April and I have been going to the same church, First Baptist Church of Canton, for about 3 years now. We aren’t officially members but we’ve recently found a great Sunday School class. We had been going to another class when we first were going but the teachers moved and the class fell apart and sometimes April and I were the only ones in the class. It is just hard to find a good class for people our age. Our new class has about 20 people in it with about 12 people on average every Sunday. Yesterday we went to the class and afterwards we all went out to lunch. Two of the guys in the class were headed to go mountain biking that afternoon. They invited me to go with them and at 3:30pm I met them at the trail. Let me preface this by saying when I go, I usually do the intermediate loop of 3.8 miles and then head home. It makes for a nice 25 minutes ride and gets my home at a decent time after work. Yesterday we started with the easy trail (1 mile) and then did the intermediate trail. One guy, Brian was amazing! I finished a few minutes before me. Scott, had only been riding for a little while and was behind me about 1 minute. From there I was ready to head home but they wanted to continue. I decided that I should keep going, I really had nothing going on at home and I didn’t want to be the wimp and go home. From the intermediate trail we tackled the hardest trail on the course called Area 51. This would be my third time on it and I have never finished it without stopping during the 4 mile duration. This time was no exception. I stopped multiple time and came in last by about 1 minute. I need to get in shape!

Lately, I’ve been listening to sermons from the Revolution Church in NYC. The sermons are different than what I’m used to and they make a lot of sense. This church focuses on God’s grace and not on tradition. Several views of theirs I’m still wrestling with but I like the overall message. The just finished listening to two sermons by the associate pastor Vince on the books of Acts. He starts at the back of the book and goes forward, his sermon title is Acts Backwards. The head minister is Jay Bakker from One Punk Under God and he’s refreshing to listen to. It’s great to get other opinions and understandings into scripture.

I’ve also been reading a book by Max Lucado that my mom bought for me. I’ve just started reading it, maybe page 25 or so and he made a great reference to God’s creation of us that stuck with me. The book is about our uniqueness and how God had a plan for us and he molded us into what we are to accomplish that plan. God knew where we were needed and made our personality a certain way, or our physical being a certain way. This got me to thinking. God is playing a giant DAOC or WOW game with humans! He wants me for a certain task, so he gives me say 25 points Dex, 30 strength, 545619819 points Intelligence, etc. So now my image of God is a guy in front of a glowing white computer specing out humans for his tasks. Awesome!

I hope I don’t hit with lightening…

We finally got our car back. Check out all the crap we went through here. It took the mechanic two weeks and one day to complete a major tune up job! Should have been 1-2 days max. Total price was $980 which I was expecting, so I’m glad I didn’t have to argue with the guy about the price. The car runs well and it all held together on our trip to Claxton this past weekend.

As I just said we went to Claxton again this past weekend. We hadn’t been in a little over a month and boy can you tell! It was time to mow the grass and with an average grass height of 3′, it was getting a little shaggy. April and I then sprayed some Roundup around each tree to reduce competition for nutrients with the trees. We used a hand sprayer to kill the grass and weeds and that got my innovative juices flowing and I’ve come up with an idea. I want to link two of these sprayer tanks together, build a fixed sprayer pipe with multiple heads. Attached a battery powered fish pump to the tanks to raise the pressure, then attach the whole assembly to a golf cart and just drive a circle around each tree. This way our time spent spraying would reduce from 3 hours to 30 minutes or so.

I hate being sick. I took off early yesterday (around noon) with a sore throat, body aches and a sinus headache. I went home popped in LOTR and fell asleep on the couch. Today I’m feeling better but not completely 100%. Another nap this evening and all should be good.

By the way, a guy at work here has tickets to the Panic at the Disco, Dashboard Confessional, Plain White T’s concert at Gwinnett Arena on Nov. 4th. Anyone interested?

