My wife and I were driving on vacation recently. We drove through the Smoky Mountains and got to see lots of little towns along the interstate. We would stop and eat lunch or dinner and stayed in a couple of hotels along the way. The way people do when they travel by car.
On one of the days I started seeing signs for a town. A flashback of memory made me start telling her about an imaginary guy named Howard. How I remembered that this town was where Howard was always stressed out. And that the people in the town tried to help him calm down. They never could get Howard to relax.
In my story a visitor came to town, an old Indian chief from up in the mountains. He watched and listened for a few days and then he spoke with the mayor of the town. He said this Howard is a very important man in your city but because of his stress many people were spending a lot of effort trying to relax. Then the great chief suggested to the mayor of this town that he rename his town. And that renaming the town would help Howard relax. Because then everybody, not just the people in town but everybody passing through would say this town's name it would be a reminder for Howard to relax.
That's how Chilhouie, Virginia got its name. (It's pronounced chill-howie :-)
Oh, by the way, the name of Indian chief was Chief Smoke In The Face. Someone who I have fond memories for from the past, a great Indian chief my father told my children all about when they were growing up. But that's another story...
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Gave up seat ~
Last year my youngest son was the lead in a play based around the clue boardgame. He was the narrator and host. And he had the most speaking in a speaking part.
He did a great job! I was shocked. He's so calm and he's so good at what he does.
A group from our church came to see the play. I thought they had come to see my son. But they had come to see one of the othe4 players that was an up-and-coming teen un the youth crowd. One of the popular families in the church and in the youth group. On stage live. Shy and anxiety ridden but up on stage and doing her thing. I always love when people that are on stage and in a public position say that they suffer from anxiety attacks and that they don't know that they can handle the struggle. Get the hell off the stage if you have anxiety. Otherwise shut up do what you're supposed to do.
But I digress. The group was there to see her and not my son. They were surprised that my son had such a big part even though he was such a big player in the youth group.
I had a great seat down close where I could get great pictures. My wife had us move back behind the group from church so that we could be part of the group. And so my video and pictures were not as good as I had hoped because we were further back with empty seats in front of us and our group was cheering when the girl was speaking.
Very disappointing. Very frustrating experience! Very telling about my wife. She would prefer to be with the crowd rather than up there in a good spot. Hmmm
He did a great job! I was shocked. He's so calm and he's so good at what he does.
A group from our church came to see the play. I thought they had come to see my son. But they had come to see one of the othe4 players that was an up-and-coming teen un the youth crowd. One of the popular families in the church and in the youth group. On stage live. Shy and anxiety ridden but up on stage and doing her thing. I always love when people that are on stage and in a public position say that they suffer from anxiety attacks and that they don't know that they can handle the struggle. Get the hell off the stage if you have anxiety. Otherwise shut up do what you're supposed to do.
But I digress. The group was there to see her and not my son. They were surprised that my son had such a big part even though he was such a big player in the youth group.
I had a great seat down close where I could get great pictures. My wife had us move back behind the group from church so that we could be part of the group. And so my video and pictures were not as good as I had hoped because we were further back with empty seats in front of us and our group was cheering when the girl was speaking.
Very disappointing. Very frustrating experience! Very telling about my wife. She would prefer to be with the crowd rather than up there in a good spot. Hmmm
Thursday, August 19, 2021
A piece of trash ~
One of the things that I read and hear from gurus online is that to help with your own happiness you should try to do a random act of kindness every day. They give examples about people buying somebody else's coffee in the Starbucks drive through or buying somebody's meal in the fast food drive through and those are great! I tend to drift toward things that nobody will really notice or remember just because I don't want to brag or get some sort of return on what I'm doing. At least not from other people.
I don't do it always but I try to pick up a piece of trash every day. I see it as helping keep things nice and clean throughout the day. Of helping somebody who may have missed the garbage can when they were throwing something away. And helping make the janitor's life a little bit easier having the garbage all in one place instead of having to clean up after people.
I have to be careful about it though. I don't want to become judgmental of others but it would be easy to. My wife and I went to an amusement park recently and we enjoyed the rides and seeing all the people out and about without masks and back to normal life before coded 19 rocked our world.
Around 6:30 in the evening we started looking for the expensive food that we could eat for dinner. Terrible fast food that was way overpriced is what you get in an amusement park and this was the same. I remember looking for a table to sit at while my wife was buying the food. I found many of the tables in the covered picnic area heaped with trash. They were trash cans all around the picnic area and they were not full. But people had chosen to eat and then just leave their trash on the table instead of cleaning up after themselves. I found that very sad and at first thought of it as inconsiderate but had to back off of that judgment and leave it outside.
