Blizzard of 2011

Tuesday overnight (2/01/11) a blizzard hit our region. We received 12" - 16" of new snow.

That evening I was out driving around for a little bit. My car nearly got stuck leaving a subdivision. And the high wind gusts made it difficult to determine whether there was oncoming traffic when I was trying to get out. But it all worked out okay.

Later I went to a store to get milk, etc. Amazing how empty stores get once a blizzard has started!

Next morning, we woke up to discover over a foot of new snow. SNOW DAY! Except for Sarah, who really needed to go in to work. Unfortunately, the van got stuck in the snow on the road in front of our driveway... just too deep. But we got the van back up the driveway okay.

The county plowed our road around mid-afternoon. Sarah was finally able to leave for work! I left after her to clear my parents' driveway. Their little snowblower valiantly removed lots of snow from their driveway!

driveway, with lots of snow

ducks' creek is starting to freeze

bush with snow

Coffee + Energy Drink = Awesome

I generally dislike so-called energy drinks, such as Red Bull, for two reasons:

1) they all have a weird taste (maybe from taurine?), and
2) they're super expensive.

Yesterday morning on my drive to work I picked up a Java Monster Nut-Up. It was tasty!

Java Monster is Monster's coffee-based line of beverages, tasting like coffee with sweetener and cream plus extra flavoring and Monster's special "energy blend". The Nut-Up tastes like it has hazelnut flavoring. Monster is pretty vague about how much caffeine is in a can, but several web sites claim it is 160mg for a 16oz can (which is what I had). It tastes good, and is good for you!

Before you get too excited about that caffeine content, just remember that 16oz of brewed coffee, if brewed pretty strong (like how I usually make it), could surpass that amount.

Anyway... I definitely liked it. But it's still much too expensive ($2.50). For me, it's priced as a luxury... if it were between $1.00 and $1.50 I'd probably buy it more often.

My daily Bible reading is currently going through the Book of Job. Very interesting. One can really sense Job's frustration at not understanding why God had brought all these calamities into his life when he believed he'd all along lived as God had wanted him to live. His friends' general lack of encouragement adds to Job's frustrations. Here's an example exchange:

Job's friends: Job, just confess to whatever horrible thing you did and God will restore you.
Job: But I didn't do anything wrong!
Job's friends: Whatever.

UPDATE: Yes, I know that "energy" is misspelled in the link for this post. I corrected the spelling in the title, though.

Happy Birthday!

On Sunday, most of late morning and afternoon large snowflakes fell from the sky. Not much accumulation, though it was nice watching the snow fall.

Dan Seaborn spoke in church that morning, talking about how easily we see the "fixable" flaws in others while ignoring the flaws in our own lives that we ought to be working on. But how can we change? We need wisdom from God. But we might doubt it'll work because a) we're human, b) we believe God's let us down before, c) people have let us down, or d) when we ask God for help, we already know what the best solution is. (Or so we believe.) Wisdom (application of knowledge) can come from time along with God/the Bible, others (we need to be willing to ask for wisdom, and willing to listen), or from our observations of life.

Sarah and I got lunch from Subway. I got their limited-time pastrami.  So, so good.

Tim was unsuccessful in his attempt to cut off part of his finger while slicing bread. Sometimes it's good to fail. :)

Later that evening, I attended the next meeting of a creation writing fellowship committee. Very interesting, though due at least to weather, only three total people showed up. Dave gave a presentation of his views of how chance possibly plays a part in God's design.

The roads were delightfully icy this morning, at least in Holland and Zeeland. I almost slid through a "T" intersection near our house. Glad I have anti-lock brakes!

Sarah holding co-worker's baby

After supper, Sarah and I visited her co-worker... she'd just given birth to her daughter earlier in the day. As you can tell from the picture, Sarah loves holding babies. :)

An Epiphany

Today is the Christian holiday of Epiphany, which commemorates the visitation by the wise men from the East (and by extension the revelation of Christ's coming to gentiles) as described in Matthew 2.

(The Christmas carol The Twelves Days of Christmas covers the days between Christmas and Epiphany, i.e., the twelve days of Christmas.)

Generally, the churches I've attend throughout my life have been Christian churches that didn't really observe the liturgical calendar... nearly all Baptist, and one Wesleyan. When I was young, I was pretty oblivious to the existence of such Christian holidays. I heard about Lent ("something about giving up chocolate for a week") and how Catholics typically (at least back in the day) had fish on Fridays. I'm not sure why some denominations stopped observing those holidays... probably having to do with concerns about legalism or a perception of form becoming too important. I think though that the result is that many Christians have lost a connection to the historical richness of their religion.

This morning some members of Congress read aloud the text of the Constitution from the floor of the House to kick off the beginning of the 112th Congress. I'm glad they did, and I think they should continue doing this at the opening of each subsequent congress. They all already swear an oath to uphold it... it's good for them to have a regular reminder of what it actually says.

Charles Krauthammer, a political commentator I greatly admire, remarked yesterday about the transfer of power from the 111th to the 112th Congress:

I’m always struck — I’m a sucker for this — the quiet majesty of the transfer of power. We are a country that’s been doing it for almost a quarter of a millennium, and to see it, even though it’s not at the presidential level but at the House level, is still impressive. [link to source at NRO]

I couldn't agree more.

Remember the massive snow storm that struck the east coast at the end of December, 2010? They received so much snow, it was like Hoth there, requiring the use of All Terrain Armored Transport vehicles in NYC. for moving around the city. More here at Gothamist.

A Different Kind of War

Not too much had happened yesterday. I felt really tired all day... stupid Monday. In the evening, Sarah found some card games. She and I played Non-Violent Politically Correct War. It's like the regular card game War, except that to win you need to get rid of all your cards. Plus, all the cards have on them nice PC terms like "unity", "diversity" and "peace". Though the Joker card looks like a cross between Rambo and Duke Nukem.  Sarah won, in case you were wondering. By the way, here's a link to the rules.

Overnight we received a few inches of snow. Nice to see the world covered in fresh snow again.

A co-worker at my day job celebrated 25 years with the company today. Hard to imagine working at the same company for so long. The cakes were all pretty good... they had three kinds:

• white with raspberry jam in middle layer,
• chocolate marble with bavarian cream middle layer, and
• chocolate with chocolate icing.

Sarah made empanadas tonight for supper, using a filling I'd made this morning of browned taco meat and chopped onions and green pepper. Mmm... The dough she used was left over from Dutch pigs in a blanket. (If you're up here in Dutch country, be sure to get some. They rock!)

After supper I had an LCS appointment to help a previous customer with a problem he was having with email software and his ISP's email servers. As far as I could tell, the problem was with the ISP. Very strange. And then his email software suddenly started working anyway! I think the ISP's email server doesn't like having multiple email software accessing the same mail account within some arbitrary time frame. Regardless, the customer had already created a Gmail account, so with his permission I set the ISP email to auto-forward everything to there, which I what I've been doing for years.