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What is Advent?

AdventReligions have a lot of seasons and celebrations. I readily admit that I don’t know most of the non-Christian ones and even some of the lesser known Christian ones are hard to remember. I won’t do this for every single Church season or special day, but I thought that for some of them I would do a little write up about what it means for Christians and why I celebrate it. It just so happens that the Christian “liturgical year” starts in December.

The church year starts with the season of Advent. Advent starts four Sundays before Christmas and runs up to Christmas. So for most years it starts the Sunday after Thanksgiving. These four Sundays are sometimes represented by four candles. One more candle gets lit each week. Some Advent wreaths have a fifth candle in the middle and that one gets lit on Christmas Day.

Advent is a season of waiting. We’re not just staring at our watches, waiting for Christmas to come. We are joyfully anticipating Christmas and reflecting on why we need Him and what His birth meant for us. Believers in the Old Testament waited thousands of years of Jesus to come. We only wait a few weeks and we get to celebrate it each year. But in addition to preparing and focusing on the birth of Jesus at Christmas, we also expectantly wait for his return at the end of the world when those who believe that Jesus died for their sins will be taken to heaven.

Want to know more? Check out this article about Advent from our church body.

I’ve already written a post about why I celebrate Christmas so it will be a little while before there’s another post in this series.

Christmas Lights

Do you remember voting for what color lights I should use around the garage doors this year? I took your advice and went all-white. You can see the end result below. I think it looks pretty nice. I might toy around with making the center door be all-red or something like that but for now, I’m happy. Next year I think I’ll focus on adding some smaller lights to the bushes and/or the little tree next to the driveway.

christmaslights2015

Parks And Recreation Review

luckyboycanoeI finished watching all seven seasons of Parks and Recreation. This show came out a few years after The Office and I skipped it because the promos made it look like a knock off of The Office. After watching the whole show, I suppose there are a lot of similarites in the styile and the content matter, but I have to say that Parks and Rec is superior. While there are loveable characters in both, the cast of Parks and Rec is stronger and the story line held up better. Chris Pratt and Nick Offerman were incredible throughout.

Trivia: The series finale features Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) paddling the “Lucky Boy” canoe across a lake. He actually built that canoe himself. In fact, all of the shots of him in his woodshop were actually his woodshop and he built many of the props for the show. The canoe was one of two big canoe projects. He kept one for himself and the Lucky Boy was recently delivered to his friend Jimmy Diresta. Jimmy is a woodworker as well and now has a successful YouTube channel that I enjoy and he’s also host of the Making It podcast which I recommend if you like to make stuff.

Parks and Rec gets two thumbs up from me. It’s easy to flip on, chuckle, and burn through a few episodes. It was available for free to Prime members but now you need a Hulu subscription to watch it (assuming you don’t want to pay ~$25/season to buy it.)

Dos Tios Glass Break

brokenglassIt has been almost eight years since Tim and I ordered 144 custom beer glasses. It was a goofy project but still one that I enjoy to this day. They have held up amazingly well. I reuse the same two or three glasses every week and even through countless dishwasher cycles, they look as good as the day we bought them.

Well, most of them look good. Last week I had one break in a crazy way. When I came down to the kitchen one morning, I picked up one of the glasses to rinse it out and put it in the dishwasher. The glass was about half full with water and I had whiskey stones (rum stones?) soaking in it to sort of clean them a bit. When I picked up the glass. the top part came off and the base stayed on the counter. The water and stones poured out.

It was a very clean break. Maybe it had cracked when I set it down on the counter the night before, but it was so perfect that the water didn’t leak out? I couldn’t figure it out, but I guess this means I’m down one glass. At this rate I should have enough glasses for the next half a millennia or so.

Broken Window Theory

brokenwindowtheoryEverybody has their own mental bar denoting what a “clean” house looks like. If you’re happy with the state of your house and the amount of stuff you have in it, then you can probably skip this post. But if you’re not, there are a bazillion different books, websites, and videos giving you ideas about how to improve the state of your home. I’ll make it a bazillion and one by sharing my own thoughts.

I hate cleaning, but even more than that, I hate looking at a mess and knowing that I have to “waste” my time and clean it. So my basic approach is to ABC: Always Be Cleaning. (Every self-help article like this needs a cheesy acronym, right?) For example, when I finish making dinner, I don’t leave the dishes in the sink to greet me the following morning, I take 5 minutes and clean them up. Doing little bits of cleaning here and there feels a lot less painful than ruining two hours of my Saturday because the kitchen turned into a nightmare.

