Strange things you hear and see...

I was out and about yesterday evening picking up Chinese takeout in town. And while I was standing around near the register, another family was sitting - waiting on takeout. When a different group of couples got to the register to pay, the guy sitting starts asking the guy paying about a tree frog tatoo on his foot. They start up a conversation; turns out they both love tree frog tatoos. One guy has a bunch of them, the other has just started his tree frog tatoo journey.

Then later, (while still waiting), this girl, about 17 or so is in there waiting. Her phone rings, she picks it up, and ends up saying, "You had it Brad. Remember, you threw it up and hit it across the road." ...Just struck me funny.

Micah and Esther

Wow. What a time it’s been. For those that don’t know here’s a quick summary:

Micah looks to be like a very normal baby, albeit his head is a little on the big size. His head was in the 25% percentile when he was born, and around the 75% later, and at his last check-up was in the 95%. Anything below 100% is “normal”. There are babies with well over 100% percentile heads. Micah was also born with a small murmur (that the doctor no longer hears and was/is supposed to heal on its own) and also a small cyst that can be somewhat common with premature babies.

It is not extremely abnormal for a baby to have a head in the 95% percentile. Doctors do become concerned when the baby’s head was not large at birth, but becomes bigger. This does not HAVE to mean there is trouble, but it can. There is a condition known as hydrocephalus. It basically means fluid on the brain. One of the several causes is a cyst on the brain. So needless to say, since we found this out, we have been very, very concerned.

The doctor ordered a CT scan for today. The last couple days have been rough ones. Days that included petitioning God on Micah’s behalf. It was a very….reconnecting…time for God and I. It’s a shame it takes that, isn’t it? I definitely asked for God to heal Micah. To let him be ok. I really felt the story of Esther laid on my heart. So I spent some time with God and that story. I know you know the story, so I won’t belabor that, but I really related to that. And I felt like I was petitioning God in the same way. And God gave me a peace about it. It’s tough to ask God to heal your son, but then to say with all the sincerity you can muster, that not my will, but Yours be done. I tried to imagine what things would be like if we got a bad report. It involves a lifetime battle. A plastic tube being inserted for the rest of your life, having to be lengthened as you grow, dealing with clogging and infection, and being delayed mentally and physically. I tried to think of ways that God would still use Micah. And how down the road, we could look back and see that God used him and used him in our lives despite his difficulties. A difficult reality to imagine. But I felt a peace about it just the same. But still,…if it was ok for Esther to plea, then it was ok for me.

So today, having been wearied by the previous days, we went down to Gainesville to have the CT scan. Poor little fella didn’t even know where he was going. We got there about 6:30 this morning. There was a little confusion about whether he was supposed to have a CT scan or an MRI. They confirmed it was a CT scan. We fed him some more and put him on a pillow on the machine. (The picture above.) Like the good baby he is, he fell right asleep (with his pacifier and clutching his favorite blue doggy blanket). He never woke up during the whole scan. So he got his scan, but we couldn’t get the results right away. The radiologist would dictate them and send them to the doctor. It could be today, it could be tomorrow before we got the results.

So we went on with our day, ate breakfast, went to a church staff meeting and then went home. A little later, Tori decided to call the doctor’s office to see if they had the results in. They did.

The doctor said the CT scan showed nothing. There was no fluid. The report said nothing of even a cyst.

After Tori hung up, we said a very genuine prayer of thanks to God. And I’m here to tell you it was all Him. I got a little choked up and had to spend a few minutes by myself in the backyard. For the first time in who knows how long, I cried – tears of joy. And I think it was from the overwhelming feeling – not as much of Micah being ok – but of the overwhelming feeling of God’s hand of mercy and deliverance.

And still…if some medical complication ever eventually does come of it, or whenever the next bad thing happens; I feel confident in the sovereignty of my Lord. God on the hilltop, is God in the valley. And today, he has delivered Micah…..whose name indeed means, ….“Who is like the LORD?”

