Mark Byron

Breaking Radio Silence

I've been under the weather a bit over the weekend. Bloggy goodness should be returning to a normal schedule.

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Good news for space buffs-SpaceX's Falcon is in the air and headed for the ISS after a false start over the weekend; an irony is that we have a privately-owned rocket doing work for the most statist administration in recent memory.

The advantage of such privatization of space is that it's not tied up in politics; the disadvantage is that it's dependent on either (a) making money or (b) living on donations or patient investors. However, that disadvantage may well be a feature in that (c) living off tax dollars is an untenable option in a tough economy.

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Two obits for the price of one. When I saw the passing of Bill Stewart, recently run out of WVU as football coach last summer, the old BeeGees tune How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (Robin Gibb passed on as well this weekend) came to mind. Stewart was put out to pasture prematurely after he tried to kneecap his successor with bad press.

At 59, Stewart's career had run his course, and he may well have had little to live for. That brings back the old Bear Bryant quip of "croak[ing] in a week" after retirment; Bryant actually almost lasted through January of his retirement. Stewart almost made it a year, more than JoePa did after his ugly axing.

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The president's latest salvo reminds me of an old DL Moody quip, where Moody liked the way he did evangeliize better than his crittic didn't do is. I like how Romney worked in the private sector better than how Obama didn't work there.

His more prominent gig outside of a government job was as that well-documented community orginizer, who then gets government and donors to cough up funds. The funds have to be made somewhere; the organizer just gets to spend them.

Yes, people need to be laid off in some businesses, but unless you're going to have government subsidize red-ink firms, that's the nature of the beast.

Day One, Decade Two

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of my first blog post. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. In 2002, a blog was cutting-edge on the Web, while it is a few years behind the curve today.

I tend to express myself in paragraphs more than sentences, so Twitter isn't my strongest suit, nor is Facebook. I have a Twitter account that mostly serves to cross-post links to this blog, and I have an inactive Facebook account that I am toying with reopening, since that is the vehicle of choice for a lot of people at present.

I have the free-time to write these days, being underemployed. Hopefully, that will bear fruit in some way as I go forward, as I try to put my psychological problems behind me and move forward.

If you have something you'd like me to write on, let me know. I'm here to serve as well as to have a place to express my thoughts to a friendly audience around the world.

I Want a New Drug

I've been walking wounded (or sittlng-in-comfy-chair wounded) for almost two weeks with a sinus infection that morphed into bronchitis. Early on, I took a week's worth of amoxicillin, the most common antibiotic; it was somewhat bootleg, left over from a family member who fought off an infection quickly and left the lion share of their dose for the next person to get a bug.

Needless to say, it didn't work. That means it was either a viral infection (which doctors can't do much about save treating symptoms) or a Moxy-resistant bacteria. I figured the former until today, when my bronchitis got bad enough to get into my allergist, who doubles as a GP for his allergy patients.

Turns out it was the latter. Moxy has the advantage of being cheap; some places (like the Meijer chain here in the Great Lakes region) will give it away as a loss leader. However, that means that critters have had a chance to develop a tolerance for it; according to my allergist, it only works on about half of modern-day bacterial infections. Bringing out the heavy artillery from the get go might be more expensive, but it heads off a second trip to the doctor when Moxy doesn't hunt and be a better buy over the long haul.

We'll see if the better drugs work.

Trip Two in the Books

I'm back in my comfy chair in the den after a second South U weekend, this one in Savannah. They have a nice main campus which reminds me a bit of Warner U (nee Warner Southern) and a bit of Florida Southern's Frank Lloyd Wright layout.

Of course, I had to fly through Atlanta and have a 5.5 hour layover; my scheduled flight got postponed than canceled, creating a mass exodus over to the ticket counter of Savannah-bound folks scrambling for alternatives.

I was this close to staying in Atlanta and doing the class from there (we do a teleconference with Atlanta, Columbia and Savannah and the first Saturday was in Atlanta), but the Delta ticket gal pulled a rabbit out of a hat and got me a ticket on the 8:30 flight... first class, no less. A guy who I was talking to got a similar bump-up, to seat 1D; I invoked the old Bob Eucker ad "Looks like I'm in the front rooooow." and he harmonized on "front rooooow".

