Some Blog Site

I kind of got mugged the other night. It was in a store parking lot. I was sitting there, minding my own business, when a little old lady with a handicap tag hanging from her mirror accosted me and forced me to pay $60.

That is, in effect, what happened. What happened, in fact, was that she drove her car into mine and caused about $60 worth of damage to my car. End result is the same though, albeit with less personal danger and more work after the fact.

Here’s the story: I was pulling into the Meijer parking lot and the entering traffic (me) does not have a stop sign, whereas the cross traffic (little old lady, or LOL for short) does. She is going to turn left to leave the parking lot, and starts to do so in front of me. I’m going slow, as I’m anticipating the cross traffic not realizing I don’t have a stop sign, so I’m able to stop before getting to the lady. Note that I wanted to turn right, so I wouldn’t have crossed her path anyway.

So why did I stop instead of turning right? Because she was taking up more than her lane and I didn’t think I had enough room to get through until she left.

But while I’m stopped, waiting for her to complete her turn, she keeps getting closer. I have my foot firmly on the brake, wondering why the gap between us is closing. Then there is a scraping, crunching sound, and I’m wondering why she isn’t stopping, because I can’t go anywhere. Finally she stops and so do the sounds.

Now I notice there’s a truck behind me, so she pulls up to the far curb, and I go around the curb and park in the closest spot. I get out, notice that my bumper is crunched up but the lights seem to still work, then I walk over to her car. She tries to open the door but her sheet metal is deformed just enough that she can’t budge it.

If you want more details of the story you can ask me later, but the end of the story is that since it happened on private property we are free to exchange information and go our separate ways. Since all I got out of it was a dented bumper and a cracked headlight housing, I was glad for that. I ordered the $60 replacement housing and will try to undent the plastic bumper somewhat, but I’m sure the long-term effect will be a slightly uglier vehicle.

Her car, on the other hand, scraped the paint off three separate body panels (front quarter panel, driver door, rear door) and deformed them enough to effect the door hinge operation. Her three seconds of inattention cost her thousands of dollars of damage.

And I must take this time to reflect on my previous accident, less than a year ago. This was on a snowy road. I was on the main road and did not have a stop sign, and the lady (middle-aged lady, or MAL for short) on the side road and who did have a stop sign had trouble stopping and slid into the intersection, right in front of my vehicle. She tried to accelerate and I tried to stop, but it was too close and I ended up bumping her. That bump caused her to go into the ditch, which caused her airbags to go off. All I got out of it was a cracked bumper and cracked headlight housing, so I was glad for that.

Her car, on the other hand, had the airbags go off and required a tow out of the ditch, with police oversight. Her three seconds of late braking cost her thousands of dollars of damage.

On one hand, I hope not to be in anymore car crashes. One the other hand, if I am in a crash I hope it keeps up the trend of not costing me any more than some tens of dollars and a half hour to replace a headlight housing.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• What would impressionists do without George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
• What would happen if we sent only thoughts to a family affected by tragedy? Or prayers only? Is this one of those sum-greater-than-the-parts things? I know you can think about something without praying, but can you pray about something without thinking about it?
• Now that I mention it, the phrase people usually use is “our thoughts and prayers go out to the family” which means they are praying to that family. That’s just wrong, and I bet they really aren’t praying to the family, which means they’re also lying. Now if someone said “we are sending prayers to God for the family” I could agree with that.
• You know who is sitting on a gold mine? – Christian Bookstore Distributors. Yes, they own the website domain name of CBD. But how could they, as good Christians, sell that to the other people who really want the CBD name?
• Kids these days don’t know the words to classical music. I was singing the other day “Smurfberry crunch is fun to eat” and all I got was a funny look. At least my kids know the words to Carol of the Bells – it’s “garmin.com”

Any other words to classical tunes that you like?

We have finally joined the civilized world and switched to an unlimited cell phone plan.

I kept my old family share plan because it was grandfathered in and once I switched away from it I could never get it back. Plus, 15 gigabytes a month should be plenty for any reasonable family.

But we had been going over the 15 GB allotment the last couple months, and the overage fees were adding up. We are in a somewhat rural area and there’s no good wired internet option, so our cell phone plan is also our home internet, using a USB hotspot that’s also on the family share plan.

Anyway, I had been resisting the call of the unlimited plans because the last time I had checked they were more expensive than our metered plan. One option was to get an unlimited plan for just a USB hotspot for the laptop, but no one does that. You can’t even get just a USB hotspot on a limited plan by itself. Everyone forbids a USB hotspot as the only device in a plan and requires at least one phone line.