Coupled with that, I also force myself to clean up the area before starting any project. Even if I clean up at the end of a task, the area slowly gets messy again. This is especially true out in the garage. So before I start that next big project, I pick up all my tools, clean off my bench, and organize the piles of wood. Then I’m excited to work in that nice clean area instead of tripping over stuff on the floor and never having room on the bench.

My approach can be neatly summed up by the Broken Window Theory. If you read that linked Wikipedia article, you’ll see the theory summed up like this:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

 

Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.

It’s pretty easy to tell when an area is clean. I feel an emotional response to setting that first piece of junk in the nice clean area. But then I get used to seeing it there and it doesn’t bother me so much. In fact, it gets easier and easier to just throw more junk in that area because hey, I have to clean it out anyway, right? Pretty soon it’s a huge mess and now I have to do one of those big huge cleanouts and my quality of life is negatively impacted because I’m annoyed by the thought of that big cleaning event coming up.

It’s surprising how often this theory applies. For example, we talk about it regularly at work when someone proposes a less than beautiful piece of code. Just take the time to fix it now because your hack will open the floodgates for more hacks until we’re left with a nightmare that we don’t have time to re-architect. If you want to get a little geekier about it, you might propose that messes grow exponentially.

If you’ve already got a system that works for you, then stick with it! But if you need a little more encouragement, remember the broken window theory.

Zion School Fire

My brother-in-law, LukeS, is the principal and upper grades teacher at Zion Lutheran School in Toledo, OH. He had a rude awakening around midnight Monday night. The school was on fire! The boiler room is a complete loss and there is water damage throughout the school. The local news has two video segments (1 and 2) showing the result of the fire and there is a LOT of work to do to get the building back into shape.

It’s going to take a long time to get the building fixed, but this is obviously the middle of the school year. They are hoping to get some portable buildings in place for a temporary school location, but their insurance will only cover $10K toward that. To help cover the large price gap, they have started a Go Fund Me page. Please consider helping them out with a donation, and whether you donate or not, please keep them in your prayers.

zionfire

Hulu Plus Review

huluplusI was happily enjoying all the Parks and Recreation episodes (great show!) on Amazon Prime Instant Video when suddenly that stopped being available as part of Prime. I was about halfway through the fifth of seven seasons. What to do?

I didn’t really love it enough to pay ~$25/season to watch the rest of it, but it was available as part of Hulu Plus for only ~$10/month. I found a coupon for a two week trial instead of the normal one week and fired it up.

It was my first experience with Hulu Plus, and, while it was nice that it worked on all my devices (Amazon Fire TV, Xbox360, Xbox One, and Windows Phone), I wasn’t impressed. First of all, the ads are annoying. Yes, it’s less than normal TV, but I don’t watch ads in normal TV because I DVR it. Here I’m forced to sit through a small selection of commercials over and over again. They do have a new price tier that lets you get rid of commercials for a few extra bucks. That would definitely be worth it.

The commercials were annoying but I knew I could pay money to get rid of them when the trial was up so it wasn’t horrible. What really annoyed me was the failure to remember not only where I was in an episode when I stopped watching but even what episode I was watching. I switched from device to device regularly and it seemed like it worked properly only about half the time. The other half of the time I’d have to flip through all of the episodes, figure out which one I was on, and then fast forward through the episode until I got to the point where I stopped before.

In a world where we are talking about 4K high dynamic range content coming soon, Hulu still streams their content in stereo like it’s 1950. Where’s the 5.1 that every other streaming service offers?

And finally, when I watched from a desktop PC, the video would stutter every few seconds. This PC is a beast and it easily handles YouTube, Netflix or Amazon Instant Video. Why does Hulu have to stink?

Hulu was around before Netflix or Amazon Instant Video and what do they have to show for themselves? It’s the same story they’ve always had: it’s almost something awesome, but it’s still not there yet.

I cancelled my subscription before the trial ran out. Thanks for letting me watch Parks and Rec.

My First Car

cars_mustangLast week’s post about the cars we had when I was growing up got me thinking about the experience of picking up the first car that I ever purchased: a 2002 Ford Mustang GT. It was a beautiful car, and I bought it right after college. The dealer had to transfer it in from another dealership so I couldn’t drive it off the lot after making the deal. Mom took me to pick it up a few days later when it arrived at the dealer. After getting the keys, I sat down in the car to drive it away for the first time. I looked up and noticed about four sales guys watching me from the window. With my foot on the brake, I disengaged the parking brake, put it in reverse, slowly released the clutch and… stalled it. My face turned bright red as I restarted the engine and gave it plenty of gas to make sure I didn’t stall it twice.

It doesn’t sound so bad now that I write it out, but this event sticks out in my head as one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I’ve stalled cars plenty of times, but never with all those guys laughing at me and my fancy new car that they probably thought my parents purchased for me.