We almost didn't get out of Atlanta, as the nasty stormfront that was item two on the BBC site just now was just about to hit. We were seeing those nasty red and orange shades on the radar heading our way and things were getting very dark (cue the "does that have a Hemi in it?" guy-"That caint be good"); we took off in the rain, but not yet thundery enough to shut things down. One of my Atlanta students, who was 15 minutes late, mentioned that a lot of power lines were down there once the storm did hit later Friday and early Saturday.

Disraeli said that there were three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics (I was teaching the latter yesterday). Disraeli never had to fly through Hartsfield, or he'd have a fourth- Atlanta airport schedules... at least in the afternoon and evening where weather and mechanical delays can create a game of musical gates. My morning flight back to Flint went just fine and on time other than returning to a sleety, windy mess.

Class proper went very well, better than any of the Saturday double-headers I had at Warner U. So, things are looking up.

Nine Candles

The first post on this blog (or at least the Blogger version of it) went up nine years ago today.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. I've gotten married, lived in three new states, been Dr. Byron at three colleges, and met a truckload of people online.

A lot of the people that were part of things nine years ago have moved on, while others have become part of the Peanut Gallery. Things are slower than they were in their prime back in 2003, but there are more people writing online these days (who isn't?) and things like Facebook and Twitter have snagged some of the blog eyeball market, as has a lot of professional reporters and pundits blogging as part of their job.

Even if the readership is 40 a day rather than 160, I'm still a blogger. I'm a bit verbose to fit a thought into a tweet and don't have a book in me, so the short-essay format that fits blogging to a T is my natural home.

I'm going to strive to write more in the weeks and months to come. I've brought the Edifiers back; the last few years have been a spiritual dry time, and bringing them back has lifted my spirit. Many readers have apprecated them in the past, and I want to keep them up.

Also, with some free time on my hands as a part-time tutor, I hope to use that time to put my ecclective thoughts in print and see what the Blogosphere and the Web thinks of them. I don't know if I can get things to a point where this can be self-supporting, but I can at least put my $0.02 out there in areas of my interest and expertise.

Here's to year ten's start.

The Suggestion Box/ Tip Box

I'm going to try hanging out a shingle here. If there is anything you'd like me to write on that isn't illegal, immoral or fattening, here's the spot to put in your request.

I've also put in a PayPal tip jar below if you want to contribute to keeping things going here.

I haven't done this before as a writer, but if you'd like me to write on something, here's the spot. There are a lot of web sites that put writers and clients together, but I'm trying to cut out the middle-man here.

Even if you don't want to chip in but have topics you'd like me to write about, please fire away. I'm trying to get the readership back up to the 150-day level that I had in my early 00s heyday (or more, God willing) and want to give people reason to come here.

A Pair of Depressions

Hopefully, I'm getting my writing muse back. The first half of 2010 has not been good.

On the political and economic front, politics is like Jackie Chan splattering a fly in the movie trailer-"That's nasty!" The economy is staggering out of the cratering it took in late 08 and most of 09 and Washington isn't helping much; the finance bill that's working its way through Congress will likely hogtie the banking industry and cut the flow of capital into small business and we have at least 2.5 more years of that old man who's a day older than me in the White House.

Meanwhile, the GOP is shooting their own; when the scene is set for major gains, they act like the Chinese in WWII who can't stop their civil war long enough to run off the Japanese. When voting for TARP (signed by Dubya, lest we forget) is grounds for excommunication from the Church of Don't Tread on Me, things aren't looking all that chipmunk friendly on the politics page. Gerson's Ugly Party is large and in charge. 

My personal life is in tatters. I'm only semi-employed, tutoring 16 hours a week online and doing some free-lance writing, and have had to file for bankruptcy this April. To my credit, I was able to do all the paperwork for a Chapter 7 filing myself (it's easier than you'd think, if doing a tax return cubed sounds like fun), saving about $1000 on lawyer bills in the process; when they had my hearing last month, I was the only one their who filed pro se and got far fewer questions on my paperwork than the other people who were going before me who had lawyers.

