Milady Has Painted Little Miss' Room

While getting the floor, we decided to repaint the kids rooms too. Milady will paint the walls and (in Little Miss' room, put up a fairy border), and I'll refloor it. Little Miss wanted a yellow color for her room, and we bought it. Today, Milady put it on.

It's yellow. Very yellow. It's flurescent yellow. It's fire-engine yellow (you know, that 80s yellow that was supposedly better to see than red). It's bright. The fairy border helps make the trim and the walls blend, and helps mute the yellow, but it's still bright.

Did I mention it was bright?

I have to take the three-day weekend and get the hallway, Little Miss' room, and the stairs done with flooring. I'm going to focus on getting the downstairs stairs done, so I can know what the stairs will require, and then do Little Miss' room if we will have enough to do the hall and the lower stairs too.

One of these days, we will have the house done with, I guess.

Spammers Go Home

I know they won't read this, but I just have to say this:

If you run a poker site, are selling loan refinancing, or have porn to sell, PLEASE don't bother commenting here. I have set links to not add pagerank on Google, so they don't help you. I'm not even a La Shawn Barber or even a Jeff H. Even if you get through the comments moderation, no one will be interested in clicking on the link.

You've made me turn on those annoying captchas (you know, the odd shaped letters on a colored background) on old comments. I hate them, but I'll use them to keep you off.

Now please, just go away.

To everyone else, I'm sorry if the captchas make things annoying to you, but I'm spending more time fighting comment spam than writing. If I don't get the comment spam stopped, I'll start coding on a spam blocker, and nothing will kill this blog dead than me wanting to code on it. ;)

My newest old time waster.

Back in college, I discovered Netrek, a terribly addicting game I first played in college. It seems that the names have changed, but people are just as cocky, and the game is just as time consuming. Even worse, I have a Mac desktop at work, and the Netrek client is showing its age as an X11 client. They need a native Aqua client, and I'm actually considering writing it. That is so sad.

Dealing with Eden

Milady has been using Answers in Genesis' wonderful series Firm Foundations as the kids' summer homeschool curriculum. They've been studying the Bible from Genesis 1 & 2 all the way to the resurrection. Since the kids also use A Beka's good Bible study texts, they've had a very deep understanding of the fundamentals of Christian Theology the whole way through.

I was surprised yesterday when Milady called me around 11AM yesterday. They'd been covering The Fall, and Number 1 Son started crying. He was terribly upset that God had created Satan, and placed the Tree in the Garden of Eden. He wondered if God didn't set us up to fail. Milady tried to help him understand this, but it's a hard problem. God did set up the situation where Adam and Eve would sin, but can you have a choice without something to choose?

Adam and Eve did have a choice. They weren't forbidden to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life. Instead, they were only forbidden to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They could have lived forever with no problems. Instead, they did listen to Satan, and here we go.

That said, we still can't blame Satan entirely. It was Adam and Eve's choice, not Satan's. Adam knew full well it was wrong, and he could have explained to Eve how it was wrong so that she would not have been tempted.

The Millenial Kingdom shows us that the sin nature is in our hearts. Satan will be bound for 1000 years, and Jesus will be ruling on Earth in person. Even so, Scriptures talk about nations having to be punished some with droughts, and that there will be some number of wicked people. When Satan is unleashed at the end of the 1000 years, he will convince a large number of people to oppose Jesus, even after they've seen the miracle after miracle that He and the believers do. Until the choice is done, and God can completely remove the sin in us, it will be OUR sin, and our fault. We can't blame Adam, or even Satan, for our problems. If we were in Eden, we would have eaten the fruit too.

Monday Musings

(Lost my last post. Let's try this again.)

• I'm really glad that my kids got to participate in our church's Vacation Bible School, but I'm still worn out. We didn't get done each night until 8:30, so by the time we got the other kids home, picked up a bite of dinner for the kids, and then did the nightly chores, it was 11:30 or midnight before we could start to relax. We are just starting to relax and catch up on some rest tonight.

• Can anyone recommend a $100-$150 digital camera? I'm not expecting SLR quality, but I would like something that can push out a decent 4x6 picture, and it needs to be both Mac-friendly and work with XP (I know, I shouldn't be supporting The Evil Empire, but I do have a family....). We don't take enough pictures because of the cost of developing film. I'll be more than content to burn several CD copies and then just spread them among the family members. If we lose our house, we don't lose our pictures.

