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Yikes! I had a stack of rebates that had been waiting on my desk to be filled out for several weeks. sigh It ended up taking me thirty minutes to get through the stack, although fortunately with the new technique of printing the rebates on the receipts themselves, it makes things easier. Still, I just don't like doing rebates for some reason… at least I don't have to think about it any more.
Well, you may be wondering were I've been. Yesterday I spent the day in a hospital waiting room. Dad went in for a angiogram and possibly an angioplasty (after the doctors noticed a small anomaly during a stress test) and instead ended up getting a quadruple bypass surgery. It was, needless to say, very worrisome — he had several passages with 90% blockage and a few with 70 or 80%.
Going in yesterday he really didn't expect more than possibly an angioplasty (where they use a balloon to clear blockages), since it didn't even look like he had more than a blockage-in-formation. We are just thankful it was caught when it was — leaving it alone for longer possibly would have caused a massive heart attack.
At any rate, he's doing fairly well today. The hospital moved him out of ICU ahead of schedule, and he might be released by Monday, which is amazing, to say the least. While the toughest part is (hopefully) over, prayers would still be appreciated.
A few months ago I ended up falling into place as the person in charge of putting together a publicity taskforce for my church. I've already been doing stuff like brochures and the web site, but we've wanted to try some different stuff. An idea came up that we could advertise on those slideshows that theatres show before the movie starts.
Well, it's long over due, so I'm finally going to do it. Here's part two of my Ozark Trip review (see part one). In part two I move to the latter days of the trip when we stayed at Big Cedar Lodge, dubbed the “Ozark's Premier Wilderness Resort.”
After being thoroughly shamed for the wasted money by Kevin, I still must come out and admit it: I love fireworks. Yeah, I do. Interestingly enough, though, Kevin and me were both on a similar train of thought as to the main purpose of fireworks displays: to blow stuff up (his post being aptly named).
Hope everyone in the Blogosphere had a good one! At this point, I should remind you to read my consideration of the problems of this holiday (along with other days of the year with issues). You can do so here.
Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Well I had hoped to catch up on SAFARI tonight, but things didn't work out that way. I ended up with a project for a client instead. It went well though, so maybe tomorrow…
1. Is your hair naturally curly, wavy, or straight? Long or short?
Kinda wavy and curly, actually, which is bad, because I really prefer it to be straight. When it's about time for a hair cut, it can get down right disagreeable with my normal style (see below). Hmm… is hair naturally short ever? I keep mine short, if that's what the question is asking.
2. How has your hair changed over your lifetime?
It darkened from a reddish color to dark brown.
3. How do your normally wear your hair?
I normally have it parted on the left side and combed over to the right. For some reason having my hair cover my forehead
more than a little bothers me, so I constantly battle with it to keep it up on top.
4. If you could change your hair this minute, what would it look like?
I don't think I'd change it much, just maybe make it a slight bit more controllable
5. Ever had a hair disaster? What happened?
Not that I can think of…
Well, I've been so busy I haven't gotten back to blog about anything, so I'll just mention what I want to blog about — Ozark Trip Review (Part 2, only one month late!), How I Like Mac OS X Jaguar, My Take on Harry Potter, and finally thoughts on Worship Services. All that and more whenever I get around to it.
In the mean time, since I already let the cat out of the bag (ahem), I did get Jaguar installed without killing Macbert the Ruby iMac. Woohoo! So far so good.. I've been trying out Safari, AppleWork for OS X, Sherlock 3, etc. It's a little disorienting the way Macs work, but it's been fun so far.
Maybe I'll get a good post on here tomorrow…
I'd like to thank anyone who prayed for my grandmother. Things are going much better now, although your prayers continue to be helpful. Prayer is certainly powerful, at any rate, and I appreciate it very much!
In all of the commotion, life indeed did trump blogging (I think that is MeanDean from blogs4God that coined that phrase), and not only blogging but BlogShares activities as well.
It seems the BSEC election has come and gone, and even though I didn't win, I want to thank everyone again for your support. While the election certainly wasn't “real,” I really appreciate your real support. In reality it was a blessing I didn't win anyway considering how crazy the last week has been. Anyway, as I said, I really appreciate support. Because of my friends here in the blogosphere I still ended up in 7th place, not bad considering many of those running had far more name recognition than I did.
That actually is an interesting demonstration of how it would be very possible, if we as Evangelicals really tried, to make a much larger political dent than we do right now. In the BlogShares example, to the best of my knowledge, every regular reader of asisaid.com was kind enough to vote for me. They knew me, knew where I stood, and made an effort to go vote. On the other hand, while some of those who won have very popular blogs, none of them won by a large margin. The name recognition didn't really help them as much as you might expect. I was running without any name recognition, and for a time made it all the way to third place (out of six seats).
In the real political world there is similar power in unknown but well supported political hopefuls. If Evangelicals could focus our energies on promoting political candidates that we thought best represented our concerns and didn't automatically assume we didn't have a chance to influence the “system,” we very well could rally enough support as our people would have a reason to go beyond the average 30% voter attendance. Think about that: if just 30% of the country supports traditional values, and unlike the other 70%, it mustered 80% voter attendance on election day, that 30% could be more powerful than the 70% majority that only has 30% active voters.
This would be a major victory for traditional values! If we, as those supporters, did this, we could let candidates know that we wouldn't just vote for the lesser of two evils. We wouldn't compromise on positions concerning embryonic stem cell research just because the other choice is to compromise on the entire pro-life agenda. Instead, we would be able to hand pick the candidates that actually stuck to pro-life views across the board (while it was lost in the shuffle after 9/11, don't forget many leading Republicans — “prolife” ones — supported and continue to support destroying embryos to create new stem cell lines).
Even if it didn't work out that well, but like my BlogShares run, only placed the candidate at a small-margin loss, it would still serve to let the politicos know that name recognition alone wasn't going to keep them going — they must also remember the powerful force that Evangelical Christianity can be and should be.
