Month: June 2007

I am flying from North Carolina to Oregon today.  I will get into Eugene a little before 7:00 PM.  Dad (I really do have the best Dad in the world) is taking a crew of his old employees down to Corvallis and, with the help of two of our other friends–Darren and Spencer– will pack the truck.  After Lorena picks me up, hopefully the house will be ready to go and we can drive up to Dad and Mom’s house for the night.  Jim and JoAnn might even make it to the airport to see us off (and so I can get my last going away hugs).  I expect to see them out in North Carolina for a visit before too long.

Tomorrow morning, we will go to Sunday morning meeting with Dad and Mom, take them out for a late Father’s Day dinner and then try to make it to Boise before we turn in for the night.  Then, we will do one really long drive from Boise to somewhere around Grand Island, Nebraska on Monday night.  On Tuesday, we are hoping to get to the Gabharts in Jasper, Indiana so we can spend Tuesday night, all day Wednesday, and Wednesday night with them, leaving for North Carolina right after a bible study on Thursday morning.  We will stay in a hotel one night in Raleigh, then pick up the keys to our rental house in Apex on Friday morning.

We will try to keep the blog updated as we go, but it might be a little touch and go with that.

I got a super nice note from my cousin Neil whose daughter, Haley took a trip around Israel, the Greek Isles and a few other places.  It got me to thinking how great of a thing it would be to be able to go over there with the family.  I was there just briefly for work, but going on a tour of the historical places in the bible would be just an awesome experience.  I had been reading about it my whole life, but seeing it in context is an amazing thing.  I remember driving past Mount Tabor on the way to work one morning from where I was staying on top of Mt. Carmel in Haifa to a little industrial town on the outskirts of Nazareth.  Our bible study a week or two before my trip had been about Deborah and Barak and their fight against Sisera near Mt. Tabor.  The historical nature of the bible became a whole lot more real for me that day.  The stuff written in the bible really happened in a real place at a time in the distant past.  I am really glad Haley got to go do that.  I hope I get to take my family someday, too.

Every day when I drive to work, I drive by either a large pond or a small lake.  After a few days, I started noticing a bird that looks like a Blue Heron.  It is really quite beautiful and I see it almost every day now.  It reminded me of a very type of bird (if not the same) that we often saw in fields and ponds in Oregon.  Then at lunch time yesterday I got in a discussion with several people about the types of wild life the have here in North Carolina.  From what I can tell, they have very similar animals to those that live in Oregon.  There are no Elk, Mule Deer or Antelope, but there are bear, mountain lion, white tail deer, raccoon, fox, coyote, etc., etc.  There is lots and lots of forest land here, but unlike Oregon most of it is privately owned.  It is a beautiful part of the world.

Kelly and I read a blog called Wittingshire.  I had not read it for awhile because of my travels, but when I was browsing it to catch up a little, I found a link to a website that has made access to all of the places mentioned in the bible on Google Earth.  You can click on any book in the bible and a map shows up with locater dots for all the places mentioned in that book.  If you click on one of the dots, the particular chapter and verse for that spot appears.  There is also a big map that allows you to click on a spot on the map without going to the book.  It is VERY cool.  You can find it here at the Open Bible web site.

One of my colleagues at my new job and I work talking over a cup of coffee when I got into work this morning about how all of the things to do here in North Carolina will be new to us.  People who have been here for a long time think nothing of the fact that the water in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina is tens of degrees warmer than the water off the Oregon coast.  It is warm enough for non-polar bear tough people to swim.  We have never seen any of the museums or natural attractions.  We have never even been to many of the restaurants and stores.  It will all be new and all be fun and exciting.

I worked through the weekend (except for Sunday morning meeting) and got a ton of stuff down for my job this weekend.  It was a really great weekend in that respect, but now I have just a few evenings to get the apartment cleaned up, get everything moved into my pickup, get all the utilities lined up for our rental house, and get ready to go back to Oregon for the big drive east.  It is a little frustrating to have a week long hiatus in my work at my new company, but even more frustrating to be here without my family.  I am really looking forward to the drive out and am genuinely excited about my new job and the new people with whom we will be meeting for bible studies, gospel, and fellowship meeting.  The elder of our Sunday morning meeting has invited the meeting to his home for the 4th of July.  His wife is from Panama and speaks Spanish.  They have a beautiful home with a swimming pool, so it should be a great time for Kelly and Christian and time for all of us to get a little better acquainted with our whole meeting.

Special note to Christian:  This is what you want to get!!!

Lorena is a champion.  She has the house very, very close to being ready to make the move.  She worked very, very hard and deserves much praise (and maybe even a new mattress for all her efforts.  I cannot wait to get out there to Oregon to see them again and bring them home to North Carolina.  Grandpa Milo is going to help organize the truck loading crew and we appreciate that very much, too.

I was going to call Trisha last night and explain to her why she should come on out to North Carolina to get her Masters degree, but ran out of time.  There are STILL compelling reasons why she should consider this.  The number two reason is that she would be close to her favorite cousins.  The number one reason is that she would be on the other side of the country from Merle!!!

Our friend, Corn Tassel wrote another poem for us to go into the KaktusKids magazine!