  While I'm at it, can someone su ggest a cheap scanner than can do APS film, or a service that would scan APS film directly into pictures? We had the dog ruin some prints, so I don't have them to scan directly.

• The Burger King "King" is really disturbing.

• Jeff H of Think Sink has reached 10000 readers. I'm jealous.

• As a former Democrat and a former liberal, the Gitmo == Gulag and US Soldiers == Nazi thing is really disturbing me. The Republicans need a strong, sane opposition party, and right now the national Democratic party isn't it.

• I haven't missed not seeing Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC cover the Michael Jackson case one bit. BBC World had one or two stories on it on PBS, and then moved right on. Those were too many as it was.

• In Reason, Jacob Sullom talks about how half of us are crazy at one time or another, or at least according to current psychiatric standards. Milady and I both have a touch of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the winters, and she was proscribed Effexor to help her past a rough 5 years. That'd make us both have mental illnesses, I suppose, but neither of us would think so. Milady just had 3 deaths and 2 kids in 5 years, and little non-emergency babysitting help available from either side of our families through it. She wasn't crazy, just exhausted. :)

• Apple will make Pentium Macs. I sense a great disturbance in the force, like a million geek crying out in anguish... Yes, I am late to this party, but I'm not surprised at this. IBM and Freescale/Motorola just couldn't make chips fast enough or cool enough for Jobs, and AMD can't make the volume he'd need. Intel makes the coolest laptop CPUs, and that's where Apple rules.

• Kodak isn't going to make black and white paper any more. I worked for a count y newspaper in high school, and one of my tasks was to print black and white pictures for the paper. I really loved doing B&W pictures, but I've never had a darkroom since. Now, digital photography, especially the high-end SLRs, are ending all but niche markets for consumer film. At least there are other vendors who still make good B&W paper.

It Burns! It Burns!

My skin does, at least. Our neighbor is in the horse-racing industry, and he obtained tickets to the Churchill Downs day at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom for his family and ours. We were able to keep the kids lathered in sunscreen, but Milady and I couldn't keep ourselves lathered up. We're both toasty red in several spots.

I'm also starting to hurt. Number One Son took a friend with him, and both of them wanted to go into the 5 foot section of Kentucky Kingdom's big wave pool. They couldn't stand up themselves, so I had to hold them up on the high waves. Considering that each of them weights over 130 pounds (and neither is overweight), I hurt today. A lot.

What's worse, Number One Son is turning into a daredevil. He talked his friend and I into riding The Tornado. You get on a raft, then slide for a moment before going straight down a couple of stories into this big funnel. You then go up a couple of stories on the other side, and start down again. Number 1 Son wanted to go again, and also insisted on riding everything that even remotely resembled a roller coaster. He only rode the smaller ones this time, since no one else would go on the scarier one with him.

When he reaches 16, I suspect he'll try to sweet talk me into how a certain tin can with a rocket motor and wheels will make such a good car for him. When his mother objects, I'll just remind her of her "speed racer" set of cars....

Power Outage

The only big problem with hosting the blog on my own machines is that they're also my own machines to fix. I don't have enough money or need for a big Uninterupted Power Supply, so the set of storms that just passed through the local vicinity took out the home power. The web server didn't boot cleanly, and the firewall was all kinds of mad.

Sorry for the outage.

Tales of Gossip and Church Dissension

I just couldn't resist quoting Mississippi Squirrel Revival by to Ray Stevens. Fortunately, my local church isn't a bit like the First Self-Righteous Church of Pascagoula, but there is a bit of dissension in the ranks because the evil C word: "change".

There's been a lot of turnover in the staff of late. The children's minister had to leave because personal life issues. Her replacement had to leave because she tore apart the entire kids program (running off several families) and then wouldn't listen to criticism about it. Our outreach minister went to start a new cross-town church just before the area of town he went to was hit by a massive tornado. The high-school minister committed credit card fraud. A "church doctor" helped kill the (IMHO ill-advised) plan to buy some high-priced land. Now, we're going from two to three services, and the Bible Fellowship classes are all being torn up by moving.