Working part time, living with my parents and having Eileen work all of a half-hour in the last six months (a temp-gig to gather information on contract bids that went quickly; she got paid for 4 hours) has not left me in the best of spirits. Resume don't get responded to, since a PhD with no experience that neatly plugs into a standard business flow-chart is a tough sell even in a good economy. Thus, I work on writing on the side and have too much time to think.

Nor has struggling to find a church home helped. A nice Baptist church that we started going to started to turn authoritarian and legalistic, so we're back at the Vineyard church we got married at. It's not perfect, for the pastor often tries a bit too hard to be relevant (without watering down the Gospel, mind you) and has brain-burps like the Trunk Monkey ads show up as a sermon prologue. However, the folks there are nice and its old-home week when we do go there.

That's why the first half of the year has been a blogging wasteland.

God is still on the throne. Better things lie ahead.... including a return to daily blogging.

I'm BAAAACK

Sorry for the long stretch between posts. It's been a very rough stretch... more on that later. However, things are working out and I hope to be getting chatty for the foreseeable future.

Random Acts of Generosity

We are back in Midland as of Monday. As it turned out, we stayed in Lexington over the weekend last weekend, as we couldn't quite get everything packed in time for a 4:30PM inspection on Friday. So, one of our friends sprung for an extended stay place for the weekend, since we had already sent out furniture to Habitat for Humanity; we had given them our old computer system, so if was something of a fair trade, but I wasn't expecting that level of unsolicited generosity.

Our Sunday School class at Tates Creek Christian gave us a Applebee's gift card as a going-away present. Another case of generosity.

We did get into Midland on Monday of last week, and my body took most of the week to recover from all the lugging down two flights of stairs and through a courtyard to get to the parking lot. The next place we get will be on the ground floor, right? Right?

Hopefully, I'll be returning to more regular blogging now that we're back in Midland and my householder duties have diminished.

Last Night in Lexington

We're in the process of loading up our stuff and heading to Midland later today; I'm writing just after midnight on a slow on-line tutoring night.

We'll miss seeing the UK juggernaut head for a national title, but we'll be closer to friends and family. Most of the UK games are on national TV anyway. Being in Midland means getting the CBC on our cable; they will likely do a great job of covering the Winter Olympics in their home turf. CBC is great for sports fans, since they cover the Olympics as sports rather than as entertainment as NBC is wont to do.

Hopefully, I'll get my blogging mojo back once I get back to Midland.

Two for Me, One For You

Things are looking up. Between the free-lance writing I'm doing over at Momentum and the on-line tutoring schedule that will ramp up in January, I'll be making more than I did when I was working as an accountant, but not as much as a college-professor's salary. So, don't let your hearts be troubled over me, things are working out nicely.

We're also changing location. With my two jobs very portable, we've decided to move back to Midland; it gets us closer to friends and family, solves the church dilemma we've been having, and given that we're staying with my folks, shaves about a $1000 a month off of our expenses. My folks are both in their 70s and starting to slow down a bit, so it might not be too long before "they're living with us" rather than us living with them.

As for the title, I'm going to try and bring this blog back to active life. I do about 8 posts a day over at Momentum and want to try to do at least four here; they might be a bit tweetish, but even short posts are appreciated by my small but loyal fandom. Two for them  one for you.

Bloggin' for a Livin'

No, not those ads on the side that I'm going to pull shortly; I'm actually paying the rent writing.

Not here, but doing some freelance writing. My major gig is working for Momemtum Freight doing automotive and trucking related posts for their Transport and Freight message boards. Some of my posts get mildly edited and put up on a pair of company blogs. That one came from a Monster ad, not any of the free-lance sites.

That covers a bit of interesting areas. Anything automotive fits, as does anything regarding fuels, trucking, trains (I was all over the CN strike, Bene), shipping; even the strong yen can generate a post on what it means for the vintage car market.

The good personal news is that my first "paycheck" from my Momentum gig hit the bank today, just in time to pay this month's rent. It's not professor pay, but it's close to my old take-home pay as an accounting temp. Throw in a few stray assignments from a couple of free-lance sites and my continued finance tutoring online (I worked three nights this week and will be up to four come January) and I'm keeping most of the creditors at bay; If we can get Eileen back to work on a regular basis (pickings are small for her now), we'll keep them all at bay.

