Year: 2017

Yesterday in seminary I was teaching about the book of Galatians in the New Testament. As a class we talked about the influence of the world (or, as Paul puts it in his writing, the “lusts of the flesh”) and the things we can do to resist temptations. Part of that, of course, is considering the “fruit of the Spirit”:

I’m not terribly creative, but every now and then I come up with a zinger. For this lesson I pulled out a bag of cuties (mandarin oranges if you want to be precise) and handed one to each of the kids. They had little ghosts drawn on them:

Fruits of the Spirit! Ha! Get it?

It’s sort of a long story, but I have a really nice iMac now. It’s a late-model 27″ with a fast processor and a ton of memory. Of course I’m not much of an Apple guy, so I wondered what interesting things I could do with it.

Of course: I could install Linux on it!

I popped in a Mint Linux USB installer, and a few minutes later I had a running system. I think Mint is a great distro, but it’s not really for me: it doesn’t have KDE3. I figured I’d see if I could run Jinux on it. I popped in a Jinux USB installer, and to my surprise, the installer ran flawlessly. I had to wrestle with the bootloader a bit, but after a few tweaks I had a running Jinux system (with KDE3):

Since I’m a certified geek, I’m actually triple-booting for now: stock MacOS Sierra, Mint Linux, and Jinux. I figured Laralee might want to give this puppy a spin. She’s out of town, but when she comes home I’ll see what works.

Last night was the end of the regular season in my indoor ultimate league. As usual, I was a captain and had a great time. Not as usual, my team is actually pretty good. Well, not just pretty good… amazing. We finished the season undefeated:

If it’s not obvious, the league theme was Star Trek, and we’re Jean-Luc Pick-Hard. Not only did we win every game, but we did so with a tremendous lead: our point differential is over 100, meaning on average we won by 7 points each game. Wow.

But I can’t be too over-confident; next week is the tournament and more often than not, top-ranked teams come into the brackets with a bye and lose their first game against a lower-ranked team who’s won their first round and is warmed up and hungry for victory. That’s what happened to my team last season, when we were also in first place during the season but lost in the tournament semi-finals (so did the second-place team). So I hope we do well and manage to snag some championship swag and bragging rights.

A few days ago, Zaque became the fourth member of our family to get braces. He certainly wasn’t very excited about it, but recognized that something has to be done about (as he calls it) his “snaggletooth”. Like Laralee, he’s missing the lateral teeth that are on either side of the top front incisors. Instead, he has canines in those spots. By dragging his teeth around a bit, the orthodontist thinks he can organize everything nicely.

Here’s my boy before heading off for the procedure:

And here he is afterward, making me wonder if he caught a whiff of nitrous oxide or something…

Well, we’re off on a two-year journey now!

Whenever I’m captain of an ultimate team, I keep track of our defensive plays on something I call the “D Board”. I’m a firm believer that defense wins games, so it’s important to reward* those plays.

Last night were the first games of the spring season. We rocked the D Board.

We won the first game of our double-header, then tied the second in a grueling match under high winds. They were both good, balanced games, and I really like my team this season. We’re going to have a lot of fun together.

* The “reward” in this case is eternal glory.

I was running some errands just now and stopped by Jimmy John’s to buy a cheap “freaky fast” sandwich for lunch. As I was ordering, one of the sandwich-making guys behind the counter called out, “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going?”

I looked at him but had absolutely no idea who he was. Sometimes people say hi to me and they seem familiar but I can’t quite come up with a name… maybe from ultimate? Church? A client from work? One of my kids’ teachers? Even then, I get a sense that I know them from somewhere. Not this time. It was weird.

Anyway, I played it cool and chatted with him for a few minutes. After leaving, I thought maybe he was the Jimmy John’s delivery guy who had dropped off a sandwich for me at my office on Tuesday. If so, do the delivery guys actually remember the names of people requesting delivery? That would be either creepy or really cool customer service.

This is going to keep me stymied for a while…

Today marks twenty-one years of legal partnership with the most amazing, gorgeous, thoughtful, kind, loving, patient wife I could ever hope for.

As John McClane said so famously, she’s “the best thing that ever happened to a bum like me.”

Laralee and I were out on a lunch date today, and stopped by Kohl’s because we’d heard from a friend they have some super sweet suit jackets in stock.

Indeed they do.

The question is which one looks better on me. La liked the flamingoes, although I think I preferred the crazy colored pattern.

In the end, we didn’t get either because they were $100 and I couldn’t think of an event other than an 80’s party where I’d honestly wear them. And we don’t have any outstanding invitations to 80’s parties.

In the photo below, #7 is Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays for the Spanish national soccer team. Check out the kids.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could all feel that way about once a day?

Today I had some free time this afternoon, and since spring is a few days away, I figured I might start on some “spring cleaning”. For a long time I’ve thought we could probably get rid of some stuff that’s been in our crawlspace for years.

I was right.

We tend to keep boxes for expensive electronics we buy (mainly computers, but also audio equipment and the like). I guess we figure when we move, we’ll want to use the original boxes with their padding or something. Well, about half of our crawlspace turned out to be comprised of such boxes. Many of them were for things we didn’t even own any more! (VCR, anyone?)

I tossed them out of the crawlspace into the basement, then up the basement stairs to Laralee, who tossed them out the side door into the driveway.

There, we removed three trash cans’ worth of styrofoam packing and crushed many of the older boxes. A friend of mine is getting ready to move, so I asked him if he’d like some of the nicer boxes. He said sure, so we managed to pass off many of these to him. Nice!

Oh, and let’s not forget things like 3.5″ floppy disks with video drivers that I found in one of the computer boxes. Yeah, that’s old school.

The rest of the crawlspace awaits another lazy afternoon when I have some time for more spring cleaning. I happen to know I have at least two big boxes of old college papers and assignments…