I happen to be a strong supporter of the move, including the most controver sial part, a young people's "Emerging" service. We had a good start of one last year, but the high schoolers kinda took it over and made it feel too much like a concert, so it missed its target.

I've been a bit disappointed so far by our college program, but I'm still working in it and I've decided to pray and fast this week. It's hard to make a college program that fits needs, so I'm hoping that the guy heading it can get some experience and get it going well.

Pain for fashion

My sister has at times been a slave to fashion. One New Year's Eve, we watched her kids while her hubby and she went to a New Year's Party. She dropped the youngsters off in near-freezing weather in the proverbial "small black dress" and heels. She was turning pale and her whole face was about to frostbite, but she was fashionable.

I always thought that I'd manage not to be that silly about my clothing, until my heel started hurting. As dense as I was, I it took me a while to connect the dots: my favorite black boots didn't have enough padding in the heels, nor enough arch support. Both feet are rail-flat, and a shoe without arch support just hurts.

A quick side-trip to Wal-Mart this morning, and I picked up set of ProFoot triad Orthodontic supports. I've tried other arch support pads, but they never did seem to help a lot. These do seem to help. I walked about a mile today (there and back) for lunch, and my feet don't hurt any more. Maybe these will be enough. They had b etter be, I like my black boots. They're my kind of fashion. :)

Why I am a Young Earth Creationist

Vox Popoli and Crystal (of The Crystal Lake Observatory) have both posted about neo-Darwinian evolution. I was a Theist Evolutionist for much of my life, but I am a dedicated Young Earth Creationist. Answers in Genesis, the Institution of Creation Research, and others too numerous to mention have re-enforced this position.

First, let me state my axioms:

• The Holy Bible, in its original form in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts are documents written by human hands but inspired directly by the Holy Spirit.

• These manuscripts form the complete, accurate, and exclusive record of God's communications to mankind as a whole.

• The Holy Spirit has acted to protect the extant manuscripts of Scripture. The differences that do exist in current manuscripts can be reconsiled using textual analysis, and do NOT represent issues that raise doubt on any significant historical or theological issue.

• The Lord God of Israel is not a liar. His statements (via Scripture) are accurate and trustworthy.

If all of these are true, then the current theories of evolution can't be true. Genesis has the creatures of the sea and air created on day five, and the land creatures created on day 6. For the moment we'll set aside the issue of whether Genesis 1's day is really 24 hours long. We will also not worry about sea mammals, since it's possible in "era days" for the land mammals to "return" to the sea. Neo-Darwinian thought has the birds evolving out of land animals, but Genesis clearly states that the birds came before any land animals existed. This is a flat contradiction.

If God had desired to tell the Creation story in such a way to agree with neo-Darwinian evolution, it would be easy to do so. Most of the other creation myths have differing, or indeterminite times. He could have even kept the "days", and just reordered animal creation. Instead, Genesis presents a creation story that is incompatable with scientific thought of this time.

Time and again, the Bible has stood up to the claim of myth. Civilizations and cities only it mentions are found time and again. Egyptology claimed that the Exodus had to be a myth, because no timeline could match up. Now, it's Egyptology that realizes that its times are all wrong.

The Bible has proven itself time and again, while man's wisdom fails. I see no reason to call Genesis 1 wrong when the rest is right.

The floor is done

At 12:53 PM today, I put the last board in the floor of the living room. Around 2PM, I'd finished taking out the first row and fixing a gap I'd created up there that couldn't be covered with quarter round. I was going to glue in the quarter round, but that seemed to be too messy and permanent. I read that you wanted a brad nailer. The sites I read recommended an air-powered brader if you had a compressor, although they have battery-powered versions too. So, off to Lowes. (I usually prefer Home Depot's products, but Lowes is right across the street, while HD is 20 minutes away. Convenience versus quality, usually.)

At Lowes, they happened to have a Taiwan-special "Tradesman" air-powered brad nailer in the discount pile for $35, which included 1000 of the nails I needed for our project. I could either buy it and a $100 hand-carried air compressor, which would be ready to work the moment I got home, or I could buy a $100 GMC (no, not THAT GMC, it's Lowes' generic tool b rand) battery-powered brad nailer that would take at least 3 hours to charge up and I might not use again before the batteries go bad. Easy choice, I bought the air nail gun and the compressor.

