in an apartment that summer and often hung out together afterwards. One evening found Sammy and myself sitting on a picnic bench looking at the sky. With a bit of apprehension he asked if he could ask me a personal question. I said, "Sure", and he proceeded to tell me that I stunk and others in the group didn't like to hang around me because of it. He asked a bit about my family as well, perceptive on his part, as my living situation at the time not so good. Did I feel hurt? Sure. It hurts to hear this kind of thing, and yes I avoided Sammy for a couple weeks after our conversation. Did I make sure I took a shower everyday the rest of the summer? You bet, and after a couple weeks I came to appreciate the risk Sammy took in reaching out to me and thanked him for making me aware. I had always liked Sammy anyways and my respect for him grew after getting over the initial emotional reaction to the bad news.

I try to reach out to others, when appropriate, just like Sammy did to me that day. I see it as part of my responsibility to fellow believers and my fellow man. It helped that I had gotten to know Sammy some over the summer, making it easier for me to accept his advice. I try to keep a couple things in mind when I'm thinking about approaching another person. Do I know them well enough to have earned their respect in the area I'm thinking of confronting them about? Have I spent enough time around them to understand the context surrounding the area I thinking of talking to them about? Having achieved these relationship thresholds before confronting a particular person will dramatically increase the chances of the advice falling on receptive ears. No one likes a know it all or someone falsely accusing them/making snap judgments without the benefit of the full picture. The better we know a person the less likely we are to fall into these pitfalls when dispensing unsolicited advice.

This and That

2005-10-10T11:11:00.000-04:00

The days are starting to get shorter and I'm going through my annual adjustment period. Something about this time year messes with my sleeping schedule, I wind up sleeping more in order to feel rested. I know I need the rest, but I feel guilty about it. Whenever sleeping comes up in a conversation people look at me like I'm some kind of slug or something, this time of year I usually sleep about 9 - 10 hours a night. During the summer more around 8 - 9 hours. I've tried a couple times to run on 7 or so, after a week I feel sick.

This weekend felt very strange to me. I did a fair amount of stuff, yet I don't feel like I accomplished anything worthwhile.

I went to the monthly meeting of our local National Model Railroad Association, Division 5, and had a very enjoyable afternoon. I picked up some parts I needed from a guy at the meeting and spent the rest of the day installing them. Today I applied all the detail parts to my Kato locos. This pretty much wraps up the train stuff I needed to do. I actually started something and saw it to completion within a week. You'd think I'd feel excited. Instead I feel tired and wonder where the weekend went.

After working on the train stuff I went outside and mowed the lawn/bagged up leaves. Since I had the flu last weekend I didn't get the lawn done, figured my neighbors about ready to kill me if I let it go any longer.

I've also debated over what to do about my cat problem. Mindy still peeing on the couch I cleared off a couple weeks ago. I need to do something about this, but after crying over the thought of handing her over the Humane Society I realize I have become more attached to her than I first thought. Still, I can't have her peeing on the couch everyday. I keep dousing it with the cat enzyme spray, but this only a stop gap measure, and getting expensive to. I've tried rearranging litter boxes and even put one of them on the couch for a couple days. She just peed on a different part of the couch instead. Sigh ...

I typed up some nice long e-mails to a couple of my friends, they moved recently to Texas and are going through some big adjustments right now. One of them made this statement in his blog "Isn't it amazing that we are surrounded by tools which are supposed to enhance communication and yet we actually share so little?". This hit me as so true and so ironic. We live in an age with virtually unlimited communication options and yet for the most part are lonelier than ever. Even with my own blog I know some of my friends check in regularly, yet I struggle to post often enough to keep it interesting for them. Not for lack of things to type, just usually by the end of the day I'm pooped and not much for typing. Still as my friend also pointed out, busyness really comes down to priorities. Where am I placing mine?

I'm in the digital camera market and have a couple models I've got my eye on. I don't have any kind of photographic background, pretty much a point and shoot kind of guy. I do know from borrowing various cameras over the years that I want something with a wide-angle lens. Say 28mm or so vs. the typical 35mm.How many times have you said to yourself, man I wish I could back up a little more? With a wide angle lens this less of a problem. Canon, Panasonic and Ricoh all have some nice, super compact models they just came out with. Giving it some time to see what kind of reception they get and where the prices settle out.

I'm also intrigued by some new laptops on the market, esp. a couple models made by Sager. Sager you say, who's that? They specialize in high performance at a reasonable price, actually their models virtually identical to other higher price brands, all made by the same Asian company, Clevo. Just Sager more low key. I'm so tempted to upgrade to a newer machine, but I keep telling myself my trusty Toshiba Satellite 5105-S607 holding up very nicely and doing everything I need. Still the new models s o o o cool and I love trying out the new stuff. When I got my Toshiba, S/PDIF outputs pretty cutting edge, I had great fun learning how to get it to work and to this day still use my laptop as my DVD player. I just plug an optical cable from the S/PDIF output into the optical input on my home stereo system and vola I've got Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound. My Toshiba has a 1600 x 1200 display, I think I would enjoy the 17" 1920 x 1200 display a lot. We'll see as the months roll by. The new models not coming out till the middle of this month anyway and the prices will stay high for a couple months there after while the gamers snap up the latest gear.

Now that the train stuff out of the way I plan to get back to finishing the big project from work. I'm very close to having all the numbers I need to see if the project viable and am very keen to enter the last few rooms into my big spreadsheet. I've had a couple projects at work on the back burner for a l o n g time now and am going to order a bunch of parts this week to try to get them done and out of the way. Electronic spring cleaning if you will.

My eyes getting real tired, putting on all those small parts has taken it's toll. So I'll bid you good night. See ya soon in cyberspace.

A Hobby Rediscovered

2005-10-04T00:48:00.000-04:00

I'm part of a model train club which has a large HO scale layout about 5 minutes away from my house. I joined it last year after going to a local train show and meeting a bunch of the guys in the club.

Truth be told, N scale my favorite, I love the size and how much you can do with so little space. The local N scale club also had a big display at the train show. I checked out both clubs and finally decided to go with the one closest to my house, the N scale club about 30 minutes away. I also liked the fact the HO club had a permanent, fixed layout, where the N scale club a modular club meeting at a fair ground.

