Tuesday's Gone

I've fallen a bit behind. My excuse is that Tuesdays are always full of life. The beginning of the week, everyone's getting their balance back at work, including me, and there's always something going on around our house when I get back. My morning consisted of tracking down some rental info and getting that taken care of. I'm working at anticipating problems and solving them before that need to be solved.

We had a meeting for men in our neighborhood in the evening. Several folks showed up though fewer than had said would come. We had a fine meeting anyway, some good thoughts were shared, we prayed together and kicked off this phase of our life in the neighborhood well.

After that we came in to a wonderful meal prepared by Gretchen; some amazing white sauce and chicken and mashed potatos. It was a sight for a sore stomach, I can assure you. We chowed down and cleaned up and then sort of lounged into the evening. The women were doing women's group and their taxes and the guys did some reading and then watched a cheap-thrills action flick.

Slow to rev

I had a pretty slow, pedantic day today. Pistons did not fire in unison, chemicals did not produce the expected solution, the package did not make it to the right doorstep the first time. Not to say that there was failure; "no failure in Christ" is a phrase we like to cling to down here. However, it was not like last Monday.

No doubt I've become accustomed to a fairly high level of productivity over the past weeks. As I planned for today over the weekend I knew it was going to be slow. I was prepared for lots of empty space in my day and I was prepared to fill it. Several wonderful books have recently come into my sphere of influence and I planned to do a lot of reading today.

Love and Friendship by Jules Toner, Choice Theory by William Glasser, The Adventures of Tintin by Herge, Gear by Doug TenNapel, the Bible by...well, lots of people. These all recieved a great deal of attention from me today as I swapped them out, one after the other, with a great deal of help from coffee.

I was eventually involved in some more active pursuits. I took Mickey to Widmo for work, went out with Nathan, Tom and Brian to invite men to a meeting tomorrow and then made my way to dinner. We had some encouraging encounters with some men in our neighborhood and I'm optimistic about our meeting.

Joan did excellently well on her final, 96%!! This brought us all great joy. We rejoiced. Together. And with her. We also had a good meeting with the Allendale folks, hashing out some details on our message as the People of Praise to our neighbors. Everyone was tuned in and we ended the meeting by praying for Ruth's leg and saw some results! We hope for much more on that front.

The sigh of relief

Aw yeaw! The day of rest. This morning Nathan said that God knew what he was doing when he started that tradition. I actually had a hard time adjusting to relaxation today. It took me a while to figure it out but by 1400 i realized that I was just too keyed up. I wanted to have an agenda to attack and there wasnt one. I did fine though, did a little reading, ran some errands and that helped out.

We had a barbeque with a family in our neighborhood today. Sausage, ribs, chicken, lovely. Liz made some scrumptious potato salad and we had beers and pops and Nathan's mom's mac & cheese too.

It was nice and warm, sunny, and a bit of a northerly wind. I played catch with Eric, a kid who's friends with us. He's pretty good as it turns out, though he did throw one that i followed, blinded by the sun, into a big bush. I got a little bloody but the bush is fine, dont worry.

The guys and Ruth left for the branch meeting while the women had women's group with Lacondra. At the meeting Ron gave a talk about personal prayer that got a very positive reaction from the branch. I liked it too.

The Missionary Company, of which I'm a member, had a conference call at 7:30. Nick recently put up a wiki for us to use and we had a kind of walk-through session on how to work with the website. I bumbled through our side of it, made a few mistakes, but we've got a lot of smart people around here and I think they learned everything they needed to know anyway.

Wrapped up the evening with some Winnie the Pooh followed by Hot Chip, my new favorite band, as well as some Ratatat. Michael Busk has told me I must check out Broken Social Scene so that's on the list as is the Rhapsody "Lollapalooza 2006" playlist which features several bands that I already like.

The work-week ending

Ah, the sweet smell of Saturday night! I know few better; maybe bacon and eggs and toast on a cold, snowy morning with a hint of the fire burning in the fireplace would beat it but it's hard to say. For sheer reliability Saturday night's smell is nice.

