But wait, it’s only 11, because we live in central time.
*huge grin* but kiddo doesn’t realize that. They dropped the ball on tv… it’s new year, head to bed.
I wonder how many more years we will be able to pull this off!
Actually, I figured she would be onto us this year… as she can tell time better now.. but as it happens, my kid… who normally fights sleep like its death and sees 11pm more frequently than i care to admit… crashed on my bed about 930.
i woke her up at 3 till 11… more because shes over 50 pounds and its much easier to wake her up than to carry her…. ball drops… and shes crashed again in her own bed.
I’m discovering one thing I don’t really like about the one year reading plan I use.. (http://www.oneyearbibleonline.com/ and most of the tyndale one year bibles)
Namely, that when it hits December, the New Testament heads into Revelations, while the Old is in the prophets.
As much as I think in metaphors… having a double dose of “huh?” isn’t exactly my favorite reading section.
But, soon we will be back into creation… and Jesus on earth, as Genesis and Matthew start again.
Sort of an interesting transition… from end of the world to the start of the world.. from the prophesy to the fulfillment.
10 Then he instructed me, “Do not seal up the prophetic words in this book, for the time is near. 11Let the one who is doing harm continue to do harm; let the one who is vile continue to be vile; let the one who is righteous continue to live righteously; let the one who is holy continue to be holy.”
12 “Look, I am coming soon, bringing my reward with me to repay all people according to their deeds.
it struck me a bit that this is the opposite of the general response. normally, the response to the phrase the end is near is to try and call anyone who might hear to repentance.
just let them be? knowing what they soon face by not changing their hearts?
i guess it just struck me as an opposite response from the obvious one…. easier i suppose with those you aren’t attached to, and yet, a lot harder with ones you are.
But I guess I kinda wonder how one would ever know to switch to this response. I mean, people have believed the end is near for every day of the last couple of thousand years.
At what point do you give up hope for humanity to have a shot at repentance?
I guess it seems to me like you’d always want to at least have some degree of hope even if you did know the end was tomorrow.
1 Then the angel showed me a river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. 2 It flowed down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit,with a fresh crop each month. The leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations.
Ok… if there is no more pain etc etc there… why does it need a tree with leaves to make medicine that heals?
Revelations 2
24 But I also have a message for the rest of you in Thyatira who have not followed this false teaching (deeper truths, as they call them, depths of Satan, actually). I will ask nothing more of you 25 except that you hold tightly to what you have until I come. 26 To all who are victorious, who obey me to the very end, To them I will give authority over all the nations.
27 They will rule the nations with an iron rod
and smash them like clay pots.
28 They will have the same authority I received from my Father, and I will also give them the morning star!
ya know… i don’t have any big desire to rule anything… or to crush nations… or whatnot.
but a morning star? to be given the morning star by god sounds really awesome!
unfortunatly, this is revelations… and so i’m sure it isn’t actually a star, and has all sorts of other meanings and is only symbolic for something else less tangible than a star, and/or god himself.
I find myself applying for a particular division of a certain company for the third time in less than a year.
Different positions each time.
But I still find myself wondering if they are noticing the trend… which with my unusual last name and one of the certain aspects mentioned each time that would be rare in their other candidates, is possible…. and if they are, whether its helping me or hurting me.
And it’s making for a rough time on a cover letter.
I toned it down a lot for round 2, even though its a creative company. But I’m not sure whether to go more sane professional or more creative thinker on it.
I don’t like writing cover letters anyway… but weird situations make me like them even less.
I think I’ll skip the “Would you just give up and hire me already so you can stop re-reading this resume every time?” that I feel like adding… somehow I’m not sure they would have quite enough sense of humor for that.
Which is odd, because I never thought I would like a very fake looking tree. But this one’s cool.
It has fiber optics in it… but they are done so much better than most of the trees that I have seen. Every branch ends in fiber optics.. not just scattered ones… but the rest of the branch is normal, only the last inch or so is clear. And they are bright, nothing like the pastel-ish looking ones… they show up bright even in a brightly lit room. And they rotate colors quickly, like a billion twinkling lights.
It does also have two different other strings of lights… one set that is “pre-lit” that is your standard multi-colored light string… that has stopped working but we usually didn’t use it anyway. I actually tried to remove it once, but I highly recommend not removing pre-lit lights… they have those things hooked all sorts of directions to make them stay put, which makes them about impossible to remove, so I gave up and left them in but turned off.
The second string is removable… just plain white lights, but they have one of those control boxes where it will play songs with the lights flashing in time, the lights can flash with no music, or be steady.
Pics trying to show our tree really never come out right… so maybe really short video works better.
tree in dark, with the music on
tree with room lights on It still looks a bit shorter than it is… (it’s not much shorter than I am at 5′6″, so I think it’s a 5 foot tree)
The stuff underneath it is about 3 different little people christmas sets. (The nativity set was busy being mixed in with her doll house… lol)
The first year we got it pretty close to Christmas, so we didn’t decorate it.
The next year we did.
And I decided that I actually like it better without the decorations on it. Just a pretty light show.
My former tree was a small 4 foot and very fake looking plastic tree that I never liked much, but it fit well…. first in my bedroom as a teenager when I first bought it on my own, then in a college dorm room, then in a studio apartment.
Originally I hung about every ornament I could find on it… lots of colors and shapes making up for the lack of tree beauty.