I watched so many people walk through garbage literally, stepping gingerly so that they don't get any of it on them and going the long way around something to get to the door so that they don't have to even get close to it. Instead of just picking it up and putting it in the garbage can.
In Scouting one of the things they teach is "leave no trace". It's a mindset when you are out and about, especially out in natural areas or the woods, to do your thing and have fun but when done try to leave no trace of ever having been there. I took that to heart and have tried to do that in my daily life. It goes along with emptying myself so that God can fill me with his presence, but that's a different subject.
I know that in the end nobody will really know what I did. I gravitate towards those sorts of activities. And I hope that I leave the world a little bit better so the next person can take it and run with it.
I don't do it always but I try to pick up a piece of trash every day. I see it as helping keep things nice and clean throughout the day. Of helping somebody who may have missed the garbage can when they were throwing something away. And helping make the janitor's life a little bit easier having the garbage all in one place instead of having to clean up after people.
I have to be careful about it though. I don't want to become judgmental of others but it would be easy to. My wife and I went to an amusement park recently and we enjoyed the rides and seeing all the people out and about without masks and back to normal life before coded 19 rocked our world.
Around 6:30 in the evening we started looking for the expensive food that we could eat for dinner. Terrible fast food that was way overpriced is what you get in an amusement park and this was the same. I remember looking for a table to sit at while my wife was buying the food. I found many of the tables in the covered picnic area heaped with trash. They were trash cans all around the picnic area and they were not full. But people had chosen to eat and then just leave their trash on the table instead of cleaning up after themselves. I found that very sad and at first thought of it as inconsiderate but had to back off of that judgment and leave it outside.
I watched so many people walk through garbage literally, stepping gingerly so that they don't get any of it on them and going the long way around something to get to the door so that they don't have to even get close to it. Instead of just picking it up and putting it in the garbage can.
In Scouting one of the things they teach is "leave no trace". It's a mindset when you are out and about, especially out in natural areas or the woods, to do your thing and have fun but when done try to leave no trace of ever having been there. I took that to heart and have tried to do that in my daily life. It goes along with emptying myself so that God can fill me with his presence, but that's a different subject.
I know that in the end nobody will really know what I did. I gravitate towards those sorts of activities. And I hope that I leave the world a little bit better so the next person can take it and run with it.
Friday, August 13, 2021
Comments about me feel weird ~
A couple of years ago I did my best to dress like I was a character in Miami Vice. I wore a tank top that was cut low on my chest. I wore an open Oxford kindness shirts made out of cotton. I wore chinos. I wore shoes without socks.
My wife was driven crazy by the hair on my chest! She was so excited to see the hair on my chest and she touched and then commented on and then pointed it out to people. It was hilarious!
I even had some some of my friends commented that I was GQ and the showing of my manliness. They thought it was cool but also seem to be intimidated by my stylish manliness.
It was weird! To have people looking at my body and commenting on my sexiness good or bad was weird. It made me uncomfortable!
It reminded me of a time when I had just started wearing sandals on a regular basis. I went into an elevator in a hospital with my mother and a couple of other women that were strangers to me. One of the women commented on my bare toes. The other woman that was a stranger to me said that I had attractive toes and well-kept nails. And my mother commented that I had good-looking feet. It was all very odd!
It was one of those uncomfortable moments where I felt cool but I also felt uncomfortable. I didn't know if I should be embarrassed or if I should be proud or if I needed to push my jeans down a little bit further so they covered my toes. These older women were eyeing me is if they thought I was a piece of meat or something. It was all very odd.
I still enjoy wearing sandals and baring my toes for all to see. But I am conscious of who is looking at my feet. And I try to keep them looking good in case somebody looks at them and thinks something of them.
My wife was driven crazy by the hair on my chest! She was so excited to see the hair on my chest and she touched and then commented on and then pointed it out to people. It was hilarious!
I even had some some of my friends commented that I was GQ and the showing of my manliness. They thought it was cool but also seem to be intimidated by my stylish manliness.
It was weird! To have people looking at my body and commenting on my sexiness good or bad was weird. It made me uncomfortable!
It reminded me of a time when I had just started wearing sandals on a regular basis. I went into an elevator in a hospital with my mother and a couple of other women that were strangers to me. One of the women commented on my bare toes. The other woman that was a stranger to me said that I had attractive toes and well-kept nails. And my mother commented that I had good-looking feet. It was all very odd!
It was one of those uncomfortable moments where I felt cool but I also felt uncomfortable. I didn't know if I should be embarrassed or if I should be proud or if I needed to push my jeans down a little bit further so they covered my toes. These older women were eyeing me is if they thought I was a piece of meat or something. It was all very odd.