Over the past few months I've slowly come to realize I had become down on my club. It seemed we spent more time messing around with building repairs and mowing the lawn that we did running trains or making improvements to the layout. I eventually saw this as partly my own doing. I like building type stuff and had all too willingly taken on a bunch of projects. It also hit me that I originally joined the club as an opportunity to hang out with folks and have fun, not to add more projects to my life. With this in mind the past few weeks I've focused on finishing, or at least winding down the projects I started and not adding any more for now. A couple weekends ago we had our semi-annual open house. For the first time we made it a two day event on Sat. and Sun. I dreaded it, as it meant a whole weekend away from getting stuff done around the house, which as my faithful readers know, something I'm very keen on putting behind me.

The Thursday before the big weekend I noted our Vice-President becoming frustrated since no one giving him solid commitments. It hit me that as a member I should step up to the plate and I reminded myself the open house only twice a year. I said I'd come for sure on Sat. and left Sun. open if he needed me.

Sat. rolled around and I had a blast. Ran lots of trains, met a bunch of people, couldn't believe the time went by so quick. That night, full of energy, I got busy getting two of the locomotives I had bought a few months before into running shape so I could pull a train of my own instead of having to borrow someone else's. Sun. I showed up early with both engines in tow and quickly discovered both had problems. I spent a couple hours troubleshooting, making repairs, and come up with one good loco. Just in time to, as we needed to get more trains running for people to see.

The open house reinvigorated my excitement for the hobby and our club. Since the open house I've gotten my other two loco's in running shape, thanks to the guys next door at work showing me how to run the mill so I could shave the weights down a bit. Thanks Pete and Adam!! This past weekend I put together the boxcar kits I had bought. Took forever! About 2 hours per boxcar. Not sure if I want to go the kit route again, seeing how it's only $5 - $7 more to by the car fully assembled and ready to roll. We'll see. Today I stopped at the local hobby shop and invested in a special pair of cutters which should reduce the assembly time by 30 - 45 minutes, should I decide to give another one a try.

In hind site, I wonder if the N scale club actually has the advantage by meeting at the fair grounds and taking the modular route. This way they have no maintenance issues to deal with and each member can focus on his individual modules which doesn't seem as daunting as a big stationary layout. During the summer they get together for big meets and put 10's even 100's of these modules together and run trains all day. Due to the small size of N scale this equates to literally miles of track. Trains with 100 cars not uncommon. Sounds like a blast.

Having said that, I'm content with the club I joined. I'm getting back into the hobby, I've gotten to know a great group of guys who are a pleasure to hang out with; and despite having burned myself out at first, I feel good about helping make some long term improvements to the building which will benefit the club for a long time to come. The N scale guys have graciously kept me on their e-mail list and I've considered picking up a couple N scale loco's down the road so I can do things with them from time to time. For now I need to watch how much I spend and stay focused on the house before taking up any additional pursuits.

Couch turned war zone

2005-09-20T23:40:00.000-04:00

Who would have thought that cleaning off a couch could result in such unexpected complications. My sparing cats have turned it into a war zone.

Almost immediately after putting the blue sheet over the couch, Oreo, the bigger cat, claimed it as his making it his favorite hang out spot. After I came back from my trip last week I noticed Mindy had started sitting on the opposite end. "Oh how nice", I thought to myself. Oreo and Mindy have had a terrible time getting along with each other, even 9 months after first meeting each other, it looked like we had finally turned the corner.

A couple days later I came downstairs, petted the little darlings, made breakfast and walked into the living room to discover a dark blue spot in the middle of the couch. "Oh my, Oreo's at it again", I thought, you may recall he has a history of this sort of thing. Only thing, it had very little odor, Oreo's mark unmistakable. I got out the enzyme spray and figured the cats still a little upset about me having left them alone during my trip.

As the days have gone by I've come to realize it's Mindy doing the dirty dead, usually every other day. I've read up some more on what could account for this, even put one of the litter boxes right on the couch. Worked over the weekend, but tonight I came home and found two spots. While working on the computer, looked over and saw a third with Mindy attempting to cover up the spot, like she thought the couch a big litter box.

As near as I can tell the couch has become a battle ground for territory and Mindy finds the sheet very pleasing to rub her paws on, making it doubly more inviting than the litter box. I think I will have to find a new home for Mindy.

Beginners guide to spending $250 at the drive thru

2005-09-13T23:17:00.000-04:00

This past week while on vacation I became involved in my first at fault accident. It all started simple enough, trying to find a nice country restaurant for lunch. My friend and I turned off of Interstate 39 and onto US 24 which runs straight east/west through Illinois and Indiana. I figured we would certainly find many such restaurants along the way.

An hour and a half later we still had not and my "internal pressure" situation became increasingly desperate, going from "need to go soon", to "really need to go soon", to "I've gotta go real soon", to "Can't hold it much longer" culminating in "I'm in pain, I'll stop anywhere now". About which time we rolled into Watseka, IL and came across the local McDonald's. This McDonald's located at a 3 way intersection, so the left turn lane into the parking lot only one car long. I pulled into this lane and promptly noted someone backing out of the driveway and proceeding to the next drive. Quickly scanning the parking lot I saw they had it all blocked off for resealing, only the drive thru lane open, cars backed up all the way to the street. So I proceeded to pull into the drive, look for oncoming traffic, put the van in reverse and Crunch!! Turned out a young high school girl and her friend had pulled right up behind me, so instead of backing onto US 24, I backed into them. Between my urinary distress, noting no one behind me when I made my left turn and focusing on the traffic barreling down US 24 it never occurred to me to check directly behind me for a car on my bumper. Well someone had made their left turn immediately after I made mine and now they had precisely one less set of headlights on their vehicle, Grrr!!

