On Distant Shores

This was a little too long for a facebook update, and my blog has been neglected.

2012-01-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, I gotta be honest about my day. First off, there wasn't any Sarah in it. Now, my day at work- my first at my new position with CB&I was just fine- but here's the sequence of events that was my evening: left work at about 4:40 desiring to get to the post office before it closes (presumably at 5). I didn't understand the intensity of traffic in Plainfield/Naperville. I was coasting through green lights at first, but as it got closer to 5PM, I indexed along in sequence and started catching all the red lights. What's at stake here? $35 in rebate cash that need today's postmark. Middlin' on the bummer scale. 5PM comes and goes, but you know, it might be one of those post offices that is open until 5:30. Don't give up hope. Still more red lights.

Okay, so I make it- and- answer to prayer! It is open, and not just until 5:30, but until 6:30! Amazing! The post office I was directed to by my new work friend is the distribution center. But- bummer again, there's a long line, and all I need is stamps. Maaan, I gotta wait anyway. Hey- I wonder if there's one of those stamp vending machines in here? Well, now somebody got in line behind me, and I'd have to give up my spot in line to look... and I don't see one... not worth it, I don't think. (5 minutes pass) Now a woman is saying that the machine is broken. Null effect: there is a machine, but it is broken. I'll check that first on my next visit.

Alright, now I'm leaving the post office- but I don't know where I am. I just followed the directions to the post office, and I don't know if I went too far on 59 and am now past my hotel, or haven't gone far enough yet. I don't have a smartphone to check with. (Yet.)

I'll bet on having not gone far enough. Also, I need to get something for dinner. I'm hungry. Should I visit a restaurant, or go grocery shopping? On the pro-restaurant side: Immediate gratification, and there is a Sweet Tomatoes salad buffet quite close to the hotel which can help with my healthy eating goals. I wouldn't be grocery shopping hungry. I don't know if the hotel has pans to go with the mini-stovetop that's in the room. On the pro-grocery shopping side: I save money, and can get something to pack for lunch tomorrow, which also saves money.

I have plenty of time to ponder this, as there is a decent amount of traffic on the road, and the light I am trying to get through is timed instead of sensored. Very little traffic is going through the other way, but lots of traffic is backed up on my road. I watch a green-light cycle go by for the left turn I want to take because I'm trapped behind traffic and there's a median preventing me from getting into the turn lane. Grrr. Estimated minutes spent at stoplight: 6.

I get onto the main road again, and I see a Meijer. Snap decison time- grocery or restuarant? Decision made- groceries. Bonus feature: I can ask someone in the Meijer how to get to the hotel. Shopping: Pro: granny smith apples are reasonably priced. Con: have to wait to get sandwich meat at the deli. Pro: This is a pretty nice Meijer. Con: I don't know if the "10 for $10" sale requires you to actually buy 10. Pro: the deli guy gives me a sample of the turkey, I didn't even ask. Con: I grab the turkey but am immediately unsure if he was holding it out for me to take, or just to inspect, because he asked if the thickness was okay. Eat turkey anyway. Pro: bread is on sale. Con: I still don't know about these "X for $Y" sale prices. Pro: random lady in frozen foods aisle is friendly when I ask if she knows about the sales. Con: I don't know if random lady in frozen foods aisle thinks I was awkwardly trying to start a conversation and ask her out. Con: She doesn't know about the sales either. Pro: Meijer guy in dairy area tells me I don't have to buy 10 to get the 10 for $10 price. YESSS. Con: I don't know what to get for dinner that I can make in a hotel room that isn't really bad for me. Pro: I decide on canned soup, and find some on sale. Con: I am dragging out my grocery shopping because I have nothing to draw me away from the grocery store. Pro: Kalamata olives are reasonably priced. Con: self-checkout aisle scanner is acting up and doesn't want to scan. Pro: lady at in-store bank gives me some directions that I can infer my location from. Con: IT'S SO DARN COLD AND WINDY Con: I want to take a left to get onto that one road, but there's a solid median. Pro: Oh, the hotel is right there. Nice.

Okay, so here's the deal with the hotel: CB&I is putting me up in a hotel for the first little bit of work while I get my lodging figured out. More on that in a later post. Anyway, when I arrived last night, the hotel didn't have a reservation for me- alright, I thought that might happen, since I hadn't heard back from the training coordinator. I can put it on my card and get reimbursed, and things will get sorted out for the second night. So now I'm at the hotel for the second night- having re-packed all my stuff into the car again this morning since I couldn't leave it there, having only paid for one night. The hotel's computers are down, and he doesn't have a reservation for me in the stack of paper he's got. Okay, the system is coming back up right now. It's slow, and- no, sorry, no record of a reservation. Well, alright, on the card it goes again, and I'll do another expense report. Now, though, I have groceries in my car and the same conundrum as last night. I'm hungry.

What's the natural thing to do? Escape! Escape from the world! I get to my room, nuke a can of soup, and decide to watch a movie on my laptop. What's handy? I eventually settle on 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've never seen it, and it's got such a prominent place in movie culture, it must be good, right? WRONG! Crazy piece of film- it makes no sense at all, and only my misguided sense of finish-what-you-start keeps me from turning it off. Blech. I finish and waste too much time on the computer. Now it's getting late. I meant to hit the exercise room tonight, so I feel lame for not doing that. I feel lame for my focus on God being so up-and-down lately. What to do? Obviously, look at the olives I bought. I won't eat any, though, because I already had way too many of those 75% off close-dated almonds. Gee, what does 'thrown' mean in the context of an olive label? I wondered about that in the store. The internet tells me. I still feel empty.

Is this how God gets my attention? Has he intervened here to get me to where I can't ignore that I need him, or is it just so much the way that he created us that it is impossible to ignore that the hole in me is God-shaped? I pray. I sing a verse. I read Proverbs. I am reminded that yes- God is the center of the universe, and I am best when the God-shaped hole in me is being filled.

Newsflash: You are entitled to softer fabrics as a basic human right

2011-09-15T23:19:00.000-06:00

I just got a great bit of news! Downy has somehow worked it out so that having softer clothes is now a basic human right. I imagine that now, the Human Rights Watch will now be on the case of enforcing this, so watch for your government-supplied Downy soon. You might wonder how I found out- after all it's not break in the news yet (what gives?). Well, this popped up just a minute ago:

It's simple logic. If Downy is displaying that ad to everyone on the internet, then that means that everyone deserves softer, fresher clothes. So it can't be that you have to do something to deserve soft, fresh clothes- because not everyone has done the same things. The only accomplishment that everyone in the world shares is that we're all alive- so I guess being alive is the only thing you have to do to deserve softer, fresher clothes. There you have it- every human deserves softer, fresher clothes, so the only thing it can be is a human right. Thanks Downy!

Be advised: If someone is telling you that you deserve something, they are probably trying to use you.

Dandelions

2011-09-11T14:53:00.000-06:00

God works through many different ways, and I think one of them is the shuffle playback for music. You never know what's going to come next- maybe God picked it! Yesterday I was doing some homework and listening to some songs on shuffle. A song came on by Five Iron Frenzy, one I've listened to a hundred times before, I'm sure. It's called Dandelions. It could have just gone in one ear and out the other like it had so many times before, but something perked my ears up just then, and I heard something I hadn't heard before.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me- Five Iron Frenzy wrote a lot of deep lyrics for a band with an average fan age of thirteen. In fact, this blog is named for a deep Five Iron song. All these words were in the songs when all of us punk kids were listening to them a decade ago, but they didn't click then. If I keep listening to Five Iron as I get older and older, I wonder if I'll just keep discovering stuff in their songs.

Back to Dandelions- here is the audio from Youtube, and the lyrics below. See if you pick up on what I did.

In a field of yellow flowers,
underneath the sun,
bluest eyes that spark with lightning,
boy with shoes undone.
He is young, so full of hope,
reveling in tiny dreams,
filling up, his arms with flowers,
right for giving any queen.

Running to her beaming bright,
while cradling his prize.
A flickering of yellow light,
within his mother's eyes.
She holds them to her heart,
keeping them where they'll be safe,
clasped within her very marrow,
dandelions in a vase.

She sees love, where anyone else would see weeds.
all hope is found.
Here is everything he needs.

Fathomless your endless mercy,
weight I could not lift.
Where do I fit in this puzzle,
what good are these gifts?
Not a martyr, or a saint,
scarcely can I struggle through.
All that I have ever wanted,
was to give my best to you.

Lord, search my heart,
create in me something clean.
Dandelions
you see flowers in these weeds.

Gently lifting hands to heaven,
softened by the sweetest hush,
a Father sings over his children,
loving them so very much.
More than words could warrant,
deeper than the darkest blue,
more than sacrifice could merit,
Lord, I give my heart to you

There's not some hidden, veiling double meaning here. I just didn't get it until now- probably because I was hearing but not listening. The point that I got from it is that we are very much the little boy with shoes untied, bringing dandelions to his mother. His mother loves those dandelions, she loves them so much- why? Not because dandelions are the most beautiful flower, or that by their own merit they have any value. Really, dandelions are weeds. The dandelions are special to her because they are her young son's expression of love- his very best, with nothing held back. The little boy gave her the dandelions with a pure heart as a gift of love.

How are we like that little boy? In plenty of ways. We are all, in some way, incompetent and backwards- with our shoes untied, you might say. Like the little boy, we are all capable of bringing a gift of love with a pure heart which will be just the very thing that the recipient wants. Finally, just like there was someone for the little boy to give his gift to, there is someone to whom we should give our gift of love- God. Now, God has a lot in common with this proverbial mother as well. She saw love in those weeds, because that's what they were: a gift of love. God also judges your gift not by some rubric or abstract value, but by the heart that presents it. If you offer something to God out of your love for him, it will be greatly pleasing to him, because that's exactly what he wants. What if the little boy had brought his mother a diamond ring, but did it out of obligation and with a sour heart? She wouldn't love that, even though the gift itself was amazing. In the same way, it doesn't matter if all you can give with your life is things that seem small and inconsequential- God is looking for your heart of love. Don't think God will be impressed by your great achievements in your life, either, if you're doing them for your own reasons and not to glorify him. Doesn't this sound an awful lot like a story you might have heard?

And he [Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."

A lot of the time, when this passage is preached on, the conclusion is "give until it hurts". It'd be easy to conclude that, given the ending- but I don't think that's the message here. I think the message is the same one that we can take from Dandelions. The fact is that God doesn't care how much you give, how much you achieve, what kind of greatness you have to offer him as this world measures it. All that will pass away. God cares about your heart. Nothing pleases God more in an offering than a heart that is giving out of its abundance of love for him. Now don't run away and think "God doesn't care how much I give, so I'm going to give very little, but do it cheerfully". Replace 'give' with whatever you want- 'try', 'accomplish', 'care'. What does that say about your heart? What if the little boy was just wanting to give his mother the easiest flowers to find?

No, what you do isn't what matters- but it is the evidence of the thing that does matter. If your heart is completely focused on God, then you're going to give your whole life to him. That's pleasing to God not because it's your all, but because it was your love for him that compelled you to give it.

Take two things from this. One is this- are you living your life as a pure gift to God? Are you sliding by with however much effort/diligence/contribution everyone else is, or, are you so motivated by your love for God that you want to give him your very best? Look at things the way God sees them.

On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

The second thing is this- don't judge your life on the same scale that the world does. The world's scale says that those dandelions were crap, a dozen roses is par. That's just not true. If all you have to give to God doesn't look like much on that scale, who cares? It doesn't matter in the least. You are a child of God, things are different. What matters is the heart that is giving it. Is it with a pure heart of love for God? That's what God wants. Don't aspire to greatness or accomplishment as measured by any earthly scale. Aspire to love God first and best, for that is far better.

He opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Six dozen failed projects

2011-08-27T09:49:00.002-06:00

As I was laying in bed last night, I had a realization. I am afraid of failure. Not just a normal fear, like I think most people have, but a paralyzing grip-of-death fear. I realized that I was haunted by my failures in the past- when I let them, they loomed over me like black clouds which followed me wherever I went, and signaled to everyone around me that I was a loser. It actually goes a level deeper- I realized that all these failures in the past, of which I was so afraid, had actually been caused by the fear itself.

Allow me to explain. I’m a tinkerer and a project guy. I love to make stuff, and I’m constantly having ideas for neat-o stuff I could make. Right now it’s an electric bicycle. A few weeks ago it was a go-anywhere miniature portable speaker powered by an old laptop battery. For a long time, the idea of a fast electric go-kart has been in my mind. I’m always thinking of something cool I can make, and I have been since I was a kid. I often dig into these projects with great fervor and excitement. I have a whole bunch of junk to prove it- things I’ve purchased for a project, or little items I’ve found and refused to throw away because of how useful I think it could be for something I could make. I get really excited about how cool my new thing is going to be.

Here’s the problem, though: I don’t follow through. Of all the projects I’ve started, just a handful have been completed. The rest are either abandoned or languishing in various states of incompletion. Combat robotics was my hobby in high school. I successfully built two robots. I think I count three uncompleted ones, plus two more that were ‘done’ but incredibly lame because they were rushed together last-minute. The three uncompleted ones weren’t just ideas I didn’t follow through on, they were projects I invested large amounts of time and (for a high-schooler) money in. Robotics isn’t the only thing- I bought a diesel vehicle because I thought the concept of biodiesel was incredible cool, and I planned on making my own biodiesel reactor and driving across the country on the cheap. It never happened. Then I got excited about it again after selling the first diesel car and bought another… and sold it. (At least I made a profit on both)

This cycle has happened many times with numerous projects- water-cooled computers, modifications to my car, several potato cannons, a motorcycle that’s now sitting non-running in a garage. Last night before I went to bed, I found out that my electric bike project probably wouldn’t be quite as fast as I had been hoping- only 17 mph. I was feeling like maybe I should give up on the project because it wasn’t quite as cool, not quite as worth it. What would my friends say, whom I’ve told about the project, when it’s not as fast as I made it out to be?

Then I started thinking about how I’ve done that so many times before, and how lame I was for it. I couldn’t make sense of that, though, because I thought I was pretty neat, and so did a lot of other people. God’s word tells me that I’m neat. Why did I feel so bad about giving up so many projects? Sure, giving up projects is bad, but why does it happen so often and why do I feel so bad about it? Then, I put the pieces together that explain why, on so many occasions, the same cycle repeats itself. I have an idea. I get excited about it. I make plans for the project. I start the project and get somewhere between 20% and 95% done- then I give up! Why? Why do I engage in such destructive, irrational behavior over and over again? It’s fear. The same thing that makes our economy run, that gives our political system its shape, that motivates beyond any other emotion.

For me, the fear block is stunningly effective because of just how excited I get for the projects. I have my idea and am convinced it’s just a ludicrously amazing idea and that when my project is finished, it’s going to be amazing. I jump into the project with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old at his first tee-ball game. I make progress. I do good work. I overcome obstacles. But then, fear creeps in. It enters the space of my enthusiasm and starts replacing it. The expectations I had for greatness in my project turn into requirements or standards I must meet. The hype I built up in my mind is now looming over me as if some panel of judges is just waiting for my project to be complete so they can evaluate it according to the expectation of greatness I set up for it- and the prognosis is grim.

So what do I do when I feel like failure is looking over my shoulder, just waiting for my project to be not quite as great as I anticipated? Or perhaps when I’ve compromised some aspect of my vision for cost, difficulty, or time- did I just break a promise to myself? Now what? I give up. I just lay the project aside and do something else. After all, my track record shows a consistent series of failures, doesn’t it? Better to just give up- it makes more sense to abandon a project and guarantee failure than to end up with something that’s not quite as amazing as I thought it could be. I should just do something else that’s more fun- I’ll come back to it later … and then the terrible feeling comes on- the half-finished project is mocking me from across the room, or the never-attempted plans are calling to me from my computer, telling me I’m a loser for not bringing them to life. There’s always something more appealing to do than coming back to a sheer cliff named ‘Project Completion’ and beginning to climb it. Something easier and seemingly more fulfilling, and I, in the sinful human condition, have historically taken the easy way far more times than I’ve challenged that cliff.

So what is the cure for my problem? Well, it has these two prongs I asked about before: why do I keep doing this, and why does it make me feel irrationally terrible? The latter problem, I think, answers the former. I keep repeating this cycle of giving up because I am so afraid that my project will be a blunder- the fear paralyzes me. Here’s the key- I let all those failures make me feel worthless. Yes, it is true- I’ve failed many times before. The mistake, though, is letting those failures define me. I let my failure identify me, slapping a name badge on my chest that reads “Ned Funnell: Owner of six dozen failed projects”. I won’t say that success doesn’t have value, or that it’s wrong to draw conclusions about someone based on what they’ve done. However, however! Performance never dictates value. My accomplishments or lack thereof can never tell me how much I’m worth. The truth is that I have immense value that nothing and no one can take from me. God created life in me, and despite my inability to do anything good without him, he saw so much value in me that he, the self-existent author of creation, lowered himself to the position of a slave and offered himself as a sacrifice- to pay the very debt I owed and could not pay. God sees that much value in me.

I could believe what my fear is telling me- that I’m worthless because I’ve failed before. On the other hand, I could believe what God says- that I’m so valuable that he would die for me. I could do what the fear compels me to do- just give up and do something else. Or, I could do what God said to do in his book: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men”. God doesn’t judge me according to my successes or failures, he judges my heart. Which heart is more pleasing to God- one that gives up in the midst of difficulty, or one that takes courage from God’s promises and continues on?

Just a thought

2011-05-22T19:42:00.001-06:00

If you look for God only in the supernatural, you're going to miss out on a lot. God displays himself in so much of the natural and ordinary; you'd be wise to look for him under every rock. Refusing to see God in every day life doesn't profit you anything.

A post for May 21

2011-05-21T23:14:00.000-06:00

This would have been more topical earlier, but I was singing this song today and I thought it would make sense, given the doomsayers (now proven wrong). Here's the song itself and the lyrics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0u2ZgGSMM0

I wonder if these minutes were my last,

If I should start to feast or start to fast.

Would I pray or would I curse,

Hope for good or something worse?

What emotion would I feel?

Would I run or would I kneel?

Time is winding down but only for this life.

I want to be found enjoying the next life.

I see leaves and they are starting to turn brown.

They'll be green and growing when the second season comes around.

The strongest will expire just the same,

The quick will fall exactly like the lame.

I'll do nothing at the most

To keep from giving up the ghost,

Try to make my shoulders broad,

But I am helpless without God.

Time is winding down but only for this life.

I want to be found enjoying the next life.

I see leaves and they are starting to turn brown.

They'll be green and growing when the second season comes around.

I may try to grip control,

But when for me shall this bell toll?

If the answer is to bow,

To him that makes how soon is now?

Time is winding down but only for this life.

I want to be found enjoying the next life.

I see leaves and they are starting to turn brown.

They'll be green and growing when the second season comes aroun

Horchatapocalypse

2011-05-02T23:29:00.001-06:00

20oz:

5 pumps cinnamon syrup
1 pump gingerbread syrup
1 pump vanilla syrup
1/4 tsp secret spices, including cayenne pepper.
Fill with milk and serve iced.

Enjoy.

Heroes and Zatzeeky

2011-04-25T13:36:00.000-06:00

I, like most young bachelors, do not fancy myself to be a master chef. In general, I'd rather bum some leftovers from Jamie Thompson (she's a killer cook) than prepare something for myself. Cooking for one is a drag anyway- you can either spend a lot of time preparing small portions, or cook a normal-sized meal and eat the same thing for a week and a half. Sure, there are ways around this- many turn to Ramen or Easy Mac, or eating out for every meal. I object to those alternatives for health and cost reasons. While it is true that I don't like to cook every night, I do find myself feeling culinarily adventurous from time to time. I've been known to prepare meals from time to time that deviate from the normal bachelor fare. Way back in the summer of 2008 I made fancy chicken parmesan for one just out of boredom- both time-boredom and palate boredom. I was impressed enough with myself that I took a cameraphone picture:

How bad is it that I'm reaching back to 2008 for examples of decent cooking? After all, I am also responsible for this mug-o-oatmeal microwave disaster:

Little cooking anomalies like the chicken do happen from time to time. I find it much more fun to make a dish for a potluck (pitch-in, midwesterners) rather than just cooking for an hour or two and sitting down alone to enjoy it- for me, the return on investment isn't there. If I'm cooking a dish for a group, though, it's much more worth it to me. I've been known to bring a mean pot of chili to a barbecue, and better-than-expected-of-a-bachelor food to gatherings.

The hallmark of my potluck contributions, though, is a recipe for which I can take no credit, but for which I have a great deal of respect- my grandmother Whittingham's cornbread, passed down to me by my father. Many a Saturday morning was spent in the Funnell house eating cornbread made by my dad with whole wheat flour, corn meal, and love. I have lots of memories of spreading molasses or honey on my split-apart slice of cornbread with the rest of my family around our wooden kitchen table. Good times. This cornbread is always made in a cast iron skillet, any other vessel is strictly barred. I made it on a semi-regular basis, and so I found myself creatively borrowing Jamie's skillet to make it, as I had no skillet of my own. Perhaps you'll remember that Jamie got me a skillet of my own for Christmas, and perhaps that is the best testament for my affinity for this cornbread:

I also made a sweet awesome apple pie a few months ago that I almost forgot about:

Alright, alright, Ned makes food sometimes. Big whoop. He has to or he'd die. What's the big deal? And who is Zatzeeky, and why is he hanging out with heroes?

Let me explain- 'hero' is one phonetic pronunciation of the Greek word 'gyro', which is a sick-awesome dish made with pita bread, chicken/pork, and a fantastic sauce called 'tzatziki'. Recently, Sarah and I returned from a two-week trip, which meant we both had to restock our fridges. I was lamenting this task aloud and Sarah convinced me to prepare something called a 'meal plan'. I usually just go to the store, grab some staple foods or whatever is on sale, then come back home and say, with a tone of incredulity, "what the heck am I supposed to make with all this stuff?!"

Well, the meal plan turned out to be a good idea but making it meant I had to decide ahead of time what I wanted to make and eat so I could buy the stuff. (How 'bout that) I was trying to think of things more exciting than spaghetti or various soups, when I remembered a meal I'd had, of all places, at Saga, the official cafeteria of LeTourneau University. (Okay, it's not official, it's a nickname from the 70's that the administration has been trying to defeat for years) This wasn't the new and vastly improved Saga in the new building, no, this is old-building Saga. Now, if you're a LeTourneau student, you think I'm insane, I'm sure, for wanting to reproduce a Saga dish. This was after the Bon Appetit takeover, though, and that makes a difference. The new chef made gyros with tzatziki sauce, and it was quite good. Intriguing, even, as a foreign dish. I liked it, and when making my meal plan, I remembered it.

So gyros it was. What is a gyro? It's a pita (which is a round flatbread) topped with chicken or pork, vegatables of choice (e.g. tomatoes, onions, lettuce), and often tzatziki sauce. You fold it up and eat it like a taco.The sauce is a cool sauce made of yogurt, cucumber, and seasonings/herbs. Sounds kind of complex, eh? It was, especially considering that I couldn't find pita bread at Walmart. I did have tortillas, but I thought that'd be a travesty of a hybrid- Mexican/Greek? No thanks. So get this- I made my own pita bread. DADGUM! That took a while. I won't bore you with the cooking details, but I'll tell you that it still involved some bachelor moves, like using a crock pot as a mixing bowl and substituting pancake mix for flour when I ran out and the dough was super sticky.

A morning of cooking gets you this for lunch:

And these are the pitas, which I thought I could make without a rolling pin:

Sarah enjoys pitas.

What does this mean for my future? Will this progress in culinary skill and interest continue until I'm an accomplished chef, and turn out to be one of my life's defining features?

Hmmm.... nope. Gyros are good though.

Apparently, hard drives can survive a trip through the washing machine

2011-03-30T00:54:00.001-06:00

Last Christmas, I was toting a laptop hard drive around with me during the Very Thompson Christmas. I had just got my laptop back from the repair center and installed an upgraded hard drive, so the stock one was out of the machine. I had it in a protective anti-static back, a little bit of foam, and just because, I put the whole shebang in a sock. Well, during the Christmas visit, all my stuff was sort of piled in a corner because there were so many people all in one house. I had the opportunity to wash clothes, and scooped up all my laundry... including an errant sock containing the hard drive. When I got my laundry out of the washer and heard the distinctive crinkle sound of antistatic, I immediately knew my error. I was SURE that the drive was ruined. Just in case, I stuck it in some rice. Four months later, I pull it out just for giggles to see if it works. Sure enough, when I plugged it into a machine, Windows recognized the drive. It's running a drive integrity test now. If that passes, we'll know that there's something miraculous about this drive.

Edit: it made it for sure.

Hold the presses. I forgot about induction.

2011-03-09T09:13:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I lambasted electric stoves as the worst cooking device in the history of the western world. This is true- but only for electric resistance stoves. That is- the normal kind with the coils that get red hot. There is another kind of electric stove that is actually pretty sweet- the electric induction stove. It uses the principle of electromagnetic induction to make the pan itself get hot instead of having a burner. Neat, right? Here's how it works- skip this part if you hate me.

There are two basic kinds of electricity- direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The stuff coming out of your house's outlets is AC, the kind from batteries is DC. AC is called alternating because the polarity- the plus and minus- of the electricity is actually switching back and forth. In household electricity, this happens 60 times per second- 60 Hertz. However, when you boost the frequency up a lot, an interesting phenomenon exhibits itself- electromagnetic induction. A changing magnet field will induce (hence induction) electricity to flow in nearby conductors. This is how generators work- a magnet spinning inside of some carefully-placed coils of wire makes electricity flow in the wires. The back-and-forth changing of the polarity of the AC electricity in the induction cooktop does the same thing! It's switching makes the magnetic field's north and south reverse every time it changes. Now, if you bring something electrically conductive near- like the bottom of your steel pot- it will make electricity flow in it. What happens when you have electricity flowing in the bottom of your pot, though? It's the same thing as goes on in your toaster. In your toaster, electricity is flowing through the wires inside- the ones that glow red in there- and it makes them get hot because the wire's resistance to the flow of electricity is having to absorb all that power- it gets converted to heat. So the bottom of your pot is having this electricity induced to flow in the bottom of it, but it's not a complex set of wires- it's just a piece of metal. The electricity then is essentially just a short circuit through the bottom of the pot- but because the pot has resistance, the power gets converted to heat for you to cook with.

(Haters, you can start reading here) The beauty of this is that electromagnetic waves travel across distance. So instead of your pot needing to be perfectly flat on the bottom, it only needs to be reasonably flat enough to stay close to the induction surface and it will still heat up. Now, it can't be inches away- in fact, magnetic waves lose power with distance to a factor cubed (or to the fourth power, I can't remember)- so if you get your pot too far away it won't work. That's fine, though, and good- because your pot is sitting right on the thing, and your metal spoons sitting next to the cooktop are far enough away to stay cool.

So all that means that induction cooktops are incredibly slick. They don't have the primary disadvantage of electric resistance stoves, which is that pots that aren't perfectly flat only heat up in the one spot they make contact. They still have one of the advantages, which is that it's a lot easier to install an electric wire for your stove in your house than it is to run a pipe for a natural gas stove. They also can pump a whole lot more power into your pot, which means you can boil water so quickly that it creates problems with making hard boiled eggs because it heats too fast. However, the primary benefit of electric stoves is lost- initial cost. Electric resistance stoves are cheap, but induction cooktops can't be had for under two grand. That's just the cooktop too- no stove involved.

Another factor though is safety. If your four-year-old flips on the induction cooktop, there won't be an element getting hot for little Bobby to burn himself on, because the stove itself doesn't get hot- the bottom of the pot does. No pot, no hot. It's all metal, though, not just pots- so if little Bobby wears a ring on his finger and sticks it on the turned-on cooktop, that ring's going to heat up something fierce. Check this out:

That's in induction cooktop, and notice the egg in the bottom left. It's half on the skillet and half off- the half on the skillet is cooking, but the half on the cooktop stays perfectly cold because it's only the metal skillet that gets hot.

Now, you have to beware of fakers. There are a lot of glass/ceramic surface cooktops out there, but that doesn't mean they're all sweet, sweet induction cooking power. A lot are just electric resistance cooktops in disguise. That's not to say that it's not an improvement- the ceramic top is always going to stay flat, and that will help your pots and pans from distorting as well. Ceramic cooktops are also about a thousand times easier to clean than a coil-based electric stove. I'd take a ceramic surface electric cooktop over a coil-based one any day- but I still wouldn't prefer either to gas. Ceramic cooktops tend to scratch like a son of a gun, and I'd be constantly petrified that I'd drop my cast iron pan on it and break it. How are you supposed to make Real Popcorn on a ceramic surface cooktop? You have to be shaking that pot back and forth like crazy to keep the popcorn moving, and what is that going to to do to your pretty ceramic surface? It's going to kick its trash, that's what its going to do.

So, gas is cheaper to operate, better for cooking on all counts, cheaper than induction, and you can make popcorn. Electric resistance is cheap but bad in all other respects. Electric induction is neat but way expensive and scratch-prone. I'll take the gas stove, please.

Cheese. Stoves. Saunas and rally racing.

2011-03-08T23:50:00.000-07:00

If possible, so much as it depends on me, I will never buy American cheese. It is an abomination to mankind as a processed food product, and it is a crying shame that America wasted our one shot that we got as a nation at naming cheese on a half-plastic 'processed cheese food product'. The Swiss have a good cheese. The French have like twenty. We wasted our cheese name on something that I wonder doesn't come out of an oil well.

If possible, so much as it depends on me, I will never buy an electric stove. Thermal transfer between the heating element and your pan depends on the two surfaces remaining perfectly flat. Of course, the two things that need to remain perfectly flat are two pieces of metal that have a high coefficient of thermal expansion, are likely to see disproportionate heating, and go through several cycles of heating/cooling a day through a delta-T of several hundred degrees. GENIUS! If it doesn't stay flat (every aluminum non-stick pan in the world), then one spot on the pan makes honest-to-goodness contact with the element and the rest has to try and conduct that heat through several millimeters or more of air through radiant and convection heating. Bad news.

If possible, so much as it depends on me, I will spend at least 75% of the rest of my life in a sauna. The Finns are, as a race, the most brilliant people in the world. They're number 1 in sauna use- in fact, in WWII, if you left Finnish troops alone for as little as sixteen hours, they would have cut down some trees, made a sauna, heated it, and all had a steambath by the time you came back. Sixteen hours in the forest. The Finns also produce more winning auto race drivers than any other country in the world. Why wasn't I born finnish? Sauna and rally cars? Who can't love that? Oh, and they check out more library books per capita than any other country and they have sisu.

In conclusion, here is Kimi Räikkönen blasting a Citroën through a rally course.

Image credit: mirror.co.uk

Okay, so I just installed an electronically-checkable mousetrap

2011-02-22T15:31:00.004-07:00

I've got a little critter living in my ceiling. For the past couple days, I've heard him skitter around up there at night. Kim mentioned it after hearing it in the floor of the bathroom upstairs, which is over the same space. It was time for a mouse hunt. The problem, though, is that the mouse is in the ceiling, which is an inconvenient place to have to check a mouse trap frequently. (If you've ever failed to check a mouse trap for a day or two and had a mouse in it, you know why it's important to check. BARF.) This brought to mind a project I'd seen on The Internet- a guy wired up a mousetrap so that he could check the status by a light. It's not hard, actually- it took me less than an hour to replicate. The basics are this- when the mouse trap is set and ready for a mouse- that is, not tripped- the bait holder and the little bar that holds back mouse death are touching. When a mouse springs the trap, these two break contact. They are also copper-coated metal, so they are electrically conductive and solderable. One can wire these two pieces as a switch between a power source and a little light, and then when the mousetrap is set off, the light will turn off. Ta-da!

