cuchillo

I could complain, but it wouldn't do any good. Sometimes you just feel like it though.

As I already mentioned, Shannon and I got a new car. I really like it. It’s a 2003 Ford Focus ZTS, and it’s blue. Yesterday was our sixth anniversary, so we drove to Coeur d’Alene. I surprised her by taking her to one of her favorite restaurants, The Olive Garden. I’ve heard of others driving all the way to Spokane or Coeur d’Alene for dinner; I got the idea from talking to Rocky the other day. We had a great time. Getting there was half the fun.

It's the drive back that was not so fun. About ninety miles from Missoula, I hit an ice chunk that was sitting in the middle of the road. I was going about 70 mph and it was dark, so I didn’t have time to swerve completely out of the way. I ran over it with the tire. So I ended up changing a flat out in the cold. These things happen.

The real annoyance happened when I took the car to the tire shop to get fixed today. I didn’t even notice as I was changing the flat out in the dark, but that chunk of ice had taken a chunk out of my wheel. So now I’m looking at needing a new wheel, a new tire, an alignment, and hopefully that’s all. Luckily, I already got insurance for it. Luckily, I opted for the $250 deductible. Apparently, the wheel alone is more than that. Unfortunately, the shop can’t start repairs until the claim adjuster returns the estimate, which can take up to 72 hours, and when they do they’ll have to order a wheel because they don’t have one in stock. Arrgh, I don’t have the time to mess with all this. I’m not getting my homework done as it is, and there goes my digital camera.

Sometimes life can feel like camping trip in the snow. You’re cold, miserable, and sometimes feel like complaining, but you know that it just won’t do any good. So you put up the tent, build a bonfire, and eat some hot Mountain House that warms you from the inside out. I’m not quite sure of all the implications of that simile, I’m just remembering my last hike, but really things aren’t too bad. I can’t complain.

Congratulations, Andrew, Nayibe, and Javier! I was overjoyed to read about Josiah's arrival.

Andrew, I still remember poaching golf courses, running the base perimeter, the lodge people, the old red Jimmy, NLB, Frazer, ICTHUS and mingle time, our ode to an Aussie in Russia, and so much more.

God bless you two. I hope to see Josiah George in person soon.

Yesterday, I put a dollar into the Coke machine, and it spit out two Cokes and five Diet Cokes. Funny. They had a repair number on the front, so I called it and let them know that they might want to come and check out the machine.

When I told the lady at the other end what happened, she said, "I'm sorry - if that's the right response." I asked her what I should do with all these extra cokes, and she said, "Well, I guess if there is no one to turn them in to, you can just keep them." Too bad I don't care for Diet Coke, but it's good that people in my office do.

Afterwards, an older gentleman who saw the whole thing said, "that was very honest of you." But really, was this anything special? It's too bad that doing the right thing doesn't seem normal.

By the Sea Shore. Well, she really is a bargain finder. My wife has found, in the last few months, several good deals. First it was all the laminate flooring, then the cheap furniture (which we haven't actually bought yet), and now she found a great deal on a new car. In fact, it was so good that when I went to the bank to get a loan, Monica the loan officer thought it was too good to be true. Not only was it well below retail, but it was even below wholesale. So she ran a free carfax report, which saved me $25, and it came back great. The car had no wrecks or anything, and it was even reported that the car was serviced every month.

This is a great replacement for the old Neon. Do you know anyone who wants a '96 Neon for say $700? It comes with a CD player, but it also could use some mechanical attention.

Of course, all the real thanks goes to God for always providing abundantly for us.

Like lafalda was saying over there at el blogo, it snowed today. There was about a couple of inches on the truck in the morning, but the real excitement started around 6:00 a.m. when I arrived at Walmart to meet J.J. and Beau. It began to come down hard and it didn't stop for about four hours.

Oh, in case you were wondering, J.J., Beau and I get together Wednesday mornings at the coffee shop in Walmart just to talk about God and make sure life is going well for each other. You could call it an accountability group if you want, but I tend to steer away from "Christianese." Perhaps I’ll do a post on that later. Anyway, this morning it was kind of interesting because when I walked in there was Russian Dance/Pop music playing. Cool, but then she shut it off. Here are some snippets from the conversation:

Here’s a side-note: I have a habit of doing this, and it is kind of annoying to my wife and maybe others. For fun, I just respond with the obvious answer to a question, and not what was implicitly asked. Obviously, what she meant was how I knew the language was Russian.