The bright side - No one hurt, no tickets issued, Van OK, girl's car suffered damage only to driver's side headlights and part of the grill, girls real nice and had proper insurance, officer very courteous and professional, delay to trip minimal as friends in Indiana expecting us, I owned up to what happened and didn't try to blame the whole thing on the girls or the McDonald's, took my friends advice and bought the girls lunch at the McDonald's, life lesson learned

The down side - I will loose my "Premier" status on my insurance, I'm still jumpy while driving 3 days later, wonder if I should have asked some questions about the role the girls played in the accident by pulling up so close to me when my bumper had barely cleared the curb due to the backed up drive thru.

In case you're wondering, we did find a nice country restaurant in the very next town, Kentland, IN and had a wonderful lunch for $11 between the two of us.

Too much stuff?

2005-09-05T23:29:00.002-04:00

Anyone who knows me knows I'm in the middle of trying to get my house back in order. I had started doing so before I became depressed, at which point all efforts came to a dead stop. Since then the house has descended into total clutter, getting perilously close to the infamous path down the middle going from room to room. Seeing that I don't like clutter this a totally unacceptable situation. Once clutter sets in, it takes a LONG time to get uncluttered.

This weekend I cleared off the couch in front of my porch windows. Embarrassing to say I had started to sort out my collection of computer, telephone and audio cables 2 - 3 years ago and there they have sat ever since. Well no more. They are now neatly organized in clear plastic tubs and have made there way down to the basement.

You might think this means I have an additional couch now, well not so fast. My folks got it reupholstered years ago and promptly put one of those cover things over it made of the ugliest green material you ever saw. I protested, "Why cover it up after spending so much to make it look nice?". "We want to preserve it". "Oh".

I had a bad feeling about this cover, and sure enough, when I took it off I found what I had feared. It had a foam backing on it, the kind that gets all nasty and sticky when it gets old. Now I have a yellow patterned sleeper couch, covered with olive green sticky foam. I figured I'd vacuum it off, instead I wound up with the stuff all over the vacuum attachments. Had to soak them down real good with Glass Plus and then almost peel it off. For now I've put an old sheet from my bed over it, transforming it into a dark blue sleeper couch.

I've never had much of an attachment to this couch so I had planned to sell it as part of a big garage sale, not sure who would take it in the shape it's in now, but yet it's in great shape except for the sticky stuff. Hmmm.

A week of silence

2005-09-05T23:27:00.000-04:00

I've spent most of the past week glued to the computer and radio keeping up with Hurricane Katrina news. Haven't had much extra energy to put towards writing up a post. The one time that I did sit down and start typing I quickly realized I had nothing to say that would strike anyone as news ... feeling sad for the people in New Orleans, what's taking so long, ... now that some time has passed a couple thoughts keep running through my mind.

I keep thinking about the New Orleans Mayor, it seems to me he has gotten a bum rap. Further revelations about his performance may prove me wrong, but so far it strikes me that he did all he could with what he had available. I read one piece of commentary that criticized him for not rising to the level of Rudy Giuliani and taking charge of the situation. Not fair it seems to me, the Mayor of New York had the resources of a small nation at his finger tips visa vi the NYPD, NYFD and other city agencies, the feds simply came along side and filled in the gaps; Mayor Nagin as leader of the 25th largest city undoubtedly had many resources available to him, but New Orleans a very poor city, I'm guessing the resources available more in keeping with a city much smaller, surely not enough to even begin to handle evacuating and later rescuing the 100,000+ people who didn't own cars. He needed federal aid even before the hurricane hit to aid in the evacuation and properly staff the Superdome/Convention Center sites. Mayor Giuliani also had a functioning communication system, Mayor Nagin operating in a near communication blackout which undoubtedly made a bad situation 100 times worse. I do wonder why he waited so long to order the mandatory evacuation, interested to see as time goes on if this totally his own decision or if others pressured him to hold off. Having an extra day to evacuate the city and get a better handle on how many left behind would have surely made a big difference.

I've never had much patience for red tape. Of course, no one does. For myself I differentiate between the needed filling out forms and letting the process work its way through which I'm generally patient with vs. flat out CYA, protecting turf, hiding behind rules and other bureaucratic machinations that serve no purpose other than to hide incompetence, cover up mistakes, deflect responsibility or allow people to take it easy while at work. I'm definitely a spirit of the law kind of person and have endeavored to uphold this in the various jobs I've held. I'm also tend to go by the notion, "it's easier to apologize than ask permission". I think sometimes in my life I've carried this notion too far and have aimed in recent years to temper it a bit. As you might guess it kills me inside to hear all the reports of the muddled chain of command hindering the relief effort. "The governor didn't make an official request", "the request wasn't filled with the proper codes", "FEMA can't task military aircraft", "Defense Dept. and Justice Dept. lawyers debated the potential liability of National Guard troops trying to enforce local laws if President Bush used his authority to federalize all the Guard troops to speed the response", ... you get the idea. Usually just added inconvenience, in this case many lives lost and needlessly so. It would seem in times like these people would look past this stuff and get the job done in order to save lives in a crisis situation. I still find it hard to comprehend officials insisting on spending hours, sometimes days, hashing this stuff out with so many lives hanging in the balance.

Race. A couple days before the press started talking about it, it struck me that every picture of looting I saw featured black folk doing the looting. Soon after it struck me that every person I saw at the Superdome/Convention Center sites black, save one white nurse helping folks at the Convention Center. I don't believe those in power purposely abandoned the people in New Orleans because they are primarily black, on the other hand I'm not so naive as to think race and politics didn't play some role in the sluggish start to the relief effort. Look back to 9/11. President Bush and Rudy Giuliani both leaders in the same political party, probably not best friends, but surely they new each other on some level. You can bet the Mayor had no problem getting in touch with the President and having his ear when he needed to. Now envision Mayor Nagin trying to reach the White House, he's just another mayor to them, they've probably never met. Chances are he had trouble getting through and being taken seriously. I'm sure the President and the people around him care about the folks in New Orleans, just the same I'm guessing they didn't initially treat the hurricane and it's aftermath with the same degree of urgency and attention another part of the country might have received. Not because they are bigots, but because they don't have any day to day connection with this part of the country. Democrat Governor and Mayor, large poor black population, in other words it's not "family" the same way Florida would be with the President's brother, New York as our country's principle city, California with it's large population and influence, no, New Orleans just a "customer" of the federal government and got treated accordingly.

