A cute visitor

Here the promised post of pictures when Jesse and Jeremiah visited!



Awww.




In this picture, Jeremiah is teaching my dad how to play guitar. :-)




What better to do on a bright, sunny day than ride a horse!
"Aunt Margaret's pretty good, but wait until I'm alone. I'll show her how fast Runner can run!"

"Oh no! What will I do??"

"Look Ma! I'm winning!"



Jeremiah enjoyed the tractor until it started up. I think the noise scared him. As soon as he jumped off, he wanted to get back on. Once he was on, he looked scared again. Go figure!

A successful day

What makes a day a good day?

Is it the amount of work that I do? No. I can get a lot of work done, jobs finished, but still consider the day a bad day.

Is it the people I get to spend the day with? That's part of it, but even with the greatest of people, bad days happen.

Is it my mindset? This is closer. At the end of a day, I can look back and say it was a good day.

The last point is the best answer I think. Our attitude towards life, our satisfaction from living does not come from what we have, but from Who we have.
"but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night."

The next blog will have some cute pictures from when Jeremiah and Jesse visited. I was looking over some old folders on my desktop, and I realized I had inadvertantly copied the pictures to my computer. Jeremiah's so cute!

Time to sit, relax, and sleep - for a bit

My first week where I've put in a lot of programming time is finished. Tomorrow, I start on week two. Fortunately for me, it's still new, exciting, interesting, and I hope it will stay that way for a long time - so cheers! To an interesting life! (Although I will admit programming isn't edge-of-your-seat exciting).

The third and final week of Yankee Peddler has passed. After a wet teardown of our booth, a long drive home, and a good subway stop, I got home about 3:15, sat down and spent 45 minutes just reading the Wall Street Journal. I didn't check E-mail, turn on my laptop, vaccuum, or do anything else other than read. After all, with the electric out from the heavy storm Sunday night/Monday morning, there wasn't much else to do!

So much excitement!

Whahoooo! Tonight was the first GCC speech meeting I've attended since graduating. I got to see my old teammates and see a lot of potential new competitors. It look like it will be a very good year for the speech team. The team advisors are heavily involved and trying to make the team a success, and the captains of the speech categories are the cream of the crop - it's going to be a great year! But that's only 1/4 of my excitement!

But as exciting as that is there is still another 1/4 of excitement about to be announced....... I have a job! A fairly serious job from what I understand. I'm programming for a company in Florida, upgrading their system from dos and C to MFC and c++. It look like it will be a very long, involved job. At the moment, I'm the first person hired to start the job, and it looks like I'll be working alone by myself for a few weeks, or even a month or two! I know someone is slated to start in December, so I'll have a teammate then, but I'll be the head programmer for a new branch office in Grove City.

I am in the enviable position of choosing my own working hours, working from home, having a free hand in how I do what I'm supposed to do, and possibly managing a large project.

I will have to admit though, that most of this is only because the Florida business hasn't opened up a business or hired other programmers. When a new office opens up and other workers come, I won't work from home, I'll have less freedom, and be more constrained in my working hours - but what do you expect - usually only high powered programmers have the freedom I have - if only for a month!

Can you tell I'm excited! I get to do what I want (though limited) and still have a job that is just what I've been looking for!

Oops. It's gotten late on me. The other 1/2 of my excitement? Having a family to support me as I grow through life and friends I can trust during my journey! Praise the Lord for all four fourths of happiness he has given me!

Home sweet home

Home is where you can find rest. I've spent a lot of my evenings this week in motel rooms or driving, and yet I find that I'm still rested and relaxed. A new environment never seems to be the same as home, but because I'm spending a lot of time with my dad I find it's been a good week.

At college, I'm occassionally invited to play games with some friends. Tonight is one of those nights and I'm sorry to miss visiting friends, but as I look at my mom and dad sleeping, I realize I have some very good friends right here.

Have a great weekend y'all.

Today was yet another good day while Jesse and Jeremiah are visiting. It started off with an early morning when Jesse, Margaret, and Jeremiah all made a little bit of noise... that and I had kicked the covers off so I was freezing! I've reinforced the covers so the mere weight should make it difficult to kick the covers off - but back to today's visit. When we went to church, everything went pretty well. Jeremiah was quiet, the sermon was nice, and the songs were moving. One thing that was slightly different is that the preacher had everyone move into the left row of pews. It was more crowded that way, but it let the congregation know they should listen.

After we got home, Jesse prepared food for the Memorial Day gathering at our relatives house. Jesse and Jeremiah went to the fishing competition before hand, and guess what! Jeremiah caught three fish by himself. Not quite 3 years old and he reeled them into shore (Although Jesse helped when it got really close to the pond edge). After that, my dad and I went to our relative's house and started eating and talking. They have a trampoline, and it was neat to see all of the children bouncing up and down doing slam dunks on a rim that was set up. After dinner, we did the traditional volleyball games, but we made a switch this year. We played some whiffleball beforehand. The final score was 8-7, we won!

Two of of three games of volleyball: 2-0. We lost! Quite badley too. Quickly moving on....or not. I just saw the time! It's past my bedtime.

Time to Rumble!

The question I must ask myself is: How many times to do I have to retype this blog!? I've been doing some seasonal maintenance on my computer. I removed old programs, erased old files, and just rethought what I wanted to keep on my computer. This time something went wrong. Very wrong. My browsers, Firefox and explorer, kept forgetting to stay open. But not this time.... There will be no pause, no retreat, no discussion of compromise until this blog is completed and the programs correctly working. No stone shall be left unturned, no food shall be consumed, and no sleep shall be taken.... Nevermind. I value a good nights sleep more than that!

Yesterday I had a pretty good day visiting college friends. I spent over 12 hours at GCC - talking to professors, visiting with commuters, bowling, playing racquetball, talking, going to the organizational fair, playing games with students, and watching a movie during intervis. A very successful and eye-opening day.

But after taking it so easy yesterday, I wanted to make up for lost time today. I cleaned the house, I stayed moderately busy working on papers, and I made sure to spend time blogging, but most of all, I enjoyed visiting my nephew. My brother came up and brought Jeremiah with him! It's been a while since I've had a good visit with either of them and I'm already expecting a very good weekend.

Hurricane Katrina has brought up some major weaknesses in the oil industry. I had the opportunity to work at a company that was somewhat involved in the oil business, and I learned from them and extemp research that the US is operating at full capacity: even if we shipped in more oil we wouldn't have the refining capability to handle the new resources. I keep an open eye out for sudden gasoline price changes, and soon afterwards, I usually read that a oil refinery somewhere in the US stopped or started working again. Few people seem to know how closely the price of oil is linked to our refining capability. When I heard that Katrina had stopped 10 refineries from refining oil, I knew a severe price rise was coming. When my sister got home from working two nights later, she told me prices has jumped almost a dollar. I'm just glad that raising gas prices seem to have little effect on the economy - not that it helps when I'm pumping gas as seeing the prices shoot up!

I still want to do a little more research into MFC... I need to stay current if I'm to get a good job.