Life on Snow Hill

Lately there are things that keep happening that are inspiring me to try to get back into music a little bit.  For instance, a good while back Becky and I decided we wanted to try to learn a song or two to be able to sing in church.  Mostly if not completely my fault, we haven’t learned anything yet.  One of the new churches we’re visiting has asked us if we sing, so there’s one thing.

I went to my cousin’s house one day to pick up some eggs (of all things, I know).  Her daughter was in her room practicing the piano, and when I came in she asked me to play a certain southern style of “I’ll Fly Away” for her so she could hear it and try to learn that style.  It’s been forever since I played that song, much less that style, so I wasn’t able to do it.

It’s just little things like that.  I’m thinking more and more of needing to get back on the piano, or my guitars.  I also have a mandoline, fiddle and banjo that I can’t play.  I need to learn how to play those.  I love the way they all sound – I just haven’t taken the time to learn to make that sound myself.

So I’m trying to inspire myself even more with this photo I took of the fretboard on my bass guitar.  I’ve also got a music theme background on my computer, so that every time I sit down to use it, I see it.  I’ll get there one day.

Tags: guitar, Music, piano

This story has already made national headlines.  Here is a link to a local TV News channel’s coverage of the story.  I won’t go into the details of the incident itself, so I urge you to read the story if you’re not already familiar with it.

What I did want to comment on is that I’m fairly surprised that there wasn’t someone in that church that was armed.  We’re in East Tennessee, a generally rural region, which is an area where most people like their guns, and quite a few follow the necessary steps to obtain a state-issued carry permit.

I’ve heard of way too many church shootings around the country in the past couple of years.  It seemed that each story I heard was literally closer to home.  I live about an hour’s drive from Knoxville, and this is the closest it’s gotten (so far).  I do have a carry permit, and I carry everywhere that it is legal.  I refuse to be in a situation such as the one these approximately 200 people were in – defenseless and helpless, their fate resting on the whim of an individual wanting to cause as much harm as possible.

Surprisingly, I haven’t heard the first thing about gun-control in this case.  Maybe, just maybe, they’re backing down a bit since the ruling of the Supreme Court on the 2nd Amendment meaning what it says.  But it could be too that they’re waiting until after the election to push it too hard in hopes that Obama will get into the White House.  Then they’ll really start pushing it.

On the church itself, I’ll make a few comments.  I don’t want to sound insensitive in these comments, so I’ll preface them by saying that if a gunman walked into a Hell Raiser’s biker bar and started shooting, it is just as wrong.  That said, a Unitarian Universalist ‘Church’ doesn’t stand for anything.  About the only good thing they believe in is the freedom of religious expression.  It is a lot of what this country was founded upon.  Beyond that, their beliefs consist of individuals developing their own personal theologies, tolerance of religious ideas (every religion has merit), and on and on.  Basically, anything goes, as long as it feels good.  Nothing is mentioned of the Bible at all on this particular church’s website.  Come to think of it, after browsing around a couple of other Unitarian Universalist ‘Churches’, I can’t find any mention of the Bible at all.

It was a violent incident that occurred in this auditorium, and I truly feel for the people that experienced it.  But I can’t bring myself to call them a church congregation, for they are not truly a church.

Today on my lunch break Becky and I went out to the garden.  There were several things that needed to be picked or dug, so we set to work.  We had it all done in about half an hour.

In this photo (You can click it to make it bigger) you can see carrots, squash, zucchini, potatoes and cucumbers.

There were a ton of carrots – all of them that were planted in fact.  We probably dug out about 5 earlier in the year, but we decided these were all big enough.  So we have a pretty big pile of them.  We just need to cut the tops off and clean them up so that we can get ‘em in the fridge.

We’ve been getting squash and zucchini for a while now, so those aren’t as big a deal – they just add to the grand total.

The potatoes are the first that we dug up this year.  They look to be in good shape, but we need to cut into them to see if there are any of those tiny little black worms.  My dad hasn’t been able to grow potatoes because of those stupid worms.  Maybe they’ll be okay in the ground I have.

And last but not least, we have another big mess of cucumbers.  There are probably enough (15 lbs) to do another batch of pickles.  We’ll see though.

We had to use the wheelbarrow to get all of these veggies out of the garden.  Now we just need to get to work on getting them cleaned up and in the refrigerator so they won’t go bad!

Although I only got one response yesterday, I went ahead and set up a brand spankin’ new photoblog called jsnowphotos.com.  Yesterday it forced me to get outside after a big rain shower and snap a few photos of the sunflowers out in the garden.  I forgot how much fun it is just to take pictures just for the fun of it.  Hopefully this new site will keep me going with it, and at the same time help me to get better.

I’ve put a link over on the right side of my page to make it easy to find.  This new site also allows for comments on the photos, so please let me know what you think of them – good or bad!

Thanks for visiting!

Due to several things that I won’t go into here, the church that Becky and I attend has disbanded.  So, we are visiting other churches looking for God’s will in where we ought to go.  This visiting has gotten me to think about how certain things are handled, and whether the way they are handled is Biblical or not.  One thing specifically came to mind at a church I visited a few years ago for a play.

I don’t recall much detail about the play itself other than it showcased several examples of people, young and old, and everywhere in between.  It showed their lives and whether or not they had accepted Christ.  They had a nice big stairway that led up to the gates of Heaven – I don’t remember how Hell was portrayed, but it was there as well for those who never repented.

The play was organized and directed by some company that the church hired.  After the play, an employee of this company (I’m assuming the director of the play itself) stood on stage and gave the gospel in a nutshell.  After that, he proceeded to call all of the youth to the front of the church.  He then led a mass ‘repeat after me feel-good prayer’ and declared all of them saved.