The big project unveiled

2005-08-24T12:04:00.000-04:00

The university built the building in which I work around 1987. It seems our university still saw A/C as a bit of a luxury at the time and accordingly designed our building with the bare minimum to keep the offices at 78 deg. during the summer. As you might guess our professors and graduate students don't find this acceptable and with the proliferation of computers, monitors, office over crowding, etc. many of the offices actually run in the lower 80's.

Various folks have investigated this problem over the years and come to the same conclusion, insufficient air flow to the offices. Solution, complete replacement of the entire system at our department's expense.

Several months ago while reading one of my HVAC engineering magazines I came across a listing of seminars at the upcoming HVAC Expo, one of them mentioned loop duct design. This triggered a memory of another article on loop piping in a chemical plant. Eureka! Our building a perfect candidate for conversion to a loop duct system as the existing office system 80% of the way there already.

I e-mailed the author of the paper and eventually the original author in Britain. Turns out this concept indeed very promising for our building. Doing so will increase the air moving capacity of the existing ductwork by about 50%, at the same static pressure. Normally to increase air flow you have to increase the static pressure in the ductwork in order to shove the extra air through, this requires bigger fans and motors. With the loop design we essentially give the air two paths instead of one to get where it needs to go, allowing extra air flow without needing extra pressure. This opens up the possibility of increasing our total air flow without having to replace the main fans in the penthouse. A huge cost savings as the existing fans the size of a small house! This all said, cooling the offices down will take more air flow, how much more will determine whether it's reasonable to think the existing fans and cooling coils can handle the extra load. At this point I realized I needed to know how much air flow each individual office really needs to maintain 74 deg. during the summer.

Hence the beginning of the big project. Commercial cooling load design software costs thousands of dollars, but the process really not that complicated, just lots of numbers to crunch and tables to reference. Various books available that outline the process and reprint all the pertinent tables. Years ago I had constructed a spreadsheet to ease this task when our church contemplated building an addition. I started on a design for the heating and cooling systems using this spreadsheet. I simply took the parts of the tables that apply to Lansing and inputted them into various lookup tables and then set up a place to enter the room data and display the results.

Zoom ahead 10 years, now I'm trying to do this for 100 - 150 rooms vs. the 20 in our church's addition. Amazingly, the old (Version 2 I think) Lotus 123 spreadsheet loaded into the modern version of Excel (Office XP) and worked w/ very little modification! (Anyone thinking God must have played a part in this?) For the past 3 month's or so I've upgraded the spreadsheet to automatically build an output data table made up of the load values for each room at different times of day and constructed a new spreadsheet to calculate the totals by floor and for the whole building. I've also had to go through and measure all the rooms, count lights, number of people, etc and find out what kind of glass they used as the each office has wall to wall windows that take up 1/3 of the outside wall.

I'm about 3/5 of the way through the building and things are looking promising. Our building a VAV (Variable Air Volume) design, meaning the thermostats on the wall regulate the volume of cool air entering each office to control the temperature vs. older designs that used heating coils in the ductwork to simply warm the cool air back up if things got too chilly. Our building still has the heating coils for winter time, but for most of the summer they stay closed. Each pair of offices has a box above the ceiling with the control damper and heating coil. As you might guess we will need bigger boxes in order to increase the air flow. We always assumed they would cost a bundle. Actually they cost about 1/4 of what we thought and it turns out we can upgrade the capacity of many of the existing boxes by simply changing out one part.

This all very exciting to me, so much so I dove in with both feet. I'm still excited, but realize I need to proceed a bit slower, so I can keep the rest of my life in balance.

Tonight a big milestone, as I'm pretty sure I've completed all the major changes needed to the spreadsheet to get an accurate result which also looks pretty enough to present to a group. I'm tickled with all the formatting features in modern spreadsheets. I've made generous use of different font sizes, borders and colors to help separate the important from the simply included for reference. Hopefully I've done so in a way most will find tasteful rather than loud and busy.

Now I need to input the room data for the last 30 rooms I surveyed and collect the info. for the remaining 30 or so rooms. Then I'll know if the grand totals fall into a range that the existing equipment in our penthouse can accommodate.

Why do they do that?

2005-08-22T00:59:00.000-04:00

I mentioned watching the latest addition to my DVD collection. For a long time I debated whether I should by any DVD's at all. If you take a hard financial look at the whole venture, buying DVD's a terrible investment. You can rent them for a $1, so you'd have to watch each movie 10, 15, 20 times before you'd see any payback. Of course buying DVD's not about saving money, it's about having all those cool cases lined up in a row and impressing your friends with your great taste in movies. I read an article a while back about how many folks never even take the plastic wrapping off, they just buy them and add them to the "line up".

As a follower of Christ, conspicuous consumption not an option, so I've really struggled with this. I finally felt at piece with the notion that I do like movies a lot, the list of movies I like enough to watch more than once not all that huge and it's very convenient to have them at your finger tips rather than running to the video store every time your in the mood to watch something. I made a list of which movies I wanted to buy, a bit longer than I expected, but reasonable. So every time I'm in Target, Sams Club, Best Buy or Circuit City I check out the DVD's.

My latest find, the Bruce Willis flick, Mercury Rising. Mind you, Mercury Rising didn't win any Emmy's, but I've always liked it. Something about the Simon character touches a part of me, I usually cry a couple times, so it made it on the list. While looking at Circuit City for something else, I scanned the DVD's and came across it for $7. I prefer to pay $10 or less whenever possible, so I picked it up and watched it tonight. Cried three times this time.

Question: Why don't they put the nice little flyers in the cases half the time? I opened up my nice new DVD and all I find inside, one DVD. I like that little slip of paper with the chapter list on it, comes in handy at times. Come on guys, does it really save that much money to leave it out?

Gettin down to business

2005-08-22T00:28:00.000-04:00

For the last couple years I've had a terrible time getting stuff down around my house. Just not much endurance, get pooped out so easily. Focusing so much time on the project from work has restored some of my energy, I'm better able to focus on stuff now, at least before I got a bit burned out this weekend.

