finite speck

I'm 717 posts in on my blog. It's also the week between Christmas and New Years'. A week when I have a lot of ideas of things to do, but then get lazy typically and don't do a lot. I've had thoughts lately of do I keep doing this writing thing or do I stop? I still enjoy it and I think it will be fun to go back and read posts later. It's been fun the last few days watching my kids celebrate Christmas. We've been with my in-laws and my wife's family. My older son seemed exhausted yesterday a lot of the day... I think he had so much excitement the last couple of days that he was kind of in a haze yesterday. My daughter was loving everything she opened up even the hand soap. I mentioned this earlier, but we are so thankful that our kids appreciate the gifts they get. Even our youngest seems to be having a blast. Last night he was trying to say every word that his cousins were trying to get him to say. Most of them all sounded the same, but it's fun to s...

I might have 5 more minutes... or maybe a lot longer until the kids wake up this morning. It's almost 7 AM and I think everyone is still sleeping. I'm on my second cup of coffee and enjoying a pretty quiet morning. I got a chance to read a few more chapters in "The Warden and the Wolf King"... I'm still hoping to finish it by the end of the year. I also took a few days off from writing to just sleep in a little and enjoy time with the kids. It's been fairly quiet with some time with my parents, my wife's parents, and my sister's family. My kids had a great time opening presents on Christmas and I'm so thankful for how content they are with not getting tons of stuff. We've tried to make Christmas about Christ and not just about gifts. We've also tried to make Christmas about others not just about ourselves. One thing that's funny that our daughter asks a lot when gifts are given is, "Where did you get that?" I want to talk to h...

I had the kids most of the day yesterday by myself, which doesn't happen much. My wife had to work and I didn't. These days are always really good for me as it makes me appreciate my wife even more. It was a full day between going to Walmart and the library. Doing maybe 5 loads of laundry and getting it all put away. Taking them out to the park. Having a dance party. Wrapping some presents. Getting our littlest to take a nap. It went by really fast and our kids really were pretty well behaved. It always takes a little getting used to when you're not used to having the kids by yourself for the day. In my mind, I always think getting out of the house for a bit sounds good, but three kids to one dad at a store or the library is pretty challenging.

Will we all continue to have it? Will I be able to write anything on a blog and not get canceled at some point? I mean I hardly have anyone that reads my blog anyway, so is there a high likelihood that it will get taken down? I don't know. But it seems like the far left and the left want to see certain things canceled and if content or ideas don't line up with their thinking they will do whatever they can to destroy it. 

It was a neat moment as a parent yesterday as our two older kids put on a show of the Christmas story with our nativity scene yesterday. They were super excited and it sounded like they'd been practicing through it for a while together yesterday afternoon. My daughter who is five had all the details of Christ's birth in order. I was impressed. Especially that she even had Mary and Joseph in separate houses in the beginning when Mary found out she was pregnant and Joseph found out in a dream that Mary's baby was conceived by the Holy Spirit. I feel like that's a hard one to grasp as a little kid. They walked through the whole story from the traveling to Bethlehem to the shepherds, to the wise men, to King Herod, and even to Egypt. We've been talking about the Christmas story most of this month, and so it's really neat to see it sinking in and resonating with them this year.

I'm definitely more of an introvert than an extrovert, but I also know that it doesn't matter what I am God made us for relationships. My wife and I had a good conversation last night as we go into time with our families. I realize we haven't seen people much this year compared to years past. It's just been a different year for sure. I also think we'll try to get together a little with our immediate family. It's easy for me to just want to have time alone during the break or be home with my family. I know that it's important especially for me to try and get out of my comfort zone of "me" and out enjoying time with family and friends. It was a goal of mine to work on relationships and it just doesn't come easy for me. I many times don't even think of initiating a get-together. My wife is more the opposite although I wouldn't say she's a big extrovert. She just really enjoys people and realizes the importance of relationships with oth...

What's your plan for your time off? Do you have one?  I was talking to my boss a little bit yesterday asking what they plan to do over the holiday break and he mentioned that he and his wife come up with a plan for every day they are off with the kids. So that they have something already planned ahead of time. I don't know if they totally stick to it, but at least they have something to fall back on if nothing else comes up. The idea resonated with me. I've had many years where we kind of float through the holiday time off which isn't bad, but sometimes it feels like every day is a little more of the same. So what will we do this year during the break? I have 12 days off including the weekends until I go back to the office. 12 days. That's a lot of time. It's an opportunity to lead my family or just sit back and be lazy. The only somewhat set plans are a family Christmas with my parents and my wife's parents. That's it. There's a full 10 days with no...