Storing Gasoline

I lived much of my life not realizing that gas has a relatively short shelf life. I figured it out by sending one of church’s mowers to the mechanic because it was running terribly. The result? He replaced the gas and it ran beautifully. The gas had gone bad sitting in the shed over the winter.

Common estimates say that after about 3 months, your ethanol blended gas (which is almost everything you buy these days) should be thrown away and replaced. If you put Sta-Bil or some other fuel stabilizer in it, you might get 6-12 months. The longer you store the gas, the more water that the ethanol attracts. Watered down gas is a mess for your engine to deal with. At best you’ll get decreased fuel mileage and power, but in extreme cases you can really mess up your vehicle.

It’s not a big deal in cars because we generally run through the tanks of gas pretty quickly. It’s a more common problem in lawn equipment. During the winter months, that gas is effectively rotting in your shed and gums up your carburetor.

To help avoid these problems, I do a few things:

  1. Whenever I fill up our gas can, I set a reminder to replace it in two months. The can is pretty small so I usually just pour it into my car’s gas tank when the car is already mostly full. I figure it can deal with a gallon or two of older gas mixed in with 10 gallons of good gas.
  2. The last time I fill up the lawnmower for the season, I use ethanol free gasoline. You can buy it from special gas stations, or you can pick up a can from the home center. It’s not cheap but spending a couple extra bucks to save yourself the headache of cleaning a carburetor is probably worth it.
  3. My weedwacker accepts multiple attachments so I can also use it as a leaf blower and an edger. It gets used pretty often during the spring, summer and fall, but even then, I hardly go through any gas. Rather than keep a small gas can with oil-mixed gas that will go bad before I use it all, I just buy the premixed ethanol free gas. It lasts “forever” and I don’t have to remember where I put the oil to mix in.

It costs a little extra but these simple steps can save you time, headaches and money.

trufuel

P.S. It feels like I just wrote an eHow article. Ew.

Childhood Cars

I’ve been spending a lot of time dreaming and learning about my potential next vehicle purchase (TRUCK!) and it got me to thinking about all the vehicles I’ve owned over the years and the cars that Mom and Dad have owned. I asked Mom to dig up photos of all the cars they owned together (until I left the house) and here’s the list:

1973 Ford Gran Torino Sport
Dad loved this car. He actually kept it until probably the late 80s though it didn’t run at that point. He gave it to a neighbor who restored it.
momdad_torino1978 Ford Mustang II
I don’t remember this car. The only thing I remember about this car is a story Mom and Dad tell about driving through Nevada (?) and it was so hot that it felt like being in an oven.
momdad_mustang1979 Ford LTD
This is the first car that I remember. Dad used to hold me on his lap and let me drive down our quarter-mile long driveway in this car. I didn’t know it until Mom sent over the info for this post, but this is the only car that they purchased from a used car lot. A couple others were used cars as well, but those were purchased from friends and relatives.
momdad_ltd1981 Mercury Grand Marquis
This car belonged to Great Grandpa Hinkle. Mom and Dad bought it from Great Grandma after Great Grandpa passed away. The only thing that I remember about this car was that a bottle of acid for the pool accidentally spilled on the floor behind the drivers seat and ate through the floor mat. Oops.
momdad_marquis
1989 Ford Taurus
I have a ton of memories about this car. For one thing, it’s the first car that I remember them purchasing. I was so excited about how “small” it was. I remember doodling the dashboard layout while sitting in Miss Loescher’s class. And this was the car that I drove to high school. By the time I got it, some of the paint was starting to flake off the gray part on the bottom and there was a little rust on the maroon parts. I tried to grind off the rust and repaint both parts. It wasn’t a great idea.
momdad_taurus1991 Ford Probe
Dad and Mom bought this from Uncle Mark who works for Ford (which explains all the Fords…) and what a cool car it was! It came with a stain on the floor in the backseat from where cousin Ryan had accidentally spilled an orange pop. I spent a ton of time in this car as well. In the photo you can see me driving it to prom. I took this to college for about three of my years at Purdue and drove it during my internships at John Deere. I got over 40mpg from it! It was also the start of my love for manual transmissions. I started driving this around 1999 and drove a manual from the until now.
momdad_probe1995 Ford Taurus
Dad and Mom liked the first maroon Taurus so well that they bought another one six years later.
momdad_taurus951999 Mercury Sable
And last but not least (while I was living there) is the Mercury Sable. This one was extra fancy. It had leather seats and a six disc CD changer in the trunk.
momdad_sableMom, thank you for finding all this information!