I think I ‘ve found a theme I can stick with for a while. It seems to work well with all aspects of this site. All I need to do is tweak it some to make it mine and not a copy of some other website.

For over two years I’ve been using the same theme with this website. I would occasionally change the banner but I was really happy with the look and function of the site.  That was until this past week. In a three day span I randomly came across four other sites using the same theme. That won’t do. I don’t think this theme will either but it will do for now.

It’s been too long since I sat down to design a website anyway. This might be something to keep me busy for a little while.

I’ve been talking to some friends about what a personal relationship with
Jesus means. They tossed around a few metaphors to explain what they
thought this personal relationship means and they were pretty good but a
metaphor wasn’t making the statement to me that I thought best conveyed
what this personal relationship is. Basically it means to me that Jesus was
speaking only to me in His sermons. His sermons on what was required for my
salvation was meant as directives only to me and not as standards for me to
hold other people accountable to. If anyone is to be held to these
standards it is only me.

When Jesus says, “Love your neighbor.” He’s talking to me. I must love my
neighbor, not expect my brother to love his neighbor. When He tells me to
take care of the widows and orphans he means for me to do so, not expect
anyone else to take on the job.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t have this same personal relationship all
I’m saying is that I can’t expect you to. That isn’t a part of my personal
relationship with Jesus Christ.

Mattie is my wife’s Bichon Frise. We got him when he was about two and have had him for four years. He’s a great little dog but he’s been difficult to train. He has a mind of his own. He will sit but only if he’s sure he will be getting a treat for his effort.

My mother-in-law loves the little fellow. So does her husband. He gets free run of their house when we visit while Sammie does not. My step-father-in-law got caught sneaking him food from the table once. He said he was just pretending to feed him. My mother-in-law asked if that was the case what was Mattie chewing on. My father-in-law just stated, “He’s pretending to eat it.”

My friend, Dan, created a weblog tool about ten years ago that would allow him to publish articles to his website via email. I always thought that was probably the most effective way of updating websites but I’ve actually used that method few times.

I think that might be changing.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

My step mother is from Guatemala. She has a fantastic command of the
English language along with French, Italian and German. Regardless of the
fact that she speaks English fluently it is still her second language and
there are occasional misunderstandings that sometimes have comical results
and at others not so funny results. I have several co-workers from India
who grew up speaking Hindi. Their English is all good but still there are
miscommunications between us sometimes.

I have come to the conclusion that no matter how well one speaks a second
language there are some little subtleties that just don’t translate. Unless
one has lived for an extended period of time in a culture there are things
one just can not understand. Colloquialisms seem to be the heart of the
matter in fully understanding each other. Even people I have worked with
who came from other parts of the US have had trouble understanding me at
times and I them due to little things like how one phrases informal speech.

I lost my photo gallery. I have backups but not good enough backups that I can get everything back up and online easily. It started with a corrupt table in Gallery2’s database and got worse as I tried to fix things. Anyway, the database is gone but the pictures are in several other places offline. Rebuilding the gallery will take some time. Time I don’t really have.

This has me giving some thought about a lot of things that I have online and what I need to do to ensure that things like this don’t happen again. One option is to quit worrying about the stuff I have online. To be honest, that is looking like the preferred option at this point.

— Update:
I’ve got the gallery back online and a few pictures loaded into it. I doubt I just throw everthing back into the gallery. I think its time that I get a little more discerning over which photos I publish and which I just keep around on my own hard drive.

My oldest son, the one that has been in Iraq for the past year, moved into a house he and his best friend rented. They served together in Iraq and figured they could put up with each other as roommates now. I spent this weekend giving him a hand. He’s twenty-four and this is really the first lease he has signed that I wasn’t part of the negotiations. He signed a six month lease shortly after moving out of my house when he was eighteen and where he has been living with other people or with me and his mother since moving out.

 This was very interesting watching him fuss around his new abode. The landscaping is actually fairly nice there and he surprised me by showing some concern about his hydrangea needing watering. He seemed fairly excited about the prospect of keeping up this yard. I wish he had taken the same interest in landscaping when he lived with me.

When I got back home from being in Chattanooga for the weekend my youngest son informed me he had opened a checking account for himself.

 I guess they are both grown now.

Dan pointed me to a couple of videos on Google Video that I thought were of enough importance in what they said to spread around a little more. I found them on YouTube and I thought I would embed them here. I am not the type of person that the police talks to much but I am taking this advice to heart. Don’t talk to the police. Save these conversations for your lawyer. I’ll support the police as much as I can in curtailing and solving crime but I’ll not do it by answering questions without an attorney present. The personal risk is just too great.

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.

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.