It’s not raining so bad now. Actually starting to clear up. But this morning it looked like we were part of the Amazon. Just a huge wash of water coming down. Been rainy here for nearly 2 weeks now. Our yard is a low yard. When it’s not rainy, it looks pretty good. But if it rains very much, it looks soggy. It it rains a lot, it looks half way under water.

Going to the beach next week. Hopefully the sand will be dry.

With all the rain we’ve been getting the past few days/weeks it feels like I’m living in Seattle’s south branch.

Not that I’ve ever been to Seattle…

I was watching the news last night and saw on the Sports that Mississippi State was going to be able to host the first round of a preseason tourney. That’s huge recognition for our basketball program, more games for our team to play against quality opponents, and about $200,000 boosting our local economy. All great stuff, right?

I open up The Daily Journal this morning to these two articles (article #1 and article #2). Seems that the NCAA has a policy of not allowing schools in states where the Confederate flag flies to be a pre-determined site for all championship sporting events. So our historic, tradition laden flag has smacked us.

I remember all the discussion about it in 2001 when it was a national news story. People wanted us to change our state flag because it had the confederate flag in it as well. But we’re Missississpi, by gosh! We don’t take nothing from nobody! And it was a big majority that voted to keep our old flag despite all the advice of how it will hurt our reputation (even more) and future opportunities. But we were stubborn.

To be honest, I don’t like other people trying to force us, as Mississippi, to change our flag just because “they” don’t agree with it. But I’ll admit that I did vote to change the flag. I voted that way because The Flag would be just another issue for the other 49 states to thumb their nose at us. It would be another reason for non-Mississippians to laugh at us. It would be yet another reason for Mississippi to be finishing at the bottom of almost everything.

And it rears its head again…sheesh!

Just found these…since there’s no Friday Five anymore, maybe I’ll do these.

::Friday Feast::

Appetizer
What kind of car do you drive? If you could make an even trade for any other car, what would you want to drive?
An ’88 Honda Accord I got in high school (used). I’d probably want to get a new SUV. Maybe that new cool one from either VW or Nissan. But I’ve been eyeballing the new Toyota Sequoias too.

Soup
Take your phone number and add each number together separately (example: 8+6+7+5+3+0+9=38) – what’s the total?
44

Salad
When were you last outside, and what were you doing?
Meaning other than walking to and from the car to the house? Probably walking the dogs.

Main Course
What is your favorite restaurant, and what do you usually order there?
I don’t know that I really have a favorite, but for the sake of putting something down, I’ll choose Harvey’s. Best thing to get there is probably the New Orleans Seafood Pasta dish or the prime rib.

Dessert
Name 3 things in which you occasionally indulge.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Ice Cream
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Have I ever said that before?

Well, we’re painting up in the youth rooms at church. Lots of green, blue, purple, yellow, orange, red….and it looks good. Really does. I don’t mind rolling, but I hate, absolutely hate detailed stuff with a brush. But I think it’s going to look good in the end.

The goal is to move the two youth Sunday School classes out of the main youth room, put them in rooms of their own, paint them, and then have the wide open youth room set up for larger youth meetings all the time instead of it pulling double duty all the time.

We’ll move some things around, put in some new chairs, hope to get some TV’s and and XBOX or two in there (or PS2, but I’m thinking XBOX) and brighten it up. Right now it’s dull. Someone suggested even some track lighting to point towards the stage we’re going to set up.

The wall in the Jr High Sunday School room looks pretty wild and funky, but cool at the same time. I’ll take a pic of it tomorrow (I always promise pics, don’t I?) and get it up.

But this week is lots of painting. I’m trying to get things situated for our trip to Panama City Beach in two weeks with Big Stuf Camps and get the final kinks worked out on a tshirt for our youth.

A very fun Administrative Council meeting is calling my name in less than an hour. It will be the first such meeting with our new pastor. Hopefully he doesn’t get long winded, but I suspect he will since it’s his first. Some pastors like to try to do a mini-sermon at those…but I’ll be wanting to get out quick for supper. I’m hungry already…

I’ve always loved this story. Made me cry the first few times I read it…honestly.