Things are pretty good for getting canned two weeks ago. Let's hope I still think that way when I write my first COBRA check for health insurance coverage.

Leroy's Gator Farm and Spa-Bluegrass Branch

Some good news on the job front. I have a freelance writing gig that you can check out here, doing logistics and trucking-related posts. Feel free to check it out.

On a lighter note, we're dog-sitting for my in-laws while they are visiting Eileen's sister and her clan in Zambia. McKenzie is a mild-mannered cairn terrier and easy to work with.

Dog sitting is new to me, but my folks are pros at it. They look after my sister's dog when they are away. When Kathy's first dog Purdy came over to be sat, my brother in law called my folks house Leroy's Gator Farm; after Purdy passed on and Chloe took over, it got upgraded to Leroy's Gator Farm and Spa.

We now have a Bluegrass branch of Leroy's.

Health Update

It seems that the bronchitis has been all-but licked. The dose of antibiotics and steroids that were given on Monday seems to have knocked it out, with just a smidge of chest congestion left, along with a lot of fatigue.

Next

I try to be as transparent as possible,  but this one is hard; I got fired on Wednesday from my college teaching job, effective immediately. At least I don't have to deal with the long goodbye of my Warner gig, where my contract wasn't renewed and I was a lame duck from March through May.

In the long term, it seems to be for the best. I have struggled with depression and anxiety most of my life, and it makes it hard for me to be "on" in the classroom for long stretches and hard to focus on grading papers.

It's been a stretch for me to hold the 6-9:40 classes that an adult-ed night schedule calls for; stress-induced asthma sometimes kicked in to cut things short and panic attacks without breathing problems hit at other times. Many nights, I had to resort to pointing students to a previously recorded podcast because I wasn't up to teaching that night.

The three weeks out with bronchitis was the last straw for the powers that be; I wasn't delivering the goods I was being hired to do, as much as I was trying to.

I still have my on-line finance tutoring gig; right now, it's one night a week for this term, but I'll be up to 20-hours a week in a 9PM-1AM slot starting in January.  That's not enough to keep all the bills paid, but it will at least bring in enough cash to pay the basics.

I don't think I'm cut out to be a classroom teacher. I have the intellect for it and the caring, but not the persona. That's hard to accept, especially when I went on to get a doctorate to do just that.

Now, that PhD tends to hang like an albatross on my resume. "Why do I want to hire a PhD for [insert entry-level business job]?" is the question my resume gets when it shows up; I have talent, but I don't fit the mold. Somehow, I have to get someone to look past that and give me a chance, and I have to have the courage and confidence to try to find that person.

Yes, God is in control, but barring a word of knowledge, I have to jump through the normal job-hoops.

Any practical suggestions? Even better, any job leads that you could vouch for personally where you might be able to get my foot in the door for an interview. I'm in Lexington, KY but could relocate for the right position.

I'm good with spreadsheets, can program in Visual Basic and a little C++ and have business schooling up the wazoo (PhD and MBA in Finance and BBA in Accounting along with a BS in Political Science) and have worked as an accountant for three years, albeit in a hospital finance setting that falls through the standard AR/AP/Payroll/GL slots that accounting positions generally look for.

I have a lot of people in the Peanut Gallery who care deeply about me and I take comfort in that. I'll need to take more comfort in that as the give-and-take on current events I got from my students and colleagues at work is now gone.

The Gift that Keeps on GIving

I've got one of those viruses that refuses to go away. I tried teaching through it last night but was coughing my way through an hour of class before calling it a night.

I went back to the doctor today and got some better drugs to try and clear out my bronchitis. Even though I'm felling better than I was this time last week when I had a double-dip of a bacterial and viral bronchitis, I'm not up to talking for long periods. That would be OK if I had a office job, but it's death to a college professor.

The doctor order me back home for two days. Other than my attempt yesterday, I've been out the last two weeks.

That's depressing. What's more depressing is that the virus has to run its course, and other folks have fought it for a month or more. I'm only two weeks in. Lovely.

Prayers for patience and healing are an order.

