Thought of the day

"I've never been an optimist. I am a prisoner of hope, which is different." -Desmond Tutu

"Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double" Zechariah 9:12

To be a prisoner of Hope is to be chained to the only force which is able to make positive use of your fallen parts. To be a prisoner of Hope is what gets you out of bed in the morning. To be a prisoner of Hope is the silver lining in an otherwise lost battle.

"Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness." - Desmond Tutu

"Does He who fashioned the ear not hear? Does He who made the eye not see?" -Psalm 94:9

Sometimes in life, you learn that trying your best just isn't good enough and you have to learn to try a little harder than what you had considered your best. This moment is one of both hope and melancholy. A true opportunity for growth.

Done moving in

Like the Incredibles, we are all moved in. Again. Life is open boxes in empty rooms, but my Wife is working hard to make it look more like a home.

"It's like being in someone else's kitchen" - upon not being able to find a spoon.

Daily Meditation

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." -C.S. Lewis

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam: "All for the Greater Glory of God"

Memento Mori: "Remember, you will die"

http://www.bakersfield.com/news/2015/07/25/inside-fracking-chevron-offers-rare-look-at-controversial-practice.html
At 2,250 ft, these guys are super shallow by our standards. Come on out to the Marcellus and Utica and see some 21,000 footers.

Professional achievement

So, at work, my position is graded based upon performance; specifically in accuracy of execution as compared to intended design. People at a much higher pay grade than I design jobs to be performed by people like me, and then my performance is graded on accuracy to that design. On Saturday, I performed a perfect job. 100% accuracy, 100% quantity. The royal flush of my profession.  My performance is also graphed, so this particular result, a flat-lined graph, is colloquially known as a "heart attack". I work hard to be always improving at my work, and I had performed very close to that before, but it was awesome to achieve it. There is still a lot of room to grow beyond a perfect score; there are lots of ways I could still do my job better, but I am a little bit proud of myself right at this moment. I am thankful to God that he has chosen this way to work through me.

Why is moving so hard?

What is it about moving that is so difficult? I love to travel, I love to be in new places. When I lived super lean, moving wasn't that physically difficult. Yet moving is so tremendously emotionally taxing. Why does it have to be this way? When we moved the last time, we moved to a spot that was very different from most of the places I'd lived before, but primarily in the attitude of the locals. It was also a physically difficult move, traveling thousands of miles in a week; changing climate and habitat. The result was a very hard move and a long acclimation period. This time, the move should have been so easy. SHOULD have. I like the people I work with, I love my job, and yet I still feel a little bit of an outsider. We don't have a concrete place to live yet, though we are working on it. All these things will resolve themselves, and yet, right now, life is unpleasant. Does it have to be this way? Is this in the nature of the act of moving? No. I submit that there have been very dramatic moves in my past which did not render this same fish-out-of-water loneliness. I don't believe this is inexplicable or random, this is certainly the result of very specific circumstances and choices, some of which I myself made. No less unpleasant, though. Can't wait for it to pass.

Moving again

one week until we move. This move is less far than the previous ones, only about 175 miles. Very exciting, lots of professional opportunities. We are even contemplating buying a house.

break from normalcy

this week has been our summer vacation week. We picked up and left our Western PA home in favor of rural Wisconsin. The departure from the day to day has been very nice. The country air and the opportunity to embed in the scenery has been good medicine for the soul. I won't be sad to go back to work, but I will be sad to leave the country. The funny thing is that one could argue that our current living place is very rural, yet it distinctly lacks a certain bucolic splendor inherent in the northern part of the American Midwest.

The beauty of creating art is that a person viewing your work may not like it, but they can never say "that brush stroke was wrong". There is no right or wrong in self expression. The concept simply does not apply.

High-walls.com

So High-walls.com is, like it's associated business, gone. The question remains: I need to sustain a web presence for my portfolio. Yahoo! wasn't cutting it, so I got rid of them. Alas, my work still needs a home. Any suggestions? I'm looking for something cheap. I can (or at least could) write html, so a sturdy prefab structure is not necessary; I'm mostly looking for cheap.

