a sigh of relief

my father called me this morning a little before 7. My parents and grandmother are all okay. Thank You, God, for taking care of them.

What horrible destruction and devastation. My heart is broken. I was born and raised in New Orleans, and then I lived on the coast in Mississippi for 12 years. I recognize many of these places shown in the videos.

What more can I say. Please, God, protect the people and help them make wise decistions.

:::sigh:::

So, Katrina has done its damage to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (and southern Alabama, too). Of course, I tried to call my parents, but all the phones are dead. Whatever service my father's cell phone is leaves a nice little message that due to the hurricane in the area you are attempting to reach, your call cannot be completed.

Hopefully, service will be restored during the night or tomorrow. I'm fairly sure they're okay, but I'd like to know just the same. Not knowing is the worst part.

Various and Sundry Items

Item the First—A Puppy

I went to Chipotle to grab a burrito tonight. When I was leaving, there was an SUV parked next to me, and inside was a man in the driver's seat holding one of the cutest little puppies you will ever see. He (the man, not the puppy) rolled down the window so I could take a closer look. My heart melted tremendously at how cute this little tyke was. He's 2½ months old and half the weight of when he will be full grown. His name is is Pilate (Pontius Pilate); they wanted to give him a really big name to make up for how tiny he is. I responded, "as long as he doesn't take after him", and the man agreed that he wouldn't. Pilate is a cross between a chihuahua and a rat terrier with the markings of the terrier. He was one of two pups in the litter, and his sister looks like a chihuahua. I hated to leave because the pup was so adorable.

Item the Second—Church and worship

I went to church tonight. I never seem to make it on Sunday mornings except to teach Bible study at 11:00. Saturday night is a contemporary service, which I enjoy very much. I don't think a contemporary service is more worshipful than a traditional service, or vice versa. However, there is more freedom of expression in a contemporary service. If you want to raise your hands, do it. If you don't want to do that, don't. Very simple.

I met some friends at the service who normally attend another church (First Baptist of Houston), but the freeway is closed where the church is (I-10 and 610), so they decided to come to our church tonight (Tallowood Baptist). <sarcasm>I hate our contemporary services when I'm in a funk, because I'm always faced with the greatness and goodness of God and the conviction of my own sin.</sarcasm> Tonight was no different.

Item the Third—Music

Today I got the music I ordered from BMG last weekend. This is the first music I've bought in almost a year. Why so long? For one, I'd rather buy comics and DVDs since there's so little current music out that I enjoy. Second is that BMG carries a very small selection of music compared to what's available, so that when I'm ready to buy some music, I usually can't find anything to buy to meet the requirements of any deal they offer. I know BMG is not the only source of music, but if I can get the average cost of a CD below $7.00, I'm going that way. One other thing that really irks me about BMG is the so-called "special" new release status of certain albums. Evanescence is a case in point. Released in 2003, their first (only?) CD is still under this special status, meaning essentially that you have to pay BMG a premium to buy this CD. Its purchase doesn't count toward club purchase fulfillment; it is not available as a free selection; and it's purchase does not allow you to take any other CDs free. I can see maybe six months, but two years? give me a large break.

Here's the music and my anticipated enjoyment on a scale of 1-10 (1-low, 10 high):

#	Artist	Title	Anticipated Enjoyment
1	Shawn McDonald	Live in Seattle	8
2	Passion (various)	How Great is Our god	9
3	Joshua Bell	Romance of the Violin	7
4	Jars of Clay	Redemption Songs	8
5	Bobby Darin	Live from Las Vegas	7

So long...

No, I'm not leaving, much to your chagrin. According to blogger, my last post was 8/5 [note: after publishing, I see my last post was 7/30, but my last updated post was 8/5, or so it would seem], not quite as long ago as I thought. It seems like forever, though you might be thinking it's sometimes better this way, my not saying anything.

If I were to have written anything within the past two weeks, without getting too deep into it, it would have gone something like, "I'm a total loser; I'm incapable of stepping above or outside myself; I'll never be out of the mess I've gotten myself into." But I try not to burden people with that junk. I mean, who wants to read that garbage?

