I love my wife. Tammy has been growing a lot over the last year. I don’t mean she’s turned into the fifty foot woman. Well, in a spiritual sense, she’s getting close to that. Tammy is growing in God and it humbles me, amazes me, and thrills me all at the same time. Here’s her latest MySpace blog post. (I’m reproducing it here so you don’t have to log into MySpace to see it.)

Current mood: determined
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Time to share. The Lord has shown me a lot that I feel needs to be shared with those I know.

If you have been going to church lately, Pastor Dennis has been speaking about the 3 chairs. The first chair represents committed Christians whose whole live is devoted to God. The second chair represents compromising Christians who live for God on Sunday, but live for themselves the rest of the week. The third chair represents the lost, people who either don’t know anything about God or who have heard about Christianity, but don’t accept it for whatever reason.

I don’t know about anyone else but these messages have been a kick in the rear for me. I’ve been going in between 1st and 2nd chair for way to long. I have tried to keep running my life on my own instead of letting Jesus take the full reign over my life.

I have been digging into God’s Word more and more since these messages have been planted into my life. The more I have been reading the Word the more the Lord has convicted me of one of the most popular phrases I hear from Christians including myself: “What is God’s will for my life?” In the Word the answer is as clear as it gets. God’s will for every Christian is to reach out to others and spread his love to those who don’t know him. Why is that so hard for Christians? Well the word FEAR is something that I and a lot of other Christians face. We fear rejection and failure more than anything. But you know what? The only thing to fear is God. I read the entire book of Revelation on Saturday and my brain hasn’t stopped thinking about the world, my family, our church, friends who are sitting in the 2nd chair and those who do not know Jesus as their personal savior. I have been dreaming about the war that will take place as the tribulation begins and how many people I know that will be in that war if I don’t do something about it. Our nation is “one nation under God,” but where is God? Our nation is in desperate need of Christians who will stand up and make a difference.

On Friday night I had the opportunity to go to Christ for the Nations in Dallas . They hold a open worship night once a month and it was such an awesome and eye opening experience. As hundreds gathered that night to worship the Lord, the speaker made a very good point. Worship that night was corporate worship but our true worship is outside the walls of the church. As I prayed and worshiped that night I cried out to the Lord about Christians, myself included, that need to stop thinking about themselves and start spreading the love of Jesus.

Over the past week my heart has been turned upside with my 5 siblings who have nothing to do with Jesus. My brother Rich was going to be a pastor and now has nothing to do with Jesus. My sister Kathy was in a tragic accident and the Lord saved her life and she still hasn’t had anything to do with God. My sisters Gloria and Misty, I’m not sure where they are or even if they ever had a time in their lives when they were saved. My closest sister Amy has strayed so far away from the Lord that she is deliberating sinning and has admitted to it. My heart is crying out so bad for my siblings and their families who haven’t heard about the Lord. It’s time that I stop thinking about it and start doing something about it. Approaching them could cause our relationships to end but if I don’t do it who will?

We need to lay down our pride and start getting our lives right with the Lord. The end is coming and it’s time to take a stand. Dig into the Word, memorize the Word. Be prepared with the Word for the events that lie ahead. Be bold!! Be Strong!!

Tammy

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(Heh. Get it? It’s a drum… rolling… Get it? Heh heh.)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to White Board Quip of the Week #100. There have been far more than 100 weeks since I began this cultural phenomenon, but let’s not quibble over the details.

Waaay back in October of 2004 I posted this first White Board Quip on my blog.

If God had meant people to run around naked, they’d be born that way!

Now since that was WBQotW #1, it can’t really be recycled into WBQotW #100. So, what quip should it be? I’ve poured over my entire quip database looking for just the right quip. I’ve decided to honor one of White Board Quip’s biggest fans.

Even though he doesn’t have a blog, and seldom visits my site, Arron Caruth never misses a chance to drop by my office and read the quip right off my white board. So, Arron, this one’s for you.

I don’t know if I’m too good for hot dogs or if hot dogs are too good for me.
– Arron Caruth

This conversation enhancement came from a coworker responding to a run-of-the-mill “Donuts in the breakroom” email here at work.

sacrilicious \SAK-ri-LISH-eous\, adj.:
Pertaining to or describing something highly enjoyable and highly destructive.
“This chocolate-fudge-pudding-cocaine-crumble-cake is sacrilicious! Of course I want another piece!”

Full discloser: While this post was being written, I ate two donuts.

I’m not ignoring you. I’m trying something different. Something that, so far, looks a lot like I’m ignoring you.

My readers know well the struggles I have with productivity and self-discipline. Coming back from vacation, I was worried that I would have a hard time working at work. So, this week, I exported my “daily reads” bookmarks and emailed them to my home PC. The idea was that I could still do all my daily surfing and blogging, but do it at home after Tammy goes to bed. I think you can see how that turned out.