Today starts April’s second week back with the students. Hopefully this week will be better than the first week. The first two days of last week April was dong well except for the girl that vomited in class on Monday. I was with April after school both Monday and Tuesday to build some shelves for her class. Tuesday was when things started to get crazy. The guy from the county came into all the 6th grade classes to check on the student level in each class. All of the 6th grade at Arnold Mill was lower than expected. April averaged about 20-21 kids per class. A little low but she’s in a trailer and it’s perfect for those smaller classrooms. On Wednesday the county said that Arnold Mill has to get rid of one 6th grade teacher and split those kids up into the remaining classes. There are 6 teachers and April is one of them.

Thursday they had a meeting and one teacher volunteered to leave. That was great news for April because she probably would have left since she was the newest teacher at the school.

So now April’s classes are packed to 28 students per class and she now has to teach all 120 kids instead of 60. Then on top of that teach both math and science.

I’m just mad at the timing of it all. This is government efficiency at it’s best. They new the kids that were coming to school a week before school started and they knew the classes were low but they waited until school started and then transferred a teacher, changed class schedules for the kids and had to inform the parents of the change.

Speaking of the school related things, I came across these today.

check out the last paragraph by the union guy. How can you have the audacity to say that!

I love this video!

Our Honda Civic just recently hit that magical 100k mileage marker. I figured it was time for a tune up and to get the timing belt replaced. Last Wednesday I went to take it in to the shop. It was a good time for April and I since April hadn’t started school yet and Jonathan was visiting so if we needed an extra car, we had one. I’ll continue with a day by day breakdown:

Wednesday:
8am I drive April to work and take her car straight to the mechanic. I show at the office and only one technician is there. I explain what I want done and fill out some paper work. I notice that the office is in quite a mess. I mention to the tech if they are remodeling or something. He said, no, to remodel, we had a fire and we are in the process of moving. I then noticed back wall was gray with black soot at the top of the wall instead of a white wall. There we holes in the ceiling as well. He then showed me the actual shop….OMG it looked like a bomb went off. Everything was black, burned or melted. There were several 10′ diameter holes in the ceiling where I could see the sky. A Nissan minivan was still on a lift all burned with that metaliccy black look. I asked the guy how this happened and he said a mechanic was drilling in the gas tank of the minivan (another mechanics mom’s car) and caught the car on fire. I asked where they were doing their current work and he said they were renting other lifts at other shops temporarily until they get a new building in a few days. So I left the car with him and told him to call when it is ready.
I called at 4pm and they said it wouldn’t be ready today. I understood so I let it go. I figured I’d give him another day since his shop burned down.

Thursday:
I call around lunch and get the run around. He tells me a ballpark price of about $980. He lets me know what they’ve looked at and what looks good and what needs replacing. I figure they really haven’t gotten too far into the car yet. I call again at 5pm and he said that it would be ready today, he doesn’t really tell me why.

Friday:
I call again in the afternoon and he said that they have replaced the timing belt and everything looks decent and they just need to test drive it to make sure things are working well. I call again at 5pm and he said that the car wasn’t idling correctly and he wasn’t satisfied with that. He said it was like the timing was off just a little and he’ll have to take it apart again and look at it. He suggested getting us a rental car for the weekend. I should I needed one. (We were going to Atlanta that weekend and I wanted a car that locked) So Friday evening we picked up a Chevy Cobalt for April.

Monday:
I called in the afternoon and they found that the idler pulley for the timing belt was acting up. He said that they don’t normally need replacing but this one did. (I talked this repair over with Jonathan before I took it in and he said you always replace the idler because you’ve already got the thing open and might as well). So he said had the part on order and the car won’t be ready today.

Tuesday (today):
I called in the morning with no answer. I go over there at lunch with a co-worker, Lance. Lance knows the guy pretty well so I took him with me as support. We drove to the new shop to talk with the mechanic. He said the part didn’t come in this morning. It’s going to be another day.

Hopefully tomorrow we get our car back. It’ll be a week for a tune up. This guy is losing his butt on us with this $30/ day rental car.

Pray for us that we get the car and it works. Also pray for this guy, his whole shop burned down and he is super-stressed and kind of losing it. (I could tell by actually seeing him today).