Ministry is going well....
Here's the recent news in a nut shell. Ministry is going
well. The Jr. High sunday school and small group ministry is growing. Friday nights are
reaching more and more students every week and lives are being changed. Mike & I are writing
our own curriculem for a lot of our small groups which will hopefully be publishable some day.
My housing situation might change this summer / fall....
I'm looking to try to purchase a house sometime during the
summer months and go to closing and move in the fall. I'm not in a rush, but I'd like to get
it done and out of the way. I'm just waiting for God to bring the right house, at the right
price, at the right time, and line all that up with the nessisary finances to make it happen.
My car is still hanging in there....
136,000 miles and counting... She's a tank! I had to
replace the transmission at the end of last fall. I kinda saw that coming, but I wasn't
sure if I was gonna do the replacement or scrap the car. It looked cheaper to put in the
replacement. The pan gasket leaks so I'm dumping in a quart of fluid every month or so.
The oil is still leaking too... same deal, add a quart every month. The oil leak doesn't
appear to be coming from an easy place like that pan, so I'm getting into even trying to
fix that. I look at it this way... its the cheapest monthly car payment I'll ever make.
My web projects are moving along....
There isn't anything pressing on the table right now.
This site has been the most recent project. We are always trying to add to, and improve,
GZYouth.com. The most recent edition has been a poll. I did have one Youth
Pastor e-mail me through GZYouth.com and ask what we used to do our site and how much we
charged so I'm waiting to see if they want us to do a page for him.
I recently served up a component
for an alt.ActiveServerPages
poster who wanted to protect the URL of downloads. He required
users to login to download material, but he didn't want them to be able to just copy and paste
the URL for their friends so that everyone could get to the files. It's easy to impliment
and it's for sale, if you're interested. Several of the other components are also for sale
through the guys at www.iBeast.com.
I've also got two projects
on the back burner... one is the Alumni site for the Eastern College Ultimate Frisbee Team
including an alumni registration page. The other is a personal contact registration page where
you, my friends, family and associates, can update your personal contact information in my
online database. It will be fairly secure and will allow me to do e-mails and Christmas
letters without a lot of administrative duties on my end because you will be able to subscribe,
unsubscribe, and update your information yourself. This will be extremely easy to complete
once the alumni registration is completely bug-proof. Most of the code should transfer right
over to the other.
New adventures in the backcountry coming soon....
The next trip on the calendar is a hike up the mountain
behind my parents house in Jim Thorpe over Easter Break. Pics of previous adventures are
posted on this site. We'll see what else comes up. I might do another solo hike / personal
retreat sometime this summer. I'll let you know about that as it gets closer.
Ultimate Frisbee, my primary athletic outlet, is going well....
Our winter league team, 2000 Flushes, did pretty well this
season. I think we finished somewhere in the middle of the league. I'm not really sure. We
won 5 of our 7 regular season games. It was a lot of fun. It took most of the season to get
back into shape again, and I think I'll ever again get to the level I was at, at the end of my
senior year when I spent several months training for sectionals. Anyway, The next event on the
calendar is going to be West Chester summer league.
Our Eastern College Homecoming Float won FIRST PLACE....
As promised, I went up to Eastern over Homecoming weekend in
fall 2001, and helped Doane (my residence hall for 7 of my 8 semesters at Eastern) design and construct
their Float. The idea this year was Doane's Goose Eating Dawg. We actuated the legs, the tail
and the lower jaw through a series of ropes and pulleys driven by freewheel hubs attached to
the wheels of the trailer. I spent about 8 hours with a small team on the design and
construction of the system and a number of Doane residents joined us to turn the hunk of
mechanical beast into something that looked like a dog. They did a great job. You can check
out pictures under My Home Life & Projects. The plans are also posted in a reduced form.
This is the second year that Doane has won the Homecoming Float Competition. Last year (Fall
2000) the decision to made to do a "Chicken For President" float. We used the the tail as a
lever to pull on a rope, that ran up the spine, around a nail and out to the control the
flapping wings. Again... once the mechanism was in place, the Doane Design team did a absolutly
amazing job of turning the 2x4's and chicken wire into something that looked like a REAL CHICKEN!!
Great job everyone. Should we do it again in 2002? My only hesistation is that we haven't
really had any solid competition the past two years. NRH/Gough Hall has done well each year
with their full custume Newsie's theme, and their Putt Putt Gough (pronouced 'golf') but we
really need the other resident halls to step it up a few notches. Just my humble opinion.