The only thing worse than reading about it is living in it.

And to think, I'm going to lead a small group about our identity in Christ starting in a couple of weeks. Talk about being completely incompetent to speak on a subject. Yet, I know that this is my problem, and I don't think I'm alone in struggling in this area. I'm sure the specifics of my struggle are not shared in whole by others in my group, but all these struggles stem from not knowing who we are and not being aware of all that Christ has done for us.

I mean, how many times are we called saints? Yet we define ourselves as sinners. Guess what we act like — sinners! How can we act as anything but when we say we are just sinners [saved by grace]? When I say I'm a loser, I'm not going to act in ways that seem to differ from a loser's actions. Self-fulfilling prophecy. If I define myself as a sinner, I'm locked into that mindset.

This is not to say that I will not sin if I define myself as a saint, but that designation makes a ton of difference in how I look at myself. Now to make it real in my life, and not just some theoretical pie in the sky.

Win, Place, or Show?

I didn't go see a movie today. Bummer. I did finish watching Gorgeous last night, starring Jackie Chan. It was a fun movie. Chan fought one guy, Brad Allan, a couple of times. Allan is the only non-Asian member of Chan's martial arts group. He's quite impressive to watch. It would be interesting to find out if these guys did any wire work for the film. For the most part, the action was fairly realistic or at least believable, but there were a couple of times that it seemed wires had to have been involved. Anyway, this was a fun little romantic light comedy, and Chan's apartment was fantastic. I'd love my house or apartment to be similar to that.

Well, I intended to write more, but the melatonin I took is apparently kicking in... later...

Touching Base

Wow, life happens... work, church, and a pseudo-personal life. whoda thunk it?

So much injustice in the world, who can write of it all?

• A woman abandons her 3-yr old son on an interstate and then hits him when he tries to get back in the car (Virginia).
  
• A man (here in Houston) gets mad at some kids playing in front of his apartment, then gets a gun out after their football goes through his window. He fires at them, and one of the bullets goes into an apartment and kills a 2-yr old girl. His defense? He didn't mean to kill anyone, and those kids had broken into his apartment before and stolen things. If you pull out a gun, you intend to shoot and kill someone with it, period. If you don't intend to shoot and kill someone, don't pull a gun. How hard is that?

Those are the ones that really stand out to me.

The Island

Surprisingly better than I expected it to be. True, it's a Michael Bay film, but I'm pretty sure Spielberg took a healthy interest in it. I was really shocked at the imagery of cloning and abortion portrayed in this movie. The abortion angle was subtle—unintended, perhaps—but present nonetheless. And the cloning, well, do we have the right to play God?

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

A fun movie. I'll add more later.

Up and Running, Sort Of

I've been having trouble with my computer lately. Well, several months, actually. Okay, for over a year or two. It all started when I bought some cheap piece of software (Print Workshop 2003) for doing some fun graphics projects. When I installed it, it installed over 1000 fonts on my computer. Already having 500-600 fonts installed, this caused a problem with having too many fonts installed (I'm running Win 98 SE). So, I got the number back down to 1003.

Now, the program didn't ask if I wanted to install these fonts, nor did it inform me that it was going to install them. Very poor design. Because of this, I removed the program. And for all it promised, it didn't actually deliver those things. At least it was only $5.

So, several of my programs, like Paint Shop Pro 7.04 (PSP) and several different FTP programs I was trying displayed odd characters in the dialogs. WS_FTP, in particular, was virtually useless as all of the messages just showed as boxes. I got some kind of error, but who can tell exactly what is going on when all alphabetic characters are rendered as boxes? At least I had an idea on what PSP was asking me, so I could get by (and version PSP 9 renders dialog boxes differently and works fine, except my machine doesn't always pop up dialog boxes -- I'm sure that's a Win 98/insufficient resources problem, not a corrupted font).