I decided to do this, and hunted around for some parts. Two LEDs were harvested from an over-designed computer case. A few months ago I combined two broken aquarium lights into two working ones, and harvested a 5-volt power supply from that, as well as some wire I used. That got wire-nutted to a 110v power plug and after some trial-and-error soldering, an electronically-checkable mousetrap was born. Here's how I originally soldered the mousetrap up:

The red wire seen at the back is soldered to the trip bar (I'll call it) and as you can see, black to the bait holder. The wire color is insignificant here, as really it's just a switch, and therefore, monopolar.

Hey look, my camera takes good macro shots. This is a bad place to solder to, as the presence of the wire causes the bait holder to shift and not hold the trip bar in place at all. I removed it from here and soldered it onto the staple that holds it down, which works a treat.

Here it is installed. Argus the ever-watchful deer is playing stand for the power supply. The wires going up into the ceiling are connected to the mousetrap, and the power supply is made up of the transformer hanging behind Argus' ear and a rectifier/capacitor package shrinkwrapped inline downstream of the transformer. From there, it's just an LED/resistor package wired in series with the mousetrap. When the mouse trap is tripped, then Argus will no longer glow blue. The wires coming down from inside his ears are earbuds, not part of the project.

Now, as soon as some unfortunate mouse covets the delicious peanut butter in the trap, I will know because the blue LEDs will go out. All I have to do to check the trap is look at Argus once in a while.

I'm not sure if this even qualifies as 'electronic' rather than just plain electric- the only semiconductors in the whole thing are the diodes in the rectifier and the LEDs, and those aren't the heart of the mini-project. Maybe I can integrate the MSP430 microcontroller I just got courtesy of Texas Instruments into this somehow to make it twitter when a mouse is caught or something. (Not likely with 2k of memory)

Update: Hello hack-a-day-ers! When I got up this morning, the lights were out, and sure enough, I found a little mouse interloper in the trap. And yes, the deer head looked like that before I did this project.

Q: What is the coolest thing in the world?

2011-02-03T18:35:00.001-07:00

A: This:

I was wrong about the cracker conspiracy. Whoops.

2011-01-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

Faithful readers, you will recall that two weeks ago I posted a scathing exposé about a cracker scandal of epic proportions. Sadly, I must report that I was mistaken. I based my understanding of the cracker situation on a single piece of evidence which I did not verify. Although name-brand cracker prices are ridiculous at $2.25+ per box, the last piece of the puzzle- a jump in generic cracker prices- turns out to be absent. You see, I was in Walmart and saw that one of the pallet-in-the-aisle items was saltine crackers. The accompanying large-letter price sign did in fact read "2.28". However, when I was at Walmart on Tuesday, I spotted this:

Hmm... crackers for $1.28. That blows my whole theory out of the water, doesn't it? Theoretically, the cracker conspiracy could still be true, and just not deployed in its final stage yet- but I'm not going to hold my breath. What I think happened is that Walmart raised the price from $0.88 or $0.98 or whatever to $1.28- and then advertised it as if they were on sale. McDonalds did the same thing for their apple pies years ago. After they established the dollar menu, they didn't put the pies on the dollar menu because they were already much less than a dollar. They sold like stale potatoes. Later, McDonalds put them on the dollar menu- actually an increase in price, and advertised them like crazy, and they sold like hot apple pies. I speculate that Walmart did the same. So these crackers were piled up in the aisle being promoted, with the big flip-chart style price sign. Either employee error of vandal intervention changed the $1.28 to $2.28, hence my confusion. There's nothing stopping anyone from taking the sign down and changing it- in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if my mischievous younger self had done so at some point in history.

I apologize, faithful readers, for my obvious failure to do due diligence in my research before wildly flinging accusations around. I endeavor to produce only accurate and meaningful posts on this blog, and I have failed you in that regard. While crackers may not be the most earth-shattering subject on the planet, it is no small thing to be starting rumors of grand-level wrongdoing- it is tantamount to libel. Once again, I am sorry for my previous post, and I will strive not to repeat this mistake.

Please, accept this picture of me on stilts as a token of my appreciation for your continued readership.

(and no, I can't walk on the stilts. To let go of the wall is to invite death)

A Thompson Christmas, some cars, and Zach eating a flaming marshmallow

2011-01-20T14:33:00.001-07:00

Here's some pics and video from the past month or so that haven't fit into other posts.

I spent Christmas with the Thompson extended family in Phoenix, and took a bunch of pictures.

The second half of that slideshow is where all the cars are- Gareth and I went and checked out a drive-in car show.

We had an all-day staff meeting that someone chose to call a "Staff Retreat" before it happened. I came prepared to make a pie, but that had to wait, as making a pie during a meeting is challenging. Nevertheless, pie happened that evening. It came out pretty well. Here's how it looked:

Last week a mission team from Biola University came to Ephraim. I never know whether I ought to write it as BIOLA- the school started out as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, hence the name, but has since then changed it to drop the acronym to just be 'Biola University', but it sounds funny to me since Biola isn't a name really, but formerly an acryonym. During their stay, we had an event at the cafe called Scarf your Smores, for which I made this coolio poster:

Please ignore that my attempt to write 'free scarves' in lowercase at the bottom ended up looking like a four year old wrote it.

Here's the full set of pictures from when the Biola team was here, including the event.

During Scarf Your Smores, Zach ate a flaming marshmallow, which is recorded for your enjoyment here:

Razzle-dazzle.

Cholula bandit, I will find you.

2011-01-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

Cholula hot sauce is great. I love it. I keep some around, but I use it sparingly because it's not inexpensive. However, my bottle seems to just empty itself. No, it's not a case of failure to realize how I'm using. The stuff just disappears. I noticed it a few months ago and I've been watching. I just went to go use some and got a little bit out of the bottle and suddenly it was empty. I know I had at least a third of a bottle left. I am the only one that uses my kitchen. Cholula bandit: I don't know who you are, where you come from, or why you keep stealing my hot sauce- but I do know that I take this hot sauce business very seriously. While I do appreciate your taste in hot sauce, that will not save you if I ever find you in my kitchen stealing my Cholula. There is no measure for how hard and how fast I will bring this fight to your doorstep.

RIP

Cholula Hot Sauce I only got to use like a quarter of

You will be missed.

The ones who walk away from California

2011-01-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

Surprise! I just got back from California! Kim (the TGM Assistant Director) and I went out this past weekend. Why, you ask? Well, for the past several years, the Solid Rock ministry has had contact with a young lady I'll call "Peggy". Peggy got into trouble with drugs during high school and ended up dropping out. For a couple years she lived the life of a drug addict, but about two months ago, there was a serious change in her. She decided she didn't want the drugs or the life that she was living anymore, and had a real desire to turn her life around. Before when she was around the college house, she would be manipulative and looking for a handout, she now was seeking support and counsel. It wasn't an overnight transformation from addict to someone who has it all together, but we could tell that her attitude had changed. She was making progress in Alcoholics Anonymous (she had tried before but never completed step 1) and we saw her turning down her old friends' requests to go party.

At the same time, her life got difficult- she lived with her mother (who was not a positive influence in her life) who was about to move far away to a town where she would have no support whatsoever, and where drugs were rampant. Through a connection with a pastor in California, we found out that there was a potential opening at a Teen Challenge program. Teen Challenge is an organization that helps recovering addicts by healing the emotional, mental, and spiritual effects of addiction as well as teaching them practical life skills that they will need to get out on their own. It's a Christian program where God is definitely at work. It has many success stories and a 92% success rate. It's a national organization and my dad knew some people who were graduates of the Teen Challenge program in New England.

Kim has been Peggy's main confidante in our ministry and has been helping her every step of the way (which is not an easy task). Kim offered to take Peggy to California if this opportunity turned into a reality. Peggy still needed to interview by phone with the program's director and the open bed needed to be confirmed. This all developed relatively quickly- it was last Tuesday that we heard about this possibility for the first time, and we left Friday afternoon. For a little while, though, we thought things were off- Peggy had doubts about her ability to succeed in the program, no doubt the enemy attacking her in an attempt to maintain the stranglehold he's had on her life for the past several years. The pastor in California, Tristan, was able to help her, though- he has met her before when he came out to Utah to witness during Manti Pageant. He is also a former drug addict himself. At first glance you wouldn't suspect that he's a pastor, as most pastors are not covered in tattoos and sporting a shaved head with goatee. Despite what outside appearance might suggest to a prejudiced observer, Tristan is a very legit man of God and His vessel in this situation. Tristan talked to Peggy and got her back on the track towards recovery.

Because this all developed so quickly, we didn't actually know for certain that the plan was a go until the car was packed and we were preparing to leave. There was a mission team from Biola University here with the ministry for three days, which made things quite busy as well. The team went up to a Fundamentalist LDS colony near Santaquin, UT to witness, and we went with them because we were going to pick up Peggy from Delta, which is where her mom moved to. We had planned on spending some of the time with the team in Santaquin, but a late start prevented us from doing so.

We picked up Peggy from her mom's house from Delta. This had the potential to be a major battle- Tristan warned us, based on his previous experience, that there would be severe spiritual warfare from the time she decided to go until she got in the car. Kim made a lot of calls and got a lot of people praying during that time, which helped a lot- we had no trouble during the pickup. We set out for California later than one might usually depart on a long road trip; around 3PM.

The drive was about 10 hours, which is less than I usually drive on a road trip, so it wasn't too bad. Kim worked on some graphic design work she had, I drove, and Peggy talked. Kim also sang to me per request of Sarah, so that I would know what it's like to go on a road trip with other people, which I claimed not to have done before. Now, though, I realize that the several mission trips I've gone on definitely count. I was thinking only of all the cross-country drives I've done over the past several years, which were always solo.

We arrived pretty late and were met by Tristan. We caught up and visited for a little while before we hit the hay. We wanted to get some sleep as we'd be leaving early for the hour drive to the Teen Challenge induction center to get Peggy there before 8AM. In the morning, I had the advantage of being a young man who is not particularly particular about his style, requiring pants, a shirt, some shoes, and the Four Items which must always reside in my pockets: keys, wallet, cell phone, and pocket knife. I had the luxury of breakfast before we headed out.

We took Peggy to the induction center, but it wasn't just a quick dropoff, naturally- this was a huge change in her life, deserving of a morning full of orientation, shopping(she had nothing), errand-running, and goodbyes. While she and Kim picked out clothes in the Teen Challenge-operated thrift store, I grabbed some cheap pants for myself and also scored a commercial grade Bunn coffeemaker for Jamie. Her coffeemaker gave up the ghost around Christmas, only one day after she gave away a spare coffeemaker in a white elephant gift exchange.

We got Peggy situated and left her in the capable hands of the Teen Challenge staff. Although this had the potential to be a sad departure, because it was for a whole year, we were glad that this positive change in her life was now in progress and that it marked a significant step in the God's rescue of Peggy from her old life.

Although this trip was serious business, it was also a bit of a vacation for Kim and I. It's California, after all. We could have driven back that afternoon, but we elected to accept Tristan's invitation to stay an extra day, attend his church, and relax. Kim and I planned before we left to visit the beach at any cost. One hiccup is that Kim's computer broke on the trip out, a serious problem for her graphic design work that had to get done. She had the foresight to save all her work on a flash drive, so she was able to continue work on my laptop for the rest of the trip. Tristan had a connection with a computer guy in the area who owns his own shop, and he fixed Kim's PC at no cost to her. If you're ever in Lake Forest, CA and need a computer problem fixed- check out Coronado Computers.

We were glad for the computer fix, but it took a portion of the day we'd been hoping to spend on the beach. We planned instead for Kim to spend the evening on her graphic design work, and we'd hit the beach the next day after church and before returning to Utah. While Kim worked on her stuff, I finished reading Just Do Something, a very good book that Sarah lent to me about discerning the will of God. I'll break for a moment here to plug this book.

Just Do Something is a short book on a much bigger subject, and the introductory sentence states the premise of the book well: "Hyper-spiritual approaches to finding God's will don't work. It's time to try something new: Give up." I had thought before that God's will was a one-track thing, a narrow path through life that I had to be on, otherwise to be sinning. Furthermore, I though that I had to determine what this path was before taking any step forward. I remember vocalizing this on many occasions in the past while deliberating over some decision. The process I went through while deciding whether to stay in Utah or return to school this past fall was a stepping stone towards this understanding.

To sum up the book very briefly, God doesn't necessarily have one track for your life, and he certainly doesn't expect you to discern it before you act. Although God has given miraculous guidance in the past, it was never the rule, and in the example of the apostles, there's no precedent of any of them waiting anxiously for God to give them a sign before they made some major decision. God gave us the ability to make wise decisions and he expects us to use that when we're walking through life. He gave us the Bible for guidance, so that we can know what is good and what is bad. He gave us fellowship for wise counsel, so that others wisdom can be added to our own. He gave us prayer so that we can bring these things before God and ask for wisdom and discernment, but not so that we can expect to get zapped with the sudden knowledge of God's Will every time we have to decide between paper and plastic. God gives us lots of open doors for us to talk through, but that's not license to take every opportunity we see and have that be God's will.

Essentially, God gave us the tools to figure this stuff out. On moral right-and-wrong decisions, God has given us clear guidance in the Bible. On non-moral decisions, though, he's given us the freedom to make choices- and in the times when he does have a certain plan for us, he doesn't expect us to divine that before we take any action, lest we be sinning. This isn't a permit to go do whatever seems right to you- it's a firm entreaty to get off of your hyper-spiritual butt and just do something instead of feeling all holy because you refuse to move forward unless you're absolutely sure that you're in the center of God's will. If you love God, live for Him, obey the scriptures, put others before yourself, and are holy- you are walking in the will of God. God's will is for your sanctification, not for your trepidation at the appearance of any decision.

Okay, plug over. I finished that book, Kim did her graphics work, we ate Chinese and went to bed. I made a mistake there. I went to bed tired without setting an alarm, and to phrase it as Kim's internal monologue did when she saw me sleeping on the couch 33 minutes before church began: Ruh Roh. I scrambled to get ready and out the door, but there was nothing to be done for my ridiculous bedhead. Like I said above, I'm not particularly particular about my style, but I at least want to be lookin' good at church. Instead, I looked like I had just rolled out of bed, because I had.

After church we hit the beach. The air was about 75°, but the water was 50°. 50° doesn't sound so bad- you can walk around outside when it's 50° and not die. However, water has a much higher density than air, and thus the thermal mass available to convect your body heat away is much greater. 50° is cold water to swim in. Nobody else was in the water except for some kids, and kids will do anything. Kim was content to read on the sunny beach and tan, but I came to the beach to go to the beach, and going to the beach for me means to swim, darn it. I've never swam in the Pacific ocean from the United States side before, but I have swam in it from the Australian side before (interestingly, both of my Pacific-swimming experiences have been in the winter). My brother Jake met a nice Australian girl and married here there in 2007, and I got to go to the wedding. Thanks Jake! (And thanks also to Ian, who funded my ticket!)

We couldn't tarry too long at the beach, though, because the long drive back to Utah beckoned. Here are some pics, though:

After the beach, I tried to find a public shower to wash the salt and sand off, but I was unsuccessful. Shucks. We changed and embarked for Utah. We stopped at a Q'doba (burrito place, one of Kim's faves) and I made some observations about California. Maybe it's just the palm trees, but the place gives off an air of being a utopia. It's got perfect weather 95 days out of 100, wide well-maintained streets, palm trees everywhere, enough Lamborhinis that I saw several during the two days I was there, and seemed to be permeated with the attitude that life is carefree and everything is just great. The other impression I get is that while it's got a great shell, it's rotten at it's core. Last year, the state of California was literally (literally) writing IOUs to state employees instead of paychecks. There seems to be an attitude of 'anything goes' and with my apologies to the many fine people who reside in California, I'd call the place godless- unless the god of California is pleasure.

If you've ever read Ursula K. LeGuin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, you'll probably understand why I titled this posts the way I did. In a nutshell, the story is about a perfect city where everyone is happy all the time, everything is great, and living in Omelas is like a permanent vacation. However, deep in one of the city's buildings, there is a child who is the reason why Omelas is the way it is. The child is feral, uncared for, naked, and miserable. It doesn't speak, it's never been held, and it receives its food through a hole in the wall. The child is a scapegoat for the whole city, and the only reason why the utopia can exist outside of that basement is because that one innocent child suffers. Every resident of Omelas has to go to view that child once they come of age, and some people, once they realize the truth about Omelas, choose to walk away. I think of California in the same way. Everything is wonderful outside, but it comes at a cost. You can say that California's own child-in-the-basement scapegoat is any number of things- morality, acceptance of God, the many who live in poverty while the rich prosper, justice. I can't condemn California, a whole state- but I do observe that within its borders there is a unique environment of man-as-god that I haven't seen elsewhere.

On the way back, Kim and I talked for a good while, but then Kim decided to take a nap and proceeded to sleep the entire way back to the Sanpete County line. She must've been tired! It was a good trip and a mini-vacation for Kim and I. We're blessed that we were able to enjoy a few days off and a little bit of beach during a Utah winter. We're furthermore blessed that God chose to use us to bring Peggy into the next chapter of her life, one that will bring healing and progress towards the rest of her life.

Corporate greed at your local grocery store: Saltine price fixing

2011-01-13T00:47:00.001-07:00

Okay world, here's your shocking expose. Moms of the world have probably noticed the same thing I've noticed, but as far as I know, I'm the first to blog about it. Prepare yourself, food industry, because I'm about the blow the lid off of your whole mafia-style corporate malfeasance. It used to be that one would go to their local supermarket and buy a box of saltines for, say 79 cents 10 years ago, 98 cents a few years ago- that's fine, that's inflation. One day when I was reaching for my ol' standby Great Value El-Cheapo saltines, I noticed something. The GV saltines were a normal price, but all the name-brand ones were around $2.29. GV is known for saving you a few dimes, maybe 15-20%, which is good money- but not over half. It's not that GV was so much cheaper, it was that all the other saltine brands leapt up in price suddenly. What happened?

Maybe a saltine factory burned down someplace and that created a ripple in the market. Well, no- for that there'd have to be two or three factories churning out ALL the saltines for the non-GV brands for the entire country, because I noticed this trend in Texas, Iowa, and Utah. Hmph. It couldn't be the price of ingredients, because the GV price would have reacted to that too- and it didn't. I watched for a year and more wondering if Zesta sold ANY of their $2.39 crackers when there was a $0.98 cent box of the exact same thing right next to them. (I'm sure they did, P.T. Barnum's Rule) If some real event took place that would legitimately cause prices to explode, GV wouldn't have taken a year and more to catch up.

So... what happened? Allow me to throw a wild accusation out there, based entirely on a single perspective and conjecture. I think that someone out there realized that saltines were too much of a steal. I always kept a box of saltines around to augment my meals because they're cheap and tasty. You can put waaay too much Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning on something, but tone it down by eating it on a cracker, like chili. It stretches your meal, too. Now, saltines aren't too much of a steal- well, they're not a steal at all. GV saltines at my local walmart just jumped up to $2.28 overnight- and they're advertised in the aisle as being an item of special interest! I agree- but because there's some backdoor saltine-management shadiness going on.

I don't think it's too crazy to think that such a thing might happen. Would this be the first time that prices went up on something because someone wanted to make more money? Of course not. It happened so much in the post-industrial-revolution days that a law was passed to specifically address this problem. It also wouldn't be the first time that corporate bigwigs have thrown the law to the wayside and done what they wanted to do. But crackers? Come on Ned, why would some CEOs meeting in a back alley wearing hats with their collars turns up target crackers as their big money maker? They would do that because it's smart. Crackers are stable, cheap enough to produce that the profit margin is already substantial, and people are not likely to stop buying them- or at least, less likely than if they tried the same thing on LCD TVs- there's competition there and undercutting that wouldn't ever let a scheme like this go over.

Furthermore, crackers are unsuspecting. Who ever links crime with crackers? Barring some weird CSI-esque criminal cases out there, nobody's ever committed a crime with crackers before. (Prove me wrong) Your average person is going to keep grabbing the same color box of crackers whenever he runs out, slide his card at the checkout after making sure the total is the right number of digits, and eat his crackers. All the snack crackers are expensive anyway, so the $2.29 saltines will fit in great with the $2.99 Club crackers and $1.89 Wheat Thins. The buck saltines were an anomaly to begin with.

If someone DID crack the case of the cracker crime ring, who in the world would care enough to actually crack down on these guys under the federal anti-price-fixing statute? Crackers in the media don't sell. It could be true, but they'll probably discover that Michael Jackson recorded a funny-sounding sneeze once and give that all the media coverage while CORPORATE STRATEGISTS ARE TESTING THE LIMITS OF OUR COMPLACENCY BY MESSING WITH CRACKER PRICES. Don't say it couldn't happen. You heard it here first, folks. If the great cracker conspiracy of 2009-2011 blows up soon, you know who to thank for breaking this story.

What do cracker prices look like where you are? Leave it in the comments.

Also, I'm out of crackers and now they're $2.50 a box. Forget you, Nabisco.

Local Motors Rally Fighter: Cool car, cool company

2010-12-31T18:33:00.001-07:00

This afternoon, I went to the Local Motors micro-factory. I was reading about their car, the Rally Fighter, on a car blog and got to clicking on their site. Lo and behold, Local Motors happens to be located in Phoenix, where I am vacationing for Christmas with the Thompson extended family. Sweet. I dispatched an email regarding a tour and got a phone call yesterday that a tour could be done today. Rock on!

Let me introduce you a bit to Local Motors. This company seeks to fill niches in the automotive market with vehicles designed by a collaborative community and fabricated in a local micro-factory, partly with the owner-to-be's labor. Local Motors is a startup, and they are now rolling the first production-spec models out of their factory. Cars are aimed at the local market, meaning they have special appeal to the region in which they are produced. Their first car is an offroad rally design for desert racing, and it's called the Rally Fighter. Feast your eyes on this:

Take another look:

It's a 430 horsepower, 20-inch suspension travel, 3500lb... er, what is it? Well, a monster, but it looks like someone popped the body off of a sports car and popped it on an offroad truck frame for giggles. No wait, that would be these rednecks from Manti:

Not quite the same effect. (I mean, cool... but I like the Rally Fighter better) Back the task of defining the RF. What is it? Well, it doesn't fit into any existing car market, and that's exactly the point- it fills a gap in the auto market that's too small for any of the large automakers to feasibly target, but which has enough demand to make people like me drool over their product. Local Motors isn't a desert racing vehicle company, it just so happens that their first product is a desert racer. They've got designs on the table for sports cars, electric vehicles, and tiny city-dweller transportation. As the company grows, it will pop up other micro-factories in markets suitable for their newest designs.

Let's get back to the Rally Fighter. It starts out as a tube-steel chassis:

Then they add a glorious 430HP GM LS3 V8 engine:

...and some enormously huge rear shocks,

(it's hard to judge the size of these in the picture- they're about 48" long)

Next they stir in some body panels, bumpers, steering column, axles, and other goodies:

Better get the wiring harness in there:

Got to make sure they get something sweet in there as well:

A whole lot more goes into it as well. We got to take a look at the back area where they fabricate the chassis and other parts as well. LM is a pretty small operation right now, and they are able to pound all the cars they are producing right now out of a single jig, which looks like a jungle of steel and vice grips.

Local Motors is growing fast. They actually only have five of these vehicles produced right now, but they have 132 on backorder with deposits paid. Dadgum. By this time next year, the engineer I spoke with says he thinks they could have all of them out the doors. LM is only producing 2000 of these, so they'll be something of a collectible as well.

I joked about moving to Phoenix a week ago when I arrived and saw five sportbikes in two minutes at a gas station. The climate is pretty boss (except for the past few days) and now there's a sweet small car company looking to explode right here. I could see that happening. I could also see it not happening, but you know.

Here's a slideshow of all the pics I took... I always kick myself for not taking more (and better-framed) pictures, and this set isn't an exception.

Have a nephew? Save the world. (Works for sons, daughters, grandkids, etc)

2010-12-28T16:48:00.000-07:00

I know that as soon as I get the point, you'll think me horribly biased and prejudiced. However, I believe I have a point (if I didn't I probably wouldn't be writing... probably). Okay, the long and short of it is that I believe that a world with more engineers is a better world. Why are engineers so highly paid? There are two primary reasons- because the work they do is generally very valuable, and also because there just aren't that many of them. Not a lot of young people want to be engineers, and even fewer of those follow through with their ambitions. I'm not just making this up- engineering schools across the US have noted a disturbing trend in the last decade towards both declining enrollment and failure to graduate (either from dropping out or switching majors). This isn't just a pet problem with one sector of the world which will recover in time, it's a real issue that hasn't yet reached the limelight.

Very often you'll hear about something being so essential that the world can't exist without it. This is frequently employed to lend creedence to some argument or add awe to something. You'll hear about how without sunlight, the world couldn't possibly exist, or without the nitrogen cycle, plants could never go, or "Without Trucks- America Stops". Whatever it is, it's always essential. The implication here is that whatever is being argued for is the most important thing... IN THE WORLD. This happens so much that I believe that the American populace is becoming immune to being told that something is important. I say this because I don't want you, my reader, to underestimate the gravitas of this issue. I don't argue that this is the most important issue in the world- it's obviously not- but it can be corrected relatively easily and does have a significant impact on the world.

First, why is engineering important? The first and most obvious thing is what engineering creates. If you look back at our world as it was in the Bible times, you can note a lot of differences. It wouldn't be hard to argue that things are better now than they were then. People live longer, in greater comfort, with more leisure time and less oppression and greater freedom. All these improvements can be linked to advances in some field- civics, art, philosophy, medicine, politics... and engineering. I won't pull the typical 'look around the room, now notice that everything you saw was made by an engineer' tactic because that's cliché. (But it's true) We can thank engineering for almost all of our modern conveniences. More importantly, though, we can thank engineering for most of the significant advances that actually make a difference in the world- modern sanitation leads to greatly reduced disease and thus fewer people dying early deaths. The invention of the printing press made the printed word, and thus education and knowledge (not to mention God's word) available to the masses. The textile mill means that your mom didn't have to stay up late with an oil-lamp crocheting your underwear. All of these things- significant and insignificant, would still be problems in the world if someone didn't employ the design process to solve a problem.

My proposition for you is this- if there are young people in your life, give them two things: a curiosity about how things work and a strong desire to make the world better. The former will give them the inclination to design better things, and the former will motivate them to put those inclinations to a meaningful use (the world needs appropriate technology more than it needs better iPhones). I need to leave the better-world part up to you, as a single 23-year old non-father, I have no idea how to make kids into better people. When it comes to curiousity about how things work... now that's something I'm familiar with.

The best way that I know of to foster curiosity (and the creativity that will follow) is to explore the world's wonders with your son/daughter/nephew/niece/grandkids. God made an amazing world and offers endless entertainment for those who endeavor to explore it. Don't force any young person to fit a mold- but make the mold available to them if they want to crawl into it. One reason, perhaps, that engineering has been less popular is that it's viewed as an honorable but eccentric trade. The remedy to this, probably, is to get a life-size cardboard cutout of Werner VonBraun to put in his/her room and venerate him as a hero at every family meal.

Provide resources for kiddo to explore. When I was a kid, we had a cutaway book which showed cutaway views of different things like jumbo jets, oceanliners, and tanks. Even though I'd looked at each of the diagrams already, I loved to look at them all to see how everything fit together and wonder how it all worked. LEGOs are great, but get them the ones where they actually build stuff instead of just assemble their own figurines. Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, K'nex, pencil and paper, aluminum and a bandsaw, whatever. Stuff like this is great:

Check out the whole site- it's great.

Anything to get kiddo's brain stimulated in a constructive and creative way (preferably towards making something practical and useful) is good. There's more to being an engineer than just analysis and computation- get kiddo familiar with a ratchet and box-end wrench as well.

Shucks, I ran out of creative juice. Turn all the kids you know into engineers. Fin.

If I've made a pilgrimage to Zion, does that make a me a Zionist?

2010-12-27T00:12:00.000-07:00

Here's your promised tale of adventure from On Distant Shores™, the official blog of Ned Funnell. With the parade in the dust, it was time to move on to bigger and better things. We had a new intern join us for a short one-month stay this fall, John Clark:

John is an outdoorsman and is on a mission to visit and hike/camp/explore every National Park... IN THE WORLD. (Maybe not. But he goes to a lot of them.) John invited me to go visit Zion National Park with him, which is a golden opportunity.We backpacked, meaning we carried everything we'd need for the two-night trip in backpacks. I'd never been backpacking before, just close-to-the-car camping. Having to carry all your stuff miles and miles makes packing a different story! We hiked into Kolob Canyon the first day. (Mormons believe their god came from a planet called Kolob, hence the name)

As everyone who's backpacked knows, proper footwear is the most important element to a successful backpacking trip. That's why I selected some random shoes I'd bought for six bucks at a thrift store. Although I thought this plan was failsafe, it turned out to be flawed. I got enormo-huge blisters on both my feet after the first few miles, which made the next dozen all the more exciting. As everyone knows, the best thing for blisters is swimming in frigid water.

I was amused in this picture, but I was less amused a few minutes later when some people came around the bend in the river doing a study on the aquaculture. My swimwear would not have been approved by 9 out of 10 dentists. The one-way hike was only 6.5 miles or so in and we made camp with plenty of time to spare, much to the enjoyment of the local mosquitoes. The next morning we woke up and were greeted by some wild turkeys:

After a backpacking-friendly breakfast (Goober PBJ on a tortilla with extra peanuts inside) we hiked another 1.5 miles to see Kolob Arch, which is pretty neat. We wanted to get a good picture of one of us with the arch, but unfortunately the best/only view of the arch is up through some trees:

The natural solution to the problem was to throw a loop of rope over the branch of a tree and pull it tight so that it couldn't be gotten down again without an hour and a half of devising and attempting rescue. It worked great! John was able to walk up the tree with the rope, but the branch was on the wrong side to get into the frame with the Arch:

He did get into the frame with a different rope trick, though:

Then there was the ordeal of getting the rope out of the tree- whoops! We threw one end of the rope over the tree branch, then tied a loop in it and put the other end through and pulled it tight. Immediately after, we thought something like "Gee, how are we going to get that down?" An hour and a half of failed experimenting later, we succeeded with John standing on my shoulders with a long branch with an improvised hook lashed to the end. In the meantime, we met two guys that had made it a day hike out to the arch. One of the guys was an engineer from Detroit working at a Tier II manufacturer. Neat. They took a video of us getting the rope out of the tree- they said they'd email it to us, but no such luck at this time.

Our original plan was to hike around that day and stay the night again at the same site, then hike out the next day and spent the morning seeing some stuff down at the main part of the park before we headed back. However, we'd seen the main attraction in the northwest part of the park. We could hike more on the trail, but we'd really just hike as far as we felt like walking back and then turn around. Not very exciting. In contrast, there was a lot to see down in the southern part of the park. We hiked out. Hey look, a tarantula!

John snapped a pic of me coming up the trail:

I don't remember where this picture was taken, but it's not as impressive as one you'll see later:

We drove from the north part of the park to the south and brainstormed about where to stay that night. John had been to Zion NP before and had some ideas. We also took the opportunity to have some hot food at a Jack in the Box. We started with driving the park road, which includes a neat tunnel carved through the rock in the 1930s. We also rode the shuttle up and down the park road and looked at all the neat sights. Most of the features of Zion are along one main road and we were able to get a lazy-man's tour of the place on the shuttle. Our morning had been spent getting out from our campsite neat Kolob and we'd driven an hour, plus an hour or so on the shuttle... not much time before sunset.

John knew of a free campground not far out from the park's borders that we might be able to get a spot at that night. We found it to be quite busy, even though it is entirely unadvertised and unmarked from the road. It's true that they say- word of mouth is the best advertising. We walked around and tried to meet some other people but most were not so amenable to the idea. We did wander over and join a group of young people who were coming to climb the rock faces of Zion. They were slack-lining, which is an like tightrope walking, only you use a ratchetstrap or some webbing and you sling it two feet over the ground between two trees. It's a skill. I tried it and almost biffed it both times so I called that my college try and let the Serious People have their go. I struck up a conversation with a fellow who was all about natural remedies and solutions, who seemed to use a tincture of basil for everything from deodorant and disinfectant. How 'bout that. One of my goals in life is to be able to talk intelligently about any topic, so I took the opportunity to educate myself a bit more on natural medicine.