So how is 2020 shaking out? Has it been anything like you thought it would?  It's kind of ironic that one of the things I wanted to work on this year was relationships and it's been a really hard year to meet in person for relationships. I wouldn't say I've done particularly good in this area either, but I have been thankful for the few men I was able to meet with this fall on a regular basis in the mornings to discuss God's word and I hope that I can continue something like this soon. There are still 12 days left for the year, so there's still time, but we're getting close to the end. One of the other things that I wanted to do was read 6 books. I'm still sitting at 4 right now, with my 5th one being about 100 pages in. I think there's still a pretty good chance I'll get 6 books read. Writing a kids' book was another goal of mine. It's something I first thought about doing 2 years ago and it hasn't happened yet, but I'm still ver...

I have 4 more days of work until the end of the year break. I'm looking forward to an extended break of time off to spend with our family over Christmas and New Years'. Overall it will be a little quieter than in years past. We won't be getting together for our larger family gatherings, which eliminates two of our four family Christmas get-togethers.  I hope to be able to spend some time tackling a few home projects and personal projects that are yet to be determined. One would be going through our family photos and deleting photos we don't need. Another would be organizing stuff in our basement. I always start out having plans in my head and the time off usually goes by really fast. Another goal would be to finish two more books while I'm off. I'd also really like to find a couple good movies to watch. I'm thankful for our time between Christmas and New Years' which is a break from work. I know many people don't get this. But for now, I've got 4...

Smiles. Laughs. There were a lot of them yesterday on Baer's birthday. We tried to make it last most of the day. There were still a few tears as you get those when you have little kids... someone's always getting hurt it seems. My wife and I have made a conscious decision to not buy lots of gifts for our kids especially as they are younger, but I think it will continue to carry over as they grow older. It's definitely not because we don't love them or because we don't have the money that we could spend. It's more because they don't need more stuff and we know that more stuff won't make them any happier. Yet still, it felt like Baer got a lot, and compared to many people in the world he did. We gave him a Paw Patrol swimsuit, a craft type of thing, Batman pajamas, and then his grandparents got him a bunch of sea animal toys, dinosaur puppets, and a bike. We don't have a budget perse of what to spend for birthdays or Christmas, but we just try to keep ...

Today I'm taking the day off to celebrate a life. My son turns 4 today. I think my daughter, who's 5, may just be even more excited about his birthday than he is. She's been putting up signs all over the house and wants to wrap everything, even the donuts that we got for him. Baer loves little toys. He can be found with 2 to 3 of them in his hands most of the time. He has a new favorite toy about every 3 days and that what he ends up sleeping with. That toy has ranged from a sword to little figurines to a candy cane to cars to name a few. I think his favorite word may still be poop and his favorite phrase might be, "I'll poop on your head." We've got some work to do there! He's a kid with a lot of energy for sure. Many nights he goes to bed singing songs or talking to himself until he falls asleep. He likes playing and wrestling with me. He's also starting to become pretty good at drawing. This year he learned to ride a bike and spell his name. He...

What happens when something you rely on heavily all of a sudden doesn’t work? What if that same something is relied on by many other people as well? As of 2019, 1.5 billion people use Gmail. According to Google, there are 7.594 billion people in the world as of 2018. That’s a lot of people on one platform. YouTube has 2 billion users. 1 billion people use Google Drive. That’s a lot of people using one platform. So why am I talking numbers here? From what I can tell this morning on December 14th Google is down. Google search works, but all of their services are down. That means I’m currently not able to write my blog. I’m writing it in Notes on my computer. I’m not able to check my email, I’m not able to access any drive docs. Youtube is not accessible. All of a sudden what you have been able to access is not accessible at all. Instead of getting to where you normally get to you get things like, “Something went wrong.” and “There was an error.” We as a culture and world are so dependent...