Anther fun one is when you are bundled up on a relatively warm day and someone asks, "Are you cold?" You can say, "No. Why would I be with this hat and everything?" Well, back to the story.

It’s funny, I seem to meet Russians/Russian speakers all over town.

Also related to Russian, my teacher announced in class that we will be playing Russian Scrabble in class for bonus points on the final. I am ready for it.

In other news, I have more to write about, but I’ll wait until I have a couple pictures.

Last night, somewhat spontaneously, Pavel and I decided to wait outside Target to buy an XBox 360. It was a cold night. With the low temperature at 27 degrees at 5:00 a.m. I really don't have the money to spend on an XBox or the time to play it even. I just thought that it would be a fun way to capture an audioblog, and make some cash.

There were only 16 systems, and I was sixth in line. The first eight were the premium systems ($400) with hard drives and a bunch of extras, and the last eight were the core systems ($300). I ended up trading spots with a guy who really wanted a premium system. He gave $150!

Now, I'm listing my first item on eBay, we'll see how it goes.

Oh, and here's that interview with Dustin, who was waiting outside of Best Buy since Sunday. Dustin is a physicist and computer programmer who wants to program video game physics.

I should be going to bed right now, but I wanted to write about the weekend. I just got the photos developed.

Tina, Scott, Brandon, and I took a vote Friday morning on whether to car-camp or do some actual backpacking. We decided to backpack even though it would be cold and snowy. Before the hike though, we went with Zach, Rachael, and Rocky to cut some wood for a family in Stevensville. They wanted to give us a pig in exchange for cutting up some logs.

We got quite a bit cut in the few hours we were there. We had two chainsaws running and the others were collecting the wood and taking it to the lean-to. The people whose wood we were cutting were gone, but they left us some pizza to bake, and warned us not to let the cows out. One of the cows got out, but we were able to round it up and put it back in its pen.

After taking the edge off of our endurance, we headed up to Canyon Creek for the hike. The car couldn't make it all the way up to the trailhead due to the slick, and steep, mountain road so we parked it in a turnout and hiked the half-mile to the trailhead. We stuck our thumbs out to one guy who drove by, but he didn't pick us up.

We reached the trailhead at 4:30, which is not an ideal time to start a four-mile hike when the sun sets at 5:30 or so. We hiked in the dark for a while, and although we didn’t reach the lake like we had hoped, we found a nice little spot to set up the tents at about 7:00. It was getting quite cold at this point, so we build a fire and made some hot cocoa, hot cider, and hot food. Nothing beats a Mountain House meal in the cold. You can feel the ball of heat go down your throat, and into your stomach. We build what started out as a little struggling fire into a bonfire with six-foot flames. That warmed us up.

Somewhere around this point, we noticed that Tina was wearing tennis shoes and cotton socks. I said, “your feet must be cold,” and she said that they were very cold. Tina must never complain about anything, because she didn’t complain about the cold once on this incredibly cold hike. Scott gave her his extra pair of wool socks, and she dried her shoes out around the fire.

The next morning I woke up early, and headed up the trail for about a half-mile without reaching the lake so I came back to camp. Tina was up by this time. We didn’t have any water left so I went down to the creek and filtered three Nalgenes, which took about an hour with my incredibly slow filter. Thank God for Gore-Tex boots because I broke through the ice and planted a foot in the stream but didn’t get wet.

When I got back from pumping water everyone else was up, and we decided to forego making it to the lake because it was already getting late in the day. So after Brandon, who has poor circulation, finished warming his toes to a tolerable state, we headed back.

You know how nice it is too get back to the car from a hike, especially a difficult hike? It is really nice, but when Scott got back to where he parked the car wasn’t there. He had a conversation with a couple loggers that went something like this:


Then he looked over the edge of the road, and there was the old Subaru. The loggers wondered why there wasn’t snow on the ground where they parked. From the looks of the scene, someone broke the windows in the car, took it out of gear, and released the brake, and shoved it off the mountain. We called the police and began the wait. One guy stopped. He was hunting with his daughter. He asked us if we were okay, and if we needed a ride. We said thanks and asked him if he could take Tina and Brandon to town and Scott and I would wait. Then they guy said, “Oh, well I’m not going there. I’m just going over to the next canyon.” I guess he didn’t really want to give us a ride.

