Personal Notes (And A Request)

First off, I’d like to apologize for the lighter-than-usual blogging over the past few days. As you may know, we are preparing to move this weekend. We signed the final papers yesterday morning, hope to be handed the key to the house early this afternoon, and will be actually moving tomorrow. We’ll be heading over this evening to clean, move in some of the more fragile and important boxes, replace the locks, and so on. As you might expect, our house is in a state of chaos as we prepare to leave it after almost six years. My entire library is sitting in boxes in the basement and there is not a bookshelf in sight. This is a great hardship for me. Thankfully, I had a box of books show up in this morning’s mail (to my wife’s chagrin. “As if we don’t already have enough boxes…”) so I can at least have something to read before those boxes get unpacked (Not that I expect to have a lot of time to read).

So I do apologize that there has not been a lot of inspiring content to be seen in the past few days. I have great plans for the next couple of weeks and hope to atone myself in my own eyes, at least. If this blog is a guage of my spiritual temperature, it seems that I must be heading towards hypothermia. The reality, I hope, is that I have been very busy and very distracted. And even more significantly, I have been out of my routine. My daily routine is an important part of my blogging, and when the routine is disrupted, so is blogging!

On to business.

I am looking for a person to help me with a project I am embarking upon. I need someone who is eager and willing to read at least fifty books a year (give or take) and review them. I hope to be able to supply the books so this should not be an expensive venture. The books will cover a wide variety of topics, but will be primarily what is published by Christian publishers. Past experience has shown me that many people are willing to accept books, but fewer are willing to actually read them, and fewer still to review them! And of even greater importance than the quantity of reading, is that this person must display sound theology and the gift of discernment (not to be confused with the dubious gift of complaining about everything). Unlike some of my previous ventures, this person does not need to have a blog or other web site. And finally, this person must agree not to be offended if I opt not to select him over others who inquire. So if you feel this is something that would interest you, please contact me [2] by email.

On a similar vein, if you are a discerning person but sometimes prefer watching good DVDs (the type of DVD I tend to review on this site) to reading books, please drop me a line as well. I may have a variation of the first project in which I can involve you.

I suppose all of this is leading to what I consider a rather exciting announcement that should be coming in the next week or two. But for now you’ll just have to wait.

Turning to matters of far less importance, this morning I headed to Canadian Tire (kind of like a Canadian version of WalMart, I suppose) to buy a cordless drill. I have to get serious about this home ownership stuff, and I think a cordless drill is a prerequisite to that. Knowing nothing about such power tools, I asked one of the helpful retired staff members for advice. I gave him three criteria: I don’t want to spend too much, I am not going to use it very often, and it has to be good enough that my father-in-law won’t laugh at me when he sees it. We eventually picked out a “Mastercraft” drill, which is, I believe, Canadian Tire’s generic brand. I wanted to get a Dewalt since my friends tell me that this is the best brand (and might even make my father-in-law jealous), but it was almost $150 more for roughly the same features. And hey, my Mastercraft came with a good warranty and that’s usually good enough for me. It has already proven its worth in making quick work of disassembling our bed. I’ll let you know if I get laughed at.

The final selling feature for this drill was when the guy at Canadian Tire told me that his son is in the Canadian Navy (we have a navy? This guy may have been putting me on…) and that they use this drill on the frigate his son serves abord. I guess Canada has a budget navy. I bet members of the U.S. Navy are stocked with brand name tools. But if Mastercraft is good enough for the Royal Canadian Navy, it’s good enough for me. I think I’m getting all misty-eyed.

Finally, I just received an email blast from the Together for the Gospel crew. Apparently there are only 400 spots remaining. The conference will be held from April 26-28 in Louisville, Kentucky. Why not group together with a few people in your church and raise enough money to send your pastor? It promises to be an amazing, encouraging, edifying event.

And now, I have boxes to pack and furniture to move. I’ll check in tomorrow once we are a little more settled.