Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Thanksgiving Week!

Well, it is the day before Thanksgiving and thing are going well. Summer is still doing well with her pregnancy. We will not be traveling to KY and TN for Thanksgiving because of how young the baby is still. at 25 weeks it is too much of a risk to drive 12 hours each way and do that in a period of 4 days. Our families agree.

My plan is to cook Thanksgiving dinner on my own. Ok, I'm sure Summer will coach. I am really glad that places like Cracker Barrell are open just in case my cooking doesn't turn out too well.

Just in case you were wondering, that picture below is a picture of my Warhammer 40K figures. I put that together and painted it.

My new admin has started and she is doing a great job so far. I think she will be a great asset for the church here.

So what do all of you do the day after Thanksgiving? (that is an invitation to post a comment) The tradition for us is after sharing the day together eating, watching football, and the Macy's day parade, oh, and of course playing cards with family, we get all the shopping ads and find all the best deals and what we are interested in buying and then we get up on Friday and are at the stores by 5-6 depending on when they open and get those great deals. Summer wanted a 19" TV for Christmas, so I waited in a long line at 5:30 in the morning at Circuit City so I could get one for $49. I got the last one. Every year though, I start to think that it is just no worth the $20 you save to fight traffic, lines, and of course getting up that early just to get a deal, but that is what I grew up doing, so I guess it is just a habit. I guess there is a little pleasure in scoring the good deal too. Well, have a blessed Turkey day.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Lots of Changes

There are lots of changes going on this week. Last week my admin's water broke at work and she had a baby the next morning. One of our other 3 admins is pregnant and having a baby in December. That leaves one admin that has been here a while. We have 2 new admins starting this week. One started Monday and one starts tomorrow. Things will be a little hectic for a while because there is much training to be done. My new admin will be a girl I grew up with. Isn't life funny? I move 10 hours away from everything I've ever known and my new admin is my former elder's daughter and she is married to one of my best friends from high school that I ended up performing their wedding ceremony. If that isn't strange enough, the admin that has been here for a while used to live in Paducah because her husband was a minister at a church there. She knows my grandparents. Isn't it a small world?

I'm back to ebaying. If you know what you are doing, you can get some great deals on ebay. I'm also selling things on ebay. It is a great way to get some money for things that you normally wouldn't get money out of at a garage sell.

I moved my recording studio to my office at chruch so we could make room for Rebeka in February. Micah now has his own room. He is so excited.

The kids are so into Christmas. All they want to do is watch Christmas videos and sing Christmas songs. Micah has already written a letter to Santa. He wants a guitar and a choo choo train.

This weekend I'm participating in the "Lazy Man's Decathalon" It is a batchalor party for Mark Moore who lives next door to me. He and one of our new admins are getting married in Dec. The events consist of miniture golf, Galaga, ping pong, eating, and the like. Sounds like my kind of decathalon. I'm hoping my ping pong skills will bring me the win in this tough line of events. I'll need to train my eating skills this week so I can rise ahead of the competition. It's hard work, but someone has to do it. :)

Have a blessed day!

Monday, November 08, 2004

It has been a rough week, but God is awesome

This past week has been rough. Of course the hard drive failure was just the start. Thursday my wife went to the doctor and found out she was put on bedrest for the weekend. We were fully expecting her to be on bedrest for the rest of the pregnancy like last time, but God is good and everything is much better. My wife said it best, so here is her email that she sent out. Praise God!!!!

