A Strange Weekend

Well, the weekend's not over yet, but it's been interesting so far. To read about my day yesterday, click here.

Hope you find that amusing.

This morning I woke up with a sore throat, which was not good, since I was doing ventriloquism, music and preaching in Peru this morning.

I left home at 7:00, so I could be in Peru by 8:00. Left myself plenty of time, which was a good thing, since I totally spaced out and drove right by route 219. I drove all the way to 232, and halfway to Rumford before I realized I was in the wrong place...by then I decided it would be quickest to continue on to Rumford and then come back to Peru. :P

So, it took a lot longer getting there than I expected. Not that it mattered, since the pastor didn't show up until about 15 minutes later.

And Ben arrived 15 minutes after that. So, we had less than a half hour to get ready for Sunday School.

And the monitor wasn't working again.

And the computer wouldn't read my CD with the pwer point presentation.

Yep. Very hectic. Fortunately, they had a guy there who was able to type up everything I needed for church, during Sunday School.

Despite everything, the services went well, and the pastor said the messsage hit exactly where the church was at, so that's good! :)

On a different subject, I've now added a Weekly Writing Prompt to Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction. go ahead and give it a try if you like!

Writing For Fun

For those who didn't know, I've been away from home since Sunday. Went hiking with Jonathan and Melody on Monday (Mt Battie. And yes, I'll be writing up that hike soon). Then yesterday I was up in Kingfield working on Math Problems with Brian. I have all my problems written and proofread. Now I just need to organize them and send them off to Maryland! :)

Anyway, the post is titled "Writing For Fun", and writing math problems isn't exactly fun - not when you have a deadline to write 99 of them, and they have to have quite a few challenging ones!

But in case you've missed it, there is a new website that's all about writing for fun: Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction

Here are a couple interesting statistics about the site...

The most popular author on the site at the moment is: Rabbit Stu Yeah, that's right...the fictional alias I created on the site while testing some features, and which I use to write totally bizarre and nonsensical poetry, is the most read author so far. I'm not sure what it says that of the four most popular pages on the site, three of them are by the fictional poet Rabbit Stu. :P

Here is the most popular piece of writing on the site: Entranced By Beauty.

It is interesting to see that, even though the site is only a week old, it's already getting a fair amount of traffic. It doesn't have a lot of visitors yet, but it seems that the visitors stick around for quite awhile, reading different things on the site. There's already been over 1000 page views on the writing...not including the times that authors viewed their own writing.

Ping Pong - With A Twist!

Last night I went over to Berea to hang out with Ben and Bobby. We played ping pong for about three and a half hours. Bobby only played for a few minutes - the rest of the time it was me and Ben.

Halfway through the evening Ben got some Mountain Dew, and I was dumb enough to drink some (which means I was up until 2:00 last night). :P

But we set our cans of dew on the corners of the table, and tried to hit them with the ping pong ball. Eventually we had drunk enough of the dew that we knew a hit would knock the can on the floor, so we stopped that!

But then we invented our own version of Ping Pong, which we had a lot of fun with. We took ten plastic cups and filled them half full of water. Then we evenly spaced them along the back edge of the table (5 on each side). And we played until someone knocked off all the cups.

The rules were simple: we played just like regular ping pong, except that serving was a little different. If you hit a cup (whether you knocked it off the table or not) you got to take the next serve. Also, if you won the volley, you got the next serve (just like killer pong).

The winner was the person who knocked off all his opponents cups.

I won the first game. Ben won the second.

We're still tweaking how the game is played. I think next time we should play with a point system...something like this:

1 point for each volley (scored just like regular ping pong)
3 points for striking a cup (but not knocking it completely off the table)
5 points for knocking a cup entirely off the table.

Of course, a game to 21 would be too short, we'd need to play to 40, or something like that! :)

Playing Tag With Daniel

Sometimes at youth group on Wednesday nights, Daniel decides he wants to play tag with me. Of course, there's not much warning, no giving me a headstart - he just walks up to me and tags me, and that begins the game.

Of course, being a lot bigger than Daniel, I can outrun him. But not for long...even though I can outrun him, he can outlast me.

Anyway, I was pretty happy last night because not only am I feeling well enough recovered from my surgery to play tag without even thinking twice about whether it's going to hurt...

I outlasted Daniel. He was huffing and puffing long before I was. In fact...

I wasn't huffing and puffing at all. :)

So, yeah, I'm feeling pretty good.

Lesson Plans And Articles

I've been dreading going back to Articles For Educators, because I haven't touched it in several months (since sometime back in the winter, I think). About a year ago a bunch of idiot spammers started submitting spammy articles to the site...you wouldn't believe some of the dumb stuff that people submitted to the site...

