Category Archives: uncategorized

Wretched Little Vignettes

I just watched a wretched movie called “Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Magical World” with Gracie. It’s a horrid attempt by Disney to further capitalize on the Beauty and the Beast franchise and the current Disney Princess craze.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. It’s actually four wretched little, well, vignettes, I guess.

And you know what? I’ll bet I’ll watch at least a dozen more times in the next two months. This is the price you pay when your main movie-watching partner is three years old and a girl.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Seder

Yesterday was interesting. I forgot to mention that instead of our regular worship service (not the sunrise service for which I arrived late), we had a Passover dinner, or Seder dinner. A Messianic Jew and her husband walked us through the elements of the Passover, explaining the significance of each. It was fascinating. There are so many parallels between the Passover dinner and the death and resurrection of Jesus. As the woman (I can’t remember her name) explained, the Old and New Testaments really are one big book, despite the fact that a lot of Christians tend to ignore the Old Testament. But the Old Testament, if nothing else, is context for the new. If we truly want to understand the nature of Christ, we need to study Jewish culture. Jesus was Jewish, after all.

Anyway, the experience was very informative, and I hope to do it again someday.

And of course, I somehow got roped into playing guitar when they sang us a song. But that was cool. It was fun to play in a whole different style from what I’m used to playing.

Frequency For Windows In Beta

Frequency for Windows is now in beta [gulp]. Hopefully it will go well. It’s running fairly well under Windows2000 and WindowsXP, but it still has a few rough spots. That should all be ironed out in the next week or so, though.

New features for 1.1: send feedback via email (done), new HTML rendering engine (done; thanks to Joe Strout for being a genius), edit last post (working on it). Once I get the Classic and Windows versions out, then it’s time to synch them all to the 1.1 codebase. Post editing has been the most requested feature so far, so hopefully that will generate some revenue for me. 🙂

Thus Began An Epic Struggle Between Man And Iron

Oh, my. I’m tired. So very, very tired.

I spent all day Friday and Saturday working on the bathroom with Clair. Friday we did the tile floor, which went exceptionally well. It was ceramic tile floor nirvana in many ways. Very little cutting had to be done. But, dang, I’m getting old. Two years ago, when we did the kitchen floor, I was OK. But this time, crawling around on my hands and knees for that long really made me sore and stiff. Maybe it’s psychological since I just passed 30. I don’t know.

But Saturday – oy! We replaced all the cast iron drain pipes under the bathroom with PVC. Clair and I figured his reciprocating saw would be able to take care of the old pipes, maybe a half hour job. Hour tops.

Wrong. More like three and a half hours when I stopped keeping track. The old pipes obliterated several blades on Clair’s saw, and we soon realized that our only weapon was going to be brute force.

So we broke out the standard set of plumbing tools: many hammers, an electric drill, a huge digging iron, and a car jack. Yes, that’s right: a car jack.

Thus began an epic struggle between man and iron.

I’m pleased to report that man eventually won, but it was a hard fought victory.

We emerged from the battle exhausted, stinking like sewage, mostly covered in some nasty black slime that I can’t even talk about, and many hours behind schedule.

So Jen and Grace packed up and headed to the in-laws, since we were without a toilet, shower, and bathroom sink. Basically, without a bathroom. And we only have the one.

Grace wound up staying overnight, but Jen came home. Clair and I finished the job some time after midnight. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but today is Easter and I had to be at church at 7:00 AM to lead worship at our Sunrise Service. Can’t really be late, because they can’t really start without me.

I was late. I got there at 7:10, guitar in hand. Everybody was pretty cool about it, though. I attend a wonderful church with wonderful people. Plus, we rarely start stuff on time, anyway.

And on top of all that, I’ve been staying up way too late at night working on Frequency. But the Mac OS 9 version should be out this week. Maybe Wednesday.

And now, I’m off to bed. I need to get some serious rest tonight. Grace had developed bronchitis, and I need to keep up my resistance because I don’t want it.