Okay, last night I grilled some chicken breasts on my charcoal grill/smoker. This had a slight twist to it. I washed and coated each breast with olive oil and then added a tad of salt and fresh ground pepper then I sprinkled the chicken with Mrs. Dash. That wasn’t the twist.

While out on my patio I noticed my rosemary shrub needed a little heavier pruning to get one branch out of the way of my path across the patio. I cut the limb off, stripped off some leaves and crushed them then added that to the chicken. The chicken then was covered and placed in the refrigerator for about thirty minutes.

When I placed the chicken on the grill I also placed the rest of that rosemary branch on the back of the grill away from direct heat. The rosemary started smoking and things were smelling good. After taking the chicken off the grill and trying this I’ve decided I’m probably going to have to replace that rosemary shrub before next year.

I love working on cars. I really do. Something about taking apart and putting together mechanical things and making them work, especially when they didn’t work before is very rewarding to me.

I’ve had to do a number of repairs on cars over the past few weeks. These haven’t been all that enjoyable. I’ve had failures on cars when I’ve had to have them working post haste and ran into troubles with the job being bigger than I first imagined it or just things being harder to get to with the tools that I have at my disposal.

Today I had planned to do a brake job on one car followed by another brake job on another one in a couple of weeks. I ended up needing to do both today. Only one got done. I was figuring on brake pads and rotors but I ended up replacing the calipers also. Nothing came off easy. I ended up having to hose everything down with liquid wrench and then just walk away for half an hour to break loose the caliper bolts. I also took four trips to three different auto parts stores to get all the parts.

The other car will get its brakes replaced tomorrow night. I’m looking right now at what I can do with my garage and tools to make these jobs a little easier in the future. I’m just not having fun working on cars under current circumstances.

Gerald, my father-in-law, passed away a little after noon today.

After re-reading my last post about him I realized that it wasn’t very flattering of him. The fact is, though, that it was fairly accurate. It just didn’t mention the good things about him. I know of very few people that actually disliked him. He was a charmer and could talk to anyone. Everyone, even those that had something against him liked the man. I also know that even though he didn’t know how to show it he loved my wife and my two sons dearly. I think the biggest problem he had in maintaining relationships is that he did love deeply. If he thought one of his kids was making a mistake he would let them know and try to do everything he could to protect them from themselves. Unfortunately while he was good at flattery he was very bad at diplomacy.

I’m going to miss the man. I truely am. I’ll miss his charm and his foolishness but most of all I’ll miss his passion.

Fly home, Gerald. I’m really going to miss you.

Gerald is my father-in-law. He and my mother-in-law divorced when my wife was two and he just never was much in my wife’s life. He didn’t make promises to her he couldn’t keep and he didn’t reject her, he just wasn’t there. My mother-in-law wasn’t the only failed marriage he had, he was married at least once before her and has been married at least twice since her. I think his current marriage will last until he dies.

Gerald has fathered a number of children. As best as I can tell he was never a dead-beat dad, he just wasn’t there. Golf and work came before family, it seems. They are all grown now with children and grandchildren of their own.

I’ve always liked Gerald. He’s probably been the best father-in-law a man could ask for. He has never butted into my family’s business and never been a source of contention between me and my wife. My wife would have liked a closer relationship with him growing up but she has accepted him for who and what he is and loves him as a daughter ought to love a father.

Gerald has been somewhat crippled since he was a boy. He had some type of bone disease in one leg that left it a few inches shorter than his other. This condition has given him problems several times over the years landing him in the hospital and in intensive care units more than once. He’s always recovered and gone back to work in his HVAC business.

Gerald is now in his late 70s. Last week complications in his bad leg led to a stroke. He’s suffering from paralysis to his left side, the side his bad leg is on. This past weekend the complications that led to the stroke also led to that leg being amputated. I don’t think he knows this yet.

If Gerald makes it out of the hospital I have no doubts that he will recover and probably even get to the point that he will need a prosthesis for the missing leg. If nothing else Gerald is a fighter. My concern now is for my wife, her step-mother(s) and her half siblings. While Gerald has strained all of his relationships over the years his family still loves him. Even several of his ex-wives.

