A Collection of My Thoughts

Now sports is not a big priority in this family and that seems to be kind of a tradition with us. I don't see any interest in sports in my wife's parents and there was very little interest in my own family as I was growing up. In fact, I had never watched a football game till I moved here to Oregon when I was a sophmore in highschool. The first Superbowl that I can recall viewing on the television was when I was a freshman in college in about 1979. As it turns out, I do enjoy watching the game once in a while and although I don't think this year was my favorite Superbowl, it was a good one and held my attention to a fairly decent degree. I generally root for the underdog and was pleased to see New Orleans come out on top this year. It is always a good reminder to see someone or in this case, a group of someones, overcome all of the challenges ahead of them and find themselves at the top of the mountain.

I told you a couple of posts ago about this new phone that I purchased. It has been an interesting few weeks as I have continued to become more familiar with it and its features. I now feel fairly confident with the device but let me share with you a fun little experience that I had with it tonight. We need to purchase a headset with a microphone so Jonathan can keep in touch with his teachers. Perhaps you already know that he does his schooling at home on line. The school has had a couple of very low end headset/mic combinations delivered here but the quality has matched the price and they haven't worked very well. We decided to check out the availability of better sets this evening and went to BestBuy. They had options ranging from $19.99 to $127.99. Oh my goodness! What makes one set that much better than the other? There was a set marked down to $49.99 but I couldn't tell what the original price was. It occurred to me that I had recently downloaded a free application to my phone that utilized the camera as a barcode reader. I chose to scan the barcode from the item and discovered, to my complete surprise, that this particular headset was available online at any number of websites for nearly half of the price that BestBuy listed as "on sale". Well, needless to say, we left the store and will be purchasing a headset from one of the popular online stores.

Ok I've been thinking. I know that you're tempted to warn me not to hurt myself by putting all of that extra pressure on my brain. Well, its too late! The thoughts have already escaped the gray matter and are now leaking through my fingers into the blogosphere.

I was thinking about synthetic sweeteners. You know man-made replacements like saccharin, nutrasweet, aspartame, artificial sweeteners. They make things taste sweet but they always seem to leave a bitter aftertaste in the mouth. I'm told that if one uses it long enough, one will begin to prefer it over real sugar. I suppose that may be true. I hope that I never get to the place where I prefer a man-made supplement to the real thing!

NKJV Psalm 119:103
How sweet are Your words to my taste,
Sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Who Stole My Church?

Did you see the obvious trap? Don't get caught! It's not my church. It's not your church! The true owner, who paid a dear price for it, will continue to take care of it. All through out time since the formation of the church as we know it, a righteous remnent has been preserved. We can be confident that the true head of the church will continue to protect its legacy in spite of the present culture within which we live.

Who Stole My Church!

Have you asked yourself this question? There is a book by a guy named Gordon Mcdonald titled "Who Stole My Church". Now let me be clear, I have not read this book nor do I know what it is about but I have, in fact, asked myself this question. I asked it today, if you can believe it, before I entered the doors of the church which I am currently calling home. Interestingly, they chose today to suggest this book as suggested reading. I read the online exerpts and got a general gist of what the book is probably about. To tell you the truth, I am not completely satisfied with the idea that I should be ok with the church experience with which I am currently familiar.

John the Baptizer, a biblical character with whom we should all be famailiar with, was not a person who found reason to be particularly concerned with the "feelings" of persons outside the circle of current believers. He believed his role was to speak the truth in blunt vernacular and allow the Spirit of God to do Its work in the hearts of the listening audience. He was able to use blunt language and the Word Of God and people still heard God's voice speaking when if, in fact, they were receptive to the words in the first place.

I am personally concerned that if we as a local church don't bluntly preach the Word of God in a clear manner as in examples like John the Baptizer, we are doing the
currently unreached a disservice and they will have to find the truth some other way.

