We looked over the menu thinking there had to be something that would be the slightest bit appetizing. Well, there was: some kind of spinach and soy cheese wanton. However, that was an appetizer, and my wife seemed loathe to let me order only an appetizer and not a main dish. I might add a couple things at this point: 1) I am very good at choosing only a simple appetizer and enjoying it at a place where the menu seems a bit suspect to my tastes. One time I ordered only a bowl of clam chowder, and enjoyed it, while the rest of my dining party was nauseated with their dinner selections. I spent less money and had a better dinner. I trust me. This did not happen last night. 2) There was another person at the dinner last night, much smarter than I was allowed to be, who was allowed to not order anything at all. Nothing. He didn’t order only an appetizer. He ordered nothing. And he got away with it. I don’t know exactly how the birthday girl thought of him, but I didn’t hear anyone coming down on him for not ordering. Taking those two facts together, I should have just gotten an appetizer.

My steamed vegetables came to me covered in peanut sauce. I thought it would be pretty good and all I would have to do is pick out a few of my least favorite vegetables. Unfortunately, the peanut sauce was chunky not smooth. Also unfortunately, as of late my body has had a bit of a problem with chunky peanut sauce.

A couple weeks ago I was, what one would call, violently ill. The last thing I had eaten earlier in the day we some roasted peanuts. The taste of roasted peanuts stayed with me through the entire day as my stomach ached and caused the most nauseated feelings I have had in a decade or two. These feelings culminated in a grand, if not violent, outpouring of nothing other than chunky peanut sauce a few times that night. Flash forward that picture to the chunky peanut sauce I was staring at on my plate last night. I should have just gotten an appetizer.

We headed back toward home from the interestingly busy vegetarian restaurant and decided to stop at a Dairy Queen at the halfway point. The DQ in Augusta is a small little hole in the wall with no inside seating, though it does have inside serving. The pictures of the 25th anniversary Blizzards were deliciously tempting. I ordered a medium Tagalong Blizzard to make up for my dinner. The Blizzard looked great; the kid had even sprinkled some of the Tagalongs on top when he was done mixing it up.

The first few bites were not too bad. I was just enjoying the ice cream, a delicacy I don’t indulge in quite so much these days. After the first bites, I noticed the Blizzard was awfully soft. It was as if the ice cream was melting rapidly or maybe it wasn’t too hard to begin with. It also started tasting funny, and not a good kind of funny like a clown. It was definitely the bad kind of funny, like nauseating chunky peanuts.

I finished almost the entire Blizzard (hey, I paid for it), and drove home quite disappointed all in all.

Today I had a Mint Oreo Blizzard for lunch. It was awesome. The end.

Ted Dekker’s Green
Ted Dekker and Erin Healy’s Burn
Mark Schultz’s Come Alive
Jeremy Camp’s Speaking Louder Than Before
Warren Barfield’s Worth Fighting For
Big Daddy Weave’s Christ is Come
Sport Coat
T-shirt
Bacon Salt
Tiger calendar
Munchkin card game
Socks
Starburst

12/24/09 – Went to my mother’s for her birthday and to swap Christmas gifts.

12/25/09 – Christmas at home. Then the wife’s dad and sister came over for gifts and lunch. Then to her mom’s house for gifts, and then to her aunt’s house with my wife’s entire family.

12/26/09 – We stayed inside all day. What a happy Saturday!

12/27/09 – Church in the morning, and then the Doughtys came a day early to stay with us! We went to Asian Palace II. It’s not all that.

12/28/09 – Got together with friends to have a prime rib dinner (delicious!), exchange gifts, and play a board game.

12/29/09 – I’m not sure we left the house for anything…the Doughtys were still here, though!

12/30/09 – The Doughtys left. We went to church that night. Then we drove to my wife’s work to look at the Christmas picture she painted on the window there.

12/31/09 – Lunch with my father and half-brother (on his side). It was great to catch up and get to know them a bit better. We stayed up until midnight, logging on to the computer just in time to watch the ball drop in New York.

1/1/10 – We didn’t leave the house. A great New Year’s Day. There was much computer time and much reading time. That’s my idea of a great day.

1/2/10 – We went to lunch with my mother and went grocery shopping, despite the snow storm that has been raging for two days, because we needed to get out of the house. Apparently the wife goes a little stir crazy sometimes.

1/3/10 – Another day without leaving the house. I think life is grand.

What if I was more observably affectionate toward everyone, instead of just my wife and my God? Obviously not everyone in the same way, but what if I just planned on being more kind as a whole? I was looking through my paltry amounts of posts from last year and I saw that I was becoming a softy, at least toward my family. Maybe I could work on that in all of my relationships. We’ll see.

Maybe I could set a goal on the number of books I want to read a month, and then allow myself to read my comics once I’ve reached that goal? Four books a month is achievable. It would let me achieve my plan of reading more books than the last two years, and it would often give me some time at the end of the month to immerse myself in the comics I’m craving to re-read.

There. We’ll see how these work.

Later.