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. “I hate you!” she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably, the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.
The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car-she calls him “Boss”-teaches her a few things that men like. Since she’s underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse, and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline “Have you seen this child?” But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.

After a year the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and all the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself steeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. “Sleeping” is the wrong word – a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.
Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?” She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.

The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. “She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing, goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads “Welcome home!”
Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eves like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know…”

He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home.”

This is the story of the prodigal son, as retold by Philip Yancey in “What’s So Amazing About Grace.” An unforgettable revelation of the Father’s goodness and grace.

Smoking Kills … duh!

LONDON (Reuters) – Cigarette smokers die on average 10 years earlier than non-smokers but kicking the habit, even at 50 years old, can halve the risk, according to half a century of research reported on Tuesday.

Rest of the story

I’ve never understood the draw to it or the attraction to those who do…

I’d heard about GMail, but wondered if it was an April Fool’s joke. But it’s real. Now I’ve gotten one (thanks to Rick) but really need to start using it more. It seems to be highly desired and wanted, but I need someone to really tell me why GMail is the coolest thing since instant messaging.

It was a good one. I had a great card with tons of letters all over in crayon. The Kid told me what each “word” said, though I think about 85% of all the letters were O’s. “That’s your name right there. And here’s my name. And I drawed Mommy’s name right there.” I have to remember what name is where, because they all look like “OoooOoOOOOooo”.

I also got a new cd (Derek Webb), a book by John Ortberg (4.9 out of 5 stars at Amazon!), and a really cool black and white framed photo of The Kid and me at PickWick last year.

During church yesterday The Kid crawled up into my lap at one point. The preacher was preaching on fathers and Father’s Day and the such. She heard him and turned to me and smiled and said, “Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.” That was probably the best part of the day.

Yesterday was a canoe trip we took with the youth. We went up to Bear Creek and used Bear Creek Canoe Run as our outfitter. Only about an hour & ten minutes away. We’ve used them the last few years for a half day canoe trip. They’re always fun. It’s always interesting seeing the mix of people who go. You have people who can canoe pretty well. They can steer and have a decent amount of power. Then you have those who are better off on the couch watching American Idol or something. And for some reason, there always happens to be a few people who cannot canoe at all end up in the same boat. It’s good for laughs though.

The water was cool, but nice. And the sun not too intense. There was one spot where you could climb up a big rock and slide down on a really slimey water trail. A may did it a few times for us as an example. Made it look easy. He warned that at the bottom you had to be sure to swing your legs into this other rock and bouce off…piece of cake. Only thing that looks bad is the big brown/green streak you get on your butt.

So one of my boys tries it. Slides down lickity-split, and he swings his legs…but in the other direction! SMACK! He slams his back in the rock. It’s not too bad, just looks bad. It builds character. But it’s a small but tough kid. He laughs it off. There was a girl of ours wanting to try it but got a little worried after seeing him go. So the original man does it again. Then his 5 year old daughter does it a few times.

That does it. The girl is doing it. Slide, swing (the wrong way), smack! Girls can be tough, I know. And this one was trying to be. But it hurt. I saw them both in church today and they said they were sore, but okay.

Well I walk down instead of sliding. I know I could have done it. No doubt. I’m cool like that. But I didn’t want the green/brown streak on my shorts (heh heh…yeah, that’s it.) But as I step down into the water onto a huge flat rock, my heel slips and I smack my butt, them my back, then my skull on the rock. It bounces. And it hurts. I wonder if I opened it up. But thankfully it wasn’t. The hurt didn’t linger like I figured it would have. But it took me a little longer to get across the rocks back to the other side of the river.

One of the cool things about the trip was that I saw some friends that I’ve not seen in a long while. They are living up in Huntsville right now and turns out it was just about an hour or so away for them too. I didn’t realize it, but they read my blog some too. That’s pretty cool. But I didn’t think I’d even told them about it. Oh well, small world. Alex has a blog as well, so I figured I’d give him a small shoutout as well.

More Lizzie Cooper updates to follow this week. Took LOTS of pictures. I’ll try to share some.