December 2006

Besides just looking beautiful with everything covered in a blanket of white, I noticed another, unexpected advantage to the snowstorm: People come out!

I actually saw quite a few people out walking in the streets, or neighbors out cleaning off their cars and digging out. If it snowed like this all the time, we just might actually get to know the people living around us.

When I walked down to King Soopers to get my car and go in to work, there were a surprising number of people out on the streets, all of them pretty cheery and ready to respond, "Nice day for a walk, isn't it", when I called out with "Hi!". When I drove home from work, there were even more people out walking in the street, by far more than I have ever seen since I moved here.

Then when I arrived home, there were three guys digging their cars out right by where I was shoveling a path out of my carport, none of them with shovels: one with a cooler, one with a trash can, and one with just the snow brush for cleaning off the windshield. As you might imagine, they weren't getting much of anywhere, especially the guy with just the brush. So I lent a hand and my shovel and while you can't exactly say they were "out in no time", it must have been faster than it would have been otherwise (and I must say, faster than my 30 minute dig in the King Soopers parking lot).

That to say, when you get snowed in, by all means don't just stay in. Put on some boots and gloves and get out. There's a good chance you'll meet some neighbors that you otherwise probably wouldn't ever see.

The word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Heb. 4:12

"This video is from the WorshipGod06 Conference Aug. 9-12, 2006. Ryan Ferguson is giving a memorized dramatic recitation of Hebrews 9 and 10 from the ESV Bible."

I think that is just awesome!

HT: Andrew Lindsey

If you noticed that my server was down for the last day or so, congratulations, you are very observant! I started an upgrade of the operating system, estimating that it would take an hour or two. But the installation takes nearly an hour in the first step and hangs in the second step.

I'm going to keep trying, so you will probably see more outages, though now I think I've figured out how to identify when it is working through a long job and when it is really hung, so I won't have to give it 10 hours of just sitting there before I give up.

The fortunate thing is that the upgrade doesn't hang at a point that makes my current installation non-functional, so I can reboot back into the current version of the OS.

This was a pretty busy week:

• Tuesday: First (trial) tutoring session with a young lady from church who is struggling with high school algebra. Her mother came to the young adults Sunday School class last week at the suggestion of the youth group leader to see if any one of us would be able/willing to try to help her. No one else piped up, so I volunteered. I enjoy tutoring and think that if Bethany is willing to put in some work, she'll have no big trouble getting caught up.
• Wednesday: I led our young adults bible study this week since Elisa had a performance with the string ensemble from the Colorado School of Mines. It may not have been a great lesson, but I think I hit the main point often enough that they should have at least picked that up.
• Thursday: Peak Power had their Christmas part at Rodizio Grill, a "Brazilian steakhouse". I'm not sure how much it has to do with anything in Brazil, but it the food was good and plentiful. First we went through the salad bar, which was also where they put the rice and black beans (staples of every Brazilian meal I've ever seen), then once we were all done with that, they sent out a steady stream of guys with all kinds of meat on skewers. And after we were thoroughly stuffed, came desert. I've never been to Brazil, so I can't say if it is very authentic or not, but they did have Guaraná, a soft drink that I was introduced to in Portugal and that comes from Brazil. It was good food and a great opportunity to meet the wives of the guys at Peak and have a chance to get to know a few of them a little better.
• Friday: Elisa organized an ice-skating outing with a whole bunch of her friends from school, church, everywhere. We went downtown and discovered that the ice rink was closed down, but it was still cool to hang out and take a couple of drags up and down the 16th Street Mall (trying to find a restaurant with a wait of less than an hour). Most of the other kids there were students out at Mines with exams today, so they wanted to get back home and study. I thought studying on Friday night was against a rule of some sort, but apparently Mines students don't obey that one. I tried to bite my tongue and not jump in with "Yeah, I remember when I took that class! It wasn't that hard..." all the time. :)
• TODAY: I probably won't get out too much, but I do want to buy some new strings for the electric guitar I bought a while ago and perhaps go see the musical at church. Other than that, I would like to get some chores done around the apartment and maybe upgrade the OS on my server.