"We love him because he first loved us."
1 John 4:19

There is no light in the planet but that which proceedeth from the sun; and there is no true love to Jesus in the heart but that which cometh from the Lord Jesus himself. From this overflowing fountain of the infinite love of God, all our love to God must spring. This must ever be a great and certain truth, that we love him for no other reason than because he first loved us. Our love to him is the fair offspring of his love to us. Cold admiration, when studying the works of God, anyone may have, but the warmth of love can only be kindled in the heart by God's Spirit. How great the wonder that such as we should ever have been brought to love Jesus at all! How marvellous that when we had rebelled against him, he should, by a display of such amazing love, seek to draw us back. No! never should we have had a grain of love towards God unless it had been sown in us by the sweet seed of his love to us. Love, then, has for its parent the love of God shed abroad in the heart: but after it is thus divinely born, it must be divinely nourished. Love is an exotic; it is not a plant which will flourish naturally in human soil, it must be watered from above. Love to Jesus is a flower of a delicate nature, and if it received no nourishment but that which could be drawn from the rock of our hearts it would soon wither. As love comes from heaven, so it must feed on heavenly bread. It cannot exist in the wilderness unless it be fed by manna from on high. Love must feed on love. The very soul and life of our love to God is his love to us.

"I love thee, Lord, but with no love of mine,
For I have none to give;
I love thee, Lord; but all the love is thine,
For by thy love I live.
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be
Emptied, and lost, and swallowed up in thee."

"Thou shalt see now whether my word shall come to pass unto thee or not."
Numbers 11:23
God had made a positive promise to Moses that for the space of a whole month he would feed the vast host in the wilderness with flesh. Moses, being overtaken by a fit of unbelief, looks to the outward means, and is at a loss to know how the promise can be fulfilled. He looked to the creature instead of the Creator. But doth the Creator expect the creature to fulfill his promise for him? No; he who makes the promise ever fulfills it by his own unaided omnipotence. If he speaks, it is done--done by himself. His promises do not depend for their fulfillment upon the co-operation of the puny strength of man. We can at once perceive the mistake which Moses made. And yet how commonly we do the same! God has promised to supply our needs, and we look to the creature to do what God has promised to do; and then, because we perceive the creature to be weak and feeble, we indulge in unbelief. Why look we to that quarter at all? Will you look to the north pole to gather fruits ripened in the sun? Verily, you would act no more foolishly if ye did this than when you look to the weak for strength, and to the creature to do the Creator's work. Let us, then, put the question on the right footing. The ground of faith is not the sufficiency of the visible means for the performance of the promise, but the all-sufficiency of the invisible God, who will most surely do as he hath said. If after clearly seeing that the onus lies with the Lord and not with the creature, we dare to indulge in mistrust, the question of God comes home mightily to us: "Has the Lord's hand waxed short?" May it happen, too, in his mercy, that with the question there may flash upon our souls that blessed declaration, "Thou shalt see now whether my word shall come to pass unto thee or not."


-Charles Spurgeon

just when it is nice out...

...I have the flu. bah. I can't really complain, as I rarely get sick.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512656/skipping-the-water-in-fracking/

https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.13/fracking-without-fresh-water

Things I wish I could remove from the world: a list-rant.

I eagerly await the demise of the following:

the Monsanto corporation
Lumber Liquidators
all McDonalds restaurants

while I'm dreaming, I might as well throw in:
racial and sexual inequality
anti-religious comments in social media

thank you for your time.

computer upgrade

enjoying the results from a modest computer upgrade- went from a 750 Gb 5400 rpm hdd to a 1 Tb SSD. it's pretty great.

same old same old.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/g161/top-10-myths-about-natural-gas-drilling-6386593/?
I like this article, though I find fault with their underrepresentation of a frac pad on the last slide: real frac pads are huge and complex. This is a deeply controversial topic in my own family and in the nation. My personal take is that U.S. sourced Natural Gas is a vast VAST improvement upon the sad state of the U.S. coal addiction; Up to 90% less pollution.P.S. I live less than a mile from a coal power plant. I believe that American natural gas is about the best we can hope to get out of fossil fuels. I also prefer gas heat and cooking to electric. Solar panel streets are an excellent idea, though. Can't wait to see that happen.

On another note, I'm vaguely wondering if Western PA is right for us. Comfortable, but doesn't necessarily feel like home. Time will tell. Maybe I'm just a wanderer by nature. I love the climate here, but I'm not enthusiastic about the spot we're living in right now. Transitional. these are thoughts fueled by a lack of sleep.

another hitch, another two weeks without much created. So is life. For now. What I have created is a well maintained and beautiful piece of equipment at work. That and a family budget in the black. It's no addition to my portfolio, but it is noteworthy. Definitely not nothin.