A Faith Walk and Talk and Some Funny Stuff!

I got a message on my Droid yesterday alerting me to a shipment I'd be receiving from Amazon: Mechanical Bull has shipped and is due to arrive on Tuesday. Say what? What did I or Tammy inadvertently place an order for? I've never ridden a mechanical bull and I'm not about to start now, besides, we don't have room for one! Cruising Facebook a few hours later I see a post from Kings of Leon. Mechanical Bull hits the stores today! That explains it. I'd pre-ordered the CD but didn't remember the title. I'm listening to it now on my Amazon Cloud Player. So far, so very good!

We finally made it back to Foci last Thursday for the first time in more than two months but we only stayed an hour. There's a crack in the crucible we gather from and because of that, the glass level is much lower than usual, meaning, it get's really hot when you try and reach in to gather glass. Tammy, not being very tall is at a real disadvantage. I made a couple of tumblers before we decided to call it quits early and wait a week to give it another go. It was nice to be back on the bench again though. Our glassblowing took a backseat this summer to so many other things going on in our lives, mostly our home addition but now that its complete I think we'll be finding ourselves at Foci much more regularly again.

I'm giving up my coveted Friday/Saturday days off at the salt mine in exchange for Thursday/Friday and expect to ride this schedule into retirement. I'll be working with some younger controllers which will be a nice change. These days off will actually work better for me in many regards, especially riding. It's nuts out there on Saturdays. I'll take a Thursday or Friday morning over a Saturday morning for riding any day.

Speaking of riding, I ventured out for a longish 105 mile ride Saturday afternoon doing my Lakeville to Rogers loop, a loop I haven't done in at least two years. I found a nice rhythm on the way up to Rogers but lost it on the way home in a barrage of stoplights along my route as I made the mistake of coming home by way of Minneapolis. I captured some video but had to delete a good portion of it when I noticed that the memory card in my GoPro was full halfway into the ride. I opted for less resolution to allow me to capture a few more scenes for some video of the ride.

I had hoped going into this Spring that my riding wouldn't get in the way of the long walks I'd grown to love last year when I was forced off my bike but regrettably, those walks have been far too few. I did get out yesterday afternoon, though, for a few hours covering much of western Lakeville. It was so nice to be out walking but it's also nice being on my bike and that's my dilemma. I'm certain the problem will resolve itself once I'm retired.

As I was putting in the last couple miles of my walk I was approached by two Mormons doing mission work, wondering if I knew about Jesus Christ. I assured them I did and they followed up with some more questions about my faith. I invited them to walk along with me and we shared our faith story with each other. I told them that I was church-less and why, which I suppose was like throwing red meat to a dog. They, of course, wanted to get my phone number so they could follow up with me. I told them that I felt no prompting at all to pursue the Mormon faith but gave them my phone number anyway and said it would be fine if they wanted to get in touch with me. We only ever have missionaries of two faiths that will on a very rare occasion send people to knock on our door: Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. We always invite them in to talk.

The updated Google Maps Street View is out for our area. It was a little over a year ago that I spied the Google car photographing our neighborhood but I was too late to get in the photos although I did try. I had seen the car parked down the street and wondered if he'd already passed by. He apparently had because I'm nowhere to be seen in the new photos although in the old photos I could be seen standing in our driveway by my mower.

I came across some really funny stuff online this past week. They're videos put out by a woman who lives in Australia and she has a knack for finding humor in ordinary life experiences. With some nice editing, she's able to play all of the characters in her videos. This humor really works for me. Okay...she's cute too! Not for sensitive ears though.