We slept well enough and set out the next morning back to Zion. We had only this morning remaining on our trip and wanted to make the most of it. Since John had been here before, I relied on his expertise when we chose what to do. We decided on Angel's Landing, which is a short hike (around five miles round trip) but with a lot of elevation change. It ends up on the tippety top of a big rock. Sweet. I've got to say, for a short hike, this one exhausted me. The blisters didn't help either. We took a bunch of water and I drank like a sieve. The hike is pretty standard, up the side of the mountain, for the first half or so. Then you hit the back of a big rock and climb several hundred vertical feet in short, steep switchbacks. When you hit the top of that rock, you walk along a narrow ridge with an 800-foot drop on one side and 1000-foot on another. For a short section, it's only three feet wide. Sweet action. Don't look down:

I met one lady on the trail who was conquering her fear of heights. I'd say this would be a good test! The last section is along a ridge and is moderately treacherous. Although I saw all sorts of people at the top, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a hike for general consumption. There have been nine fatal falls from the trail since 1987. If you're in decent health, though, don't let my warning stop you- there are chains anchored into the rock at all the tricky points for you to hold onto. Just don't do anything stupid. We made it to the top:

John's on the highest point of Angel's Landing there. Note the astonished hiker below. He's wearing pants. If you go in the warm months, don't wear pants. (Wear shorts) I wore my double-layer canvas pants, which are thick and heavy and made for chainsawing in. Don't do that either. And bring lots of water. Better to arrive back at the base station with water to spare and have carried a little extra weight than to run out or have to ration your water and dehydrate yourself.

The trip back down, predictably, was much easier than the trip up. Once we made it back down into the valley, John and I elected to dip our heads in the cool river water, which was excellent and comes highly recommended to others returning from that trip. After that hike, I was exhausted and not sure that my feet could take much more. Angel's landing is the greatest view in the park which is available to tourists who are not specifically prepared for an expedition. We could have gone on several lesser hikes, but we opted to let that be a suitable 'finish with a bang' to our trip and headed home.

It's always a bonus to end blog posts with a bang, so here's Shane looking funny:

Image credit for all photos except Shane goes to John Clark.

Buried alive!

2010-12-21T15:29:00.001-07:00

We've got TONS of snow here! Yesterday afternoon a snow-laden branch broke off of a tree outside the college house and fell nearly on the man van. Zach, Chip, and I went out to move it out of the neighbor's driveway. Just as we got it into the yard, there was a crack and a snap above us! A branch snapped right off of the other tree were now under. I didn't see it, only heard the shouted warning- I tried to run out from under the tree but slipped and fell on the snow, then hands-and-knees crawled away from the tree and the still-unseen falling branch. Once in the clear I turned and saw the sizable branch laying where Zach had been standing- fortunately, Zach is quick on his feet and got out of the way with time to spare. It scared me, though- the branch could have just as easily have been the one above me.

That night I was over at Flic and Amanda's place last night playing sweet Wii games like Wii Sports Resort, which somebody needs to donate to the ministry. Zach and I left pretty late, around 1AM- and as we walked out the door, the lights went out! Power outage. Ephraim has short outages and flickers pretty frequently, and usually power comes back on within a few minutes. Not so this time. Power was out for a few hours at least. When I drove over, I'd cleared 4-5" of snow off the Camry, and now it had 8" or so on it, just from the few hours I was Wiiing. We went drifting in the Race Camry and didn't get arrested. It was kind of eerie to be drifting around a corner and the whole town is completely dark and unlit. No lights on main street, nothing. Cool, though.

When we got back, we naturally returned to a dark house. I'd left my lighter over at the Thompsons during the week or so I lived there (while my floor was getting done). So, no candles. Fortunately, I am an engineering student. More than that, I am certified and Applied and Practical Nerdery. By this time the power had been out for 30-40 minutes, so who knew when it would come back on again. The first order of business is light, which was provided by a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) and a reading lamp, which thankfully has a very long cord:

Of course I could have used the flash to take a decent picture, but then you wouldn't have gotten the idea.

I didn't want my cell phone to be dead the next day if this power outage was for reals, so I rigged my car charger up to an SLA (Sealed Lead Acid [battery]).

I know, scotch tape is not appropriate for electrical use. Just call it Field Expedient Electrical Tape.

It's silly, I know- but the power outage got me thinking, lying there in bed. What if the light don't come on tomorrow? Am I prepared for that? As the maintenance guy for Trigrace, is the cafe ready for that? We're prepared for short term 'blips' of power with a UPS on the computer system, but the furnace doesn't work without power. Neither do the fridges. (Although I just put the potato soup out on the back porch.) The fireplaces in this house have long since been decommissioned. I don't know why this next thought came into my head, but what if the sun didn't come up tomorrow? What if this insignificant power outage was to be how the end times begin for me? Am I ready for that spiritually? Could I handle what that might bring mentally and physically? Sobering.

Well, the sun did come up this morning, and so did the power, at least for a little while. I was awoken by a call from Chip soliciting help with snow removal. I saw also a text from him earlier saying only "HELP", which probably would have been disconcerting had I not received the call first. Anyway, I prepared myself for the cold, including my waterproof over-socks (read: walmart bags). When I got outside, boy howdy was there snow!

Dadgum. We had a fun time clearing it all. That's not sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek either. We had the proper tools (read: Dingo) and no time crunch. I didn't have to actually manually shovel much because I spent half my time on chainsaw duty. It was mildly disheartening to watch snow continue to fall and accumulate on the surfaces you'd just cleared, but with a lot more of this still to come, we couldn't afford not to clear it. To my great satisfaction, Jamie made breakfast for us (on her gas stove, no power needed). Everyone had a good laugh that I'd freaked myself out wondering if the sun was going to come up this morning.

Side note: I offered to charge Chip's cell phone from my SLA the same way I did mine. I saw it took the same connector as my phone so I left his car charger there and figured I could just plug it into mine. Well, not so, because the software engineers at VZW are a bunch of jerkfaces. Turns out you can't use any charger but the ones they sell you. I got a screen on the phone saying "UNAUTHORIZED CHARGER" when I tried to use mine. Come on, VZW, five volts is FIVE VOLTS. I went back and got his likely-overpriced VZW car charger and it worked great. Doesn't matter too much, though, 'cos power came back on before it finished.

We always try to help out our neighbors with snow whenever we are able. We had the Dingo taking care of most of our heavy snow, so we could afford to go to a few other houses and clear snow. I spotted a branch fallen across the driveway of our two-doors-down neighbors and grabbed Chip's chainsaw to take care of it. It was still attached quite a ways up, so I was only really able to chop up the lower parts of the branch for easy removal. I discovered halfway through the nobody lives there (it's a history site- Brigham Young or someone stayed the night there once) so I left the chopped pieces for the city to clear. I also cut up a branch that'd fallen next to the LDS missionaries' driveway

Looking farther down the street I spied another downed branch across the sidewalk and walked down to take care of it. Turns out it was also leaning against a police cruiser, but precariously held aloft by a still-attached branch. I carefully cut on the side I wanted it to fall towards and was able to get it all down. The guy who lived in the house next door came out, and it turned out he actually was the officer to whom the cruiser belonged. He was surprised to find out I wasn't a city worker, and was thankful to have his cruiser freed. I discovered that he is also the owner of the possibly-race-prepped-but-at-least-dope-looking Impreza that I see parked on the street there. I left the chopped up bits of tree there for the city again. The guy said his landlord was crazy about firewood so maybe he'll end up with it. He and a young lady that also lives there snapped some pics of the process and kindly sent one to me:

Because of this, I assume that I'm now Totally In with the police in Ephraim, which means I can commit crimes like crazy and get away with it. I'm pretty sure that would only ever apply to snow drifting in the Race Camry, which I'm pretty sure isn't illegal anyway. It's just turning with gusto.

I returned and we cleared snow some more. I manned the snowblower for a while, which has a ritzy electrically-adjustable snow chute. Fancy. Our old one growing back in MA had a steel rod and a leadscrew. I hacked up some more trees on our property and finally figured out how the bar lock on a Stihl 034 chainsaw works.

That's all, you can stop reading now.

P.S. FORGET YOU, SNOWSTORM! You totally ruined any chance of seeing the lunar eclipse last night.

Ned's Totally Bombski Potato Etc Soup

2010-12-20T14:52:00.005-07:00

Ingredients:
Don't worry, if I have this stuff, you do too.

Start by wanting to use the old potatoes you have. Peel and quarter about 4lb of potatoes to the Seatbelts on MP3 player, place in plastic bowl and microwave for a long time. Fetch pot from upstairs kitchen, while upstairs realize the music played in basement is almost as audible upstairs as down. Add a big dollop of Blue Bonnet margarine and some milk to potand turn burner on '2'. Press 'add minute' on microwave several times. Run over to the Thompsons and get onions from 50lb bag in their garage. Take three, then decide a fourth is in order. Return to kitchen and peel and halve onions LENGTHWISE, WITH THE LINES ON THE ONION. Dice according to this technique:

Put diced onions in smaller pot with water and turn burner to HI. Notice burning smell and wonder if it is dust on seldom-used small burner burning off, or microwave frying itself from grossly exceeded unpublished duty cycle. Smell microwave and continue if not smoking. Use a whisk to stir the milk/margarine in larger pot. Run over to MP3 player and turn on Section Quartet to increased cooking tempo. (Seatbelts were too slow) Add random amount of flour to milk/butter mixture directly from the bag and stir for form a roux. DO NOT BURN THE ROUX. Stir frequently and maintain low heat. Once flour is absorbed into roux, add a whole lot more and make it way too thick. Fix problem by pouring some of the now-boiling onion water into roux using whisk to strain out onions. Double win: onions were about to boil over and removing water fixed problem. Stir both roux and onions with arms crossed.

Realize you intended to put celery in this shebang and get celery from fridge. Realize that celery is not very crisp at all, floppy in fact. Use remainder of celery anyway, about five stalks. Chop and add to onion, making smaller pot very very full. The roux will now be simmering, try to stir it continually with one hand while doing whatever else with the other. Add Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning to both pots using large opening. Look in microwave and discover that potatoes are drying out, pull out of nuker and add hot water almost to cover potatoes. Return to microwave and press add minute many times.

Look in fridge for Bonus Ingredients and add what seems right. Example: about 1/5 jar of sliced jalapeños. Add directly to already-brimming smaller pot. Do dishes while waiting for vegetables in small pot to cook. Peel thift store price sticker off of strainer and wonder how many use/wash cycles that brave sticker has survived. When celery and onions looks like they're kind of cooked, sort of, add entire contents of pot to larger roux pot. Stir vigorously and wonder if pot will be large enough to hold potatoes and their water.

Poke potatoes in microwave with fork to check for doneness. Neglect results. Pour some of the potato water into the pot, then strain the potatoes, discarding remaining water, and add mostly-uncooked but hot potatoes to large pot. Attempt to mash potatoes (and rest of pot contents) with potato masher, but withdraw masher from pot strewn with partially-impaled uncooked potatoes. Stir again and remark how full pot is, resolve to plan better next time. Leave to simmer on medium-low heat and go write blog post while waiting to cook, deem soup 'bombski' before it's even done cooking.

Serves one for a week.

Update: I realized I hadn't included any meat in the soup. Gareth's rule #52 is: "If there's no meat, it's just a snack." I couldn't bear to have my soup relegated to snack status, so I chopped up some breakfast sausage patties and threw those in there. I will update again when the Deliciousness Index of the soup is established.

The ghost of Christmas yet to come

2010-12-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

Last episode, I had been to general conference, gone to Texas, made T-shirts, and painted a stripe on my car. I'm glad to report that I still have my T-shirt, the Camry still has its stripe, and I've still been to general conference and Texas. But wait- THERE'S MORE! Here's a preview of what you'll get in the next few action packed episodes of On Distant Shores™, the official blog of Ned Funnell:

(for maximum effect, read in the voice of a monster-truck-show announcer)

Solid Rock appears in the Snow College Homecoming PARADE with a tie-dye themed float!
I go backpacking in ZION!
Sarah Smith returns from distant shores with tales of ADVENTURE and loci!
I do well in the Chili Cookoff with the help of TONY CHACHERE'S CREOLE SEASONING!

(There is NO finer seasoning. Use it on everything!)

I create a VOLCANO inside Ephraim Church of the Bible!
Some friends go out the CHINESE RESTAURANT!
I make COFFEE!
Solid Rock celebrates Martin Luther's REFORMATION!
I make CORNBREAD!
A YWAM team comes and we learn a NEATO Indian song from them!

Also, we climbed ROCKS!

Internationally-renowned musical group SIXTEEN CITIES plays EPHRAIM!
Everyone loves grandpa DAVE THOMPSON!
I become a DAD!
I mourn the loss of my BELOVED Logitech MX620 mouse. :(
I bring the TIM-TAM SLAM to America!
I celebrate THANKSGIVING with my Ephraim peeps!
There is SNOW and DRIFTING in Ephraim!
Ephraim Church of the Bible is in a PARADE!
Ephraim Church of the Bible is in ANOTHER PARADE!
I start a SIDE BUSINESS!
I make a geodesic dome out of an IMPROBABLE MATERIAL!
Work begins on my FLOOR!
Work finishes on my FLOOR!
I make a ten-foot long DESK!

BAM! You'd better strap in for all that EXCITEMENT!

Okay, enough with the caps and monster truck announcing. I'll bring these adventures to you, a few per post, and hopefully in rapid sequence, over the next week or so. Today's installment brings you bullet point #1.

Just after my last post, work started on making a parade float for the Snow College Homecoming parade. We always make a point to enter a float in parades as a way to keep the public informed that we are here and active- of course, not all of the community likes the idea of us being here (much less active), so the response isn't always outstanding- but anything that confronts people with Christianity can be used of God.

The theme of the parade was love, and we had a tie-dye event while we were planning this whole shebang- the natural result is a giant tie-dye heart:

...and also some goofy getups, once the costume box has been unearthed.

Shane and Kim (or is it?) looking festive.

Clarification: I'm not in love with Jamie, just her cooking.

Steve-punzel.

The parade was a success. My part in the float construction was to find a quiet power source for the sound system- although we looked for one of those sweet Honda EU2000i super-quiet generators, what we ended up with a standard loud generator in a box. I made a box out of MDF (particleboard) and put it over the top of the generator. It hardly did anything- you still had to yell to have a conversation. When I lined the inside with fiberglass insulation, though, one could have a conversation only a few feet away with an only slightly raised voice. Success! We could have our (obnoxiously repetitive) music!

The parade was a success. We danced, we waved, we hucked candy and bouncy balls at little kids- all the way through E-town, then back through side streets to get back to the college house to dismantle the float. To get a feeling of what the parade was like, listen to these two twenty times, only skip everything but the choruses:

I count it a success, but not only in the sense of having made a cool float, chucking candy, and making fools of ourselves. I also call it a success in bringing God glory and reaching the people of Utah. The entire theme of our float was directed at God's love and loving God. Furthermore, we confronted people with the cross. That's significant in Utah in a way that it is not in the rest of the continent. LDS people do not use the cross, it is not their symbol. They don't like it. When my friend Steve received Christ and bought a cross necklace, his then-Mormon wife flipped her lid when she saw it on him. The cross is not a welcome symbol here. By displaying it proudly, we confront people. From my experience, LDS people in Utah are happy to live in a 'bubble', surrounded by Mormons and enjoying the isolation of being surrounded by like-minded people. This existence is not one that will typically generate spontaneous contemplation of truth and eternity. The Holy Spirit can use little things like being startled (and possibly offended) by a giant cross in the parade to work on people.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for the next episode of On Distant Shores™, the official blog of Ned Funnell. (Hopefully tomorrow)

Shoffenked.

2010-10-14T02:02:00.002-06:00

Scooped!

The Twenty-dollar beater: How to make your boring car more fun

2010-10-09T21:01:00.000-06:00

There are some things that happen in life that are too stupendous to wait for the next semi-regular update. This is one of those times. Without further adieu, I bring you On Distant Shores: More Frequent Than Usual Update Bonus Edition.

I can't describe exactly how it started, but since I got the Camry I currently drive, I've felt the urge to spice it up a little bit. It was essentially given to me by my generous friend Caleb Reinking and his wife- we exchange $20 to have something to put on the tax forms. I had to spend three days under the car to get it roadworthy, and it suffers from significant rust issues and semi-high mileage. It's not a fabulous car. It's golden years are behind it, but it is still quasi-reliable transportation and useful. I really don't have any problems with it, and I'm grateful to have it.

If I have one qualm with the Camry, though, it's that it is a boring car. It has no character. It is common. There have been more Camries (Camrys?) produced since the car's introduction in 1980 than there are people in South America*. I don't like driving a car without character. I'd rather drive something unique, something that puts a smile on my face. Something with a story behind it (although the Camry does) or at least that doesn't scream 'typical broke college student wheels'.

Perhaps this anti-boring-car sentiment has been percolating since May. Perhaps I was inspired by the episode of Top Gear which I watched with Travis last night, in which Jeremy Clarkson hilariously tosses a three-wheeled Reliant Robin around the roads of Britain with admirable panache. Or perhaps I just wanted to do something fun and productive (well, sort of) rather than entertaining myself with tiny blinking lights on one screen or another.

Ideas for un-boring-ing my car have mainly consisted of three camps: the utterly ridiculous, the silly, and the ridiculous but could be momentarily mistaken for serious. The leading contender in the utterly ridiculous camp was the idea of converting the Camry into a Camrymino. That is, to chop up the trunk and rear seats an add a bed, El Camino style, like this:

I also considered making over the car as something entertaining, like a shark. The silver/gray color of the Camry would have lent itself to this well. I toyed with the idea of adding a shark fin on top and painting teeth on the front fenders in the style of WWII war planes:

I opted against both of those options though. I realize that the Camry was a blessing to me provided by God, and to ruin it by cutting its butt off or disfiguring its appearance would not be good stewardship. (For the sake of argument I'm using everyone else's definition of "ruin" and not my own) At the same time, the Camry it at the ends of its useful life- the residual value in it will likely be expended while I'm still its owner, and if I sell it (as opposed to junking it) the person I sell it to will probably be like-minded and won't mind some tasteful re-styling. (Now I'm using my own definition of "tasteful") I decided today that the third category didn't constitute poor stewardship as long as it was either "tasteful" or reversible. I also decided that my life was too boring and that it isn't wrong to enjoy oneself when the opportunity presents itself so long as moderation and wisdom are employed.

With that in mind, I settled on the goal of plastering my car in random racing stickers and doing it up like a rally car. I felt that the way to go about this was to make it look like some people could wonder (for about four seconds) if it was actually a race-driven car. It would be critical to avoid the obnoxious, distasteful, ubiquitously poorly-implemented The Fast and the Furious imitator style agreeably mocked by VW:

I didn't want to spend more than a pittance on this goal, however, so I broke out my oft-used scrooge skills. I knew some places would send you free stickers if you sent them a SASE(self-addressed stamped envelope) so I looked for those and made up some SASEs. However, I soon discovered that some companies didn't even require a SASE, they would just send you stickers for free if you emailed them. Hey, free advertising, right? I sent off no fewer than 36 requests for free stickers from racing companies online, most of which don't even make performance parts for the Camry, or even any car. I also bid on a handful of one-cent-and-free-shipping car-decal auctions on eBay. Wanting to give my re-styling job a professional touch, I also decided to drop $4.50 on having "N FUNNELL" cut out of vinyl lettering to be applied under the driver's window, along with a $0.49-and-free-shipping American flag decal. Driver identification is all the rage in all the cool international racing series.

Stickers don't come for days or weeks, though- and I wanted to actually do something, though. I knew instinctively, though, what any faux-racing-car needs: a racing stripe. Vinyl stick-on racing stripes can be had for $20 or so, but that was how much I paid for the car. I turned to my old ally. Some know them as spraybombs or rattlecans, but to your average joe, it's spraypaint. Now, spraypaint has a bad rap. It's the weapon of choice for graffiti-writing hooligans and many atrocities against style have been committed with spraypaint. Nonetheless, it remains a legitimate tool for the well-informed artisan. With a little bit of technique, patience, and masking tape, wonderful things can be done with spraypaint.

"Hey Travis, want to put some racing stripes on my car?"

A smile. "Where are they?"

"No, spraypaint."

"Right now?"

"Yes."

A mutual smile.

All we needed now were the supplies and the design. I was partial to the offbeat and aggressive offset double stripe of the Ascari A10:

I also considered the centered double stripe so often seen on the late Dodge Viper. My uncle gave me a blue Viper model car that decorated my room until I move out of the house. Although the centered-double stripe is somewhat common, it would also have injected an element of the familiar.

I also considered the unequal-width off-center stripe favored by BMW enthusiasts and briefly gave thought to doing an elaborate set of stripes transitioning from the hood to the sides, which would be more rally-authentic, but which was a bit over-the-top. Travis and I also went back and forth on black vs. white, but when we looked over the car before going to Walmart to get supplies, the correct styling became obvious. It would be a white stripe, centered and following the contour lines on the hood, and I am sure you will concur based on this "before" picture:

You also have a chance to reflect on the comical nature of restyling my car as a rally car. With the rust holes over the wheel arches, nobody can take it seriously as racer. As the old Nordic proverb goes: "If you're going to drive a cheap beater, you might as well have fun with it, right?"

Normally for a fun-and-useless project like this, I'd grab the El-cheapo Walmart-brand spraypaint for a buck a pop and whatever the cheapest masking tape is. While being sensitive to cost, this endeavor would be fruitless if the paint started to fade/crackle/peel after two months of high-elevation Utah sun. It may be ridiculous, but if it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing it right. After all- eventually I may sell this car to some poor misguided high school student who actually thinks the stripe is cool based on its own merit, rather than for its comedy factor. For these reasons, I reached for the Krylon gloss white (and clear coat!) and the 3M blue Clean Release painter's tape.

Supplies in hand, there was nothing left to do but to do it. I was waiting on Trav to come back from his house with newspaper so we could mask properly, but I decided to commit to the project by applying the chosen 600-grit sandpaper to my still-good paintjob. And so it was. A bit later we had the first part of the stripe carefully masked off (we even used a ruler), the glossy Toyota clear-coat knocked off (paint applied directly on gloss will peel), and cleaned with 409. We didn't bother with primer because, hey, it was primered in Japan 20 years ago. Primer is only really needed on wood or bare metal anyway.

The first layer of paint went on:

Note the handprint on my pants above.

After two hours or so and a run to Walmart for an extra can of Glossy White, the deed was done. I learned one important lesson that I would be remiss if I didn't pass on. This was my first time to paint a large flat area with spraypaint, and I discovered that you need to carefully alternate the pattern in which you spray- this way, you won't see horizontal lines (or whatever) in the finished product. The patterns cover each other up. I had luck with horizontal, then vertical, then diagonal both ways. We used four or more light coats on each of the sections painted.

Finally, the finished product! It's pretty boss, no?

I don't normally wear heart-pattern tie-dye shirts, but this morning the Solid Rock Christian Club was in the homecoming parade, the theme of which was "A Little Thing Called Love". Our float was pretty rockin', but I'll write that up in the next Semi-Regular Blog Post (SRBP).

The future plans for the Camry are to stick all the stickers on when they come. This ought to be done in a racing style, though, not like bumper stickers. The stickers will go on the rear quarter panel and extend on to the rear doors if additional space is needed. On race cars, the stickers always go on the rear because you're moving so fast that by the time the photographer snaps a shot, all you can see is the rear of the car. Because photographers are on the side of the track, they see the rear quarter panel and not the rear bumper, really. I may also go with a single line of stickers along the bottom of the rear window, just so that people tailgating me get to know that I'm an idiot too. I also want to do enormous car numbers on both sides (as is befitting of a proper racecar), but those can't easily be masked off an sprayed like a stripe, and vinyl ones would be prohibitively expensive. I'd also really like to do a logo on the side with the Solid Rock Cafe logo, because we have a sweet skyline-cutout logo that is bombski. The difference would be that the subscript would say 'RACING' instead of 'cafe'. It'll definitely have to be in italics because italic writing looks faster than boring straight-up-and-down writing. Both of these may be projects for an Inconviently Complex Stencil (ICS). Spraying on the number and logo would violate my goal of being either tasteful or reversible, though, because while the logo would be tasteful for me, it wouldn't be so much for the poor high school student who may end up with this car.

The last matter to be settled is what number to go for. On my 2A shirts I always get the greek symbol λ (lambda), and I know a guy who actually races his car and uses π (pi). To stay with the goal of getting the response of "Hey, is that actually a race car? It's all... wait, no, that's ridiculous", though the numbers must be Serious Business, and that means no greek symbols. With that in mind, I ask my diligent readers for number suggestions. Yes, I know, 42 is good, but I'm just not sure. Leave it in the comments!

*I made this up. Who knows if it's true.

The return trip, child-wrangling, 'heroic' wrenching, and a good hot shower

2010-10-05T13:09:00.002-06:00

If any of my faithful followers rely solely on my blog to keep track of me, then you can stop holding your breath- I did in fact make it back from my Texas trip. I'd like to extend a big warm "Thank you!" to all of the people who helped me out along the way- my hosts on the road and in TX, all those I visited with on the trip, and to Kentucky for letting me put 2600 miles on his truck. The return trip saw me stop in with the Hutchens in Dallas:

I spent a fun evening with the Hutchens. We made a pizza, played a little Wii, and just hung out and visited. They got some hamsters, which I put on my head:

I departed in the morning for Albuquerque. I experienced a short unintentional detour courtesy of a cheap
Magellan GPS which though that the shortest way from Dallas to Albuquerque involved going through Oklahoma city. Not likely. After a common-sense 'why am I headed North' reality check and a minor temper flare at the Magellan engineer who programmed the unit, I got directed onto a better (but still sub-ideal) route to ABQ. I wasn't actually sure of where I was going in ABQ, just that my parents knew a guy (Peter) who lived there whose wife I had met once and who had emailed me that it was cool to stay with him. I didn't actually get his address, though, an oversight I realized about noon. This led a brief afternoon semi-crisis due to my inability to get a hold of him. I was lulled into complacence by the soothing voice of Edward Herrman reading the military-political thriller Executive Orders, by Tom Clancy.

About an hour out, though, I got in touch with Peter and the crisit was abated. Peter stands unique among the people I've stayed with before because he's Air Force Special Ops. While I was there he was training for some kind of crazy rescue stuff. I don't think anything he told me is terribly secret, but I'll assume it is and avoid violating his privacy. Peter was a great host, and an early riser. He planned to get out of the house by 6:10 AM, and while I wouldn't have picked that particular time myself, I decided to leave with him both because it would make life easier for both of us and because no time is too early to get on the road on a road trip.

The next day's drive was generally uneventful, except that about three hours outside Ephraim my butt was so
miserably sore that I opted to take a non-fuel stop (GASP) at a rest area. This decision was also motivated by the neat-o scenery:

Being a dork, I was also interested in the solar-powered streetlights:

I got back into Ephraim too soon, though- the chinzy Magellan GPS was also incredibly unoptimistic with estimated arrival times which made me arrive everywhere earlier than I thought. That's generally a mental boost ("Hey, I madegood time!") but it also misled Kim and others who were making a huge "WELCOME BACK NEDLY" banner for me. That made me feel loved and appreciated, but also somewhat bad for having arrived too soon for them to finish. I ran through it football-opening-game-day style. Or at least that's what I think the style was. I don't watch football. Sidenote: Somehow, the nickname "Dear Old Nedly" had caught on here. It's even programmed into the cafe cash register that way. I went to sign my name on the signature wall in the cafe, and shortly after someone added 'dley' after my name:

It was (and is) good to be back in Ephraim. As I mentioned in my last post, Ephraim has become home to me now. LETU no longer is, and although the visit was good, it was good to be home, a feeling not diminished by its short tenure. I've taken on my assistant staff responsibilities in earnest since I got back, mainly as the guys dorm advisor. I'm the go-to guy for problems and for keeping the peace and order up there. I've said it before and it's still true- I hate telling people what to do with any kind of authority, but God seems to keep placing me in positions that entail that so I guess I'd better get used to it. After all, I'm going to have kids someday and I've got to be competent at laying down the law when necessary.

On the topic of being a dad someday, I've siezed the opportunity this summer to work with kids a bit. I realize
that the chances are high that sometime in the next decade I'll have little Ned and Nedettes running around and needing raising, so I figured it's high time to gain some child-wrangling skills. My pastor and his wife have six young kids who are well-behaved and fun, so I figure that making friends with them is a good step. I made general statements at the beginning of the summer that I'm not really good with kids- I tell people that I went straight from infancy to adulthood and spent the time inbetween in a robot chrysalis stage. I also have no younger siblings. As a result, I regretably have little ability to empathize with kids, so I've gotta be a quick study. Kim noted during VBS that although I stated I wasn't good with kids, they tended to flock to me. Probably because I take a free-range attitude toward kids and go with the 'yes, and?' approach that oddly ends up with them climbing all over me and going nuts:

I figured that'd be no way to raise a kid exclusively so I determined I'd learn to child-wrangle. As with most
things, there's no way to do it except just to do it, so I started talking with kids and picking them up and
horsing around and generally getting my feet wet. Now Pastor Z's girls come to me during/after church for piggyback rides and hide-and-go-seek etc which I go along with. It's pretty fun. However, Kim et al have observed the fact that I now pick kids up (and they don't cry or hit me in the face) and assume that I have mastered the art of child-wrangling. I think that's very untrue. I've become competent at keeping already-happy kids entertained for a short time. There's a lot more to learn, I know. Stinky diaper? I don't know. Check the yellow pages. I'm about as likely to be able to make a baby stop crying as I am to lay a golden egg. There is much to learn yet.

Some of the more eventful things since I've returned have a been a little bit more ragged than child-wrangling,
though. This summer the ministry received a donation of a Ford conversion van which crapped out on an inbound mission team. It required a transmission replacement, which they were not in a position to wait or pay for, so the gave it to us free, but needing a new transmission. Before I left for TX I located and the ministry bought a replacement transmission. We got a killer deal on it- $150. To have the transmission pulled and rebuilt was in the $1800 - $2300 range. Why so cheap? The scrapyard had noooo idea if it worked or not, didn't know the mileage, anything. It was a great big question mark. We got a cheap transmission, but with no assurance that it would actually work. Half the reason the ministry keeps me around is because I'm the mechanically-inclined guy, so the job of managing this transmission replacement fell to me.

I have no formal training on auto repair or mechanical work of any kind. I've always just wanted to make or repair stuff so I've looked up and figured out how to do and had success some of the time. Over the years I've acquired some modicum of knowledge and skill in car repair. It also helps to have an attitude of willingness to take a shot at something and hope it works but contentment with knowing that if might not but you'll still have gained some experience for how to do it right the next time. That's how the Camry brakes got fixed when I needed to come out here, and that's how the transmission repair would have to be. I'd never replaced a transmission before, nor any other major driveline component. Ever. The ministry encouraged me to give it a shot, though, and so I read up on the procedure and got under there and started to get dirty.

One factor that worked hugely in my favor was the van's origin- California. Completely rust-free and well-preserved underneath. Most of the cars I've owned before have been heavily rusted and seemed to take some kind of perverse non-sentient pleasure at flaking rust off into your eyes while I've been underneath them. Safety glasses, kids- they may not seem like they're cool, but they're a heck of a lot cooler than wearing an eyepatch over an empty eyesocket for the rest of your life. The factor that worked against me was that the van was a van. Vans are some sadistic miscreant's idea of cramming all the components needed for a truck under an oversized and low body and pushing the engine so far back into the vehicle that you can't actually reach anything from under the hood. The engine block STARTS at the firewall. That's messed up. I say that to say that absolutely everything on a van is hard to reach. I have big hands. Wonderful.

