Jairus' Daughter

Did ya miss me?

Whew, I'm back.  After much angst, stress, and IT nonsense, I have moved my site to a different server:  ipowerweb.com.  I was just fed up with the needless downtime on my old server, and I'm sure you were, too.  Hopefully now we can all be happy again.  :)

Let's see...  What has happened in the meantime that I need to catch you up on?  Last Saturday I went to the zoo.  My favorite animals were by far the children under 5.  They were so cute!  And there were about a gazillion of them.  It would have been a stampede, but luckily they don't move very fast.  I also liked the rhinoceroseses, the lions, and the monkeys with the funky butts.

That night we went to a Major League Soccer game.  DC United v. Chicago Fire.  Of course, I had to be sitting next to the only Chicago fan in the stadium.  ;)  It was a pretty good game--went into double overtime--but nobody scored.  This of course segued easily into jokes about our friends' love lives.  I love soccer, though.  It was so fun.  I have decided, however, that at my next game, I am going to need one of those plastic horn thingies.  Or a bass drum.  Or several reams of paper, shredded.

Then Sunday was Easter.  I went to the sunrise service at the Lincoln Memorial.  I have never been so excited to wake up at 4:15am.  After studying Jesus' arrest and crucifixion in-depth the past two weeks in BSF, I was going to get to celebrate His resurrection.  The triumph of His coming back to life struck me so intensely and unexpectedly, that I wept through most of the service.  The sun was blinding, just as if I were trying to look on the glory of Jesus' resurrected body.  I looked forward to the day when I will be able to withstand the radiance, and worship Him with an even bigger crowd than was on the monument that day, singing "Crown Him the Lord of life, Who triumphed o'er the grave!"

It's the Little Things

The coolest thing happened to me this morning.  I was behind a garbage truck on my way to work (no, that's not the cool part).  As I was nearing my office, the top of the truck brushed a tree by the side of the road, sending down a shower of white petals like confetti.  My girlish squeal of delight escaped too quickly for me to stifle it, making the first words I spoke this morning, "Eeeeeee... yay!"  :)

Do you have a license to operate that alarm clock?

My junior boss is THE MOST technologically-challenged person I have ever known.  There should seriously be a Dilbert character based on this guy.

When he joined our team in November, my senior bosses gave him a BlackBerry.  Big mistake.  I have logged more hours on the phone to BlackBerry-tech-support than should be legal.  After we replaced his BlackBerry the first time, he dropped it--*he actually dropped it*--and put a hole in it.  It was really an internal crack which leaked air into the LCD, but it looked like he had used it for target practice.  There was a black, bullet-size void right in the middle of the screen.  So now he's on his 3rd BlackBerry.  We'll see how long this one lasts.

Then there was the day he came in and his computer decided to lock him out.  For no apparent reason, it had started to ask for a password to log on to Windows.  Only problem was, he didn't have a password.  He had never set one.  It took us all day and the help of a professional IT guy to get his system accessible again.  His only explanation:  "Well, I tried to print something yesterday, but it wasn't going through, so I tried to fix it."  He attempted to troubleshoot a print job, and ended up locking himself out of his computer entirely.  I don't even know how you would do that.

And just yesterday, he effectively rendered our fax machine useless for an hour or so.  It was out of paper, and since he was in the fax room, my other boss asked him to refill it.  Not a hard task.  Really.  I've done it many times.  From my desk, I could hear the plaintive beeping of the fax machine, and I knew it was taking much longer than it should have.  As I was getting up to see what the matter was, my befuddled boss begged my assistance.  He just couldn't figure it out.  I looked.  The top page was not lined up with the stack and therefore was not feeding through.  Easy fix.  Every fax we got after that, however, didn't come through; the fax machine wasn't picking up when it rang.  I thought perhaps there was a bigger problem that had precipitated the paper jam, but no.  Upon investigation, I discovered... HE TURNED THE AUTO-ANSWER OFF!!  No wonder it kept ringing and ringing.  Now I may not have great expertise in the technological realm, but I at least know not to push buttons if I don't know what they do.

My one consolation is that if we are ever at war with artificial intelligence, we have one heck of a secret weapon.  No technology can continue to function properly when subjected to my boss.  Pretty soon I think our office equipment will just break when he walks into the room, just to save time.

Yes, he's wearing makeup and no, he's not gay.

My good buddy Alex was in Classical Ballet Theatre's Cinderella last night, so we all went to see him perform and be a righteous cheering section.  He did a fantastic job; the whole ballet was danced very well.  But, being the cultured bunch that we are, we were left with a number of burning questions at the end of the performance:

- What do you call a male ballerina?

- Would it really have hurt them to add some speaking parts?

- Isn't Cinderella's father supposed to be dead at the beginning of the story?

- I don't remember the woodland scene from the cartoon.  (Ok, that's not a question, granted, but it was the source of moderate confusion.)

- Why does the prince have to wear tights (and several other more personal questions regarding the prince's undergarments that I don't care to repeat here)?  Alex did a very good job of explaining the reasoning behind this one, but not to the satisfaction of some who were sitting in the 2nd row and saw more than they wanted to.

All in all, I learned that you can't take the average 23-year-old boy to the ballet, and that we seem to get all our shared cultural knowledge from Disney cartoons.

