Being thankful, Day #13

Day thirteen is a hard day to come up with something to be thankful for.  Not for any other reason than i would like it to be somewhat special.  The only thing that makes it special is that it's thirteen, a supposedly unlucky number.  Growing up my mother was a crazy superstitious woman.  I remember her telling me that she would have preferred i was born in Philadelphia (pretty sure, time fogs the memory) because they do not adjust for daylight savings time and i would have been born on the 12th instead of the 13th.  It was not a slight, or a disappointment, to me.  She had a thing for black cats, walking under ladders, picking up coins that were tails up (any coin), etc..  Once we walked on opposite sides of a pillar and she walked all the way back, halfway across a parking lot to go back around the same side of the pillar as i did - just because i refused to say "bread and butter".  I must have been no end a source of consternation for her. 

She, my mother, passed away in December of 2000.  She never got to see my daughter, she never knew about 9/11 (which i am pretty thankful for), she has not seen my two boys grow up.  She was far from perfect.  She drank and smoked herself to death.  It was only in the end that she saw what she had done to herself.  While my mother had custody of us, she was not usually home.  I grew comfortable eating cereal or a tub of whip cream, or grilled cheese, for dinner, because she was out at the local pub or who knows where.  I learned how to vacuum and wash dishes, do laundry (sort of), i scrubbed a toilet or two.  I grew comfortable being around strangers (ones i rarely had to interact with), i played a LOT of pinball (and got pretty good IMO, skills that have faded with disuse). As best i can remember i have lived in:  Washington, DC; Cherry Hill, NJ; Philadelphia, PA; Brooklyn, NY; Alexandria, VA, Arlington, VA; Annandale, VA; Columbia, MD; Athens, WV; Olney, MD; Rockville, MD; Silver Spring, MD - and these are just the cities i remember before i turned 16.

She fought a losing battle with depression for all the years that i knew her.  But for all her faults and failures, to the best of her ability, she tried to provide a better life for my brother and me.  I remember her putting us with a nanny and her family in Philadelphia Monday through Friday, i remember her putting my brother and i on a church bus on Sunday mornings (i once won a hostess cupcake ).  She did her best to date respectable men (which, with one notable exception, she was a pretty decent judge of character).  She once had us stay with some cousins in West Virginia because she knew they were a good family, and she was not able to support us.  She is a main reason that i am so fond of Christmas time too.  While there were rarely more than a handful of presents under the tree, she always put a lot of thought in to them, and she did her best to convey what the celebration was truly about - a time set aside to celebrate the coming of the Divine in to the world of man.

Today i share my thankfulness for my mother.  By many standards, she was not a good mother, and i am just being honest here, but i am still very thankful for her because she was the one whom God had placed me with.  It is a part of what makes me who i am today, and i know that she loved me, and i her - despite my own laundry list of short comings. I have a love of Christmas, pinball, American Football, an understanding of families who struggle with poverty, addictions, and depression.  I have disdain for beer and cigarettes - but a level of comfort in pubs (go figure), and a dislike of those who do not try but make excuses.  I struggle with tidiness around my own home, with self discipline, and understanding others.  All of these i can in some form trace back to my mother.  Good, bad, whatever, she is the foundation of who i am, and i am forever thankful for her.

---

And in other newz

What a crazy couple of days. I had a song all picked out for my "Music Monday" offering, but it's gone now... completely left my brain. Today has not been much better... so despite my efforts to avoid ramblings... today is going to be a rambler... First i would like to say how good the Panthers' victory over the Arizona Cardinals felt as a fan. The Panthers are only 3-4 so far this season, and they are a far way from being able to work their way into the playoffs, but since that embarrassing beating the Cardinals put on the Panthers in the playoffs last season the Panthers have been playing like dirt. The game on Sunday was not perfect, but it was executed very well. Six turnovers, the special teams played well, and the offense had zero turnovers with over 200 yards on the ground. Next week's games against the '7-0 New Orleans Saints is going to be a huge test. If the Panthers pull off a win next week i will begin to believe that a 9-7 season is possible again. I want the Saints to go 14-2 and on to the Super Bowl if the Panthers aren't going to represent the NFC South. I know i will be accused of being a bandwagon fan, but i had a place in my heart for them when they were the 'Aints. Flair has become an obsession. A thing i can collect without it costing me money or taking up room on a shelf. Last week a friend was sharing pictures of when he was in Iraq and i wanted to honor him so i set out in search of a new piece flair. I found the one on the right here. I like how this picture has the soldier in silhouette with the clouds and sun behind him. The outline is as such that you can tell it is a soldier, but that is it. It is generic enough to represent all of the service men and women who are serving. Not just in Iraq but every where. I added it to my collection, and then sent it to all of my fellow soldiers that i am friends with on facebook. When i was a wee lad back in the 'hood (i.e. the suburbs of Northern Virginia) my mom struggled to keep things afloat and worked two jobs. This left my brother and me all alone. As a result i had little supervision after school and took to wandering the neighborhood, bike riding, etc. One of the neighborhood shops was a little pizza place. It is where i played my first game of pinball. It was on old style deal with mechanical tumblers for the score and only two banks of targets to shoot the ball at, but it captured my attention. The chunk-chink-chunk of the mechanics resetting every game, the sharp crack of the ball jumping and smacking the glass. This was around the time that video arcades started becoming popular. The thing is i did not have the means to get to places like Putt-Putt, so Pinball became my main form of diversion. Later when mom would drag my brother and me to the her favorite watering hole (this became common enough practice i was on a first name basis with pretty much every bartender) i saw my first electronic pinball game. Electric bumpers, digital scoring. The Black Knight and Buck Rogers pinball machines were practically mine whenever i wanted. I got so good that my mom could give me a roll of quarters and i could entertain myself pretty much a whole Saturday. As i got older i found it harder and harder to actually get to where the machines are and picked up my first PC pinball sim. Well, in reality it came with windows, but it whetted my appetite. Eventually i learned about "Pro Pinball". This company made some really good PC pinball sims. My first being "Fantastic Journey" (pictured left). Eventually i picked up all four (The Web typically not bundled with the other three) to play. Recently though... i've not been able to play them at all as Windows seems to have a thing that if you hit a key repeatedly it does something funky and i've tried disabling it... but to no avail. At least not on the old XP version of windows. Maybe i will try and reload them on a Vista machine. If any readers out there can help me i would be grateful. 8)