I still enjoy wearing sandals and baring my toes for all to see. But I am conscious of who is looking at my feet. And I try to keep them looking good in case somebody looks at them and thinks something of them.
Saturday, August 7, 2021
Good to hear him again ~
So I wrote about finding and downloading a Paul Harvey archive a while back (http://whollydavid.blogspot.com/2021/02/paul-harvey-archive.html). It was wonderful but it's been sitting on my hard drive taking up space and I haven't been able to do anything with it.
I had this vision of being able to use recordings like this in a podcast for myself so that I could listen to things that I want to fill my head with and be able to pause and resume them easily and have them automatically uploaded and updated every day. But for a while I had no solution to that dream.
Last week I looked again at podcast apps and discovered one that could help me make my dream a reality. Podcast Addict https://podcastaddict.com/app is an app for iOS and Android that will treat a folder on the device as a virtual podcast. That means that whenever you put files in that folder it will present them in a playlist is a podcast for that folder and track which ones you listen to and which ones you have not listened to. I could set it to automatically delete them after listen to them, but I'm not quite there yet. But it also allows you to drop other files in the folder and it automatically updates the podcast feed that it creates and then let you play it.
Me being the tech oriented person that I am I automatically created a folder on my device and synchronized it with dropbox. Then in the dropbox folder of set up a way to drop audio files in that folder and then it synchronizes in the middle of the night every night with my device. And voilà ! A personal podcast that I want to dwell on throughout the day is now available to me.
One of the first things that I did after figuring out how to make it all work was drop a couple of the rest of the story files from Paul Harvey's archive. When I listened to that first set of recordings as if it was random and just dropped in my folder I actually teared up a little bit! I remember listening to Paul Harvey for so long and I enjoy his storytelling technique for so much. So when I heard him telling a story about Andrew Jackson and his parents I got a little emotional.
I love it when my technology touches me. Now I have to read up on legalities and see if I can offer Paul Harvey to more than just me. Because that would just be awesome!
I had this vision of being able to use recordings like this in a podcast for myself so that I could listen to things that I want to fill my head with and be able to pause and resume them easily and have them automatically uploaded and updated every day. But for a while I had no solution to that dream.
Last week I looked again at podcast apps and discovered one that could help me make my dream a reality. Podcast Addict https://podcastaddict.com/app is an app for iOS and Android that will treat a folder on the device as a virtual podcast. That means that whenever you put files in that folder it will present them in a playlist is a podcast for that folder and track which ones you listen to and which ones you have not listened to. I could set it to automatically delete them after listen to them, but I'm not quite there yet. But it also allows you to drop other files in the folder and it automatically updates the podcast feed that it creates and then let you play it.
Me being the tech oriented person that I am I automatically created a folder on my device and synchronized it with dropbox. Then in the dropbox folder of set up a way to drop audio files in that folder and then it synchronizes in the middle of the night every night with my device. And voilà ! A personal podcast that I want to dwell on throughout the day is now available to me.
One of the first things that I did after figuring out how to make it all work was drop a couple of the rest of the story files from Paul Harvey's archive. When I listened to that first set of recordings as if it was random and just dropped in my folder I actually teared up a little bit! I remember listening to Paul Harvey for so long and I enjoy his storytelling technique for so much. So when I heard him telling a story about Andrew Jackson and his parents I got a little emotional.
I love it when my technology touches me. Now I have to read up on legalities and see if I can offer Paul Harvey to more than just me. Because that would just be awesome!
Sunday, August 1, 2021
God as a father figure ~
My wife and I had a time of talking about the Bible and what God is saying to us lately. I talked to her about God as a father figure and how that works for me.
I told her it was probably easier for her since her father died when she was 10 years old. She wants that five father figure and so she can easily transfer that feeling to God and get that out of the Scripture.
I on the other hand had a father until well into my adult life. I knew who my father was and lived with him until I was an adult and moved out to go to college and then move further out when I got married and started my career. So for me it's more of a challenge to approach God as a father figure because I am an adult male in the United States of America and I've been taught that I need to stand on my own 2 feet and make my way through the universe one way or another.
It wasn't harsh, but my father taught me many things about being a man. He taught me to be honest. To share. That it's okay to cry. To love. To stay calm when you're angry, something I still struggle with but I've gotten better. He loved John Wayne and Western movies so that sort of rugged individualism permeated what he talked about. While being a Christian he fell out of going to church after some interesting experiences in organized churches and then began to talk about how God could be seen in nature and things that were created by God. But he got back into a church toward the end of his life.
But because of the American way and the thinking of making it on our own I tend to struggle with approaching God as a father.
