Most. Offensive. Lacing Card. Ever.

We were having family devotions when I glanced over at some toys on Elijah's bedroom floor. One of them was a lacing card that I think Tiffany bought at a thrift store or garage sale. I thought, "What on earth... It can't be." But, yes, the more I look at it, the more the lacing card looks like a blue klansman.

Ok, I'll admit that I added the lace noose, but it's purely to help you see it as I saw it.

Anyway, I drove to Bolivar and back today to pick up Tiffany & Elijah and bring them back home. Tomorrow, we're all headed off on a long weekend to Spring Lake Wesleyan Church in Spring Lake, Michigan. That is, we're leaving, weather permitting. It's looking like it might be a little yukky tomorrow.

BreakPointe

I was a little reluctant to haul out of bed at 5:00 this morning, but I knew I needed to finish up my slideshow for this morning's service. Usually, we have had the full service in most churches we have visited, but today we were only having 10 minutes in the adult worship service and a longer time with the children.

After reading email and finishing the PowerPoint presentation, I did half an hour on Dance Dance Dance. I was in the expert level for the entire time, so I managed to work up a bit of a sweat.

When Tiffany came down, I opened up the blinds to discover that we were in the midst of a heavy snowfall. We began to wonder if our service was actually going to happen. KCI was closed, and a number of other churches were also announcing cancellations, but there was nothing from BreakPointe, so we pressed on with plans.

I had a bowl of gravel--er, GrapeNuts--and a boiled egg for breakfast, and then got myself and Elijah dressed and ready for church. The service did go on as planned, but the attendance was severely hurt by the bad weather. The people at BreakPointe really welcomed us, maybe to a fault. We were having a hard time getting our display set up and getting PowerPoint stuff arranged, because so many people were greeting us. For some reason, the video guy in the sanctuary wasn't able to import my presentation into Media Shout, but it ran okay directly through PowerPoint. Then, I went upstairs to load the lyrics for a Tagalog song Tiffany was teaching onto the kids' computer. They have their USB hub wedged into a completely inaccessible place, so inserting a jump drive was quite a challenge. We finally got everything set up though.

I went down to the worship service, while Tiff stayed with the kids. She taught them a bunch of games that kids in the Philippines play. Here are some of the kids playing jump rope with rubber bands.



I did my ten-minute spiel with the adults, and then Pastor Tom came up and asked me a few more questions. He asked me how much we needed to raise, and my mind momentarily went blank. I said $68,000; even though we actually need more than $76,000 a year. I got that question right in the second service; I wonder if people who were in both services got a little confused. After talking to the adults, I headed up to the kids' department and spent about half an hour up there.

how I wasted my day

I feel a little guilty about the fact that I never blog. I really don't have anything important to write about today either, so I'm just going to write about my day. I think that's what I'm going to do, anyway. If you don't like it... well, you get what you pay for.

I slept in a little today. I think I stayed up last night trying to watch Elektra or something, to no avail. When I woke up, I came downstairs and watched the first hour or so of I Spy (the Eddie Murphy/Owen Wilson remake), until Elijah woke up and bumped me off the TV so he could watch Playhouse Disney. During commercials and after I got bumped, I worked in half an hour or so of Veggie Tales Dance Dance Dance. I was in and out of expert level this morning, not really very focused.

Tiffany made a nice breakfast of biscuits & gravy, and then I headed out for some weekend geocaching. I took Elijah along with me, and we headed out to look for a couple of caches I hadn't been able to find. We spotted the Brookside Area Cache about 80 feet south of where the coordinates had said it would be. Fortunately, with the trees so bare and no snow on the ground, hiding places are a little more obvious. The cache container was an ammo box that was frozen, but I was able to get it open and swap travel bugs. The one I picked up is supposed to go to Bond film locations. I don't think there are any around here, are there?

Then we went after a previous DNF in Loose Park's rose garden. This was a very cleverly hidden cache. It was just a strip of paper on the back of some magnetic numbers stuck to a metal utility box. I'm pretty sure I had looked at those numbers on a previous occasion, but I had no idea that I could just pull them right off.

We were close to the plaza, so we tried a few caches there too. There was a virtual cache that was supposed to be a quarter stuck to the sidewalk in front of the Raphael, but the quarter was missing. We tried a couple of fountain tour caches on the plaza, but I didn't have much faith that either one was actually still there. Even though there aren't as many muggles on the plaza on Saturday morning as there are at other times, I still felt a little conspicuous pawing through the shrubbery surrounding the fountains. Finally, we had better luck near the J.C. Nichols fountain. That one has memories for me.

Many years ago, Heartland had an all-night bowling fundraiser. I think they actually lost money and had to pass the hat just to break even. At any rate, when we left the bowling alley, Kenny Ray and I went to a Greek play at sunrise on the south steps of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Not the easiest thing to stay awake through when you just got done bowling all night. At any rate, once it was over, we decided to go splash around in the Nichols fountain. It's off limits now, but I don't remember any signs back then. It's quite possible the signs are there now because of what we did then; who knows? At any rate, I was ready to get home and drop into bed and sleep until afternoon. When I arrived home, my mom told me my new job had called and wanted me to start that morning. Naturally, the job involved running a gigantic mechanical razor blade--an excellent job to learn on zero sleep.

Anyway, the cache was a little difficult to retrieve, but we eventually managed. Heading back to the car, we tried to find a public restroom. Halls Department Store was the best we could find. I was wearing my geocaching gear--camouflage coat, ripped jeans and ancient tennis shoes. I'm not sure the looks we were getting in the Prada department were all approving.

Well, I only got to about 11:30 AM, but that's all you're getting for today.