-Friends married

-Friends visited

-Adventures

-Fun puppies

-New church family

-Cars which now run

-Cameras which take nice pictures of friends and family having fun

-Good health

-Houses which stand

-Sewers that run

-Back yards with grass

-Dirt which has been moved (and dads who help moving dirt)

-A job

-Bikes which do not disappear when only ridden sporadically

-Summer

-Certain legal rulings in favor of human rights

But at least it got fixed, and almost everything was reassembled.  Three weeks of weekends gone and neighbors’ permanently singed nostrils were the biggest casualties.

Here’s the line with the new section clamped in.  Using the diamond blade to cut concrete was certainly the highlight.

The saddest part of the fix was the total disintegration of my pair of hiking boots/work shoes.  A step I took felt strange and I couldn’t figure out why.  Within 10 minutes the entire sole peeled off one shoe, with the other not far behind.  I’ve had these since I was 15, which is really remarkable.  I remember when my parents wouldn’t buy me nice things on the grounds that I’d outgrow them before I’d wear them out.  Now I’m old enough to wear out the nice things (notice there is no tread left).  This combined with the realization that I have 10 year old t-shirts in my closet is making me feel old.

Fortunately those boots were replaced with these boots: 8″, insulated, waterproof, soft toe loggers by Carolina.  They are the manliest boots ever and give me an additional 47 man points (not like I needed more, but hey).  They have come in handy now that the entire back yard is missing.

New yard and more to come soon.

Things are going to hell.

When you were around last there were 5.3 million Americans.  Now there are, like, 308 million.  I know, crazy huh? AND NONE OF THEM ARE SLAVES! At least legally… and that means the descendants of the almost 900,000 slaves in 1800 are free!  Like I said, going to hell… And by the way, women vote now, and drive.  Oh yeah, driving, we’ll get to that part later.  But, ZOMG!

There are some good things too, I guess.  We smoke everyone else in GDP.  Yeah, baby!  Last to first.  And we still throw down.  Other than having a few islands bombed in World War II (in which we totally kicked ass, btw), we haven’t fought a major war on our own soil in, like, a 150 years.  We’re so powerful now that we get to enforce freedom for other countries.  While we had a pretty good run with ass kicking, we’ve had a hard time closing out wars for the last forty years.  Like I said, going to hell.

Anyway, Texas.  As you know, it’s important to rewrite history every few years, and we all know it is too important to leave to the historians.  School boards do a much better job interpreting the course of human events, and most importantly they do it without the “liberal” bias.  Tell Jefferson and Franklin to get in touch if they can though, just to clarify the whole “no, we were actually atheists and anti-clerical and wanted separation of church and state.”  Also, you might want to hush up the four of your constitution framing asses that we life-long bachelors.  People might freak out now if it turned out that any of you were gay. lolz.

Oh yeah, health-care.  Freedom is in shambles.  It’s a good thing the Patriot Act got passed a few years back, or we’d really be screwed.  Here’s a quick primer, although since you lived on average to 67 years of age, you might not really care because you clearly did about 20 years better than most of your contemporaries.  Health care got really advanced, so much so now that people live about 11 years longer than you did on average.  That’s progress really.  In two hundred years, Americans live about 14% longer than you managed.  It also got mind-bendingly expensive to take care of everyone.  Congress got all uppity (dude, a black guy is president now, if you know what I’m saying), and tried to extend health care insurance to tens of millions.  Nazi’s and socialists I tell you.  (We’ll get to Nazism and socialism in the next letter when I explain the state of our churches and race relations)  Anyhow, that means that if you were alive, your rich asses would be paying some taxes to make sure little Tommy and Granny Ann don’t go without the latest and greatest.  Sucks, huh?  No shit.  I mean, we’ve got $1 trillion to spend in Iraq and Afghanistan, but geesh balance this budget asap.

PS. Your plan with the Indians worked.  Your successors created little reservations, and they stayed for the most part. PWNED.

PPS. We’re friends with England again.  AWKWARD. We messed them up good though. Guess who builds all the big ships now?  You’ll never guess… SOUTH KOREA.  Told ya.

Anyway it’s hard to tell the idiots these days that you guys created the more perfectest union of all time.  I mean, you guys FTW!  We’ll never do better.

I’ll write back, but I spend most of my day on politics blogs telling people how the world is ending, so it might take a while.

Peace,

Alan

As of this morning, the website for our church plant is now up.  It’s far from finished, and not exactly pretty, but it’s mostly functional.  I’m sure it’ll be heavily modified in the upcoming weeks months, but it’s nice to have in place.

Check it out at Sinnersandsaintschurch.com.

Peace!

(Devolving into direct catch up on events)

The church plant has been a little intense at times.  That’s not to say there haven’t been good parts, but we’ve run into a bit of an issue with our denomination regarding our desire to start a church which would be open and affirming towards homosexuals.  Our plant’s funding, Leah’s salary and her ordination hang on the resolution of the issue.  There is plenty at stake.  It’s also complicated the process of getting the word out due to being in a sort of limbo until approval is complete.  We’ve been moving ahead with Sunday night dinners and bible study at our house, which has been fun, if not well attended.  We didn’t expect an easy go of it, but there have been several demoralizing turns and it feels pretty socially isolating at times.  However, any church planter will tell you this.  Ultimately it’s not about us.

I’m hoping to put out our new church website in the next couple of days.  I started out trying to use Drupal as a content management system, but ended up bending  Wordpress to my will, which has worked to some effect.  It’s fun to spend a little time hacking php and css, although every time I try to get back into it, I’m amazed by how much it’s advancing and becoming more complicated.  I used to try and make things pretty… now I just try to make them work.

We’ve been having spring like weather here in Seattle, which has led to the ability to spend a fair amount of time on the bike.  Riding for fun is nicer than riding for training when life is tiring enough as is.  The lack of rain has also enabled us to make good progress on the outside of the house.  We’ve put up a new fence and begun reworking the yard(s).  Part of this is to enable the adoption of a dog, which could happen soon.  Leah hearts doggies.

The M5 has seen some attention too.  The rear suspension has been replaced, and the front suspension and steering is disassembled pending re-installation with all new parts.  After that, it’s just getting a new windshield in, fitting the new bumpers, fixing the electrical issues, and getting it back into the body shop for a few touch ups…  c’mon, it’s practically done… heh. heh. er.  Then I can fix all the crap that’s broken on our two other cars!

Work is plugging along for me.  Same ol’, same ‘ol.  Having fun with the camera.  Looking forward to remodeling part of the basement.  A few fun irons are in the fire.  Still searching for the illusive eighth and ninth days of the week.

Leah has been writing daily over at her blogspot blog.  Take a look over there for more updates on the church.

More soon.