Not much...

Work was super annoying today. We've got kids who just think WRONG. They can be vicious, aggressive, absurdly illogical, annoying... whatever. And it seems so simple to just be at peace with those around you and get along!

But sometimes it's super fun. A few days ago, a girl looked at my pink and blue plastic lace botitch keychain thing i made back when we didn't know what gender Katrina was, and she said "My keychain is better than yours" and i said "better than mine?" and she said "That's right, it's better than yours"... "What's that?"... "Dang right, it's better than yours"... "could you teach me?"... "I'd have to charge" Hahahahahahahahah!!!!
Then there's the kids that call up after being with us for ages and say something like "I learned a lot from you guys. You really helped me." That's something else that makes my job rewarding. But today... no, not cool.

Dreadlocks

I was all bummed by how immature my dreads looked compared to Antony's:

So, i made some more dread wax. And i spent a bunch of time smearing it on my dreads. Me me me me. So we'll see if it improves my locks.
Dread stuff that nobody will really care about follows (maybe i'll get a few hits from people looking for recipies for dread wax).
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Bye!

Having the family here was really such a blessing. I thank God for giving us each other!

There's JJ and me showing how secure we are with our hetrosexuality!
The fam left at about ten thirty in the morning. When Karen and I came inside and looked around, we crashed into exhausted heaps of Nothing Is Going On. Houston took a four hour nap, and Katrina seemed about normal... but she's easy going enough not to care. Except she's got the same cold-ish think Karen and i have. Karen was SO CUTE (even cuter than normal!) this morning, because she honestly could not talk in anything but either a whisper or a painful sounding croak. Whisper is cute.

Here's just another thank you to my nearly whole family (missed you, Phoebe) for visitng us out here. I know it was a hassle and expense, but it was an enormous blessing! Getting to hang out and have good talks with all of you was so incredible. It's so good to remember not only how much you love people, but why you love them! God be with you until we meet again... i guess it's our turn to travel now, huh?
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No pic today!

except maybe one from yesterday:

Josiah!!!
He rode in my car today and showed lots of curiousity about how to drive a car, specifically a manual transmission car. I am confident that i have the best, foolproof way of teaching how to drive a stick, so if ANYONE so much as displays curious body language about this, i may just write a tutorial article.
In other news... Sometimes i make a puzzle like a silly test or a maze or clever saying... and i look forward to seeing people "do" whatever i've prepared. God made the universe, and i was thinking about how it probably gives him enormous satisfaction and delight watching us try to figure it out. The ancients wondered if some huge being was pulling the sun around the earth. We wonder how come background radiation is cottage-cheese like and not uniform. Same basic question, and i bet God gets thrills everytime somebody figures something new out.
If the children were silenced, said Jesus, the trees and rocks would cry out praises to God. (juanito's can't remember very well paraphrase) So if non-life forms and plants can worship God, how much more can a scientist intensely studying the very oldest boundries of our universe with a radio telescpoe be seen to be praising God? A team at CERN studying particle physics with their supercollider. A biologist studying how species developed. Even if these people are athiests, or worse, obsessed with proving the obsolescence of God, they are still studying God's great, Him-glorifying puzzle, and He still loves it.
I like to think we're living inside God's mind. The only reason anything exists is because God is THINKING about it. Subatomic paritcles, galaxy clusters, the hairs on my head. It's all being "rendered" by God's infinite, loving, personal, spiritual mind. So the very fibers of my being are inside the mind of God, and because of His grace and love, i have my being.

that thought truly warms me inside. :)

Super late...

...and i'm getting a cold. But mere illness doesn't stop me from having fun with my FAMILY!!! It's so fun to have them visiting.