Keep fighting, Gerald. I’m confident you can recover. This next year will be interesting.

I received a phone call from my son Thursday afternoon. He was in Mississippi. This was very comforting. As I mentioned about a year ago he’s been in Iraq stationed at Camp Bucca. He’s a member of the Tennessee Army National Guard’s 1-181st Field Artillery Battalion but for the last year he’s been a prison guard.

He should be back home in Chattanooga either Monday evening or Tuesday morning. The down side of this is that I have to be in Newark on Tuesday afternoon. I’m just glad he’s home.

I spent the weekend working in the yard. After seven years of living here I’ve never had the time to do more than just the simplest maintenance and even some of that has fallen behind. With the change in jobs I’m looking at more time available at home and I’m also looking at two things that I really need to give more attention to, cooking and gardening.

So this weekend I’ve reworked the landscaping in the front of the house and created a planting bed at the side of the house and planted some tomatoes, peppers and herbs there. It’s been a long time since I’ve had my hands in soil like this and I find that I like it. Even the cussing I did was more of a relief of built up tensions than a display of frustration.

The landscaping at the front of the house consists of two areas on each side of the front door where some shrubs had been planted. Chinese privet was planted on both sides of the front door with a holly at the corner. All of this had grown so big that there was no way of trimming it back and it still look decent so I cut it all down last fall. As expected more of all of it has popped back up from the roots left in the ground. I dug up as much of the roots as I could this weekend, amended and turned the soil and then planted some periennials there.

While turning the soil I discovered what the guy that built the house did with all the left over bricks and trash from building the house. I found a pretty good sized pile of bricks buried just a few inches under the surface. I also found a drop cloth in surprisingly good shape for being buried for around fifteen years. Why do builders do stuff like this?

All the digging left me fairly tired but it felt good. This week after work I plan on tackling the mess at the back of the house. Blackberries are sprouting up everywhere. I’ve tried to keep them contained because I love fresh blackberries with pancakes and cereal but I don’t know that having the plants take over my yard is worth keeping this one patch for having fresh blackberries for three weeks out of the year.

It feels good knowing I don’t have to head to the airport any next week. I’ll be traveling the following week but this should only come up every four to six weeks. Let’s see if I continue enjoying this gardening through the summer and fall.

Up until 2002 I was a pretty stable employee. I left Picket, Tarpley and Associates after 15 years of service that year to follow my wife to Atlanta where she wanted to continue working for her company that had closed their Chattanooga office. The job I came to in Atlanta was with Hampton-Tilley Associates. The job lasted for six months and then the office closed down. I went out on my own then for nine months and discovered why Hampton-Tilley had closed, there was not enough business during that time to keep me fed.

My next job was with Polytron and it lasted for three years. Half of that time was on my last project. That project broke me. It had me out of town way too much. That job was followed by three more over a years time. The first one I just wasn’t the right guy for and that was followed by another that just ran out of work and the third was a personality clash between me and my manager.

My current job I’ve been at since August of 2007. It sounded like a dream job and except for too much time on the road it has been. I say has because I’m changing jobs again.

 A couple of weeks ago a head hunter that I had previously tried placing me called me up to see how I was doing and what my current employment status was. There was a company looking for someone like me and he wanted to submit my resume to them. Now, my resume had been submitted to them  at least twice in the past without any result at all. I told him I was skeptical of there being any result this time either and that I really wasn’t looking for a job right now. He gave me one last pitch though and I told him to go ahead and send it to them.

I was surprised when he called me back a few days later and told me they wanted to talk to me. I met with them this past Monday and discovered that I had worked previously with two other employees there and one contractor. The director of Technology had been employed by the company that I hooked up with when I came to Atlanta, Hampton-Tilley, and we knew a lot of the same people. I learned that the past couple of times I had sent them my resume it had never made it to the electrical managers desk.