The Joys of Summer

We had a church choir (I'm not in, but Eileen is) picnic partly washed out by a thunderstorm last night, and a front's coming through later today. I took a look at the regional radar, and see a big frontal fiesta (as my mother-in-law christened the Mexicanesque orange and red colors of a storm's core on radar) coming down through southern Indiana with Lexington's name on it.

As Little Enos said at the end of Smokey and the Bandit, "Daddy, you're about to get your afternoon ruined."

Too Close to Home

This was a scary piece of news in the Lexington paper; a guy was shot in the Lexington Green parking lot. That complex includes the Joseph-Beth bookstore that Eileen loves. The shooter then high-tailed it across town before getting cornered a few miles away.

The scary part is that I know where the shooting took place and recognize the Rio Dosa Drive area where he got captured; I'll use that road when going into Kroger's on Richmond Road when coming from the Hamburg shopping area to the east; it's part of a back way into that shopping center.

Another strange thing about Lexington; as the horse capital of the world, we have some high-profile people in town. Captain Kirk was in Joe-Beth during the shooting-

TV and movie star William Shatner, who owns a farm in Central Kentucky, was one of those patrons. Shatner said he had been at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. He was trapped at the scene for several minutes because his truck was parked inside the area police had cordoned off. Police eventually allowed him to leave.

"My car is here, that's all I know," he said. "I just want to get my car and go home. It happens where I come from; it doesn't happen here."

The early reports have the shooting as a personal issue; the dead victim was shot twice in his car, so this wasn't one of those random acts of first-shooter-acting-out.

Meltdown Day

We're finally out of the freezer. The Winter Wonderland shots of the ice clinging to the trees got toasted today when the temperatures got up into the 50s. The airport registered a high of 54.

So, you saw trees shedding their ice en masse this morning. By the time we came back from lunch, the trees were back to normal. Unless the modest amount of wet stuff due later tonight screws things up, I'll be back to teaching tomorrow.

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I've been watching too much basketball as of late. Eileen and I were running herd over the two year olds at church and one emotional youngster threw an elbow at a fellow rug-rat sitting next to him during a game of musical chairs. I called over to Eileen, "Was that a Flagrant One or Two?" She said two, but we changed it to just a flagrant-1 and kept him in the game.

Ice Capades

More bad weather fun today; Eileen is having her birthday and both of us have the day off. She's between assignments and Thursday is an vacant day on my schedule, since my four classes are Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights and a once-a-month Saturday (with the rest on line).

Sullivan U wound up having to cancel day classes for the third day in a row, which means (if traditional patterns hold) that they'll be meeting on Fridays for the next three weeks starting a week from tomorrow. That will make my Friday office hours interesting, since instead of the laid-back nature of our "Plus Fridays" (we run day classes M-Th and leave Friday mornings free as office hours for times all students can grab their instructor without having a competing class intervene) we'll have a normal weekday schedule for three weeks.

The ice is still thick on the trees, many of which have fallen down. I'm blogging from one of Lexington's public libraries while Eileen goes on a book crawl; one of the trees across the street from the library had one of its main branches split off, only to be held up by a neighboring tree. Even this branch has an abbreviated schedule, running from 12-5 today.

At least one stop light to the east of us on Man O' War was out; another one to the west of us wasn't working last night. The city schools are shut for the week; they've already announced that they're closed for Friday.

President Obama gets some brownie points from this red state; he's signed off on a disaster declaration. The latest reports have 1.3 million people without power nationwide due to the storm and 580K in Kentucky. I had anecdotal reports of a friend's house being without power in Poplar Bluff, MO; the owner's off at a conference in KC, so pray that nothing bad happens while she's gone.

Thankfully, we've kept our power and our Internet and cable, although we had the local station link to our satellite/cable provider taken out yesterday for a while. I got two days off when I could use a breather, which isn't bad. Now, I can continue to spoil Eileen rotten on her birthday, which includes a nice breakfast out, a library run (good for beaucoup husband point for my book-loving wife), a run to the mall for buying gifts of her choice and a nice dinner out.

Life's good, even when the weather leaves a bit to be desired.