I have personally sat in the audience of a preacher who consistently preached the Bible chapter by chapter and verse by verse and found that the scriptures themselves spoke far more intensly to my soul than some poor individual trying to determine what might be an appropriate series of subjects to talk about and support with appropriate scriptural texts.

Don't you think that the Creator allowed the current scriptural text for a reason? Isn't it all there for our benefit? Why then does the clergy apparently completely ignore the "difficult" text and tend to only talk about the easy stuff? If the status quo was to teach verse by verse, there would not be freedom to ignore the more difficult passages.

This is my belief, take it or leave it. The scriptures will always talk about whatever is going on or can go on in one's life and if God's prophet, whomever he may be, is willing to proclaim His Word, in the literal manner in which it was intended, it will not return void. It is not his job nor should it even be his concern whether or not the message is milky enough for the present audience.

Clam Chowder Extraordinaire

Oh Yeah! I just had to add a quick post. We had a fairly simple and yet wonderfully tasty dinner tonight! I had one of those ginormous Costco cans of chopped clams and was convinced by my life time sweetheart to make a batch of clam chowder. We just got back from Winco where she found some fun sourdough loaves called "sourdough bowls". We have always threatened, since experiencing something like this at Disneyland, to serve some great clam chowder in loaves of bread. It was fantastic!!!

I used the recipe for chowder on the can of clams although I added a lot more flour to get the thick viscosity that this family prefers. Here is an image of the final outcome.

Today Is The Day The Teddy Bears Have Their Picnic

Please be sure to click on any of the links that I've included. Don't forget to come back and finish the post though. I love your visits and the comments you leave. As insignificant as you might believe they are, they lift the spirits of this "Old Man" to heights you couldn't imagine.

Now for those concerned readers of this blog, it seems that I am finally getting used to this new hand held wireless device. I actually posted a couple of comments to facebook today and there were at least two images taken and posted via this device. I was also able to remember the path to silence the phone during church and no one got their head bitten off due to my frustration. Ahh! Life is truly good!Don't expect, however, for me to make posts such as this one with just one or two thumbs. Efficiency calls for the use of all ten fingers. Besides, the skill of touch typing is one of the important skills which my mother left me and it is good for me to exercise that skill as frequently as time permits.

Ok, some of my visitors through Facebook asked for more info regarding the restaurant that we visited today. That restaurant would be the Black Bear Diner. Now Debbie and I have actually been to the Beaverton, Or location three times and have been pleased during each of these visits. We don't drive to Beaverton to visit the restaurant but if we happen to be in the neighborhood when the "urge" to replentish our stores of calories, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals, (as in we're hungry) then we stop by. Interestingly, there does often require a wait though today it was only 10 or 15 minutes. The menu is on recycled paper and looks somewhat like a newspaper but the items listed on it, at least the ones that I have experienced, are tastey and filling. In fact, today I had to laugh because as we were waiting, a waitress delivered a dish to a relativly small women that could have easily fed three people like myself. I think she split it with her companion but one needs to know that one will not go away from this establishment hungry.

All of the decorations are bear related to some form or other. There are bear carvings, paintings, and usually somebody wandering around the place dressed as, yeah, you guessed it, a bear. Oh well, that is part of the charm of the place.

Go ahead and check it out on my recommendation. I'm confident that you will come away having received good service, a good meal, and a good time.

Dude! What Happened?

Isn't all of our modern technology supposed to make life so much easier? I mean, isn't that why the technology was invented? We should be able to apply modern gadgetry to our every day situations and relieve the stresses that confronted the people of the last decades.

