I’m writing this entry wirelessly on a Sony CLIÉ. That’s enough to be thankful for right there, even if it’s not mine. Honestly, I’m trying not to sound trite here, but God has blessed me more than I could ever deserve. I have an amazing, beautiful wife (try not to agree too vociferously), I love my job, I’ve got a bunch of creative opportunities coming my way, and when you count the forgiveness of Christ in that list, I’m ridiculously “lucky.”

I also want all of you to know how thankful I am to count you as my friends. I think of you guys all the time, and I miss you all every day. I’m thankful that I have such great friends and family to come home to over Christmas. I’m looking forward to seeing you all in less than a month!

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a dog park, it’s basically a big, fenced-in area where dog owners can take their little buddies to romp and play outside and off leash without worrying that their dog will be unwelcome. (Dogs Gone Wild!)

There’s a dog park near our house that Steph and I have been going to recently. The folks that built it were actually considerate enough to create two separate fenced-in areas: one for big dogs, and one for little dogs. I can tell that Henson yearns to go cause disturbances in the big dog area, but there’s no way we’re bringing him in there.

The interesting thing we’ve noticed as we watch Henson (“The Grandmaster”) walk around (Note: he does not run) is that he actually prefers to keep to himself. He doesn’t do the thing that many other dogs do where they buzz alongside each other and clash and roll and yip and circle. He certainly has his moments where he smells another dog, but that’s about it. He prefers to walk along by himself, smelling the ground and watching other dogs from a safe distance while looking longingly at the German Shepherds, Rottweilers, and American Bulldogs on the other side of the fence. I’m certain he’s thinking something like, “When I get over there, I will rule them all!” If another small dog comes up to him, he’ll allow it to smell him briefly, and then he’ll turn and bare his teeth and try to chase it away.

When Steph saw that, she said, “Dang it! My dog behaves like a home-schooled kid!” I’m not totally sure I understand what that means, but I’ve got a few guesses.

I’ve said in past entries that I’m becoming much more serious about web design, as you may recall. I think the Net is going to have a second wave of prosperity in the near future (beginning in the next one to three years probably), and I think that wave will be due to the increasing popularity of using standards (CSS, XHTML, etc.) to create powerful, beautiful websites without messy, overly-verbose code. As long as the browsers of the world can keep up, which in every case but Internet Explorer’s I think they can, we’ll have a lot of happy authors and a lot of happy viewers/readers/users out there.

But enough about my ivory-tower idealism. Steph heard that there was an opportunity to create a website for the Cupertino Education Association, and she told me about it. We then thought about the fact that Steph has a good amount of knowledge of the inner-workings of the CEA, a newfound love of webpage authoring, and an advanced sense of aesthetics. We realized that when those skills are combined, nay, welded to my knowledge of PHP, MySQL, CSS, and webpage layout, a gargantuan machine of a webmaster emerges, resplendent in the glory of its own untapped potential. Within its furious roar the zen of the web lays, unmolested.

So we made a webpage and showed it to them. They really liked it so they’re paying us to make the site. It’s not a huge sum of money, mind you. But I guess this makes us professional website authors now. So that’s pretty cool. I just wanted to share that fact with you all so you could wave your tiny flags and throw streamers and confetti, or something.

I’ll show it to you when it’s ready. It’s not yet ready.

The Geek Factory

Today as I was leaving my house, I saw a really beautiful cherry-red antique roadster pass by. It was the kind where they lift the flaps on either side of the engine, and you can see it glistening in all its perfectly-polished chrome glory. And a couple seconds later, an orange one following behind it. And a couple seconds later, a yellow one. And then I noticed they all had “funeral” stickers in their front windshields. Then I saw a bright purple one. I didn’t have time to wait any longer to see how many more there were, but the fact that they were driving in the order of the colors of the rainbow is pretty fricking cool. Dang, I wish I had my camera with me.

The burning question that remains in my mind is Who died? Honestly, who has friends with color-coded antique hot-rods that love them so much that they drive them in order for your funeral procession? Or, more specifically, who has a close friend or relative who would arrange that for their relative/friend’s funeral? I would love to know who that guy/gal was.

It’s been just over a year since I’ve sung in public. Last fall I sang at church with that Sunday’s worship team, and I haven’t publicly uttered a note since then. Some of you understand how odd that is for me, since throughout high school I was involved in music and plays, and in college I began my career as a music major with a vocal scholarship. 13 months is too long a time to go without doing something you really love to do. I’m not saying that I haven’t had opportunities since then, either, but that I just haven’t taken them because I’ve been too busy, or I just didn’t like the timing for some reason.

A few days ago the youth pastor for the Junior High group at our church emailed me (since Steph and I have been involved there since late September) and asked if I would play “host” for the Sunday morning Junior High service, and also sing on the JH worship team. So I said I would. It wasn’t a big deal, really. We didn’t even rehearse. The songs were really simple ones that I think most churchgoers know. But even though I wasn’t necessarily as picky as I can get with the musicians I’ve been involved with, and it wasn’t a very big deal or a very big crowd, it felt really good.

God has been bringing it back to my mind all day today, saying, “I want you to sing more often. Keep pursuing those opportunities wherever I give them to you.” So whereas last year I might have said, “Well, I’m a little busy this week, so I can’t sing with you. Maybe next time,” I think this year, I’ll just respond to opportunities with, “Yes.” We’ll see how that works out. Maybe God is teaching me to use my gifts to meet The Body’s needs on His terms rather than mine.

A few weeks ago, I got an email at work that said that the entire company was to shut down for a week over the Thanksgiving holiday. That time has finally come, and today was the first day of that vacation. I don’t go back to work until December 1st, and I’ve got nothing pressing to do during the day until then. Those facts make me smile.

I get the sense that I will find plenty to keep me busy. I’ve got tons of website reworking and redesigning to do for seven different websites. (Maybe I’ll let you see them as I make progress if you’re interested.) I’ve also got a lot of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time to play. I mean, hey, that game isn’t going to play itself, people! But as I was thinking about it, I realized that I should also offer some benefit to you, my reader, since I had such a windfall.

I looked over at the calendar showing the number of times I’ve blogged this month, and I’ve decided that I don’t like how sparse it is over there. So I’m now promising you that I will blog every day from now until December 1st, since I know I’ve got the time.

I may not talk about what I did that day (in fact, I usually try to avoid writing a “what I did today” blog) but I’m sure I’ll cover many interesting subjects. Well… many subjects. If it goes well, I may try to imitate the blogging consistency of my friend Jeff and blog every day in December. Or… better yet… maybe we should have a competition amongst the circle of blogging friends on this server and a few other places (you know who you are) to see who can blog the most in December, and then pool together to buy that blogger a prize for Christmas (which means that logically the competition would have to end before Christmas, but you get the idea). We would have to define what a “blog” is, precisely, so we would know what to count, but after that it’s just a numbers game.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Winter blogathon?