^{PS 107:19} Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,

and he saved them from their distress.

^{PS 107:20} He sent forth his word and healed them;

he rescued them from the grave.

^{PS 107:21} Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love

and his wonderful deeds for men

Joke

A Welshman an Englishman and a Irishman were being chased by Farmer Giles with a shotgun. After 10 minutes of running they spotted a barn and ran inside.
Once inside they each hid in a old sack against the barn wall. The farmer went into the barn but did not see where they went, he was about to turn back when he saw three suspicious looking sacks. He walked forward and prodded the first sack with his gun. The Englishman inside said...''Meow''.

"Just cats," he thought.

He then prodded the second sack. The Welshman, hearing how the Englishman got off said....''woof''.

"Just dogs," he thought.

As he walked towards the last sack, the Irishman worked out what he was going to say. As soon as the farmer prodded his sack he said.....''potatoes!''

Sounds cool to me...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - [By Alicia Chang]

Not all dazzling fireworks displays will be on Earth this Independence Day. NASA hopes to shoot off its own celestial sparks in an audacious mission that will blast a stadium-sized hole in a comet half the size of Manhattan. It would give astronomers their first peek at the inside of one of these heavenly bodies.

If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1 - about 80 million miles away from Earth at the time of impact.

"It's a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with a third bullet in the right place at the right time," said Rick Grammier, project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Scientists hope the July 4 collision will gouge a crater in the comet's surface large enough to reveal its pristine core and perhaps yield cosmic clues to the origin of the solar system.

NASA's fleet of space-based observatories - including the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra telescopes - along with an army of ground-based telescopes around the world are expected to record the impact and resulting crater.

The big question is: What kind of fireworks can sky-gazers expect to see from Earth?

Scientists do not know yet. But if the probe hits the bull's-eye, the impact could temporarily light up the comet as much as 40 times brighter than normal, possibly making it visible to the naked eye in parts of the Western Hemisphere.

"We're getting closer by the minute," Andrew Dantzler, the director of NASA's solar system division, said earlier this month. "I'm looking forward to a great encounter on the Fourth of July."

If the $333 million mission is successful, Deep Impact will be the first spacecraft to touch the surface of a comet. In 2004, NASA's Stardust craft flew within 147 miles of Comet Wild 2 on its way back to Earth carrying interstellar dust samples.

Scientists say Deep Impact has real science value that will hopefully answer basic questions about the solar system's birth.

Comets - frozen balls of dirty ice, rocks and dust - are leftover building blocks of the solar system after a cloud of gas and dust condensed to form the sun and planets 4 1/2 billion years ago. As comets arc around the sun, their surfaces heat up so that only their frozen interiors possess original space material.

Very little is known about comets and even less is known about their primordial cores. What exactly will happen when Tempel 1 is hit on the Fourth of July is anybody's guess. Scientists believe that the impact will form a circular depression that will eject a cone-shaped plume of debris into space.

But not to worry. NASA guarantees that its experiment will not significantly change the comet's orbit nor will the smash-up put the comet or any remnants of it on a collision course with Earth.

Discovered in 1867, Tempel 1 is a short-period comet, meaning that it moves around the sun in an elliptical orbit between Mars and Jupiter and can be sighted every six or so years.

The Deep Impact spacecraft shares the same name as a 1998 Hollywood disaster movie about a comet headed straight for Earth. NASA says that the names for the space mission and blockbuster movie were arrived at independently around the same time and by pure coincidence.

The spacecraft blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in mid-January to make its six-month, 268 million-mile voyage. In March, scientists got a scare when test images from one of Deep Impact's telescopes were slightly out of focus. The problem was fixed, and a month later, Deep Impact took its first picture of Tempel 1 from 40 million miles away, revealing a big snowball of dirty ice and rock. Last week, scientists processed the first images of the comet's bright core taken from 20 million miles away, which should help the probe zero in on its target.

