What a Weekend!

Karen and I helped out at a wedding this weekend. It was at Mt. Hood. The actual ceremony was at the Silcox Hut at the 7,000ft. level of the mountain. It was one of the most beautiful settings for a wedding I have ever seen.....
Karen played beautiful music and sang as though "there was an angel in the room(an actual comment made by one of the people there)." She also did all the makeup and hair for the girls and had general crazy fun. I am so proud of her. She was a great blessing for all involved.
I really wanted to be here...


This picture was taken around 10:00am. It is of the Palmer snow field. Timberline has one of the longest seasons in the country. I think it's open until September. And that is just to give the employees some time off and time for maintenance. I have skied a couple times during the summer. It is quite an experience.
For those who don't know, Timberline lodge was built in the 30's under the Works Progress Administration. It is amazing. I don't think it would be built today. There are four old growth trees cut into columns in the lodge, as well as rough-hewn stones all over. The story of its construction is really interesting. Here is the official site.
We got back on Sunday and Karen helped me finish my paper's second edit. So I am all done with the Romans class. It is on to Greek Exegesis 2 this fall. It's the last one in the Greek series at Faith (OTS). I need to start re-practicing my Greek!
Well, that's all for now I guess. Enjoy.

Blurry Eyes

Today has been quite a whirlwind day.
Last night sometime around 12:00am we finally shut the lights out. Got up the next morning planning on doing my paper on Romans. It would have to wait...
Our saga of car problems continues. Friday someone tagged the Outback while Karen was downtown. It went unnoticed until Saturday night, when I went out to drive us to dinner with some friends. I saw that the front bumper was dinged and cracked and the fog light cover gone. Being Saturday night everything was closed. Monday morning I went down to a body shop and got an estimate, while waiting for the insurance agent to call back. I got a hold of him around 11:00am and got the claim going. From my earlier time at the body shop I thought they would be able to take the car today, figuring I'd give them a week-and-a-half or so to fix 'er up. So on the way back to the body shop to drop it off we stopped at the rental car place (Enterprise). They didn't have a car for the ammount we were covered for, so we got one we would have to pay the difference on, a Ford Taurus (The supervisior told the guy to give us a "good deal" on a Caddy, but that brought it to 36.00 a day! Why they couldn't give us a good deal on the Taurus, I don't know). We got to the body shop and found out that they couldn't even take it until next Friday!! So we went back to Enterprise and dropped the Taurus back off (they were nice and didn't charge us). Besides not needing it, I got a headache from the smoke odor driving it 10 blocks. Yuk! The guy at Enterprise was sheepish about it, saying, "Yeah, well we take them to a detail shop and they do what they can." Karen piped in that her husband happened to be able to take it out, but he wasn't intrerested in it. By now it was 1:30 and we were hungry and angry, so we went to DQ. While there an employee of Kettle Foods (they make Kettle Chips) made a scene because he thought it was taking too long to get his ice cream. He finally got it then proceeded to stare at all the women in DQ as he ate his tardy frozen treat. I made sure Karen had her back to the creep. I should call Kettle. 'Course they probalby have a few "Johns" working there, and I don't know his last name. Gives me the jibblies. Well, after eating I finally got around to typing the paper.
I just finished it 20 min ago. It ended up being 16 pages single-spaced. I haven't formatted it or edited it, but it needs to be 15 pages double spaced, so I got some cuttin' to do. Whew. So, I am blurry-eyed from staring at a computer screen for 8 hours.
Tomorrow I will be greeted with fresh torture, as I will return to cleaning all things nasty out of carpets. Good thing I have all my shots...speaking of shots, I haven't posted a good shot picture for a while so, here it is.

He was at a dead run. My friend Jim got him with a .223 Remington 700 last November. A nice shot. Shows how that little bullet shatters on impact, with all of its energy being displaced on contact.

"What Bugs You" Thursday

There's a local sports talk station that has a "What bugs you Wednesday." Well, it's Thursday, but I have a couple bugs, and it's my blog.
First, I got two phone calls on my personal cell phone and one on my work cell today from some number I didn't recognize (469-476-6982). Each time it was a recording in Spanish. Translated it said, "Hello, you have terminated all options this call will be ended now, thank you. (roughly)." WHAT???? I googled it and found this has been going on for over a year, with different numbers. No one knows why it is happening. The number is from the Dallas TX area. I tried calling it back and got a "this number cannot be called as dialed" message. Very annoying!
Second, as I type this, our computer room window is open to take advantage of the cool weather we are having (67 F as of 7:20pm). Twice now a car has come by with the music so loud that it vibrated my computer monitor. Grrr....One was "oom-pah" Mexican music. The other was Rap-crap. What gives them the right to force me to listen to their dumb music as they sit at the light? Makes me want to share my rusty nails-pushed-through-tar-paper collection.....In the street.....
'Course then they would spend more time out there with their loud music, so it would defeat the purpose. Maybe I could share my keys-nailed-to-a-car-door-height-2-by-4-and-placed-along-the-street-in-a-bucket-of-cement collection. Yeah, that'd do it.
Seriously. I thought there were volume ordinances. Where are the police? As I type, a third car is waiting at the light with loud music. Another oom-pah song.
Well, enough griping. I shouldn't let other people's rudeness ruin my evening. I'm gonna go get some ice cream....

