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Last night was our indoor ultimate league tournament. True to form, my amazing team managed to win all of our games, and we were crowned the champions. It’s been a few years since I’ve won a league, and I’ve never been on an undefeated team. It felt pretty good.

We had a lot of fun together– what a great group of players.

A few weeks ago, Laralee and I decided that we need to do some serious de-cluttering of our house. Our motto is:

Stuff that doesn’t meet one of those criteria needs to go. We started with the crawlspace and managed to get rid of a ton of boxes that were neither useful nor joyful. While I was visiting Missouri, Laralee tackled our bookshelves, removing all kinds of books that she knew she’d never read again, or that she had electronically on her tablet, or that were duplicates of others (paperback and hardcover, for example). I told her not to touch any of mine, although the day is coming when I’m going to need to cleanse my bookshelves.

Today I was going to vacuum my office and noticed a pile of computer parts sitting on the floor. They were overflow from the closet, where I keep all kinds of old components… because, you know, you might need them someday, right? I opened the closet, gave a heavy sigh, and decided to start a purge.

How many keyboards does a guy need? I had about twenty, most of which had PS/2 connectors (PS/2 was replaced by USB at least a decade ago). Oh, and one ancient model with clackety keys and a connector I can’t even remember:

That was probably from one of my very first computers, circa 1992. Anyway, I kept one PS/2 model– still brand new in the box, in fact– because someday I might need one. I also kept a couple of newer USB ones, and chucked the rest.

CD-ROM drives were cool… in 1994. I had almost thirty of them. They’re all IDE-cabled, meaning they won’t work in a modern system, and I have a fancy little external USB unit that can read and burn CD’s and DVD’s. Even that I don’t use much, because who uses CD’s these days? So a pile of drives headed to the heap.

A scanner from the late 1990’s that probably weighed ten pounds? Gone. Power supplies for cases I don’t even have… hard drive caddies for IDE drives… speakers that don’t work… 16MB RAM sticks… an Apple mouse from an old PowerPC… all gone.

After heaving quite a bit out of the closet, I admired the pile of stuff.

The sad thing is that much of it still works! The keyboards are fine, the CD-ROM drives spin up, and so on. They’re just from a bygone era of computers that you can’t buy any more (except maybe on eBay from junk dealers). It seems a shame to get rid of perfectly good components. The pile probably represents thousands of dollars of purchases.

But, neither useful nor joyful. Away it goes.

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.