Think Clearly. Love Deeply. Choose Wisely. Live Boldly.

I’m usually very suspicious of getting something for nothing, or very little. I’ve been doing Swag Bucks for a couple of weeks now, and I ‘m still suspicious, but I’m also impressed.

Swag Bucks are virtual currency. You ‘earn’ them by using the Swag Bucks toolbar for your searches (powered by Google and Ask so you get good results) entering codes that are often hidden on the website, and following Swag Bucks on Twitter and Facebook. The prizes you can ‘buy’ with Swag Bucks are impressive, and as you might suspect the more expensive a prize is in real life, the more Swag Bucks it costs. I’ve been signed up for a couple of weeks now and I’ve earned just under 600 Swag Bucks. That’s a far cry from the 38,000 Swag Bucks you need for the iPhone 3GS, but not bad for the 2800 Swag Buck wireless Xbox 360 controller. All for using a different search bar.

I was also concerned that this was a passing fad, or a business that wouldn’t last long, but Swag Bucks just celebrated its 2nd birthday last week. The drawbacks? Well when you searched some of the first results are ‘Sponsored by’ so you might not get exactly what you’re looking for in the first few hits, the codes that are given out are usually only good for a few hours (I have literally missed some codes by 5 minutes on more than one occasion), and the rewards for searching with the toolbar are random, but that’s OK with me, I usually spend a few minutes each day Googling random stuff.

Then there are the referrals. If you look around swagbucks.com and decide to sign up, I’d appreciate it if you used my referral link. When you win by searching, I’ll win too, so there’s a small bit of “Welcome to Amway” feel, but it’s totally free.  If you don’t like the tool bar, but you still want to win by searching, you can switch your browser bar to use the swagbucks engine.

No pressure.  I’m not giving out emails or anything like that.  When I win something cool I might post it on Facebook.  Give it a look and if you decide to sign up, I’d appreciate the referral.

I’m just now getting into this band, though I love They Might Be Giants.  I liked their video to “Here It Goes Again” in which they performed on moving treadmills.  This new song has them the victims of an elaborate Rube Goldberg apparatus.  Enjoy.

A facepalm is just that: when you smack your face with your palm because of disgust, despair, or frustration.

Now, normally, I love AT&T customer service.  I have always had pretty good results from them and they have been kind, courteous, and knowledgeable.  I realize I might be in the minority with that, but so be it.

We upgraded phones for Katie back in November.  We thought it would be OK, but it’s not a great phone.  She didn’t like it, and after playing with it a bit, I didn’t either.  Of course, it was too late to take it back, they never give you an exchange period longer than the learning curve, so we felt like we were stuck.  Then another friend upgraded from the original iPhone to the new 3Gs and offered to sell us the old iPhone at a price we could get for Katie’s phone on Craigslist.

They told me on the phone that for Katie’s iPhone to work we would have to have a sim card that had never been in another phone.  I confirmed this when the iPhone arrived by trying Katie’s current sim card in the iPhone.  It would only let us make an emergency call.   Off to the AT&T store down in Cool Springs where we picked up her sim card.  Took it back home and activated the phone in iTunes.  Now for the dilemma: Katie’s contacts were all on her old phone.  I had been warned about the sim card and tested it myself, so I was worried about how to transfer.  I tried pushing a few via bluetooth to my laptop then to the iPhone, but that was going to take forever.  I called customer service.

[Introductory conversation where they verify my identity]

Me: I have these three models of phone.  I’m trying to get the contacts from one phone to an iPhone.  I don’t have a PC.  I was told the sim card needed to be brand new in the iPhone. Will any of them sync to a Mac?

AT&T: Hmmm, no.  Have you tried sending them via bluetooth?

Me: Can you send more than one at a time?

AT&T: No, I don’t think you can.

Me: I guess I could borrow a friend’s PC, synch up the contacts, export it as a CSV, then import it to the Mac, import it into Address Book and sync that way.

[this goes on for a few minutes, exchanging ideas, brainstorming.  Then,]

AT&T: You know, as a last resort, you could take the sim card in the iPhone, put it in the old phone, copy the contacts, then put it back in the iPhone and go to Settings, Mail, and import from sim card.  I don’t know how well that will work…

Me: *facepalm* So, once I initialized the sim card in the iPhone, I can use it in other phones?

AT&T: Oh sure.  That shouldn’t be a problem, but I’d only do that if you can’t find a friend’s PC.

Me: Thank you.

3 minutes later, I had Katie’s contacts in her iPhone.  I know you can’t bat 1.000, and I’m not really complaining.  More sharing because it was funny.