No, instead of resolutions, I will share my plans for the new year. These are goals, sure, but they are less stringently enforced or sought after than resolutions. I will not make 90 day action plans to meet these goals, nor will I obsess about them. These are things I plan to do in the new year:

I plan to display more observable and outward affection to my wife. The original thought was to love my wife more this year, but that hardly seems an observable goal. I want to move beyond any inward build up of love and onto an outward manifestation.

I plan to display more observable and outward affection to my God. Again, to say I will love God more this year is great, and should be a goal of everyone for every year, however I want this to be noticeable to an observer. Not for my sake, naturally, but to display that there are people in this world who still care about him, to be a light, using terminology Christendom is familiar with.

I plan to read more books. This is somewhat of an arbitrary plan, as one could actually read fewer books containing more pages and end up having read more than previous years. However, all things averaging out in the end, I would like to get back into the book reading habit. I have spent much time over the past few months re-reading some of my comic books. It was (and is) a yearning inside me to re-read them until I’m caught up again with the monthly storyline. However, I plan to put this aside to get back into a regular book reading routine.

I plan to lose weight. Seriously, I got on the scales a few days ago and it went up higher than ever before in my life. I didn’t stop at my arbitrary, self-imposed maximum. No, it kept going almost 10 lbs higher. It was horrible. I have been pigging out for over a week now. Luckily most of the junk food is gone, and my wife has the same plan. We’ll lose weight, and we’ll do it with diet and exercise. That means getting back to a regular gym schedule as well.

I plan to post to my website more often. If I don’t, then I’ll start to wonder why I keep it, which would be completely understandable. I spend so much time as a taker, reading other people’s blogs and following people on Facebook and Twitter. I want to be a giver. At one point I fancied myself as somewhat of a writer. I’d like to get back to that. We’ll see what happens.

Those are my largest plans for the year. I have other minor goals, like being more fiscally responsible, catching up on painting some miniatures (for a board game I haven’t played in months, unfortunately), catching up on digitalizing my pictures, and some other catching up I can’t think of now. I don’t want to play catch-up any more. So, let’s see how this all goes.

Later.

Once we had made it underneath the overcast sky, Dallas spread out before us as far as the eye could see. It was dark out, so what I actually saw was lights. The ground was flat, and out my window lights spread all the way to the horizon. Looking across the aisle and out the other window, I saw the same sight. Dallas was huge.

From the airport we rode a bus to the rental car station. I am used to rental car stations being located inside the airport. This trip was 10 – 15 min of nonstop travel away from the airport. The rental station alone was a large building full of unused space.

I could get used to the great wide open.

I have a cousin getting married in Dallas. I’ve been to Austin, TX for a week…in years gone by…and I loved it. When my mother asked if I wanted to join in the party heading down, I sure did! The bad part is that it is relatively expensive (I thought I had money to blow at the time she asked) and I have to leave my wife behind. She’s in the middle of a school semester and has to work clinical hours while we’re gone.

Other than that, I expect to love it. I think I’d make a good Texan. Let me head south and mess with Texas and we’ll all find out.

I hope it’s not just me and him playing chess against each other…

The store was empty, and the desperate man had wasted no time pulling a gun on the clerk. Josiah caused the robber to turn toward the door. “Don’t move, pal.”
“Hey, tough guy, don’t point that thing at me unless you intend to use it.” Josiah flicked his right wrist and a knife appeared. The robber fired the gun.

Josiah threw the knife with his right hand, while bringing his left arm in front of his chest where the gunman had been pointing. It stung like mad, but the metal plate in Josiah’s forearm deflected the gunman’s bullet. On the other hand, Josiah’s throwing knife had knocked the gun out of the man’s hand before he could get off a second shot. The robber gaped at Josiah, and then he looked for the gun. The weapon had fallen behind the counter.

The robber looked at the gun and looked at the clerk. The clerk was scared, not moving. The robber looked back toward Josiah, but he was gone.

Josiah shoved a display of two liter bottles over upon the robber. The man fell, hitting his head on the counter. Josiah plucked his throwing knife out from under the bottles. “Sorry about the soda. Maybe you can return it for credit.” Sirens began a couple of blocks away. “He’ll be out until the police you called get here. I wouldn’t touch that gun if I was you.” Josiah walked to the back of the store and out the delivery exit.

I found Deeper Water to be an unexpectedly interesting book about a young woman from a dedicated Christian home. She is a law student going to the big city for an internship. Since she’s a conservative Christian from a small town, life gets very different for her.

This book captured my interest in its conservative Christian focus. The stands that the family takes are some of the same ones that I have been raised on. Also, I’m occasionally interested in law-based books, but some get too technical for me to care to follow. (I’m a bit challenged, what can I say?) This book was easy to follow, as the technical aspects took a back seat to the story.

Some things that surprised me about the main character, though, were personality quirks. For the beliefs/personality setup we were given on the main character, I found her to be a bit snippy at times. Also, she can be rather evasive with the truth. These are qualities I would not expect, but ones we were shown right from the beginning, so I can’t really say they didn’t fit the character.

I can identify with her struggles both with her everyday faith and with her interaction with the big city. The best thing I can say about the book is not that it is great fiction but that it exceeded my expectations. (I guess Bryan would call that a cannarf.)