The college and young singles home group last night was great - a whole lot of them came over (I think we had around 16 to 20 or thereabouts). I love those people! They were talkative, open, we ate, sang, studied, discussed, prayed and played games together. It was a good start.

Jill and I were talking last night, and I remarked that we'll have ups and downs in this thing. Last night was an up, but my goal is to be flexible and persevere through the downs.

I spent the last few hours dragging seventeen years of stuff out of our attic. The garage now looks like a landfill, but the attic is completely cleaned out. Now to start rebuilding . . . the great Garage Renovation of 2010 is in progress. Slow progress, albeit.

No soccer this weekend. Which is a good thing.

I'm almost done with Bloo version 1.32. Will be deploying the 1.31 test version very soon (maybe today). In 2010, I'll be doing a lot more (and more frequent) Bloo releases. This first one is more or less a maintenance release, with a few goodies thrown in. More later.

Soon will get my lesson prepared for tomorrow.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. - John 6:35

Have a great weekend!

I'm driving Jill's Sebring full time now. Our mechanic pronounced it beyond help a few weeks ago. I'm becoming an expert in working the "feel" of a transmission that doesn't want to shift. Also, the engine sounds like I'm shaking a can full of bolts. So every day's gravy.

Daddy date with Bethany tonight was good. She's awesome. She puts up with a lot too.

Great talk with Molly last night.

I was in a room full of millionaires today. "Room full of millionaires" would make a cool band name.

Lost Premier party tomorrow night at our place!

Cooper lives to have his belly rubbed.

Cooper is our dog, by the way.

I am gearing up to liveblog 24 again tonight. We'll see.

I'm going to weigh 400 pounds.

That is all.

I don't want an iPad.

(even though everyone else I know is going batty over it).

I am in the midst of the Great Garage Renovation of 2010 (a slow-going process, but a process nonetheless). Currently I'm in phase one, which is the "throw everything I don't need away" phase.

I have trouble throwing books away, but I've been forced to throw some away, while doing my best to keep the gems. But there were two I had no trouble throwing away today.

The first was Widow of the South by Robert Hicks. I read this one a year or two ago; being a Civil War enthusiast, I thought it looked intriguing. Instead it was just . . . well, extremely anachronistic. I have no doubt most of the historical details were true, but the attitudes and thoughts of the characters were post-modern and strange to what I know of 1860s thought. I tossed that one in the trash with no problem.

The other one was a fatherhood book I never read. Not that I probably didn't need to, but the introduction to the book was a long dissertation about why fathers would rather not be in the delivery room when their kids are born. What the? Being with Jill as she delivered our four children was among the greatest privileges of my life.

That is all.

This was a great Sunday morning. In the College and Young Singles we planned on starting a series Charles T has recommended on basic discipleship (having just finished Habakkuk last week). The first week of this series was, fittingly, on the Gospel.

This morning our pastor started a series on 1 John (aw yeah!), and had a heavy Gospel and Christ-centric focus this morning. It fit perfectly with the CYS class.

Good Sunday.

(and my Texans won a squeaker today too. That just added to the awesomeness).

Today is day one of Selah week. This is something Jill and I are doing: we have four kids and I work full time so it's not like we can really retreat, but we're attempting a smoothing out of the sharp edges of schedule this week. We'll be eating in more, going to bed earlier, resting more. We're each fasting on certain things: For instance, I'm staying away from sugar and caffeine, and from political blogs and news. We've selected an easier, somewhat less rushed schedule for the week.

Will keep you posted on how this goes.

(For starters, today, we accidentally overslept and will be late for church! Selah! :-)

Peggy Noonan nails it. A few excerpts:

It is absurd and it is embarrassing. It would even be infuriating if it were not such a declaration of emptiness.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has embarrassed itself and cheapened a great award that had real meaning.

It was a good thing, the Nobel Peace Prize. Every year the giving of it was a matter of note throughout the world, almost a matter of state. It was serious. It mattered that it was given to a woman like Mother Teresa in 1979. She had lived for 30 years with the poorest of the poor; she and her Missionaries of Charity dressed their wounds, healed their illnesses, and literally carried them from the streets to mats and beds in a home where they would at least have in death the thing they had not had in life, someone to care for them. She didn't just care for them, she did the hard thing: She loved them. Her life was heroic, epic, and when she was given the Nobel Peace Prize, it was as if the world were saying, "You are the best we have. You are living a life that should be emulated."

