:: inamirrordimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

After finishing my morning blogging, I went to the bedroom to snatch up some socks. The distinct scurrying of little feet on the other side of the room caught my attention.

I saw a gray blur slip underneath my wife’s dresser.

Shoot, I thought, we probably have a rat or a squirrel in the house; not a far-fetched thought for our country home. The squirrels have parties in the attic all of the time.

I slowly walked over when a little nose popped out and I recognized two long, familiar ears: it was just Evan, our gray rabbit. In awe of his ability to escape his cage, I peeked in the rabbit room (also my office) and found that I left the top of his cage open when I gave him lettuce this morning.

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get a rabbit out of a bedroom. They hide in the darkest, hard-to-reach corners under the bed and then cannot be moved.

Since I was already on the later side of arriving at work, I needed something that would work quickly. Rabbit trauma could not be a concern. After barricading off the hallway, leaving only the rabbit room as an option, I looked for a long, broom-like object.

I found our swifter and set to work on chasing Evan from under the bed. After some minor furniture modifications, I took a swipe at him and ended up with an encouraging push that sent him scattering out of the bedroom.

With the rabbit on the run, I kept up the momentum with some yelling and brandishing of the swifter. The results were favorable. Though he didn’t hop into his cage, he did run under my desk.

Now when a rabbit is out, they typically want to go where they can’t. So I shut the door to the office/rabbit room and waited a few seconds. Sure enough, when I opened the door he was heading right for the door,  hoping to wiggle his way out.

I pounced on Evan, pinning him to the floor with one hand long enough to scoop up his powerful back feet and settle him into his cage. He made a few grunts of protest, but soon began inhaling his lettuce as if nothing at all had happened.

Over the past month I put writing on the back burner, save for a few projects in order to finish my home office. The amount of work has been nothing short of staggering for me, and I’ve stayed up well past midnight several times just trying to push things ahead.

The first step was removing all of our junk out of the office, since we’d been storing many of our things in there while renovating the rest of the house. The office is also home to our rabbits Eva and Evan, so they were relocated to the living room and dining room respectively.

Then I ripped out the smokey carpet and the cheap laminate plywood, and set to work on installing a laminate floor. When the floor was done, I patched up the holes in the wall and labored over the sheet rock seams: spackle, dry, sand, spackle, dry, sand, and then sponge. Then on to priming, painting, staining, and putting up a chair rail to divide the upper tan section from the lower plum section of the wall.

To my surprise my new desk took about two hours (midnight to two in the morning) to assemble, not to mention the new chair–bought at half price. In the home stretch I installed 3 4-foot long shelves and 3 2-foot long shelves on the walls, along with a bulletin board and a dry erase board. Oh, I also stocked up a 3-shelf bookcase with my emerging church and theology books and moved a shelf of Christianity books into our bedroom for lack of space.

After moving boxes of files and photographs into the closet, playing with the tangled mess of wires required to hook up a computer, and then hauling our rabbit complex back into the room, I could declare myself done.

So now it’s happy blogging. Pictures of this project and our recent vacation to Lake George are available at our flickr account. Be sure to check out my collection of sunrise pictures.

I forgot to mention that we’re on vacation this week up at Lake George, NY. I actually have internet at one of the cabins, and the wireless even reaches down to the dock. Not bad.

Still I’m going to take some time off from the blog and jump back into it next week when I’m filled to bursting with writing topics. Until then we’re reading, playing board games, kayaking, and swimming.

I saved a book just for vacation: Benedict Arnold’s Navy. It sort of fits right in with this region. Now that I’m done it I’m sort of lost. I’m filling in the gap with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Who Needs Theology?

In our rural Vermont setting it’s been a real trial to find internet at home. It’s not all bad. In fact, I’ve discovered that life goes on without internet at my finger tips. Nevertheless, as someone who keeps in touch with family primarily through the computer and who enjoys blogging and writing, it’s a bit of a drag to pack up the lap top for a half hour drive every time I want internet.

Our first solution to our internet conundrum was Wild Blue Satellite Internet. Without DSL or cable in our area, it was our only choice. Wild Blue wasn’t ridiculously expensive, just regular expensive. We shelled out $200 for the stuff, another $200 for installation and the router, and then braced ourselves for $50 a month just to move at half the speed of DSL. The up side was the constant connection and free phone line when compared with dial up.