Got home, plugged it in, and had to "test it" by filling a board with brads. No, it might have looked like a guy playing with his toy, but it was tool testing. Honest. :)

About 4:30, I started cutting quarter-round in the downstairs, starting with the square pole in the middle of the floor. I cut all four pieces of it with the power mitre saw I had from a previous project, and nailed it down with the gun. Perfect little holes, waiting for the color-matched putty. For the next 2 hours, I cut quarter round and nailed it down, and covered most of the flaws I'd developed during the floor installation.

I have to put one last piece of quarter round on the door jam on the way out, putty and fill around the bottom of two door frames I didn't fit well enough, and put end pieces of lamina nt coating over the exposed quarter round pieces. Simple stuff. At least until we get to the hallway.....

By 8:30, we had cleaned the floor and garage some, and gotten enough furnature downstairs to call the move-back done. We had already ordered pizza for dinner, but Milady took us and a friend (who had stopped by to help us carry stuff down) to get Krispy Kreme at 10:30PM. I'm still on a carb/sugar buzz 4 hours later....

A Bad Sound

Milady and I worked all day yesterday on getting the first fourth* of the room covered in laminate. Today, we spent about as long, and got all but 1 row of the rest done. Appearantly, we managed to pick the hardest part of the room first, plus I didn't learn several tricks until today.

At 11:30 tonight, I was putting the final touches on the next to last row of boards, musing that, since the flooring isn't quite straight, the last board will be small in spots. As I mused, I walked. Then I heard a crunch.

Pops are OK, they mean that a board wasn't quite seated right, and your weight has fixed it. A crunch, on the other hand, is bad. Very bad.

I turned around, and on the fifth and sixth rows from the end, there was a raised spot, like a nail sticking up. We did our best to find all of the carpet nails in the floor, but it seems that there was one left, and I found it too late.

Since I didn't want to stress Milady, I started taking the laminate apart. The first three rows seperated out fairly easily. The rest I only took out the boards I needed to reach for the repair. Fortunately, the nail damaged full-sized boards, so all I had to do was pop out the two damaged boards, replace them with new ones, and then put it all back. More easily said than done.

Now, I'm just unwinding a moment before I go to sleep. I'll sleep until 8 or so, and then finish the room. And I mean it this time.

*This shows my geek age. I almost said "forth".

Michael Savage has melted down

Occasionally while we're driving around, we turn on Michael Savage. He has a bad habit of ranting anyway, but tonight he was melting down far past normal. He wanted Felt (aka "Deep Throat") convicted of a crime right now, and he screamed something about the old liberals not dying fast enough.

I don't miss the cable news talking heads, so I suppose I won't miss the little bit of radio talking heads I won't be listening to either.

Monday Musings

• It doesn't take long to lay laminate. Maybe not. But it does take forever to pull out the carpet, fix the wall, paint the fixed walls, etc. before you can put that laminate down.

• I'm the Emperor of the entire universe, and I can't even keep track of one little family in a far corner of the universe. If I'm the evil dictator of the entire universe and a kid named Skywalker shows up on Tatooine, he's dead. Good grief, it's not that hard.

• The French can't even be convinced to vote for a socialist constitution. I'm happy that I'm not having to watch the talking heads ramble on and on about this, but I'm not at all surprised that Chirac and crew are implying that there will be a second try at ratification.

• Speaking of talking heads, Mr. McCain has probably finished his chances at getting out of the Republican primaries. I've not mentioned the Republican Party's debacle in the fillibuster "compromise", but I wasn't a bit surprised when I heard that McCain was in the middle of it all.

• Indiana Jones 4 is moving. I'm not sure yet if it should be moving to the circular filing cabinet on the floor yet, but there's one hope: Lucas isn't writing it.

• Thank you for those who served our country, and continue to serve.

Day 3 of vacation - Family Break

We spent all of yesterday pulling up carpet and getting things ready to fix. Little Miss ended up having to go to the doctor because her hacking cough wasn't getting better. She ended up having a sinus infection, and is now on antibiotics. Since that left her and Milady out of work all morning, I was able to pry Number 1 Son away from the Gamecube enough to get every bit of carpet out of the family room. That was really hard work, and I was very impressed with how much effort he put forth.