Winter Wonderland

We've been iced in for two days here in Lexington; the tough-to-cancel Sullivan U had to pack it in both on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving me with a one-night work week this week outside of my on-line class and office hours on Friday morning.

It has been that icy. I got out to try and shake the cabin fever this evening and had to use every trick in the Michigander's winter playbook to get my car going. There was at least an inch of ice on the car with three inches or so of snow on top of that. If we were expecting warm weather tomorrow, I would wait for Mother Nature to do her thing, but we're expected to be sub-freezing for the next few days, so it had to get done sooner or later.

Trick 1-Hot Stuff. Fill up some available bottles with hot-as-you-can-get water from the bathtub. I had three empty two-liters of pop and a gallon milk jug filled with the hot stuff (cue Donna Summer). In an apartment, this also doubles as a device of getting said trash down to dumpster at the same time.

Once down, pour water on windows, or on doors to deice them so that you can get at your scraper.

Trick 2-Bang on the Drum Windows all Day. Time to go Cro-Magnon on the windows, gradually cracking down the ice. The hot water application creates a small water layer at the bottom that will allow the ice chunks to come off cleanly.

However, you need to be careful not to bash it with the scraper end lest the scraper come off from excess force, which I did; I had to get into Eileen's car to get Sparkle's scraper as a back-up.

Trick 3-Rock with You- I had enough snow and ice to deal with between my car and the plowed section of the parking lot to require the old rocking technique. Go back, then forward, then back, then forward, then back... until you get out. It's usually one I've used if I slid into a snow bank or off onto the shoulder of the road, but it worked well to get out of the parking spot.

Once we got out and on our way, we saw one of those views that you only get every few years, of everything being one big icicle. Some folks in town are without power, including one of the lights on Man O' War (Rapid Run, if memory serves). People don't seem to remember that a malfunctioning stop light is a four-way stop; most of the folks on Man O' War blew through not bothering to stop, although it was dark enough where they might not have seen the darkened lights in order to know to stop.

Many trees came down due to the ice coating they took. Some parking spaces in our complex are off limits due to tree branches sagging into them; we have a half-million people without power statewide and about 36K out here in Lexington. One of Eileen's buddies from church is without power and her cell phone is playing hard to get.

However, the main roads were clear enough to get us out to a late dinner. More later.

Retreating to the Cave

The first week of the semester has been a bit draining, especially when I teach Saturday afternoon and I'm recovering from bronchitis.

Bloggy goodness should resume next week.

Broncoitis and Bronchitis

No, I haven't fallen off the planet. I've just been on vacation and just got back from a newfound joy-finding a doctor in a strange town. Not that strange; it's northern metro Houston where my in-laws live. Still, I had to hunt to find a good urgent care place to take care of a budding case of bronchitis that I brought back from Rockford.

When did we stop going to our regular doctor for garden-variety illnesses? That used to be the case, but most GPs are booked solid and some sort of doc-in-a-box urgent care clinic is now the norm for treating things like sinus infections.

The PA who treated me was very good, hooking up a nebulizer inhaler to get some immediate relief to the lungs and getting some steroids and antibiotics to clear up my sinuses and lungs. I guess I need to hold off on my Olympic career for a bit ;-).

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I haven't been watching much football during bowl season; I've been on the road a lot and my in-laws don't have cable, so no ESPN.

The bowls have been cheapened quite a bit, which is good for mid-majors, who now get bids they would often get snubbed for in the past. Now, a pulse and a 7-5 record clinches a bowl bid, and a 6-6 has been known to get in. Down in Houston, the locals saw Rice beat Western Michigan in the Texas Bowl for Rice's first bowl win in 54 years.

Rice is one of the few school that's been downwardly mobile, going from being one of the doormats of the old Southwest Conference to being competitive in Conference USA. Had they been in the Big 12, they would have had a much harder time getting to a bowl and probably been slated to face a better team if they did manage to limp in with a 6-6 record.

Rockfordphiles

We're up in frigid Rockford, IL, having made it through some snowy and slick roads in eastern Kansas and western Missouri, introducing my in-laws' Houston-reared dog to her first sub-zero weather (it's 5 at present and slated to go down to -3 tonight). Poor little McKenzie is probably thinking "Who expanded the walk-in freezer?"