About my senior year of high school this changed into a more uniform look. Everything in pink and purple. It helped a lot that this was the year crayola came out with light strings in all sorts of pretty colors. (actually, the pink lights under the tree in the video was one of the sets)
So from then on, it was mostly just multiple sets of ornaments in those colors. 12 pink snowflakes, 10 purple balls, 6 pink whatever… pink and purple tinsel… and the pink and purple light strings.
I can’t say they were traditional colors… but hey… it worked… and you’d be surprised how many things come in them.
I thought I had a brilliant plan this year though.
Kiddo had a lot of fun helping mom decorate her larger tree, and the front yards. So…when I was getting the tree out, I saw the older tree sitting in its box… so I brought it upstairs too, and the box of ornaments. Before she got home, I tested, and 2 sets of pink lights, 1 set of purples, and 1 normal multicolored set all worked still (go crayola… lol)
The deal was… she got her room picked up, and she could put the old tree in it, and decorate it however she wanted.
Of course my kiddo wouldn’t fall for something that obvious though. Her room was probably only about 10 minutes from clean when I made the offer… and it has gotten progressively worse throughout the season.
So I took the old tree out to the garage on the morning of Christmas eve… still a bit sad my brilliant room cleaning plan didn’t work.
Zechariah 1
20 Then the Lord showed me four blacksmiths. 21 “What are these men coming to do?” I asked.
The angel replied, “These four horns—these nations—scattered and humbled Judah. Now these blacksmiths have come to terrify those nations and throw them down and destroy them.
Blacksmiths? Terrify using blacksmiths?
I’ve never though of blacksmiths as being all that scary…
These converter boxes are beginning to annoy me, and they haven’t even arrived yet.
We don’t actually use either of the tv’s for anything except a monitor for the dvd players most of the time anyway… but I suppose its nice to have the option to watch something… so I suppose we’d probably better get them.
Coupons arrive with no problems. Now comes the fun.
I’m beginning to appreciate the fact that the cable company never gave us an option to use anything except one brand of box. Very much so actually.
Because… really… every single one of these boxes does the same thing. And there only seem to be about 4 variations on features.
Thus, every review says about the same on every box. One reviewer will insist that a box has dvd quality, another will insist it is awful. Different box, different people, and you get the same thing written about it.
And at about 50 different prices. At about 50 different in person stores and 500 different online stores.
The online sites seem to be a lot cheaper than in person. So I was leaning there.
I’ve never found myself on so many questionable store webpages in pursuit of a product.
But of course, the cheapest ones are on the no name sites. If you go to one random site you’ve never heard of, this particular box is only 6 bucks above the coupon… go to buy.com and its 20, go to amazon and its 35.
How much is it worth to me for site reliability?
How much do the low power local stations matter to me, to decide if I want to pay how much more for analog pass through… to be able to watch stations I could watch now but never do?
How much would I currently pay someone just to hand them these stupid cards and have them hand me a cheap functional box without asking me any further questions?
I suppose its nice we aren’t stuck giving one company all the advantage and such. But really… there should be a “I really don’t care, just send me something that will work on my 10 year old 15 inch tv” button to check when requesting the coupon… and they just randomly grab a box and mail it out.
update:
ok, i’d saved this as a draft a while back, so need to update to current.
i gave up… went to target and paid the 20 each above coupon price for the random cheapest converter box they had… which had no brand name on the box at all, but turned out to be rca boxes…. wrapped them and stuck them under the tree.
i figured if had to buy them anyway, might as well get some gift mileage out of them while i was at it! lol
anyway, they hooked up easy enough…
one tv that already had decent reception it made a huge difference…. very clear pic now, only occasionally pixelated, and added a handful of channels.
the other tv didn’t fare so well. it had kinda spotty reception anyway… a bit fuzzy most of the time, and some of the channels completely unwatchable in bad weather. well, now, none of the signals is strong enough to hold the channel… they all stay at mostly “no signal” black screens and occasionally pop into a brief, very jerky low signal and still unwatchable spell, then back to blackness.
i think i may invest in one of the stronger sets of bunny ears for that one and see if it helps any.
This article made me shake my head a bit. Cool finding, but the article is just a bit twisted.
Seriously… did we just toss the entire “correlation does not mean causation” idea out the window to fit a motive?
I guess since they are scientists, they have to look at it that it must be that the brain changes reducing the “me” focus must be what’s causing the spiritual “feeling”…. surely it couldn’t be that the spiritual might not just be a feeling and might be what would cause the changes.
Now think about it…. for that matter, lets even play scientist and pretend that spirituality is just a feeling.
if it had been, say, the feeling of enjoying to a certain style of music that they found to cause the same changes… would they do the same and say that the brain changes caused the feelings about the music?
More than likily, they would assume the reverse… that the feelings about the music caused the brain changes…. and then we’d see articles and products all over trying to capitalize on that.
Or, with a less commercially minded scientist, we’d just get that it occurred together without saying which one caused the other, and leave readers to draw their own conclusions from that neutral, purely observational position.
The findings are interesting… but I find myself imagining how much red ink this would have come back covered in had I turned something like this in to even my most anti-religion science professors.
I suppose if you worry your findings aren’t strong enough to make their own points in the direction you think they should, then you feel like you need to prop them up in that direction.
Maybe that says more about the lack of confidence in the position truly being correct, than it does about the findings. Who needs to slant something if it clearly already says it on its own?