Oh, and Katie loves her iPhone.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner.
Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.   –Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Naval Treaty

I am a big fan of things that seem insignificant, but in Truth and Reality are extremely important.  Sometimes you can go for days and years looking over something extraordinary, and then you suddenly see it anew.  Have you ever taken a “shortcut” (that word must have quotations when used in reference to Nashville) you’ve never taken, and find yourself at a T-intersection with no street sign?  Everything looks strange for a moment, then you realize you not only know where you are, but you are on a road you travel often?  You don’t recognize it because you’ve come at it from a different angle.  This event is known as “mooreeffoc” and I enjoy those moments.

Take this quote from Dostoevky’s The Brothers Karamozov.  It’s one of the last lines of the book.  The protagonist, Alyosha, a young priest, is returning from the funeral of a young boy and walking down the street with some of the younster’s friends.  These children, being unacquainted with death, are not sure how to act at the upcoming memorial dinner.  Alyosha tells them:

‘Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes.  It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there’s good in that, too,’ laughed Alyosha.

Pancakes.  A simple goodness that God gives us.  It is one of the little good things among millions of other good things we have.  When people recognize this, and show us the mooreeffoc of pancakes, then it can show us just how good God is.

Which brings me to Hellboy.  Not the movie.  It was a comic long before it was two films.  (I enjoyed both of them by the way).  The big story is the redemption of a demon.  Set aside the theological consistencies for a moment.  I’m aware.  My point is that Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, can tell a short story very well that makes you stop and think.  I’ll leave you with this two pager.  Makes you think.

I’m hungry.

(Hellboy (c) Mike Mignola, published Dark Horse)

Well, our stuff got to China just in time for Chinese New Year.  So, our Date to China (DTC) still hasn’t happened yet, because that only occurs when you’re logged into the system.  We’re hoping that early next week we’ll be logged in.

We went to a local Chinese New Year celebration last night.  Sophie had a blast.  There was a dragon dance and some crafts.  It was held at a children’s museum in Murfreesboro and I had a good time walking around looking at the exhibits.

I had a big, long reflective post typed up, but decided against publishing it.  Please add my friends, the Stallings to your prayer lists.  E. went in to the ER a few days ago after two weeks of throat pain and trouble swallowing and they found a tumor.  It has spread.  The prognosis is not hopeless, but everyone is still waiting to see the plan of attack the oncologists come up with.

I am so thankful for their friendship and I am more thankful that I serve a big God who was not surprised.

So, we are in a holding pattern, and we’re thankful to be up in the air.  It’s been two years since we started this journey and our hope and prayer is that we will be able to bring Shepherd home this summer.  Once our DTC happens and we get a preliminary match we can post the pictures we have of him.  He’s a cutie.  Although some of the pics have him in pink jellies (hold on, son, Daddy’s coming) there’s another one where he is totally doing a Spider-Man pose.

I love it when folks (especially kids) do unintentional pop culture poses.  Sophie totally struck this one during our recent snowfall.

How’s that for random?

Hope all are well.

Soli Deo Gloria.

We just finished with Spiritual Emphasis Week at BA.  We topped it off with a Christian Illusionist.  Now, I know what you’re thinking;  in a week where the guest speakers include Sean Tuohy, the father portrayed by Tim McGraw in “The Blind Side”, and Zac Sunderland, the youngest person to sail solo around the world, you might be tempted to write off an illusionist who goes by the name of “Harris III” as cheesy filler.

You would be wrong.

He started out the show with some simple tricks.  He then went into a great presentation about how deception works.  He told a little of his testimony, how he has performed on 5 continents and at the age of 18 was pulling down more scratch in a year than I will in 5, and how that lifestyle was deceptive.  He encouraged all of us to not trust what we see or hear or think, but to search for the Truth.  The deception comes in advertisements, messages from others, and Hollywood Lifestyles.  Not to knock any of our other speakers; it was a great week, but I think on a personal level I enjoyed this one the most.

I gained a slightly new look at 2 Corinthians 5:7, “for we walk by faith, not by sight.”  That doesn’t mean we don’t believe what we see.  That means that our senses, and our sensibilities (sorry Ms. Austen) can be deceived and we should have our skepticals on.

Harris III ended the show with an incredible illusion that we’ve all seen on TV, but was extremely impressive live.  It was Houdini’s Triple Escape where the magician and the assistant swap places inside handcuffs, inside a canvas bag, inside a padlocked crate..  What I found interesting, and why I titled this post what I did, was that as I listened to the conversation of the students and faculty as we left the gymnasium, it seemed that the younger kids were saying things like, “Wow”, “That was amazing!” and enjoying the mystery.  The older students and faculty were discussing how he did it.  I found myself in the latter group.