An advertisement for a trash can cleaning service
An advertisement for valentines day bouquets
An advertisement for a real estate firm
And much much more

Anyway, I hadn't been keeping up with the site, which meant there was a pile of articles to go through and edit, and either delete or post.

Of course, all the spammy articles got deleted (sorry, SaniCan!). But I also had to review the "real" articles to decide which ones were "good enough" to be posted on the site. There were a few articles that just didn't measure up to my standards for the site (mostly they were articles by people from India and Singapore and places like that - people whose first language is NOT English!)

Once I got rid of those, I had several reasonably decent articles:

ADHD Diagnosis
Geometric Shapes in the Preschool Classroom
Preschool lesson on emotions
A Lesson on Electricity
Learning to Use Division (Division Unit Rationale)
Division - Meaning, Manipulatives and Relationships
Relating Division And Subtraction Lesson Plan
Connecting Division And Multiplication
Division Unit: Writing A Number Sentence
Dividing By 2 and 5 (Two And Five)
Dividing By 3 and 4 (Three and Four) Lesson Plan
Dividing With 1 and 0 (One and Zero) Lesson Plan

Orrington

This afternoon I head off to Orrington...will return tomorrow afternoon. I'll be taking Ben and Ellis with me. Ben will be running my sound system, Ellis will be handling the overheads for the sing-along part of the presentation. I've been working on getting everything I need printed up for this...I think the only things I need to do now is print off schedules for Ben & Ellis so THEY will know what I'm doing. :)

This will be the first time I do my new presentation Join The Chorus, so I'm both excited and a bit nervous about it. But the folks in Orrington are a real nice group of people, so I should be able to be fairly relaxed about the whole thing.

Tomorrow is Sept 9 - a year ago on Sept 9th I was in Orrington also. That was the date Tommy Boyd had his fatal ATV accident.

Fifteen Minutes

Okay, it's not like I don't have enough blogs that I write in (not that I write in all of them faithfully!), but I've just added another one. I'm sure most of you won't be interested in keeping up with this one, because its posts are going to be pretty random.

The blog is titled "Fifteen Minutes". The basic premise of the blog is this...I enjoy writing (and I'm not talking about writing software documentation!) but I never find time to write stuff "just for fun"...but I figure I can spare FIFTEEN MINUTES here and there to write something short - a piece of descriptive writing, a poem, and nonsense story, etc.

So the rule for my new blog is, I write whatever I like, but I can't take more than FIFTEEN MINUTES to write it. Once my FIFTEEN MINUTES is up, I post what I've written.

Here's a more detailed description of the blog: FIFTEEN MINUTES: PREMISE.

I've invited a couple people to be contributing writers in this blog, one of whom has said she will try to post something from time to time.

Anyway, here is the blog address, and you will see that I've already posted a couple items...

Fifteen Minutes of Fictional Writing. What can you write in just a quarter of an hour?

Health Update

If only all doctor's appointments could be like this one, I wouldn't hate doctors so much...

12:20: Arrive at Dr. Navarro's office

12:25: Assistant takes me to room and asks me: "Any pain?" "No" "Any bowel problems?" "No" "Do you need a back-to-work slip?" "I'm self employed, so I can give myself the slip" :D

12:28: Dr. Navarro comes in. "Feeling good?" "Yep" "Appetite good" "Yep" "Let me see the incisions." (I lift my shirt) "Good. Good. Good. Good. Okay, that's great. You're all set, thanks for coming in."

12:30: Ushers me out of his office.

How's that for a nice doctor's appointment? :D

Oh, and on the way out I mentioned that I was going hiking in a couple weeks, and that would be okay, right? He grinned and said, "You can do anything you like!"

Cheesesticks and Stuffed Crust Pepperoni Lover's Pizza...

Yes, that's right, on Saturday Ben and Cody and I went to Pizza Hut. My first pizza since that fateful night when I spent the night in the emergency room in Farmington.

I don't remember if I've mentioned it here, but one of the common side effects of having your gallbladder removed is that if you eat a lot of fatty foods all at once, you're likely to have *ahem* diarrhea. :P

So, it's been almost two weeks since my surgery, and I haven't had a single problem that way, so I decided it was time to push the limits and see what happened.

I'm pleased to say that I had absolutely no side effects from my evening of fat-splurging!

On another subject, if you want to try out a new version of a game I created about ten years ago, visit this link: Zero Gravity Connect Four. You'll need someone to join you in playing this game, because it's a two player game!

Please drop a note here if you try it, and let me know whether it works well for you.

This weekend I'll be heading to Orrington, to speak at the Orrington Center Church. I always enjoy going up there; it's such a nice group of folks there at the church.