Yesterday at work I found a way to replace a very good, but expensive lighting system ($1500) with a very cheap, but even better lighting system by using a parabolic reflector from a cheap flashlight (2 flashlights and four batteries for $2.97 at WalMart).  I love that kind of thing.  Then when I got home, I found that Oregon State’s “Super Regional” NCAA playoff game against Michigan was on TV at my company provided apartment, so I got to watch them qualify for the college baseball world series in Omaha for the second time.  The great part is that one of the local colleges here in the Raleigh-Durham area (University of North Carolina) qualified for the series yesterday.  UNC is the school the Beavers beat last year to win the national championship.  Then, after I was sound asleep, Grandpa Milo called me from his cruise in Alaska with Del and Alice Weber to ask who won the game.  It was, all-in-all, a good day.

I am wondering if JoAnn is still alive out there!?!!

I made it back out east on Sunday evening.  I will post more when I get a chance.

I am writing this blog post via wireless internet from the Eugene Airport as I return to North Carolina after my one day visit to Oregon.  We had a great time together.  Yesterday, we did nothing other than what we would normally do on a lazy Saturday.  We got up late to to to Elmer’s for biscuits and gravy and to look at the Norman Rockwell paintings.  Then we went to Ross to buy me some new underwear.  After that, we did more running around and hanging out followed by working on our portrait drawing.  Our buddy Dellas sent us a photo that we want to draw, but we need some more practice first.  Our portraits are starting to get better, but still pretty rough.  We are hoping that, with practice, they actually might start looking like the persons we are trying to draw.  After that we read together about hell in Psalm 9.  I do not know why I picked that, but is was a good read.

We got a nice note in the blog comments from our poet and friend Corn Tassel from Southern Indiana.  She is an amazing homeschool girl with three amazing siblings that we are planning to visit on our trip out to North Carolina later this month.

I had a great time with my family, but I miss them a lot.

    Last night, I was reading the Internet with Mom, when I felt a cold sore inside my lip.  It was itchy and uncomfortable, as most cold sores are, so I bit down on it.  I stayed like that for more than a half an hour and when I let go, the right side of my lower lip was bigger than a swollen watermelon with a gland problem.   Mom freaked out and I started crying.  At first we thought it was an allergic reaction to food or something.  We put ice and Neosporin on it and Mom debated whether or not to go to the doctor.  It leaned down on my face, and the swelling wouldn’t go away. We decided to stay home, but didn’t get to bed till 1:00 in the morning. Ugh…  The lip deflated by morning, and Christian got a picture of it with the cell phone (yuck!  I’m not going to post it up for obvious reasons) 🙂  Needless to say, I survived, though just barely. 

I will be flying home to be with the family tomorrow and get the move coordinated with Lorena.  I will fly back to North Carolina early on Sunday morning to be back at work on Monday.  I am hoping to get some work done on the airplane, but who knows how that will go.

Yesterday at lunch time, Glenna, the roller derby lady took some of us out for Mexican food to a place called Salsa Fresh.  It was really pretty good–not Baja Fresh good, but pretty good.  I had salsa rostizada on a huge vegetarian burrito.  I think we are going to be able to find some very good Mexican food here, but we will be in a little bit better situation here than when we moved to Dallas because there is a Baja Fresh on Glenwood Avenue right in Raleigh.  Woo-hoo!  I knew this was the right choice.  The closest Baja Fresh to my other opportunity in College Station, Texas is ninety miles away in Austin.

I am heading back to Oregon for the weekend on Friday.  I am not sure whether I will make it all the way down to Albany, but at least I will get to see my family.  Hopefully, I will get something rented in which we can live for awhile either today or tomorrow.  Then I can get the truck to get our stuff scheduled and we will be set for me to go out and get the family to drive back on June 22.  It is bad to be without the family.  I have corrections on the kids annual reports that I have not yet made so, even though the school year is officially over, we have one more thing to do to really finish well for the year.  I will publish the reports here when they are finished.

More days of just working while I am waiting for my family. There will continue to be fairly small posts until the family get out here a little before the 4th of July.  Here is my current stock pick position versus the S&P 500 after about 4 months total:

Yesterday was a very full day. Everyone in the meeting stayed after Sunday morning meeting for a potluck. They are the same here as every other place in the world; there was too much food, but we ate as much as we could. I learned that blueberries grow very, very well here. That should bring joy to our little family. We are huge blueberry fans and will still be able to fill the freezer up with frozen blueberries every summer if we are diligent. The blueberries are way cheaper in the supermarkets here, too. It may be that they just happen to be in season, but I count this whole blueberry thing as a huge positive because we thought we were going to have to go through serious withdrawal due to our acute blueberry addiction.

One of the huge advantages of working for my previous company was that the sodas in the soda machine only cost 25 cents. For a programmer, that is huge. You cannot image how delighted I was when I found that there is no soda machine at my new job. There is only a refrigerator, but it is full of a bunch of different kinds of soda and they are all FREE!

We are almost to the point now where we are going to commit to rent a house for six months or a year while we sell our house in Oregon and decide whether to build a new house or buy one that is already built. It is a tough decision, but I think it will be best in the end. Hopefully, I will get back to Oregon in the next week or two to either get the family or just visit for a few days.

The director of software in my new company does this in the evening and on weekends.  She is pretty amazing.

I am really starting to get into the work they have given me in my new position.  My plan is to put in as many hours as possible until Lorena comes so I can get ahead a little.  I will have dinner tonight with Courtney and Carolyn, then try to get a rental house picked out tomorrow.