Frustrated

For lack of a better word, I am going to call myself frustrated.

I am frustrated over the fact that I submitted an 18 page paper for class a week and a half back and have not received feedback from it, with another 15-20 page paper due in four days.

I am frustrated because we are supposed to get snow, and although we were promised snow by 11:00 AM, it is now 3:20 and we still have not had a single flake fall. To add insult to injury, I get to see pictures of a 100 year record for snow get broken in the part of Oklahoma I grew up in.

To top it off, I have people who complain about having to do their jobs.

Finally, I have not blogged much this year because I have been so busy.

Add all of that up and I am Frustrated!!!!

Until next year....

Well, I am back just as I promised I would be. It has been two months since I actually blogged about anything and a lot has happened in that two months. Let's see how much we can cover before you get tired of reading this.

School:

I mentioned yesterday that I got an A- in the class I completed earlier this month. I am mostly okay with that, because I just wanted the class to be over. It was a class with just me and the professor, so I was getting tired of not having any other thoughts and ideas. I guess it was a good warm up for the class I have starting in January. January and February will be filled up with the Independent Study that I have mentioned before. I recently received a little more direction on what it will be, which makes me a little more comfortable with what to expect. I will be spending this time doing research for and writing my Literature Review for my dissertation. That is exciting to me, because that will be half of my dissertation being mostly written. If I am able to accomplish this, which is required to get an A, I should have little problem completing my dissertation by May 2012. The biggest thing holding me back will be waiting on responses from the survey I will submit as part of my research.

So, January and February I will be reading a lot of articles and finding information that will help me focus in on my research topic and prove that it is a valuable area of study that has not been done before. The end result will hopefully be 60 pages of my dissertation done.

Weather:

This year has been an odd year for us here. Normally we don't see snow until January, but we have already had at least three inches of snow on two occasions and one or two other occasions of a dusting of snow. While three inches of snow doesn't sound like much, it reeks havoc on our roads. Since my family and I live on some back roads, our roads are usually the last to be cleared, and we have hills all around us.

This leads to a fun story about the first time we got a few inches of snow this year. It was a Sunday, and the expectation was that we would see snow in the morning with no accumulation. Sunday morning it was snowing when I left for worship and was still falling when I got home. It snowed all afternoon and started to build up on the grass. My wife told me that I needed to stay home Sunday night and not got worship because she was afraid the weather was getting too bad. My daughter was sick, so she was staying home with my wife. My son and I left to get to worship. I am the preacher and felt like I shouldn't miss. By the time we made it to the church building(it's a 25 minute drive), the snow was starting to gather on the roads. Salt trucks had not been sent out because the weather people were not predicting any accumulation. After services when my son and I left, the roads were getting bad. We made it to the Interstate, which had finally had salt put on two of the four lanes, and began our drive home. When we got to our exit, I had a bad feeling. The roads were completely white and you couldn't see the lines, just some tracks from where others had driven previously. We get to the road we live on and turn. Right after the turn in a small but steep hill. We make it two thirds of the way, and start sliding back. I back up to get a running start and the same thing happens. This goes on for three more attempts, it is the best way for us to get home. On the fourth attempt, I drive off the road where this a little gravel shoulder which allowed me just enough tracktion to make it up the hill. The roller coast just began. We made it over a couple of smaller hills and began our decent towards the biggest hill we would face. It is tall, has a three foot drop off on one side and a five foot drop off on the other. There isn't a shoulder to drive on, so I start up hoping for the best. Three fourths of the way up, we lose our traction and start sliding backwards. If you have never been in this position, sliding down a steep hill backwards is very difficult to control. The van started to slide sideways, but I get it straightened back up and stopped about halfway up the hill. The only option I have is to back down the hill and pull into a driveway. Fortunately, my brother-in-law has a four wheel drive and was able to pick us up and take us home. The little front wheel drive mini van just wouldn't make the hill.

We had a white Christmas this year. It was the first one in 17 years for our area. I knew that I hadn't seen one in the 14 years I have been out here. It was beautiful. The roads were bad again, but this time we stayed in until they could be cleared. One of the elders preached for me that Sunday morning and was very understanding in why we weren't there. Total we had 20 that Sunday morning.

Church:

I am still preaching for the small congregation. We have hit 80 on 2 occasions, so the elders set our new goal to be 90, even though we average 65-70 on a regular basis.

Friends:

I greatly miss some friends. My best friend in Oklahoma is the one I miss the most. We have some friends that have worshiped with us for the last ten years that may be going somewhere else, and that is upsetting to me. Their daughter is my son's best friend and he will be devastated if they leave.

