Harry's Ruminations

In working on my small group lesson this week, I'm stuck again in James 1, and there's this verse (26) If   anyone   thinks  himself to be  religious , and yet does not  bb bridle  his  tongue  but  deceives  his own  heart ,  this   man's   religion  is  worthless . You could pretty much summarize my last 5 or 6 years right there.  I've deceived myself time and again, focusing on what was easy, felt good.  I can rationalize  anything, it seems. "Worthless" If accountability has taught me anything, though, it's that so long as you're sucking wind, you can change.  Goes right along with my One Step --> Focus less on myself and more on others.

When I was born, my head was almost too big to fit through the birth canal. That explains much about me to this day.  Just sayin'.

After 2 days' exposure to corporate purchasing and approvals, it amazes me that my lights stay on. ( Yeah, I know.   Not up to my usual standards. )

You know how you go out looking for the right car, with a checklist and a list of requirements?  I've been doing that for the better part of two years.  I've driven every small car known to man at intervals, trying to find some reasonable personal transportation when the Camry of Doom goes kaput. What I'm *really* looking to do is duplicate the love I had for the 1998 Impreza 2.5RS, a car with All-Wheel Drive, a sweet 5-speed manual transmission and the turn-in responses of a B13 Sentra SE-R.  I still remember the test drive I took at the now-defunct Oldhan's Subaru in Nicholasville Kentucky back in college, and whoo boy, was it FUN.  Pity I had no job at the time. :-) Anyway, fast forward > 1 decade, and here I am.  Camry is getting lose about the....well, everything.  The Front end wobbles.  The transmission slips.  There's the every-present water leak in the trunk that's never bad enough to fix.  It smells like vomit so badly that n...

It's been a rough few weeks, almost entirely self-inflicted. As the Eastern KY saying goes: "Work is aggravating me to death."  Nothing about what I'm doing is hard; tedious and frustrating, sure, but not difficult.  Basically, I fight whatever fires appear, and 90% of the time these are communications issues between teams, not technical problems.  Corporations tend to self-select for people who can hide within bureaucracy, stifle their own opinions, and dumbly line-up behind meaningless mandates.  That's wearisome, to say the least. I feel like the same passionate guy I was  eight years ago .  It's just tough keeping that passion going when all it does is get you in trouble with the political animals who smell blood in the water.  If what happened Friday blows-up on me, well...I'll own my mistake and learn from it.  I did a lot of learning last week. * * * The grind of keeping the house clean and picking-it-up for showing is wearing on us...

The listing Yes, there's Kitchen-Aid porn in that picture.  Jealous?

Nothing like a deadline, I guess. So, we've known we needed photographs of our house up on various MLS/Zillow.com sites, and our realtor scheduled a photographer for today. Today?! Yeah, lots of work had/has to be done.  We were up last night until after 1am, and back at it again this morning ~7am.  I had a Diet Mountain Dew influenced crisis of confidence at 11pm, but...uh...pushed through it.  I stuck my head in our oven. I left at 9:15 to go to work, with Whitney still at it. If you hear a thud followed by a snore, that's my head hitting the keyboard, asleep.