Anyway, I received a call from the HR manager on Tuesday afternoon with an offer. It was a very good offer and travel would be a lot less. I told him I needed to sleep on it and I would call him back in the morning. I discussed the offer with my wife and we decided that I would accept the offer but would make a counter offer first. I’m getting too old to wait around to accrue extra vacation time. I wanted a week after six months and three weeks after a year.

I begin work on May 12, 2008 with Clyde Bergemann, with the vacation I asked for, in the position of Senior Controls Project Engineer.

In spite of the long hours and constant travel I will miss working with Matrix Scientific. There are good people working there and my customers were some of the nicest people you would ever want to meet. This was just too good of an offer to refuse. Hopefully I will only have one W2 form to worry about on my 2009 taxes.

I managed to find my way to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles this past Thursday. I finished the job I was working on by 10:00AM and my flight home wasn’t until 11:10PM. In keeping with my resolution to take advantage of my travels more for personal enrichment I took off exploring. The trails surrounding the observatory could not be ignored. Crows and hawks entertained me as I walked.

I looked down from a trail and saw a little cave or what could have been a fox’s den. I looked again and could swear I saw an old man peering back at me with one eye from the hillside. Can you see him?

The area truly is beautiful. My previous trips to LA had left me thinking that Los Angeles was lacking in something…. a place I wouldn’t care to live. This trip, with finding these trails has me believing that maybe I could see my self living there.

I’ve been excited about electric cars for a couple of years now. No, not hybrids that require a fuel tank an an internal combustion engine but cars that have an electric motor and a battery pack that is plugged in to recharge. I believe electric cars and nuclear power plants are the key to our energy independence and reigning in our output of greenhouse gases. Now it looks like my dream of electric powered transportation can go even farther.

Electraflyer Corporation has strapped an electric motor and a lithium polymer battery pack on an old Monnet motorglider built from a kit, and the aircraft just this week earned its experimental airworthiness certificate. The company is also flying a battery powered ultralight trike which has about 50 hours on it.

I know this is a long ways from commercial flight but so was the Wright Flyer. Besides, with Avgas running at over $6.00 per gallon these days this could be the one innovation that keeps recreational flying attainable by ordinary pilots.

I’m really interested to see where this goes.  Marine Sgt. Rick Sanchez is a career soldier who received an expensive gift has been relieved of duty and is under an investigation that could lead to a court martial. A Marine Corps spokesperson has stated that, “as of now it doesn’t look like he’s done anything illegal but we are still investigating.” So I have to wonder is this really a story?

I have no problem with people who claim to be agnostic. Lord knows I’ve been there and still find myself wondering at times. Still I consider myself a devout Christian who can recite the Apostle’s Creed with conviction.

Atheists, however, are another matter. I don’t dislike them I just can not fathom how anyone can say, “There is no God,” with any certainty. I don’t understand them and I can’t help but view their certainty of there being no god as a bit of arrogance.

I know it may seem hypocritical of me to view an atheists certainty of there being no god and not some believers certainty that there is but I don’t see it that way. To me I can understand someone taking even the flimsiest bit of evidence of a god and having it become a certainty but just because to another there is a lack of evidence can not lead to a certainty that there is no God.

Look at it this way, we really have no universal definition of what a supreme being might be. On top of that we really have no consensus that a god has to be a supreme being or that just any supreme being is a god. Since we really don’t know what a god or a supreme being might be how can we say it doesn’t exist?

To look at it another way we live in a complex universe. The more we find out about it the more we find that we don’t know. Some look at the universe as being boundless, without limits or as constantly expanding. We understand the basic laws of physics and how they work but when we go beyond the basics we continue to find things to be just a little more complex than what we fully understand. We get a grasp on that complexity and that opens up even more complexity.

The complexities are proving to be more and more enormous the more we look. So are we so arrogant then as to think that we are looking at something that the human mind is fully capable of completely understanding? I’m not saying that it is useless and that we should stop looking and theorizing but what I am saying is that I don’t expect us to ever be able to comprehend the laws of physics completely, at least not in our current form.