"I wanted to update everyone on our pregnancy with Rebekah London. I had a Drs. appointment Thursday. Up to that point, everything had been looking great. When I went to the specialist on Thursday, he did an ultrasound and saw I had what he called funneling or beaking, which is an opening in my cervix. That was not a very promising thing since I was only 25 weeks along. He told me to go home and take it very easy and come back first thing Monday morning to have another ultrasound to see at what rate I was having change. I had an appointment scheduled with my regular dr. Friday and he with even more concern reiterated what the specialist had said. They were very concerned and said if there was any increase in the funneling, I would likely have to go to the hospital for the rest of the pregnancy. I did take it very easy over the weekend and Bret took amazing care of me and the kids. We prayed for a miracle. not only for the baby to be healthy and strong, but also be born at the right time and for me to not have to be on bed rest for the remains of the pregnancy (esp. in the hospital). I asked God to give me a miracle I could testify about to everyone. I know he is the God who provided another sacrifice in Isaac’s place, he is the God who was able to place a baby inside of Mary, he is the God who was able to keep the fire from consuming Shem, Ham and Japheth, he is the God who closed up the mouths of the lions in Daniel’s den, and he still is that same God and I asked him to do that today. I promised I would still praise him regardless and if he chose not to close up my cervix, I asked him to do something much greater. He did close up my cervix and I want him to receive all the credit for what happened. After my appointment this morning, I am not on bed rest. The specialists want to keep seeing me at least once a week. I am still supposed to take it easy, no lifting, pushing, prolonged standing or walking, but I don't have to be laying down all the time. I can do several things I couldn't do on bed rest. I am still taking it extremely easy and staying off my feet allot. Please keep praying for us and thank God for his answer to our miracle. We love you all so much and wanted to share our testimony of God's miracle with you. Summer"

Blessings,

Bret

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Backup Your Files

You don't expect for a hard drive on a less than 6 month old laptop to crash on you. Well, I have news for you: They do. I have not backed up anything since I got my laptop at the end of April. Yesterday, I had the big blue screen that scares people. I turn it back on and get it going. I had to go to a meeting so I left it on so I could deal with when I got back. When I got back the blue screen was crying out to me once more. This time when I turned it back on, it said "No Operating System Found." Surely this was not happening to me. Well, it did. My hard drive is fried. So I took it to Fry's where I purchased it. After lots of confusion (when I bought it, they associated the Serial # on my computer with the description of another laptop I bought) they checked in my computer. Thankfully I bought a good warranty. They will ship it to Fujitsu since it is still under manufacturer's warranty. I'll get my computer back in 6-8 weeks. Joy. The good things are that they have given me a loaner which is a brand new computer until mine is fixed and they think they might be able to recover my important docs like email, and my docs. They will have that done tomorrow. I'm typing on my new computer. I spent the evening putting everything back on it.

How about the election? Wow. There were several things made me excited. Of course, GW has 4 more years. Yeah!!! Another was that people came out voting based on moral issues. Praise the Lord that people are still concerned about morals. And of course I'm excited that we know the day after instead of a month after. I hope that the parties can get rid of such differences and accomplish something. And I did say both parties. Both parties need much improvment. I'm just glad all the bashing TV ads are over.

We have a girl from our New Friends New Life ministry being baptized tonight. It will be a real special evening. Well, it is time for me to finish all my stuff for tonight. Have a blessed day.

Bret

Monday, November 01, 2004

Good Weekend

I had a nice weekend. Friday was spent almost entirely with my family which is a great thing. Saturday my quartet got to work with one of the top coaches, Jim Casey. He taught us about "speech-level" singing. It is really facinating. Our quartet seems to have a lot of potential.

Sunday went very well. I thought that service was smooth and the worship team sounded great. Unfortunately my voice took a vacation for some reason. I barely made it through leading on Sunday, but my voice held up. Then last night we had a big Halloween bash at our place for the "compound." That is the church houses and all that live in them. There were about 20 of us including kids. Mark fired up the grill and we had a BYOM (bring your own meat) party. We had a great time. If you can believe it, the guys were remembering old 80's songs from groups like Chicago, Journey, Boston, Duran Duran, Huey Lewis and the News, etc. It was fun. This morning staff got together to pray and we've been discussing lots of church stuff. I've had lunch and I'm ready to start back in. I have several things on my plate that I'm working on. One of the hardest is learning flash. I want a cool worship ministry site and so I'm working throught the big flash handbook so I can design and keep up a cool site. Well that is about it for now.

Don't forget to vote tomorrow.