My Honey's Birthday

Today is my girl's birthday -- happy birthday Heather!! You'll never really know just how awesome you are, but here's an attempt.

You hold our family together and keep us organized,
You show our children what it means every day to walk with God,
You make me feel loved and cherished and valued,
You are creative in everything that you do,
You make even half birthdays special for others,
You bring consistency to the kids lives that they miss terribly when you are gone,
You are a sounding board, a voice of wisdom and reason, and a source of strength and help for your friends,
You are an awesome prayer partner,
You take a house and craft it with loving care into a home,
You are a valuable resource and servant in the body of Christ,
You are absolutely my other half and something is definitely not right when you are away from our home,

and never forget that you are loved by your children and adored by your husband!

Jackie Robinson Day

Today was a special day. I led a meeting today and asked the group of about 12 people what made today special. Tax day was the most common response. When I mentioned the number 42 and baseball, one person in the room remembered Jackie Robinson.

What a great man -- a true competitor, patient, skilled, intelligent, persevering. As baseball honors the 61st anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, here's my small tribute with my favorite quotes by him.

"I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me... all I ask is that you respect me as a human being."

"Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life."

"There's not an American in this country free until every one of us is free."

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."

Reminded of Derek and Jim Redmond

I can't believe that it's time for the summer Olympics again. It's been crazy watching all of the controversy surrounding the torch relay. I would like to dwell on something more positive. I was recently reminded of one of the most personally inspiring moments in all of sports -- the story of Derek and Jim Redmond at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

I remember watching track and field on TV and getting ready to watch a typical runnng event, the 400-meters. However, the race was anything but typical! Derek Redmond from Great Britain seemed to be running well! However, coming around the turn, Redmond's hamstring suddenly pulled and he hit the track. I remember thinking how sad it was that a world-class athlete worked so hard to make it that far only to be injured during the race of his life. I saw him get back up and wave off the trainers coming to try to help him and it was obvious that he wanted to cross the finish line . . . to finish what he started. Then, his Dad came up to him (who had made his way onto the track from the stands) and put his arm around his struggling son and helped him hobble to the finish line. I've got tears in my eyes just typing this (once again proving beyond doubt what a softy I am).

It was an amazing show of determination by Derek Redmond and an outstanding show of love and support by his father, Jim. Lord, please let my kids know that their Dad loves and supports them! Hopefully, some day I'll get a chance to show them I support them even if it's not as dramatic and with the world watching.

Unhappy Opening Day 2008

What a wierd opening day of baseball for 2008 — the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A's in Japan!

I am none of the following:
– an isolationist,
– anti-Japanese,
– against global marketing,
– anti-expansion, or
– a stiff traditionalist who can't accept change (well, maybe I am to some degree)!

It's just IMHO (in my humble opinion) — it's just plain wrong to to open the baseball season in any country other than the U.S. or Canada. Opening Day should be the official inaugeration of Spring and should make you yearn for the smell of freshly mown grass, the sound of the crack of a bat, the warmth of the sun on your face, the sight of the teams running onto the field for a "real" game, and the taste of roasted peanuts followed by a hot dog and later snacking on sunflower seeds with a large Dr. Pepper . . . wait, where was I . . . .

To have Opening Day start at 5:00 in the morning, played by teams on the other side of a very large ocean, no broadcast available on radio, etc. is just frustrating. To make it even more strange, after this initial series, both teams will come back to the states and have additional Spring Training games before the season resumes. This year, I will consider Opening Day to be March 31st when most major league teams take the field for traditional day games to start their season.

Commissioner Selig is now talking about opening future seasons in Europe and other countries. Please, can we all just take a breath and learn from this first and listen to the response from fans like myself. We can all win. Here's a proposal — send two teams to another location like England or Germany but have them play their series after the official Opening Day of most other teams, then give them a break to fly back, rest, and then continue with their season once their series is over. No wierd opening day of the season, but with every other advantage of having teams play meaningful games abroad.

My personality profile

I took a DiSC personality profile recently and scored highest on "Steady" no surprise to me! My patterns are Agent and Specialist. Here's the description of a Steady: "Steadiness (Submission in Marston's time): People with High S styles scores want a steady pace, security, and don't like sudden change. High S persons are calm, relaxed, patient, possessive, predictable, deliberate, stable, consistent, and tend to be unemotional and poker faced. Stable, Cooperative, Predictable, Deliberate, Work in background, Diplomatic, Consistent, Good listener, Sympathetic."

My personality profile on Gary Smalley and John Trent's scale is "Golden Retriever."

Strengths	Strengths Pushed Out of Balance
Sensitive feelings	Easily hurt
Loyal	Missed opportunities
Calm, even-keel	Lacking enthusiasm
Non-demanding, patient	Push-over, taken advantage of
Peace maker, hates confrontation	Misses honest intimacy
Enjoys routine, dislikes change	Stays in rut, not spontaneous
Warm & relational	Fewer deep friends
Accomodating	Too indecisive
Sympathetic, good listener	Holds on to other's hurt or pain

What does a balanced Golden Retriever look like? Since Golden Retrievers have an eagerness to please others, they have a hard time saying "No." Therefore, their greatest relational need is to set limits and boundaries essential for their own well-being. Further, Retrievers need to practice confronting others. Turn your ability to feel deeply about negative things into a positive step, one where you think and act decisively.