I'm assuming our Saturday morning breakfast with the Seitzes went well. I was unable to make an appearance because of my work schedule so that's too bad. It was a pretty exciting workday actually. A storm rolled through our area that beats out every other storm of the past two years in terms of ferocity and damage. There were high winds, gallons of rain, and at least one tornado. I watched from the second story of our office while rain was whipped over the ridgelines of near by buildings. Thick and heavy as waves over the gunwales of a ship it snapped and curled over corrugated tin sheds and around trucks in our parking lot. Tim's wife called him to say that she woke up late and looked out the window to see house in their neighborhood without roofs, privacy fences replaces by red-clay trenches. The tornado left some traces of its passage.

Gretchen and Cathy held the second Camera Club during this part of the storm. It wasn't nearly as bad in our part of the city. They stayed inside '46, out of the rain, for the first part and then took advantage of the corruscating sky as the jagged tail of the storm crinkled its way across this part of the globe. Cathy was glad to dive into something she loves. It's been a rough week at the office. Her camera arrived via FedEx (though not very smoothly; I need to look into that) and that was a great blessing for her as well.

Joan's been studying very hard. She's got a final on Monday and has to bear down on her material to make this class relinquish the "A" is been guarding until now. She sort of holes up in the back of '46, does her version of Emo Phillips' cramming, and emerge on the other side of Monday with an excellent grade.

Gretchen's been steadily plugging away at her work in the office. I believe the latest version of the Partners in Service newsletter is nearly finished. She takes no small joy in the Camera Club that she and Cathy founded.

Brian spent today working on a coffee table that he's putting together with material from Widmo. He's had the opportunity to use several of his favorite tools: the planer, the router, the hammer, the brain. He was the subject of several Camera Club photos.

Thomas and David worked their tails off through the storm down at Widmo. I recieved and gave a call to David regarding the weather; whether he and Tom ought to stay at work was up for grabs. They did, had a productive day, got home on time. David came home for lunch just after I did and told Nathan and I a story about the headaches that can accompany retail business. He had a horror story of an insane but monied customer making an incomplete and therefore intenall inconsistent order. That, I can assure you, and so could David, is extremely frustrating.

Nathan's been working hard at the coordinating-lots-of-activities business. We had barbeque planned for Saturday; then it was on Thursday; then it was next Saturday; then it was back to this Saturday; and now it's Sunday. He's a marvel of flexibility and level-headed leadership. I've been fortunate to have some good conversations with him during my lunch breaks this week.

We had a nice, easy pizza dinner. Homemade pizza of course. And beer. It was nice. A bit of tense conversation about the broken public education system during dinner was ended smoothly and we all relaxed to a movie and some dessert. It was a nice way to end the day.

Oh the goodness of Quicken

Yes, another day has gone by and I am tired. Today got a little extra kick in the pants for me because a couple of guys who work for Home Delivery on the region level were in our terminal today. They gave out some good advice, fixed some problems and generally added more to my list of daily tasks. This is a great blessing because I'm basically learning how to take care of every piece of information that is worth taking care of and in the process I am learning what they all mean.

Over the lunch hour I was able to have a conversation with Nathan about finances. We have been doing some pretty cool things of late, such as buying a minivan!, and this requires some extra-special attention on the money end of things. Yesterday I discovered a heretofore unknown and extremely powerful tool in Quicken: The Analyze Button. I use Quicken to keep track of our finances and it has been very good to us up til now. From this point forward it is going to make our financial lives much smoother.

The Analyze Button reveals a bar graph containing month-by-month totals for the expenditure in any one budget category as well as calculating a yearly average. In other words, with a couple clicks you can see how well your budget matches your actual expenditures as well as which months were closer or further from your initial budget. This is wonderful; it accumulates and organizes the data into terrifically useful categories and allows me to get a feel for how well we're budgeting with just a glance.

So that's great. Also, David and I recieved a package with some books we'd ordered from Amazon. A telling collection I think: The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun with Paul Hattaway, Gear by Doug Tennapel, and Love and Friendship by Jules Toner. Search away....

