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Kathy and Caden
AWANA

AWANA Go Home

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Today was another AWANA Wednesday, and I awoke with a wicked sore throat. I texted my Prayer buddies: “I’m blessing you with my absence, this morning.” I could barely swallow the hot ginger-honey tea Kathy made for me — how could I handle being ‘on’ for AWANA this evening?

Our whole family is involved with AWANA at our church again this year. AWANA stands for ‘Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed’, based on 2 Timothy 2:15:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

Joshua is Games Director, Rachel and Daniel are Sparks Leaders, and David and Sarah are Truth & Training club members. Kathy and I serve as Directors of the Truth & Training (T&T) program.

Kathy and Caden

It is hard for me, partly because I really throw myself into it. As a fairly extreme introvert, I’m often very tired after exerting so much social energy for the kids and the other leaders. Council Time, at the end of the evening, is my opportunity to teach from the scriptures for about 20-25 minutes; I’m always racking my brain for something to teach that won’t go over the kids’ heads.

Often I write skits, which are presented by some of the most dedicated student leaders, who seem to enjoy the challenge of memorizing the lines and acting out the roles I invent, with less than an hour to practice.

The All-Star Cast

The AWANA Players

This week I showed clips from the Gospel of Matthew (Visual Bible), but I didn’t think I would have the voice to do the additional explaining that seems necessary for 3rd – 5th graders. On top of that, I knew we would be missing some leaders for Handbook Time, and I dreaded having to substitute for one of them, with my throat feeling like it did.

Kathy posted on Facebook, and voila! I had three volunteers, who pitched in and listened to verses as if they were veteran T&T leaders. My good friend and nemesis Tung even agreed to handle the Council Time teaching, which was a huge relief.

One of the best things about serving in AWANA these past few years is that it has really stretched me in leaning on God for help. Rather than trying to do things in my own strength, the Holy Spirit routinely gives me the inspiration I need to come up with something fresh and compelling for Council Time. It was good to be reminded that God can easily bring others to stand in the gap for me when I fall down.

Tim

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Not my actual website
Musings

Three Weeks of Bloglessness

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I should have known. As soon as I made a New Year’s resolution to blog every day, I knew something would go wrong. I made it eight days, and then Kathy made an innocent request:

“Why can’t we change our blog theme? Can’t we upgrade our version of WordPress so we can change the theme? I hate having to wait for you to change the background and graphics …cause you’re so busy, dear. “

Right then, I should have told her what I tell my work customers, when I don’t want to do something: “That just isn’t technically feasible at this time.” But, then, she wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Or I could’ve said, “Tell you what. Here’s a thousand dollars to forget about upgrading.” I would’ve been way ahead, in terms of the cost of my time.

But I was naive and I agreed to do it. Oh, wait; one minor problem, if I upgrade WordPress, I’ve got to upgrade PHP and MySQL. OK, no big deal, I did that — so far only a few hours lost. Then I upgraded our blog, and sat back to enjoy the rest upon my laurels.

Not my actual website

For about 10 minutes, until the website went down. And stayed down. And wouldn’t come back up for more than a few minutes at a time, no matter how I cried, cajoled, fussed, and opened trouble-tickets with my hosting company.

It seems the increased resource utilization of the new versions of PHP and MySQL were just too much for my little server. So I upgraded the server — still no luck.

Eventually, I moved to another hosting company and built a new server from the ground up. Along the way, I learned a lot about the CentOS variant of Linux, about Postfix, and Spamassassin. I learned to perform a variety of sysadmin tasks I had never needed to bother with, as a snooty programmer. You, of course, have now learned more about these topics than you ever could have wanted.

Unless you’re a nerd. In that case, you’re probably saying, “You fool! Why didn’t you just limit the Spamassassin settings to one child process, and set MaxSpareServers in Apache to something reasonable, like 5?

Please feel free to identify yourself in either camp, in a comment. Altogether, I spent at least sixty hours (unpaid, of course) doing all this.

But now, I think the blog is up, and hopefully up to stay. If only I thought it was worth it. I hope she likes this plain, white background…

Tim

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Family, Musings

A Visit with Timothy

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My nephew Timothy has been visiting with us the last few days; it has been a pleasure for us to have him with us. Sadly, he heads back to college tomorrow, taking some of the fun with him. On Friday, he joined us for a game party, and on Saturday he helped to pick out Rachel’s new kitten. Today we taught him to play Stone Age — I particularly like having him around because he takes even longer than I do, to decide what to do in a given game-turn.

I’m always being hassled for my careful, deliberate style in playing games. The kids like to tease me about it:

“Hey Mom,” one of them will quip. “It’s my turn after Dad’s turn, so I won’t be able to wash a load of laundry. I can, however, wash the dishes, clean my room, mow the yard and attend a swim meet while we wait for Dad.”

My children are hilarious.


Timothy missed his little brother, so Daniel stood in for Samuel.

I think part of the problem is that I play games, not so much against the other players, but against myself. I want to play each game (within the context of the luck of the draw and the choices of the other players) in the most efficient way, maximizing my chance to win. I don’t so much care if I win or lose, but mostly I want to be sure to squeeze every possible advantage out of each of my turns. I particularly hate to win when I don’t know how or why I was victorious.

It was a good day. We enjoyed Tung’s teaching on Luke 6 in Sunday School, an excellent lecture by Andy Frye of Worldview Academy fame, and a delicious meal back at home. My parents came by for a quick visit and belated birthday celebration for Timothy, and then we read a few chapters of our latest Gordon Korman book (A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag). We played a few more games (Race to the Galaxy, Stone Age) and finished the evening with a Tim Hawkins DVD. All in all, we counted the day a success.


Sometimes you count yourself lucky to get your own hand back from a game-turn.

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Musings

The End of All Things

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I never thought it would come to this.

In spite of all the hype of the Mayan calendar, and 2012, and all that, I didn’t really think that the world would end this year.

Don’t get me wrong — Jesus can return any time He likes. But now the clock is ticking: Rachel picked out a kitten today at the Humane society, and we’re scheduled to bring it home on Friday.


Rachel with her soon-to-be-adopted kitten.

We’ve been without a pet for so long, we don’t really believe it will happen, I’ve been racking my brain for what will prevent us from being cat-owners; this is why I am feeling so apocalyptic.


Kathy tried to stage this picture, telling them all to point at the kitten … but she forgot to tell them where to point.

Clearly, we’ve forgotten all the lessons we learned from previous pet ownership, as chronicled in The Cowardly Cavy Caper.

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Musings

Photo-less Friday

Some days nothing works.

This was such a day. I upgraded our version of WordPress to 3.something at Kathy’s insistence, but in doing so, I pretty much killed our web host. We keep running out of memory for the simplest tasks, and every time I get the server up, my spam software stops working.

Anyway, I can’t seem to upload photos to the blog under the new setup, just yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Still, we had a lovely game night, and (although I lost a lot) I had a good time. I ate WAY too much, and (to add insult to injury) forgot to go to AnyTime Fitness after everyone had left. Now it is too late (yes, I know, AnyTime is open … ANY time) — I just can’t bring myself to leave the house now, when it is so late.

Lets hope that tomorrow brings me great success in all my various goals.

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