We'll be having Christmas with Eileen's clan tomorrow and going to a cousin's wedding on Saturday. I think this is the first time I've ever spent Christmas Eve in a hotel and the first time Eileen and her folks have been in Rockford for Christmas since her grandma passed on in 2005, so pray for the emotions to be manageable for her clan.

It looks like there is some excellent hoops action tomorrow if you get tired of family or don't have any. If you're in the former block, I'll lift up a prayer for you to get along with your clan. If you're in the latter block, I'll pray that you not get lonely on a family day.

Either way, Christmas winds up being a depressing time for a lot of folks, as dysfunctional families get out the long knives when they get together and lonely folks feel kicked in the gut if they have no one to share a family holiday with. May they all reflect on a God who loved (and loves) them so much that He sent Himself in human form to die for them.

"Mt. Enterprise... and put it in a museum"

We're in Texas, possibly for the last time in a long while. Eileen has a long Christmas hiatus from her current position and I can prep for next semester from my laptop anywhere, so we're visiting my in-laws in metro Houston. They're looking to sell their house and retire to Tennessee, so it may be a while before we come this way without her parents as a draw.

We took a slightly different route south than with previous trips to Texas, swinging by metro Longview to visit a high school buddy of Eileen's on our way down yesterday. A couple of the locales on the way down got a chuckle.

One county en route was Upshur county. It's good that they don't have county wide school districts like they do in Kentucky, where many of the high schools are X County High. "Upshur, up your [insert anatomical part]." Kilgore was en route as well; sports chants there would have spooked the Secret Service in the 90s.

The one that got the most fun was a small berg of Mount Enterprise. I recall saying "Don't give the Obama team any ideas, for they'll want to mount enterprise and display it in a museum."

I like the trip in from Beaumont on US-90 better, where the mileage roadsigns have Liberty winning out over China, then see Liberty losing out to Houston.

Please, Not on the First Date

We've been on the go this week; we spent Monday and Tuesday in Missouri visiting a seminary buddy of Eileen, bopped back to Lexington on Wednesday so Eileen could start a temp assignment, then back on the road Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with my clan.

The traffic on I-75 Wednesday night in Ohio was nasty. I would love to have some sort of rear-mounted LED display to tell off people following me.

For the jet jockeys flying past at 80-85 miles an hour

"Your speed: Mach 0.12...0.11..0.12" (acting like those radar-equipped roadsigns)

For the tailgaters doing their best NASCAR imitation

"Please, not on the first date."

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On a lighter note, I caught an interesting gospel group at the community-wide Thansgiving service in Poplar Bluff on Monday; a Golden Road Quartet that did barbershop-quartet style southern Gospel, but with a gal and three guys. I'd seen co-ed Christian groups, but not one that was singing guy-style in a mixed manner.

That's not too much of a reach, since most of those all-guy quartets have a guy singing a rather high tenor that a lady alto could easily sub for. You didn't notice the difference until the gal, Stephanie Clark, had a lead and you could tell she was a gal. When they did four-part harmony, she blended right in.

I was expecting something tame, giving that our friend in town is a PC-USA pastor, but a local charismatic church, the Palace of Praise (that sounds like a generic Pentecostal church for something like The Simpsons to use) was hosting and most of the speakers were Baptist.

Expect blogging to get back to normal next week.

Give Thanks

It's the beginning of Thanksgiving break here at Sullivan; well, we have our Plus Friday office hours this morning, but we have the week off next week.

We've also got (for Kentucky) an unseasonably early snow, but a near perfect one, one that sticks to the grass but blessedly leaves the roads unscathed. Eileen gets to rub it in to her heat-weary Houston-based Midwestern transplant mom who's still waiting to sell their house and get out of Dodge.

Me, I'm not a winter fan; I'd rather be back in Florida, all else being equal. I recall my Grandpa Byron, who would snowbird down near Fort Myers, calling up on a winter day with six inches of snow in Midland; "It's a bit chilly, only in the high 60s, and we just got back from a round of golf" or some other rub-it-in statement.

When I was doing my teaching at Warner Southern, we were literally a few miles north of Frostproof; we had to squeegee off the car rather than scrape off frost barring the one or two near-freezing days of the year.