Nelson Mandela was unjustly imprisoned for 27 years, and he came out without bitterness. There's a hero for you. He preserved his faith and that of his countrymen that together they could make their nation better, more decent and humane. He lived a life of moral and political struggle, broke the old chains that had bound South Africa. At the end he was a literal inspiration to the world.

. . .

[The] giving of the peace prize to President Obama is absurd. He doesn't have a body of work; he's a young man; he's been president less than nine months. He hopes to accomplish much, and so far--nine months!--has accomplished little. Is this a life of heroic self-denial, of the sacrifice of self for something greater, of huge and historic consequence, of sustained vision? No it's not. Is this a life marked by a vivid and calculable contribution to the peace of the world? No, it's not.

This is an award for not being George W. Bush. This is an award for not making the world nervous. This is an award for sharing the basic political sentiments and assumptions of the members of the committee. It is for what Barack Obama may do, not what he has done. He hasn't done anything.

In one mindless stroke, the committee has rendered the Nobel Peace Prize a laughingstock, perhaps for as long as a generation. And that is an act of true destruction, because it was actually good that the world had a prestigious award for peacemaking.

. . .

How to redeem this? That is a hard question, but here is one idea. The president will deliver a big speech in Oslo Dec. 10: white tie and tails, a formal, bound statement. The world, as they say, will be watching. He should deflect the limelight. (Can he?) He should make his subject bigger than himself. (Is there a subject bigger than himself?) He has been accused of traveling through the world on an extended apology tour. That isn't fair, but the tag is there. How about an unapologetic address, a speech, with the world's elites leaning forward and listening, about the meaning of America? A speech that shows a grounded and sophisticated love for his country and its great traditions and history. Not a nationalistic speech, not a prideful one, but a loving one.

For instance: The Peace Prize judges won't see it this way, but America has gone to Europe twice in the past century to fight for peace. This is an old concept, and has to do with killing killers so they can't kill anymore. It cost America a lot to do this, and we kept no territory, as they say, beyond the graves where our soldiers lie. America then taxed itself and gave its wealth not only to its allies but to its former adversaries, to help them rebuild. We didn't actually have to do this. We did it to make the world better. We did it to foster peace. (They should give us a prize.)

. . .

This might to some degree redeem this wicked and ignorant award, this mischievous honor.

"When Orwell says that even a reborn Shakespeare couldn’t get away with “raping little girls,” he was either reflecting the mores of the times (1944) — or he forgot about Hollywood." - Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy (commenting on an Orwell essay on Salvador Dali)

[H/T The Anchoress, who also has a great post on this subject]

I can't seem to learn anything about [the president's] health care reform plan. I watch the network news and discover that the plan cannot be summarized briefly. I read the papers and find the plan cannot be explained at length. I listen to the president himself and he seems at least as confused as I am, though less succinctly.

. . .

I gather, from the president's sales pitch, we're supposed to come up with a large sum of money to invest in a vaguely described deal that's going to have a huge payoff someday. Isn't the SEC trying to crack down on this sort of thing?

. . .

Understanding government programs is like looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Form is more important than content. The plan is 1,400 pages long, detailed specifics to come. You can stand on this thing to paint the ceiling. In my copy of The World Almanac, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights occupy 4 1/2 pages. That's 4 1/2 pages to run an entire country for more than two hundred years and three reams of federal pig Latin if I slam my thumb in a car door.

Is this some recent quote from a blog or pundit about the Obama health care plan?

No. This is excerpted from a P.J. O'Rourke column, written for the Wall Street Journal in 1993, about the Clinton health care plan.

Tonight I attended Open House at Bethany's high school. I always enjoy these things, and it's good to meet the teachers. Bethany goes to a great high school, and nearly every teacher she has is obviously in love with teaching and devoted to the kids.