Since our trash pickup is Monday, we now have a large stack of carpet and padding bundles on the back patio, waiting for the make-up day on Wednesday. I've already told the family to visualize less trash for the next couple of days, since we're down to 1/2 of a trash can left. For this crew, that's not much.

Last Night at Home Depot, I finally met another 'we'. As I've mentioned before, Milady loves to say "we" will do something that I know will end up being my job. As I was putting the exterior paint* in the buggy, a lady at the counter commented that I had a lot of paint. I told her that Milady had told me that "we" had projects to do. She said that her husband had made the same comment about "we". Then Milady got back from the wallpaper section, and her husband came up too, and the two ladies started in. I almost got a hernia laughing so hard. The poor guys at the paint counter weren't sure if they should laugh or run us off (the $300 in paint in my buggy pretty much precluded the latter...).

Since we've had two good days, we've decided to take a break day.

*The exterior of the house and garage need painting to match the new siding. Milady has also determined that we need to paint the currently-unpainted concrete portions of the garage.

Moving slow on the first vacation day

We got in bed late last night, so it was about 10AM before Milady got up (to answer a phone call), and I didn't get up until almost 11AM. I hope the poor Jehovah's Witnesses who got to see me pre-shower with my white undershirt, a pair of shorts, and hair going everywhere weren't too scared. They were real troopers about that (probably used to strange dress), but when I not only wasn't scared by their "You know there won't be poverty eventually" speech, but I explained that I was a Christian apologetic and study end-times theory regularly. They started getting that "Oh, no, the Jehovah's Witnesses are at the door" look I usually get, and made their apologies and left as rapidly as possible.

We didn't get started in the house until 1PM, but by 8PM all of the stuff in the family room was either in the garage or in my office, including our former wet bar. I'm not sure if I'll be able to walk tomorrow, much less pull out carpet and start laying down the laminate.

And we're a depressed, "backwards" state?

Alarming news passes along (via Red State) an Andrew Roth article on The Club of Growth: listing the US states as entries in the international Gross Domestic Product listing.

I was interested in the following numbers from Mr. Roth's article (I've added the population Stats myself):

Status	Country/State	GDP in USD	Population (est)
7	United Kingdom	132,000,000,000	60,441,457
75	Peru	132,000,000,000
76	Kentucky	128,982,000,000	4,041,769
77	South Carolina	127,251,000,000
78	Israel	122,000,000,000	6,276,883
79	Oregon	120,289,000,000
80	Ireland	118,500,000,000	4,015,676

Kentucky has a bigger economy than either Israel or Ireland. Israel, while still suffering the aftereffects of the most recent recession, still has the healthiest economy in the Middle East. Ireland is the growing dynamo of the EU, with low taxes and excellent industry growth. We earn more GDP per person (about $31000 per person) than even the United Kingdom ($25150).

Kentucky's GDP per person is better than any of these economies, yet we are one of the poorest states in dollars of effective government services per person, especially personal education. I don't know if it's poor management or poor expectations, but it's disappointing to see just how much wealth (and by that wealth, tax base) the state really generates, and yet it can't deliver the services we need while taxing at a very reasonable level.

This is hardly a call for more taxes. There is already more than enough tax revenue to fund good services, with minor exceptions (primarily in higher education). That tax revenue usage simply stinks. It's not a Democrat problem or a Republican problem, and that means I don't know if Kentucky can fix it.

One can hope.

Thorns

Paul had a thorn in his flesh, as he describes in 2nd Corinthians 12. The original Greek word, skolops, isn't used anywhere else in the New Testament, but its use elsewhere in koine Greek is as a thorn, a prickle, or an object with a sharp point. A few people have speculated that Paul was feeling homosexual tendencies. Most commentators of note believe that it was a physical problem of one form or another. It is clear that Paul was given this embarrassing condition to hold back his pride. When Paul would ask for it to be taken away, God would instead point out that the thorn was for Paul's good.