In early May the dish was installed and we hummed along for over a week without a hitch. Enter thunder storm. Game over. That led to over a month of waiting for service since Wild Blue parcels out their service and installation among other companies. If they’re using a company right around the corner with a lot of availability, then you’re set. If it’s not, you’ll be waiting for the repair company to call–like we were.

The waiting ended on Monday with a quick repair of some electrical element that was fried in the storm. We were back online in a few minutes and enjoyed our internet until–you guessed it–another thunderstorm rolled into town yesterday.

Game over again.

So now, while I need to get rid of Wild Blue due to its inability to cope with natural elements, I needed to find an alternative. I decided to beg Comcast and Verizon for help. 

Selecting Comcast, since I’ve seen their trucks right down the road, I plowed through technician after technician, only to find out that the only reason why they turned us down in the first place was because our home wasn’t listed in their database or something like that.

After working their magic on the database they scheduled us for high speed installation. It was worthy of a “Napoleon Dynamite” fist pump: “Yes!”

At the end of the day, I’ll give Wild Blue a C+ and may even raise that to a B- if they can handle my cancellation gracefully. The people are really nice, they try to provide quick service, and the satellite internet is good when it works. 

The down side is they parcel out their service to so many different companies, it’s hard to control quality and the timing of service. No one wants to call about poor service and just hear about the failure of another company. In addition, satellites dishes are quirky and run into all kinds of problems out in the elements, as we’ve found out.

I have a book to work on and so I need an office at home to focus my energy for said book. My office has been covered in smokey carpet and cheap, dingy wall paneling, and so renovating that office is a top priority right now.

This week I’m tackling the floor, which meant I hauled out the old carpet last night and began laying a dark cherry laminate floor. Laminate floor is best done with two people, but in a small room you can sort of get away with doing it yourself.

Another factor to consider is the type and quality of the floor you have. Thickness and many other factors change how fast or slow the job goes.

One of the keys for laying laminate is ensuring there are small gaps along the sides. We even splurged for the spacers used in such an endeavor. The trouble is that the floor moves while you’re laying it, the spacers fall over, and you end up spending most of your time repositioning the spacers.

I was advancing toward a mental break down around 11:00 am when a brain storm formed. DUCT TAPE! With just a little wad of my Martha Stewart Living duct tape (K-Mart brand), I taped the spacers to the wall and solved my problems in a matter of minutes.

Even with my superior new method, I still had a hard time snapping the planks together. They didn’t want to slide together on the short end, resulting in the acrobatic trick of snapping three planks together and then popping the whole line into place.

By midnight I only had about 1/4 of the floor done. The plan right now is to chip away at it tonight. Hopefully the spacers will be the worst of my problems.

We’re in Bethel Maine for a friend’s wedding and I’m really digging it. Maine that is, the wedding hasn’t happened yet.

We drove up I-91 in Vermont and slipped through St. Johnsbury, a really nice little town. The views were fantastic on the drive out on route 2, especially in the town of Lunenburg.

Once we hit New Hampshire the views of Mt. Washington and the other presidential range mountains were shocking and dare I say awe-inspiring. Cliches filled my mind, but they all rung true. I hated myself all the while I pondered them and the majestic, breath-taking mountains.

When we popped into Maine the mountains continued to surprise us with their towering presence.

Now I’m hanging out in Bethel, just killing time at a cafe during the rehearsal. As far as town’s go, Bethel is a nice mix of residential and downtown business. Cafes, restaurants, and pedestrians dot town.

I recommend a gelatto at DiCoccoa’s. It doesn’t get much better than that.  

Technorati Tags: maine - new hampshire - Vermont

I can’t apologize for the silence on this blog lately. I’m a victim of circumstances. The chief of which is the malfunction of my Wild Blue satellite internet connection on the home front.

Add to that a long list of home renovations that gobble up free time, and the result is a relatively quiet blog. I’ve been limited to e-mailing during free moments while at work. That’s it.

It’s amazing how dependent I’ve become on the internet. I have no idea what the weather is going to be from day to day, know little of current events, find myself lost when I come home since I used to read online articles after dinner, and am much less likely to spend time writing, even if it doesn’t require the internet. Oh, and I still don’t like using phone books instead of Google searches.