Later, another car came down, and a nice couple picked up Tina and Brandon. They waited at Perkins, and we waited for the Highway Patrol. Rocky picked up Scott and me after the car was out, and we met Courtney and Zach at Perkins with Brandon, Tina, and the nice couple who even stayed to talk to Tina and Brandon.

We got back to Missoula quite a bit later than planned on Saturday, and Scott left for Great Falls quite a bit later than planned. My truck is stuck at the guys, because my keys are in the car or on the mountain. All this surprised us, but it didn’t surprise God. We trust that he’ll take care of everthing.

If you didn't already know, Google has a new tool: Google Blog Search. This makes it really handy to search through those old posts of yours. It's based off of your RSS feed, which for us on Blogger is your url plus a "/atom.xml". So for me that's http://lancefisher.blogspot.com/atom.xml. You can click it, and your browser will figure out a way to render it. The downside is that blogger doens't include the comments in the RSS feeds. I've written them emails in the past requesting this along with other comment related feature requests.

So the next question may be, "how can I use this to search lance's blog?" Well, you can type "site:lancefisher.blogspot.com borsch" and get only the posts on my blog that contain the word "borsch".

I just replaced the Pico search box I had with one that uses Google's blog search. I like this better, because I don't have to worry about reindexing the search like I had to with Pico. Here's how you can add a Google blog search box to your blog:

Put the following code into your template (right before your links is a good spot):

Now, just change lancefisher.blogspot.com to your blog's url minus the http:// part. If you want to get a little fancier and add some style to it to make it look nicer, you can add this to your template:


Just look for the </style> and put this code right before it. The #77886 and #556655 are colors that look good on my blog. So unless you are Katie, they probably won't look good on yours. Just find your colors somewhere else in your template, and use those.

This has been the week of openings. On Tuesday, Bailey's Market opened right across the street from my house. I've been waiting for this for a while now. They have a little coffee shop and convenience store. They also sell baked goods from Bernice's and Chocolat. I can even connect to my home wireless network. So I dragged myself out of bed extra early Tuesday morning and showed up at 7:00 when they opened. I can proudly say that I was the first customer.

Yesterday, Krispy Kreme opened in Missoula which so far is their smallest venue. I'm not sure what it is, but Missoulians love Krispy Kreme. Groups would drive four hours to Spokane to get them and sell them for fundraisers. They are in the parking lot of Lowe's on Reserve.

I went this morning to get a dozen doughnuts for the office. They look like they are set up for a big rush. There are orange cones set up to direct traffic through the drive through and even a couple of guys in orange to stand around and talk to each other. Here's my conversation with the drive through worker:


Now, I just looked at the menu, and noticed that they have four different coffee blends to choose from: Smooth, Rich, Bold, and Decaf if I remember right.


So I just chuckled to myself, drove up, got my doughnuts and coffee, and drove off. Then I noticed that the coffee was the rich blend. I thought to myself, at least they were probably to busy to spit in it.

I have been back from hunting for almost a week now. This is the finished product. My dad got two and so did I. I took home 45 pounds of hamburger, including about 100 patties. I also have a bunch of steaks. I need to hurry up and finish off last year's meat. You should check out my hunting photos on flickr. It sure is pretty there.

I'll probably bring some meat in to my old math teacher. He always enjoys it. He's a pretty cool guy, he sort-of re-ignited my love of math which has since died down once again. Oh well, that's the way some things go. If you ever take some Abstract Algebra at the U of M, try and get Adam Nyman for a teacher.

I can say I get a real enjoyment from teaching math. I've been tutoring a friend in his Math 107 class, and I like explaining the stuff, and seeing people finally understand it. It seems like lots of people didn't have the greatest math teachers in high school. I had good math teachers all the way through, and even though I often didn't get along with them I learned a lot.

My dad will be here in 32 to 62 minutes to pick me up to go hunting. Every year since I was twelve, we've gone up to my uncle's house in Shelby, and he takes us out hunting. He knows several ranchers from his accounting practice, and they let us hunt on their land. It is really beautiful up there - quite different from Western Montana, but beautiful in its own right.

I missed four years of hunting while I was in the Air Force, and now my sister and brother are missing some hunting. Usually we all go, but Ted is in Wisconsin, and Renee is too busy with school in Bozeman. So it is just my dad, his brother, his brother-in-law, and me.