As I walked the halls with the other parents, prodded along helpfully by student volunteers, it occurred to me that, for our society, people in my age bracket are basically done. Our culture worships youth: young, healthy, in shape, beautiful youth. Our celebrities are either young or they are surgically nipped and tucked (and injected and stretched and suctioned) to look young. Our athletes are young. Our artists and musicians are young. Even our President is young, as Presidents go (though he still has a few years on me). I, on the other hand, have crossed the line where I now work out to feel better, rather than to look better. Looking better became an impossibility quite awhile ago. But twenty minutes on an elliptical at level five makes me feel slightly more alive, provided it doesn't kill me.

So there we were, we middle agers, moving like the lumpen masses we are through the halls of this enormous, modern high school, squinting at the impossibly small print on the school map as we huffed our way to third period.

And the thought hit me: not done. I'm a parent. Jill and I have been parenting now for twenty years, and we've got, well, we don't know how many years left. Technically, in theory, eight more until all the kids are out of the house, four years after that until the last one's done with college, and, presumably, there will be some weddings sprinkled in there as well, and a grandchild or two or a dozen. But, as the movie Parenthood so wisely put it, you're never really done. You never cross the goal line and spike the ball. Parenthood is like your Aunt Edna's [backside]: it goes on forever and it's twice as frightening.

This is the task. This is the great Odyssey Jill and I are on, and we drive an Odyssey to prove it. We're in the thick of things, and time will tell how well we did. Time will display our diligence, and it will expose our sloth and passivity, wreathed in regret, should we fail as parents. We've either trained up our children in the way they should go, and prepared them for life, or we haven't. Lord have mercy.

On a side note, I believe firmly that a real man rejects passivity (that's from Robert Lewis' Raising a Modern Day Knight - a good study). But I've found that passivity is a puzzle. I have large regrets over times I was passive in my children's lives when I should have been active - I should have seen the storms coming and done . . . something. But I also know that I have a tendency to go off half-cocked and three sheets to the wind as well. After all, being a parent is an exercise in the art of letting go. There comes a time when, as a parent, you're sidelined and you just get to watch the game, however it goes. The trick is knowing when. Go Team.

Here's where I'm supposed to insert the obligatory "parenting is hard" statement, along with a lament about "how time flies" and "where did the years go". Well, fie on that (I've been wanting to work "fie" into my conversation recently). Parenting is what it is. It is what God has made it, and parenting plays its role in Christ's work of grace in salvaging lives and societies in our fallen world. By golly, there's no sense in either bemoaning it when times are bad or getting complacent when times are good (as they are now, by the way). Because the times will change. This isn't a job for cowards. It's also not a job for those with too much bravado. We are dependent.

Parenting is the most important thing I've ever done, and probably will ever do. Compared to being a dad, my day job fades to insignificance (other than, of course, as a means to the end of feeding my family). And I'm not done yet. As the kids grow up and I (surprise!) get older, new enemies join the battle, namely the enemies of "boy, am I tired" and "ow, my back hurts". But all the more reason to strap on the old armor and slog up the hill again. Battles do, after all, have their element of fun, and I have a goal to be old and crotchety, yet hale. We'll see.

Did I mention that I went to Open House tonight?

A quick list:

Andrew turned twenty yesterday. Yes. Twenty.

We got to see both Andrew and Molly this weekend. Awesome. We're celebrating Andrew's birthday tonight.

Bethany won the part of Olga in Stage Door. Not only will she be acting, but she'll be playing the piano. Great part.

The Dallas Texans - Houston Division U12 Red team (Blake's team) dominated at the tournament this weekend. They won their four games, 4-1, 4-0, 2-1, and 2-1 against some tough Dallas Texans - Dallas Division competition. They looked fabulous.

We're blessed.

I admit, I'm feeling a bit pesky tonight about the doings in Washington.

From my Thinkling bro, Phil:

Man steals painting of the Virgin Mary to fund abortion for a teen that he raped.

Molly's settled at UMHB and appears to be enjoying herself and making new friends. Yesterday, we hugged Andrew and he got in his car and drove himself up to Baylor to begin his sophomore year. Tomorrow they will start classes, as will Bethany, who is now a Junior in high school, and Blake, who is - I can hardly believe it - going into junior high.