Eventually I got the process started and found a likely cause of failure. The transmission tailshaft housing casting was actually cracked. That's not something that's supposed to happen. The only way I could imagine it
happening is if the driver reversed into a curb at high speed and the wheels hit hard enough to force the driveshaft into the transmission and impact the casting. That didn't happen though. The other factor of failure was that the transmission was as thoroughly cooked as a 20-minute egg. Automatic transmission fluid is normally crimson red. The stuff that came out of this transmission was opaque black and smelled terribly like burned popcorn. Gross.

It also spilled all over me while I was undoing the cooler lines. Crawling underneath a greasy van isn't conducive to staying clean. Sarah commented that while she was in the cafe all day working on the computer, making phone calls, etc, I would come into the cafe periodically and be dirtier and dirtier every time. I guess our jobs are a wee bit different. I got thoroughly filthy, and I wish I had a picture of myself- I chose to wear a yellow shirt the first day, which contrasted well with the black grease and ATF stains. Here's a picture of what it looks like AFTER washing- now picture it about twice as dirty, and me with a similar amount of soil on my face and my hands and forearms completely blackened.

The first real day of wrenching saw me get the transmission out. That is something to be excited about, but also a bit forboding. It's not hard to take something apart. That's just increasing entropy. To put something back together- and actually have it WORK at the end is quite different. It's also at the point where you can't really back away from the project. Who's going to take a transmission-less van to an auto shop and say "Hey, I kind of got lost on this whole procedure... could you finish it up for me?" Nope. It's all or nothing now. I also reflected on the unknown nature of the replacement transmission. I would be more than a bit chagrined if the replacement went in and didn't work. I'd just have to smile at myself internally and repeat the procedure.

One thing I remember about this job is that I probably gave myself a predilection for respiratory illness when I
flushed the cooler lines. I knew that there was still going to be some of that nasty burnt-popcorn fluid in the
hoses that ran forward to the cooler, so I needed to flush it out. Fortunately, there exists a product specifically
for this need. AutoZone, unfortunately, doesn't carry it. The next best thing, I was told, it carburator cleaner.

Carb cleaner is a powerful aerosol solvent which is designed to dissolve nearly any substance off of metal. Remember high school science when the teacher swabbed some rubbing alcohol onto your hand and you could feel the slight coolness as it evaporated off of your hand? This stuff is like that except that it's so volatile it evaporates within seconds and leaves your skin completely dried out and with a strange white appearance. Anyway, I got under the van and sprayed a whole bunch of that into one end of the cooler lines and blew compressed air through to push the concoction of burnt-popcorn ATF and skin-destroying carb cleaner through. I had a pan to catch the discharge, but the pipe was horizontal and the stuff blew out at high velocity. My solition was to put a Wal-mart bag over it which would catch it. It didn't catch, howvever, the large amounts of vaporized carb cleaner which soon filled the entire under-van atmosphere to the point that I was breathing probably half air and half carb cleaner fumes. Wonderful. A smart person would have at this point gotten out from under the van, breathed some fresh air, allowed the under-van area to ventilate, and have purchased an OSHA-approved full-face respirator certified for organic solvent vapors before continuing the job. I was not so inclined, so I put my grease-sodden t-shirt over my mouth and nose and repeated the procedure a half-dozen times. Life is a carcinogen.

Anyway, after much knuckle-bustery and hefting and reaching and ratcheting and grunting and reference-consulting and aligning and lifting and smacking and muttering, the 'new' transmission was physically in the van. I was about right with my estimate that something that took one day to undo would take two days to redo. The 30-day warranty on the transmission was running short since it was ticking away the whole time I was in TX. I couldn't afford to dally much with the installation because we wanted to have some time to test the thing out before the 30 days ran out.

Only a few more tasks remained before the moment of truth would arrive. I reattached the starter. I am surprised that the van actually started before, because I discovered that nothing was holding the starter solenoid in place. It was physically there and in its proper location, but both of the machine screws holding it in place were fully vibrated out. I think one big bump would have knocked it out of position, and bam- no more starting. Got that wrapped up. I had to guess at the level of ATF in the 'new' transmission because the old one actually got SO hot when it cooked itself that the plastic end of the dipstick completely melted. Dadgum. After another few hours of putting stuff back in order, the time came to start the van back up. It could go one of two ways. If I had improperly aligned the torque converter, I would hear a terribly clanging/grinding noise and in a worst-case scenario it would violently break everything it was attached to, then forcefully fly out of the transmission and through my upper legs, propelled by the raw power for 5.8 liters of American iron. I didn't think that was terribly likely, though, or I would have told Kentucky that I'd give him the first honor of starting the engine. Although I would find out immediately if I had botched that aspect of the install, I still needed to wait on the process of filling the transmission before I could find out if the thing actually worked or not. The engine needs to be running for it to force fluid through all the passages and solenoids and clutches etc.

Sometimes I am boggled at how incredibly consistently the mind-bogglingly complex contraptions we make actually work. Just think about it- the computer you're reading this on has millions of pixels being controlled by tens of millions of transistors, reading data from probably dozens of much more complex contraptions halfway across the world. I could elaborate on just how incredibly unlikely it is that such a contraption would ever work properly in the first place, much less to do it for years on end. (Okay, I know computers don't work perfectly all the time, but that's almost always a failure of the guy who programmed it, not a physical failure) The automatic transmission is no different. I honestly don't know fully how one works. I know there's a lot of complex junk going on in there and in general the only people that shoud mess with the inside of an automatic transmission are Germans and witch doctors. It's on the same level as the Saturn-V rocket and the female mind. You just trust the creator to have made it properly and try not to mess things up as the end user. The likelyhood of this abused, grease-covered mystery black-magic transmission from a junkyard actually working seemed slim.

I got the transmission filled, going more by counting quarts poured in than by the dipstick, and the moment of
truth came. The van was still up on jacks, but the sound and sensation of a transmission engaging the wheels is
familiar and distinct. I cycled the transmission through the gears after putting in the last quart, halfway expecting absolutely nothing. Instead, I was rewarded with a definite thud and a slight lurch when I threw it in
reverse. Wow. Okay, so the black-magic box transmits torque to the wheels, at least in reverse. I couldn't really tell if I was feeling a lurch in drive, but it wouldn't be terribly unexpected if I wasn't- the drive ratios for first gear and reverse mean that it could still be okay if I didn't. Time for final testing. Just like I said with little kids above, there's nothing to do but just to do it. We tool the jackstands down and I insisted that we hold a prayer meeting before the test drive.

We prayed that the van would work, and for my soul if it didn't. With three days of hard work invested, I really, really wanted it to work. Chip and I climbed into the van, with a crowd of onlookers on the other side of the driveway. It started. Good. No reason why it shouldn't, but the onlookers appreciated that with applause anyway. It went into reverse and moved backwards down the driveway. Woohoo! If nothing else, the college kids could drive backward to work and the grocery store. We got out of the driveway and pointed down the street. The moment of truth- did the forward gears work? I shifted and took my foot off of the brake- and the van rolled forward. That's a good sign. A little gas, and the van complied with acceleration. Very nice. Up the street at about 20mph, and a shift into second! That's a very good sign. A little more speed got us third. Nice. All systems go so far. A U-turn back towards the college house, and the highway where we could get up to speed and see what would happen. I fumbled for the horn on the unfamiliar steering wheel and got off a late celebratory horn-toot as we passed the onlookers. On to the main drag and the highway we went. I gave it a firm right foot to make sure it was a fair test as we got out of town. We had clean, firm shifts into second, third, and fourth, and a solid lockup at cruising speed. No slippage with sudden acceleration. WIN! God provided us with a working van for just a few hundred bucks of input and three days of wrenching. Sweet!

I'm glad to have some significant material thing that I did for the ministry that I can point at as an example of
something useful I did. It seems that I spend most of my time chasing down little things that surely need to be
done, but which don't make a very impressive list of accomplishments. Having a real, positive, significant contribution to the ministry is nice. It helps that I received plenty of back-patting for it: Chip said he was
'thoroughly impressed' and Sarah for some reason felt compelled to call me a hero. Hey, why not? I'm not opposed to a little bit of hyperbole now and then.

After that bit of glory, though, I feel I need to record for posterity the half-day I spent over at Pastor Z's
house helping snake plumbing. He had some water back up into his basement and needed help mending the situation. I thought this might entail bucket-brigading water out of the basement, but what actually needed doing was to use a plumbing snake to clear the clogged pipes. After getting Pastor Z's done, we'd also do the neighbors, who had a chronic problem with their pipes and needed their snaked about yearly. For the uninformed,a plumbing snake is a long flexible metal coil that you shove down the drain and is spun by a motor or hand crank. You can put attachments on the end of the snake to clear whatever blockage is there. Most of the time this is tree roots that have gotten into the pipe. I didn't have much to do with the snaking of Pastor Z's house- Pastor Z himself was the gloved bandit shoving the unruly beast down into the pipe and Shane was handing turning the machine on and off as needed. I just stood there and kept the youngest Zedicher daughter out of the line of sewage spray. Mrs. Z came out to encourage us, and I remarked that I wasn't doing anything but keeping Aliyah out of trouble. Mrs. Z thought that was just wonderful, so that took that as my cue to be useful by continueing to do that. The snaking moved on to the basement and I kept Aliyah out of trouble, eventually devolving to reading books to her. I felt slightly guilty about sitting on the comfortable couch with a toddler while the other two men on the job were getting stuff done and good and dirty. But hey, somebody's got to keep the toddler away from the sewage-covered snake, and I was working on my child-wrangling skills.

Eventually, though, the call came for assistance and I knew my time had come to get a dose of sewage myself. The work was now on the neighbors's house, which turned out to be a bit more problematic than Pastor Z's. The distance between the snake machine and the pipe entrance made this job harder and I was placed as the second man on the snake, and closest to the pipe, the one to shove the snake in there. This ended up being an opportune time to exercise some good humor in the face of unpleasant work. Sure, we were all getting covered in the sewage that was getting slung around by the writhing snake- but why should that stop us from having some laughs? It took a while to get the roots that were blocking the circuitous pipe cleared, and by the end I was sufficiently sprayed with yuck to merit riding in the back of the truck on the way home, even after a hose treatment. There wasn't much glory at the end of that job. Just agood hot shower. I think reading to Aliyah was better.

This last Saturday a group of us went up to the LDS church General Conference in Salt Lake City. I like to get out and do outreach events like this. Because I'm in a support position in the ministry, I often feel quite removed from the actual purpose of the ministry here, which is the share the love of Jesus Christ with the Mormon people of Utah. I spend my time making that goal possible for others in the ministry, but my tasks are indirectly related to that goal. It is intimidating to go out on the street and witness to people, but that is the direct act of what we are here for- if I'm not willing to be the one sharing the good news, then I tend to think that something is wrong.

General Conference draws a lot of LDS people into the Temple Square area of Salt Lake, and my group took that opportunity to go out and talk with people about God. Chip, the ministry director, has been developing a witnessing tool over the past year called the Jesus Survey. It's a survey which questions people about the teachings of Jesus in a way that is not combative or overtly contrary, but which prompts people to think about the things he taught. The questions are aimed to highlight the contradictions between what Jesus taught and what the LDS church teaches. LDS people who take this survey often get only a few out of the 15 questions right. If they were well versed in LDS church teachings and answered the questions forthrightly, they couldn't honestly answer any of the questions according to the answer in scripture. That's because each of the 15 questions is on a topic on which the LDS church teaches a doctrine that is contrary to what Jesus actually taught. The idea is to get people to think about what Jesus actually taught and let the Holy Spirit take over from there, being available to provide dialog if needed. The survey does that in a way that generally doesn't offend people, because we're not coming out and saying 'You! There in the red shirt! Your doctrine is WRONG and I can prove it!'. Approaches like that are rarely conducive to getting people to actually listen to your message. The fact is that the message of the gospel IS offensive to many- but the less that we can be needlessly offensive when preaching it, the more likely it is that the people who hear it are to listen and open their hearts to the Holy Spirit. That openness is what we want to get people to do. The LDS Church teaches its members to be closed to any outside ideas or examination of their faith- but what kind of faith can it be if its church is afraid to let its members examine it for themselves? Too often people approach their faith with a motive to confirm what they already believe rather than to seek the plain truth. If ones faith really is true, then examination will only strengthen your knowledge of it, not cast doubt and shadow on it. The survey shows people that this doubt exists, and a person who is being honest with themself will study it out and find the real answers- the truth of what Jesus Christ taught, without manipulation by any outside source.

I was able to do eight or nine surveys throughout the morning, and had some people who were very interested in it. It is great to get into the theological discussion on the street, but I think that this method can be even more effective in some cases. If someone is thinking back on a stressed-out discussion they had with a stranger on a busy street, it can be easy to rationalize that the person what being confusing, or not telling the complete truth, or what have you. When we give then an answer sheet and they take it home and study it to find out why they did so poorly on the survey, then they have only the words of Jesus to contend with. I sent eight or nine answer sheets home with a dozen people (there were couples). I will almost certainly never know what effect I had- but I know that God can take a dozen people honestly studying his word over that yellow sheet of paper, work through their open hearts, and reclaim them from the enemy's camp.

The street during General Conference aren't 100% peaceful. I take a very unobstrusive approach. I dressed up in a suit and tie and asked people if they wanted to do the survey as they passed. Other Christians, though, take on more of a role of 'protestor' and hang signs with some pretty intense and offensive messages on them. They are true, but tactless and blunt. I want to condemn the preachers who shout offensive messages and are rude with people. It's not nice. But if you read the prophets's deeds in the Bible, they weren't nice either. They got offensive and rude. They weren't afraid to get loud with the message God had given them to give. I can't say that God didn't give the loud preachers their message, although I don't feel called to do what they do.

One street preacher through actually started his shouting with me. He was following a couple down the street,
shouting behind them, and as he passed me he threw a few accusations my way as well, which I responded to as politely as I could. After a few denied accusations he figured out that I wasn't a Mormon, but a Christian
missionary, and then got offended with me that I wasn't out shouting at people as well. He was actually ticked that I was taking a gentle approach. Weird. I don't think that guy was in the right.

My time on the street wasn't the full day because I got the opportunity to actually attend the second session of
General Conference, which took up the afternoon. The presentation and organization was superb, and the conference center is an engineering marvel. The content of the conference wasn't much different than what you'd hear on Sunday morning at an LDS church. I think sometimes at GC they announce some significant stuff, but this year nothing stood out as huge news. A lot of encouragement to refrain from wordly ways and be faithful. It was a mostly unoffensive message, but after having been in the culture for a while and trained to understand the differences, I can hear what they're saying an recognize that everything has a little bit of a slant on it to suggest to people that they support the church, be peaceful, and trust the leadership. Again, all good things- but it leads people to focus on the church, not on God.

That's the major stuff that's gone on since I reported last, but not everything. Plenty of other neat things have gone on as well. I've been getting my apartment set up more with the stuff I brought back from TX. I scored a projector at the LETU IT yard sale last year for $40, then the ladies found me a $5 projector screen at a thrift store. I installed the two in my room last week and coupled that with a free-but-slightly broken stereo and a $4.50 input cord for a very cheap entertainment system. Right now the project on my apartment is the kitchen floor, which is concrete and will receive an attractive and functional stain-and-seal treatment. That means, though, that everything needs to be out, and that my stove and fridge currently reside in my bedroom:

The fridge and microwave are functional, but as comical as it would be to make quesadillas next to my dresser, the stove is not hooked up. It only ought to last a week while we clean/stain/seal the floor.

We had a tie-dye event at the College house, for which we made posters:

My brother Jake sent me a birthday card which got very delayed by international mail. It had some sweet Australian temporary tattoos, which I applied to my wrists:

I don't have a dish drying rack, so I took the bachelor approach when I recently did a sinkful of dishes:

I made some ridiculous and impractical stilts hoping to promote events on campus:

Finally, actually an old pic- I didn't show it last time because the shirts depicted were a surprise yet to be sprung at the time of posting. They're souveniours for staff from the TX trip. All the shirts except for mine say "NED WENT TO TEXAS" and were spraypainted over scotch tape negative-stenciling.

Thanks for having the interest to read, folks. I would ask for your support in prayer as I'm continuing in my work here. I've highlighted a lot of the fun and light-spirited things in my life, but enemy doesn't like what the ministry here is up do and he tries to attack us all the time. Your prayers for me and the ministry are the most important thing you could do for us. This is also the time of year that the ministry is seeking to bolster the fund that allows me to eat and buy socks, so if you like for me (and Sarah) to be able to eat and buy socks and are interested in supporting us financially, drop me a line. Thank you!

From Utah to many places

2010-09-13T13:07:00.000-06:00

Last week I departed Utah with the college group to Wyoming for the annual retreat. Unlike the rest of the group, though, I wasn't returning to Ephraim three days later. I departed Wyoming at the same time in the same convoy, but embarking on a 2600 mile journey of adventure and purpose. You see, God took me by surprise not only with his plans for my summer, but also with my next year. I had no idea I'd be staying so long when I made the original TX to UT trip this May. I hadn't packed for a year in UT, and furthermore I left most of my belongings in a storage spot that wasn't appropriate for leaving untouched for a year. Therefore, it was necessary to make a trip to TX to collect the belongings I'd need for the upcoming year and stow the rest in the storage van. The myriad of bonuses arising from this necessity include the opportunity visit with my friends in TX, rasie support, and bring back my ATV. As I write I'm sitting on my would-have-been-roommate Tyler's couch here in Longview, TX, so you know I made it here safe. Allow me to bring you up to date on how I got from then and there to here and now.

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My original plan for this trip included taking my new-to-me motorcycle with me on the trip. I'd ride it from Utah to Wyoming and throw it in the back of the truck for the rest of the trip. This would give me the safety net of being with a convoy on my first long motorcycle ride, allowing me to bail out if some unforeseen problem arose. Unfortunately, my bike wasn't roadworthy when we needed to leave. Things were way too busy with the ministry, and all the things that needed to get done with the ministry came ahead of getting my bike back together. Sadly, the carburetors still sit disassembled on a table. Things were actually a frenzy of activity before we left for Wyoming actually. It's a miracle I didn't forget anything major. Only minutes before we rolled out I was eyeballing the dimensions for a plywood tailgate I was cutting out to fit Kentucky's truck, which he let me borrow for the trip.

We got to Wyoming just fine, though, having picked up my friend Meg in SLC on the way. We got there late but even in darkness we knew the location of the retreat was totally sweet. Some background- the Olsons are friends of the ministry and live in Wyoming on a sweet ranch, and they let us come invade their space and use all their toys once a year for the college ministry retreat. They have a sweet house, some ATVs (four-wheelers to the rest of you), horses, and lots of acreage. We pretty much run amok there for two days. Well, there is more structure than that- we have bible studies and organized activities but during the unstructured times I would fairly call what I did on the ATVs 'running amok'. That's what ATVs are for, after all.

Here are some pics from the trip so far:

We had a hoot, but eventually it was time to go. The last morning we spent there we cleaned up everything we touched during the weekend. For me, though, I had to prepare the truck for the long journey, including removing all Kentucky's stuff from the truck and into the vans. There was a bunch of sawdust in the back of his truck that had spilled, and I wanted to sweep it all out. I didn't want to sweep a bunch of sawdust into the Olson's driveway, though, so I grabbed a broom and went off in the truck to a more remote wilderness-like area where it wouldn't matter if some sawdust was spread. As an aside, while I was sweeping it out the horses came to visit me. I tried to be polite and not sweep sawdust into their curious faces. It was a unique experience to be standing in the back of a truck in the middle of the Wyoming open range, sweeping it out while surrounded by horses. Anyway, I after sweeping out the truck I returned to the house. As I was walking up, my phone rang; Chip was calling. Apparently the absence of both me and the truck prompted everyone to think that I had left for TX without saying goodbye. I was both flattered and somewhat insulted- flattered because they were so bummed that I didn't say goodbye (I felt loved) but somewhat insulted that everyone thought I would do such a thing. Never!

The plan for my trip was to lay over in Denver and Wichita. Generally, I'd try to make a trip of this length in two days rather than three, but leaving with the group around 1PM excluded that possibility so three it was. I've never used a hotel on a road trip- between myself, my parents, and others that I know, I generally can ask around for most places in the country and someone will know somebody I can stay with. I asked Chip if he knew anybody in the Denver area I could stay with, and sure enough there were some supporters of the ministry there that were willing to put me up. They were a very nice older couple who were interested in my story and provided me with everything I could possibly need for the night I spent there. It was great. They already knew all about the ministry, being supporters, but were glad to hear the news and stories I brought and we had a good time discussing it all. I got underway early the next morning, leaving with my hosts.

Before we left for Wyoming, Kentucky had been trying to install a new radio in his truck. Unfortunately he didn't succeed and the truck was left with only the stock radio, which doesn't have an auxillary input jack. My lack of CDs meant I listened to the radio from Fort Steele to Denver the previous day. I wasn't willing to use local radio (all country) through whole trip, so the night before I'd looked up the closest Target store so I could go get an FM transmitter. I headed there before taking off for the day and used the gift card that Ian and Libby sent me for my birthday. Thanks guys! You made my trip much more civilized! After getting that figured out, I departed for the day's journey, Denver to Wichita.

The previous night I'd set my laptop to download the audiobook of the Tom Clancy novel I'm currently reading (Executive Orders) and the Zune MP3 software to discover and sync the downloaded files to my Zune, which is Microsoft's version of the iPod. (As an aside- don't buy a zune. I hate mine. It is an abomination to music enjoyment) Unfortunately, my clever plan didn't work well at all because the Zune software tried to identify and sync the files while they were still downloading, so they all got mis-IDd and placed, to my great chagrin, out of order, which is catastrophic for an audiobook. I discovered the problem this morning but had no time to fix it before I left.

Wichita made sense as an in-between destination between Wyoming and Longview, and fortunately I knew some people there. My friend from LETU, Joe Carroll, is from Wichita. I got on the horn with him and asked if he could hook me up with anyone. His parents still live in Wichita and were willing to host me. Bonus! I arrived in Wichita that evening, having made better time than my borrowed GPS estimated. It turns out that the GPS is very conservative and I get places in advance of when it tells me I will. Beats the alternative. The Carrolls were also gracious hosts and provided me with everything I needed. They were interested in what I was doing in Utah and we had a good long conversation over the delicious dinner that Mrs. Carroll fixed. I also ended up scratching my head for a while with Mr. Carroll over an engineering curiosity that he'd encountered at work. Joe got his engineering talent from his dad, who is an engineer with Hawker Beechcraft, a company that makes airplanes.

That evening I tried fixing my MP3 audiobook problem but, in typical Zune fashion, had trouble. I'll spare you the details but just know that at one point I was looking around the Carroll's house for a small screwdriver as a fix. Not good. Eventually it got sorted out and I was able to listen to Executive Orders the next day.

In the morning, the Carrolls were as hospitable as they were the night before. Mrs. Carroll made me a wonderful breakfast of bacon and eggs that I was surprised to find was just for me (I had a lot of bacon to eat). She sent me off also with a grocery bag full of goodies for the road, including the entire rest of the pan of lemon bars that she'd made the previous night. Mrs. Carroll is a saint in my book.

The next day's journey is as typical as one would expect of any road trip, with the added adventure of fueling a diesel vehicle for the first time and having a fun time trying to fill up with the giant nozzle meant for a semi truck. Part of the day's busyness preceding the trip to Wyoming was replacing one of the truck's fuel tanks. This got done with no problems... until Kentucky went to fill the tank up and diesel went everywhere. Turns out we forgot to put the rubber O-ring under the fuel sender before we put it on. Bad news bears. Diesel was everywhere after he filled up, and we knew not to fill up the front tank more than halfway until that got fixed. This left me with the rear tank, from which I can get about 200 miles. A big 'ol truck like this is supposed to have range to go for miles on end, but without the bigger front fuel tank it's got short legs.

I made it into Longview ahead of schedule, as is apparently typical with the GPS I'm using. I dropped off the stuff I brought down for Kristen and Gareth and spent the evening visiting with Candyce and Tyrell and guys on 2A. There were supposed to be devos that evening, but they were supplanted by a last-minute all-residence-hall meeting, which is never a good sign. Before I go on my rant, some background. When I was visiting LETU back in 2005, I heard that one of the residence halls had great big wooden structures in the rooms that the student had been allowed to build, essentially adding an extra floor to the high-ceilinged rooms. This was true, and my dorm rooms have looked something like this since I've been at LETU, and for approximately 30 years hence:

At said meeting we were told that lofts, the defining feature of Tyler, had been condemned by the local fire marshall and all of them had to be removed in their entirely by October 4th. This was met with unprecedented student unrest and resistance. Lofts have been part of the dorm's culture at LETU for decades, and to have them taken away is a huge loss. Spirits were both high (with outrage) and low (with depression) at the news. It's a terrible thing. However, after hearing about how it has all come about, it is apparent that nothing can be done about it within the realm of feasibility. While I'm greatly disappointed by the news, and perhaps a year ago I would have taken up a crusade for the cause, today I just can't bring myself to. I know from the Bible that the entire world is headed way, way downhill. I hate to see the little things like this happen but I know it can't be stopped, and it is all part of God's great plan. LeTourneau was once a great school, and now it's headed down a different road, for this and many other reasons. Many other things that once were good now are tainted. I hate to see the mighty fall, but that's just the way it has to be sometimes. That is not to say that everyone ought to take every inch of the world's downward spiral in stride- but just to use their discernment in which battles to fight. I can't take this one on.

I've been here visiting LETU for about five days now, visiting with friends and taking care of the little business that I have here. It's been great to see all my friends and acquaintances from this part of the world again, but I also am reminded that this chapter of my life- college and early adulthood- is largely behind me. When I drove onto LETU's campus my excitement for the people was dampened by the place. I no longer fit into a place that is one step out from home- I've gone farther since then, and to return is a step back. I know I will be returning to LETU in a year to finish my degree, and that's going to be hard. All the same, I have to finish one chapter of my life before I can move onto next without being held back by the last.

I will take off tomorrow afternoon. In the same way that my return to LETU was dampened, I am looking forward to my return to Utah. Although the prospect of venturing out into the unknown future that Utah carries with it is scary, it is also where I feel I belong. I do worry about my future- I don't know exactly how God is going to provide all the needs I'll have this upcoming year, or even that he will- maybe his plans for me only include Utah for the next few months. Maybe they include Utah for six years and two children. I don't know. I do know, though, that placing my future in his hands is what makes me come alive, because it's what he created me for.

Suspiciously convenient and reasonable tire shops, round two

2010-09-02T00:38:00.001-06:00

A week or so ago, my friend Flic asked me if I would be willing to help her get to the Salt Lake City airport in case an impending family emergency took a turn for the worse. Well, she got the call yesterday that it was time to get on a plane, so we made a drop-of-the-hat trip to SLC. I got a text around 2:45 and we left by 3:00. Gabe, Flic's boyfriend, came and got me from the college house and we departed shortly from Flic's place. The three of us piled into her old Accord and set out. It was a somber trip due to the reason for the trip, but Flic has a strong spirit and was calm and kept her head on despite the circumstances.

We got about 45 minutes into the two-hour trip and were on I-15, a major interstate. We had the windows down due to the Accord's lack of air conditioning, which made talking a bit difficult but helped beat the heat. At one point we were passing a semi truck, and I was looking out at it- I noted that the trailer was sporting the new super-single tires: really wide single tires where most trailers have double tires. I was focusing on the tires as we passed, and as we got up by the front tires I heard a skitch-skitch-skitch sound that means something is wrong with the tire. I assumed it was the semi's tire and considered hand-signalling to the semi driver that something was wrong with his tire, but decided against it. It couldn't have been more than three seconds later, though, that our own front passenger-side tire catastrophically blew out.

Gabe was driving and kept control of the car and steered us to a stop in the left-hand shoulder. We came to a stop and it didn't take long for the gravity of the situation to reach us- Flic had a flight to catch in SLC that departed at 7:58 and it was after 4:00. SLC isn't the fastest airport in the world to get through, and we were still upwards of an hour away. Dadgum. Well, with no time to waste, we set about changing the tire. That was good news and back news- Flic actually had several tires in her trunk, but unfortunately they were all sketchy tires, and the best one was one that had been preemptively taken off due to a bulge in the tread and was only have half aired-up. We figured it'd be better to put it on and limp to a safe parking place than to sit in the left shoulder. I got about changing the tire, which really went like any other tire-change except that Gabe spotted a crack pipe on the shoulder of the road where we stopped- I guess somebody pitched it when they were getting pulled over.

While the tire change was in progress, each of us was thinking of ways to ameliorate the situation- I had AAA but no card on me. We considered having someone drive my car up so we could complete the journey in it, and actually got as far as Shane looking for my spare key but getting stumped. (I still don't know where I put it when I moved down into my apartment) Flic was on the phone trying to see about changing her flight to the next available one. I thought perhaps we could get the car up to SLC on the sketchy tire if we aired it up at the next gas station.

When we got the replacement tire on, we could see it wasn't really going to last long- it was quite flat. Gabe and I concurred that we oughtn't to go over 30 mph on it. Fortunately, we weren't too far from the next exit. We decided to drive to the nearest gas station and reassess our situation. I was on the phone with Chip trying to figure out if they needed to send someone out for us, and I didn't want to trouble someone if Flic was going to reschedule her flight anyway. We limped in the right-side breakdown lane at 30 for a mile or two. We actually passed the first exit, for South Santaquin, because it only joined with a road and offered no services- we knew the next exit had a gas station and wasn't far. Gabe had accelerated to 45 so he could be in the slow lane somewhat legitimately. We pulled off at the Santaquin exit and were planning on hitting the gas station- but right next to the gas station I spotted something handy:

"Tire shop!" I shouted and pointed up at the top of the hill.
"Go!" said Flic, I'm sure to the confusion of the Travelocity agent on the other end of the phone.

We pulled onto the side street that'd take us up there, and just as we were pulling into their driveway, the sketchy tire let go, evidenced by the sudden sound of shredded rubber flapping against the road and wheel-well. At this point we just laughed that it would happen here. We pulled into a parking spot, tire flapping.

I took note of the tire size and determinedly walked into the tire shop. Time was of the essence, after all. We had to wait for a few minutes for the sales person to become available, during which time I considered just waltzing into the shop floor and seeing if one of the tire jockeys could fix us up. Soon enough it was my turn and I asked the lady behind the counter if they could fix us up with a P185-70 R13 tire- or any other 13"rim tire with a remotely similar size- ASAP.

"I don't know, thirteen inch tires are getting kinda rare these days, but let me go check."

She disappeared down a hall and I waited. Flic was on the phone with someone then, and Gabe was probably waiting outside. After a few minutes the tire lady reappeared with a tire in hand!

"Fantastic!" I exclaimed. "Do you think you can get us back on the road in twenty minutes?"
"Sure thing" was her response.
"What's the damage?" I asked.
"For this one, eh... " she paused a moment- "Thirty bucks."

Fair enough- I didn't even have to start telling her about our dire circumstances. My guess is that she'd plenty of young people in sketchy cars who needed a cheap tire to get back on the road in a hurry. Gabe got the bill paid while the tire jockey performed the tire work, and after only ten minutes or so, we had a drivable car. We expressed our gratitude and departed around 4:45- according to my phone's log, only about 35 minutes elapsed between my first 'Oh snap, we're in trouble' call and my 'Everything is OK' call. That's cool.

We got back on the road with joy at how God had provided for us- if you'll remember, this is the second time this summer that God provided a tire shop right were it was needed. Flic remembered, though that we had failed to start the trip with prayer- an oversight that God didn't hold against us while he provided for us. We prayed then simple and joyful prayers of gratitude and supplication for the rest of the trip. Flic started telling stories of sketchy road trips she'd taken in the past wherein God had come through amazingly in the face of car problems.

Flic still worried that we might not arrive at the airport in time- likely because some overzealous ticketing agent told he she needed to be there two hours in advance, which is a complete falsehood for domestic flights. I thought we were golden, and I wasn't wrong. Although we got delayed some by traffic, we arrived at SLC with much time to spare- something like an hour and a half, I think. After some hugs, Gabe and I took off with the request not to leave the city until Flic made it through security. I was driving and took us to NPS rather by autopilot, mostly just because that was the place I knew how to get to from memory, which was only five minutes away or so. I was just up in SLC the day before and had driven that route with Kim and our new assistant staff Sarah while running a slew of errands for the ministry.