Then, I realized that I do that too much in other areas.  I get more caught up in explaining the mysteries like the duality of Christ, or the Triune God, or how an eternal God can die than I am in just saying “Wow.  That was amazing!”  That’s not to say that we cast doctrinal truth aside, or we stop digging for answers, but we shouldn’t let the academia of theology replace the wonder of Grace and Mercy.  It should enhance it.  Guilty.

On a side note, rabbits fighting, while serious (they can kill one another) are humorous to watch.

I have to admit that I didn’t get to see the “controversial” Tim Tebow commercial as we were driving to a Superbowl party and arrived late.  Such is life with kids.

I thought the commercials were a bit lame this year.  The two underwear themed commercials back to back were a bit much.

I think my favorite one was the Volkswagon commercial where everyone was playing punch-bug.  The close runner up was the Griswold family.

I stand corrected.  I missed this one when it aired.  Classic!

Which Superbowl ads were your favorite?

With the server swapping I haven’t been able to update folks on our adoption status.

We received our approval from the US Department of Homeland Security for adoption of a child from a Hague Country.  That basically means that we’ve passed all the checks on the US side of things.  Hopefully our dossier will be headed to China this week.  There’s still no way to accurately know when we will travel, but May/June/July seems realistic.

We also received an update on Shepherd.  He has grown some and he is actually on the curve in some respects.  He also has either chicken pox or something called Molluscum contagiosum.  Not a huge deal either way, but that up to 18 months of being contagious doesn’t sound like fun.  Pray for a quick healing, whichever one he has.

We still can’t post pictures yet, but hopefully we can soon.  We’ve got some good ones.

Thanks for your prayers.

I’ve added some forums to Infinity and Jelly Donuts.  Feel free to register and look around.

http://infinityandjellydonuts.com/phpBB3/index.php

A couple of the forums are password protected.  I’m involved in a couple of book studies and I’m providing the place for the group discussion.  If you want to read along with us and discuss, let me know and I’ll let you in.

Expect minor tweaks to the layout, but I’m pretty happy with the theme.

Any other categories you’d like to see?

I had it called to my attention that somehow registration was disabled on the blog.  I also had a setting checked where someone had to be a registered user and logged in to post a comment.  I think I have it fixed for now.  I’m looking into some plugins that will double check the humanity of any registering users and posters to discourage spam bots.

I’m really, really sorry about that.

Sign up and comment away.

Sorry we were down for a few days.  I moved my website from one server to another.  I think we’ve got the kinks out now.

Welcome back, Internet!

This is a pretty amazing App.  Shazam will listen to whatever music you are listening to and then fetch the title and album information. Ever hear the last part of a song on the radio that’s catchy and the DJ doesn’t say the name? Let Shazam listen.

I put it to the test.  Katie had quite a few songs in her iTunes that were mix CD’s and therefore they just said “Track 1″ etc.  In fact I think she had about three albums that were all in there as track numbers.  I put Shazam to work and it was able to find almost all of them just by listening.  It seems to have the most trouble with percussion, guitar, etc. because some of Katie’s folk songs were unrecognized.  I skipped over to the middle of the song and had better results than Shazam listening to the beginning.  I *think* it puts the music it hears into a mathematical algorithm and then matches it to a database: musical gene sequencing if you will.  Despite it not handling voices or live music, it was good enough to distinguish between the Queen/David Bowie song “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby”. That’s right.  I put it to the test.

Shazam is free in the App Store.  You can buy the (RED) version for $4.99 and a portion goes to fight AIDS in Africa and you have the added ability to look up concert tours.

What are some of *your* favorite apps?

Today we received our I-797C, Notice of Action.

That means that the government has cashed our check and we are in the system.  Next we will receive a date to go and get our fingerprints taken.  Excuse me, “biometrics”.

Closer and closer.

Well, I did it.  I think this might be the only New Year’s Resolution I have ever kept.  I got off schedule a bit, and I didn’t stick to the original idea of having each week correspond to a particular theme, but I managed to read through 52 books in 2009.  I did enjoy it and I enjoyed sharing my thoughts on them with you.

I’m not making a 2010 book-based New Year’s resolution, but I do have reading plans.  I think after a year of new books, that it might be time to revisit some old favorites, and some that I’ve been promising myself to read and couldn’t get to in 2009 because I knew I couldn’t finish them in a week.