God has been very good to us.

Bethany and I spent two hours today at the local DMV, trying in vain to get her learner's permit. We left close to five, as she had to get to work. We were no where near even getting in the final line to the computer test.

I'll vote for any politician who promises to privatize the DMV.

We are in Molly's dorm, doing last minute things. We're about to leave.

I love you, Molly, my precious daughter. I already miss you.

God speed.

Since yesterday I've been experiencing something rare: a week-long vacation at home. Man, I could do this full time (although, of course, I really, really enjoy having a job too!).

It started on Saturday; we went to San Antonio to hold an Oscar-tinged family birthday party for Bethany at my parent's house. This included a red carpet entrance, then Beth was whisked away for hair and makeup by the girls. She was escorted into the festivities by Blake (in a little tux - ha), to hear a hilarious "lifetime achievement" speech written by eldest son and delivered by aunt Kim and cousin Macy. Following this, we showed her sixteen-year DVD, which Jill and I had worked on diligently into the late hours last week (we produce a DVD for each of my parent's grandkids on their sixteenth birthday. I think this one came out pretty well!). This was followed by an Oscar-like awards ceremony, in which Bethany won every award (and gave an extremely believable and funny acceptance speech). We ended up with cake and cupcakes, baked lovingly and expertly by Molly, and then the opening of presents. All in all it was a great night. We came back here Sunday evening.

Since then, we've been working hard at taking care of lots of last minute details in preparation of taking Molly and Andrew to college this week.

Andrew had his wisdom teeth taken out yesterday too.

So lots of stuff has been happening. Here's what's not been happening: I haven't been thinking about work or monitoring work emails at all. They know how to find me if they need me.

Here's to another day!

Dissent. Even with a change of the party in power, it's still a good thing.

Regardless of your views on the healthcare issue . . .



[H/T Instapundit]

There's plenty of both heat and light in what's being posted on the web these days about the healthcare debate. I don't intend to get into it here, so much, but - and this is old news - does anyone else think this bit on the White House's website is . . . irritating?

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

I said "irritating", not "ominous". I don't think it's ominous, just yet. But what's with this note about "flagging" things that look "fishy"? Are the ears of the white house really as tin, politically and PR-wise, as this makes them appear?

We're having a vigorous debate in this country right now. At times really vigorous. I'll save my thoughts on the whole thing (maybe) for the aftermath, once the President's legislative goal is either dismantled or voted through. But these are interesting times. For the first time in, well, forever I kind of feel like picking up a sign myself.

The inestimable Mark Steyn has this to say:

DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTI- . . . No, wait, that bumper sticker expired January 20. Under the stimulus bill, there’s a new $1.3 trillion bills-for-bumpers program whereby, if you peel off old slogans now recognized as environmentally harmful (“QUESTION AUTHORITY”), you can trade them in for a new “CELEBRATE CONFORMITY” sticker, complete with a holographic image of President Obama that never takes his eyes off you.

“The right-wing extremist Republican base is back!” warns the Democratic National Committee. These right-wing extremists have been given their marching orders by their masters: They’ve been directed to show up at “thousands of events,” told to “organize,” “knock on doors” . . .

No, wait. My mistake. That’s the e-mail I got from Mitch Stewart, Director of “Organizing for America” at BarackObama.com. But that’s the good kind of “organizing.” Obama’s a community organizer. We’re the community. He organizes us. What part of that don’t you get?

. . .

Fortunately, this president doesn’t fold like a Robert Gibbs suit. He won’t give in to the attire pressure. So, on Monday, the official White House website drew attention to the alarming amount of “disinformation about health insurance reform.” “These rumors often travel just below the surface,” warned Macon Phillips, Chief Commissar of the Hopenstasi . . . whoops, I mean White House Director of New Media, “via chain e-mails or through casual conversation.”

“Casual conversation,” eh? Why can’t these “dissenters” just be like normal people and read off the teleprompter?

Today we got our ride, a 2000 Honda Odyssey, past 200,000 miles.

Here's to, hopefully, at least 50,000 more. She's been a good car.