I set the dishwasher! Run!

Ahhh. The sound of quiet swishing of water cleaning the dishes in the kitchen. I am the family dishwasher. Always have been. I do my best to get the dishes, pots, pans, and utensils pre-cleaned and fill the dishwasher to finish the job. The sound of quiet dish washing is welcomed after what we have been put through our dishwasher named old yeller.

Some bearing, pump, or other motor had run its course and let us know with the loudest and longest of noises. It was so loud that we had to run the dishwasher when we were all out of the house. The poor cat would have to endure the unbearable noise of what ever this thing was doing. The crazy thing about it was that the dishes were clean once the machine ran its cycle.

So for several months, setting the dishwasher was like lighting the fuse of a firecracker. We would head out the door for church or school and I would take the solo journey back into the house to fill the detergent, close the door, hit the start button on old yeller and take off. The noise was just unbearable. That was until yesterday.

We heard about a marketing scam that Sears was holding called a Friends and Family night. Friends and family received an additional 10% off of any sale priced appliance. Neither Jen or I have family or friends that work at Sears. We didn’t know the code word or hand signal, but walked in anyway. We must have looked the part because they sold us a new dishwasher.

A friend with years of appliance install experience came over yesterday and had old yeller taken out into the backyard and shot. He had the new machine installed in under 45 minutes. No leaks. No scratches. Leveled and currently cleaning tonights spaghetti dinner dishes. Dishwashers should be seen, clean and not heard. So it was a Friends and Family sale after all. A friend installed it so my family can endure it.

60 hour week

15 minutes until my 4th and final 12-hour shift ends here. I spoke with many home owners and contractors. Lots of stories and memories. I was able to avoid cell phone calls while here and talk to people who lost everything. It was a learning week of listening. A week of trying not to listen to other help agencies talk endlessly to each other to kill time. I have 10 minutes remaining. It is 7:50 p.m. I arrived at 6:50 a.m. A slow drive home and then some sleep.

LAC: Help is on the way

I’ll be on for a 12 hour shift the next five days. FEMA will open a Local Assistance Center (LAC) in Anaheim, CA tomorrow morning. Our agency was asked to participate in helping home owners seeking aid, information, and shelter.

The recent Southern California fires are devestating to see on television, print, and on the net. It is another sight altogether when you meet a home owner who has lost everything. The shocked faces. The stories. The loss. Couples simply seeking aid. FEMA may have received some bad press in the past, but to see them in action is quite the opposite.

I have volunteered before to the LAC in Irvine and Malibu last year. FEMA runs an efficient operation. They care for the volunteers as the do the disaster victims. My goal will be to educate home owners with knowledge on how to not be taken by dishonest and unlicensed contractors. I’ll try to take a few photos, but having done this before, you learn to stay attentive, humble, and sensitive to the victims.

Stay tuned.

The spring had left our living

It’s not that the feelings are still raw. The scars cover the hurt now. I’ll still find that people will friend and unfriend me. It just feels good to reconnect with God on fresh soil. I’ve had friends move on from church. Some left when they disagreed with a pastor’s position on abortion. One friend left based on a domineering fellow churchgoer. One left when his skeleton was revealed. He is now in Celebrate Recovery and a better man for it. Me. It was time. I enjoyed the 12 years, but it was time to go home.

I had spent several on and off years at a Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. We chose not to marry there. We stepped out into a small church across town. Married and then reconnected with Big Calvary long enough to leave circa 1990. Skip ahead 5 years when a former drug dealer invited me to his little A-framed chapel in Garden Grove. We took the bait and tasted to see that it was good. For a while.

That church was small, but God showed us how to serve others. We stayed just long enough to become confidants of the pastor. It was time to go when I became a sounding board to the man’s position on firing staffers and being prayed for inappropriately about my wife and I not enjoying parenthood when we had been married for more than 5 years. Oops! Time to go. The staffer that got fired may have left on her own. On her and her husbands last day at that little A-framed church, we secretly said our goodbyes to friends. We mirrored their exit. We never looked back.

We landed at another A-framed church across town. One that another couple we knew earlier hopped to. I dove into reading book after book dealing with myself as a man with my issues, strengths and weaknesses. God blessed us with 2 children, a great group of friends, a burned out pastor, and the welcoming of a new pastor. Somehow over 12 years I had gained weight, lost weight, gained more weight and yet became invisible to those same friends. Strangest thing.

A friend up in age had finished his life on earth very strong. I looked forward to the service of this great man. As his family and friends sat listening, speaking and saying goodbye, I said goodbye silently to that body of believers. It just felt right. Still feels right. No hard feelings. Just a mild case of plank eye. But you know what, the depression of a weekend is gone. Wild. Was it attributed to the old church? Perhaps. Yes….likely so. Doesn’t matter. We failed to contribute. We knew it. Other factors factor in, but the time had come.

I drove away and explained the feelings to my family. We returned only to serve one remaining Sunday committed to teaching a group of 2-3-4-5 year olds. Said goodbye to them. Walked away. As usual. The red flag popped up in the metal and glass housing. Time expired. We have not returned. We went home. Back to Calvary, only a sister church. You can find us these days recovering and enjoying faith and fellowship once again at www.cchb.org.

Picture this!

It is told that my grandfather would fill out each of his 6 voting aged daughters primary election sample ballots to make sure they knew who to vote for. He would then get up very early and open the voting booth. He did not host a voting booth, he would stand at the garage door of his local polling home waiting for them to open. In essence, he would open the voting booth. First in line. A democratic vote across the board. This book would have been a great gift for him.

He passed the year Jen and I were married. He missed the Clinton years. He would have loved them. I would have heard an earful of Bush bashing for the past eight years. Not that I blame him. He was gone in 1992 when the press dubbed that election year, ‘Year of the Angry Voter’. I have a button from 1992 with that slogan. I would have to say that 2008 is also the year of the angry voter. I found this book at a local Barnes and Noble on a recent date night with my wife. It was in new condition. I paid $3.45 for it. My wife asked, why did you get that book? I said surprise! I was a life long dem before meeting you. Surprise!

Love me some Tivo

Photo courtesy of Dansays

We have been Tivo subscribers since 2003. I wanted a Tivo for many years before we bought one. I posted about this somewhere years back, so I won’t rehash the story. In short, we picked up a 2nd Tivo at a garage sale for $10. I set it up to discover that the owner had purchased the unit in 2002 and bought a lifetime service for the unit. The translates to no monthly fees for that unit.

I got the unit up and running with the latest service upgrade, I was able to see the deleted recordings. The last deleted recordings were 75 soap operas recorded in 2004. I assumed with this information that the owner used the unit for a year or more, then stopped recording 4 years ago. I picked it up with all of the accessories. The guy I bought it from was a guy about 23 years old. He and his girlfriend were moving from their apartment. The guy said it was his father’s Tivo who had moved to dish TV leaving the Tivo unused. This was of course before I discovered that not only did the unit work, it was a lifetime unit. We paid a few hundred dollars for the Series 2 – 40 hour unit we bought in 2003. This 2002 Series 2 – 60 hour unit with a lifetime service was probably $500 or $600 in the day.

I contacted Tivo this morning to add this Tivo to my account. The Tivo rep was very nice. I told her the basic story of where I bought the 60 hour unit. She added the unit to my account. The point here is this. I qualified for a multi-unit discount. So rather than $12.95 a month for a one-year commitment on the 80 hour dual-tuner, I recommitted to a one-year Tivo service for $9.95 month. So to the dude who sold this $10 Tivo to me, thanks.

Ben gets it!

I remember the day when my daughter *clicked* with the computer. The day that she began to see the computer. The day that not realizing what she was doing, her hand-eye coordination with the screen and mouse opened a new world. Her frustration with my teaching stopped. She began to interact with the computer and she began to experiment with GUI objects on our old Mac LCIII running OS7. She fell into a groove. It was the day that my frustration ended and the guidance began. She was home sick that day. She was 3-years-old. Today, I had the same experience with my son, Ben.

Ben is 6-years-old. Before today he was a frustrated, keyboard pounding kid who did not *click* with the whole computer thing. He had the same frustration that some have with learning a new skill. His came today. He was given an older PC that is on its third hand-me-down. From me to Elizabeth and now to Ben. The computer is dreadfully obsolete. A 1.3Ghz P4 with 378MB of RAM and a 15″ CRT monitor. It has a fresh XP3 update and a connection to the home network. I bought him a new $10 keyboard and mouse. Today was the day. It was of all things, a Disney web service named Club Penguin, that did it.

This is Ben playing the ‘DJ’ to earn tokens that will later allow him to upgrade the igloo that his penguin and puffle live. I had to snap a b/w of him grooving the music. He gets it. He got it. Good!

Mark Hoekstra

Mark Hoekstra passed away yesterday. He was a geek from the Netherlands who ran a tech blog for the past 5 years. Mark shared his flat with a black cat that he named Bates. Mark’s flat was his lab. He would hack a new or legacy device and write a detailed post on how he did it. He would travel with friends taking photos along the way. Check out his creative commons licensed Flickr set. He posted over 5,000 photos. Hopefully his blogging community gifts and renews his Flickr Pro account.  Blessings Mark.

Yes, I am a geek/nerd

I have been spending less and less time on the home PC and more time searching do-dads on the iPod Touch. This is a good thing. I have been more active on Twitter using an online web app called Pocketweets

Earlier tonight I found this post on Mental Floss asking the question, “What’s the nerdiest thing you’ve ever done?”

If you can believe this, I can honestly say the following:

• I was once the Secretary of a Commodore 64 club.
• I once ran a single-node DOS based Bulletin Board System in 1993-1995.
• I once ran an HTML web 1.0 site that instructed people how to bypass the Sprint system to get email on their Palm Pilots using a serial cable to their cell phones….using only airtime minutes and not a data plan.
• I ended up with a ‘fan/stalker’ from that web site.

Twelve years from now I will answer that same question this way:

• I used an iPod Touch to communicate with people on Twitter.

New Years memory of the devil

I was just a teenager. The lights were out. My mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table on New Years Day. The light shown in from the window. My mother was playing Yahtzee solo. She was smoking. It did not occur to me that she was using the black bake-light ashtray that I was using the day before.

A friend and I found a large case of matches in the trash while dumpster diving. We scraped the sulfur from the matches into the ashtray. Once full, we were going to light it. Too chicken, we dumped the red sulfur. The ashtray was returned to the house.

So we are sitting at kitchen the table. Mom taps an ash from the cigarette into the ashtray. WHOOOSSSHH! A flash of white heat shoots from the ashtray in a momentary flash. She panics. She had the look on her face as if the Devil had found an escape hatch from hell right there in the kitchen of our apartment. I did not have the guts to tell her what it was. I continued to read the paper.