Antony got up that post on the beach with very little effort, and in about seven seconds. I, however, struggled significantly, and wobbled mercilessly, and pretended like i fell right on my head. But i got the best jumping picture i've ever had taken of me! Thank you JJ!!!
Well, Karen has a neat little write up of the rest of the day (which also includes that "coolest ever picture of juanito jumping" in case you want to look at it twice) so i won't try to repeat what my beautiful wife has already said very well. Plus, it's really late, i've got sand in my dreads, we just saw Farenheit 9/11, so i need to chill and take a shower. The movie was really pretty good. Hilarious at times, usually good natured, and very slickly cut. We saw the cover of some newspaper that had the movie poster on the front, and what we could read through the glass of the newspaper machine had Mr. Moore saying that he hoped this movie would get Bush defeated in the upcoming election. It might... but we live in a time when TV (and this movie, i guess) is the medium the canidates choose to "educate" the voter, persuading them to vote for THEM, based on a fifteen second commercial! This leaves me feeling personally insulted! There is no way a television advertisement is going to teach me about the issues. The intricacies of government policy are beyond what can be gotten across by a few expensive, polished ads!

So maybe i'll quit voting again, out of disgust. Or maybe i'll start my own party where everyone who actively seeks office is immediately, unconditionally disqualified, and criminals are sentenced to serve in public office. I'd call it the Cell Block Party. It would free up space in jails, serve as a true deterrent to those considering a life of crime, and guarantee that we'd have less corrupt people in office!
I wonder who i could get to run... where did those dudes from Enron go?

FAMILY!!!

The family is visiting! Yaay!

It's such a blessing to have FAMILY in town!
Oh - Intros... from left to right: JJ is sitting down with his arms crossed like he's in an ad for Olan Mills, Antony is the one with dreads, and looking like an Australian surf wear model, Josiah is the pensive "3" boy, Houston is the only natural blonde, and me - i'm wearing a watch. And Chichi is the very small dog that seems to hovers tawnily just off JJ's right shoulder. One wonders if a cat ever hovers on his right shoulder and they lead him down various paths of choice. I'll ask him tomorrow.
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SELF portrait

What a super-cutie our son is! Katrina is a super-cutie too, in case anyone thought he was my favorite kid. That was taken at the Park Celebration. Everything was free free free there, which instantly turns most people into entitled monsters. Like the whole line-conflict Karen alluded to... this white lady yelled at us basically for being in front of her. She said "WE'VE BEEN IN LINE FOR OVER AN HOUR" so i went up to where there were seven popsicles sitting on the cooler and said "could i have these" and gave them to her and her troop of Krispy Kreme hat sporting shorties. Why can't we all just get along?

Ever since digital cameras got cheap, anyone with a couple hundred bucks and the right priorities could hold the gadget at arm's length and create limitless self portraits. And of course since everybody is always seeing out of their own face, but really don't know what that face looks like, they are immensely curious. I know i am, and that's not just the narcissism talking. I guess if somebody could catalog all the pictures ever taken, the "arm's length self-portrait" file would need it's own filing cabinet. Or terabyte hard drive array. The subject of today's impompty photo shoot got to work whole minutes early today, so i thought to myself that it has been a long time since i did a serious arm's length self portrait. So i got my camera out and snapped away. I got lots, all of which i'll be deleting. But not this one.

But then at work, i had to go downstairs to admit a new client. I have never done this, so it was really confusing and weird, but hopefully everything gets sorted out. As soon as i walked toward the car, i noticed the kid and the lady who was transporting her smiling. The transporter got out and said "We were just talking about your hair! I like it! You don't see a lot of people with hair like that, i mean you see lots of people who want to pretend, but you've got the real thing!" I was kind of beaming warmly on the inside.

Anyone heard of nigritude ultramarine?

Power

Sorry about the dearth of recent new pictures... i've been doing other things besides taking pix. That's a TVR - they make my favorite supercar cars.
On the way home i saw a thunderstorm that was electrifying its way across neighborhoods north of ours. I can understand that some people are frightened by the whole electrical storm thing, but i LOVE them! They are just so beautiful! It's God saying "hey, puny humans, check out what kind of power I have to just waste!" Those bolts get to be 50,000 degrees Farenheit! Like, that's several times hotter than the sun! Of course the Wikipedia is a great place to look stuff like this up.
In college i had a long debate with my roommate tony about wether sound can travel faster than sound. My main argument was thunder, where you get the crackle BEFORE the boom, right? Well he maintained that no, sound can only travel as fast as sound blah engineering blah physics... but turns out shock waves can travel faster than sound, that that's what the crackle is, the sound of the shock wave. And whoah is it COOL!
When i was four, i think i saw ball lightning. I think. I distinctly remember a flash of (normal?) lightning hit a telephone pole maybe a quarter mile off, then see a ball stay up there. I told my mother "a fire!" but she said it was ball lightning.

