Right now I am online at an Internet Pub in Rome, Italy. We stopped in here to get online just for 1/2 an hour, to book our return trip home via taxi and to check some email.
I will be blogging more when I get home and upload some photos from this trip. Until then, Prego!
I was finally able to get on an American Airlines flight that had this free inflight wifi. So of course I had to try it, right? Right now I am at 30,000 feet on a Super 80 airplane, headed towards Albuquerque NM for a weekend trip. I just had to record this moment :O
I got tired of the dark theme, with white text, so I decided to try something different.
Thanks to mg12 for this them titled iNova
I can’t explain why, but I don’t like football. Well, actually, I don’t like sports. And my dislike is only amplified when everyone, around this time of year, starts talking about it more and more and won’t shut up about the new Fall Season (I missed the memo where Fall now begins in August when it is 100+ degrees in Texas)
Anyway, just a short rant about that. But please people… who is playing this week and who won last night? These are questions you should direct elsewhere… like, I dunno, to someone who CARES about such trivial things. I don’t know who plays next weekend. I don’t know who is ranked where. I don’t know when the Cowboys next play on a Monday night. No, I don’t want to come to your house to watch football when I could be watching my grass grow at home, which is much more exciting. So please, direct your questions elsewhere. Kthxbai.
So I applied to get onto the Miami Ink show, to get a tattoo on TV. They make you fill out an application, tell them about yourself and the tat you want and why you want it. Then they make you send a video tape to them to see your personality when you tell them the tattoo you want and why you want it.
http://application-miami-ink.com/_mi.php
When I get a reply I will post in here again….
Today we attended the funeral for my wife’s Great Uncle, Fleek Fortner. He passed away quite suddenly at 92 years old and was in almost perfect health up until only a few months ago.
Fleek was the kind of guy that would always come up and talk to you, even though he might not know you well. He always made an effort to greet me and ask about current events when we got together each year at the family reunion. He was always happy and had a great sense of humor.
I am glad that I had the chance to meet Fleek and to speak with him on multiple occasions and I look forward to seeing him again some day.
I haven’t blogged anything in a while and I wanted to write something, so I thought that I would write about what I should write about.
I changed the format of this Blog site today to this new look. Post a comment and let me know what you think, anyone.
I’d like to start writing more in this Blog so I will think about what more I can write about and what I feel passionate about. If I can be inspired, upset or convicted about a certain subject, I can usually sit down and let my fingers run over the keyboard to produce something that is considered insightful, given my IQ level. So I will need to find something to inspire me this week.
Today, at work, we learned that one of our co-workers had passed away recently. This is someone that we all knew and worked with on a daily basis, someone that was still employeed with the company, someone that in your situation you might miss tomorrow if he didn’t show up to work. This was someone in a position of not much authority, someone that worked right along side us lowly personelle in an environment that was fun and real-to-life. Not someone that you ” heard about” but someone that you knew.
I had misgivings…I had doubts about if I would be able to write this. I can’t write if I am not motivated or inspired and since I have been mulling this over and over today in my head, I wasn’t sure if it would pour from my fingertips as it is now. Even still, I have doubts as to whether I am doing these feelings and thoughts justice, nonetheless this is something that I must write, not because I feel obliged to, not because I want another entry in my blog, but rather because I feel that if I don’t write down the thoughts in my head, I feel they will be lost and never found again. Hence, I do not have a choice at this moment, but to write the thoughts racing through my skull.
How many hours do we have left in this world? How many minutes? Who can say? I meet people every day that don’t believe in God, or even a higher power, people that both ridicule me and think my beliefs ridiculous because they are either scared of the truth or because they don’t the responsibility of their own actions so it is better to deby the truth rather than face the fact that one day, at some point in time, they will have to answer for things they have said and done.
My friend was not one of these people. My friend was someone that I both laughed with and argued with, when the circumstances at work required it. He was someone that I respected and also someone that I believed in. Yet somehow I feel that I failed him. Not because I didn’t sit him down and present the gospel to him, which I never did. Not because I didn’t tell him that I was a believer in Jesus, which I might have done, but do not remember. Had he ever asked me my beliefs, I would have gladely shared them with him. I do not withhold my beliefs, but I feel sometimes that someone needs to ask before I speak up. Was I created this way?
I think back on the time that I had with my friend…someone who I wasn’t as close to as I would have preferred. Someone who I invited to spend time with me after hours at worked, but due to circumstances, never came to pass. Not because either of us weren’t willing, but because life gets in the way.
“Of my friend I can only say this. Of all the beings I have encountered, in all the worlds, his was the most….human.”
Sadly what I cannot tell you is if my friend knew Jesus or not. Now, what I should say is that this friend and I were not really close, although I would have liked to have been. But as I said, life gets in the way. Anyone who knows me knows my beliefs, I do not conceal them from anyone who asks, but sometimes I feel that I should be more open with them. I don’t care about offending anyone, their offense isn’t my problem. But I do not want to alienate anyone either, I don’t think that is our purpose here. What I will say is that I hope to see him again some day. And what I will say is that I have learned from this experience, as with all of life’s teachings, that I will be more open and more willing to share from this point forward. He who began a good work in me will be faithful to complete it. Sometimes I wish that I would simply allow Him to.
While I will always remember this moment as I look back on this posting in the future and while I do not think that I will ever be the same, I will say that anyone who reads this should know that I am not just babbling, but I am speaking from the heart and I am expressing true belief, true emotion (which I hate, to be honest) and true beliefs. We do not make our own truth, truth is not something that we make up as we go along. Truth doesn’t become truth because we believe it, rather we believe truth because it is true. Nothing else matters.
Would someone who has never heard the gospel, upon death, which is only really the beginning, stand before God and be presented with a choice of Christ or a choice of Eternal damnation? I don’t know that the Bible clearly defines this situation. However, maybe our focus should be for no one who ever crosses our path to be faced with such a burdened decision. Maybe our goal and focus should be to be voices crying in the wilderness, the wilderness that is this messed up world, for truth that is unmoveable and static, not dynamic.
May no one ever say that my stance on God and who He is wasn’t clear. Especially not me.
Well, I haven’t written anything in this blog for a couple of months, so I thought I would try and type something in here on this last hour of the year.
This year, I traveled to Las Vegas, Danbury CT, New York, and Lake Tahoe for Christmas. You can see photos of all my trips on my photo website at
Right now we are looking to sell a couple of our rental properties in order to get some bills paid and eliminate some extra rental work.
We are still running our forum posting business at www.forumelves.com. That is going quite well.
This year I am going to try and post more in this blog, read more books and travel more with my wife.