A couple weekends ago I went out and bought a bunch of clear plastic storage containers. I wanted to get the clear ones, even they cost more, so I can see the stuff inside at a glance without having to lift all the lids off. The first batch worked out real well so I set out this weekend to get some more and return a couple sizes that didn't work out.

I figured on picking them up after eating dinner with my folks Fri. night. That didn't work out, ended up spending about 3 hours helping a guy at work replace the alternator on his Jimmy, so I got to my parents late, never made it to the stores. New plan, spend a couple hours Sat. afternoon picking up the stuff. Try 5 stores, 7 hours. Takes me so long to shop, I like to look at everything thoroughly and weigh all the options. I did find some great containers, especially for small stuff, in the fishing dept. at Meijer of all places. They had like 10 different kinds, with movable dividers and nice strong latches. Between shopping and attending our neighborhood block party I felt wiped out Sat. night. Today I've felt a bit sick, like I over did it, so I worked on computer stuff, went to a birthday party and watched the latest addition to my DVD collection. Something I haven't done for a couple months now.

I'm frustrated that I haven't put one thing in my nice shiny new containers, it feels as if I didn't do anything, since I had my mind set on filling them up and getting my couch cleared off. Telling myself it's OK, I did make a big step by buying them and having a game plan, now just to implement the plan over the next few days.

Impressive Fragility

2005-08-19T01:09:00.000-04:00

In our day to day lives we take for granted the complex infrastructure that underpins our lives. An incredibly delicate web, really, of systems that are interdependent on each other. The last couple days at work have shown what happens when just one of these systems has a hiccup.

I work on lab equipment, cooler/freezers and building mechanical systems at a Big Ten university. I'm blessed to have a job I truly look forward to going to 90% of the time, lots of variety.

Among other things, we repair -80C freezers used for long term preservation of samples. They're big, expensive and break down every 3 - 5 years on average. Requiring about $1500 of parts to properly repair - 2 new compressors, new oil separator, 30' of capillary tubing and two high pressure shut off valves to ease future repairs. One of the labs had one go down a couple weeks ago at a very critical time and are desperate to have it running again, so we've done our best to hurry up the process which usually takes about a week once all the parts have arrived.

Well, I'm getting a bit sidetracked. Here we are in a side room off one of our large equipment rooms in the basement working away on this thing and poof we loose power. Gives new meaning to dark. Thankfully, the emergency generator worked, and after 30 sec or so about every 5th light in the hallways came back on. Just enough to see our tool cart and dig out our two flashlights.

So began a very interesting afternoon. First off, make sure no one stuck in the elevators - amazing no one in any of the three in our building. Go check the environmental rooms, all in alarm of course. Silence all the alarms and turn off the older units so they won't all come back on at the same instant and make a big power surge . . . gurgle, gurgle . . . Hmmm what's that? Steam coming out of the drain pipes!?!

Side note [The pumps in our building that pump the steam condensate back to the power plant on campus broke down a couple weeks ago so the pump shop took the pumps away and in the mean time are dumping the condensate down the drain]

I go in the main mechanical room and find steam and water blasting out of this drain pipe, whole room so hot and full of steam it fogs up my glasses. Try to shut off the steam supply to our building, can't budge the valves. Remember seeing the steam guys use a pipe wrench as an extension. Find ours, not big enough, find a bigger one, brace myself against the air compressor and push as hard as I can. I think it moved, push again, yes it did. Get all three lines shut off, after about 10 minutes rush of steam comes to a stop. You see, many big buildings use compressed air to operate the temperature controls. Remember those thermostats in school that hissed sometimes? No electricity, no air compressor. No air compressor, no controls. No controls, all the steam valves go wide open. We prop the door open and open up some access panels to help air out the room.

You get the picture. Without electricity the delicate web of services in our building ceased to work, making the building almost uninhabitable. No lights, computers, elevators, water on the upper floors (buildings over 3 or 4 stories need booster pumps for the upper floors) or mechanical ventilation for all the interior labs and offices. Everyone went home, out of the 200 or so people that work in our building, only 20 of us left when the power came back on 2 hours later.

In the end we ended up having two blackouts, two days in a row. Looks like they've got things ironed out now at our campus power plant. The news said the second outage caused by attempts to fix the problem that caused the first outage. How would you like to be that guy?

"Welcome home sweetheart, can you believe it, they had a second power outage today, isn't that just terrible? Ya. How'd your day go? Not so good. I'm sorry to her that honey, what happened? Well, me and Paul set out to work on the boiler that went down yesterday you see. Uh, huh. Ya, well anyway, I was real tired from everything yesterday and turned off the wrong one. Oh dear, let me give you a big hug ..."

Whenever this kind of thing happens it reminds me of how little it takes to throw our modern lives out of wack. It also reminds me of how much the Iraqis have suffered over the past 10 years or so. They had a very modern, middle class society w/ technologically advanced cities, top notch hospitals, . . . What would we do if we went from what we enjoy now to only having electricity 3 or 4 hours a day, water that doesn't always work, sewage sometimes backing up into our houses or 4 hour waits to get gas for our cars?

This post not meant as a commentary on the Iraq war, but just a reminder of how much we really have, and the delicate chorus that goes on behind the scenes that keeps the shelves full of every fruit and vegetable year round, home improvement centers fully stocked with goods, water safe to drink at virtually every faucet, electricity 24/7, our online purchases arriving at our front door within 2 days of placing the order, . . . humbling isn't it?

47 days ago

2005-08-18T23:19:00.000-04:00

The big project I mentioned in my last blog, um, 47 days ago, pretty much took over my life. It's still not done, but I'm getting a bit burned out from it and have started to reflect on if the price worth the cost. As I look back on life I can see a pattern of getting totally engrossed in this and that to the total exclusion of most everything else. This doesn't strike me as healthy. So I'm slowing down on the big project so I can focus on other things, like putting posts up in my blog.

Coming in last place

2005-07-02T00:24:00.000-04:00

My big project at work coming along nicely, although this stage taking longer than I anticipated. I had originally planed to just work out a pilot project and then realized I really needed to work through the entire design in order to make sure it workable. Think in about another week I'll have all the preliminary figures together.