So what’s on tap for 2010?  I’m not entirely sure, but I hope it can include:

The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  I read this once several years ago.  It was one of the hardest and one of the best books I have read.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  This is my favorite American novel and quite possibly my favorite novel, period.  I try to reread it every few years and it’s due.

Watership Down: A Novel by Richard Adams.  Another favorite.  The last page makes me cry.  Every time.  It is the rabbit equivalent of “Well done, though good and faithful servant.”

Ivanhoe (Penguin Classics) by Sir Walter Scott.  I’ve started this one several times, but never got through it.

That’s fiction.  I also plan to read some non-fiction.  I think one thing I have learned from the past year of reading is that I like biographies more than I thought I did.

I’ll probably post the occasional book review here just to keep myself honest.  Right now I have about 6 months of Field & Stream to catch up on.

Keep reading.

OK, the final book of the A Book A Week series and I wish I had something spectacular for you, but I don’t.  I downloaded this book to my iPod’s Kindle reader because it was free.  I have been reading it slowly since October or so.  I really want some of you to read this book, or to hear from some of you who have read this book because I can’t tell if Farley is a genius or a heretic.

OK, maybe heretic is a bit too much, but some of the stuff he says in here makes good, biblical sense, and it makes biblical sense in a scary sort of way.  I just finished it this morning, and I am still processing, and it might get a reread.  On the one hand he lays out the gospel in a very straightforward and easy to understand way.  he tries to free us from some of the ‘religion’ that many of us grew up with.  I know I am a recovering Pharisee and it will be a battle I struggle with for a long time.  Farley does a good job of explaining being dead to sin and what Christ did for us on the cross.  Maybe my hesitation is me trying to hold on to that legalism I put myself under for so many years, or maybe it’s my common sense tingling.  I don’t know.

If you’ve read this one, chime in.  I’d love to hear your take.

Sophie got me this book for Christmas.  That needs some explanation.

This year we wanted to teach Sophie about giving gifts as well as getting them, so we loaded up the car on Christmas Eve and headed to Thrift Smart.  Then Katie and I took turns taking Sophie around and shopping for the other parent.  It was a lot of fun and on Christmas Eve teachers got 50% off.  There was some guidance from us, but some things Sophie just picked on her own.

If you have ever watched Al Roker on television, then what you see is what you get.  Reading this book I could hear his voice in my head speaking.  There were some corny jokes (that’s Al), and his love of cartoons came shining through (I think Sophie picked it because of the cover that’s not shown in the image above, but one Al drew for the paperback), but there was a little more depth than you get from us watching him do the weather.  I disagreed with some of what he had to say on parenting, but I found his opening up to share about his world of divorce, adoption, infertility, and marriage quite touching (not necessarily in that order).

If you like Al, give this one a try.  I’m not a Roker fan, but I am a Sophie fan, and that’s why I read it.  Through that, I came to appreciate Al Roker a little more.

If you’ve lived in Nashville for a while and consider yourselves even slightly political, you’ve probably heard of Teddy Bart’s Round Table.  It was a show that aired on both radio and the local public access channel.  I enjoyed it, even though I found myself disagreeing as much as agreeing because Teddy and crew discussed the issues rationally and without a lot of rhetoric.  It was entertaining and educational.  Teddy’s cohost was a lady named Karlen Evins.

Karlen has written a few books, and I think they all deal with etymology.  If you like word origins and phrase origins you might want to check her out.  This book, her latest, was my first foray into her world.  It was a quick read, but it was enjoyable.  A lot of the phrases I was familiar with, but she gives some good insight into a lot of the meanings behind the phrases (She has an MDiv from Vanderbilt).  I found myself thinking about a few passages in a way I hadn’t before and that alone was worth the read.

“The beauty of the star [in the east] smote Sam’s heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him.”  J.R.R. Tolkien
“The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus means that one day everything sad will come untrue.”  J.R.R. Tolkien

“He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.”  Roy L. Smith

“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”  ~Charles Dickens

“There has been only one Christmas – the rest are anniversaries.”  ~W.J. Cameron

We sent our paperwork off to Texas (USCIS) and Utah (our agency) yesterday and overnighted it via FedEx.  Marilyn, our contact at our agency emailed me and said she sent it on to Washington.  It will be authenticated by the US Secretary of State and then it will go to the Chinese Embassy.  After that it will be sent to Beijing for translation and processing.

We have both been a bit nervous because we’re not officially matched with Shepherd yet, but that day is getting closer.

I’ve got a couple more books to post about, but if I don’t get to it before Friday, Merry Christmas.