Wow, October seems to be going REALLY fast. Here it is the 19th already.

Today was a “hymns only” day at church so I didn’t play bass. I have to admit that sleeping in felt good, but I think I missed playing more than I enjoyed sleeping. I miss playing more than I ever thought I would. I think next week should be back to normal again with the full praise team.

Tomorrow I’ll be working at home installing a new vanity cabinet that I just got done building. Lori’s favorite cousin will be coming for a visit Friday through Monday and she thinks it would be nice to have a sink in the bathroom (and she’s right) so I’ve been working on that. The plumber needs a few days to work in the sink installation so if I can get the cabinet installed tomorrow, he should have three days to fit that in. I know its going to take a while to do because in this old house, the floor is a little uneven and the walls are not square. It will take some cutting and fitting to get it all in tight. I could normally install the sink myself, but we had a plumber rough it all in and he used flexible plastic supply lines that need special tools to put ends on the pipes.

I’ll still have the medicine cabinet and trim to make and install in the bathroom, but at least we’ll have a sink again by Friday.

Oh yeah . . . the plumber’s name really is “Joe”.

There is an old song by one of my favorite bands from back in high school days ( .38 Special) called “Hittin’ And Runnin’”. No, this is not about .38 Special.

I got into a little fender scuffle at school on Friday. I was dropping off the boy on the North side of the school. As I was approaching the parallel parking loading zone, I noticed several cars behind me, so rather than taking the first available spot, I went on a little further. There was one stopped car letting out a girl. I went on around that car and was pulling around to park in front of that car.

As I was pulling in, the driver must have started driving before looking and she ran into the back, right corner of the van which caused a little scrape:

I pulled on over to the curb, and Logan got out and went on in to school. The lady in the other car pulled out and started around me. Since she was kind of in the street when she hit me, I thought she was just going to pull on around me and park in front of me. She pulled up beside me, paused a bit, then took off.

I got out and looked at the damage and saw that it wasn’t all that bad. I mean, this is a 14 year old van with 140k miles and a broken transfer case, its not worth a lot. I was going to go on myself, but then I stopped and thought about it a minute. I thought “What if this lady goes home an tells her husband I hit her and that I’m the one who left the scene?” I thought I better call the police to cover my own actions.

I don’t know what the the police did about it, if anything, but I do know who the lady is. She is a waitress at a cafe in town.  Plus, its quite likely I will see her again most every other morning at school dropping off kids. Running was not her best plan but its the choice she made.

I probably won’t get the van fixed.

Oh, and I still like .38 Special too.

It was a good day at church today.

Praise team seemed to go pretty well. We only lead four songs because we had others doing special music, and at the end of the message Pastor Scott wanted a song played off CD that fit in with his sermon. Our worship leader (Doug) got us copies of the sheet music for Paul Baloche’s “All For You”. I suspect we’ll be leading it soon which will be neat because that is such a cool song.

I spent most of the afternoon working on church stuff after I got home too.  Since I record the service and maintain the church website, I put the sermon online and so it is available for those who missed it. Here is today’s sermon.

It takes a while to do each week, but here’s the process I use: For recording, I feed a custom mix from the PA board into my laptop and record the entire service with Audacity. When I get home, I listen to different parts of the service and then cut everything else out from around the sermon. Next, I add an intro and closing back around the message. That all gets exported out of Audacity to a WAV file for burning to CD and for making the mp3 files. I convert the WAV file into both a 56k and a 16k mp3 file (using CDex) so the listener can decide if they would rather have better quality, or smaller files. Finally, I edit the web page, upload the files, and add the sermon to the RSS feed for those who use podcast receivers.

Later, I burn the sermon WAV file to CD for use in the church office. They make copies of the CD to give out to people who request them. It was totally my own fault, but I got behind in making CDs of the sermon recordings. A church member had requested a copy of a recent sermon so I decided I’d better get caught up. That took a good portion of the afternoon burning and labeling 12 CDs (yeah, I was really behind), but it feels good to be back on top of it again.

I tried out a CD/DVD burner program that I recently downloaded to make the discs today. It is a free program that is available from this site. It seemed to work well. It burned the 12 CDs fine and then I also put nine sermon files on one DVD for backup/archive purposes. If you need a free CD burner, check it out, it may work for you too.

No, this is not a political rant . . . although “turkeys” does describe a lot of the people making the news headlines lately.

A friend of mine who shall remain anonymous (Jim) keeps reminding me that I haven’t posted anything in a while so you can blame him for this one.

My office/woodshop is just outside city limits on a dirt road. As I was coming in this morning, I noticed a flock of wild turkeys strolling this way. I always keep my camera in my backpack, so I grabbed the camera and waited behind a row of cedar trees that is here on my property. The turkeys came up to the trees and then walked along the other side of them emerging right beside me.

This is one of the the better pictures I got:

Now that I think about it, these do appear to be Republican turkeys. Notice the red coloring and most of them do seem to be looking right of center.

We are starting back to school today (Aug 19th). The boy was pretty excited to get back. This morning he jumped up and put his clothes on in record time. I only wish that morning enthusiasm would continue throughout the school year.

This year, he’s one of the big kids. We have two elementary schools. One is K-2nd and the ohter is 3rd-5th. Since he’s starting 2nd grade today, he’s one of the “old” kids.

We did manage to get him to stand still long enough for a first day of school pic:

The “2″ is for “2nd grade”.