I've always been fascinated that Paul didn't identify his thorn. A lot of people love to identify their thorns. Sometimes, in the case of addictions and groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, this is essential. In other cases, we want to wallow in the sin. Bill Clinton's sexual history was critical information. People were fascinated by the idea that George W. Bush may have taken cocaine during his college career.

Paul's goal was to glorify God. It glorified God for Paul to talk about his trip to heaven (either through a vision or a bodily translation), but it gave more glory for him to speak about it in the third person. Paul describing that God has given him the thorn glorifies God, and helps other believers to deal with their own thorns. Since the details of his thorn won't help us as much, and doesn't bring glory to God, Paul leaves them out.

We need to keep this in mind in talking about our troubles too. We are not our thorns. If God is calling you into a specific ministry (like Alcoholics Anonymous), then you need to talk about your thorns. For the "rest of us", we may need to bring less attention to our problems, and focus more about giving glory to God.

You see, I have whined here before about my weight. I've mentioned how I have trouble reading my Bible regularly. I have other thorns that I have not mentioned. I too have asked God to remove my thorns, but He has chosen to leave them with me. Spiritually, they attack me by making me think of myself as a pincushion for my thorns instead of being a child of God who still is flawed but is under grace. The Lord appears to be leading me against dwelling on my thorns, so instead of focusing on them, I'm going to accept that He will fix them when He is ready, and will strive to get past them with His grace.

Quick prayer requests

The grandmother of one of Number 1 Son's friends has an unruptured aortic aneurism that is growing. They are going to evaluate her for surgery tomorrow, but there's no promise that they will operate yet. Please pray for healing for her.

Also, I am driving to Cincinatti at 0 Dark 30 tomorrow morning for an all-day class being given by IBM. I don't do well with driving tired, so please pray that I sleep well, and don't sleep at all tomorrow. :)

Slow death by Nutrasweet

TheAnchoress is having health issues, and still manages to write a wonderful article about David Horowitz's new book. Our prayers go out to her, and we hope she gets better soon.

Some of the commentors mentioned that TheAnchoress should kick her Diet Pepsi habit. I had decided to leave a comment on that regard, and then it got too big, so a trackback will do.

I was violently allergic to MSG when I grew up. Any trip to McDonalds, and many of the meals in the school cafeteria, would give me a migraine. Almost everyone has quit using MSG, so my sensitivity to it has gone down a lot in the intevening years. Aspartame is sufficiently similar to MSG that I'm also allergic to it. I would get headaches and other light symptoms every time I ate or drank NutraSweet products. I also hate its taste, so it wasn't hard to not use the stuff.

A couple of months ago, I started taking the low-sugar version of SlimFast without reading the label. I react badly to stress. I am a person that no one, even me, likes to be around. I can't stand anything, and lash out almost without provocation. Since I've started with Current Employer, I've only had the lightest of stress, and can deal with it. Except when I started taking that SlimFast. Then the grouch was back. By the first week, it was rough, but I wasn't getting my traditional headaches so I didn't notice. I skipped the SlimFasts a couple of days and noticed that I wasn't grouchy-bear any more. Two cans of diet formula quickly entered the trash can.

Aspertame metabolizes into methanol, which metabolizes into formaldehyde. Worse, aspertame deteriorates rapidly under 130 to 140 degree temperatures, which aren't hard to reach in shipping crates and trucks in the summer, producing formaldehyde in larger amounts. Aspertame and its children can also cross the blood-brain barrier. There's widespread speculation that Nutrasweet is the cause for the large growth of Parkinson-like symptoms in young people and "Grave's Disease", among other issues.

I was going to suggest that TheAnchoress look at sucralose (Splenda), but the health troop are starting to point out its chemical similarity to DDT and other chlorocarbons. Research it yourself, but don't just jump from Aspartame into Splenda.

Stevia has a fan club, but it tastes metalic to me, and a few people are countering the "all safe" designation. Saccharin appears to have weathered the "rat bladder" problems, but I still don't trust it, and it tastes metallic to me too. I think that Americans need to retrain themselves to a sweet-free diet. Given that I am obese, I know it's easy to say and hard to do... :)

TheAnchoress, drop the Diet Pepsis now, drink water (and for a while, a lot of it) and light juices, and get better. We can't take too many light posting days. :)