I figured NPS was a great place to pass the time while waiting for Flic to clear security, but she texted us that she was through before we even got into the parking lot. Well, being at NPS isn't an opportunity to waste so we went in anyway. NPS is a surplus store that deals with everything. They buy up outdated food, truckloads of whatever crashes on the highway, items that just don't sell... whatever. They have everything from frozen bacon from last week to car body panels and nearly everything in between. It is a wonderful place, sort of like a discount store with everything under the sun. I'm particularly taken with their industrial section (building, actually), because everything there is cool and could totally be used on a Sweet Project. Unfortunately, they seem to have a good grasp of what everything is worth, so there aren't any spectacular bargains there, just decent deals. The industrial building was closed when we got there, but from the food/household goods building I got a 10-pound torpedo of frozen ground beef that could be used as murder weapon ($14.97), four frozen pizzas ($1.50 ea) and a few packages of Rice-a-roni for something cheap.

I wanted to seize the opportunity of being Up North to get silverware for my apartment, a vital item that was neglected the day before when I picked up most of the other stuff I needed. Gabe searched for a DI on his fancyphone. DI stands for Deseret Industries, which is the Utah/LDS equivalent of Goodwill or Salvation army. After a pitifully long fight of getting lost which probably took 30 minutes, we arrived at a DI to see that it was closed. Shucks. Well, too bad. Time for dinner. We'd been up and down that particular block three times so I knew there was a Taco Casa down the block, so we headed there. At the red light, though, I noticed the presence of two Sketchy No-English Taco Carts.

"Sketchy taco cart?" I asked.
"Sketchy taco cart." Gabe replied. It was so.

I wanted to order in spanish to show off the modicum of foreign-language skill I retained from high school, but biffed it. After surveying their menu board, I strode up, confident that "Dos tacos al pastor y un birrito de carne de res, con todo" would roll off my tongue, but instead:
"Hablas ingles?" Doh. Biffed it.
"Hm?" replied the taco lady, with a turn of the head.
"Do you speak english?" I asked.
She gestured to an adolescent who took my order in english. In retrospect, I think I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to make a fool of myself by rattling off awful Spanish only to have the taco lady reply "Dude, I speak English." Instead I just ended up looking like a rube. Oh well. I later tried my spanish skills on the adolescent when I returned for drinks (bebidas) only to get answered in English. Fail. Oh well, I got this, and it was totally rockin' delicious:

I'll make a ~~fool~~ gringo out of myself for cheap awesome burritos any day.

Gabe and I had an uneventful drive home, except when I spotted a supercar dealiership:

Don't tell anyone, but I took that pic while driving a standard-transmission car, and holding a soda... in the middle of an intersection. Some call it irresponsibility, I call it skill. That's a Ferrari/Maserati dealership, by the way.

Here's an update on everything else I've been up to. I feel lazy when I write updates because I can never remember what exactly I've been doing, all I can remember is that I've been busy and all of it has been important. I've been working on a mailing of a support letter and today I started work on swapping the transmission in a van that was donated to the ministry. I've also been working the cafe and putting in some hours on-call at my new part time job, moving/installing appliances and furniture for a local store. Jamie is the on-call style consultant for the store and a friend of the owner. Apparently, before she came and styled everything, they just lined all their furniture up in the store in rows. It needed a woman's touch, I'm told. I've also taken up the reins as the guys dorm advisor, trying to keep things orderly up there.

That's all for now. As a last note, this is the time of year that Chip and Jamie look to build up the fund that supports Sarah and I throughout the upcoming year. I'm also starting to wonder about how bills are going to work when my student loans come due. If you'd like to receive a support letter to learn more and prayerfully consider supporting me, just send me an email. Thank you!

VERBOTEN! smoothie

2010-08-28T10:26:00.000-06:00

For those of you who have watched Hogan's Heroes, you will know that certain things are VERBOTEN!, according to Hans. One thing that probably was not specifically VERBOTEN! was smoothie-making. Of course, not all smoothie-making is VERBOTEN! If, hypothetically, one wanted to break the rules by making a smoothie, it could be done this way. In theory.

After installing a non-hypothetical sink in my apartment, I felt the need for a celebratory smoothie because I had over-ripe fruit and was hungry. I may have allegedly gathered my hypothetical ingredients:

Two small very-overripe plums
One middlin'-size slightly overripe nectarine
Two scoops of Blue Bunny Double Strawberry ice cream that Travis forgot in my freezer and told me to keep
A generous slice of Jamie's Ninja Cake (which is a normal slice for any other cake, due to opulent richness)
A hypothetical three-quarters scoop of coffee-toffee frappe mix that we're not going to restock anyway
A hypothetical splash of skim milk from the café fridge because we don't use skim before it expires
400ml of a mix between almond and non-almond Honey Bunches of Oats (on sale at Kent's last week)
Two handfuls of ice cubes after hypothetically realizing that the hypothetical smoothie is too thin

Hypothetically blend with the smoothie button on the café's Blendtec Total Home Blender. You're done!

*If this actually did happen, the hypothetical smoothie-operator would realize that he'd succumbed to the Smoothie Greatness Postulate, which states that

When making a Smoothie, any given operator will add too much of every ingredient, because all of the ingredients are Great, and the operator will inevitably think that "a little extra of this would be good". The effect is that the resultant smoothie is of unintentionally Great volume due to the additional portions of each ingredient. However, because the portion of each ingredient was increased, the proportions of ingredients remains largely unchanged, which leaves the net result as an unintentionally large smoothie, the largeness of which could be argued to be a expression of Greatness itself.

The Smoothie Greatness Postulate is analogous to the Taco Overfilling Theorem with the exception that the overfilling of a Taco does not always result in arguably increased Greatness.

I bought mayonnaise and a crotch rocket, and survived a wreck

2010-08-17T00:50:00.002-06:00

How do you like that juxtaposition? Believe it or not, each of the title items are significant. No, the wreck wasn't on my crotch rocket- read on, friend; all will become clear. I'll explain the mayonnaise now, stick around for the rest. I bought a jar of mayonnaise at the beginning of the summer and for the past few weeks it's been at the level of lowness where one makes a mental note to get more. I never did follow up on that mental note, though, because before I made my decision, I didn't know if I'd be staying around to consume the mayonnaise, which I would not need if I were returning to LETU. So I let my mayo get super low while I waited on the decision. If I wasn't staying, there's no sense in buying mayo I'm going to waste. I was nearly out by the time I made the decision, and yesterday I bought another jar of mayo. I wouldn't argue that it was significant, but it was something I noticed as a real change in my life which was dependent on the decision to stay or go. I bought a jar of mayo. I'm staying around to use it.

I'm using this.

I had a birthday last Sunday- thanks to everyone who sent me gifts! It was a great birthday. I decided to make it just a little bit greater on Monday, though, by buying myself a birthday motorcycle. I've been aching to own a motorcycle for about a year now and have gone through all the prerequisites- I took the safety course, got my license, got protective gear, etc. I've been prowling used-bike ads for a while now, but not very seriously. I wouldn't have bought a bike if I were returning to LETU, but now that I'm staying that option opened up. I saw an ad for a steal on a sportbike on the same day I was accompanying Tanner (fellow intern) up north to check out some trucks. We checked out the bike, too, and came home with this:

My sweet new ride.

It is a 1988 Suzuki Katana 600 / GSX600F. It, like any bike in my price range, has some issues to work out. Like most things I buy, it's now disassembled for work. I need to clean out the carbs, fix a starter issue, and put new tires on it- but otherwise it is ridable. I look forward to carving the canyons around here! I got an absolute steal at $500.

I'd like to make a quick note about my finances. As most of you know, I raise support to pay my way to be out here in Utah. Not every hour is spent doing direct ministry work, though, nor is every dollar- therefore I keep a to-the-cent record of all my ministry-related expenses. I judge this based on what I really need to be out here in the ministry, with the guidance of the senior leadership here. Expenses like food, gas, and rent I consider to be valid uses for God's money that others direct to me. Other things like discretionary purchases, expenses incurred during non-ministry related outings, motorcycles, and generally things not required for me to be here come out of my own pocket. Most of the ministry expenses come out of my own pocket, too- so you needn't worry about me buying motorcycles with other people's tithes.

I count the motorcycle as another benefit of staying here in Utah as well. Because I'll be working while I'm here in Utah to save up to go back to school next year, I'm generating an income, which, over the course of a year, will be enough to ~~rationalize~~ justify the motorcycle. I look at motorcycle ownership as something I could either do now, or kick myself for having not done when I'm middle-aged.

Of course, everybody will want to know about the wreck. Well, it's not that long of a story, and not super dramatic, but here goes: After bible study last night (we're studying the Trinity), the college group went up the mountain to Skyline to watch the Perseid meteor shower. The shower was cool, but we didn't stay up there late enough to see the real cool part. Most of the group took off before midnight, but Zach, Kylee, and myself stuck around to watch longer. It was cold so we cozied up under a blanket to keep warm. When things got just too cold to justify the not-as-frequent-as-we-would-like shooting stars, we decided to pack it up and head home. We took off down the road in Kylee's 4WD blazer, with her at the wheel, Zach riding shotgun, and myself in the back. The road up the mountain isn't very treacherous, if some of you are imaging us rambling through the forest on a road that was last traveled by an expeditionary party in the 1920s riding horses. It is an improved gravel road, fairly wide- but very, very twisty.

The Blazer had slid a few times, but more in the category of weee-fun rather than ohhh-crap. I'm one who likes to rally-style drift around corners with the e-brake, but then again I'm a practiced driver. We were about halfway down the mountain when we started to slide again. I wasn't too worried, because sliding is fun- but then the slide didn't stop, and Kylee over-corrected and stomped on the brakes. We were now coming through a turn sideways and careening towards the edge of the road, and too fast. When the truck's driver-side wheels dipped down at the edge of the road, I knew we were going over. I started to pray and put my arms out to keep from bouncing around the cabin like a rag doll. To be honest I don't remember the actual roll all that well. I remember coming to a stop with the car on the driver's side and me probably sitting/crouched in a weird position.

"Are you alright? Is everyone alright? I asked.
A little bit of silence was eerie.
"I am alright. Are you okay? Is anyone hurt?"
"Yeah, I'm okay." answered the two up front (or some semblance thereof)

Zach and Kylee exited the car through the broken driver's side window, now facing up. I had a little of a harder time getting out because of the crunched-in nature of the roof and being in the backseat. I extricated myself as well, lifting myself out of the window and sit-sliding over what I realized was the broken windshield onto the ground. After reconfirming that Zach and Kylee were physically okay, I did a walk-around of the car and realized there was a fuel leak, and worse, right onto the catalytic converter (which gets really hot). I urged Zach and Kylee, who had settled down in the middle of the road and illuminated by the still-on headlights to move farther away and out of the road, which they both simultaneously realized was a bad place to be.

Once the scene of the accident was safe, I determined that we didn't need an ambulance and that rousing a tow truck in the middle of the night was probably an unnecessary measure. I called Shane to have him come up and check us out, plus give us a ride back to Ephraim. Kylee was in a bit of shock about the whole ordeal, and sadly barefoot on the rough ground as her flipflops hadn't stayed on her feet in the accident. She was mostly worried about her mother killing her, which I tried to reassure her was unlikely and pointed out that we were all alive and unhurt except for a few scratches, which was something to thanks God for. Consoling young women isn't exactly something I'm practiced up for so I just tried to be nice and gently remind her that God is always in control.

A family in a pickup came around the bend and stopped to see if we were alright, which Zach and I assured them that we were. After checking us out for a few minutes, they were satisfied that we were fine and had help on the way and left us. Shane arrived not long thereafter, which I realized might have been quicker if I had told him that we had lights on still and he didn't need to search for us in the shadows. The predictable Shane response, after satisfying himself that we were unharmed, was the perennial 'Dadgum!'. A little bit of the familiar to reassure us after an eventful evening.

We reapproached the car (which I was satisfied was not going to catch fire) to extricate Kylee's wallet and cell phone, which was accomplished with some difficulty due to the on-its-side nature of the car. We weren't sure if it was required to call 911 since we had the situation under control, but we erred on the side of caution and I called it in anyway. The dispatcher took a description of the accident and car, and seemed satisfied that we would call a wrecker in the morning to take care of the car and let me go. We rambled back down the mountain (cautiously) and got into bed late- my phone showed my first call to Shane was at 1:49AM.

It turned out that the Sheriff wasn't happy about the way the incident unfolded and I got to tell my account of the incident to a deputy the next day. Apparently the dispatcher should have sent responders out regardless of my statement that we were fine, and because there weren't any officials there that night, it is difficult for them to confirm what really happened, we could have been hurt and not realized it, etc- the presence of a beer can near the car (littered by a good old boy rambling up the mountain in his pickup, I'm sure) added an unneeded layer of confusion to the incident, which isn't entirely wrapped up yet to my knowledge.

I think it is miraculous that we all came out unscathed. I don't have a picture of the car handy but it's fairly well crunched up. (I may get a picture at some point). I know that we were praying as the car went over, and I know that there are definitely a lot worse ways that a rollover accident on the mountain could have ended up. I won't know in this life if God intervened supernaturally, but I do know that I was in a car that rolled once and a quarter over on a treacherous mountain road and came away with only a single piece of glass in my hair to show for it.

Things have otherwise been standard fare- working on cafe stuff. One thing we did this week was to take a day and re-do all the cafe landscape stuff. The cafe looks much, much better now with its freshly-stained decks and re-mulched and manicured flower beds:

Cafe looking good!

There's also the run-of-the-mill errands and moving furniture and all sorts of other stuff that gets taken care of every day. Lawns mowed, garage door openers getting fixed, motorcycle carbs waiting to be cleaned... any plenty to take care of. Whether it holds sobering adventure or opportunities to diligently serve through labor, I count myself blessed to experience every new day.

Healing hands of God have mercy on our unclean souls once again.

Jesus Christ, Light of the World, burning bright within our hearts forever.

Freedom means love without condition, without beginning or an end.

Here's my heart, let it be forever Yours

Only You can make every new day seem so new.

Every New Day / On Distant Shores by Five Iron Frenzy

And now, for the moment we've all been waiting for...

2010-08-07T14:39:00.001-06:00

The past weeks, and even months, have flown by pretty quickly. There was one thing, though, that couldn't have come soon enough, both for me and for many of you: the decision about whether to stay here in Utah or return to LETU this fall. I covered my dilemma in a previous post. This was a decision that I took none too lightly- I regarded it as having more significance than just what I am doing with the next year of my life. I saw it as a fork in the road which would affect the shape of my life far beyond the next year, perhaps even influencing where my career goes.

I've long told people that I don't wish to live a typical white-collar life- to be educated, work for forty or fifty years, then retire and buy a big yacht. Honestly that kind of lifestyle just doesn't appeal to me. Not only would I not honestly enjoy the kind of opulent lifestyle that that would bring, but I crave the adventure and risk of a life lived outside the sterile white-collar bubble. More important than either of those, though- which are simply my preferences- I think that God can do much more with my life than just a career and maybe being active in the church during the evenings and weekends. Please don't think that I'm condemning white-collar life as an invalid choice for some to make. God probably calls many people to that and I hope that they take their calling seriously. It's just not what I feel called to.

Shane and Kim, the ministry assistant directors here, have told me about a retirement village in Florida which is specifically for retired missionaries. When I think about an community filled entirely of missionaries, what comes to mind is the wealth of amazing life stories that is represented there. Each of the missionaries, I am sure, could tell you of many times in their lives where they were in some sort of peril and God delivered them, or how God provided some immense need right on time, or how once they had no idea what do do next or where to go but then God opened a door. Those are the stories I want to tell my grandkids, not about this one time I got a great deal on a sports car that I bought with my stellar engineering salary.

So I saw these two options for my life, and I saw the choice ahead of me. Sure, the decision was only for a year, but it was also a symbol- the decision declares what is most important to me, what I want to do with my life, what path I want to take a step on.

I tried to make this choice not a choice, but a matter of following God wherever he wanted me to go. That is valid- if it were not in fact a choice I would be doing wrong by trying to go somewhere other than where God was leading me. But I feel now that it was a choice. The litmus tests I tried to set up didn't work- I tried to automate the decision by stating that it'd be miraculous if I got enough financial aid to go back to school and it'd be a sign from God that he wanted me to return to LETU if that happened. In the end, the financial aid I got was not insignificant, but placed me right on a line where I could do it but only with some real but doable sacrifices. That brought it down to a choice again.

I had been telling everyone who was waiting on my decision that financial aid was the thing I was waiting for, and now that I knew how that chip had fallen I still wasn't decided. I felt I needed more information to go on- so I contacted my preferred potential future employer and asked what a delay of a year would mean. The answer came back neutral, that a delay of a year wouldn't prevent them from being interested in hiring me, but that there were not guarantees. Still, it was a decision.

God's greatest gift to us is the free gift of salvation. After that, I feel, the next best thing he gave us is free will. After all, the gift of salvation wouldn't be a gift if we weren't free to choose or reject it. Many argue about what free will really is if God is all-knowing and all-powerful- whatever the ultimate truth of free will is, I feel sure that God was offering me a choice here. As if he were saying "You are free to go either way. I will be with you at LETU if you go back there, and I can do good in you and through you there. I will be with you here in Utah if you stay- no matter where you choose to go, I will be there, and my power is vast enough to be unaffected by the decision you make."

So it really was a choice. Even with all the information I could need in front of me, I was still indeterminate. I usually am not indecisive- when I made the choice to go to Iowa, it was almost a snap decision- I got the info I needed, decided it would be cool adventure, and so I pulled the trigger. Perhaps it is the significance of this decision that gave me such pause. This really could affect the rest of my life.

A few nights ago, as a stand-in for a real Bible study, we watched a DVD called Furious Love. It was about a real and proverbial journey that a filmographer took to try to understand how God's love penetrates even the darkest parts of our spiritual world. It showed many things that the church in America doesn't encounter very often, or like to think about: demon possession, witchcraft, satanism, destitute drug addicts living in a dump, prostitutes trapped in their lives in Thailand. All these dark things have been overcome not by God's might or power, but by his love. It is an amazing film that I encourage everyone to go out of their way to watch.

It did have the proscribed effect on me- I was awed by what God's love was and how the filmographer had experienced it and shown it to us. There was something else, though, that it did for me- it presented me with all the things that God is doing all over the world- all the things that those retired missionaries could be talking about, all the things that God might do with me if I chose to abstain from the white-collar option and step out into the unknown. Am I ready for that? Can I really be the one that God uses to cast a demon out of a convulsing woman in Tanzania? Do I even want that?

I don't think anyone wants to hang out with the demon-possessed because of the merit of the situation. People choose to put themselves in situations like that- to pursue lives that take them to those places- because they want to be the hands and feet of God's unquenchable love to his children, and they won't let something petty like their own carnal comfort get in the way of what God can do through them. They are looking at the higher goal- the glory of God and the building of his kingdom- over their own desires.

No, I didn't make a snap decision as I sat and watched Furious Love. That experience was only fuel for the fire. It was still up to me to decide. Sure, God can use me to cast out demons- but he can also use me to encourage kids in VBS and to fund those who go to the dark places. He needs all sorts of people in his kingdom. He let me decide where I wanted to be.

I can't say that there was a moment when the decision felt right to me. If I went only by the facts, I would have decided to stay in Utah long ago. I never did feel a peace about doing that, though- somehow I felt it would have been presumptive, that in a way I really didn't understand the gravity of my decision and that I need to wait until God revealed more to me. This entire decision was a process.

Yet, it was in a fact-gathering way that the decision was made. I was standing in the basement room where the in-construction men's apartment was, the room I'd be moving into if I decided to stay. The weight of the decision was bearing on my shoulders, and I knew I would need to have this all sorted out sooner rather than later. And then I decided. I would stay here. I would go down the path that may someday take me to casting out demons, because that is what I want in my life. I don't know my future any better than I know yours, anonymous reader; I can't tell you if the decision I made is really going to send me into situations like that. What I know is that I've taken the opportunity presented to me this summer to make my intentions clear- God, if you will send me, I want to go.

Well, now that all that serious business is sorted, who wants to see my new apartment? It's so sweet! I'm not completely moved in yet, but it's going to be the ultimate bachelor pad. I'll post more pics when it's done.

A view from the door into my bedroom. They assured me they'd take the loft out but I assured them that they certainly would NOT. Lofts own. The ultimate plan is to put a couch under the loft, a sweet one that was donated to the ministry this summer. It is super comfy and I campaigned for it to be placed in the guy's dorm. I'm taking it downstairs with me, since I'm the only one who sits on it anyway. If Shane disagrees with me he can feel my wrath. Once I get back from TX I'm going to set up my projector up over the couch to project onto the opposite wall. Sweet!

Looking into the other corner- I have significant hanging closet space for the first time ever. I think I'm going to try hanging my t-shirts.

My new deer buddy. I feel, the highlight of the room. I haven't named him yet. Any suggestions?

My desk area. No the deer doesn't have a massive third antler growing out of its face- there's another antler sitting on top of the desk. Classy!

This is what will be my new personal kitchen- it's not completed yet. Doesn't it look great so far? Chip's dad is a super handyman and this is all his work.

Finally, the bathroom. Again, a personal luxury I get to enjoy. The mirror is, unfortunately, low enough that I have to stoop to see myself in it. The light fixture there is pretty, but it may have to go so I can raise the mirror. If I'm going to stay in this apartment for a year, I'm going to take the hour or so to raise the mirror so I can see myself. I already mangled the ceiling fan to raise it 2" so I wouldn't walk into it all the time. Whoever has to remove that fan next: I'm sorry, it's going to be impossible. Just tear down the building around the fan, because there's no way it's ever coming down again after I shortened the mounting hardware.

So there you have it- decision made, future determined for at least the next year. I'm sure roughing it in that apartment after having made the 'hard choice' huh? The next year will be interesting. I'm now on the job hunt and I'm sure that God will provide something. I'm also going to start raising support and enroll in a class at Snow College. My immediate plans are to take a road trip to TX Aug 16-24 to collect the remainder of my belongings. After that, the real work begins.

The long term future is not entirely unclear either. I may have left you with the impression that I'm forsaking my engineering career for some idea of going to weird places and doing weird things. I'm not, at least not entirely. I will be returning to LETU in the Fall of 2011 to finish my last semester. That is set in stone because the classes I need to graduate are fall-only classes, and if I stay away from LETU longer than two semesters, then I have to come in as a new student under the new catalog and take a bunch of new classes- very disadvantageous. I really don't think that God brought me (at great effort) to within one semester of graduating LETU to not let me finish. Furthermore, I have a large amount of student debt to pay off and I think that an engineering career is a good way to pay that off and make myself more available for God. If I had to guess I'd say that I'll graduate December of 2011 and go work in engineering for some years until debt is paid off (and maybe even the family I may have is ready for a more adventurous lifestyle) and from there I'll go wherever. I'm also not ruling out that God will use engineering in the adventurous lifestyle I'm aiming for- there is certainly a lot of adventure to be had in engineering (international contracts- yes please) and like I said before, God can use me wherever.

Thanks for tuning in- don't forget to name my deer in the comments.

A Dog Named Turbo and the Ant Fire

2010-08-05T13:07:00.000-06:00

I like to think of this blog as a record of my doings and happenings in the world, and generally I like for those to be services of benefit to others and epic adventures with a moral at the end. However, I am afraid that this latest entry is not going to really fit either of those categories. I'm afraid that today I did the world a bit of a disservice.

I started a brush fire.

Well, not me, really, but I was involved and I certainly didn't stop the stupid plan of lighting a fire in dry dry central Utah from going forward. Let me rewind a little bit before I start justifying (or rationalizing) too much. It all started with helping the college house's newest resident, Jamie (AKA Kentucky) move in.

Kentucky was living in a terrible little apartment with no stove or cooling before he heard of the college house. He would have moved in straight away if he had known of it before coming here, but we didn't connect with 'tucky until Manti Pageant. Moving in after the fact was complicated, however, by the fact that he had bought a dog after arriving, a non-starter for college house living. In true Kentucky form, the dog was named Turbo, surely a sign of Jamie's fondness for turbo-diesel trucks. Well, a couple days ago he went outside and found his dog gone, and with it his housing problem. (Heartless, I know, but true)

And so Jamie made plans to move into the college house today, and we spent most of the day doing all the things that that entails: borrowing Shane's dump trailer, breaking into Keegan's truck to get the dump trailer controller so we can dump out the junk in said trailer, picking up a totally sweet wooden spool at the dump to use as a coffee table-- but I digress. Y'all know how moving works- you get the biggest vehicle you can manage, throw as much stuff in as will fit, and drive to the new flat and reverse the procedure.

Well, we got Kentucky most of the way moved in (the bed is here, and that's what counts) and were grocery shopping to fit his new-found stove access when a call came in. 'Tucky had an announcement made on the local radio station regarding the missing Turbo. Someone a few blocks away from Jamie's old place had picked up a dog matching Turbo's description. We headed straight over from Walmart and sure enough, there was Turbo. Well dadgum. Now we have the dog situation to figure out.

Fortunately, we weren't completely out of sorts- before Turbo ran off, 'Tucky had been examining options for finding a place for Turbo so he could stay in the college house. In fact, the deal to have Turbo stay on some land belonging to a gentleman in our church was all but sealed before Turbo ran off. When we got Turbo back again we just needed to get the final go-ahead and make it happen. The land in question is about 10 miles out of Ephraim and the barn which would act as an oversized doghouse needed some shoring up before a dog with a Houdini history could be let loose inside.

The refurbishment would have to wait, so we decided that we'd tie him up for the night in the barn and get it dog-worthy after we finished moving. And so we headed off to the land with Turbo and an enormously heavy Utah-style (construction remnants) doghouse in the trailer. Given that Turbo had been good enough to escape before, we decided it was high time to get a proper collar for him. (Ed. note: I looked at the rope 'Tucky used to tie him up before- the mock-collar was a shoelace. True Country, right there.)

Given that Turbo is only three months old, the collar was of course too big for him. Well, we've got a country solution to that- we'll just put another hole in it by heating up a piece of baling wire that is sticking out of the wall and poking it through the nylon webbing of the collar. Well, we took out the lighter and got to work. And, well, you know what we did with that lighter in that rickety old barn in the middle of the field full of dry grass? Can you guess? We put a hole in the collar. Worked like a charm.

With that problem effectively solved, we looked to wrap up our mission by improving Turbo's accommodations. After all, 'Tucky was moving up in the world, so we ought to see that Turbo had a similar upgrade as well. We had two problems with the area where he was tied up- there was a fire ant hill close enough that he could get into it, and all the dry grass around the barn was rather prickly and unpleasant on Turbo's soft little puppy feet. Our hearts were moved with compassion for Turbo, and it was decided (rather complicitly on my part) that the obvious thing to do was to pile up some of the grass on the anthill and light it so that the ants would be burnt out.

So we lit a little bit of grass on top of the anthill. It burned very quickly. I started plucking up clumps of grass and throwing them on the fire at a controlled rate. At this point I was actually more concerned with keeping the fire going than with it getting out to control- the grass I threw on burned up so quick that by the time I threw the next clump in, the last one was almost completely gone. While I was pulling up grass to throw in, I saw out of the corner of my eye that two spots of fire had appeared off to the side by 'Tucky. I figured he had it under control. I never did mention that Kentucky was a volunteer fire fighter. In fact, he joined just the day before. He's also a salesman for his dad's business of selling rescue equipment like the Jaws of Life and firefighting equipment.Jamie is not unfamiliar with the firefighting business.

It is at this point that I am somewhat unsure of what exactly happened. There were those two little spots of fire a few feet from the anthill, and then all of a sudden things got crazy. The fire started spreading out into the dry grass surrounding us. It became apparent that we should control the fire, and so we started stomping out the burning grass. Right then it didn't seem like we had a big problem- the fire was pretty small and we could stomp it down pretty quickly. However, things got out of hand really quickly. The flame front was growing faster than we were stomping it out and we started working quickly to stay ahead of it, but to no avail. It became apparent that the fire was serious at this point. Stomping wasn't effective anymore, and we grabbed boards to beat the fire out with. This was working better, and I was beginning to think that we could get the fire contained and out. However, the boards were dry, weather-rotted, and soon broke into pieces, becoming useless.

We got way behind the fire at this point. Jamie was starting to flip out a little bit. Furthermore, the more the fire spread outwards, the harder to got to control. A three-foot ring of fire is one thing. A thirty-foot ring is a lot more fire. We knew we wouldn't get back ahead of the fire at this point and Jamie called to me to call 911. I've been reluctant to call 911 frivolously my whole like, after all, I'd rather solve my own problems than have a dozen people rustled into frantic action and rushing down to highway to help me. I recognized now that playing it safe called for containment of the fire, not politeness in not inconveniencing the responders. I got on my phone and called 911 while continuing to try and fight the fire with my other hand, now using a two-foot-square piece of roofing tin to smother the fire.

After I gave 911 our location, Kentucky shouted at me to move his truck- the flames were starting to get close to it, and the last thing we needed was an engulfed vehicle. As I ran to the truck I tried to toss my sunglasses in the back but missed- normally I'd stop to pick them up, but firefighting had suddenly turned into Serious Business. I jumped in hoping that he'd left the keys somewhere obvious. I tried to start his truck but found that I'd turn the key and nothing happened. It was a manual truck, and I knew enough to push the clutch in to start it, but nothing would happen. After frantically turning the key a dozen times or so I heard Jamie shout "You have to push the clutch in HARD!" I bore down on that clutch pedal with the whole of my strength and turned the key- it started. It didn't feel like the clutch moved any more, but I guess ornery old trucks like his are entitled to their idiosyncrasies. While this was going on I was listening to the dispatcher announcing our "out of control brush fire north of Sterling, 500 yards west of 89" over Kentucky's volunteer firefighter pager which was clipped to the visor. The irony didn't escape me.

The location where we started the anthill on a fire was in a little fenced-in area for horses, long-abandoned. There were shed-sized barns off to two sides of it, and an entire field of dry grass separated by only a wire fence. We were on a slight hill, and above us on the hillside was a bunch of sagebrush- even worse, over the crest of the hill was a house. I kept beating away at the flame front spreading out back towards the road, and was actually making a good headway. I got the flaming grass extinguished on that side when Jamie ran past me with the bucket he was using to spread dirt on the fire on the other side of the yard. He was fairly well flipping out at this point.

"This is bad, this is really bad... oh man.."
"Well, we've got it out here, where else is it?"
"Dude, it's up on the hill on the other side of the fence!"

I started to realize the gravity of the situation at this point. While I was busy beating out the fire advancing towards the road I had paid only limited attention to the other locations- I thought the heavy wooden fence lined with feed troughs would contain the fire to the yard while we stopped it from getting out of control outside of it. But no- there was a two-foot gap in the fence where it met one of the sheds, and the fire had spread through it up to the hillside. This fire would not burn itself out. It would only spread. It was already wider than just the two of use could contain, and only growing more quickly. If the sheds started to burn, that was bad news- and if the fire advanced up the hill that was worse news yet. Looking around I saw that the fire had handily spread through the wire fence into the field of dry grass and was advancing much more quickly than I imagined it would.

'Tucky ran off towards the field with his bucket so I ran to the hillside to keep things from going nuts up there. The tin I was using to beat the fire out was now too hot to hold, and I stopped for half a moment frantically racking my brain for how to solve this problem. I tried using a clump of grass to hold onto the tin with, but it just slipped out of my hands and let my fingers be burnt while I tried to move the tin around.

"I need a glove" I said out loud.