Family:

I have a great family. As a part of my New Year resolution to write on this blog each week, I will be introducing them to you. I am going to add pictures too. I have been really bad this year, so look for that to come in 2011.

Me:

I am exhausted. With work, school, church, family and anything else that decides it wants to creep up going on, I just get worn down. I took three days of vacation last week along with the holiday and am more tired now than I was before. I just hope that staying up to bring in the new year will provide me with the rest that I need, or at least the excuse to sleep in new years day.

Until next year....

In short, Merry Christmas!!

I want to take a few minutes to say Merry Christmas, even though it is a few days late. I plan on writing more tomorrow to catch up on the past two months. I also plan on spending more time each week next year on my blog. I am actually going to schedule time on my calendar where I write in my blog. I hope that it will provide me a time to step away from all of the things going on in my life.

I made an A- in my most recent class in school. I would have had a solid A, but I turned 6 assignments in atleast 2 days late. Those points really add up. The thing that stinks about the A-, is that now my GPA is a 3.96, despite never getting lower than an A- in a class. Oh well, I guess it can't all be perfect.

Well, I am going to go for today. I will write more tomorrow. For today, in short, Merry Christmas!!

Trying to slow down

Hello blog world. It has been a long time since I have posted and I am sure that you all greatly missed reading about what is going on in my life. I have been extremely busy the past few weeks, so I am going to try to catch you up on what has been going on in my world. Also, I am going to "try" to talk a little more about my family and what is going on with them moving forward. I can't make any promises, but I am going to try. My wife recently learned that I have a blog and was a little hurt to find out that I wasn't talking about her all the time. I guess I can see her point. I talk about work and school most of the time, so it might be nice for you to hear about other parts of my life.

So, to start us off, lets talk about school. I know what I just said in the paragraph above, but I am still going to write about what I started this blog to be about. I am rapidly closing in on the end of the class I am in currently. When I say rapidly closing in, I have sixteen days left in this class. I have a lot of work to do to make it and get a decent grade in the class. I am currently caught up with all of my assignments, but the two biggest assignments are still coming up and are due in 10 days. I guess the last six days are more of a vacation for me as all of my assignments will be finished by then.

When I finish this class, I will be 9 hours away from my comprehensive exam and dissertation. That is 3 classes. It looks like it will turn into 2 defined classes and an independent study, which will be great for me. It is kind of scary to think about the end coming so soon.

On top of being busy with school, I have been very busy with work the past couple of weeks. I lead the quality assurance team on my contract, which comes with a lot of work on its own. I am responsible for creating any and all of the templates used by our analyst and programmer team, and also used by the team for our other MIC contract. I also am responsible for driving the quality process to ensure that our clients only get the highest quality deliverables from us. This is a time consuming process, especially at the end of the month. To compound this, in September we scheduled a new staff training in our Baltimore office for the last week of the month. So, as the lead for the QA team, I got to travel to Baltimore and present several training sessions.

After we planned our training, I found out that I would also be giving a presentation to our client. So, I had to travel down a day earlier to give that presentation and spend all day in meetings there. I think the hardest part of all of that, was flying on Sunday afternoon and then getting up earlier than I ever do for three days. Monday morning I had to get up at 6:30. That doesn't sound like that early, but my body thought it was 5:30. To make matters worse, I never get up before 7:30 on a regular day. And to put the icing on the cake, since I normally stay up until 1:00 every night, I could go to sleep that Sunday night. In the end, the presentation and training all went well and I was very happy about that. I ended up getting home around 10:00 Wednesday night. Thursday rolled around and I was in the office from 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 p.m. It was the last day of the month and we had to get work done. Friday I got a little of a break and left early, at 3:00, but that was to plan for working from home Friday night. From the Saturday to Friday, I worked right around 60 hours. Then Friday night, I started working on updating on of our web-based tools. I happen to be the administrator for this tool on both of our contracts and our company decided we needed to make some changes. I went to bed at 4:30 Saturday morning. I really wanted to sleep all day on Saturday, but no such luck. I had important football to watch. Can we say Boomer Sooner?

This week has been a lot less stressful. I have still been very busy but at least things are trying to slow down.

I miss my friend!!!

I am hurting today. I have had a friendship with one of the greatest people I know for 14 years. We have been through it all. We almost hated each other when we first met, but then we got to know each other and decided that the other wasn't as bad as we thought. We struggled with maintaining a close relationship while we were hundreds of miles apart. We were there for each other during difficult times in our other relationships. We laughed with each other and we cried with each other. We saved our friendship after it almost fell apart because of my stupidity a couple of times. We rejoiced with each other as we found the ones we would marry. We rejoiced together with the announcement of my becoming a father and cried together when the struggles for her to become a mother. We rejoiced together again when she bore her first child and fulfilled a dream. We have shared almost everything over the past 14 years, and we have been there for each other. Today, I feel like we are slipping apart. We have not spoken in several weeks and reading each other's blogs seems to be where we learn everything that used to be first hand. I know that life moves forward, but I don't want to lose this friend. I miss her so much!!! I miss my friend!!!