Ok, this is what I'm really talking about. This weekend we were allowed to upgrade our wireless phones. We decided that it would be helpful in our little weekend junking business to have at least one phone that could do a few more tricks than just make calls. I looked around and kind of decided which phones we wanted and so we went in and made the purchases. We determined that Debbie's phone only needed to make calls and text messages and that my phone should have the ability to do data exchange and have internet access. Well, suddenly the stress level around here has gone through the roof! Yesterday while sitting in church, I tried to silence the phone and was so engaged in trying to remember the path to that feature that I nearly bit Jonathan's head off as he tried to hand me something. That was just the beginning. Without going too deeply into the details, I lost some important contacts from my previous phone and again, there was some loud exchanges between certain family members and myself. This whole thing was going downhill at a steady rate and recovery was looking pretty grim. This morning the darn thing thinks it is an alarm clock at 5:30 am and that would have been ok if I had had just the slightest clue as to how to turn it off. Oh my goodness!! I had to get out of bed and run into the bathroom so I could just figure out how in the world to silence this devil machine that I now own. Have you heard of the rule of unintended consequences? Basically it is like this. No matter how hard one tries to anticipate the affects a certain decision will have on one's situation, there will always be effects that are completely unintended. I have certainly experienced this law over the last couple of days. So far during this process I have not uttered any language that is not part of my normal vocabulary but there have been times when certain unacceptable words have been bouncing around in my cranial cavity looking for an exit.
Hopefully, there is a learning curve and I will soon acheive some level of competence.

Ok, let me tell you about the phone. In spite of my current frustration, it is a cool device that, in time, will be a valuable addition to our current assortment of technology. This device is called the Motorola Droid and falls into the smart phone category and is one of the hottest items in the current Verizon Wireless line up. You need to know, however, that currently it does have what might be considered a fatal flaw by many people. It cannot make a phone call using only a bluetooth headset. To make a call one must actually hold the phone in one's hand and make a couple of different strokes with one's hand. That obviously makes it a problem here in Oregon as well as many other states with the current hands free rules. I have been assured that Motorola is currently working feverishly on a fix that will be "pushed" to the phone in the next couple of months. I don't know how the designers could have overlooked such an obvious problem. Other than that, it is very cool.

It has a Google based operating system called Android. Google is a proponant of open sourced programing which makes a huge number of the applications available for the phone for free. Oh Man! You wouldn't believe the number of fun and useful apps that you can download for no additional cost.

It also comes with a 5.0 megapixal camera with a flash and a full qwerty keyboard.

Dude! That is so amazing!

This post is getting way too long but hopefully soon I can post some pics which I've taken with this phone. I have to go to bed but hopefully the dreams will be sweet before that obnoxious phone wakes me up again. (I'm not sure if I remember how I finally turned the thing off this morning.) Uggh!

We Went Shopping And We Weren't Alone

Today Debbie and I were on the "other" side of town. We decided to stop for a sinful bite to eat at The Cheesecake Factory.Have you ever been there? Man, that is an experience! I've been there three or four times and at least twice we waited for over two hours. Today it was only about an hour. Now I realize that somewhere around here there is a recession but not today. At least not at The Cheesecake Factory, Nordstrom's

or any other place that we strolled through at Washington Square.

That place was hopping and it appeared that people were spending money. Now this, of course, was just a microcosmic look from my little world but it sure looked as if people were easing up their grips on their liquid assets.

Ok, let's get back to the restaurant.

Look at this crowd waiting to be seated.

And this lot is already enjoying their dining experience.

The menu is the largest of any menu that I've ever read. If you'd care to preview it in pdf format, you may click here.

Our meals were each outstanding. Debbie enjoyed the same thing she always has when we're there. (She believes that when one finds a good thing, one should stick with it.) Each of our dinners can be found on page 12 of the menu in the pasta section. She had the Bistro Shrimp Pasta and I had the Cajun Jambalaya Pasta. We were each served portions large enough to bring some home. In additon to our dinners, we each added (this is the sinful part) a lovely piece of cheesecake. Her's was called The Chocolate Tuxedo Cream Cheesecake and mine was called Stefanie's Ultimate Red Velvet Cake Cheesecake. These can be found on page 18 of their remarkably long menu. Just to "wet your whistle" as it were, let me leave you an image of my choice for dessert.

Whew! That reminds me. I better go take my cholesterol pill and an asperin!