However, I've got a nice place to teach, good colleagues, good students and considerate bosses. I can go into Thanksgiving and count my blessings.

A bass-ackwards blessing is Eileen's unemployment; she lost her long-term temp position late last month and has yet to get a replacement. The advantage now is that she has the week off, too. We'll be able to spend some time earlier in the week visiting one of Eileen's seminary friends who could use some de facto family for Thanksgiving week (she lost her parents recently), then bop up to Midland for Turkey Day and my family and watching a likely Battle of the Perfects, with an 11-0 Tennessee playing a 0-11 Lions.

Illicit Freebies?

I'm blogging from Larry Bird's hometown of French Lick; Sullivan U's having their faculty "advance" at the French Lick Springs Hotel this weekend. I'm comfortably ensconced in my room, watching the Pistons beat the Lakers after practicing our skit for tomorrow morning and making a visit to the hotel's casino.

Yes, the casino. They had a $10 free playing money voucher as part of our check-in package. I've never been inside a casino in my life, at least not in the gambling part, other than to momentarily walk past the tables en route to a concert at the Soaring Eagle Casino in Mt. Pleasant.

Dilemma: do I have the discipline to take advantage of the offer, pocket any winnings off of my freebie, and walk away? Is it sinful to do so? After a bit of prayer and a call to Eileen back in Lexington, I decided to give it a shot.

I got my $10 comp card and headed to the nickle slots; instead of feeding coins in like the old one-armed-bandits, this system has a debit card-like setup. I proceed to make $42 on my $10 of gaming money, cash in my winner slips (getting a bar-coded coupon-like critter for the $31 highlight jackpot rather than a gusher of loose change takes a bit of the mystique out of things, but c'est la guerre) and leave the joint.

I know that the casino is willing to spend $10 on folks, counting on making a gambling fan or addict out of that on some. Was I tempting fate by making my foray?

Good question. I'm not one who has that gambling bug, at least not the casino type of gambling. I don't enjoy the games much and know that the house will win in the long run. However, if the house gives me $10 free, I'm literally playing with the house's money, not mine.

I might get that for sports betting, where there is an art and science to handicapping games and races. However, I know I have that weak spot, and steer well clear of Keeneland in my new home turf of Lexington. Sullivan has Keeneland outings at least once a year, but I've opted out of such trips, lest I get the parimutuel bug.

Question to the Peanut Gallery- Is this a stronger brother-weaker-brother issue? Should I have passed and not given other folks a good example when someone else might get hooked on gambling? Possibly, but I don't know of too many weaker brothers.

It seems odd that something might be legit if it's a freebie but sinful if you're paying for it. If someone hands you ten lottery tickets, do you rip them up? If you think you might get hooked on the lottery, maybe. It will depend on the person, I think.

What sayest thou?

Escape from Headache Central

Things seem to be improving, finally. I had a CAT scan Monday, experiencing that for the first time. Looking at my reflection in the machine as they were scanning my head reminded me of something out of Altered States, but the process was rather painless, in and out in about 10 minutes.

Like the old joke about Dizzy Dean, the CAT scan of my head found nothing. I visited my regular doctor this afternoon, who thinks that what I have is a tough but localized sinus infection; I'm on antibiotics, Mucinex and am continuing to take the pain medication the urgent-care doctor prescribed on Thursday.

In 20-20 hindsight, I should have asked the doctor for antibiotics on Thursday on the chance that it was a screwy sinus infection that was so ingrained that it wasn't kicking loose any discolored phlegm. I'd have had the thing licked by now that way, assuming my regular doctor is right.

C'est la guerre. "La Guerre."

Headache Central

Prayers are an order; I have a recurring headache in my left temple that doesn't want to go away. It's not a sinus infection, but it is influenced by sinus pressure and has been coming and going for two weeks; I went to the doctor Thursday and got some pain medication that makes things a bit more bearable without turning me into a zombie.

I'm due for a CAT scan tomorrow to check on things. I don't think it's life threatening and the pain wasn't that bad untreated, but bad enough to slow down my intellectual life and cut my blogging down to a crawl.