Other than some video links that were emailed to me at work, and PvPOnline, I haven’t surfed this week. While I was a little more productive during the week, I’m not sure if it was enough to justify the suffering. Plus, this morning, when I dragged myself out of bed, my brain was nearing the oatmeal state. I was babbling to myself all morning as I got ready, and most of the babble (that was coherent) had to do with going back to bed.

I can’t even blame my mood on “spring fever” because it’s been so hot and humid, I’ve had no desire to be outside. Pretty much just the desire to be on the my couch, drooling and staring slack-jawed at the TV.

I’m going to call this experiment, at least in the short term, a failure.

I must apologize for not announcing this before the fact. Tammy and I have just returned from a fantastic vacation, our first real vacation in five years.

We spent the week back in our old haunt, Colorado Springs, and the surrounding areas. We rode our mountain bikes down the ski runs at Snow Mass (near Aspen), we climbed Pikes Peak, we took over 300 pictures!! We … are … tired.

I need to dole out thanks to Raju for the use of his Canon Rebel XT digital SLR and mad props to Shane and Jen Weeks for their hospitality and very comfortable basement.

I hope to get some pictures and maybe even a little video up sometime this week.

Now back to your regularly schedule programming.

[Edit: Pictures from the trip are here.]

I’ve said before that I really like numbers. Numbers seem to give life some sense of order. They give guys like me a way to filter this analog world into a digital view.

I love StatTraq. It’s a plug-in for WordPress written by my good friend RandyPants. StatTraq breaks down my web site stats into easy to swallow tables and numbers. Since 2007 is half over, I thought I’d check out what the numbers look like. For 2007 so far…

The SYNS home page has been viewed over 47,000 times with over 4000 rss feed hits.
The top ten most viewed posts are…

Make note of that Mythbuster’s ranking. Even though the post is two years old it stays at the top and you’ll see why momentarily. The top twenty referrers (pages that link to my site) all come from google images, so the search terms are a better judge of how people find SYNS. The top five things that people type into search engines that end up linking to SYNS are…

In addition to over 600 search engine hits for Scottie, I’ve had about 100 hits from searches for Something involving “Tory Belleci” or “Kari Byron”, especially Kari’s silver bikini stunt. Looks like I’m not the only person out there who likes Scottie best. The Favorite Mythbuster post has been in the top three every year since it was posted.

Here’s a little graph I threw together for the growth of SYNS over the last two years.

If any of you read Arvel’s first post about his cruise from [heck] and asked yourself, could it possible get any worse, shame on you! Because of your casual question, Arvel is now suffering even more.

Read part two, “Shiver me times or How the pirates stole my underwear.”

My boss, Arvel, is on vacation and blogging about the worst cruise ever. Funny stuff.

Despite what you may have heard, I don’t hate kids. I actually love kids… once they’re old enough to keep their bodily functions to themselves and understand physics of sound well enough not to yell at me from two feet away. That is to say, I love most kids by the time they’re thirteen years old.

I just wanted to clear that up before I posted WBQotW #99.

Children are the original sexually transmitted disease.

Next week I’ll be on vacation, but I’m hoping I’ll have net access and can post WBQotW #100. (A land mark event!)

For lunch today, I wanted something different. I stopped of at Jack in the Box where their latest pitch is a burger made with 100% sirloin beef and offers you a choice of cheeses. Sure! That sounds better than plain old hamburger to me plus I get yummy swiss cheese instead of the normal yellow rubber stuff. I decided to give it a shot. As usual, I eschewed the combo and went for the sandwich alone. Fries are fattening and soft drinks are all sugar. Aw, what the heck. I threw in a side of onion rings (not health food, but better than fries).

My first clue that something was amiss was the fact that the paper bag I was handed looked like it came from Safeway. When I got back to the office and settled in with my big mug of water, I was pretty surprised at the size of the burger. It’s big! Really big. Bedaubed with some sort of special sauce, big pickle slices (cut longways) and bacon (didn’t mean to order that, but too late now). I dug in with nescient glee.

Even after taking off the top bun (which I always do), I could barely get my mouth over it. But I had to admit it was toothsome and lacked the drippy greasiness of most burgers. I made it through and soon after began to realize, that burger was just too big.

Hm. “Just how big was it,” I wondered. So I pulled up the Jack in the Box nutrition page. Holy heart attack Batman!!

(Before reading on, I recommend you refresh your memory on the recommended daily dosages of fat, sugar and salt in my original nutrition post.)

This monster (bun, special sauce and all) weighs in at nearly a pound. It’s crammed with a whopping 1120 calories (over half of my recommended 2000 per day) along with:

73 grams of fat (That’s well over the recommended 65g per day.)

2620 milligrams of salt (Again, more than my daily allowance of 2400mg.)

And this surprised me most of all. 11 grams of sugar (Almost half my daily allowance.)

Factor in the half order of onion rings I managed to eat and it looks like I’m having water for dinner. “Ohhh. I can’t believe I ate the whooole thing.”