Figuring that the situation merited the immodesty, I used the Sprint method to take my shirt off and used it to hold onto the tin. I advanced up the hill putting out fire as a went. The fire I was putting out before was easier because it was just grass on flat ground- the hill was covered in sagebrush. I couldn't pat out the fires around the bases of the sagebrush with the tin, and I couldn't stomp any but the smallest flames there because I was wearing my handy Chacos (sandals). At one point I picked up a sage branch that was burning so I could blow it out and throw it back into the blackened area, but it caught on something and I ended up hitting myself in the forehead with the burning part. I laughed in spite of the situation- I'm sure that in a different context hitting myself in the forehead with a flaming branch would be hilarious. It didn't leave a significant wound. Unable to completely put out the sage, I settled for putting out the perimeter of the fire and trying to keep the brush inside from blazing up so bad that they'd jump the perimeter.

As I was working on this I saw a white Sterling Fire Department pickup rambling through the field between us an the road. Thank God they responded as quickly as they did- it was probably only 10 minutes between my call and their arrival. From my spot on the hillside I could see that the fire was advancing with frightening speed through the dry field that it got into through the wire fence, as well as into the corner of the field of green alfalfa hay on the other side of the shed, which was now surrounded on two sides by fire. We really needed their help. The truck, which was equipped with a big water tank and hose, was unfortunately on the other side of a barbed wire fence. I knew it would take them a few minutes to get to the fire and applied myself to keeping it from advancing up the hillside and the house that stood over the ridge.

I had the perimeter of the fire on the hillside extinguished a few minutes later, but the sagebrushes still kindling inside. With the Sterling FD pickup approaching, I look towards the field below which had become an inferno and decided that if they were going to take over the hillside my efforts would be best spent stomping out the grass fire down there. There were a few hundred feet yet between the field fire and the nearest building, while the hillside fire, although not blazing anymore, presented a significant hazard if it advanced up the hillside, as fires are wont to do.

The fire in the field was a lot more intense than the grass fire I'd put out earlier because the grass was a lot taller. This corresponded to a significantly higher degree of heat. I was somewhat surprised with the degree of success I achieved by stomping out the fire with the tin- but I still had little chance of getting far enough ahead of it to stop it if the Sterling FD brush truck weren't working its way down. I had to be careful with placing the tin before I stomped on it, because if I overshot the amount of fire to put out, stomping the tin would put out the fire underneath but also billow the flame out at my sandal-shod feet, making things worse. I was approaching a bend in the fire line, which meant I got the heat not only from the fire I was putting out right in front of me but also from the side as well. Stomping the tin is up close and personal, right in the fire, and things were starting to get just too hot to stay in the fire. I had to turn away a couple times to keep my still-shirtless top half from getting burnt.

By now the brush truck had the hillside wetted down enough that they could turn their attention towards the field fire, which I had half put out but was failing to make any quick progress on due to my burning-alive problem. The fireman waved me off as he started working the fire on the other side of the fence with the hose, not wanting me to burn myself putting out the fire the hard way when he was able to put it out the easy way in just a minute. At that point I stepped back and looked to see if there were any other flame fronts advancing that I needed to stop. Thankfully, there was nothing blazing anywhere else. There was plenty of smoldering going on where the fire had been stomped out, but once the blaze in the field was hosed down, the flames would be out, the advance halted, and we could work on making sure it wouldn't start back up anywhere. Around this time, another brush truck arrived from Manti. I had overheard one of the firemen accepting the second truck's aid but waving off a tanker truck- if the firemen were optimistic, so could I be. Seeing that I wouldn't be needing to hold my hot tin anymore, I donned my now-very-smoky shirt again.

The sheds had thankfully not begun to burn, although after we got the flames out we spotted the corner of the roof on one was smoking from under the roofing tin so we peeled that back and hosed it down well. Some of the hay in one of the feed troughs was smoldering as well, so one of the firemen was chopping out the wood and pulling out the hay as another spread it out thin and yet another hosed it down. I asked the fireman who had arrived first (who I later found out was the chief, despite his young appearance) if there was anything else I could do, and he had me get a shovel-pick tool out of the truck and showed me how to dig the sod out from around to base of the shed's wooden wall to make sure no smoldering grass would light the shed up later. While I was doing that, the firemen were wetting everything down with their hose to make sure nothing would flare up again.

Well, the fire was out and the panic was over. While we were winding down the main extinguishment effort, I'd overheard Kentucky kicking himself for lighting the fire in the first place, and claiming responsibility for the fire- he verbally absolved me of blame for the fire, but in reality I feel a dumb as he does for letting it happen in the first place. Even if I'm not the chief perpetrator, I can't deny that I'm implicitly to blame because I let the stupid mistake happen. While things were winding up and I'd finished digging out around the shed, a fireman named Thomas introduced himself to me and asked me to fill out a voluntary statement of what had happened. While I was writing I wondered if I was incriminating myself, but figured that even if I was justice would be served by it, and being uncooperative probably never helped anybody in my situation anyway. Being the word man that I am (as my mom calls my brothers and me) I filled up the lined area on the page as well as half of the back of the sheet. I was halfway through the statement when I wondered if anyone would be able to read it- my penmanship was especially atrocious because I was writing on the hot hood of a truck with hands made very shaky by the events and exertion of the past hour. When I was done, though, Thomas said he could read it, so I figure I'm alright.

During all this Kentucky was quite worried about the consequences that might land on us as a result of our foolishness- although he insisted that he was the one to be fined if someone were going to be. While I won't argue his claim of primary responsibility, we both acted pretty stupidly and I wouldn't think it unjust if we both got some kind of fine. Thomas, though, reassured us that in a case like this, the fire warden was unlikely to issue any consequence and that because of our cooperation, attitude, and open acceptance of the blame for the fire, he didn't want us to get fined and would pass that impression on to the warden. I think that's as strong as a statement as he could make in his position, really I don't think there any risk at all of me getting one, and only a slight chance for Jamie.

The other thing 'Tucky was doing during the wrap-up was selling rescue equipment. I can't blame him for taking the opportunity, and the firemen were interested in his pitch. An appointment was even set up for a demo. A bit ironic, I think. I'd think it inappropriate if it weren't for the genuine interest and good nature of the firemen. The chief who arrived was smiling and jovial during the whole event, if businesslike during the heat (har har!) of the situation. Generally I'd expect men in such a position to be more severe, especially when dealing with two idiots who lit a field on fire while trying to kill some ants. I offered to re-weld a broken bracket on the Manti brush truck's storage box, and I think they may take me up on it. I can't say I wasn't partly motivated by wanting to make friends with the firemen- after all, friends don't issue fines to each other.

The fireman who was calling in the report to the dispatcher had a laugh with the paperwork- his first radio call named the fire "The Ant Fire" as a temporary moniker until the reports were being written. This was, after all, because the fire got started Well, Thomas (who I think was the senior man on site) saw no reason to rename it, so The Ant Fire it became officially. I gather that's something a bit usual because the firemen all found it entertaining.

Things had pretty well wound down and we were all getting ready to leave, each of us with another fire story (I have a previous one from Alaska I will have to write up sometime) behind us. I snapped some pics of the carnage before we left- check them out:

This is the area I fought first, out the gate from the fenced-in area towards the road.

This is the view over the wire fence that the fire hopped through into the dry field- this is where I was putting out the line of fire when the FD waved me off.

This pic is from about where the anthill was (and IS! With live ants!) looking out the gate. That's the hay we broke out of the feed trough to stop from smoldering- it is all black underneath.

And so you have it, friends- the story of how 'Tucky and I started a brush fire in central Utah. It could have been a bad day, but I see it as another adventure under my belt and a cool story to tell my grandkids. Life without brush fires would be boring.

Look, I'm famous! Also: breaking news!

2010-07-22T02:30:00.000-06:00

Well, not really. Does having something posted on the LETU admissions site count? A week or two ago I was asked I if could write a short blog entry for the LETU admission blog. They post stories of what students are up to weekly. Candyce is friendly with the staffer who runs the blog, and suggested to her that I might be able to write an entry for her. Well, I did, and you can find it here. It's a short depiction of my summer so far and what I'm learning from it. It's not an epic-of-gilgamesh length entry like I'm sometimes wont to post, but it gets the job done.

Some of my valued readers may already know this, but it is probably news to most: I am considering staying here in Utah through the school year. I knew this spring that my ability to return to school this fall might well be limited for financial reasons. However, I didn't really expect that my drive would be changed. After all, I have only one semester left, and it would be certainly wise to finish that rather than deferring it.

For those of you who are thinking 'Come on Ned! You have ONE semester left. Just FINISH IT!': Consider Luke 5:11-

So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.

Surely when Simon Peter left his livelihood behind, people thought it was crazy, irresponsible, and at best a gamble. Nevertheless, it was God who called him to pull his boat up- remember the verse above. If God calls me to pull my degree up onto the shore, who am I to contradict him? Is my own analysis of the situation more accurate? Look at this:

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. (1 Corinthians 1:27)

I have been coming to understand more clearly that there are really always two sides to anything. The wise thing to do in my situation- from the logical and carnal perspective, would be to return to school and finish my degree, and go from there. Certainly it would be foolish to defer finishing my degree when completion is so close. However, the wisdom of man does not always line up with God's wisdom. In such cases, it seems like foolishness. But isn't God's foolishness better than man's wisdom? The 'foolishness' of simply following God's plan is better than the 'wisdom' of following my own plan, however well thought-out and logical it might be.

When I decided to come here this spring, I knew I was placing my fall in God's hands. Historically, I have worked during the summers in order to earn money to pay for school. I knew when I was making the decision to come here that I would have no opportunity to earn, and therefore no savings to pay for school this fall. I knew that my return to school this fall would be entirely in God's hands. Well, I was thinking about it then, but now I am in the middle of it. The only way that I can return to school this fall is if God works a miracle of providing for me financially. Sort of like Gideon's fleece, I am to look at the results of my financial aid report to see where God wants me. If God does a miracle in providing me for to go back to school this fall, then well, I'm not going to ignore it. It is generally best not to ignore acts of God. And if God doesn't provide for me to go back to school this fall, then it's not really a choice I have to make, is it?

I am trying to be careful not to oversimplify this decision, by reducing it to an "if-then" statement. I could force my way back to school this fall even if God doesn't provide miraculously. I could take out some high-interest loans and just get my degree done. Maybe that is what God wants! Or maybe I will have an amazing financial aid package, making a way back to school this fall- but in spite of that, God could still want me here in Utah. What I really want is to follow God's direction. Coincidences do happen, and if I start interpreting tangible phenomena (such as finances) as the infallible word of God, then I will get myself in a whole lot of trouble. So this decision depends greatly on how my provision works out, but more important than that is what God's will actually is, regardless of how I might interpret any earthly happenings.

Naturally, determining God's will isn't simple either- and really that's a subject that could fill many books, so I won't get into here. I am just trying to listen with an open heart and avoid projecting my own desires and prejudices on the situation. There is also the possibility that God is giving me a choice here- after all, doesn't God preside over both Longview and Eprhaim? He is in both places, and where I go, he is there. He could have good things for me down both paths, and he is leaving it to me. Keeping that in mind, I need oven more discernment.

I would appreciate it if you, friends, would lift me up in prayer this week. I should be hearing back from Financial Aid any time now, and after that comes the decision. I have to be very careful to listen to God and not to myself. I need wisdom now, perhaps more than any other time- because this could determine more than just my disposition for the next year, but longer-reaching effect of what role ministry plays in my life, and perhaps even what the rest of my life looks like. I need wisdom. Pray also for God's provision for me either way- both options incur costs and require effort. I've raised some support to cover living expenses this summer, but if I stay in the ministry, that I will be looking at raising recurring support.

Through all this, I know that no matter where I am, God is with me. God's power isn't diminished by any wrong action I might make. Regardless of my physical circumstances, so long as I am pursuing him, things will end up alright. After all, the battle is already won, is it not?

Getting to Utah: An adventure and a half

2010-05-20T22:25:00.019-06:00

This post finds me sitting comfortably on the couch in the college house of Trigrace Ministries in Ephraim, Utah. Well there, now I've gone and ruined the ending. Most of you already know that I made it here safe, however, so I probably haven't ruined anyone's surprise. The story of how I actually got to this couch is full of surprises and adventure.

I started out with a commitment to come to Utah this summer but no idea how everything would come together. I had a faith conundrum on my hands- I trust God to provide for me everything that I need in order to do the things that he has given me to do in any situation. I also know that many times God's provision in my life comes in the form of the sweat of my brow, providing for myself through the abilities he has given me. If I merely have faith that God will provide and wait, without action, for the things I need to come to me- God's path in my life will wait unwalked because I have failed to put works behind my faith and go out there and get the things God has provided for me.

So I have a balance to keep- I have to actively work and pursue the provisions for my needs that God has given me, but I can't do that to the extent that I am failing to trust God in faith that he will provide in me. There are some times that I am perfectly content to make a leap of faith, knowing that no matter what end I find myself in, God will provide for me. There are other times when I know God has called me to be a good steward of the things he has given me, carefully preparing and using every available asset in concert in order to meet a challenge. The flip side of those is a leap of folly, when I step out in what I think is faith but is really foolishness, having failed to see what God wanted me to do and take a more difficult path. Finally I can be shortsighted to the faith and work so hard to ensure my success that I have provided for myself in blindness to the provision that God has, which I failed to see because I was either too busy making plans for myself or not trusting in God enough to give me what I need. All this factors into how I got to Utah- in this story, there was a lot of God's provision through the sweat of my brow- as well as the blood of my knuckles and the buzz of my alarm clock.

I find myself in late April with a commitment and desire to go to Utah to serve the Lord, but no plans or idea how it will all come together. The first and most obvious need is to actually get myself there- I explored all sorts of options. Flying in to Salt Lake City, hitchhiking, catching a ride with the north-bound Baja senior design team, even a possibility of borrowing a truck from a friend currently in Idaho. What ended up happening, however, is that God provided me with a steel steed to carry me all the way there. A benevolent graduating senior, a Mr. Caleb Reinking, had an old and slightly-unroadworthy Toyota Camry he needed to dispense with before he left LETU. He was looking to sell it for only $100-$200, but upon hearing that I would be taking it to America's foremost mission field this summer, he and his wife decided to just give it to me. It's at this point that I must warn you, reader, that things are going to get pretty long here. I'm going to recount all the details from Longview to Ephraim if for no other reason than my own reminiscing over it decades from now. In the meantime, perhaps you will find it fit to read- but if you find yourself at the end of this entry and shaking your head at how much time you spent (wasted?) reading it, remember that you were warned.

I had two main obstacles that I needed to take care of before I could hit the road to Utah: first, the car needed to actually be capable of taking me there. Second, I needed to complete the checkout process for my floor. When I got the car from Caleb, he told me it needed a few things- one or both of the CV joints were bad, the brakes needed work, one of the tires was low, and some brake lines were rusty and might need help soon. In fact the main thing I ended up working on was the brake lines. I never touched the CV joint and the brakes ended up being fine on all but one tire. I accidentally brought home brake shoes the first time, thinking for sure a 1990 Japanese econo-box would have drum brakes in the rear. Not this Camry, though- disks on all four corners! Classy! I took the Camry for a spin and stomped on the brakes a few times to diagnose- I got out to discover a steady and rapid drip-drip-drip of brake fluid from the middle of the car, where I found out the rear brake lines run. Uh-oh. After removing the plastic cover, I found that three of the five lines that ran there were incredibly rusty (as is the rest of the car). I was pulling strips of rust off held together by the paint that used to be on the outside of the steel lines. Bad news bears. Steel lines are no fun to work on. I resolved to get some nice rust-free Texas steel lines from a junkyard and patch them in. My research showed, unfortunately, that there is no easy way to safely join steel lines. The only safe and acceptable method is what's called a double-flare joint. It involves using a special tool to deform the steel on the line such that a special fitting can be tightened down on it and form a connection than can withstand the 1000+ psi transients present in brake lines. Unfortunately, I had eight of these flares to make under the car.

I took off to a local scrapyard with my friends Neuse and Guac. After a fair amount of searching, I found a Camry which I hoped would have the appropriate brake lines, but it was in a second row back from the lane, and sitting on its haunches in the dust with my brake lines right there under the car on the ground. I decided this was a time to accept the hard road and get that car lifted up enough to get at those brake lines. After a surprisingly long time searching the junkyard for a jack, I found a little one and tried lifting the car up, which was slow going both because I had to dig under the unibody rail to get the jack in under it and because there were no jack handles to be found, and I was using a bent-up hood support rod to turn the screw on the jack. It was slow going indeed.

Fortunately, however, Neuse and Guac were more optimistic and while searching for some internal trim for Guac's Pathfinder, hailed down one of the giant fork-loaders and sent him to help me out. The operator pulled out the car in front of the Camry, but informed me that he wouldn't be able to lift the Camry out because his forks were too short to get under it completely in the second row. Shucks. He was able to lift up the back of the car, however, and we stacked some discarded tires under the Camry so it would remain lofted up in the air. In a move sure to worry my mom, (sorry mom!) I found myself crawling under a car half-suspended in the air by its bumper, shifting tires around so that when the forks were withdrawn, the car would remain in its position, looking like a snapshot of a movie stunt with the car plummeting to earth nose-first. In this case there was no stunt driver, just me sweating it out in jean shorts underneath the car trying to cut the steel lines free. It was edging close to five o'clock, though- I had to work fast to get them out. Unfortunately, I hadn't brought the proper tools and was using a pair of vice grips and dikes to crush and cut the lines. Not very elegant... or fast. I was nearly done when a rattly old junkyard van arrived to tell us that it was quitting time. I asked for five more minutes, but understandably heard back that 5 o'clock is 5 o'clock. I've seen the way that the topology of a junkyard changes day to day- the line of cars that was there yesterday might be completely different today. I was worried that I would return Monday to find my prized Camry with it nearly-liberated brake lines nowhere in sight. I asked and was assured that the operator and counter man would not move the Camry from its perch until Monday after I came back and got my brake lines.

The weekend saw me give a short blurb at church about my summer plans. I handed out some copies of the recap I wrote up of my spring break mission trip to Utah which Corey and Patty had printed out. I was blessed to receive support from the church in prayer, and also a $50 donation from a friend. Thank you to my church friends, if you ever read this!

This upcoming week was made interesting by the finals I had. I had a final Monday morning preventing me from returning to the junkyard bright and early to glean my brake lines before anything bad could happen to them. When I came back in the afternoon with my freshman friend Josh in his (fitting for the task) Mustang, I was craning my neck around the corner of the junkyard to see if it remained in place- and there it was, sitting cockeyed in the air among all the other Japanese econoboxes. With the car in the air still, I was able to comfortably (if somewhat nervously) complete the extraction process without a time rush. I was hoping to take as much of the line as possible so that I could avoid coming back to my own Camry and finding that I hadn't gotten enough line to get past the (expansive) rusty portion. This was made complex by the fact that steel brake lines appear to be the first thing Toyota installs, with everything else piling in around it in fun locations sure to exclude the easy removal of a circuitously-bent steel tube. In order to get one of the lines, I ended up undoing the gas tank from its mounts and hoses to get at it. I would later find out that this wasn't actually a brake line, but a fuel vapor return line. It exists for emissions purposes, and could safely be left in its rusty state. Had I known that, I certainly wouldn't have bothered.

If you're an ecologically-conscious person, it may pay to skip the next few sentences. When I lowered said gas tank, I was surprised at its weight. I am fairly sure that automobile recyclers are supposed to drain all of a vehicle's fluids before condemning it to the scrapyard. This tank turned out to be full of gas. Not so much that it spilled all down my front as soon as I disconnected the filler neck, but enough to dump several gallons of gas on the ground when I shoved the car over to signal to the fork-loader operator that I was done with the it. Sorry, mother earth. Unburnt gasoline is supposed to be something like a million times worse for the environment than its combustion products.

With my ever-so-valuable brake lines in hand, I went forward to the front of the yard. I stopped at a Camry that was much closer to the front of the yard, and also much more accessible than the last one. Neuse and Guac had pointed it out during the first trip's closing-time march out the yard, much to my chagrin. Had I found that one first, I would have had my brake lines Friday instead of Monday. Shucks. I harvested a brake caliper from this one. I had very inconveniently sheared off one of the bolts in a rear caliper when trying to do the brakes the previous week. The bolt was sheared off deep enough that I would have to resport to die-grinding through part of the caliper to get it out, and count myself fortunate to have that opportunity due to the design of the part. I would need a new caliper, in any case.

With parts in hand, though, car repair would have to take a back seat. The feared checkout week had come, and I had my hands plenty full between checking each of my 31 residents out of their rooms and completing my remaining final exams. As a wise returning RA said, checkouts are the one time of the year when it pays off to be a jerk as an RA. Why? Because the RA is the one finally responsible for the cleanliness of the entire floor, including every room, and every mess that a resident left uncleaned was one I would have to clean myself. Therefore, almost all of my residents had to return to their drawers at least once with a moist paper towel to chase the last dust bunnies. Sometimes, though, I decided it was easier to clean the last bit of mess myself than return to an obstinate resident's room four times to tell them they hadn't actually cleaned anything.

I found some time to steal away and do some brake work on the car. While I would need a lift to do the real brake line work on the car, I could do the brake-pads-and-caliper job with just that wheel jacked up. As I mentioned before, though, I needed to grind through part of the caliper, a spacer sleeve in which the stub of the sheared-off bolt was hiding. Naturally I needed some power tools. [grunt grunt grunt] While the rules of the Machine Tool Lab don't specifically forbid backing a car in through the roll-up door to work on it, I'm not sure how it would have been received if a Figure of School Authority (other than myself) had walked in on the scene. I decided to plead the fifth if necessary- I needed this car to WORK! I closed the door behind me after the sketchy maneuver of backing-a-car-with-no-brakes-up-a-ramp-and-towards-a-two-ton-engine-lathe.

Soon after starting work, I discovered that I was the most epic of epic klutzes. Had I applied an iota of thought to my preparation for this work, I would have avoided the problem I now had: I had acquired a right-rear caliper to replace my left-rear one. I failed to note that there is actually a functional difference. The casting I had in my hand could never work in place of the one I had to grind through. I decided not to let this stop me, and ground through the sleeve on the old caliper anyway. I was able to remove the bolt handily enough with some vice grips. I found myself then in a strange position. The ground-through caliper was 'technically' usable. I hadn't ground into the cylinder, or through any fluid lines, and the new bolt could still go through where the sleeve had been and secure it in place. The sleeve, however, was a precisely machined component of the caliper that I had just ground off and was now lying on the ground amidst all the rust that inevitably comes off whenever I work on the Camry. Those of you familiar with disk brakes will know that they are a fairly precise mechanism, with the distance and perpendicularity between the two brake pads and the disc itself being fairly critical. The now-destroyed sleeve was half of the mechanism which kept those things within their operational tolerances.

My problem was fairly large. I could order a new caliper online or from a parts store, but junkyard-diving was not an option: the first Camry I found had drum brakes in the rear, and the one from which I harvested the caliper I had in hand from had the exact same problem mine had: some ham-fisted so-called-mechanic idiot (cough who could that be?) had sheared off the bolt holding it on. Despite the precise nature of the disc brake system, I justified/rationalized that I could get by with my old caliper. After all, brakes are a self-adjusting mechanism as the pads wear, and the remaining stud would keep things roughly in alignment anyway. Besides, I could slip some washers over the bolt where the sleeve had been in order to set the distance at least close to where it had been before to ensure things wouldn't get too out of hand.

Well, throw that out the window too because the second-hand junkyard brake pads were too thick. If the caliper still had it's proper sleeve, the new brake pads wouldn't work. At least problem #1 helped with problem #2. With my safety-system-integrity-flaunting decision made, I just bolted it all back together as near as I could guess would work. As an aside, some of you may be thinking "Ned is nuts. I would never let him work on my car with that kind of disregard for craftsmanship and safety!." I'll point out that I only ever gamble with my own neck- I wouldn't put this kind of sketchy work onto somebody else's car. And come on- it was the rear brake. Front brakes do 75% of the braking anyway. Job done!

I was able to take a bit of an adventure on Wednesday- I had some errands to run for car parts, and although I could have surely borrowed a car or truck, I decided to exercise my newly-acquired motorcycle license. I packed the brake shoes I needed to return into a backpack and rode Patches' sweet Honda CBR600F4 across town. I hate left turns, by the way. Ever since my wreck in Marshalltown I've been very apprehensive about making left turns through traffic. Pulling out from Autozone at 80 and Spur 63 is the worst. The combination of lights means a skittish driver like me has to wait a looong time to get a break in traffic. I'm sure that on a sportbike I could have darted out nearly any time and a proper application of riding skill would have kept me from trying to occupy the same space as another vehicle. However, for a new rider, that just wouldn't be wise. I'm not looking to evaluate my protective gear's capabilities first-hand.

On the same trip I had to pick up something at Hobby Lobby. It was a non-event, really, but I thought it was kind of funny to be walking through a crafts store in a motorcycle jacket and a helmet in hand, asking the craft lady where the bandannas were. (They were right behind me. She said so.) I also picked up the flare fittings I needed at a cool Volkswagen shop in town. It's of a dying breed, one being killed off by corporate chain stores. The guys working there are actually knowledgeable and give advice, and were able to get me all the fittings I needed. Eighteen bucks feels like a lot for a handful metal trinkets, but then again, an artificial heart will fit in my hand but is worth a lot more than that. My errands took a lot longer than I thought, and I ended up walking into my final a few minutes late and still in riding gear, to the amusement of Mr. Warke. I got my B, though, motorcycle gear or not.

By this time of the week, checkouts were at their peak and I was glad to have an incoming RA who was available at times when I was not in order to check out residents with tight schedules. I started to think more about fixing the car, but knew I could do nothing with it until at least after church on Sunday. I needed to work in Automotive Society, a club/building on campus with a car lift and some car-wise guys. Finishing my last final on Thursday was a relief. On Thursday night I met for the last time with some Mormon missionaries that a friend and I had been meeting with for the last month or so. We talked for a good two and a half hours and covered some serious topics. I pray still that God is at work there.

The next day was interspersed with checkouts all throughout the day. I felt like a jerk all day as I told my guys to sweep again, hit the drawers again, wipe the shelves again.. etc. I also discovered that the dining hall was closed, and I began to feed myself off of student chow left under the water fountain (free pile). Saturday smelled like a busy day a long way off. I had signed up to be an usher at graduation (easy money!) and had two graduation parties to attend before an RA last-hurrah party that evening. Busy, yes- but I don't feel like I can complain when two-thirds of the day is busy due to parties. Man, what a rough life I have! Juggernaut ever let me ride his motorcycle to one of the parties. Sheesh.

And now for an update from the slightly-illicit-fun department: part of cleaning up meant that all the old mattresses no longer fit for college-dorm duty had to be disposed of. We were getting rid of all the mattresses two years old and older, because we didn't know how old any of them were beyond that and all the newish and new mattresses were going to be labelled with a date. Therefore, we had a LOT of mattresses to get rid of- 20 or better. The natural, efficient way to move 20+ mattresses from the second floor to the dumpster is to pitch them all out of the bathroom window, then carefully arrange them in a landing zone and follow them out of said window. Here's a video of OT helping with the cleanup:

The fun didn't last long, however, as the Voice of Responsibility and Reason arrived shortly thereafter to remind us how silly we were being in our cleanup procedure. Naturally, the safe and wise way to arrive at the mattresses' location to haul them to the dumpster was to take the stairs.

My plan was to fix the car on Sunday night, wrap checkouts up on Monday morning, and hit the road to Dallas to stay with Tim Hutchens Monday night. I knew, of course, that chances were very good that this schedule would get pushed back. On Sunday morning I went to church as usual with Titus and Lydia, but Titus' parents were in town to see him graduate the day before. (Congrats, Titus!) This, combined with my unexpected bringing of a guest, made for a cozy car ride. At church received a warm send-off from the people there, more promises of prayer, and another gift of financial support.

When I got back from church it was time to face my challenges in earnest- getting the car on the road and getting the floor prepared for checkout. I have a couple contacts who are members of Automotive Society(AS), where I would do my car work, but unfortunately none of them were available to let me into the building for me to work until that night. I reversed my plans and decided to work on getting the floor spic and span so it would pass T-bird's white-glove inspection. In theory my room checkout inspections would have been strict enough to ensure that all the rooms would be this clean already. However, the reality is that sometimes I let residents go with a less-than-perfect room for my own sanity, I miss things, people have to leave in a rush... etc. I spent the afternoon cleaning up the rooms to T-bird level, mopping the bathroom, etc. I have heard stories before of RAs having to spend twelve additional hours cleaning up after T-birds inspection, and with my plans being as tight as there were, I figured that as long as I was waiting to get into AS anyway, I might as well make darn sure that the floor was as clean as possible to minimize the chances that I'd have to delay my departure to clean some more. Therefore, I scrubbed, swept, mopped, and vacuumed all with the utmost gusto.

My evening appointment came to work on the Camry. I brought it down to AS and got it up on the lift and began my work. On the junkyard car, where I performed the reverse procedure, I had the luxury of not caring about the rest of the car. This enabled me to drop the tank and forget about reinstalling it and to just cut, bend, and break things that got in my way. This handy fact was not true for my own Camry. I had to cut the lines beyond their zone of rust, which meant after they started curving up into the jungle of components that is the bottom of a modern, efficiently-engineering, emissions-compliant automobile. Snap. While the splice work up front would be fairly simple thanks to a long straight unrusty stretch, the rear work would be inside the jungle of car parts and linkages around the rear wheelwell. I swallowed in resignation to my fate and began diking out the old lines, the sound of brake fluid dripping into the catch pan below whispering to me that the point of no return had been passed.

At this point, as had happened many times before and would happen again soon, I wondered if rear brakes were really so important. I had asked my cardinal car guru friend, Micah, if I could get away with just closing off the rear brake lines and enjoying front brakes only. After all, front brakes, as we know, do 75% of the braking. Well, it is at this point at which a man must sit and think about just where his threshold of sketchiness-acceptance lies. I am willing to put up with a fairly high level of sketch in my vehicles (as the riders in my van to Utah know, thanks to my life story including many of them). However, having just plain ZERO rear brakes, and the front brake pressure being held in only by some half-witted plug, crimp, or braze job on the steel lines is just too sketchy. My sketchy side was telling me that hey, it wouldn't be that bad- at least the sketchy plug would be downstream of the proportioning valve, so I would still retain some front brake pressure in case my super-sketch rear line plug failed... right?

I decided it wasn't worth it. I would proceed as planned, just like Darth Vader proceeding to blow up Alderan even after Princess Leiiaiaiaiah gave in and revealed the location of the rebel base. Apparently, I'm nerdy enough to make that reference, but not nerdy enough to know how to spell Princess Leahehehiahaheiah. Until recently, I didn't know how to spell Albaquerqueueueueueuque either. After the rabbit-trail, though, the brakes would get their legitimate fix- complete with double flare fittings instead of the convenient-but-unsafe compression tube fittings. I'm building my good-mechanic cred.

That resolve to do things the right way took a nose-dive, however, when I discovered that AS's flare tool, critical to creating all of the connections, did not have the right size die to do my brake lines. Ooooh badnews. If there was no die, there would be no flared connections that night, and that meant no on-time departure. The temptation to lower my sketchiness-acceptance threshold was increasing. I didn't want to push back my departure by a day. I wanted this car just make it the 1337 (!) miles between Longview and Ephraim. I started consulting with the Car Guys about blocking the brake lines. Various options existed, but we had the parts for none of them, and as it was after midnight already none would be available until the next day. They pointed out that if I could trace the lines from the Antilock Braking System (ABS) pump, it wouldn't be that bad, probably, as long as the ABS pump didn't explode from the immediate and massive backpressure buildup.

If the Camry didn't have ABS I might have done it. But as it was, I stared at the jungle of steel lines under the hood and knew that among the things that shadetree mechanics should not meddle with, ABS was right there near the top of the list, right next to automatic transmission internals and alarm system wiring, where all of the thirty wires are the same color to confound theives. These things run on Magic, which is really expensive to replace if you mess it up.