I'm starting to get out more. I'm continuing to eat lunch w/ Peter and Alban, Mon - Thurs. Stephan gone for a couple weeks. I look forward to it, not only for the fellowship, but also the good food giving me more energy during the day. Alban going to move away soon to his new job in Germany. This makes me very sad, he's great fun to talk to and we seem to connect on some level. Too bad it took so long to get past the saying Hi stage, I would have really enjoyed the opportunity to get to know him better.

On Wed. nights I'm going to a home group of sorts at the Peterson's house. They open their place up to anyone who wants to hang out. Jim makes up some yummy food around 6P, we eat it all and spend the rest of the night talking, playing computer games, talking some more, playing volleyball, occasionally catching a movie, mostly talking. The typical group that shows up big enough to meet some cool people, but small enough that folks like me who don't do well around bigger crowds (like at church on Sat/Sun) can feel at home and part of what's going on. I really admire the Peterson's. They are an amazing couple in many ways, advancing the Lord's work one person at a time by example, compassion and caring, rather than by formulas or clever come ons.

Riverview just wrapped up a series called Below the Water Line. Noel normally hands down my favorite, this time Steve and Mark did the preaching and I found I got into it just as much as I normally do w/ Noel. So cool!! Each week a different boat theme tied to a character trait. I'll aim to do a summary post, just to show I really did listen :-) and highlight the great preaching that occurred.

What up with the coming in last place title? Well, I want to make my blog a cool place, kinda like how Noel does, where people hang out and have a sense of community. Just I'm not Noel, not sure if I have the stamina to keep up the pace of posts he and his friend Dave manage to do in an average week. Nor do I have the polished literary skills of my friend Frank. Still I think I do have something, I'm generally honest, straightforward and transparent, or at least like to think I'm that way. Hopefully that counts for something.

The past few weeks I've failed to put up even one post, which bothers me, like I came in last place in the blogging world. Not trying to make it a competition, but from the readers point of view if you come back and don't see anything new, things get stale in a hurry, just like if you don't see or talk to your best friend for 2 weeks. Things get lost along the way.

So as get my routine down I hope to become a more regular blogger. We'll see how it goes.

New Title

2005-06-17T23:00:00.000-04:00

My original title stuck me as a bit too ponderous and I didn't like how the one word spilled over onto the second line all by it's little lonesome. So a new leaner, meaner title. Do believe it rolls off the tongue a bit easier as well.

A whirlwind week

2005-06-16T23:53:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a big project at work, even bringing stuff home to work on, something I normally don't do. It's coming along well, just taking a lot of time. Real excited about it. As part of this project I've had to do a lot of work on Excel, most of my previous experience w/ Lotus 123. So far I'm finding Excel easier to work with. I especially like the ability to set up multiple pages. Before I had my entire spreadsheet on one huge page, made it really time consuming to move from one part of the sheet to another.

What's the project you may ask? No big secret, just it's a bit technical and I figure people probably not that interested in all the details. However, if ya'll are interested in hearing more let me know and I'll gladly do a post on it.

Shifting gears . . .

Seems most of my life I've known lots of people, but this hasn't translated into making much in the way of friends who like to do things w/ me. Ironically I made more friends in my three years of going down to Battle Creek every weekend than I've made in a lifetime in Lansing. At one time I figured I'd move to Battle Creek, but that didn't work out, so I've tried to recenter my life back here in Lansing. At work I've met a bunch of people I like, but everyone so busy, nothing has developed beyond chatting w/ folks in the hallway and such. That is until this week.

Alban and Peter work on the 5th floor of the building I work in. I do a lot of work in this set of labs, so I bump into them a lot. Last week while chatting w/ Alban about the recent vote in France on the EU constitution, he mentioned that he, Peter and Stephan eat lunch together everyday. Really!! I asked if I could join them and he said sure. So this past week I joined them on Tue, Wed. and Thurs. What fun!! Thankfully the meals at the Owen cafeteria are reasonably priced and they don't mind you supplementing the main course w/ your own food in tow, which helps keep the price even more reasonable.

Over time I've come to realize I get excited when I'm invited to do something w/ a group and tend to talk too much. I'm trying really hard to monitor myself and make sure I'm not dominating things. As near as I can tell, they are enjoying my company as much as I'm enjoying theirs, so I think I'm doing OK.

A different take on Revenge of the Sith

2005-06-09T12:24:00.000-04:00

I've noticed on the radio lately several reports about folks taking parts of Revenge of the Sith to have a political meaning, somehow a slam on President Bush. Frankly this strikes me as a big stretch, however another message jumped out at me during the movie that hits a little closer to home.

I've forgotten a lot about episodes I and II so forgive me if some of my recollections are a bit off. That said ... I saw a big parallel between Anakin's slow descent into the dark side and many of the struggles our teens and young adults have today. Think of the Jedi as the parents, very busy parents, who see Anakin as the chosen one and want nothing but the best for him. Yet how many times do they actually say this to him or take the time to sit down and listen to their young prodigy. Esp. in episode III, Anakin pretty much left to his own devices and to wonder if the Jedi would accept him anymore if he came clean on his marriage, ripe for Palpatine to drop ideas into his head w/o anyone to counter them.

How would things have turned out if Obi-Wan instead of rushing off to the next battle, and telling Anakin to wait in the temple, had taken the time to sit down and talk? Find out why his young pupil so on edge, make clear the reasons they didn't make him a master and lay out the steps to attain that goal, let him know they valued what he had done to date and that they trusted him, but yet had concerns about the motivations of Palpatine in picking Anakin as his personal representative. Ditto this in the earlier movie with Anakin dealing w/ the loss of his mother and increasing turning to Padame for comfort, slowly increasing his reliance on her and his desire to marry.

Instead from Anakin's point of view the Jedi came across as rigid and arbitrary, Palpatine as willing to listen and concerned for his welfare. It seems to me a lot of our modern households have a similar dynamic, any wonder kids turn to gangs or their friends for advice and a sense of worth? The good news, it's never to late to change the dynamic in your household if you realize your family resembles Revenge of the Sith more than you'd care to admit.

Hurray for Dan!