Heading home....

I am writing this blog from the 14th floor balcony of Surfside Resort in Destin, Florida. In less than eight hours, I will be waking up to begin the drive back home. I had forgotten, since last year, just how much I really love this part of the country. There is just something about the feeling of being here. The feeling that life is so much simpler and the pace of life is at one's own leisure. I am sure that there are people here who feel the same about their favorite vacation spots, but I can't image a place more peaceful and more beautiful than this. Hearing the waves lap against the shore, and the roar of the Gulf as it pushes another round of waves to their end. It brings a peacefulness that I miss out of my everyday life. For the last eight days, I have negotiated around the desires of my kids, wife and parents to provide a great vacation experience. I told my wife that I have done everything that everyone else wanted to do and have not done anything just for myself. As I look back, I find that I lied and told the truth both in that statement. I did do everything everyone else wanted. I juggled the concerns of everyone and made sure that we all had a great experience. That is what I did for myself. I like to make people happy and I like to make sure everyone has a good time. For me, in making sure that everyone else was satisfied, I was doing what I wanted the most. I guess at some point I will have to tell her that I did do what I wanted. Tonight, though, is all about me. I am sitting here on this balcony just for myself. I have spent the majority of the last eight days away from my computer. I was almost completely unplugged from work, with one minor slip on Thursday. I wanted to get back to a life that did not revolve around my job, and give myself back to my family. I had planned to check my e-mail every morning, but I was instructed by my manager not to even think about work, as I was heading out of the office last week. All of that is about to change. I will be plugged back in and working hard to catch up on Tuesday. The rat race will begin again and I will let my love of this place slip back from the front of my memory. Tonight, I celebrate my last night in paradise, for tomorrow I am heading home.

It's been too long

I was just realizing that it has been over 20 days since the last time that I blogged. It might seem like nothing is going on in my life, but really there is stuff. I am just too lazy to blog all the time. Really, I am too busy playing pointless games on Facebook. So, this blog is going to be a catch up on what has been going on. I know that I have previously promised pictures, and I will try to get to that sometime. I just have to make myself a list and get it done.

So, I believe that I mentioned that I accepted the preaching position at Mission church of Christ. It has been a great experience and I really love being able to share my knowledge and understanding of the Bible with others. It is really hard to gauge how well people like my preaching, because no one walks up and tells the preacher, "That was a horrible lesson this morning. Why don't you get a new job and quit preaching." No, everyone always says, "That was a great lesson. It was just what we needed." I think the worst part of preaching is being able to see the faces of the people in the audience. It doesn't bother me to know that they are looking at me, but I wish I could read their minds. Sometimes I think they are wondering if I am going to finish my lesson anytime soon. I also think they are wondering what the point is. I think these are just my self conscience side working on me, but I will never know. I have really enjoyed getting into the scriptures and bringing out the true meaning in context with what was going on in the first century and how it still applies to us today.

My parents are in town visiting. They spent the last week staying with my sister and her husband. They are staying with us this week and traveling to Florida with us on Friday for a week at the beach. It is nice to have them visit. The kids really love seeing them. They brought two of my nieces and one of my nephews with them for a few days last week. That was not as pleasant of an experience. Don't get me wrong, I love my nephews and nieces, but some of them are starved for attention. I have enough trouble making sure my kids feel like they are getting enough attention without having others in my face wanting me to poof my cheeks out so they can push the air out with their hands. It is annoying.

I am looking forward to my trip this weekend. As I mentioned we are going to Florida for a week. We will be in the Destin area, staying in the same condo building we stayed in last year. I am ready for a break.

I got my schedule problems worked out with my school. I start a new class on September 7. I have two scheduled for this fall and that will leave two for next spring. I am scheduled to take my comprehensive exam starting the morning of May 16. I will have seven days to complete the three question exam. It sounds pretty easy, but considering each question will require 15-20 pages of an answer, it is going to be very time consuming.

Since my last blog, we celebrated my daughters second birthday. It was great to be able to mark that milestone in her life. It was a Strawberry Shortcake party, which she refers to as Cake Cake. I love that girl!!!

Well, I am going to be stopping here. As I say every time, I am going to try to be a little better about blogging in the future. I was going to comment on the New Coney at Sonic, which is great, but I will save that for another day. That would just be in response to a friends blog. I will try to do better in the future. I realize it's been too long.