On the SOCIAL STYLE Model™, my primary style is "Amiable" with high Versatility (I play well with others). My back-up or subquadrant is the "Driver" which means that I take charge when needed. Here's the description for an Amiable:
"Amiables are people-oriented, and care more about close relationships than results or influence. They usually appear warm, friendly and cooperative. Amiables tend to move slowly with a low time discipline, minimizing risk and often using personal opinions to arrive at decisions. Belonging to a group is a primary need, and Amiables may make every effort to gain acceptance. They typically seek to uncover common ground, preferring to achieve objectives through understanding and mutual respect rather than force and authority. When managed by force without relationship, Amiables appear to cooperate initially but will likely lack commitment to the objectives and may later resist implementation."

So, what's your style?

March 2008 Scattershooting

I've wanted to write for awhile now, but I'm so busy! I decided that I would write here until I got a certain amount of things accomplished. Tonight, goal completed! Various things to write about, so here's some scattershooting . . .

The main thing keeping me busy at the moment is getting our house to sell! Lots of minor repairs, some yard work, painting, etc. Boy, I'm ready for this to be over. We're hoping to stay within our school district with a little more room for the kids to roam.

Gearing up for March Madness? This Oregon Urology clinic has a genius idea that some guys should gear down. They're pitching that guys need to get a vasectomy before the tourney starts so that you have 4 days of non-stop NCAA basketball watching without hassle! Genius! Here's the news article, here's the link to the actual clinic's news item. I was hoping to get the audio of the commercial that ran on the Eugene, Oregon sports station but I can't find it anywhere.

Collin got promoted to the rank of Bear in Cub Scouts -- way to go Collin!

Also, getting ready for fantasy baseball season with my buds in the northeast. I love reviewing the teams and players. I also like ranking the players in their positions. However, I sure miss live drafts! Everything in online now which makes the season so easy, but the automatic drafts where you have to rank every player in one big list is a whippin'! I don't want to decide now between Jake Peavy and Carlos Beltran -- I'd rather wait and see which top players are available at all of the positions and then pick the one I like best. After the automatic draft last year, I was left scratching my head over some of the picks wondering why it drafted the way it did. Oh well, it's still a lot of fun.

Let it snow . . .

It's snowing in Texas and I love it! Colorado is one of my favorite states and I love winter sports, I just wish I had the day off tomorrow so I could play in it. We had just put the boys to bed when we realized it was snowing so we went and got them to look out the window -- how cool!

Top U.S. Cities and the 7 Deadly Sins

Forbes just published some interesting information on what they consider to be "America's Most Sinful Cities." The online version is complete with an interactive map of each of the deadly sins and the cities that they selected (using data compiled from various sources) .

They failed to make it easy by providing a list of the top 10 cities in each category, relying instead on the map. Also, I was looking for the overall top 10 cities but they only show the cities within each category. Interestingly, Las Vegas only showed up on the list for "sloth."

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Reading Guide

It's about time for Collin to tackle the next book in the Harry Potter series — Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. That means that I needed to read it ahead of time and work up some discussion questions. There are some very good lessons to be learned from this next installment and I didn't want him to miss any of them including racism, decision making, problem solving, initiative, courage, and more.

Download the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Reading Guide in Word/Google Docs or you can download the Chamber of Secrets Reading Guide in PDF. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to leave me a comment here or e-mail me.

2007 (not a Space) Odyssey

I just realized that I haven't written about out latest major purchase -- a new 2007 Honda Odyssey! We originally were not real excited about going into debt again (the only debt that we've had for awhile is our house) but we have already paid it off (thanks to some help from the family).

Our old van was a 2000 Plymouth Grand Voyager and it had over 125,000 miles on it. We put it in the shop and when our mechanic said "it'll be around $800" my response was "no, it won't!" Since Heather broke down by herself with all of the kids driving to New Orleans to visit some of the friends that we made from the Katrina diaspora, our confidence in that van was in major decline. We got $2,000 for that van and were thankful for it. It's a good thing we sold it too! A friend of ours bought the van for his dealership and a week after he sold it the new owner called and told him the engine blew on it — thank you Lord!

We had been saving money for a new van but the cash on hand would only buy us another run down van. After weighing our options and praying over it, we decided that we should go into debt and get a little better van and focus on paying it off as quickly as possible. Our family then stepped in and offered to pay the difference between what we were willing to spend and the cost of a new van. So, we got our dream and went shopping for a new Toyota Sienna or Honda Odyssey. The Sienna's didn't impress us near as much as the Odyssey's.

The only thing that the kids cared about was a built in DVD player. When we started looking for used vehicles, we told the kids to pray specifically that we would find the right van with a DVD player since I wasn't willing to pay much extra for it. The model of Odyssey that comes with the DVD player also happens to come equipped with a 6 disc CD changer, sun roof, leather interior, and other awesome trimmings that we wouldn't ordinarily care about. Since the dealer just got a big shipment of 2008 models, we negotiated a great deal on a 2007 model!

Thank you family and thank you Lord for providing us everything we could have asked for or imagined!