The real action starts in the early morning of July 3 (Eastern time) when the spacecraft separates, releasing an 820-pound copper probe called the "impactor" on a one-way trip straight into the path of the comet. During the next 22 hours, mission control at Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena will steer both craft toward Tempel 1.

Two hours before the July 4 encounter, the impactor kicks into autopilot, relying on its self-navigating software and thrusters for the rest of the journey to steer toward the sunlit part of the comet's nucleus so that space and Earth-based telescopes can get the best view.

Meanwhile, the spacecraft - with its high-resolution camera ready - will veer out of harm's way some 5,000 miles away, as it stakes out a ringside seat for recording the collision. The spacecraft will make its closest flyby minutes after impact, approaching within 310 miles.

The collision is expected to occur around 1:52 a.m. EDT when the comet, traveling through space at 6 miles per second, runs over the impactor, which will be shooting some of the most close-up pictures of Tempel 1 up until its death.

Grammier has likened it to standing in the middle of the road and being hit by a semi-truck going 23,000 mph - "you know, just bam!" The energy produced by the crash will be like detonating nearly 5 tons of TNT.

The high-speed collision is expected to excavate a crater that can range anywhere from the size of a house to a football stadium, and from two to 14 stories deep. A spew of ice and dust debris will likely shoot out from the newly formed hole, possibly revealing a glimpse of the comet's core.

Scientists say if the comet is porous like a sponge, the impact should produce a stadium-sized crater about 150 feet deep and 650 feet wide. This suggests that the comet's inside holds some of the pristine material of the early solar system.

But if the comet is packed like a snowball, the crater formed would be much smaller. Another scenario is that the comet is so porous that most of the impactor's energy is absorbed, creating an even smaller but deep crater.

The mothership has less than 15 minutes to snap images from the cosmic collision and resulting crater before it's bombarded with a blizzard of debris. Scientists expect to receive near real-time data from the impactor and spacecraft.

"We get one chance," said Michael A'Hearn, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland and Deep Impact principal investigator.

---

Crazy coffins exhibition opens

Crazy coffins exhibition opens

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1423623.html

You can read this article to see a couple of funny looking coffins. I haven't actually visited www.crazycoffins.co.uk yet, so do so at your own risk.

Bionic Man Moves Artificial Arm With Brain

Bionic Man Moves Artificial Arm With Brain
Breakthrough Could Change Lives Of Amputees, Patients With Spinal Cord Injuries
http://www.local6.com/news/4643968/detail.html

CHICAGO -- Researchers have developed artificial arms that can be moved as it if they were real limbs, simply by thinking about making them move, according to Local 6 News.


When Jesse Sullivan's brain tells his arm to do something, it's done in seconds.

The world's first bionic man, Jesse Sullivan, 54, accidentally touched live wires while working as a utility lineman in Tennessee. He suffered severe burns, causing him to lose his arms.

Now, Sullivan is the first to try out the most sophisticated artificial arms ever designed.

Surgeons attached his arm nerves to healthy muscles in his chest.

"So now when Jess thinks, close hand, the impulse is picked up by a transmitter, and goes to his hand," doctor Todd Kuiken said. "He thinks, closes hand and it does."

Sullivan's hand rotates 360 degrees, according to the report. When Sullivan's brain tells his arm to do something, it's done in seconds and he has feeling in the bionic arm.

"This gives me a lot of hope," Sullivan said. "I was an independent kind of guy. I didn't ask anybody for anything. If I could do it, I did it."

Eventually tiny sensors in the fingertips will allow Sullivan to feel texture and temperature.

Doctors at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago said the breakthrough could change the lives of amputees, patients with spinal cord injuries and stroke victims, according to the report.

By the time it's perfected, the cost of manufacturing the bionic arm is expected to be about $6 million, according to the report.

