movie kick and other mundane news

My girl got back from Missouri last night, so we went out on a date and saw The Village. I'm not a huge M. Night fan (I swear that guy is the worst dialogue writer ever), but his stories are usually unpredictable enough to keep you guessing. This one was no exception. Good ending.

Being that my mom is still out in Cali with my sick grandfather, I'm going to yet another movie tonight with Katie and my dad. I've probably only been to the theater once or twice in the last three months and all-of-the-sudden I'm going two nights in a row. That's enough to knock my head back.

In other news, I finished destroying Vern Hammett's fence today for profit. I got to use an air chisel. There's just something about destroying concrete that makes the day seem strangely productive.

That's all for now.

The gift that keeps on giving

At the moment, or I should say over the past few weeks, I have been perusing a book that I picked up in California entitled, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. I figure that I'm a bit predisposed to this sort of text, being a lit major and having dabbled in education a bit, so I can understand if this topic would seem either elementary or boring to most people. As for me, however, it's strangely exhilarating (but I won't go into that now). I'll get to the point.

This morning I was reading about how the American educational system has largely failed to equip students (mainly high school, but college as well) with mature reading skills. By mature I mean the ability to not only grasp what a text says and interpret its supposed meaning, but also to compare it to other similar texts and draw well-informed, yet personal conclusions on a given topic, conclusions that may not have even been suggested in the texts themselves. It's also important to note that the book itself was written in the forties and revised in the seventies, but I honestly think that many of its critiques still apply.

Now, while I'm no expert on this process, these abilities were certainly requisites to successfully completing my college coursework. Writing comparative papers is pretty much all that I did for the last couple of years of college. While I'm really not trying to brag, the whole process of synthesizing and comparing texts to draw my own conclusions really was not that hard for me. But here's my point: why wasn't it difficult? I certainly didn't learn those skills in high school or the first year or two of college. And then it dawned on me: I've used inductive methods of studying scripture since I was in tenth grade. Could it be that a sophomore Bible study could have primed me, at least in part, for success in college? It would be interesting to take a random sampling of mature readers (how that would be done, I'll never know) and find out how many of them were active students of scripture from a young age. And while I did go to college in the Bible belt, which throws out the random sampling idea, many of my lit major cohorts either had graduate-level educated parents or were involved somehow in a methodic study of scripture for several years prior to college. It simply amazes me to no end that a relationship with the Lord prompts young people to read and wrestle with texts that our centuries old. It makes sense that one of the many and perhaps less-important byproducts of that would be a more mature reading ability. Interesting.

P.S. I also just realized that I'm blogging this mental-mess when I'd normally just talk my wife's ear off for about twenty minutes. You become my victims when she's AWOL. Just smile and nod and it will all be over soon.

wi-fi and hair dye

So I'm sitting on the porcelain throne (atop the cover, thank you very much) while my wife is standing beside me dying her hair - gotta love wireless technology. I just finished tuning up our car so she could drive on up to Missouri to spend a weekend with her girls. I always find myself spending every available moment with my gal when she's about to split town. It may be a little too mushy, but three days still seems like a long time not to have her around. After a year and a half it gets harder to see her go, not easier. Yeah, my life is this good.

the afterparty

Last night was our welcome home/supporter appreciation night at Wilma and Bernie's. It was strictly family and a few friends who we consider to be family, which made it its own kind of fun. Although it's hard to share a year of your life simply with words and a twenty minute slide show, I think it's important to give it a try. I think we constantly find ourselves trying to hold on to all of these stories and experiences, but I've found them harder to hold onto if I'm not talking about them, even to people who have no frame of reference. So, a big thanks to everyone who came last night. Hope it was coherent.

For those of you who weren't present but are interested:

A lot of you know that we've been toying with the idea of moving to the Northwest in a few months. Well, being that we hate being in a state of limbo, we've decided to move up our departure. We'll be driving up to San Fran, Portland and Seattle a week from this Wednesday to poke around, talk to some people and hopefully find an apartment. We'll be back in Texas for at least the first half of September (if not more). We're shooting to be on the upperleft coast indefinitely by October 1st. We're officially offering ourselves for slave labor to raise funds for the move. If you've got some painting that needs to be done of some kids that need to be sat, give us a call.

Have a nice weekend.

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Indefinately...but with plans. We're "home" and the job search has begun. Since our plans toward the future may hold more re-locating within the next few minutes, we're looking into the hard-to-find jobs with good benefits, but are realistic about doing the more accessible gigs. What I've found surprising is that so much recruiting is done strictly via the web. I set out with the mission today of meeting a local bank manager just to supplement my online resume, only to find that all hiring goes through independent recruiting agencies these days. I did meet said bank manager, but even as a man with quite a bit of weight, his hands were tied as far as superceding the hiring beuracracy. I guess it's good for some, but bad for others. My resume is far from outstanding, but I'm confident to let it speak for itself. On the other hand, I have many friends with limited qualifications whose personality and relational skills get them in the door where their education or experience can't. Seems to me that it's getting harder to do that these days.

On a completely unrelated note, I came back from training with a PowerBook in tow, only to realize that our blog is pretty skewed through the Safari browser. For you Mac users, I'll do what I can to remedy the situation. I'm a people-pleaser...I guess.