Except for Boost mobile, but we tried their USB hotspot and it was terrible. The device was fine, it was their signal was so poor. Then we tried a T-Mobile line and it was great. They offered a free USB hotspot for a month. Their signal was great, speeds were good. But then the trial period was over and they didn’t make it easy to keep using that device. I was ready to pay $30-$40 a month for a limited USB hotpsot plan, but they didn’t want my money.

In the end, it worked out better I suppose, since I had no other option but to switch my existing AT&T plan to unlimited. I did have the option not to switch, but after pricing it out, their new unlimited plan was cheaper than my old family share plan. Even if I didn’t want unlimited data (so as to prevent the family from becoming mindless zombies), it was going to at least save me money.

For a little while before the switch though, I did feel like such an old-timer. I reminded myself of the people who saved every little thing because they lived through the Great Depression, but I was trying to save every little bit of bandwidth. Just like it doesn’t make much sense for me today to wash and reuse tinfoil, that’s how I probably appeared to my kids. “Dad, why are you worrying about how much data we are using?” They never actually said that, but I imagined they were thinking something along those lines, since to them just about every place has Wifi and bandwidth is just not something that needs to be thought about.

Oh well.

Maybe someday I’ll tell them stories of the first couple of modems I ever used – the 300 baud, then 800 then 2400 baud modems on the family’s Commodore 64. No prefix of kilo- or mega- or anything. Just plain ol’ baud. And yet the messages went through a lot faster than some of these texts that I send these days. When I see a text taking forever to send, I’m thinking to myself “It’s only 50 bytes. At the speeds this phone can transmit at, the transaction shouldn’t even be noticeable.”

I suppose that’s the price of convenience.

Delta came home with this bit of schoolwork to show us what he’s been doing and learning. It’s good to see the school encouraging creativity – it’s the geographical equivalent of looking for shapes in clouds.

In case you need help reading his writing, the text is this (with slight corrections):
Superior looks like a big bad dog
Michigan looks like a person with a jetpack
Huron looks like a MONSTER!!!
Erie looks like a reindeer
Ontario looks like an upsidedown rocketship

My kids like to tease me by playing Christmas music before Thanksgiving, even though I am trying to raise them in the truth that the Christmas season does not start until after Thanksgiving. But we got snow here on Halloween, so it’s easy to see why they felt like it.

Anyway, Christmas is a very popular time for Pachelbel’s Canon in D. If only he were around today to collect royalties…

I figured I might as well add a contribution into the mix. Here are some links to the song in various file formats, as I didn’t want to go through the hassle of setting up an audio player within this blog. I’m assuming your device will know at least one of these formats and can play it. Note: the MIDI format is the worst of this lot, at least on my computer.

Pachelbel and Soul in MP3 format
Pachelbel and Soul in WAV format
Pachelbel and Soul in MIDI format

And here’s the score, in case you’re, umm, keeping score.
Pachelbel and Soul in PDF format

I started trying other parts of the song too, and everything worked well together. I just didn’t feel like spending more time on it, but there’s a lot one could do with this combination.

As a bonus, I finally have an ending to Heart and Soul that I like. I’ve heard a couple different endings and I never could remember what the official ending to the tune was. Now I’m going to stick with this amalgamation.

A recent Bible study question asked if Simon the sorcerer from Acts 8 was a true believer. A lively discussed ensued, with me and one other guy saying yes and most other people saying no.

I had various reasons, but I thought of this one later so I’ll share it now.

Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

Matthew 7:1-2, emphasis mine

In some circles, people declined to answer the question, saying it wasn’t their role to determine that. I think that fits with my thinking, which is that it is better to err on the side of grace and give people the benefit of the doubt, because that’s how I would want them to treat me if the tables were turned.

A couple days after that, Some Wife brought up the fact that Kanye West had released a Christian album. Alpha had already downloaded the album (due to poor internet at our house, people here have to download music and videos for offline viewing rather than stream things, and the downloading is best done somewhere else) and so he Bluetoothed it to the van’s radio while we were driving back from a cross country meet. While that was playing, we debated the topic of if Kanye was a Christian releasing an album or a non-Christian releasing an album for Christians. No son, don’t listen to his older songs.

As we were talking, I made the connection from Kanye to Simon the sorcerer. Are we judging Kanye by the standards we hope to be judged by? I thought it fit quite nicely.

Remember the reason for the season: one Mediator between God and man, which is Christ Jesus.