It would be great to be able to believe they all repented and received Christ as their Savior that night, but unfortunately it is not the case.  On the contrary, that man probably made most of them a two-fold child of Hell.  Simply because a lot of them went forward because their friends did, and others because a lot had already gone forward and it was the popular thing to do at the time.  For the rest of their lives, they’ll bet their eternal existence on that experience.

I’ve decided that lately I’ve been severely lacking in furthering my photography skills.  In other words, I have been really lazy and don’t take my camera out of its bag nearly as much as I used to.  So I’ve come up with an idea, and hopefully you, my loyal readers, will help me out with it.

I think that buying a new domain (Only $9.99/year at GoDaddy.com) and setting up a dedicated photoblog will force me to take more photos.

I’m doing some research today on the best way to set up the site itself, and I may even get it installed and running today.  But I wanted to try to get some feedback from you guys to see if it might be a good idea.  (I might go ahead with it even if you don’t respond..but some encouragement would be nice. )

Let me back up a bit and start with Thursday.  I mowed the yard for the first time in what seemed like forever.  Some of my grass was at least 6 inches high if not more.  Needless to say, when I mowed that area, I had huge clumps of cut grass all over the place.  Not a pretty site.

Fast forward to Saturday.  I mowed the yard again after giving the cut grass a chance to die, and the rest of the grass a bit of a chance to grow a little more.  It was a little more enjoyable this time (I normally love mowing the yard, but not last Thursday!) because I didn’t have to poke along in the thick areas.  I did, however, have to go over those areas twice so that the clumps of grass would spread out a little more and make the yard look more presentable.  That was what I spent most of my time doing.

The first thing I did, however, was to go out and run the weed-eater.  I really hate that part of yard work, and I conveniently skipped it the last 2 or 3 times I mowed.  Things were starting to look really bad, though, and I knew it really had to be done.  So I got out of bed and started it first thing so that it wouldn’t be too hot, and I’d still be willing to mow later on in the day.  There were 4 flower beds and a strawberry patch that was way overgrown.  Normally I’d blame Becky (:)) but she’s been hurt, and I honestly haven’t been able to keep up with everything outside.  So the weed-eater took care of all of those, and they look at least manageable again.

A lot of the rest of the day I helped Becky out with a few things here and there.  I got some time in on the PS3 as well, but with my help, Becky got some bread & butter pickles done (15+ pounds of cucumbers worth!), got the smaller fish tank cleaned up and a few other smaller things throughout the house.

At the end of the day, we were both worn out, but were happy with the things we’d accomplished.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, July 16, 2008) is the 17th Annual Ride to Work day.  Basically, the idea is to promote motorcycling as a legitimate means of transportation, not only on the 3rd Wednesday of every July, but each day of the year.

There are tons of facts and information on traffic congestion, gasoline usage and parking space, and how riding motorcycles rather than driving a car really help out in those areas.  For example, in cities where a parking space is a real pain to find, riding a motorcycle can help simply because 3-5 motorcycles (depending on their size, of course) can fit in the same space as a single car.

I’m already doing my part, because I ride to work and anywhere else I can get away with.  As long as I don’t have to haul something that I can’t handle on the motorcycle, I’m riding it.  I calculated my MPG one day, and my bike gets right around 44 MPG.  My truck (my only other vehicle at this time) gets about 15 MPG.  You can see a huge cost savings right there alone.  Especially since I drive 30 miles one way to work.  That’s 60 miles every day – 300 miles a week!  That’s a savings of just over 13 gallons of gas each week, and at around $4 per gallon (I picked an even number, but it’s close), that’s a savings of $52 a week, or a little over $200 a month!  Yep, I’ve just paid for the new set of tires for my bike just by riding it for a month.

The latest and greatest version of WordPress is out and available for download.  Here’s a video explaining some of the newest features:

The biggest features I’d like to point out are:

• Post revisions – WordPress now keeps multiple versions of your posts, so if you make a change to a post, you can always go back to the original (Or any other version you may have saved).
• Gears - a browser extension that basically creates a ‘local server’.  Or, in other words, it caches commonly used javascript and CSS files locally to speed up page loads.  There is a lot of potential for Gears, so keep an eye on this one.
• Theme Previews – Pretty self-explanatory.  Without ‘applying’ the theme to your entire site, you can see what it will look like before you make it a real change.

There are many more smaller features listed in the official announcement.

First of all, I’d like to bring to your attention my opinion of this sorry excuse for a man. (Jesse Jackson, that is)  He’s a racist anti-American and doesn’t deserve to live in this great country.  For what it’s worth, my opinion of Barack Hussein Obama isn’t much different.

Last Sunday, Jesse said of Hussein, and I quote, "See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based . . . I wanna cut his —- off."  But don’t take my word for it – you can see the video here.

Jackson said in a press conference later in the week, "And this thing I said in a hot-mic statement that’s interpreted as a distraction, I offer apology for that.  I don’t want harm or hurt to come to this campaign."  Jackson said that he was trying to emphasize that Hussein’s moral message should "not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy."  He took issue with Hussein’s statements about how black men failed to uphold their responsibility as fathers.  Jackson said other issues should be highlighted, including unemployment, the mortgage crisis and the number of blacks in prison.

I’ve given my opinion on unemployment in the past, so I won’t go into that.  As for the mortgage crisis, if people wouldn’t get in over their heads it wouldn’t be such a big deal.  And as for blacks in prison, if they’d stop committing crimes, they just might not go to prison.  They’re tried by jury just like white people are…

If there is anything good that Hussein has said, it’s that fathers need to stick around and be responsible.  And Jackson is taking issue with it.  Really though, they’re all just a bunch of idiots.