And lightning is a PUNY little terrestrial phenomenon! And it's just in our atmosphere! Imagine the lightning on Jupiter! That red spot thing! I bet there's lightning bolts as long as the whole state of Michigan! Or at least western Michigan. And then the power of the sun, which is where atmospheric energy comes from, after all... And all of it comes from GOD!
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Just another depressive tuesday

You know... as opposed to a Manic Monday. Get it? Manic depressive? Ha? Haha?

I remembered to what i was gonna link yesterday. Living in Peru during the Eighties, we could only expect to get outdated, poor quality comic books. So i used to actually see silly ads like the one here. I especially like the Tootsie Rolls comic ads - pretty hilarious. I apologize profoundly if there's too much skin in the banner ads that pepper the site - i guess that site is sponsored by an adult site. Seanbaby, whoever he is, seems like a bitter person, but bitter person's rantings can be funny in small doses.

Sides that, i just gotta expound again on how much i love my cast iron pan. Getting it perfectly seasoned and keeping it that way is very rewarding. Getting PERFECTLY cooked eggs and having them just kind of roll off the pan and still getting to use a properly sharp metal spatula is just so cool. And I got a new keyboard. An old IBM. Dan gets pretty excited about these things. We'll see if the loud CLICKING bothers Karen. She hasn't mentioned anything yet. If anyone wants one, i can get them for... uh... let's say eleven bucks, since i can buy them from this one shop, but without cables. I have to solder cables in myself. Lemme know.

Finally, hit the shift key five times. If something pops up, you have the StickyKeys virus, and if you send Juanito seventy hundred nineteen million dollars, it will go away.

can't think of anything to write.

What's up with leaving the E off of the word extreme? Like, the Chevy S-10 Xtreme or the absurd number of hits on Google when searching for the word xtreme. "We're so extreme we had to leave the E off." Wow. I'm impressed.
If something is labled Xtreme, it probably isn't. And if someone says "Trust me..." you probably shouldn't.

Speaking of extreme, though, here's a picture of me trying to look as overcome with delight as i felt while eating the culinary masterpiece that was the swordfish at Carrabba's. Oh man was that good. Worth every p... no, probably not, but the company sure was worth it! Of course the picture makes it look like i'm about to cauterize my forehead with a plasma torch or something...

Hmm... i was just thinking about something really interesting to which to link today... but it's totally gone. Well, in lieu of a link that is actually INTERESTING... here's more than you thought possible to know about papayas. We got papaya juice at work a while ago, and NOBODY would drink it even though it was, like, a "premium" brand (not GFS). It smelled kind of like barf. Which might explain why papaya seeds are used as meat tenderizer... it contains some of the same compounds found in stomach acid.

MHBC; Pre or Free?

We had lots of fun today. It was really great to spend time with the kids again! Love!

Pastor Rob Bell of Mars Hill Bible Church has taught before, leading me to believe that he's a free-willer. Adult baptism seems to coexist with the free will doctrine in many church bodies, and MH does adult baptism. Back then he talked about how the "best love" is love which makes the lover vulnerable to rejection, hurt. Love that exposes itself to rejection is better than "love" that is irresistable. So i thought that Señor Bell was chillin' in the Armenian court. I talked to my Reformed super-intelligent and well learned seminary-attending friend Travis, who said that love that is able to be rejected is only considered better by our flawed human minds. God's predestination, His election, His love were all things that He did and does at His own pleasure, and they are impossible to thwart. Irresistable Grace is the I in TULIP.

Today, however, Roberto talked about the fact that Jesus paid for our sins, and there's NOTHING any of us can do about that! We're free and clear! WHILE WE WERE YET SINNERS, Christ died for us! This morning made me think that he's not as Free Will as i thought. So maybe he's like the guy from Christafari to whom i've linked twice before, but i'll do it again since his answer is the most satisfying answer to this question i've ever encountered. Go read it again if you have the time! Or for the first time... whatever.