I prepared a meatless dinner that was very tasty. We had black beans and rice tortillas with some cumin and oregano and salt and pepper and two cheeses and avocados and tomatoes and sour cream and salsa and chips and salad and olives and it was nummy. Nathan wrastled up some drinks and we had a good conversation about our days and enjoying our meal in between bites. Joan and Liz needed to meet during dinner because we dont have any more time to spare.

Then we cleaned up and headed out to Party Central for some put-put under the lights. We had fun, especially Cathy and Liz and myself. And especially Brian and Liz and I when we drove home and beat the minivan with everyone else in it and cracked open some beers and skipped ahead on a DVD so it would look like we'd been home for a while and had just been lounging around because it took the other car soooo long to get back. We had a good time with that.

Now we're all convalescing, ready for a new day tomorrow and a Lord's Day barbeque with a family in the neighborhood. People of Praise: Changing the World One BBQ at a Time.

Thursday, The middle

Not for everyone, surely. But the middle of my work week. The halfway point. All downhill from here. The fulcrum on which turns the week. It's appropriate at this time to note that I collect idioms. A conesieur one might say, a sampler of linguistic oddities. A peddler of the melded craftwork of etymology, tradition, and common sense. I like words. Tons.

So this day was full of activity. The morning consisted of some intense prayer for our neighborhood and our neighbors and our work to lift them up. We planned on going out to visit some of the folks who live near us and we prayed for them and for us that we'd be able to make more and better inroads into their lives and that they would speak the word of the Lord to us. Then we parted ways for our jobs and looked forward to the time when we could be back together.

From the sounds of it Widmo had another good day. David told us a story of how he got a door at the shop and sold the same door to a customer 2.5 hours later! What a salesman. Joan was able to have a successful conversation with a fellow teacher and clear up some confusion that the two of them had been experiencing. Nathan invented a good meal: scalloped potatoes, white sauce, ham and chicken layered in a 9x13 pan and sprinkled with cheese. It was delish. We've floated a few names: the Delish Dish, 2/22 (today's date). Any other ideas?

Of course this meal was enjoyed only after we had all gone for our walks in the neighborhood. We talked to a whole bunch of our neighbors; we made some new connections, solidified a few more, and generally proclaimed ourselves and Christ into the neighborhood.

Not a lot of newness

I had a chance to give one of our neighbors a ride to work this morning. Thanks to Nathan I woke up for MP and was there when she came to the door needing a ride. I headed to work right after dropping her off, arriving just a bit ahead of schedule and in time to get a jump on the day.

I was glad I did as the day wore on. My boss was sick as was my compatriot on the Ground side. Also, the other full-time member of our staff needed to take some customer service rides with two of our drivers as a way for us to keep them sharp on their customer service skills. So, three office folks out for the day leaves who in the drivers seat all day? Moi. I relished the opportunity and got down to business, finishing up several projects as well as keeping an eye on the phones, putting out a few fires, and generally being able to multi-task like I love to do.

Joan and I had made plans to meet with a woman in the neighborhood to talk about what we could to together to help this place out. She's very impressive, seems to be firmly rooted in the neighborhood but not brought down by its poverty. Unfortunately she had forgotten about some church obligations and was unable to meet today. However, we've rescheduled for a meeting with her, her mother and one of their friends next week. It looks promising.

We returned to find preparations for our Allendale dinner well underway. David was cooking, as usual, but in a more supportive role. Val has taken the reins on the last two dinners and that's been fun. She's a pretty good cook too and it gives David a bit of a break after a long day at work. We had some new folks over, a friend of Mickey's and a friend of Val's. Mickey's friend was great, started dividing the guys into football teams within about 20 minutes of sitting down at the table. I like that kind of thinking.

Tonight is, as everyone knows, chores night so we all pitched in. David's the master and commander of that operation and he divied up the house into shares of chores. I got bathrooms. I love bathrooms. We got done in good time and now it's time to take a break before the next day starts.