2005-06-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

So far I've wondered if anyone reading my blog. I hadn't publicized it to any extent yet, wanting to get a few more posts under my belt before opening it up to greater scrutiny. I looks like I have at least one regular reader though.

Dan left no less than two comments yesterday. So, Hurray for Dan!!

Bay Pointe Inn and Restaurant

2005-06-08T01:46:00.000-04:00

I have a friend named Tom. We met at the first church I attended, he's about 88 years old now and lives in one of those independent living places. He's pretty much legally blind now, due to macular degeneration, otherwise he's very fit and able to get around just fine. He likes to go to nice restaurants from time to time. So tonight I drove him and couple of his lady friends to a place on Gun Lake called the Bay Pointe Inn and Restaurant. Previously located in an old lake side villa (ie - huge house) its now in a brand new facility with an attached inn.

The last time we went I had one of the most enjoyable dining experiences I've ever experienced. This time also very enjoyable. I've never had duck before so tonight I tried a pasta dish with sliced duck, Andouille sausage, Creole sauce and fettucine noodles. I liked it a lot. Not quite as good as what I tried last time, but still very very good. If you ever want to try something different and check out Gun Lake give it a try, prices in the $10 -18 range for dinner. Travel time a little over an hour each way.

Oreo the wonder cat

2005-06-07T02:40:00.000-04:00

Going on a year ago now, some friends of mine faced a dilemma. Cheryl had two cats, Oreo and Phosphorus (yes she's a math/chemistry major), brother and sister. She had also become engaged to her husband to be, Steve. As the day of the wedding approached Oreo decided to take action and started peeing on Cheryl's bed, so she put plastic on it. Well then he started peeing on it w/ her in it, so Oreo went into the bathroom each night. After they got married and bought a new sofa, Oreo made this his target of choice. It came time for Oreo to go.

Knowing that Oreo liked me and that I'm single they asked me if I'd take him in. Welllll I didn't exactly want him to pee all over my house too, but I liked Oreo, so I agreed to take him in on a trial basis.

Best decision I ever made. He's a wonderful cat and has really boosted my mood since I've had him. Ya, he's peed on my bed a few times too, but that stopped a long time ago, so I think we're out of the woods in that department. For some reason he loves to lie on top of paper. Right now he's laying down next to me on top of my mail. It's so cute. He loves felt too. Cheryl gave me his Christmas stocking last winter, he liked to lay on top of it so much I never got to hang it up in front of the fireplace. He's also close to 15lb's (he's not particularly overweight, just BIG), so when he decides to lie on your lap you really start to feel it after a while, likewise when he wants me to hold him and take him for a "walk" around the house. He loves that and purrs up a storm.

Recently a friend had to move unexpectedly so I took in another cat, Mindy. Oreo's really struggling w/ this. He doesn't jump up on the couch or sleep alongside w/ me in bed like he used to. I miss that a lot. I'm still hopeful he will get used to his new "friend". I've had Mindy for about 3 months now and they're slowly getting used to each other. Although Oreo still seems unhappy about the whole thing.

I love my big, black cat very much and will miss him a lot when the day inevitably comes that he passes away. Thanks Steve and Cheryl for such a wonderful gift!

A work in progress

2005-06-05T21:55:00.000-04:00

More fiddling w/ the blog today. Back in college I spent one summer doing database entry for my residence hall. They had an old system called the IBM 5520 (if I remember right) that used templates to control the output to the printer and the screens used to enter data. The person who had originally set it up created a system that worked, but extremely inconvenient to use. I had a lot of fun fixing up the templates and developing a series of form letters. By the end of the summer the system worked very smoothly.

The HTML and CSS codes remind me a lot of that old system. As you might guess, learning the ins out outs while customizing my blog template brings back some old memories. Today I added the email link and fixed up the About Me box. It really bugged me how none of the profile info. lined up with the picture, the fonts so huge and the picture so small. Also happy to report the XML feed works fine, just took a few hours before the My MSN reader picked up anything.

Fixing up the About Me box ended up involving more that just changing the CSS styles. Blogger uses a prepackaged approach to the HTML part of the code that handles the profile section, so I couldn't just insert the email link like I wanted. After some searching on the web I discovered you can click on Source in the View menu of IE or FireFox and see the underlying HTML code. So I brought up my blog, clicked source, and the mysterious black box of the Blogger Smart tag <$BlogMemberProfile$> revealed itself.

I relied heavily on the web site W3Schools to help me learn the basics of HTML and CSS. There are still a couple things I don't understand about the Profile and Sidebar Boxes sections which frustrates me, but I'm learning. For instance if I remove this section nothing changes, so what does it do?

.box p {
  margin:0 0 .6em
  }

It seems the Blogger code fairly advanced, the W3School examples pretty basic, I couldn't find any examples that looked like this. Eventually I'll figure it out, but for now I'm excited that everything seems to work on IE and FireFox.

All Things Technical - The world of HTML, CSS, XML, ATOM, ...

2005-06-04T16:14:00.000-04:00

Today I worked on adding the little XML button to my blog page. At first it seemed simple according to the Blogger help pages. Add some HTML code w/ a link to the appropriate .gif image. Well, not so fast. No one wants to give away free bandwidth so I can have a cool little XML button on my blog, not even Blogger. Although they will let me access the Blogger .gif file for free.

After doing some web searches I discovered something called CSS which makes it a lot easier to manage stylistic elements across pages. It also can create the little XML button right from within my Blogger template. So I've spent the last 3 hours or so inserting code and getting a feel for how it works.

So I proudly present my new XML button, drum roll please, ...

XML ATOM Feed
If you want to learn more about the CSS method for creating buttons check out this article (My first embedded link in a post, Hurray!)

I added my blog to my My MSN page along w/ the feeds from Dan, Noel, Sean, Rubber Ducky Adventures and Mission Safari. So far nothing has come through. Not sure if this a time issue or if something a little off w/ my feed. Guess time will tell.

I've also modified my links so they open up in a new window.