I took my lumps and accepted a day-late departure. I would go to the parts store tomorrow and borrow a flaring took kit with a right-size die. I would come back the next day and finish the job, come hell or high water. Gosh darn it, I would be in Amarillo by morning. (That's not actually that far off, actually- my planned route would take me through Amarillo around noon on my second day of travel.)

Normally, nothing exciting really happens after one decides to call it quits for the night. On car shows on TV it always just happens with a burly guy with a mustache throwing a rag on a table and a shot of the shop lights turning off from outside. Not so in my case. As you recall, I cut the brake lines completely away after I got the car on the lift. Before, I thought I had no brake pressure due to the leak. I was wrong. Now, with the brake lines completely gone, I KNEW I had no brake pressure. I backed the car off of the lift, which actually takes a fair amount of gas pedal because you have to make it over the hump. I was rolling backwards towards somebody's project Case-IH Scout behind the lift, and my foot went STRAIGHT to the floor on the brake pedal, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Omigosh. There was a Rational Thing To Do, of course- I could put the car in neutral and apply the parking brake. I didn't do that. I slammed it into park and listened to the loud click-click-grind as the dog teeth on the park mechanism in the poor transmission caught the still-moving vehicle and squeeked the tires with the sudden stop. Moments like these are the ones that give mechanics that lump in the throat feeling like they just might have caused a much bigger problem than the one they are working on.

As a small consolation, the Rational Thing To Do wouldn't have worked either, as the parking brake was so worn from being used as a last-ditch-maneuver brake on this brake-deficient car that it wouldn't have done anything anyway. So really, I had actually made the right decision on impulse. I can't take credit for it, though- as I did out out of panic, not out of reason or honed instinct. I'm still an idiot, even if the idiot thing to do was actually the right thing, as transmission-punishing as it was. I managed to get the car rolled onto the grass outside safely- although I opted to push it rather than risk another engine-powered zero-brake adventure.

Monday's sun rose and I found myself in the same predicament as Sunday- car work desperately needing to get done, but impossible to do without AS being open. There was still plenty of floor-cleaning to do, though. The original plan was to have a working car at this point, and to finish clean-up and inspection by afternoon so I could roll out to Dallas in the evening and spend the night at Tim Hutchens' place, ready to to embark fresh in the morning. As I did all my stuff on Monday, however, I realized just how impossible it would have been to get out of town that day even if I had had a working Camry. It was still not in my name, inspected, insured, or registered. All that needed to happen before I could roll out, in addition to all my cleanup and fixing.

I would take care of what I could, though, while I had time. I cleaned and cleaned. I went to AutoZone and got the flaring tool with the right-size die. I cleaned some more. I ate an MRE. I cleaned. I went down to the Reinking's apartment and officially 'bought' the Camry, which was essentially a gift anyway. I texted T-bird that my hoped inspection time was delayed by a day. T-bird had an impression that I would be leaving Wednesday, an impression I might have given him a few weeks before in an RA meeting. I decided to stick with the mantra to under-promise and over-deliver. If I could leave earlier than Wednesday, I'd look good- rather than having plans in stone for Monday and looking incompetent when a postponement became necessary.

All my delays to my already-late departure had an upside or two, though. The school's staff cleaning crew was coming through already, and before my inspection- meaning that even though I had already cleaned pretty thoroughly, the janitors were coming through and giving it a professional job, and before my inspection. Score! That's insurance for getting a clean bill of... er.. cleanliness.

In the afternoon, I decided I could at least do something on the car, if not the main job of brake lines. The parking brake I mentioned before is adjustable. While it was useless the night before, a tensioning of a certain cable would bring the friction material closer to the inside of the drum, meaning that when I wrenched up on the brake lever in a panic, the car would actually decelerate and stop rather than careening into the nearest fruit stand. I had left my toolbox and materials in AS next to the lift the night before, though, so I was hoping I could manage the simple job with only a leatherman.

I might have been able to, but I didn't have to. When I got down to in front of AS where my car was parked, I saw signs of life- another car parked out front. I tried the front door, and open it came. Bonus! Now I would access to my tools and brake lines and get some of the work done in advance. A guy I didn't know was sitting on one of the couches inside. He must be a trusting guy (I forget his name), though, because he had no problem when I asked if I could take all my tools and stuff outside and work. He had to leave shortly, otherwise I might have asked about pressing my luck and putting the Camry up on the lift and getting to work. That would have been superfluous, though, as there was plenty of preliminary work to do before I needed the lift.

With the aid of the service manual that I got from the Reinkings with the title and papers, I discovered that the properly adjusted brake lever should click between five and eight times when adjusted to spec. Mine clicked eleven times. Ouch. Fortunately, the adjustment is an entirely inside-the-car procedure. That doesn't mean it's not capable of being irritating, though. Interior trim works is always a Chinese puzzle box to get off. The courteous "don't forget your keys, mister!" beeper will go off when the door is open and the key in, meaning any music one tries to play while working with ones lower half extending out the driver's door to work is accented by a staccato bong-bong-bong-bong-bong endlessly. Look, Camry- I know the keys are in the ignition. Shut it. The Camry also has those totally 1990's automatic seatbelts, for which a mechanism exists right behind the brake lever, adding a level of complexity to the Chinese puzzle box.

A proper application of tools, patience, skill, and euphemism-utterances got the jamb nuts that adjust the brake cable managed. I was down to a nice and tight five clicks, which would assure me maximum parking brake performance in case my should-be-legit brake job pulled a Chernobyl. I decided to do that before taking on the preliminary work for the main brake job because it is always a good idea to have your factory-equipped backup plan functional to stop your car when your brakes have any degree of sketch to them.

Now I got to move on to the task of flaring the brake lines. There were three lines that needed to be replaced, and two of them needed to be flared. I had the new sections to go in, and each of the ends of those would need to be flared, as well as the ends of the sections still on the car that I would be splicing to. I would need the car up on the lift to to the latter, but I could work on the former in the open. The AS member who was there was leaving, so I just worked on it outside on top of the Camry.

In every instruction set that exists for how to flare brake tube, there exists in very large print a warning: ALWAYS PUT THE FLARE NUT ON THE TUBE BEFORE FLARING THE TUBE. This is because it is impossible to get the flare fitting on after- flaring expands the tube, and naturally, the close-fitting flare nut won't fit over afterwards. Despite how obvious this step is, everyone makes this mistake at least once. I swore I wouldn't- I would use my careful approach and analytical skills to avoid making the rookie mistake. Naturally, I failed. The very first flare I made looked really good- except that there was no flare nut behind it. Off it had to come, and since I only had my hand tools to work with, I had to file the whole thing off. Well, the more dearly one pays for a lesson, the better it will stick.

Flaring is a pretty menial and time consuming job, the kind of thing that clever engineers have made specialized machines for that will do the job that takes me 15 minutes to do in a swift three-second operation at a button-press. Doing the task on the trunk of my Camry and in a brisk wind took about two hours and a few scares after the plastic-bagged fittings blew off and I briefly thought I had purchased the wrong amount. I eventually got the two brake line sections flared and was prepared to do my work on the lift that evening.

Afterward, I went down to Titus and Lydia's apartment, where they had invited me to dinner. Titus was experimenting with marinating chicken in Dr. Pepper. This actually turned out pretty well- Dr. Pepper has most of what a marinade does- acidity, sugar, and flavor. Titus noted, however, that one missing ingredient was salt. He said he'd try it again. I visited with the Lepics for a while before I had to depart for AS to meet Tim, who was letting me in, at 8:00.

I was worried when I entered, because there was already a car on a lift- uh oh. Fortunately, work hadn't started on it yet, and the owner didn't mind pulling it off and doing the strut replacement with a floor jack so that I could use the lift. After getting the Camry on the lift, I settled in for the hours of work I knew I had ahead of me. It was rather long and tedious, with not much to write about. I flared the brake lines attached to the car. It took a long time. I was down to the last of the four I had to do, and it was a bear. I remember proclaiming aloud (although to myself, due to the nearly-empty shop) that I was clamping down on the brake line for the last time. I was wrong, unfortunately, as I apparently hadn't clamped hard enough and ended up with a botched flare. I did the dang-it-I-screwed-up ritual of fuming while I hand-filed off the botched flare and trying again- success! ...only when I went to actually screw down the connection, the threads didn't fit- argh! I had grabbed the wrong size flare nut when I put it on, and it was now trapped behind the flare.

I had a moment or two of panic while I carefully sorted through all the plastic wrappers that the flare nuts came in, petrified that I had too many of the big size and one short of the small size. After searching through my toolbox and bag, laying everything out neatly on the floor, I found a plastic wrapper that still had a small flare nut in it. Whew. I still needed to cut off the beautiful second flare I had just done to get it on, but at least I had the materials I needed. After a bunch more monkeying around with the flaring tool, I finally had all the flare nuts on, and found that all the flare nuts agreeably threaded into each other finger-tight: right sizes all around. Finally! Done with flaring! I used the borrowed flare nut wrench set to tighten down all the connections.

Tightening down the connections is non-trivial, as when you are torquing the nut into the fitting,you are actually deforming the steel line non-trivially to make it fit the fitting with absolute conformance. The word here is 'torque'. Lots of it is required. The people I talked to said just to torque it down as hard as I could without stripping anything out. Well, that's sort of a conundrum. I'm going to be able to torque it down more than a six-year-old girl and Ahhnold Schwarzenegger is going to be able to torque it down more than me. And you never know when you're about to strip a fitting, it just comes sort of all at once. Well, that is to say, unless you've stripped a great many fasteners in your life and sort of have an idea of just how much abuse a fastener can take before it gives you the proverbial finger and gives up on being a hexagon and decides that life as an irregular circle is less likely to garner more abuse from a ham-fisted idiot mechanic. Like me. So I torqued them down until I estimated I was near the point of fitting capitulation.

If you're familiar with the operation of hydraulic systems (like brakes), you will know that it is necessary to ensure that there is no air in the fluid system. The reason for this is that air is compressible, whereas the basic mechanism of operation for hydraulic systems is that the working fluid is incompressible, and therefore relative motion is absolute. If air is in the system, then the motion of me pressing on the brake pedal does not have an absolute relationship to the brake pad being pressed against the disc, resulting in me crashing into a moose or truck or child or fruit stand. Therefore, air in the lines = collision with fruit stand, just like in the movies.

The act of mangling the brake lines severely and splicing in new (air-filled) sections meant that my brake system contained probably half it's own volume in air. Bleeding brakes takes two people - one to pump the brake pedal and one to work the valve at the brake caliper. I enlisted the help of James Wolfe (who apparently sleeps at AS frequently, which meant I had the convenience of being able to work through the night) to help bleed the air from the brakes. This took a while but the job got done. (thanks James!) This was the beginning of the end- was the brake pedal firming up? Were the newly-rigged brake lines holding pressure? Hard to know. After the brakes were bled and the pedal apparently possessive of a normal amount of firmness (according to James). I let the car down and stomped on the brake pedal violently a few times, which ought to simulate the worst-case scenario for pressure building in the brake lines. I got out and lifted the car again- holding my breath: would there be brake fluid seeping from the new connections? Gushing? Would they be completely dry?

A grin spread across my face as I saw that each of the connections was entirely devoid of brake fluid. Hooray! The ludicrous-torque method had worked! The hours of being dirty under the car had paid off! This was the moment when I knew I would be on the road to Utah. With a car that moved and stopped, nothing could get in my way- no matter what other problems the car had, it could get to Utah. Yes! Thank you God for a working car! He always provides. I cleaned up and went for a test ride. Bear in mind I'd never had the car over 25 mph because I could only drive it on campus and with shoddy brakes. I took it out on the real road and got up to 50mph and was satisfied with having a working car. Hooray! It was only as I was pulling back into campus that I remembered I still didn't have insurance. Whoops! Good thing it was 2AM with no other cars on the road to speak of. With this job done, I cleaned up and went to bed.

The next day would be departure day- but there was a lot to do. I started off the day with the breakfast of champions: insurance shopping. As usual, Geico was cheapest for me and I ended up going with them. I might have been able to save $20 from some obscure company, but with the day so packed, it wasn't worth spending the requisite hours on. There was a lot to get done- the car still needed to be inspected and registered, then I needed to pack myself, clean my room and do all the other cleaning the floor needed, and do my walkthrough with T-bird. Phew. I decided to do the inspection first, as it was the most likely of anything to throw a wrench in my plans. I took it down to the shop Mr. Arden used to own. I had a moment of slight panic while I was driving down there when a police cruiser appeared behind me- but apparently the cop wasn't worried at all about a sketchy Camry rolling down the street without plates. Go figure.

Unfortunately, the Camry did not get off with a clean bill of health. I was most worried about the notable exhaust leak or perhaps that the brake repair would catastrophically pop during the test drive and the test tech would crash into a fruit stand. That would probably fail the inspection. What got me, though, was more mundane- a small broken section in the driver's side rear tail light was letting white light shine through, which is contraindicated by the test requirements. I didn't think it actually was visible from behind, but I'm not the one administering the test. Therefore, I knew I needed to make a trip to Joe-boy's to get a taillight. This time I knew where the Camry was (hopefully would still be) and the procedure to take the light out should be fairly simple. I took the offending light out of my Camry to make sure that if there were going to be any problems with the operation, I would find out before I was in the junkyard. It was simple after all, except for the inconvenience of the sealant Toyota used to keep water out of the trunk, which was a tar-like stuff about the consistency of mozzarella cheese and as sticky as honey.

My longsuffering friend Titus let me borrow his truck for probably about the billionth time since I've known him, and I took off to get my taillight. I also needed to return the flare tool to Autozone. I went to leave about four or five times before I actually made it off campus. I would make it as far as Glaske and remember that I had to go back for something- first it was the flare tool, then the receipt for the flare tool, then two or three other things. Crazy. I was also confusing the snot out of some people in Titus' parking area, who apparently were trying to learn to drive stick while I was maniacally driving around them several times in my rush to get out of dodge. At one point I was trying to sneak behind them and they started rolling backwards on an incline. Hill starts in a manual are very tricky for a novice, and I probably made the driver very nervous. After I left I noted somewhat sarcastically that I had left the parking lot three times in a stick vehicle before they had left once.

Once I was departing for the last time, I looked in my rearview mirror to see a grey plastic bag fluttering out of the bed of the truck- oh snap! That bag had the Autozone receipt in it! And now it is blowing away! I did a quick U-turn and doubled back, watching the bag blow across the field between MSC and AS2. I pulled quickly into the MSC parking lot, cutting it off at the pass. I leapt out of the truck and positioned myself to intercept the bag, which was now blowing obliquely toward me. There were some pedestrians nearby watching my antics, and they probably thought I was nuts. I caught it, but a thorough search revealed no receipt inside. Shucks. Hopefully Autozone would be able to look it up.

The cross-town trek was unadventurous, except that while I thought I was being clever taking guessed-at shortcuts, I'm pretty sure I took the long way. I've been living in Longview for four years now and I still don't know my way around very well. Autozone was in fact able to look up the receipt from my phone number, and I was able to return the flaring tool uneventfully. Hooray for zero-cost tool loans. At this point I was actually closer to another junkyard I know, which probably would have a Camry, but I knew that Joe-boy's had at least one and I decided to go there rather than risk the closer one not having any. During this drive I also did the whole talking-on-cell-phone-while-driving-a-manual operation, which is exciting for the person on the other end of the phone because they get to listen to engine noise mid-sentence every time I need to shift. I don't remember what the call was, only that it was important enough for me not to want to hang up prematurely but also needing to not stall traffic. Hmph.

Once I got into Joe-boy's (they are charging $3 admission now), I reflected that I shouldn't have worn sandals. All that sand, and the dangers of the junkyard- broken glass and sharp metal- mmm. To my surprise and pleasure, the same Camry was sitting exactly where and how I left it, cocked up at a weird angle on a stack of tires- even though the topography of the cars around it had changed significantly. I was able to pull the taillight assembly in no time. The office guy asked $35 for it, and I countered with $30- he said he'd take it- but as I was counting how much cash I had on hand ($27) he told me just to pay the $25 I had in my hand. Sweet! I stopped at Taco Casa on the way back and got some real food to eat because I was tired of eating cold MRE food. I acquired a taste for Taco Casa when we ate it for lunch during the Spring Break Missions fundraiser car wash. I thought it fitting that Taco Casa was keeping me going for mission work.

I got back to campus and had the new taillight in just as quickly as it went out. I drove the Camry back over to be reinspected and had no problems- the test tech was surprised to see me back with the problem solved only two hours later. He must have figured that I meant it when I said I needed to get out of town in this car ASAP. The rest of the inspection went smoothly except for a moment of panic when he pulled out some kind of gun-like apparatus for testing my gas cap, presumably to ensure no gas vapors could leak out into the atmosphere. Perhaps they just started doing this recently, I've never seen it before. Given that the car is 20 years old, I was worried it might not pass and I'd be on an errand to get yet another unanticipated fix done. It passed, though, so I was happy. With my handy inspection sticker displayed proudly in the lower driver's side corner of my windshield, I was good to go. I also got a slip to take to the courthouse as proof that I was inspected.

My next stop would be the courthouse to get the car legal. I still needed to print the insurance and directions to Utah, so I stopped into the Longview Hall computer labs to do that. Unfortunately, something had gone wrong with the PDF I had sent myself of the directions to Utah, so I had to run back to my room to re-do them, as I couldn't remember the addresses of where I was to go. I was making two stops before Ephraim, Utah- on in Irving, TX with Tim Hutchens, and one with some second-degree friends of the family in Albuquerque. With all that finally printed off, I headed to the courthouse in Titus' truck to do the deed.

This was the last hurdle in getting the car Utah-bound. There was no real reason why the car ought not to be completely legal and no reason why the registration ought not to go smoothly. I'd wager that most readers have some sense of fear and trembling when it comes to the DMV, though- they have the power to make your life miserable when it comes to cars, and often appear to do so according to unknown and arbitrary rules. It's the same reaction to seeing a police cruiser on the highway- you are doing the speed limit, but you instinctively hit the brakes anyway, by instinct. Just the presence of an authority like that makes one feel guilty automatically. ...or maybe it's just me. In any case, whenever I go to the auto registrar, I always put on my extra-nice face. I'm usually pretty nice to begin with (I hope), but I am super bubbly and friendly and sickly-sweet when to go in there. I want to gain as much buffer from sourness as I can.

The lady that helped me was also nice, so no real problems existed. The one thing that came up is that I have two names- Ned and Edward. I signed the back of the title as Ned (like I normallly do) but my legal name is Edward. The signature on my driver's license is actually Ned, so it's not completely illegitimate. The lady filled out a form called "statement of fact" that Ned and Edward are in fact the same person. Last time I was there, registering the Montero, I got them to give me a license plate that contained a power of two (HZN-164). I asked the same this time, and because they were not busy, they actually went to all of the desks and found a liscense plate that was ***-R256. That makes it easy to remember. I wonder if I can have power-of-two license plates all my life. In the end, I think the registration fees and tax actually cost me more than I spent on the car and repairs combined. I could use that fact to say that the fees are expensive and our government is bloated, or I could say that God blessed me with such an inexpensive car that the amount I actually laid out was trivial. I choose the latter.

I got back and things were getting quite underway- the car was drivable and legal, so now it was just down to being ready to leave in terms of packing and being squared away with T-bird for checkouts. My room had been getting packed over the past few days while I had time waiting to get into AS or somesuch. There was still a load of stuff that needed to go over to my storage van - everything that wasn't coming with me. It turns out I missed some things I should have stored- you know thing are getting down to the wire with packing when your peanut butter is in the same box as your spare video card.

The biggest item on that list was my ATV, which has been sitting on campus since I quasi-finished it over christmas break. It still needs a few things, but it moves under its own power. In anticipation of needing to move it, during the last week of school I had moved it up close to the building so I could charge the battery. Tyler wanted to ride it before he left, so when he was just on his way out of town we fired it up and he rode it around the parking lot, discovering that it has a dangerous predilection to want to throw the rider in turns. Something is jacked up with the front suspension- the front wheel on the outside track of the turn wants to camber in during turns, which is bad news. Gotta fix that before it can be ridden. I loaded it up into Titus' truck using the Belcher-loading-dock method and piled all my other stuff in around it.

I had made a van run earlier the week before and got a chance to speak with Mr. Arden, whose land I am storing the van on. He was very generous to let me park it there all the way back in 2007, with our original agreement that it would remain for about a year. It's been much longer now, and I didn't ever see him since then so I had no idea if he was completely cool with the idea of having the van back there still, or if he wanted to get rid of it ASAP but could never get in touch with me. I'd left him notes a few times over the years, but I was still nervous every time I drove to the van that he'd come out of his house shaking a broom and shouting at me to get that darn ugly van out of here. (He'd be entirely justified) I needn't have worried, though, as Mr. Arden has not a mean bone in his body. I caught him in his shop and we were able to catch up for a while. He was not at all worried about the van still being back there and was very friendly, and told me I could keep it there as long as it took to graduate. Phew- good to know.

On this last trip, I took things like my bike, fridge, Tanner's old scooter, boxes, etc with me. I forgot I was supposed to leave the bike with Darly for the summer- oops! My bike lock apparently bounced off of the handlebars during the drive over and is decorating the Texas roadside somewhere. Darn.

Inching ever closer, I was now ready to pack the Camry. I was scheduled with T-bird to check out at 4:30. The Brakers were returning to town at 5:00 or so, and I had planned on leaving no earlier than that so that I could see them and say goodbye before the summer. 5:00 seemed like a late time to be staying around, as I wanted to get to Dallas that night as early as I could, but realistically I never would have gotten out of town before then anyway. It was good to see them again before I left. T-bird was a wee bit late for checkout anyway due to some meeting running long, so I got to actually chat with the Brakers some instead of just waving goodbye. By this point I had the Camry mostly packed and my room cleaned up. They helped by accepting a box of random leftover camping food and stuff, in addition to the Mac I agreed to post on ebay for them ages ago but never have. Sorry for so many empty promises, guys- I will do it sometime!

Walkthrough is a daunting time. It's the first time you've ever done it, generally, and you've been given reason to expect the worst. As I mentioned above, though, the cleaning crew was already coming through and doing their thing on all the rooms, so really I got off easy. All the extra cleaning I had done was being followed up on, so all we really did was clean out some drawers as T-bird directed, clean some glass, and make sure that each room's condition forms were in order and any necessary fines would be dealt with. We were done in 30 minutes, which T-bird remarked was probably the quickest checkout he'd ever done. He was also probably being sensitive to my readiness to leave and schedule to keep. I also found out that the directive to discard all the old mattresses was actually in error, and they were supposed to go out at the end of the summer rather than the beginning, as LETU hosts summer camps. Oh well- looks like 2A won't be hosting any summer kids.

After my final handshake with T-bird, all that was left to do was fill my water bottle and get on the road. Finally! After all these 10,416 words of preparation, I was ready to go. I checked my tire pressure. I cleaned my windshield. I visited the restroom. And after all that, I got in the car and drove off campus for the summer. Woo! After a gas stop, I was on the long road. It would be 1337 miles to Ephraim, Utah from Longview, TX. I’d made arrangements to stay with Tim Hutchens in the Dallas area for the night- this allowed me to beat the Dallas traffic and to slightly shorten the distance I’d have to travel spread out over two days- a little head start. Leaving from Dallas in the morning meant I’d drive a 10 hour day and an 11 hour day subsequently, rather than making those longer.

The real bonus, though, was that I got to visit with Tim overnight. I arrived early enough in the evening (8:00?) that we were able to spend some time catching up and talking and sharing a meal. I hate it when I am staying the night with someone and I just show up late, leave early, and feel like I just used them as a hotel. Tim and I walked over to a local grocery store and got some fancy soda, which is a habit that Tim is making into a tradition- his mantle is adorned by a collection of fancy soda bottles, reminders of visitors he’s had. Neat. Another neat feature of Tim’s apartment is a super-cool quilt his sister made for him. Because Tim was so involved with leadership and activities at LETU, he ended up with a quite a few T-shirts during his tenure there- too many to reasonably keep around, but many too sentimentally-valuable to simply discard. He gave his sister a bunch of these T-shirts and she made them into a super-cool quilt. Tim’s sister- I don’t know you, but I give you a high-five for such a cool creation. I wish I had an industrious sister like you to convert my voluminous t-shirt collection into a quilt.

The next morning I took off when Tim did, around 7:30. Because I was leaving the city, I didn’t hardly have to worry about traffic. What I did have to worry about, however, was a flat tire. Darn. When I walked out to the Camry, I found one of the tires was low. Drivable to a nearby service station, but not fit for highway travel. I checked the pressure- 20psi. Down from 35 the day before at my departure. Caleb had pointed out to me that it had gotten low during the two months he’d not been driving it. It’s strange that it would hold pressure for a week or two when I was working on it at school, but then die in the span of 16 hours or so. My theory is that the driving on it is what actually caused the leak. Perhaps there is a little hole someplace that has enough compression to remain closed normally, but rotating at 1000 rpm, every time it hits the ground it lets a little bit of air seep out. Could be.

In any case, I needed this to be fixed before I could hit the highway again. I drove out of Tim’s neighborhood and a commercial area around the onramp where I was supposed to get on the highway. Just beyond the overpass, I spotted a Firestone- perfect. I pulled in and told them my predicament (as if a tire tech wouldn’t have spotted the low tire from 60 yards). They told me they could affect a repair for $30 and within 45 minutes or so. I agreed, handed over the keys, and resolved to find some breakfast.

Next door was a Panera bread, which I briefly entered but decided I could do better after viewing their menu full of $6 breakfast sandwiches. I spied a Kroger grocery store across the street and decided to do the frugal thing. I played frogger across the six-lane street between Firestone and the grocery and survived. This Kroger was apparently a pretty upscale one- everything was all fancy-like. They had an olive bar. Sheesh. I got myself a half-pound of ham and a loaf of bread. I contemplated getting a head of lettuce to complement my sandwiches but figured that it’d go to waste sans refrigeration. One might argue the same about the ham, but it's not really negotiable. I picked up some mayo packets from their deli (no mustard, darn) and checked out. I made myself some sandwiches while sitting at the patio furniture they had on display out front. I wondered if passers-by would think I was a hobo. I decided my t-shirt was classy enough to accurately place me as a college student. After having only killed about 20 minutes this way I decided some yogurt was in order, and also got a container thereof. I almost left it in the store, though, as I already had a Kroger bag in hand still containing my sandwich fixings. The deli again provided; a spoon this time. I contented myself with strawberry yogurt and moseyed back to the Firestone to check in and wait for the car to be done.

I found, though, that I would have done well to come back sooner as they were unable to do the repair. The tire has previously had fix-a-flat used on it, which is a goopy substance that comes in an aerosol can and can be used to re-inflate and sometimes ghetto-patch a tire in an emergency situation. Unfortunately, it makes a sticky mess out of the inside of the tire, creating difficulty for any tire guy that wants to work on it. Most tire chains refuse to work on a tire that has previously been fix-a-flat’ed. They offered to sell me a new tire for $60 plus installation, and also informed me that the results of their 27-point inspection were that my car had 27 things wrong with it. I told them that I had bought the car for $20 and couldn’t really justify all the repairs they wanted to do, and really wanted to get back on the road. They said they could put the spare on for me and I could try another tire shop nearby which had used tires, a cheaper alternative. I agreed, but we quickly found that my trunk was filled with junk, so getting at the spare would be a hassle. I told them they could just put air in the bad tire and that’d be enough to get me a few miles down the road to find another, sketchier, tire shop.

I figured that if the tire had gotten to a low-but-drivable condition in two hours last night, I could safely check on it after an hour this morning. I followed my directions out of town, and was reminded that I had promised myself that I would buy a GPS before attempting any more road trips. (I broke that promise, under the circumstances). Whenever I drive in urban jungles, I always get confused. Am I on the right road? Every road has four names, and when construction hits everything just gets doubly confusing. In the end I resisted my ever-present urge to give into the thought that “surely I have missed my turn, I should pull off and turn around”. I managed to get out to Dallas and on the northwest road just fine.

During my hour, I discovered that there was one problem with the Camry that bothered me above all the others. It was developing a problem with the tape deck: about once per song, the stereo would suddenly emit a very loud SCREEEEEEEEE sound that would not go away until you ejected the tape and put it back in. The sound didn’t come from the speakers, but from the tape unit itself. I tried jamming things into the tape opening to see if perhaps I could free something that was jammed. I tried smacking my tape-to-MP3 adapter around to see if that was the problem. I wasn’t looking forward to another 21 hours in the car with this issue.

After an hour had passed, and I was starting to notice the Camry wanting to pull to the left, I pulled over into a gas station to check the tire. One look told me all I needed to know- the tire had gotten as low in one hour that morning as it had in two hours the night before. The problem was intensifying, not ongoing. It needed to be fixed before I could go on. I was in a pretty small town- Decatur, TX. I craned my neck to look around to see if there were any tire shops nearby. Well, wouldn’t you know it, there was a little tire shop 300 feet down the road. I pulled a little bit of slightly-illicit wrong-lane driving and pulled into their parking lot.
Unfortunately, they catered more towards larger vehicles and farm equipment and had no tires my size, nor any 15-inch rim tires at all. A phone call to their local competitor (whose number they cheerfully furnished from memory, apparently competition in North Texas is friendly) confirmed they had the same story. Shucks. I figured I’d get back on the road; maybe I could get 30 minutes out of the tire this time and find another tire shop that would work. Little did I know, though, that tire salvation was close at hand. I pulled my car around back and was going to fill my tire, but the young man working there said he’d do it for me. Just to check, I asked him if it was possible to repair a tire that had previously been fix-a-flat’ed. He said it was. Hooray! I asked him if he could do so for my car. Sure enough, it would be no problem and they could do it right away. He got to work.

While the young man was doing his thing, I began to be impressed by this little shop. At a commercial chain, surely at this point they’d be stretching on a plastic steering wheel cover to keep technician’s greasy fingerprint off of my obviously-already-greasy steering wheel, and walking around the car with a clipboard doing a 27-point inspection. That is great on someone else’s $60k Caddilac, but on my $20 beater Camry it’s just a waste of time. The guys at North Texas Tire didn’t fool around. While the young man worked on my tire, I watched at the shop’s presumed proprietor got some work done. He had a PT cruiser pulled into the bay- he had it jacked up, tire off, tire aired down, tire removed from rim, new tire mounted, reinflated, balanced, and mounted back on the car with all four wheels on the ground in what couldn’t have been more than four minutes. After watching that work I was sure my tire was in good hands.

The young man working on my tire wasn’t quite as fast, but he got the job done quickly nonetheless. I am actually not entirely sure what he did while repairing, all I know is that at some point the inside of my tire was on fire, and a few minutes later I was good to go again. And how much did they charge me for the lightning-quick service on a tire that the last shop wouldn’t touch? All of ten bucks out the door. If you ever need a tire in Decatur, TX, then don’t neglect North Texas Tire.

Getting back on the road I reflected on just how much of a godsend that little tire shop was. God knew I needed a tire, and that I didn’t want to waste his money on a new one that would outlast a car I only needed to eek 1141 more miles out of. I’d hardly have been surprised if I went back the next day and found there was no tire shop there at all, God had just popped one down for the 20 minutes that I needed one, right there.

I was on the phone with my parents telling them of my renewed safety on the road thanks to God’s provision when the rainstorm of the century hit. I was glad my tire problems had hit when they had- only 15 minutes later, and I would have been dealing with the problem in the driving, pouring rain. I’ve only seen rain that intense one time before in my life. It slowed everyone on the road way down- I could only barely see the car ahead of me with wipers on high. I would guess that North Texans are oddly proud of their freakish rain. Intense though it was, it was brief- only about 20 minutes and things had cleared up to a steady drizzle.

After that, it was down for the long haul. There are lots of long, boring straight roads through North Texas and New Mexico on the way to Albuquerque. Unfortunately, those long, straight roads lulled me into complacency. I looked down to realize that I was low on gas. Really low- the light would be coming on any minute. Ohhhhhhbad. I’m in the middle of nowhere, Northeast New Mexico. This is the point where I start praying that I will make it to the next gas station. I estimate that I’ll get 30 miles after the light turns on before the engine sputters to a halt. I watch the light turn on as I’m seeing signs for towns about 30 miles away. Phew… this is going to be close. My friends have heard a lot of stories about me running out of gas in sketchy ways before, so I’m no stranger to the experience. I actually once managed to run out of gas and get a flat tire at the same time.