Our usual way of hunting is not like the lazy road hunting you may have heard about. We get out and hike. Up to ten miles in a day. We start very early. We'll shoot a deer, clean it out, mark its location in the GPS, maybe leave a little flashing light, and continue on to the next. Then in the evening, when we can't shoot anymore, we'll go back and drag out the ones we shot. We've gotten up to seven in a day using this method.

This year I rigged up a harness from some webbing to wear for pulling them out. I also packed my old Advantix camera, so hopefully I'll have some photos to post. I just need to buy some film for it.

Have a great weekend everyone. I'll most likely be disconnected until Wednesday. Poka.

True story. No, really it is.

The building I work in is an old building with many mysteries. Wait a minute, I work in the 70's looking addition. Okay. The building I work in is a building from the 70's attached to an old building with many mysteries.

J.K. tells me of a story when late one night when he was working with J.G. He went to get a pop, and saw someone out of the corner of his eye. J.G. saw it too. He went into a utility closet. When J.K. went to look, the mysterious man had disappeared. J.K. says maybe he went into the hole in the wall, but the jail used to be in this building, and there are stories of ghosts of inmates who hanged themselves.

Perhaps some of those stories can be somewhat explained by yesterday's discovery. I overheard the janitor talking with Jason about the discovery of a courthouse troll. Well, not a real troll, just a person who kind of behaved that way. Perhaps it's mean to call him a troll. Anyway, this person was living in the walls of the old building. He'd climb in through the utility canal in the utility closet. Apparently he had a nest in the open ceilings.

I guess there was a little bit of a scene when he was asked to leave. The janitor, who is a woman, (which makes it a bit scarier) told him to leave. He responded with something like, "you can't make me leave, this is a public building! I'm higher ranking than you! I'm a citizen!" I guess some deputies made him leave after that.

Perhaps that also explains where a couple of our laptops went, and other missing items from around the courthouse. J.G. was kind of "creeped out" by the whole thing so it didn't really help when I said, "I wonder if there are more?"

I hypothesized that the obviously homeless guy had taken the laptop, hooked into the network, and was selling other stolen items on ebay for a living. Who knows? It would make a good story.

The hole is now boarded up. That's a good thing. I hope no one is trapped, but I'm sure there is another mysterious way out.

It's about time for an update. Sorry there aren't any photos. My camera is broken, instead you get an exciting magazine trick.

The weekend before last was exceptional. I would encourage every college student to try and go on a foreign mission trip. It does takes quite a bit of sacrifices to come up with the time and money. It also takes a certain amount of faith that God can provide. He can, of course, but still there are many people who never make it on one. We wanted these people to experience what a mission trip is like but on a little bit of a smaller scale. That is what mini mission trips are about. We go somewhere semi-local and help out a church. In this case I went with about eleven others from Chi Alpha up to Plains, MT. All it took was fifteen bucks, a weekend, and some hard work.

Plains is a small town where the industry has all but dried up. About 1,200 people still live there though, I suppose out of habit or because it is beautiful. Many people heat their homes with wood stoves and the average household income is around $26,000 a year.

This was the second time I have been to "Church on the Move" in Plains. It is an amazing church. If you want a model of what a church should be to its community this is it. They have a soup kitchen where they provide two meals a week to those who need the food or fellowship; a clothing ministry which provides, among other items, much needed winter coats to families; and a wood ministry which provides wood to people who can't get it themselves or buy it. Even if you can afford to buy wood, finding someone to buy it from can be a challenge.

I really feel fortunate to be a part of this ministry for even a weekend. We helped them with the wood ministry. Some stayed and split wood with the hydraulic log splitters, and some went to the mountains to log. Scott, Dan, and I were with one of the logging teams. We went with a few members of the church, chopped down dead trees, skidded them onto the road, cut them into 18" rounds, and loaded it all into the truck and trailer. We collected four and a half cords.

Dan and I rode up with Ken. Like many people on staff in the church, he has an incredible story. He had, by many standards, a perfect life in Hawaii: Surfing, building hot rods, and flying to the mainland for a weekend whenever he wanted to go snowboarding. Then one day, just over a year ago, after visiting Plains, God gave him and his wife the message that is where he wanted them to be. They sold their stuff, and moved to Plains.