The worst thing the POJ (piece of junk) program did was replace my Marlett font. This is a system font that Windows uses to render fun things like the minimize/maximize/close boxes in the upper right-hand corner, check boxes and radio buttons (not rendered through Java or some such) in your browser and dialog boxes (real fun to try to figure out if a green squiggle means it's checked or not).

Anyway, a friend sent me a new Marlett font (I was assured that this font was responsible for all of my font woes -- both system and printing) to install on my system. I deleted my corrupted font and tried to install the new one. It bombed and told me the file was corrupt. So, for about three weeks now, I've had no real check boxes, radio buttons, or proper mini-icons. I didn't know where my system disk was to get the actual font. I found that yesterday.

Anyway, in an effort to do a little other cleanup, I wound up (accidentally) deleting my TCP/IP stack from my computer (Micro$oft sucks at directions, I tell you, even in later products). Then I remembered that I had forgotten my AOL password over 3 years ago (their web-based password reminder service stupidly only sends me my AIM password, even though I'm on their web-based email page. How stupid is that? Please, tell me), and I had read that you can get that problem fixed by trying to log in three times. I installed AOL (I only pay the $5 monthly to keep my email address there, not use the software), and sure enough, during the installation process, I saw a progress window about restoring TCP/IP. I would be able to log in again. (I had also lost dial-up networking in the midst of all this, and when I got that back, Micro$soft didn't think it proper to include a TCP/IP install.

So, anyway, I installed AOL and got my password reset; I can now log on without using AOL (they've provided more functionality in their software, less brain dead and all, but they still try to take over everything -- I had 8 icons besides the AOL program icon on my desktop, three processes that start up "in the background", and I now have Real Player on my computer again -- Yuck!!!). I also have the proper little icons and boxes everywhere.

My biggest problem still remains, though: when I print from Netscape 7.2, all alphabetic text prints as boxes (regardless of the font used on the page). Numbers and symbols print just fine. IE 6 printed just fine. If you have a clue on this, I would be more than happy to hear it. I've re-installed Netscape two or three times to try to resolve this, all to no avail.

I have another problem with my Netscape mail client: I can't use my Netscape email account any more. Back in Dec 2004, the program stopped responding to my requests to download email. This had happened intermittently before, so I just took Netscape web mail out and "reattached" to it. This solved the problem the few times this had happened before, but not this time. Now (and every few weeks when I try to reattach), it goes through the whole registration process, connects to all these different servers, but in the final step it fails and tells me that it is unable to connect to the server at this time. I have a modem manager running, which shows me activity. This last step does all kinds of things for about a minute, downloading about 300-400 Kb, then gives the error message. Netscape's basic response is that since I can see my email using their web-based client, there's no problem that needs to be resolved. I know it's all free software and storage, but still, shouldn't their own products work with their own other products? Is that too much to ask? The only saving grace on all of this is that Netscape web mail upped their storage to 250Mb from the previous limit of 5Mb.

This is still a major inconvenience for me. I like to store certain mails together on my computer (like jokes and devotionals), and I can no longer do this with anything that comes to my Netscape account. I have to forward it to one of my other two accounts. Eventually (a long time from now, of course), I will run out of storage space online. If anyone has a clue on this problem, I would appreciate any advice on the matter.

What Movie would You be in?

Answer some questions; find out what movie you would be in. Fun stuff!


Lord of the Rings!


What movie Do you Belong in?(many different outcomes!)
brought to you by Quizilla

Picture

Well, here's my first picture upload. This is not me, in case you were wondering. This is my cat, Clark Kent. He's the main reason I'm still around today. Not trying to discredit God or anything, but He uses ordinary physical means many times to accomplish His supernatural will and purposes. In my darkest days, when I could not find a reason to continue on, Clark would jump on the bed next to me and go to sleep. In all good conscience, I couldn't leave him on his own, abandoned to whatever happened to everything after I was gone.

Even though my life is still not going great (but not horribly, either), that idea is so far away, that it would somehow be okay to remove myself from this life. It almost seems like a totally different person. Thank God for His work in my life, for preserving me through the dark times and the light.

Here's one more picture of Clark, my favorite one: