Nonsensical Ramblings of Mark

Well, I needed a topsoil screen in the worst way... I am almost there with the trench and had visions of finishing it up this weekend when I ran into an idea. I am, probably, an eighth of a yard of stone short of completing this trench the exact way I wanted to in the beginning. I was going to just throw a bunch of dirt on top of the trench (that is surrounded by landscape fabric) but I got to thinking that there is probably at least an eighth of a yard of stone in the dirt that I dug out to begin this whole process. What I needed was a topsoil screener and, of course, I don't have one. So as I am making my way to the Home Depot I had an idea: drill a bunch of holes with a spade bit into a piece of plywood, place it over the wheelbarrow, and sift the soil through it. OK, I thought, that's cheap and we'll see how good of an idea it is. Well, I made a u-turn and found a piece of plywood that was the exact width and length I needed to make this work. I then drilled 1/2" h...

Why does the sweet Spring send its rain to sing its purple and pink unless it was for her to hear? Why does the Summer sun bake the hard clay if it was not to set the reds, yellows, and whites to frame her? Why will the winds of Autumn vanquish the color of the ground and shout their gold to the skies if not to lament its beauty beside hers? And why the death of Winter if not a surrender to her for she remains unbowed...unmoved...unmatched... In her ever-increasing beauty.

Well, the boys started Happy 5 Soccer Camp at (run by First Bible Baptist Church here in Greece) and they look to be much improved from last year. Will is getting much more aggressive and seems to enjoy getting into the scrum for the ball that (unfortunately) is still characteristic of the level of play that the third and fourth grade boys exhibit at this stage. Of course it would be nice if they spread things out a bit, but that will come I'm sure. One of the nice things is that their team is probably one of the best on the field they are playing on (if not the best) and that they have taken to actually passing the ball to each other. Will even had his first assist which is amazing in that it took 8 weeks last year before he got one. All in all this looks to be shaping up a bit better than last year's effort. Drew has actually taken to running after the ball rather than just standing around and waiting for it to come to him. Mind you, this is from the boy who continually annou...

Usually my "nostalgia kicks" leave me by the beginning of Summer. Every once and a while I get a whiff of what used to be and I realize either how far I have come from those times or how far I have fallen from what used to be. I am listening to a couple of Bryan Duncan songs on YouTube songs and recall a conversation that Bryan and I had during a concert in Buffalo when I was in college: Bryan Duncan: "[I forget what he said]" Me (from the crowd): "Bryan!!" Bryan Duncan: "What?! Me: [Um, OK that wasn't supposed to happen...] "Yaaaaagggghhhhh!" Bryan Duncan: [laughs] "[Goes on talking about whatever it was he was talking about.]" I know, not exactly riveting theological musings, but it was memorable. I do recall it was an absolutely fantastic concert and that guy could dance. We would make many trips to Buffalo, Houghton, Roberts Wesleyan, the Auditorium Theater to see all manner of concerts from people and groups like Whitehear...

I am not entirely sure if I like the fact that my friends seem to be multiplying. I have blogged before about a particular idea in C.S. Lewis' Miracles that brought death into a new light for me. I now see God's defeating of death for the masterstroke that it really is. Not only is it a vehicle that carries me into a presence of God that I have not known up to this point, but it ends my tendency toward rebellion as well and allows this mortal to clothe himself in immortality. That is sweetness. But I have a new friend as well...suffering. This Sunday we listened to a message that framed suffering in a way that I had never thought of it before. My overarching goal in life is to glorify God. In other words, I need to make more and more of Him as He sanctifies me and matures me in Christ. Well, it turns out that suffering is a megaphone that shouts that reality to the world counteracting (if that is the right word...maybe augmenting? complimenting?) the whisper that this reality...

So my wife and I were shopping the jeans sale at Old Navy last night and we were both chatting with the woman who was ringing up our jeans (well, Nan was chatting and I was more or less engaged in some type of performance art) and noticed that things were not quite right with our total. It was pretty obvious that it was ringing up a bit less than we had anticipated. Our friendly cashier assured us that everything was fine and, after paying for our purchases, we left. Well, on our way out of the mall we were remarking at how good of a deal it was when we realized, yet again, that all was not well. After pulling out the jeans from the bag and comparing the receipt to what we had we realized that she had not rung up one of our pairs of jeans. So, we went back to let her know that she undercharged us. She was pretty surprised and pretty thankful that we had come back. I was mildly disappointed that she decided to charge us for the jeans that she didn't charge us for before (hey - Wegma...

This next statement means something to someone: This will only work with XSLT 2.0 as variables in predicates contained in match expressions are not allowed in XSLT 1.0.   I was thinking about an XML solution that could be reusable (and listening to some Phillip Glass) when I came up with an idea for reusing the templates in an XSLT stylesheet. Normally a template in a stylesheet would be written in this way:   <xsl:template match="p"> ... </xsl:template>   This would, obviously, tell the stylesheet to process all of the "p" elements in the document in a particular way. Now, the problem with this approach is that the template is now rendered useless for an XML structure that would have a "para" element designating a paragraph rather than a "p" element.   A better way would be to define a series of variables that would specify the following: the top-level element in the document to be transformed the names of the elements...

On my way into the office this morning I was thinking about different things to write about and thought I would write about the different things I was thinking about writing about. Here is a list of potential topics that I would like to address at some point: Female Christian music artists that have influenced me. Why it seems that every fast food restaurant has more and more things for $1. The lack of my understanding about a topic and the influence it makes in whether it is ultimately true, a good idea, or something to avoid. (read: none) The fact that I can change a couple of letters in a sentence or sentence fragment and make it stick around in my head for a longer time than usual. (mowing green lawns - gone in an instant; towing keen prawns - I'll probably tell Nan about it) Modular XSLT stylesheets. The stress of the past week and a half and the lifting of much of that stress in the second half of the day yesterday. Why 5:00 p.m. and Friday are not the magic time and day a lo...

It is irrepressibly hard to counsel someone who has a different world view than me. I can't even begin to describe how much it makes my head hurt to give someone advice when what they are communicating to me is born from a framework that I do not (read: will not) hold. It is easy to enter into their pain, find the hopelessness, and see the questions that are in need of answers. But, at the point where empathy turns to counsel...that is a turn that I simply cannot negotiate. Maybe it is a weakness of mine, but I find it to be like trying to speak Polish when I have had only 3 years of Spanish in high school. And so I offer the counsel through the only framework I know. And now, I am the one speaking Polish because not only am I asking them to consider my counsel, but I am asking them to change their world view as well. And that is a turn that is impossible to negotiate with assistance from the Spirit Himself. Thanks be to God that He is the one that changes hearts, frameworks, world...

You don't have to admit that you missed my blog posts, but it would make me feel better. I was on a home-bound vacation last week and had a lot of fun and got a lot done. I am not sure what the exact order of events were as everything ran all together, but here is a general, topic-based breakdown: the trench: The trench is just about done (pictures to follow soon) and I just need to finish filling it in with more dirt after reinforcing the trench proper with more landscape fabric. It turns out I needed about a yard and a half of stone to do the trench like I was originally envisioning, but I am going to modify the plan somewhat and only use the yard that I have. If this does not cure our front-garden water problem I will have to eat my left arm. the playset: the playset has been power washed and stained. I have a little bit left to stain way at the top but that will take me 5 minutes to do tonight. Seabreeze: last Wednesday we went to Seabreeze and had a great time (as usual). I...

I have to admit that I would have been geeked to have some of the toys that my boys have when I was a kid. Actually, I have to admit that I am geeked now to have them. Drew bought a way-cool Wall E robot with some of his money and gift cards from Toys R Us and even I like playing with it. I have always had somewhat of a fascination with robots and this one is pretty advanced. They boys and I were playing with their Star Wars Lego last night and were having a really good time. Drew's Stormtroopers showed up to the fight without their weapons and General Grievous (i.e. Dad) had to reprimand them. Of course, as a result of Grievous' admonishment, hilarity ensued: General Grievous:   "What are you doing here without your weapons? You can't come to fight without any guns!" Stormtroopers (in unison): "It's okay. We know Kung-Fu." General Grievous: **makes random noises to try to mask his speechlessness** Well, the good guys won. Will never ceases to ment...

I was doing some reading the other day and came across a couple of programming languages and integrated development environments (IDEs) that I may use to introduce my oldest son to scripting/programming. Scratch is the one that I think I will start with first as it looks to be a bit less complicated than Alice . Obviously, because Scratch is less complicated, the capabilities of the language are more limited than Alice, but I know that I would have been very happy with something like this (read: given my left arm for it) when I was initially exploring computers in the 5th and 6th grade. I am not sure whether he would be interested in this or not, but I would like to expose him to scripting/programming early on to see if it would be something he has an aptitude for and will take a liking to. He is a very logical thinker and a visual learner so a simple IDE where he can manipulate certain aspects of the script he is building and see the results fairly quickly would be a very good thing ...

I have written about this before. In any type of communication there is a transmitter and a receiver. It is incumbent upon the transmitter to make sure that the transmission is as clear as possible so that there is no misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the intention and content of the communication. That is a big responsibility but it is a real one and is one I shoulder every time I open my mouth or put something down on paper. Now, if I transmit something like, oh, I don't know, "baptist" and someone receives that transmission an interprets it as "bad", I cannot simply say "well, there is obviously something wrong on the receiving end" and write it off. There is, clearly, something wrong on the receiving end. But why should I not try to overcome that weakness by modifying the transmission? That would be the loving thing to do in this instance. Now, if I transmit, for example, "Bible" and someone receives that transmission ...

There are quite a few things rattling around in my head about this whole changing the name of our church thing and I have stumbled on something that needs to get fleshed out some. I was thinking that we, as a church, could actively misrepresent ourselves to the community that we are a part of. For example, if we said that we were the North Lutheran Church and then started teaching the Baptist distinctives in our Exploring North class we can be rightly accused of actively misrepresenting our church. That's a no-brainer. Then I got to thinking about it and it seems to me that there is another principle that is more subtle, but equally real: passive misrepresentation. In other words, if the words that we choose to describe ourselves evoke, whether rightly or wrongly, images of who we are that are not accurate, is that equally as bad? I wouldn't exactly say that it is equally bad for one is pre-meditated and the other is more incumbent upon the one that is doing the perceiving, but...

"Let us pray." I cannot tell you how many times I heard that with the church when I was growing up. I also cannot tell you how sorry I am that I did not take the opportunity to pray when the priest invited me to talk to God during that time. It was only after I got saved that I found out that those were the times that I was enter into the presence of God in a more intimate way through speaking to Him. When the Spirit finally woke me up and I found that invitation to be exactly that and found a richer experience with God than I had ever had before. Fast forward from 1988 to 2009 and from Mark to mini-Mark 1 and mini-Mark 2. I watched them last night when the invitation to pray was issued from the prompter and they closed their eyes and bowed their heads. Now I am not so naive as to think that they were concentrating on all of the words that were being spoken as we conversed with God. God is fully aware that my mind wanders far too often as well. But what struck me is that they...

I have to admit I am not a big hand raiser, clapper, etc. when I am singing with the church. My hands have not been above my shoulders in a while anyway so I may just pull something in the process. On the flip side I definitely do not want to discourage my sons from anything that will help enhance their worship of God and connect with Him in a more meaningful way. Last night as we were singing I noticed Drew clapping his hands along with the rhythm of the song. He was the only one in the auditorium that was doing it so I know that it was not in imitation of what was happening around him so I had to think that it was a outward manifestation of an inward reality. Maybe I am making too much of this but I was happy that he was worshiping and that he was responding to the words and music in this manner. I was equally thankful that we have a church that allows him the freedom to express his worship of God in a way that is both biblically-based and is relevant to where he is. No disapproving ...