So where am I going with this? If we can’t fully understand our universe, and by that we I’m also including the physicist who is so intelligent he can comprehend 26 different dimensions in a theory that has merit throughout the scientific community, if we can’t come to an agreement on what a supreme being might be or what a god is, how can we be so arrogant as to make the bold statement that there is no Creator God? How can anyone possibly state with any confidence at all that it all just happened?

Now, with that said I can fully understand someone telling me they can’t believe in a Sky Wizard or some invisible Magic Man. I find those terms offensive to me but I can understand someone not being able to believe in the God of the Bible or the Koran or any of the pagan gods out there. I just can’t understand how anyone can say with any certainty that there is no God, period.

I’m on the west coast this week and next. I drove down to San Diego last night from Los Angeles. Things didn’t go all that well in Los Angeles. I managed to break a robot pretty bad. I’m taking today off before starting an install at a customers site in the morning. I’ll probably be back in LA for a few days next week and then back down here in San Diego again.

This is an extended trip.

This morning I had breakfast, wrote up a short report of what happened yesterday and sent pictures of the destruction to a couple of people. I can’t share those here. However, I did drive up to Mt. Soledad after finishing the report and took some pictures I could share.

This is a beautiful mountain top. I just wish haze hadn’t been so bad.

I’m depressed. The only candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States who brings the experience needed to the table to actually perform the job from day one has just dropped out of the race. I can’t in good conscious vote for Senators Clinton, Obama or Edwards. I just don’t see them as people capable of being the president I want leading my country. I’m not sure there is a Republican candidate for the nomination that I feel any different about.

This may be the first presidential election I opt out of.

As of right now I only see three candidates that I believe are capable of holding the office of President of the United States. This has nothing to do with ideology, I’m not ready to pick on that yet, this is based purely on credentials and integrity. Two are Republicans and one is a Democrat.

 I like Bill Richardson. I disagree with him on many of the issues but I believe his life experiences have left him most qualified of any of the candidates to be president. I’m really surprised he is running behind Edwards, Obama and Clinton in the polls. None of these Democratic frontrunners have anywhere near the experience in running a government as he does. None of them have the diplomatic experience he does and none of them have the policy making experience he does. Bill Richardson is a remarkable man. He also strikes me as a man of integrity.

Of the Republicans you have Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee who both have demonstrated skills in running government and both man appear to be men of integrity. Out of the Republicans, who more has experience running government than these two men? Gulliani may come close but running city government, even a city government as large as New York City does not fully prepare one for running a country.

I like Huckabee a little better than Romney, though and if I was voting in the Republican Primary today I think I’d choose Huckabee. He’s a FairTax supporter, you know. I think I like Richardson the best of the three, though. I worry a little about a Dominionist bent with Huckabee.

This past week I’ve been talking to some friends about God. One of my friends wanted to know how I rationalized other gods to my own. It’s fairly easy. I’m a monotheist. There is only one God so the other gods he’s speaking of must just be different names for my God. He wasn’t very satisfied with my answer. Other religions worship their God differently than I worship my God. They have different creation stories and such. How could they be my God by a different name.

I understand his confusion. He’s an atheist and doesn’t believe in any gods. I can appreciate that he doesn’t believe in a supernatural being and this leads to his confusion in my answer. He does believe that there are things more important than just living his life to the fullest so there is something bigger than him, something he must serve. While I believe in God as a supernatural being I also believe that your god is who you serve. Micah 6:8 tells us exactly what my God requires from me to serve Him. I must act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with my God. From what I’ve gathered from my Hindu friends, that’s what Brahman requires from them in order to reach Nirvana. Same God, different names, different rituals, different stories.

Still, I believe the important part isn’t the name of the god or the ritual or the stories. The important part is how you serve God. I believe we serve God by serving His creation and it only really counts is that our motivation for doing so is our love of God. Call God what you will, just love Him and serve Him and you are on the right path. To me, that’s all what believing in Christ is all about and everybody has to serve somebody.