Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Well, I’m not very good at blogging it appears. It’s bee way too long since I posted.
The concert is in Modesto at 1038 McHenry Avenue (ok, its at the First Christian Church). September 11, 7pm, and will include Michael’s own original music from his CD “Fruit of the Vine”, amazing vocal renditions of pop-rock songs using vocal looping, and jazz standards sung by the ModesTones.
Click here (or anywhere else in this post) for Michael Carlson and TripleOhNine on myspace.
Wilderness Shot
We’ve had the usual challenges of keeping two boys occupied in the back seat with activities other than fighting with one another. On top of that, we’ve all been sick.
It started with our youngest, tummy ache, head ache, 102 fever. So, our Shasta Lake stay included a trip to the urgent care in Redding. Due to the wonders of modern medicine, we still managed to see Shasta Caverns. We spent two days there in 100 degree heat, loving it.
Then Crater Lake for two days. Wow! It’s still my favorite body of water. So blue. Two days there fighting mosquitos and enjoying the scenery. Then it was our oldest’s turn to get sick. His neurology means he gets sick differently than the rest of us. So, we were back to the urgent care in Portland after our drive up north.
My wife and I both got sick as well, so we decided to take it easy for an extra day at a hotel in Portland before going to visit family in Spokane.
Now, we’re getting ready to take off again for the next leg of our journey. It’s funny that we’ve now ALL been sick as dogs, and our little doggie who is traveling with us is healthy as a human. But its all good.
Rather than pushing too hard, sometimes its good to take a little mini-vaction inside your big vacation to rest and prepare for more vacationing. 
I’m still loving being self-employed right now. My eyes are going crossed from working on the computer so much lately, though.
That’s why its good that I’m still getting out and performing, preaching and giving lessons.
And, I’m trying to do some completely non-work related recreational activities as well. And, if I want to go to a movie during the day I don’t feel to badly about it because I’m working a lot of nights and weekends.
I went to see the new Star Trek movie, and I guess I’m more of a traditional Trekker than I thought I was. It was a good movie, and sets it up to be different by altering the actual time line of the Trek universe. How convenient for the writers and the “new direction” of the franchise. Even so, it was an awesome movie and I enjoyed it a lot.
And I’ve finally started to watch the series “Heroes.” I’ve wanted to do that for a long time, and my wife finally put all of the DVD’s in the queue with our Blockbuster-by-mail memberhsip. I’ve watched the first six DVD’s of the first season, with only one left. I’ve been staying up until well past midnight to watch these shows on my laptop in my office.
It’s starting to take a toll, both with my energy level and my mood. When I get into a show, or a book, or a series of movies, sometimes I start to take them a bit too seriously. Especially the dark ones. And Heroes is really pretty dark. It’s got a lot of messiah metaphors. (It IS a superhero story, after all.) And the relationships between the generations of the Heroes is really well-developed and pretty intense.
So, since I’m self-employed I better limit my late-night viewing a bit and “get back to work,” lest I get lost in sci-fi land.
So, we got our puppy Charlotte fixed last Monday, and our boys were pretty concerned for her. Sunday morning during worship at church, Isaac asked for prayer:
“I’d like prayers for Charlotte, because she’s getting her uterus and her ovaries taken out tomorrow. And we won’t be able to play with her for a couple weeks until she feels better, so we want to pray for her.”
There were some giggles and nervous titters in the congregation, but people are used to our boys saying interesting and precocious things in worship so no one was really offended (as far as we know). Everyone understood how serious this was for Isaac, so they all said the response, “Hear our prayers, O God.”
Later on that day, I explained to Simon that when you talk about what was happening to Charlotte, you usually just call it being “spayed.” He replied through his teeth, “Well, you could have told me that on Saturday.”
Now, Charlotte is wearing the “cone of shame.” (refer to the movie “Up” to understand this phrase) It turned out that she had double ear infections, doggy conjunctivitis (pink eye), and they had to pull her last little baby tooth out while she was under sedation. Needless to say, Charlotte is very high maintenance lately, needing lots of love and medicine.
A few weeks ago, my younger son noticed that one of our babysitters’ dogs was wearing a cone. When he told me about it in the evening, he leaned over to me, looked me straight in the eye, and said in a serious tone, “It’s because he got his beans taken out.”
So, for all the pets out there wearing “the cone of shame,” hear our prayer, O God.
Hot Coffee, Cold Commentary
So I was getting some coffee at the Queen Bean, and a woman was complaining about the air conditioning not working. The barista said they got an HVAC unit that was too small, because the engineer didn’t take into account that the coffee-making equipment would heat the place up. (That seems like a no-brainer to me, but what do I know.)
The woman suggested that maybe they should do a benefit concert to buy a bigger air conditioning unit. I pointed to the wall and said, “Yeah, maybe after they cure breast cancer.”
There was a poster for a concert to benefit breast cancer research on the wall: “Rock for the Boobies. Don’t let cancer steal 2nd base!”