There are some positives and negatives here. Without internet I’ve been able to work on our house a lot and have been prodded to read books a bit more than usual. Nevertheless, blogging is a major source of writing inspiration and simply keeps me in the writing mind set, thereby increasing my output in other, non-blogging areas. Without the ability to blog I feel a bit lost.

So now I’m waiting for a clear day so that Wild Blue can send a little signal to confirm my internet is not working, something I could have told them a week ago, but procedures are procedures.

It may be at least another week before I’m back online at home. I’m really not looking forward to the first bill for internet service I have not received. Booo!

We are officially hooked up now.

A satellite dish has been planted in our back yard at significant cost. The internet connection is fast enough and we’re chugging along with a wireless connection.

The dish washer at our place needed to be replaced, so we bought one last Sunday, I set out to change it over on Monday, only to find I was missing the correct kind of connection pipe. That meant a trip to the hardware store. A second try yielded wires that were too short. Another trip to the store.

While working on the dish washer the hot water line decided to burst, so that led to an attempt to replace that line. Unfortunately the faucet connected to that line was ancient, so we couldn’t  replace the line without replacing the faucet. Trip number three to the store.

I banged, clanged, and fiddled until the dish washer was done last night. Then I set to work on the sink, burning out about half way through. I contemplated calling a plumber.

Julie walked into the room and offered to help. She had the rest of the lines disconnected in five minutes. I know it would have take me longer than 30 minutes. Apparently the threat of calling a plumber motivated her.

With all of our grunt work done last night, we settled into bed. I breathed a sigh of relief and then my ears perked up at the sound of “ka-plump” up in the attic. Familiar scratching followed.

It wasn’t our bunnies scaling the walls. It was a stupid squirrel. Shoot. I returned to the hard ware store today for a trap.

When God joins a man and a woman together, he usually ensures that at least one of them goes postal. Wait–that didn’t come out right.

Let me start over.

When God joins a man and woman together, he usually ensures that at least one of them is proficient in all things related to the mail: notes, thank you notes, and returning invitations on time. There has never been a couple more bankrupt in this department than Julie and myself.

Wedding thank you notes were a six month trial, and I wonder if a few distant relatives on my list probably hate me because didn’t have the resolve to deliver just thanks. The mother of one friend called before the wedding, “Are you guys coming, we didn’t receive your reply card?”

My response: “Of course we’re coming, we sent the reply card months ago!” After the wedding we found it in our junk drawer of all places.

Today I vacuumed Julie’s car. With the understanding that her car only serves the purpose of transporting her to work–and it’s not a bad car, we just like our Subaru better–we have neglected interior maintenance.

I wanted to surprise her, so I cleared out trash and sucked up the gravel, dust, crumbs, and whatever else. On the floor of the back seat sat the reply card for her best friend’s wedding.

This card was going to change everything for us. I filled it out the day it arrived and proudly took it into the car so I could hand-deliver it to the post office.

I’m not sure what happened, but somehow the card ended up on the floor of the car. It was due on May 1st. The curse continues.

Julie is the maid of honor in this wedding, so I don’t think the mother of the bride or the bride worried all that much about the card. In my eyes it was the thought, the ceremony, the gesture. And I blew it. I blew it big time.

The card has been sent safely on its way for now. There’s another wedding coming up in August, and I’m training myself now to increase my mail box accuracy for the big event.

Technorati Tags: mail - postal - wedding

We are moved in. I wander among the boxes. I look for something to do. Dang, I’m really hooked on having internet at home.

Saturday was our big moving day, and also marked the beginning of our internet fast. The move went fabulously, if I may say so myself. We haven’t lost too many things that I’m aware of, we had a lot of great help, and the whole thing was completed in two trips.  

The move itself was rather miraculous, to say nothing of our closing situation. We came back from vacation on April 22nd, hoping to close on the 27th, but still needing some details to line up before that was a sure thing. We needed to be out of our rental by the 30th!!!

We received a lot of gracious help on Wednesday, the 25th and were able to schedule for closing on the 27th. This required some key people to go out of their way to help us, and we are brimming over with gratitude for them. The problem is that we only had 2 other people to help us move, no small thing for a couple whose life long goal is to have their own library in their house!