For more information on the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Please click www.ric.org.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

Man hid turtle on his back

...sounds like something my dad would do with a pet rooster.

Man hid turtle on his back

A Chinese man pretended to be a hunchback to smuggle his pet turtle on to a plane.

Wu, who is in his 60s, strapped the turtle to his back before boarding the plane to Chongqing.

He got through security but was then stopped by a guard who thought his hump looked odd.

A quick search uncovered the turtle which had a 20cm diameter and weighed about 5kg.

Wu, who was flying home to Chongqing after eight years in Guangzhou, said he knew he was not allowed to take live animals on board but was too attached to his turtle.

Finally, he changed plane and checked the pet in as baggage, reports the New Express.

Cake Tori ordered for the VBS workers. ...Apparently Jar Jar Binks works in the Bakery.

What the crap did you just put in my mouth?!?!!!

Feeding Micah "peas".

Just made the Dakota blog.

I will put this web address in the advertisements I do. If you want to see all the pretty pictures you can click here to go to it.

Another Charlie moment (at church)

Tori was talking to two eldery ladies at church in the hall. I walk up and join the conversation with Tori . We talk for a minute, and then .... the second older lady looked RIGHT AT ME, and waved and said something like "hey there!". I thought "...ok....I've been standing here talking for a minute, why is she just now seeing me and saying hi? I thought....who knows?....She's old, maybe she didn't see me." So....I (standing about 4 feet right in front of her), started waving back, and said "hey". She continues to wave.....I look behind me, and there is an open room with some guys practicing instruments. Yeah, she was waving at one of them.

But there I was, standing right in front of her, whom I had been in a 3 person conversation with seconds ago, waving at her in her face.

stupid, stupid, stupid

Yeah buddy; thats what I'm talkin' about!.....(they want 4k, but would take best offer) ......see previous post for explanation.

The brainstorming has begun.................

When I get into the groove of trying to figure out how to best work something, my mind starts to run through all sorts of scenarios to try to make it work / work best.

Goal: Nice van

Manipulatives:
3 vehicles
don't need any of them (except to get from place to place)

So.....here is what I'm thinking about now.......

First - You know the original plan was to sell the Lincoln and truck and buy a van. I would drive the Neon.

So I'm talking with Tori about it. I go to Taco Bell (brain food) and I think on the way...."Ok. Wait a minute. The only thing I'll ever do in my vehicle is drive the 3.4 miles (7 minutes) to work. Thats it. Everywhere else is in the van. To church in the van / to friends houses in the van / to parents houses in the van / any and everywhere in the van." I had somewhat thought of this before, which is when I gave up my dream of a Chevy Avalanche. I have always driven well over an hour round trip to work, so when you spend that much time in your vehicle, you'd like to like what you are in so much of your day. But, now I won't even be in it long enough for the engine to heat up in the winter. By the time it starts to warm, I'll already be at the school. So it dawned even more so on me tonight. "It doesn't matter what I drive. In that case - why drive a nice Neon which blue books for over 8 k? I don't need to ride 8 grand down the street and back."

So my brainstorm tonight is sell the Lincoln, Neon AND Dakota. I would sell the Lincoln and which ever of the other two, then buy the van, and then sell the third vehicle. (I have to do it like that to avoid having NO vehicle for a period of time.) This way, I could put more money towards the van. For instance - I could sell the Neon for 8k, put like 5 of that towards the van. Then I could put the last 3 towards something for me to drive to work and back. I might not even need 3k. And this is a double whammy great thing, because then I can sell my weak (albeit newer) 4-cylinder go-cart engine of a Dakota, and then buy a 8 cylinder (albeit older - which is fine) beast of a retro-truck. I could get an old one thats easy to fix. It would just be for driving to work, and I could haul something with it if I wanted to since it would have power. (<--Wouldn't that be nice for a change.) Gas is a non-issue (unlike the rest of America). Tori will not be working. I will work a stone's throw away. Church is like 2 miles away. Local friends are less than that. It would only be a factor when we travel, which is not a regular thing. We have a couple aces up our sleeve like that.

