Christmas Reflections

I really loved Christmas this year. I flew to Portland and have been enjoying a whole week with my family and extended family. I will fly back to Santa Barbara on Sunday, just in time to make my usual Church service, which is cancelled this week. My flight arrives in the middle of the one service they are having. I obviously won't hit everything, but I'll hit some of the highlights.

This is the first time I've seen my brother Nathan since he turned 21, so I got to have a few drinks with him. I introduced him to Rum and Coke, Pina Coladas, and sent him back to college with Rum to spare. Happy New Year Nathan!

My father recently digitized some of our old reel-to-reel family videos and put them on DVD. The videos started with my parents' wedding. My grandmother asked them if they were thinking "will this work out?" My mother's answer was somewhat striking to me. She said back then people generally didn't think about that. They went into it knowing it was a lifelong commitment. As I'm hitting the point in life where my peers are starting to get married, I wonder which ones will last. I hope that they all will, but statistically speaking it is very unlikely that all of them will. It saddens me to know that marriages that fall apart are just as common as marriages that last in America. I also realized that my parents were my age when they got married.

Another thing I noticed about the videos is that there were a lot of videos of me. Just about every semi-major step in my life up to age three was caught on film. My two younger brothers got progressively less. I'm sure that's quite common for first children, but it seems too bad. If I'm ever a father of multiple kids, I hope I make the effort to take plenty of pictures and videos of all my kids, not just the first one.

As a closing thought, I am realizing that Portland really isn't my home anymore. I spent a week here for Christmas. There is a good chance that I will not be back before Christmas next year. Similarly, I may not see some of my extended family again until Christmas next year. Up until now, I've always been back in Portland at least twice each year. Throughout college I still spent about four months out of every year living in Portland. It's a little hard realizing that I'm now past that point in life.

Reiteration

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been having trouble with the alumni.hmc.edu email forwarding. I am currently aware of four emails that I did not receive because of forwarding problems. There were two more that bounced back to me because I tried to send them to someone at an alumni.hmc.edu address. In that same time period, some did get though, so it is very intermittent.

From now on, please just send directly to my gmail address. This is not a temporary request. I'm done trusting a forwarding server that only sometimes works.

Email Problems

I have reason to believe that they alumni.hmc.edu email forwarding system is not currently working. If you have emailed me recently and I haven't responded, I would recommend re-sending the email. For now, please just send email directly to my gmail account. If you don't know that email address, just leave a comment asking for it and I will email you.

Final (?) Car Update

I got the battery replaced this morning and it seems like everything works fine again. Given that the car is about four years old, the battery is probably also four years old. Apparently that's a pretty common age for batteries to die, so I guess all is well and hopefully this battery will last me for at least another four years.

Thank you to everyone that offered me advice on what was going on and how to fix it.

I Spoke Too Soon

My car still won't start, although now I hear a very weak clicking of the starter. I guess I have one of two problems. Either my battery is completely dead and needs to be replaced, or my car isn't able to sufficiently charge it during a 40 minute drive at unusually high RPMs.

Whew!

This morning I had the unfortunate surprise of my car not starting. Actually it did start, and I pulled out of my parking space. Then the engine died and wouldn't start again. It wouldn't give me so much as the slightest try. Ugh. Now I had to get my car out of the way of another car and get to work.

I tried everything I could think of, which wasn't much. Mostly it was just opening the hood and staring at everything in there. I did locate the fuse box and verify that the fuse wasn't blown. I also convinced myself that it wasn't a dead battery. The radio and the lights still worked. I hadn't left my lights on or anything. Also, the car started up easily the first time.

Eventually I called Steve Palladino and he came over. He helped me push my car back into a parking space, then I dropped him off and borrowed his car for the day. The whole thing only put me back about 75 minutes. During the day I called a few mechanics, and one of them suggested that it really did sound like a dead battery. I came home, tried to jump start it, and it worked. The whole thing only cost me $20, and now I own jumper cables. Oh, it also cost me something to drive around for 40 minutes to charge the battery.

A few things are still a mystery to me. First, why did the engine die when I pulled out of my parking spot? Second, what drained my battery? I'm almost certain that I didn't leave the lights on. Oh well, what's life without a few mysteries?

Christmas Dinner - One Week Early

On Saturday night Philip and I hosted a Christmas dinner over at our apartment. We managed to fit 11 people at one table and fit that table in our apartment. The whole event took a lot of time to organize, plan, and prepare, but it was certainly worth the effort. Once we were able to sit down to dinner I didn't need to stress out about the food and I could just enjoy the food and the company.

One of the men there took some pictures and posted them online. Here is the link. I think the pictures pretty well capture at least a little of everyone, except for Mark, the person who took the pictures.

My Apartment

A month or two ago Philip and I received a letter from our landlord informing us that ownership of the building was changing hands and that we would have a new landlord. Our original lease would still be valid under the new management. At the end of last month, everyone upstairs moved out. Last week a giant dumpster was moved into the parking lot. I didn't hear a lot of details, but my best guess is that all of this was a plan to do some remodeling and/or non-trivial maintenance on the upstairs units. Yesterday we received a letter letting us know that they want us out too. We have until the end of January to be out.

This is frustrating to me. A lot of it is just the work and hassle involved in finding a new place quickly, moving, and then informing a multitude of companies, organizations, and people that my address has changed. On top of that, I just like our place and I'm not sure if another place will really match a lot of the things I like about this place.

More on Jeremiah

We are nearly at the end of our Jeremiah study, and certainly there seem to be new things hitting me each week. Last week we studied Jeremiah 31:27-40. This is probably one of the most central pieces of Old Testament prophesy, and yet I had never been aware of it before. This is where God announces the new covenant. Among the amazing new promises in this section are:

• No more punishment for sins of your ancestors. If they sin, they will be the ones that will receive God's judgment. (29 & 30)
• Direct access to God. Everyone can be in relationship with Him. (34)
• The Kingdom of God will be extended to the outcast and unclean. (38-40)

There's a lot more there, but I just wanted to get that little bit out there. This passage is an absolutely amazing bridge between the old and new covenants.

Ginger Bread: 1 - Cheapo Mixer: 0

I'm working on making ginger bread cookies. The motor on the $10 mixer I have just died because it couldn't handle the thick batter. Now I understand why some people spring for the fancy $12 mixers.

Helping Mario Jump

Do you remember back in the good old days of Super Mario Brothers, how people would often jerk the controller in the direction Mario was jumping to "help" Mario make the jump? Well it looks like that will actually be a reality in Nintendo's next generation gaming console.

Not Worth It

As I've mentioned many times now, I have recently become quite a reader of classic literature. For the past couple of months I've been trying to read The Last of the Mohicans. Just by mentioning that I've been reading it for months tells you that this cannot be the most grabbing book I've ever read. This weekend as I pulled myself through another chapter, I realized two things:

1. Even as I was "reading" it, I wasn't actually paying much attention to what I was reading. Consequently, I didn't even have a great sense for what was going on, which made it even worse to read.
2. Having this as the novel I'm currently reading tends to turn me away from reading toward other activities like dinking around online doing nothing.

The upshot of all of this is that I decided to just put the book back on my shelf. There isn't much point in doing pleasure reading that isn't actually enjoyable. Honestly stubbornness is the only reason I stuck with that book as long as I did. Maybe someday I'll decide it's worth it to read it, perhaps a different edition would help me get through it.

All that being said, I cannot say that this is an awful book. A quick look at the comments on Amazon shows that people pretty much either love this book or hate it. Unfortunately I'm in the second category. I you decide to read it, perhaps you will be lucky enough to be in the first category.