Music to My Ears

The zenith hum, the perfect strum I have become completely numb

Went to see Carbon Leaf in concert last night.  How much do I love them?  Yeah, a lot.  I braved the 9:30 Club, weighed down by the fatigue of the work week, and fighting a killer stomach ache, but Carbon Leaf did not disappoint.  Every sound they create resonates on my auditory nerve, so that it's hard to tell whether the vibration is going in to my brain or coming out from my soul.  If I had an inner soundtrack, I think it would resemble Carbon Leaf.

Jump Little Children opened for them.  Can't leave them out.  Also a very cool band.

Ghosts of My Past

I said he was dead to me.  I was more right than I knew, for now he has become a ghost and he haunts me.

He appears to me in crowds, in mutual friends, and most unsettlingly in dreams, where I do not have the advantage of my waking faculties to banish the apparition.  When I do wake up, I feel that I have lost a part of myself.  A piece of my sanity is missing.

I do not communicate with him, not because I do not want to, but because I know I shouldn't.  It is the last kindness I can bestow upon him.  And bestow.  And bestow.  Sometimes I demonstrate this charity many times a day.  Every time I keep my mouth shut against my raging curiosity, the tally of my good deeds increases.

I want to know if I haunt him.

Happy Anniversary!

Congratulations to my parents, for on this day, they were married--26 years ago.  And on this singular day, I would like to take the opportunity to share with you a little of my family story.

In the summer of 1976, my dad was 23 (whoa, that's how old I am).  A seminary student, he had taken the position of summer youth minister at Great Neck Baptist Church in Virginia Beach, VA.  It was there that he met my mom.  She must have stood out in that small congregation, with her stylish way of dressing and her long, sleek, reddish hair.  She was a new Christian, and had only been coming to the church for a few months.  After their first date, they both had a sense that they had found something special.  My mom knew that my dad was a world apart from any other guy she had ever met.  My dad spent that night walking along the beach, pondering it all.

When his stint at Great Neck was over, my dad left to take up a pastorate in South Carolina.  And he was miserable.  He was so lonely apart from my mom, that after just a few weeks, he proposed to her over the phone.  They were married that spring, on Easter--April 10, 1977--in the little church where they met.

Epilogue:
I found out later that it was my dad who performed my mom's baptism there.  He baptized me there, also.  In 1987, when I was 7 years old, we were stationed in Virginia Beach with the Navy.  We attended Great Neck Baptist Church (which was across the street from my elementary school), and it was there that I accepted Christ.

New Developments

As you can see, I'm messing with the format of my site here.  But don't get too accustomed to it--I'm not quite satisfied with it yet.  I didn't have much time to fix it yesterday, what with all the retching (no, not because I didn't like the new colors; I'm pretty sure it was something I ate).  So if you were worried about me because I was missing, you had good reason.  I'm happy to say I am doing much better now.  Everything that is supposed to be on the inside is staying there.

In the words of the great Bartles & Jaymes, "Thank you for your support."

Hello Mr. Handcramp

Because of a glitch in our payroll system, the job has fallen to me to fill out W2's, corrected W2's, W3's, corrected W3's, 941's, and corrected 941's.  By hand.  These forms, especially the W2's and W2c's, were not meant to be filled out by hand.  Each form is comprised of roughly 438 sheets of carbonless copy paper, the last of which is supposed to be equally as legible as the top sheet on which one writes.  To accomplish this Herculean feat, I must apply my entire body weight, through my pen, to the surface of the paper.  I have visions of myself as a druid carving runes in medieval England, or an Egyptian scribe decorating pyramid walls.  I'm sure archaeologists unearth these treasures and find important messages like *Social Security Tax Withheld* and *Employer's Federal EIN*.  Anyway, back to work; no reprieve in sight for this lowly scribe.

Our Little Friends

Welp, the squirrels are back.  We can hear their tell-tale skittering over our heads in the space between the second and third floors of my office.  It sounds like this:  skitter, skitter, skitter, clink, clink, clink, skitter, skitter, clink... (recessed lighting).  We thought at first that it might have been mice, so we called the exterminator recommended by our condo association guy.  Yeah, that was a smart move.  We payed $150 for some guy to put out little black rodent-death-boxes all over our office.  We told him, "No, you don't understand.  They don't come into the office; they are between the floors."  And his oh-so-helpful reply:  "Well, there's nothing I can do for in-between the floors."  Granted, his expertise was sufficient to tell us that it didn't sound like mice, but rather squirrels, and that they were "just playin'."  Thanks, bub.  We left the little boxes out (all 150 bucks worth) in case any animals ever did come into the office.  But they didn't.

I suppose they went somewhere else or hibernated or did whatever squirrels do in the winter, but now that it is warm again, they're back like unwanted relatives.  It adds a real air of professionalism to our business, when clients come here for a meeting and hear the critters scampering overhead.  "Wheeeeeewwwww dawgies!  Looks like them thar varmin are at it agin.  Now shush, y'hear, 'fore I come up thar with mah shotgun!"

Spirited Away

Oh, how I love this movie.  I went to see it again last night.  The imagination of Hayao Miyazaki is profound and unfathomable to me.  The images, which are so vividly drawn, and the story concept holding them together are brilliant.  To my American cultural outlook, some aspects of the movie are unfamiliar (which adds to its intrigue), yet so universal that I feel not as if I have stepped into a new world, but that my own world has in that moment gotten bigger.  I feel like Chihiro, who finds herself among strangers, but by the end has won them all as friends.  This film is my friend.  :)