It is fun to try to contrive these things.

This may all change tomorrow - but it's fun to think about.

Pimp my ride

I spent the better part of the first 1/2 of the day detailing my truck. (Part of the sell the truck and Lincoln for a van sales drive.) She's lookin' perdy now. I vacuumed it out really good, took it to the car wash, bought some good wheel degreaser, used some black magic on the tires. The stinky part was that I had left the tool box open because I had a bucket of oil in it I was going to take to the auto store to dump out, and it rained and filled the box with water. There must have been some kind of oatmeal or something back there because it was all over the place. And it smelled HORRIBLE! I used a wet vac to get it out and then drilled a couple of small drainage holes and then washed it out real good at the carwash. Next up will be the Lincoln. That sucker hasn't been washed in no telling how long. The wheels are going to take forever. But....it was fun in a way, so it'll be ok.

Where a kid can be a kid.....

We took the kids at church to Chuck E. Cheese yesterday. The kids had fun.

Micah getting some cereal for the first time....

As you can see, HE LOVED IT!!!!

Ok. Actually, it wasn't as bad as this picture makes it look. But he did prefer the bottle. (I hope that doesn't last into adulthood.) So a big first step for him today.

Eureka! I've found it!!!....or have I?

Ok, so you see, we have this '95 Lincoln Town Car. My parents let us borrow it when the truck was out of commission. They bought a new car, and even when the truck was fixed, they said we could have it. I let them know I was going to sell it and the truck to put towards another vehicle (a van).

So anyway, they keyless entry system stopped working. Blown fuse. I could didn't get around to it, so when my dad was over, he went out there and started looking for a fuse. He found one that was blown, and left it on the counter. They left.

So I go out to cut the grass. The Lincoln was parked in the yard. So I go to crank it up to move it. I turn on the key, the dash board lights come on. But when I turn it the rest of the way, it doesn't hit or anything, and the lights in the dash shut off. (Some of you may already know what the problem was, but I didn't.) So anyway, I think "great." So I cut the grass except for that spot, and then I go out to the car, look at the low-amp fuses under the dash, mess with them, but didn't really change anything. It cranked. "Weird" I thought. So I moved it and cut the grass under it.

I go back out there yesterday, same thing happens. I find the owners manual, and look at the fuses under the dash. I see where the one my dad pulled is missing. So I go to AutoZone, get some 20 amp fuses, go back, replace the burnt one. Same problem. I check the manual, get under the hood and check out the high-amp fuses. I take the cable off the battery, and notice it was loose. Don't think much of it. Examine the fuses and see this one in the picture, which controls the engine fan, with a noticeable burn on it. It's a blown 30 amp, so I go back to the parts store and get some 30's. Replace it...and STILL the same problem.

My neighbor David (the car-audio store guy), sees me out there, comes over. I tell him the problem. He says, "sounds like a loose battery connection". Walks over to the battery, connects and tightens it. ...It cranks fine.

So I try to defend myself saying, there were two blown fuses....but bottom line.....I spent probably an hour out there not doing much, and then my neighbor walks over, fixes the problem and then walks back to his house. Yes! I am a moron. Go me. My neighbor keeps coming over and doing stuff for me. I hope he doesn't ask me for a kidney,.....because at this point I might have to give it to him.

My day

Today I was supposed to go to a workshop thing from 8:00 - 3:30. I went to a workshop. About 9:30, I realized that I was at the wrong workshop. They have that same one on July 27th. Thats when I'm supposed to go to that workshop. I hurriedly get up, scoop up my papers and fumble my way out of the door, to hurry to the workshop I'm supposed to be at across town. On the way out I drop my folder full of papers into a deep puddle.

This is a summary of the beginning of my day.

Micah and his cuz Kaden