It's finally quiet and it's 5 AM. Our youngest is curled up on the couch next to me sleeping... finally after waking up at 1:30 AM. Until we get another year under our belts with our youngest our trips will probably still consist of him not always sleeping really well. But we're making our way through the woods of the early tough years with little ones. We have two of our three out of diapers and able to go to the bathroom by themselves. They're basically able to get dressed by themselves. They're able to eat on their own. They're still little things we're working on with Baer like getting his shoes on and coat, but he's really able to do a lot like his big sister. It's just Mac and he'll catch up soon. He sure is cute now after being up all night and now he's totally out on the couch. Not cute when he's tossing and turning in your bed though. For some reason when our kids are in their first couple of years they just don't sleep well ...

I'm sitting this morning with a cup of Pike's Place Starbucks coffee, a blanket over me, and my laptop on my lap. I can hear the rain on the roof. And I just heard our kids' footsteps upstairs. I'm at my sister's place for the weekend with our family for a little getaway. I think it's supposed to be cold and rainy all weekend, but we'll be cozy in the barn that they converted to a guest house. Our kids will be enjoying playing with their cousins all weekend and I'm hoping for a little relaxing. The wild card is Mac, our youngest, we'll see how he does. Well, the kids went back to bed, for now, and my wife came down to sit beside me. It's peaceful for a little bit until everyone wakes up. Not sure what all we'll actually do today, maybe some games, maybe some just some conversation. After this year, these little getaways are just a nice change of scenery for a few days, even if we don't get outside.

There are people that as part of their job they go and check people's new mattresses for "dips". I know because the guy came and checked my in-law's mattress. They have some kind of tool that helps measure the amount of dip that's caused by sleeping on a mattress and if it's over a certain number they will replace the mattress. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough dip in my in-law's mattress to get it replaced. It sounds like it was a lousy customer experience as well because the person that came out to look at their mattress basically said he couldn't do anything about the fact that their mattress had compressed on one side more than the other unless it was another half inch.  But, my point is less about the customer experience and more about the fact that there are people that part of their job is to go around check the dip in a mattress and then tell a customer whether or not they can replace their new mattress. What a job! I can only imagine what...

"As you go, we go." I heard this quote yesterday in an interview with Matthew McConaughey. It was what his wife said to him not long after they were married. It stuck with me and I think there's some truth to this. Not to say that the wife can't make decisions, but there is something about the husband in the family that steers the family by the decisions he makes. Even if it's that he makes few decisions and is super passive that has an impact too. I have a specific example I'm thinking of this week as my wife and I have started exercising. She definitely pushed me to start running again and we have a sort of schedule of Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays now. But she made the comment to me last week on a day I didn't exercise that it affects her. She said we're in this together and it helps me when you do it as well. So yesterday as I'm listening to the podcast and I hear, "As you go, we go." I'm thinking, ok, this makes sense. There...

"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." Revelation 21:4 One day there will be no more crying. None. I was thinking about this the other day. Why do we cry? We have crying at our house almost every day. No, it's not typically me or my wife, but we have 3 little kids and one of them is usually crying about something. Like one pinched the other or hit them or our littlest one is just crying because he wants something that he can't get himself like food or a toy. What made me think of it though is we were watching a music video the other night that was about Dax Locke a young boy who had leukemia in Washington, IL a town over from where we live and I felt some tears welling up as I watched it.  I believe there's something within us in how God created us that just senses when things aren't as they should be and we cry or tears w...

We had a marketing deadline yesterday for our dealers and they were using a new system to order their materials and it was pretty disastrous. I created a video that showed how to use it and we sent it out in an email. We sent out an email with specific instructions twice prior to the deadline. Deadline day we got phone calls and emails saying how do I do this? I can't access it? Where do I upload my addresses? I will take ownership and say I could have done a better job communicating and there are things we should have done to make it easier. The other thing that was good is we had our vendor taking phone calls as well and answering emails. So they see the things that have to change in the near term and long term. Deadlines really show you how good your system is. When everyone that waited until the deadline to get the task done tries to do it you see really quickly where the weak areas are. I also called dealers back yesterday when they called in and got a chance to help them out....

This has been the year of streaming concerts from music artists' homes. We watched a Christmas concert last night presented by TGC. I never would have guessed that we would have music artists recording their performances in their living rooms or streaming from them and having their fans watch from their own homes. But that's what's happened this year. It also seems like there are more music artists doing Christmas concerts online this year. I don't know if it's because many artists do them, but typically they don't have a large tour. Or if it's just one way to engage with their audience this year. I'm also surprised at how well our young kids do at watching a fairly stationary camera with a few people singing songs. Andrew Peterson had his last night, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors had theirs last week as well as Ben Rector. I believe Sara Groves has one coming up this week. We watched a little bit of The Gray Havens do theirs on YouTube. Randall Goodgam...