New Links, Old Friends

I have been re-connecting with some of my old IBEX acquaintances as of late. "What is IBEX," you ask? Well, it stands for Israel Bible Extension. It is run by Master's College in CA. They allow students from several other colleges to participate also, including: Biola, Cedarville, Concordia, and Western Baptist(Corban). It is an extension campus in Israel about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the Judean Hill Country - the Shphelah. Students go for a semester, learning about the land, the Bible, history, language and people of the Holy Land. There are many field trips and too many activities to mention. I went my last semester of college. I thought it would be a good culmination of my Bible training. Boy was it! It was more fantastic than I could ever have imagined. Almost every day I think about going back. If the Lord would allow, I would move there tomorrow. At the very least, EVERY Christian should go at least once. Time does not allow me to communicate all the things the Lord did for me there. Suffice to say I went an immature Christian boy, and came back "a man," as Karen likes to say.
Anyway, I found a blog run by one of the profs there, Todd Bolen. He posts almost every day about events in Israel and it is excellent. Here is the link :http://blog.bibleplaces.com/
I also found a blog run by "The IBEX Scribe," Angie. It is good too :http://ibexscribe.blogspot.com/ She gave Karen and I a really comfy fleece blanket for our wedding. We still love it. Anywhoo...time for bed!
But not before a random pic!


This is our friend Joe and I being boys at the beach. Enjoy.

Is anyone out there? Including me??

It has been over a month since I blogged. Sorry.
I worked 196 hours this month, moved some friends into the basement for the summer, and oh yeah, am working my way through 62 study questions for my Romans class. Still. I have yet to start the paper. Although I learned that according to "Chicago Style" it is supposed to be 12-15 pages double spaced! No prob. now. I can whip out a 7 page paper easy. One on into., four on language issues, two to three more on interpretational views, and one conclusion page. Wait....that's one, five, seven or eight, nine or ten...I haven't written it yet and already I'll have to edit it down. :-)
Karen gets here gall yanked...err...I mean her gall bladder is being removed Monday. I'm taking Mon., Tues, and Wed., off to nurse her.
We saw Karen's sister and brother-in-law yesterday and thier cute baby Aaron. "Do I want one?" you ask? Nope, I'll just play with yours :-)
As I blog, the resounding music, cows, and sounds of gunfire can be heard. Karen's watching Silverado. Yup, my wife likes westerns.... :-)
I'll end with a pic from our new camera. The old one had three or four pixels out and would shut off by itself periodically.

This is a pic of Manzanita(notice the uncannily similar pic on thier page, although you may have to hit "refresh" several times to get the right one) beach looking North using the 300mm telephoto lens. We love our camera.
Until some unknown and probably far in the futute time....good day.

Ok, ok, so it's been well....entirely to long since I posted. Things have been very busy around here. Yes, Cherrie, the car is running. In fact the guy who put the new transmission in it specializes in hot rods, so it shifts like a race car - very short clutch throw. Nice.
Well, I can't find the lecture notes and I don't have time to search right now, so I will post something from what I am working on right now, a class on Romans. I am taking it via DVD because our Greek Exegisis prof. had quadruple bipass surgery (he is on the mend) and had to postpone the class. The prof. for Romans made a list of 62 study questions for me to answer in a, "thourough and scholarly" way.
(Q.) Romans 2:7, Is this not salvation by works?
(A.) If it were truly possible to lead a life of only doing good, then yes, but Paul will begin to build the argument that it is not possible to do this. In fact in 3:9-20 Paul quotes the Old Testament, arguing that not one person does good, and that “because by the works of the Law, no flesh will be justified in His sight;[and this is important to the question] for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.” The Law established what “good works” are, but there is no man who has or will be able to fulfill the entire Law, and God planned it that way. We are to look to the Law to see we are incapable of only doing good, so that we would be “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” As Moo (the author of the commentary I am using for the course) says, the promise Paul makes in 2:7 can never be fulfilled because a “consistent, earnest seeking after good can never be realized.”
On top of all these, he wants a 12-15 page paper on the "meaning of Romans 6:3,4." I have my work cut out!
I should be able ( and would like to) post more when we are in Hawaii. Until then, who knows.

It really has been a long time since I posted here. Wow.
Well, things are going along. Our Sentra's tranny died. It sounded really cool limping it home. We are going to see if the one Frank has in the junk (errr...I mean scrap) yard will fit it. The engine is a '90, the tranny is an '88. If it does we are going to see how expensive it would be to have someone put it in for us.
Today I am typing this blog while I install Win98 on my backup gaming compy. The hard drive from the computer my parent's gave me was about to go out ( in fact it kinda sounded the same as the Sentra's tranny - a kind of metallic scraping sound). My friend Jim had an old Hewlett Packard he gave me so I pirated the hard drive out of it. Only problem is that the HP's hard drive didn't take kindly to being yanked out of it's home, so I had to format it.
For the time being, spring is here in the Willamette Valley. Today it is sunny and in the high 50's. There are some flowers blooming and others coming up. It's nice.
I must attend to software loading. I know I said I'd put more info on about the Habermast lectures, but be patient.