You might not expect something like visiting a small town in Montana to be anything like a foreign mission, but it really is. This church is meeting the needs of its community, and God is working in some really big ways there. I'm excited to see what happens. God often does the most incredible things in the most unlikely of places. Thanks Ken, B.K., Pastor Jim, the cooks, and everyone else who showed us such hospitality and gave me so much inspiration to really love those around me.

Hey, I realize it's been a little while, so here's an update for the weekend. Friday I spent the evening over at the Chi Alpha Guys' house helping build the float for the homecoming parade on Saturday. It turned out really great. We took my old convertible horse trailer, and converted it into a pirate ship. Zach built a platform on top of it which served as a deck. It was raised up enough to provide sitting space in the below deck area and windows out on each side. We installed a trap door to get down there. On the front of the ship we screwed on a plank for people to walk. It went out of the ship and over the back of the truck pulling it. In the bed of the truck we laid down a mattress for a soft landing. When Zach or I would walk the plank during the parade, Peter, dressed as a shark, would attack us upon falling into the truck. The crowds loved it.

Saturday night, Shannon and I went to Serenity which Orson Scott Card has called the best sci-fi movie, ever. I really enjoyed it, and so did Shannon. It is pretty surprising that it is only being shown at the Village 6, and the theater was only about a quarter full. There hasn't been much hype for it, but there has been a lot of buzz on the geek side of the net.

I hear it is snowing in Bozeman where my sister lives. I bet we'll see snow here in Missoula soon too. Actually we can already see it in the mountains. I hope it will be a good snowboard season this year.

Last night, lafalda's friend Daniela said one of the biggest differences between the states and Slovakia was that we don't lock our cars here. That is true in Missoula. This is a great place to live. Just today I ran into Dustin and Evan, a couple friends I haven't seen for a while. Dustin and I talked about how much we love this place, and how we realized it even more after we had left and came back.

That is why it is so terrible to read a story like this in today's paper. Ben Corbett had just moved to Missoula after serving in Iraq and Kosovo. While he survived his time in the military, he suffered an unprovoked, but severe beating in downtown Missoula.

Ben, I am so upset and dismayed about this. May justice be served. You are in my prayers.

C2 G D Em7

Verse 1:
Reach the unreachable,
Show them love.
Touch the untouchable,
Show them love.
Break the unbreakable,
Show them love.

Chorus:
And we say,
Hey, hey, hey, Jesus is Lord (x4)

Let every tounge confess,
Jesus is Lord.
And every knee shall bow,
We praise you more. (x2)

And we say,
Hey, hey, hey, Jesus is Lord (x2)

Verse 2:
You reach the unreachable,
And show them love.
You Touch the untouchable,
And show them love.
You Break the unbreakable,
And show them love.

Chorus

Yesterday I bought Switchfoot's new album, "Nothing Is Sound." The music is really good like their last album, however, Sony released it with the content protected. This means that it is difficult to get on the computer. I listen to most of my music on the computer, so this is a real headache for me. I don't use iTunes, just Window's Media Player. It would hang when I clicked on Rip.

Coincidently, I read an article on Slashdot about this very album. Tim Foreman from Switchfoot wrote up a detailed forum post apologizing for what Sony did with the album, along with instructions on how to get the music from the CD.

I sent this letter to Sony via their online feedback form:


I doubt I will hear back from them.

Time flies when you sleep-in 'til one.

When Microsoft throws a party, they go all out. Wednesday night they rented Universal Studios Hollywood for the PDC attendees. In case you don't know, it's a big theme park. All the restaurants were open and free. They had fondu fountains all over the place, and free drinks. All the fair type games were open and free too, and if you won you still got the giant stuffed animal prizes. I won two for Rich's kids, and gave a third to someone else.
Thursday night, Wayne, Rich, and I drove around. We ended up going to a In-N-Out, the Santa Monica Pier, and then Hollywood. It was a very late night, but pretty fun. Wayne was nice enough to let me use his camera to take some high-quality photos.

Yesterday, I was really surprised to run into a couple of old friends from the Air Force. Wayne, Rich, and I were all stationed in Alabama at the same time, and went to the college ministry (Icthus) at a local church there. Wayne is living in South Korea now, and Rich is living in Miami. It should make the rides at Universal Studios tonight a little more fun. They aren't very exciting by yourself.