Finally, I see an overpass coming up- an exit! Woo! I might make it! As I get closer I start examining the skyline for gas stations- I see a big truck stop on the other side of the highway, but I’m worried- the blue signs advertising services haven’t shown any gas stations. Additionally, the truck stop has a big ‘DIESEL’ sign… only. But surely a truck stop will have gas too, right? I decided to chance it. I got off at the exit, navigated the overpass and arrived at the truck stop- I looked around for gas pumps and saw none- everything was marked diesel. Oh darn.

I’m nearly running on fumes and I’ve made an unnecessary detour. I head back to the highway, and somehow find myself on an access road that is joining up with the highway eastbound. I must have missed a turn, but I swear I never saw a sign for the westbound lane. Maybe I needed to leave the truck stop going the other direction. In either case, I was now headed the wrong way on the highway, making negative progress with nil gas. Each foot I covered now would burn its own gas, plus the gas I’d have to burn making that foot up the opposite direction. Generally, the little gravel turnarounds on a divided highway are ‘for official use only’- but I saw one that wasn’t marked as such and decided I’d take the next one, which mercifully was only a mile or so down the road. I braked hard to get into the 20-foot long gravel strip with no run-down lane, and punched the accelerator hard to get up to speed on the highway ahead of the approaching traffic- burning a whole lot of fuel at wide-open throttle. I start to pray harder that the next exit will not be much further away, and that it will have gas.

An episode of Top Gear comes to mind in which Jeremy Clarkson is trying to drive to London to Edinburgh and back on a single tank of fuel- some 800 miles. He employs tons of crazy fuel economy techniques, not of which are applicable to me, but I remember one thing- as he is getting to the very end of his fuel, he can start to hear the whine of the fuel pump after it has pumped the tank dry and is now churning air. I tried to listen for that sound myself (morbidly, perhaps), but Jeremy Clarkson was driving a fancy luxury Jaguar with tons of silencing and sound-deadening pads to kill engine and road noise, and I was driving a rusty Japanese econobox with an exhaust leak. The chances of me hearing the fuel pipe whining on air were from impossible to almost not impossible.

I made it a point not to count the miles since the ‘E’ light had turned on, as there was nothing I could do about it. Signs for another exit starting appearing, some number of miles away. Whether that number of miles was something to celebrate or something to fear, I didn’t know. As I neared the exit and took it, I was listening not for the fuel pump whine that would signal nearing doom, but for the sound of doom itself, the sputtering engine. I was starting to call to mind the old trick of pushing the car to a downhill slant and turning the key to the on position five times to get the fuel pump to suck up the last dregs of fuel from the tank. Fortunately, I didn’t need it- I made it to the gas station with nary a sputter or cough. I decided it was an opportune time for a break and used the last of my ham to make sandwiches for dinner, and ate some of the now-no-longer-very-cool yogurt. When the pump clacked to signal the tank was now full, it had put 12.93 gallons in the tank. Apparently I have a 13 gallon tank.

I took off with my nerves remaining only slightly taut from the experience, and looked forward to having half of my day’s driving done. That night, I would be staying with the son of a pastor whom my parents know. I’d never met him or his father before, but I’m much more of a fan of staying with friends of friends than I am of hitting a hotel. It’s more adventurous, sociable, and free. Nate lived right in Albuquerque, conveniently splitting my journey in half and not even requiring a significant detour.

Nate has led a life a bit different from my own, one that might lead some to judge him. His driver’s license is suspended due to DUI, he works at a call center, and lives with an older woman, Mary, as a roommate. He is, however, unfailingly kind, generous, and always was going out of his way to make me feel comfortable and at home. I’d arrived around 6PM and we had an evening to spend- they fed me dinner, and asked me if I would like to go to a bar with them. They assured me it wasn’t a bad bar and we wouldn’t get into trouble. My inclination is not to go to bars, but to steer clear. I saw it, though, as an opportunity to live the difference in being in the world but not of the world. I have met too many people who live sheltered lives in the sterile Christian bubble, steering well clear of anything that could stain their bleach-white reputation, and completely missing all the opportunities they could have to minister to the world. I wouldn’t change Albuquerque in one night, but then again one night is the entirety of the opportunity that was set before me.

When trying to describe things that are generally outside of my comfort zone while trying to avoid sounding judgmental, I typically run to the word ‘interesting’. My bar experience was interesting. There were a lot of things that you’d expect in a bar. Incredibly loud music (which fortunately was not continuous), typical bar patrons and not much house lighting. Nate had a lot of friends and acquaintances that I tried to accept introductions to, but frankly all I could do was smile and pretend to hear over the music. Nate bought me a Sprite and a Coke for Mary. Conversation was a bit limited due to the music’s volume, but after we moved to a table that was farther from the speaker, it was the kind of conversation one might expect at a bar. Loud though the music was, I have to give props the guitar player. He was really skilled. Mary introduced me to a few people and made sure I was comfortable. I played a game of billiards with a girl I had been warned about. I took a lot of opportunities to look at decorations on the wall rather than things I oughtn’t have. I made conversation and tried to keep it above water level. I realized I had accidentally worn a LeTourneau shirt into a bar, which students (and RAs) are not supposed to do. I hope, imperfect as I am, that I left the people I spent the evening with not with an impression of a stuck-up Christian who wanted nothing to do with them, but of someone who doesn’t need to condemn them to follow God.

We got back at a reasonable hour, as Nate and Mary were sensitive to my desire to depart reasonably early. On the drive in and seeing how nicely Albuquerque was laid out, I was starting to get a good impression of New Mexico. Nate and Mary filled me in some of the state’s deficiencies, though- apparently their education system isn’t the best. Their roads are nice, though.

Mary had generously prepared the couch for me and I was glad to have a solid night’s rest after a long day of driving. Between that and a shower I felt downright human again. After some cereal and reclaiming my food that I kept in their fridge overnight, the three of us set out for the day around 8AM. Nate had given me a road atlas which ended up coming in handy later. I checked my tire pressures and found that the earlier repair was holding just fine. They insisted on leading me out to the on-ramp that I would need to get to for the highway, which was quite handy- it’s the in-city driving that always gets to me. It was very nice of them. At the appropriate on-ramp, they waved me on and I was on the road once again.

Northern New Mexico is pretty boring. There is a lot of sand and rocks and not a lot of vegetation. In order to avoid my tape-deck SCREEEE problem, I tuned into the Albuquerque radio stations as long as I could before they faded. For some reason, the Camry has an enormous three-stage telescoping antenna. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought to extend it before I departed. Oh well- popping the tape out every minute isn’t that bad, I guess.

Progress was made, miles were counted by and by… I got bored and started with my irresponsible antics. I tried to see how many miles I could go without touching the steering wheel, driving only with my knees. This worked pretty well except when there was another car nearby and I got nervous and grabbed the wheel. The road I was on actually had a fair amount of curvature to it, so it wasn’t all trivial. I tried seeing how many seconds I could drive with my eyes closed on straight sections. At one point, I decided I wanted to be a racecar driver, and donned my motorcycle helmet, which was within arm’s length in the back seat:

I was tempted to change my driving style to match the racing driver attire, but I did not. I also found that the combination of helmet and limited headroom meant I couldn’t really move my head around at all without hitting my helmet on something. I took it off after a few minutes, it was getting hot. I started raiding the bag of food I had collected from the free pile on the water fountain- somebody had left a whole sealed 1-lb bag of pistachios- score! I started eating them, but because they were heavily salted I found myself getting very thirsty very quickly. Eating a ton of pistachios isn’t really good for your lips, I guess. I was tossing the shells out the window and I wondered if people thought I was a litterbug. Pistachio shells are biodegradable, I swear.

I stopped for gas in some little town in New Mexico- I didn’t know where I was, really, only that they had cheap gas and I needed some. Unfortunately, the girl working the counter in the gas station didn’t know what town we were in either. Strange…. It’s not like there were any towns nearby… I guess she had a long commute to a mystery town. I only wanted to know so I could estimate my distance covered, so it was no big deal. I made myself some sandwiches with my remaining ham and bread, ate some yogurt, and filled up the water bottle I was using. I cleaned out the car after I got it from the Reinkings, but I apparently missed the one-liter Nalgene bottle hiding under the seat. I started using it in preference to the half-liter bottle I had, as it had a convenient spout top in addition to twice the capacity. I also scored from the water fountain free pile an entire Walmart bag of Crystal light packets and tubs. Score! If you know me, you know I thoroughly enjoy my Crystal Light (or rather, the Walmart knock-off brand) I drank a whooole lot of sugar-free beverage that trip- nearly making myself sick of Strawberry Kiwi.

People who make long road trips will be familiar with the idea of turning left and going 300 miles, then being rewarded with only another turn, which ends up only really being keeping left at a fork, and then another few hundred miles. This was essentially what I did all morning. I crossed into Colorado, the first time I’d been into the state except for the Denver airport during my layover on my way to Alaska in 2007.

Shortly after cruising into CO, however, I managed to miss one of those once-every-300-miles turns. I ended up going down a wrong road for 10 miles or so. I knew something was wrong, but by the philosophy of the heroic Kip Russell in Have Space Suit, Will Travel: it’s better to go one extra mile to be sure of your mistake than to turn around and return five miles in vain when your quarry was in fact just a bit further. I knew I was wrong when I hit a turn with road signs that didn’t make any sense. However, I did spot a Chinese restaurant, and decided to stop for lunch, as it was about that time anyway. In fact, I had told Nate and Mary that morning that I had intended to get Chinese for lunch if possible. Perfect.

I took my newly-gifted road atlas in with me and figured out where I was and where I needed to go while I waited for my General Tso’s chicken. An older couple at the table across from mine informed me that I was in Cortez, Colorado. They also told me how to get back to the road I needed to be on. Job done. I ate my meal (and was surprised by the super-ridiculously-hot peppers hidden in it) and got back on the road. I filled up with gas before leaving Colorado because I wasn’t sure about gas prices in Utah. I’d feel dumb if they were cheaper in Utah, but the station I saw advertised prices on the lower end of what I had seen thus far on the trip. During my gas break I let the car continue to play some funky music, I think it was Jamiroquai. A young guy on a motorcycle pulled up and I wondered what he thought of the weirdo in the beater car from Texas playing really odd music and checking his tire pressure. I tried to act cool in my sweet safety sunglasses that Tyrell gave me. I looked over his shoulder and realized there was a family in a Subaru with Texas plates parked at the convenience store. Ha! Texans have got you outnumbered in your own state, Colorado biker dude. I might have been kinder to him in my mind if he had been riding a sport bike rather than the cruiser he was on.

Less than an hour on the road and I was over the Utah border. Hooray! I texted (yes, while driving, I know- it’s long and straight, ok) Gareth to let him know that I was getting closer. I’d also been told by Kim, who is half of the couple running the intern program, to call once I was about an hour out to make sure someone would be there to meet me. Up until this point I had been hoping and praying that God would get me to ‘Utah’ but I changed my focus at this point to ‘Ephraim’, because he had already brought me to Utah. I must have rejoined the route that we took on the Spring Break trip- I started recognizing things from the not-that-long-ago drive, and being reminded of what we were talking about in the van as was passed those areas. Candyce, I think we used up a good 100 miles on your testimony.

Things started to get exciting that afternoon, though- after passing through Moab, the land of Sweet Off-road Vehicular Fun, (SOVF), I was going through a mountain pass, which provided a steep and winding road through whatever range it is that occupies southeast Utah (not the Rockies). I noticed I was having to apply a whole lot of pedal in order to keep pace up the mountain. I was losing ground to 18-wheelers. Aren’t cars supposed to be faster than big trucks up mountains? Odd. Also, my steering was acting funny. Why am I having to correct so much to the right? Even in left-sweeping turns I was still holding the wheel almost straight. This isn’t good. Soon there was no denying that something was wrong with the Camry… oh nuts.

I’m somewhat ashamed that it took me as long as it did to note the obvious problem with the car. It was masked by the simultaneous onset of the mountains, which are also the reason I couldn’t pull over right away. I didn’t want to be working on the car in the outside edge of a bend, in the narrow breakdown lane, with 18-wheelers blowing by me trying to keep every joule of forward energy they have.

Things had gotten pretty bad by the time the road straightened out after the pass. I was having to hold the wheel at about 60° to the left in order to keep going straight, and with the pedal fully juiced I was going only 55mph. I pulled off as soon as I could. I got out and took stock of my situation. The same tire I’d been having trouble with before was flat, and catastrophically so this time. When a tire goes flat, the sidewall bulges out at the bottom between the rim and the road. I had been forced to drive on the flat with the sidewall completely flattened to the ground, and so badly that the molded-in writing on the side has worn off:

I gave some thought to my options. As I was just past the peak of a mountain, I could see that there were no services for miles and miles around. I also remember from the drive during spring break that there was nothing for a looong time- we had an adventure with the wipers freezing over during a snowstorm, leaving me with only an index-card sized part of the windshield to drive through while piloting a minivan full of college students down the winding, snowy mountain road. Fun times! It looked like I could either call AAA or try to get somewhere on my spare. The Camry was a 1990 Japanese econobox. I didn’t have a lot of faith at the time in it having a useful spare.

I got on the phone with AAA to see about a tow. Fortunately, my parents had the foresight to add me to their AAA plan before the trip- good thinking mom and dad! I gave them my info, but while I was on hold with them I decided to check out my spare anyway. I’d hate to be towed probably 100 miles to the nearest tire shop only to have to shell out for a new tire- it might pay to check the spare.

And of course, the Camry keeps on surprising me. I piled all my luggage in the trunk up behind the Camry and got at the tire under the trunk floor. I had thought for sure it would have a little donut spare, and flat at that. Nope, not this time- it was a full-size spare, and it didn’t even feel soft. Amazing! While still on hold with AAA I quickly got my tire pressure gauge out of the glovebox and checked the pressure- 28 psi. Not bad, and enough to get me down the road for a while until I could air up at that distance service station. Win! AAA got back on the line with me shortly and I informed them that I no longer needed a tow. The AAA person seemed reluctant to cancel my tow, and could barely hear me- I was worried they would send a tow truck anyway if we got disconnected or couldn’t communicate further. For all I know, they did- I was out of there shortly.

I pulled out the tire and jack and got to work. Getting the Camry up on a jack is always an adventure, as the steel of the Unibody seam where one is supposed to jack from is quite rusted and tends to crumple in instead of lifting the car. I found a solid-enough spot and got the car up and tire off. I was mortified when I inspected the damage more thoroughly, as I saw this:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is bad news. I figured out while I was driving that the tire was bad, but come on- if I had known I was driving on something that bad I would have pulled over a lot sooner. I almost feel like I lose car cred just for having failed to pull over sooner. Surely anyone who knows cars would have pulled over long before things got that bad.

So apparently the fix in Decatur, TX wasn’t that great after all- but it got me the next 1000 miles, which is most of my trip. Between that and having a pressurized, full-size spare ready to replace it, I think that’s God’s provision. What more, the full-size spare wasn’t perfect- it actually had a small split in it that worried (and worries) me. It may be that I needed the last 1000 miles out of the first tire because the spare didn’t have all 1300 miles in it, and the extra 1000 miles got from it made all the difference. If I had known I had a full-size spare back in Dallas, I would have put it on- but maybe that split would have let go sooner than the patch did. What I know is that God got me here on the combination of two sketchy tires. I trust his methods.

While I was changing my tire, a police truck pulled over to check on me. Last time I had the police check on me on the side of the road, they called in a tow truck that wasn’t AAA and I had to shell out $100 on the spot to get my car winched out of a snowbank- no choice in the matter. This time, though, the police office believed my statement that I had the situation under control and needed no assistance- I was almost done with the tire change then. Phew. With the car whole again and the scarily-deteriorated tire stowed back in the trunk, I was able to get back on the road. I’m always timid about pulling out in front of traffic, and it seems like the cars are always evenly spaced so that I don’t get a comfortable window between any of them. In reality, I think a normal person would have pulled put in a third of the space I waited for, but it pays to be cautious sometimes.

Back underway, I was glad to have the car feeling back to normal. I pressed on through the many miles before the next service station at Salina, UT. I was able to spot the exit where we had pulled over in with an opaque windshield in the minivan and James ran out to clean it quickly so we wouldn’t lose too many miles to the silver van. I arrived in Salina, again recognizing it from the prior trip. I was fortunate to find a gas station that didn’t charge for air- I rarely see gas stations that just have a compressed air hose sitting out for free rather than one of the ubiquitous 50¢-for-two-minutes compressor stations. This station was like a miniature truck stop, so I imagine it’s a courtesy to the truckers, but one plebian car drivers never see because it’s always hidden away with the set-apart diesel pumps.

I filled the tire, didn’t need gas, and got back on the way. I was getting close- Salina was my turn off for the last major road I’d take towards Ephraim- only about 45 minutes away. So close! So very close! Close enough that if something went horribly wrong, someone from Trigrace could come out and get me- it was like I was already there! Woo! I called Kim to let her know I would be arriving within an hour, and received direction to go to Chip and Jamie’s house. Chip and Jamie are the ones who lead the ministry in Ephraim, and when they arrived in the Sanpete valley 18 years ago, there were almost zero other Christians there. I was glad I was heading to their house, because they are great hosts, and Jamie is a great cook and always feeding people. I was looking forward to an end to packaged and fast foods.

On the road from Salina (pronounced Sal-eye-na, not Sal-ee-na, I found out) to Ephraim, there are several other small towns, and gosh, when you’re too excited to look for road signs, Manti and Sterling look a lot like Ephraim, which I’ve only been to once before. I remember making the same mistakes on the spring break drive out, only then it was snowy and foggy and cold- on this trip through, spring had sprung and green was everywhere. When I saw the Mormon temple in Manti I was reminded of why I was coming, and my excitement for my arrival was combined with the somber sense of knowing exactly why I am in Utah this summer.

It was not long before I started recognizing features that actually belonged to Ephraim- I had neglected to take note of my mileage-to-next-turn earlier so I wasn’t exactly sure when to expect to turn on to Center St, the location of the college house. The turn took me by surprise, and it was prooobably too late to turn- but I wasn’t about to add an extra quarter-mile to my 1337-mile trip by circling the block, so I impulsively jerked the wheel into the turn and attracted the attention of a nearby elderly gentleman by squealing my tires through the bend. I was a bit surprised by how much tire squeal I had induced. For a moment was worried that I might have rolled a tire off of a rim, given that the Camry’s tires are not exactly low-profile track tires.

The grin spreading across my face could not be resisted- I was finally here! I pulled into a parking spot on the street in front of Chip and Jamie’s house and started to ply myself from the Camry, collecting my cell phone and wallet etc from their hiding places. I’m not sure why I thought I’d need my wallet in Chip and Jamie’s house, but habit is hard to break. By the time I was approaching their front door, I was being greeted by the indefatigable Jamie. I had arrived before dinner was completely wrapped up, and she made some great homemade fried shrimp for me (really homemade, not just from a bag). Thanks Jamie!

That is the story of how I got from Longview, TX to Ephraim, UT- quite an adventure. I believe that even though it may appear to be a story of hardship and trial to some, that it is a testament of God’s faithfulness. I am thankful to have had this experience, every moment of it, because it taught me a lot about perseverance, work, faith, and following God. I don’t mean to make this out as one exceptional week in my life, and everything else it just boring- I frequently find myself in positions that give me the opportunity to learn the same lessons that this adventure taught me. Not every week of my life has the same visible and tangible experiences as this one, but every day is an opportunity to follow God and grow in him, just like this adventure was.

Two years since something exciting enough to write about: a summary

2010-05-15T09:16:00.003-06:00

Well hello, my faithful blog followers (hi mom!). It's been almost two years since I've written here, meaning it's been two years since anything newsworthy has happened in my life. Well, not really, but the planets haven't aligned for that long for me to have both the material to write about and the motivation to face the shame of writing that first blog post in ages, facing the stigma of being 'that guy' who leaves his blog unmaintained for so long. Well, here I am. More for myself in 40 years than anything else, here's a summary of what I could have written about since 2008, in roughly chronological order:

Returned to school in fall of 2008
Started pursuing a young lady
Was offered an internship in Iowa which would be for both spring and summer of 2009
Accepted said internship, condemning myself to 9 months in the Corn State
Traveled northeast for Christmas break, split time between family in Boston and work in NY state
Saw my brother Ian get married in scenic Aurora, Ohio during the break
Made entirely unplanned best-man speech at said wedding, fooled crowd into clapping somehow
Drove to Iowa in sketchy Montero, made it alive
Started intern work for Fisher, gained both good experience in engineering and renewed dread of office life
Found cool church with awesome people in town, begin making cornbread for weekly bible studies
Got in car crash after making sketchy left turn, first accident ever. Montero survives sketchier than ever, speeding white GMC Jimmy loses
Start to think about prospect of RAing at LETU the next year
Spend most of free time trying to troubleshoot mysterious electrical problems on Montero, biking to work in meantime
Receive news that economic downturn may cause Fisher to lay off all interns, start looking for new job for summer
Fisher layoff confirmed, however good job prospects exist
Appointed as RA on 2A for 2009-2010, as does young lady on sister floor
Fly to LETU for visit during easter, stay longer than planned, discover things are not well with young lady
Receive job offer with Kinze only 1 hour away also in Iowa, failing to realize how big of a blessing this was at the time
Pack all my stuff in super-sketchy Montero, somehow make it to new town alive (!) after crawling under car and starting engine with a section of 8-gauge wire across solenoid
Move into new apartment before roommate does, living alone in new town is super lame
Start work at Kinze, pleased by no-nonsense organizational style and freedom to work
Find small church in new town, people are nice
Furnish apartment after tiring of sleeping on floor and cooking with only crock-pot
Young lady decides to put relationship on hold, summer becomes difficult
Start learning how to program $250,000 robot at work, acquire new respect for Japan
New roommate moves in, brings more furniture
Receive 'talking to' at work for using internet too much at work, realize I need to actually close browser windows when not in use so it doesn't look like I'm checking my personal email for 25 hours per week
Initiate a new project at work to save shielding gas ($$) and enjoy freedom of directing it
Acquire PS2 and Guitar Hero 3 to abate boredom of Iowa, still can't play on 'hard'
Travel to smalltown Iowa with roommate, realize that #1 hobby in Iowa is Miller Lite
Catch self picking up Iowa-specific speech patterns, appending 'yet' to end of sentences
Becoming very anxious about long silence from young lady
Somehow unsketch-ify Montero enough for trip down to TX
Finish big project at work, bosses pleased with $$ saving prospects
Make super-sketchy journey to TX in Montero, almost lose foot when it falls off of a tiny jack while changing blown-out tire
Young lady ends relationship upon return to school, much angst ensues
Beginning of year busy-ness sets in, new RA responsibilities settle on shoulders
Rebel somewhat against school with floor activities, nearly quit RA-ship in protest of policy
Classwork fits in here somewhere
Leave campus for a weekend on RA retreat, return to find that entire room (including loft) has been moved and set up identically to a room on the next floor up, swapped with their RA- live on Flooders for a week before I can move back down to 2A
Start concocting plans for dubiously-wise ATV engine-swap project during Christmas break
Stay in Longview over Christmas break, house-sit for couple and enjoy free laundry
Spend nearly all of break transplanting too-powerful motorcycle engine into sketchy Chinese ATV, laugh maniacally when it works, mysteriously avoid death while riding
Start leading study of book: Wild At Heart on floor, growing experience
It snows in Longview, creating much confusion for first-time-in-Texas freshmen
Realize that Dynamics, Senior Design, and RAing all in one semester was not best idea
Decide to go to Utah to witness to Mormons for spring break mission trip, begin training
Decide to get motorcycle license rather than grow to be 40 and realize I never did
Spring break mission in Utah makes me realize God has given me a heart for the people there
Realize I need to really bust my butt in Dynamics and Tech Calc II in order to graduate on time, begin doing so
Acquire motorcycle license, permanent ear-to-ear grin under helmet
Begin to concoct summer plans, a return to Utah to volunteer there among them
Realize I don't have money to return to school in the fall, start applying for scholarships
Resolve to volunteer in Utah the following summer before hearing results of scholarships
Receive news in the negative about scholarships, swallow lump in throat
Start wrapping up the academic year with classes and RAing, busy-ness meter tops out
Pass Dynamics and Tech Calc II with requisite grades, pat self on back
Receive gift of car to go to Utah in, rather sketchy
Begin the adventure of actually getting myself to Utah... that's the whole next blog post.

There it is folks, the last two years of my life in sixty-two easy-to-browse bullet points. If I were more philosophically-inclined right now I might make a comment about an unbearable lightness of being within the irony of summing up two years of my life in such a fashion, but I am both disinclined and somewhat dubious of the correctness of such a comment.

All my faithful blog readers (hi mom!) will have to wait another day or two (hopefully not two years) for my next post, which will sum up the adventure I had getting from Longview to Utah. It will be a typical Ned-style post, entirely too long to be enjoyable by another but my mother and Titus, detailing the most inane points and stretching on and on as I lose all sense of how appropriate it is to ramble at length about what I had for breakfast when I got a flat tire.

I was going to wrap this up with a thanks to the reader and a slightly self-deprecatory comment about the value of this post, but I will refrain for a dearth of the required wit. Cheers!

Into, and Out of, the Wild

2008-06-28T17:21:00.004-06:00

I just finished watching the movie "Into the Wild". What a movie. The attitude I've had over the past few weeks and the premise of this movie aligned perfectly. Quick synopsis: a upper-middle class white boy is fed up with typical society and decides to depart entirely from a normal life by becoming a tramp. He graduates from college and completely drops off of the radar- ditches his car, his money, his identity, etc. He goes on a complete radical two-year adventure that involves lots of hitchhiking, meeting interesting people, kayaking down the Colorado River, trainriding, and a "Great Alaskan Adventure". I won't spoil the ending for those of you who will watch the movie (and I highly recommend that you do), but between all of the things that he did and none of the things that I'm doing- I'm incredibly jealous of his adventure.

Now don't get me wrong- I'm not about to go abandon everything I've worked for and the plans that God has for me because I saw a movie. But that kind of revolution- the willingness to disregard everything that you're being told is true and good, everything that the world insists that you conform to- is what we need. I won't launch into a diatribe as a often (well, previously) have. But my most recent outlook on the world is that the way things have always been done is not necessarily the way things ought to be. I don't even mean that in a 'some things could use improvement' kind of way. There are some things in this world, in our society, in my life- that are completely wrong. There are even more things that are tolerated despite being okay, but not ideal. The tolerance of mediocrity in one's own standards is unacceptable.

Despite the monotony in my life as of late, I suppose change is upon me. I've gotten into reading Christian literature and found it to be a great way to enrich myself. It turns out that the people who write highly acclaimed books often have some interesting points to make. So far, I've read Wild At Heart, Every (Young) Man's Battle, The Jesus I Never Knew, and most recently, Blue Like Jazz. As a result of the wisdom I've gleaned from these books in combination with the things that God has taught me through experience, reflection, and revelation- I'm changing. The greatest changes in my life started almost a year ago when my own Alaskan adventure started. In that time, I'm not the same person I was when I started. I don't think that the change is going to stop here. Even though my latest adventure is concluded and I am currently living a very typical, very normal, and very monotonous life- I know that God has a lot of things to show me.

I'm not a normal person, nor am I typical. By no means do I mean to sing my own accolades, but I now understand that God has made me into the person that I currently am for a purpose. He has a plan for my life, and as I've told myself countless times over the past year, I could not possibly improve on His plan. Therefore, any idea or plan that I have is inherently and fatally flawed- unless it aligns exactly with God's plan. So why has God brought me to where I am? Why, on an otherwise nondescript Saturday afternoon in June, was I inspired to watch Into the Wild alone and be launched into a tirade of introspection? I think God had a hand in all this.

I'm in a unique position. I'm going someplace that not very many people go, apparently, because I'm not like many people. I'm absolutely certain that there are aspects of my personality that God does not like and wants me to change. However, I know that I am not all wrong and that at least part of the way I am is the way that God wants me to be. Why is that? The aching to know what purpose God has made me so very different for is killing me. I feel like I'm on the verge of life, some purpose that God has for me; but either I have not been in tune to His messages or He has not yet revealed it to me.

This is quite exciting, though- because the unique way that God made me says a great deal about the unique life he is preparing me for. I can look at myself and estimate just how exciting and unusual my life is going to be based on how unusual God has made me. It's absolutely OUTSTANDING to know that I am not going to lead a typical life because that is not what God has made me for. Because God has formed me into an unusual person, He has an unusual life in store for me.

This answers, then, the frustration I've been feeling over the last few weeks. Last summer and the whole last year were chock full of adventure, the dangerous kind that makes unique guys breathe life and the mothers worry terribly about how uncertain it all is. The kind of thing that involves going to Alaska and Australia and Korea and Japan, most of it with very few plans and the wonderful feeling of uncertainty and responsibility for oneself. To put it one way, over the last year, I was alive. By contrast then, I am now dead. My life is so certain, so well-prepared for, and completely safe that I feel like a walking corpse. Although my work does occasionally pique my interest and keeps me busy, I am bored out of my skull. I haven't built anything in weeks. It's awful.

Perhaps you can see the relief that I feel that this walking-dead corporate white-collar zombie life is not what God has planned for me. I can see this because although I am competent at my job, I am not content with it. God has made me to be ill-content with this sort of existence, and that is absolutely wonderful- God does not plan for me to be a white collar worker, and perhaps you tire of hearing this, but that is JUST GREAT. I am going to live a life of adventure because that's what God made me for. I didn't know it was possible to get excited while writing a blog post in a basement in upstate New York- but I am. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up.

All of this merely from the thoughts of the plans that God has for me. God has brought me this far through his grace and leadership- and if I keep my end of the deal and follow Him, my life will turn out to be an incredible, satisfying, and wonderful adventure.

That's great. I want to end it there, but that doesn't address the inadequacy I feel for being stuck here and now. The great excitement I feel is because of the relief that I won't be the way that I am now for the rest of my life. That's awful, because the way that I am now is... bland. Boring. It's killing me. This summer is good because it's what God has for me, and I know that because of the way that He led me here- and I'm going to stay here. But in the interim, I'm going nuts.

I have so many desires that come as a result of the way God has made me, it's hard to live a boring life. I want to make things. I want to learn things. I want to meet people and hear their stories. I want affirmation. I want to make a difference in lives. I want to do things that conventional wisdom says is a 100% bad idea- and get away with it because conventional wisdom is so often wrong. I want to travel and see the beautiful world that God has made. I want to develop personally in ways that I didn't know were possible. I want to have emotional closeness with the wonderful woman who will one day be my wife. I want romance. I want to not feel like a horse straining at the reigns of a carriage that is just going way too slow.

I'm tempted to use all this desire as an excuse to plan my own life and determine through my own will that God's will involves excitement RIGHT NOW. It doesn't, though. God has me here and has given me no indication that a change is imminent. God set me up wonderfully in Ithaca. It's almost miraculous- everything worked out better than I, a mortal man, could have hoped for or arranged by my own efforts.

So I'm frustrated, but also glad. I'm frustrated that things are moving so slowly right now and that so many of my desires are unfulfilled- yet. I am glad, though, that God has a perfect plan for me and that he knows the desires of my heart and he put them there. He has plans to fulfill them- I just have to wait and follow him unwaveringly.

Yes, I know that this is my first post in almost seven months, and more than likely it doesn't make complete sense to people who don't know my summer setup. I will explain that soon, as I finally get around to updating my blog. As a sort of consolation prize for having put it off so long, I can salve my need for adventure by reliving and retelling the great adventure that was December 2007 while I update things around here.

Note: Into the Wild is rated R. It doesn't censor his story. There is nudity.