On Thursday a bunch of people offered their help. In addition, I was praying that the Lord would send some friends down from Burlington to help. On Thursday one of those friends called from out of the blue, saying that he was praying and he heard that he needed to come help us move. Crazy!

To make things better, our Budget moving truck (never, ever rent a U-Haul) was upgraded to a 24 foot monster at no cost. It was pretty sweet. We practically threw things in, not having to pack it very tight at all.

For now I’ll actually have to WORK on the house since I can’t fritter my time away on the internet, lest I drive the 20 minutes to Manchester.

Sigh.

I can also light candles, burn incense, and pray to the satellite gods for high speed internet beamed down from above.

Technorati Tags: internet - moving - budget

We are moving tomorrow and as of midnight tonight we will no longer be DSL customers, sniff, sniff. In the near future we are having satellite internet installed, but until then I won’t have access to internet unless I go to a cafe or to work. I hope to post again on Monday.

This whole moving experience has been absolutely nuts, and really stressful, but against all odds we have a place and will move our massive number of books in along with the two bunnies. They are going to rip the new carpet to shreds!

If you’re itching for some blogs with a touch of humor and a Christian perspective, check out Nate or Makeesha.

If you’re the Vermont blog type, I’m happy to report that Cathy is blogging more at 802 Online.  Way to go Cathy, stop apologizing for not blogging, we all understand your new job is demanding. 802 Online is a great place to find out what Vermont bloggers are up to.

I hope to be up and running at least from a cafe in the near future. Until then, let’s all covenant to not do anything too important. I don’t want to miss out.

Technorati Tags: moving

Saturday is a our moving day, and we have spent quite a bit of time packing and organizing our home. Last night I carried most of the smaller items from upstairs into our garage. The less up and down we have to do, the better.

Today and tomorrow I hope to move everything up from the basement. This will keep everything we own on one level, speeding along the moving process.

I spent a good deal of my time carrying boxes last night that I was tempted to just chuck into the donation pile. I’ve grown less and less attached to my own possessions the more I think about moving them, and especially when I think about asking other people to move them. I kept asking myself, “Is this important enough to ask someone else to move it for me?” Many of my old history books did not survive this question.

If only I could remember that I may end up having to move an item one day before I purchase it, then I would probably restrain myself more often when out in a store.

But in the midst of the books and other items we haven’t used so much, there are some precious memories I dug up. For example, our photo albums were all boxed up, which was a reminder to give them a look sometime in the near future.

I also uncovered my Master of Divinity hood in a pile of clothes that I was planning on sending to the thrift store. It’s almost like I’ve uncovered another life I used to live, or possibly another person I used to know.

Moving brings about an odd look at the past through artifacts. It reveals where we come from and hints at who we have become. It’s a time of discovery that is both creepy and wonderful.

Technorati Tags: moving - Vermont

In order to improve the world, the following changes will be put into effect immediately:

- The absence of butter at a cafe does not merit a hissy fit.

- Except in the case of a medical emergency, cell phones may not be used at indoor public places, especially cafes and airplanes.

- When using a cell phone for a medical emergency, the caller is to speak in a low, “inside voice” and is not permitted to say, “I’m in a plane right now” or to discuss other conditions that are inconsequential for the conversation.

- All passengers on airplanes must restrict their bodily appendages, especially legs and arms, to the designated space. All trespassing into the private space of other passengers will be punished through a hefty fine that increases at 15 second increments if the violation continues.

- Airplane passengers who recline back will be ejected from the plane immediately.

This is not a complete list, but it’s a step in the right direction. Additional items may be added through an additional post or through the comment section.

It’s about time that Google caught on to the resurgence of paper today. Instead of fumbling around with all those e-mail messages and searching through them so quickly with the mail search, Gmail now offers Gmail paper:

A New Button
Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we’ll send it to you in the mail.

Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe
Google takes privacy very seriously. But once your email is physically in your hands, it’s as secure as you want to make it.

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I was checking out a web site called Web Pages That Suck and found a web site that literally made me dizzy and almost made me sick. It’s an experience. I can’t believe that human beings do this to one another. “Psychedelic” comes to mind.

Unfortunately the theme of this web site is Accept Jesus, Forever Forgiven. Fortunately this is not the only site on the internet where you can read the Bible. Try reading this site. I double dog dare you!

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