Puttin on the show

2005-06-03T23:59:00.000-04:00

For the past couple weeks I've built up a list of folks at work and the grocery store I shop who wanted to see Revenge of the Sith. I wound up with about 10 names, and after consulting w/ my friend Sam, decided on the 6:05P show at NCG this past Tuesday. As promised, although a bit later than I anticipated, I sent out an e-mail over Memorial Weekend to everyone on the list to let them know the time Sam and I planned to go. In the past, I had tried to work w/ everyone's schedules and quickly discovered that doesn't work. So this time I went w/ the pick a time and see who comes approach.

Watching movies a pretty passive activity. You talk a little before and afterwards, but for the most part you sit, watch and keep your mouth shut. When I go out to do things w/ people I enjoy the personal interaction the most. Seeing I don 't have a very big circle of friends, one of my favorite things about going to see a movie, besides the movie of course, is going some place afterwards to hang out. As it turned out, three of us showed up to check out the main attraction, Me, Sam and Grant. They both had a lot of stuff to do, so this ended up one of those times we just watched the movie and left, a downer for me. Afterwards, I didn't feel much like rushing home, even though I felt pretty hungry by then. I looked at DVD's at Sam's Club for a while and then bowed to reality and went home to make up some dinner and hang out w/ my two cats.

Ya, OK, whatever, but what about the movie??? Right, the movie ...

Lines definitely down now, compared to a couple weeks ago, about 20 of us in the whole theatre. Turns out Tuesday a great day to see a movie at NCG, it's $2 for a small pop, popcorn or candy. Assuming you bring a water bottle along, you can see a movie and enjoy some nice fresh popcorn for under $10 bucks.

It took me about 1/3 of the movie to really get into it. I had forgotten a lot about the episodes I and II so I had trouble getting my bearings at first. My impressions similar to most everyone else who's seen it already, a lot more action, characters more relaxed (telling jokes and such again) and all the loose ends tied up. So when the last DVD comes out, you could watch I - VI in order and have it all make sense; assuming of course, you can overlook the jarring change in the detail of the special effects and sets between I - III and IV - VI. R2D2 and Yoda kick ass in this movie (R2D2? you may ask, when you check out the movie you'll see what I mean). Compared to the other 5 movies there are a couple scenes that are on the more gruesome side, I've seen a lot worse.

All in all, a must see if you've followed the Star Wars movies over the years.

Virtual Friends

2005-05-31T22:58:00.000-04:00

This past Sunday while walking into church I said Hi to Dan our ... Hmmm always so hard to come up with titles for the leaders at our church ...

Worship Leader, well yes, but we have more than one band so he only leads on the Sunday's his band plays ...
Worship Coordinator, OK, but I don't think he coordinates the whole Worship service, more the music part ...
Worship Pastor, no, we have five Pastor's but Dan's not one of them ... Hey, lets see what our church website has to say about this weighty issue ... Dan Price - Music. Well it's settled then.

As I was saying, I said Hi to Dan our Music Guy and he asked me if I had a blog, because if I did, he wanted to read it. Wow, pretty much made my day and put me over the hump to sit down and finally start a blog of my own.

I know Dan primarily through his blog, for that matter I know pretty much everyone that I know by name at my new church through their blogs. For a while now I've pondered about this new sort of friendship. In my mind I've coined the term virtual friends.

I know lots of things about Dan, Noel, Joel, JR and Sean via their blogs and the comments they leave on each others blogs. I've even met most of them face to face, but yet I really don't know them at all. It's a bit like listening to people on the radio, you get a vision in your mind of what they are like and then see them in person and go "That's what they look like!!!"

In this case it's not so much looks, most of them have pictures on their blogs, but the absence of any "life experience" w/ my virtual friends. Especially in the case of Noel, since he blogs much more frequently than the others; I have a feel for the pace of his life, his interests and have come to admire his ability to keep the overriding issue at hand in the forefront of his mind. Yet if I were to walk up to him at church or his favorite coffee shop and dive into a conversation with him, dropping in various tidbits from his blog along the way, I imagine he would find it a bit creepy. Sure on one level he knows his blog a public thing, but on the other hand, at an interpersonal level we don't really have a connection. From his point of view it would be as if someone who had stalked him suddenly walked up and started talking to him about the bike ride he went on w/ his kid the day before. To go back to the radio analogy, we each have a minds eye of each other, mine a bit more informed than his, but both sorely lacking in terms of one on one chemistry. Will this person who writes and speaks so clearly, come across as abrasive in person? or laid back? Confident or a bit shy? Hard to say if you've never sat down for a bite to eat or spent an afternoon helping them clean out their garage. Hence the radio effect of the blog world, we each have a vision in our minds of how the other person will come across (the interpersonal equivalent to the mind picture of what our favorite radio personality looks like), we are more times than not in for a big shock when that mind picture meets reality.

It will take time for our social structures to catch up to the blogging world through an expanded vocabulary which includes these new types of relationships and social norms to grease the skids when "pen pals" do eventually meet face to face. In the mean time, for myself, I've taken a cautious approach in meeting the people I've come to know online. Noel asked me to introduce myself to him, so that was easy, although I still felt really nervous that I might do something in person to deflate his "minds eye" of me. I bumped into JR walking in from the parking lot one day, went up after church to say hi to Sean after I realized who he was (The Firehead = red hair, duh!) and Dan likes to play at local coffee shops and posts the times on his blog, so I just went early one evening and got to hang out w/ him and his wife for a few minutes before he played.

Turns out Dan a great example of the minds eye thing, my minds eye made Dan out as a carbon copy of Noel. I figured I would find myself outclassed in a one on one conversation as I'm not particularly fast or witty in person, as Noel seems to be. Turns out Dan very laid back and easy to talk to. I've enjoyed our brief conversations very much and hope things will work out to have more as time goes on.

So in that spirit, thanks for the boost at church today Dan! Hope you like my first set of posts in the blogging world.

What's in a name

2005-05-31T22:55:00.000-04:00

You may wonder where did I get that name for my blog from. It's pretty simple really, just popped into my head while driving home from church.

Literary Litanies - Writing sounding words that start w/ L
Lansing - The city I live in
Lugnuts - Our minor league baseball team, we are a big GM town in addition to the capital of Michigan (no it's not Detroit!!)
Lifer - I've lived in Lansing all my life, even in the same house, except for my time in college

There you have it