Yesterday was a busy and productive day. We helped friends move and also got our bedroom painted. I didn't know that you don't always have to prime before you paint too. I talked to my brother-in-law who manages painting crews and he said as longs as the surface has been painted before you don't have to prime, but you should typically do at least two coats. So that's what we did yesterday. We've had purplish-blue walls in our master bedroom since we move in and a crack in the wall that was plastered over that looked like a white cloud. Two years later we got it painted. The last two weekends have been painting project weekends and I'm starting to feel like a "weekend warrior"... I think that's what they call those people that work on house projects over the weekend. But it feels good to get these projects done. Today, Sunday is going to be fairly relaxing we hope. We've told the kids we'll do some Christmas present wrapping, but we're g...

We did it. We finally got something hung on the wall above our desk in the kitchen/living area. It's been a point of contention between me and my wife, but we came up with a solution yesterday that we both like. I was planning to build her a pallet wall area with some string that went across it for hanging and organizing stuff that accumulates on the desk and on our kitchen counter, but I was also hoping we would have some sort of basket that we could put some of the stuff in as well on the wall. So, yesterday we decided to hit up Hobby Lobby one more time to just see what they had instead of building something and ended up finding a framed cork board and some baskets that we both liked. Thanks to a little help from my mother-in-law and sister for giving us a little feedback on how to hang it and which baskets to use we got it all hung and we now have a place for some stuff that usually sits in a pile on the desk!  I remember a co-worker saying that it takes a couple years to final...

I feel like I've been in a funk most of this week. I can't put my finger on why. I felt like we had a good weekend last weekend getting the house decorated for Christmas after time with family for Thanksgiving. I guess I was off for 5 days, so maybe that had a little to do with it. We also had a fairly productive time off with painting the ceiling and regrouting the kitchen counters and going through stuff in the kitchen. Then it was back to work Monday through Thursday in the basement. Maybe that was part of it. Then I didn't have the most productive week in general for work. I tend to measure my week by how "productive" I am. The more I get done... the better it was. I don't typically measure it based on how my relationship is with others, which is more important. I put tasks before people, which I want to get better at not doing. What if my kids really need me and I'm like well I really need to organize my sock drawer. Or my wife needs me and I'm bu...

I asked my niece if she knew how to spell any words yet. She's five. She replied, "Yeah. I know how to spell a few easy ones, like OK. You spell it "O" "K". It's really easy." My sister said she had no idea where she learned that, but my guess is one of her older siblings. I thought it was hilarious. I look forward to our kids learning to read, but so far our oldest who is five also hasn't been super interested in learning. We're working with her some on it. She knows most of her letters by now and can write her full name and a few other words like mom and dad.

If you told me when I was in elementary school that I could call my grandparents in Illinois from Kentucky and actually see them on a phone I think I would have thought that was the coolest thing ever. Here we are 30 some years later and that's a thing. Well, I can't call my grandparents and see them on my phone because they don't own a cell phone, but my kids can see their grandparents on our phones and talk to them "in person". It's kind of funny, because sometimes when we just make a phone call with no video they wonder why they can't see who we're talking to.  Last night we did a video call with my sister who lives in Alabama. My kids could see her kids and they could show each other things. I feel like this technology keeps getting better and better. For the most part, I could hear her really well. The only thing technology hasn't compensated for yet is how to make your kids' voices when they're being bad disappear so you can still hea...

Asking for help. Will you ask for it? Or will you just do it yourself? You can just ask Google or Youtube, right?  Why is it that for many of us we would rather not ask someone else for help? We want to be independent. I think of my grandparents who don't have a car anymore because they both shouldn't be driving even though they technically could. They have to ask for help now to go get groceries or to get to appointments. One of their kids has to take them. But I know it's hard for my grandma to ask for help with these things. She feels like she's being a bother, but she can't do it herself anymore. Or I have an aunt that's older that's not really technology savvy, but she wanted to be able to use a smartphone. So she found a friend that had the patience and was willing to help her with her phone and now she can use apps like Marco Polo on her phone to talk with us. But, she had to ask for help. I'm willing to make a call and ask for help, but I tend to...