Full tummy empty house

Another day of by ourselves-ness! It was really really weird waking up without being woken by Houston saying "Downstairs? Downstairs?" or, like on the days when Karen gets up with the chillen, "thumpthumpthumpthump" back and forth as Houston practices for when he's a cricket player (see, they run back and forth between the two wickets, like Houston runs back and forth between the front room and the living room).
So our house was EMPTY! A really odd thing.

We miss our little kids. But i love being with my wife!
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Decaversary!

In 2014 it'll be a double decaversary! Heh. Heh.

So Karen planned a SUPER elaborate and amazingly fun involved day of... well, day long date today! She deserves mad props for such a well planned, carefully laid out adventure! I love you, Karen!
First, i was told to search for envelopes with clues on them, like the first one was "Where the slumbering child sleeps, there will i be found", so of course i looked where our kids sleep, but it wasn't under their mattresses, it was in the crib (duh) but it was THIS - a sweeet drawing that Karen did! What a cool thing! The right-most drawings are pencil, the next to the left are colored pencil, then darker crayon, then what looks like watercolor!!! Houston could tell who each picture represented. Imma frame it fa sho!
Other kewl things she gave me were these little spit-ring bound books. The fairy tale one is so cute - it tells the story of us from when we met to when we were married. It talks about "maidens" and "carraiges" and how I learned fencing and she learned "proper speech and counseling". Here's her drawing of our first kiss!
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the home stretch!

To being married ten years, that is. Like twenty four more minutes. Although i guess since we were married in Chicago, one time zone behind us, we should celebrate in one hour and twenty four more minutes.

I'm really excited about our anniversary even though i haven't planned anything really. Karen has, so all of us will find out tomorrow, i suppose.
I was sitting down by the kitchen today at work, and two kids were walking down the hall towards me, and one of them (who i've mentioned before, the one with whom i have talked about being VAIN, we'll call her Machiko) was messing with her very long pony tail. The girl behind her was flipping her long, full hair. I though to myself, and particularly about "Machiko" - there they go being all vain again! Then i realized i was twirling one of my dreads. D'oh. And we played soccer today at work, and it was AWESOME! "Machiko" was like a ninja Power Ranger, and Julie (her real name) was like Kiera Knightley in that soccer movie, and Charity was FEARLESS, putting her head, face, and rest of her body in HARM'S WAY! My staff rock, and the rest of the kids were really good too! I love good days at work. Right after our game, all the girls were in such good moods and i told them all "Hey, you're in such good moods because we all just excersized our butts off playing soccer!" And i've had two girls approach me about getting on some kind of calorie watching program with excersize and stuff included. I wish they showed as much interest in learning about GOD!!!!!!!!
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why?

Check out that sweet picture! I did it by accident! If you wanna know how, drop me an IM or something. I'm on Yahoo as ozerik.

Lots of times when i'm coming in the building at work some kid or other will see me and bang on the window, like, to say hi or something. I saw a group coming back from Yesterdog and tried it, but fail to see the appeal. They kind of waved noncommittaly up, not being able to see who was banging at them. "Hey, i don't know who you are, but hi anyway. Hi." Weird.

Rrrbody knows that "juanito karen katrina houston" gets Karen's website as the first hit on Google, right? Well i just spent a few minutes typing random first names into Google trying to find personal weblogs like mine and Karen's. I got absolutely no hits. If "blog" is entered into the search, the results will be weblogs, but they are all so political or like who cares or maybe interesting but no pictures or verbose, but fascintating. Or, maybe there's Aaron Wetzel's or Richard's, Aaron's little brother... but Richard's is kind of even more narcissistic than mine. Well, i'd find a picture filled log like Karen's or mine interesting, so if anyone finds one, lemme know!

Okay, i'm gonna go read some of those links to make sure they don't have horrible stuff in them. :)

Enough about me, let's talk about my car.

i lost my memory card reader... so i can't easily transfer pictures from my camera to computer. However, i did not do much today, so there's not much (about MY LIFE and the events that surround ME) to report. There has been a flurry of activity over on the forums, though.
So i was chatting with Er"Bastion of Sensible Physical Therapy Advice"ic today and he told me about this site. Now i