Enough said.
Mother’s Day inkblot test
So, as one of my mother’s day gifts, I took the comforter from our bed into the cleaners.
Over a year ago, I was trying to get some work done late at night and I fell asleep in bed with a pen in my hand. I woke up with blots of ink all over the comforter, my hand, my arm, and the sheet.
Not necessarily a big deal, except that my wife had spent a lot of time picking out the comforter, pillows, and sheets for our bed, and we painted our bedroom to match. It was practically brand new. She went out of town for a few days to take a class, and when she returned and saw the stain, she burst into tears.
Of course, I felt terrible. So, after a year (I know, I know) I finally followed through and took the comforter to the cleaners as a mother’s day present this year (shhhh! don’t tell her). It remains to be seen whether they can get the ink stain out. I’ll pick it up tomorrow (Monday) and see how it turned out. It should be ready for her when she returns from her trip on Tuesday night.
Speaking of ink (love that segue), I took an inkblot test on Facebook and the result was “perfectly sane.” When I told my wife, she broke into a laugh and questioned the validity of the test.
Poodles of Love
Well, it finally happened. We had our puppy groomed, and she lost her beautiful brown and black puppy highlights. (sigh)
So, now she’s a peach. But at least her ears still have the dark patches on the ends. I’ll post a pic soon.
An Era of Violence?
Last weekend, I took my youngest son to a Renaissance fair.
It seemed like every other booth had lethal weapons for sale. Knives, swords, battle axes, arrows, etc. One person even gave us a little speech about the tactics and strategies for using medieval weapons, including a graphic description of how the archers would urinate on their arrows to cause infection, and how best to use a long-sword as a pike to stop a charging enemy. My five-year old was entranced by the whole thing. I kept trying to drag him away, but he wanted to hear more. Since we don’t have any arrows or long-swords around the house, I suppose it didn’t do any harm.
But one of the other children insisted we go over to the archery range, where my boy expertly (so he perceived) shot a wicker deer. (Environmentalist daddy cringed.)
I thought, then, let’s go over to the mock sailing ship that they had set up by the pond. That started out much better, with a young woman giving an amazing demonstration of how to use authentic navigation devices, such as a sextant, to find one’s way across the sea.
Then, however, it came time for the evening firing of the canon. I thought it was to be one canon, but it turned out they had ten canons of various sizes all around the “boat,” and they fired them off in succession. They showed us how to cup our ears rather than cover them, to avoid puncture of our ear drums. I took my boy over to the side, where I imagined we would be further away, only to realize that the largest canon of all was right next to us.
Isaiah did just fine, cupping his ears obediently, and jumping a few inches off the ground with the fire of every canon.
I guess that was a pretty violent time in the Middle Ages, but then today isn’t much better. Some nights from our living room we hear the gunfire from a few blocks away. Our next-door neighbors were burgled a couple of days ago at 3:30 in the afternoon. I had left at about 2:15 to pick up my boys from school, and it happened by the time I returned at around 4:00. They went through two doors and napped their VCR. Now, they have security doors on all their entrances, a security system in the house, and motion sensors on their lights outside (although this wouldn’t have done any good at 3:00 in the afternoon).
Our neighbors keep telling us that the people who lived in our house before us moved out because someone threw a brick through their window. They also said that our neighbors across the street kept coming into our house while it was vacant and taking various things.
Down the street, there are always a group of young men hanging out, and a few weeks ago there were four police cars with their lights on in front of one house.
So, before I go judging past eras for violence, today isn’t much better. We think we’ve grown and progressed, but I’m not so sure. We’re responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths because of our military campaigns over the last few years. Is the armor our soldiers wear much different from the armor worn in previous eras? Armor is a privileged defense. Most people in the world are armed with nothing more than their skin and perhaps some garden tools.
My mother’s Mennonite background has instilled a deep commitment to pacifism in me. And yet violent movies and animated TV shows seem to make a case for getting even, for retribution, and for violence. My older son struggles with these messages.
So, I sat my boys down the other day and said I was going to read something to them from the Bible. They groaned. I said, “Well, would you rather clean the toilets?” So, they gave in. I count it a source of great pride that I have trained my boys well enough that they prefer reading the Bible to cleaning toilets.
Anyways, I read them the passage where Jesus goes to the garden, Judas betrays him, a disciple cuts of the ear of one of the scribes’ slaves, and Jesus tells them to cut it out and heals the slave’s ear. See? Jesus didn’t come to overthrow or get revenge, he came to bring grace and forgiveness.
I didn’t read them the passage where Jesus says he came to bring a sword to separate families and peoples. They can find that for themselves later and come back and say, “But, Dad! Look!”
My oldest son informed me that the passage I read to them wasn’t really a sword fight, but just one person with a sword cutting of somebody’s ear. But I think he got the point I was trying to make. I can only hope.