But when I read about Jesus going off to be alone with his father and to meditate with his father and how he pleaded with his father at the end but ended up doing his father's will I can see it and I try. It's hard to let go and let God take something when I feel like I need to drive and make it happen through force of will or eking out a finish over the goal line or whatever.
One of my takes on God as a father figure is different than I've heard from other people. When I read the book of Job I know that so many people get wrapped up in the troubles that Job had. Troubles that were caused by the devil, not by God. But I don't want to get into those.
What I see when I read Job is God bragging about his guy. The devil went to accuse God. Before he even got to that point when the devil God pointed Job out and said have you seen my man Job? God bragged about Job.
Let me say that again: God bragged about Job! I remember in a Bible study with other adults that the church that we were going to we were studying Job. And I shared that thought with the group and I pointed to one of the guys and I said can you imagine if God said have you considered my man so-and-so! And he immediately started waving his hands and said no no no I don't want God even pointinh me out or knowing who I am.
That reaction has stuck with me for many years. This idea that we all need to lay low and creep through without being noticed doesn't sit well with me. While I don't like to walk around spending money like crazy and drawing all the attention to me with flashy clothes I do like to do my thing and be comfortable doing it and not be worried about people noticing me or not. I like it when people brag about me to their friends or family. I love the idea of God bragging about me, although I would hate it if anything were to happen to my family and friends.
I share this because as a father I love to talk about my adult children. When they were growing up I loved talking about the different things that they had done, sharing pictures and videos with my parents and my wife's mother. I loved recording journal entries about them and bragging about how great they were and when I got the chance I would immediately tell people about the funniest thing that one of my children it done lately. Even as an adult with adult children I love to tell people about what my kids are doing, including my son-in-law. Once you're part of my family you are part of my family.
Next time you read Job take a little bit longer at the beginning of the book and notice what God says about his guy. You can read it at https://www.bible.com/bible/97/JOB.1.MSG
I told her it was probably easier for her since her father died when she was 10 years old. She wants that five father figure and so she can easily transfer that feeling to God and get that out of the Scripture.
I on the other hand had a father until well into my adult life. I knew who my father was and lived with him until I was an adult and moved out to go to college and then move further out when I got married and started my career. So for me it's more of a challenge to approach God as a father figure because I am an adult male in the United States of America and I've been taught that I need to stand on my own 2 feet and make my way through the universe one way or another.
It wasn't harsh, but my father taught me many things about being a man. He taught me to be honest. To share. That it's okay to cry. To love. To stay calm when you're angry, something I still struggle with but I've gotten better. He loved John Wayne and Western movies so that sort of rugged individualism permeated what he talked about. While being a Christian he fell out of going to church after some interesting experiences in organized churches and then began to talk about how God could be seen in nature and things that were created by God. But he got back into a church toward the end of his life.
But because of the American way and the thinking of making it on our own I tend to struggle with approaching God as a father.
But when I read about Jesus going off to be alone with his father and to meditate with his father and how he pleaded with his father at the end but ended up doing his father's will I can see it and I try. It's hard to let go and let God take something when I feel like I need to drive and make it happen through force of will or eking out a finish over the goal line or whatever.
One of my takes on God as a father figure is different than I've heard from other people. When I read the book of Job I know that so many people get wrapped up in the troubles that Job had. Troubles that were caused by the devil, not by God. But I don't want to get into those.
What I see when I read Job is God bragging about his guy. The devil went to accuse God. Before he even got to that point when the devil God pointed Job out and said have you seen my man Job? God bragged about Job.
Let me say that again: God bragged about Job! I remember in a Bible study with other adults that the church that we were going to we were studying Job. And I shared that thought with the group and I pointed to one of the guys and I said can you imagine if God said have you considered my man so-and-so! And he immediately started waving his hands and said no no no I don't want God even pointinh me out or knowing who I am.
That reaction has stuck with me for many years. This idea that we all need to lay low and creep through without being noticed doesn't sit well with me. While I don't like to walk around spending money like crazy and drawing all the attention to me with flashy clothes I do like to do my thing and be comfortable doing it and not be worried about people noticing me or not. I like it when people brag about me to their friends or family. I love the idea of God bragging about me, although I would hate it if anything were to happen to my family and friends.
I share this because as a father I love to talk about my adult children. When they were growing up I loved talking about the different things that they had done, sharing pictures and videos with my parents and my wife's mother. I loved recording journal entries about them and bragging about how great they were and when I got the chance I would immediately tell people about the funniest thing that one of my children it done lately. Even as an adult with adult children I love to tell people about what my kids are doing, including my son-in-law. Once you're part of my family you are part of my family.
Next time you read Job take a little bit longer at the beginning of the book and notice what God says about his guy. You can read it at https://www.bible.com/bible/97/JOB.1.MSG
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