Ramblin' Man

I had to search a little bit to find this fine piece of flair. When i was younger i remember tagging along with my mom to her favorite "watering hole" - usually on a Saturday. My brother and i would be given one, maybe two, rolls of quarters for our entertainment that had to last all day. That was when i fell in love with the 'silverball'. Just out of necessity i became fairly decent. Although i probably would never have won any competitions, i was able to keep myself entertained with free games with high scores and matches. I was so into Pinball that the song "Pinball Wizard" felt like my theme song. One time, after i got home from school, i was a little bored so i walked to my mom's Pub of choice to play a couple of games. It was small "family-like" place, and the owner's knew me by name. When i got there i got change for a dollar (back then you could play a game for a quarter) and the owner gave me Coke on the house (yes, we were there that often). Just as a dropped a quarter in my favorite machine in walked a State Trooper. The whole place got quiet as the trooper walked right up to me to ask me a few questions. Long story short - he said i matched the description of a runaway and wanted to see if i was him. The past week or so my area has been getting rain everyday. Well, at least some rain every day. Enough to keep the grass wet and not "ideal" for cutting. To be honest i did have a window of opportunity on Saturday, but because my mind was elsewhere i really didn't take advantage of it. Although i did edge around the house. Well, yesterday the rain held off and the grass was pretty dry so i pulled out the walk-behind and went to work. Wouldn't you know, less than halfway through it started to rain pretty lightly. Not so much as to drive me inside so i plugged along. I finally got to the halfway point when the sky just opened up! That was enough for me to call it a night. It went against my sense of wanting to keep working until i was finished (i hate leaving things halfway done), but i really couldn't keep going at that point. I am hoping to finish tonight. I don't mind all the rain we are getting because i LOVE rain. I was actually enjoying myself while i was out there... it was just no longer practical to keep going. This morning i had a trouble come in from a remote site. I originally thought it was an issue that i've been working since last June, but it turned out to be a fresh report of a trouble from the same site. The problem is that a remote office has two even more remote locations that connect via two physical circuits that each have three "logical" circuits configured on them - each having the ability to use up the entire physical capacity of the links. So you have say a two gallon pipe, but it is possible to have six gallons worth of data trying to flow through it. And then we get complaints of slow response or unable to connect to whatever they need to connect to. I would really like to know who thought that was a good idea. I know there is usually a lot of "dead time" on circuits... but this is not trying to rent out a recording studio or something. Anyway... it is "interesting" to say the least. When i retired last July there were two other "old timers" who retired within 30 days of me. I had known both of them since i had joined Alpha Battery back in 1999, been deployed with them, and generally became pretty good friends with them. So one of them tells me, "we have got to keep in touch". Well, out of the three of us we started meeting together about every other month for breakfast. To talk shop, tell stories that we have all heard a hundred times - if not lived out in person, and just keep in touch. Well, somehow i have become the defacto organizer of these get togethers. I don't mind, but i am not sure i am the best one to dor it. Anyway, we were supposed to meet this month but life kept me busy and i had not set anything up, and then yesterday i get an e-mail from one of the guys asking me when the next one is. Doh! So i picked a day in June and sent out e-mails and messages from Facebook. Only after i sent out the notice did i realize that the day i had picked i will be away with my family on vacation. 8/ Oh well. I will organize this get together and begin preperations for August for the next one. The group has grown from the original 5 or so, to about 2 dozen worth of invitations now being sent out. I am bummed about missing this one, but at least the rest of them can get together. Last night, while i was mowing the lawn but before the rain really started coming down, i was listening to my MP3 player and a sermon from CJ Mahaney came on. Normally i will skip to the next random track on the player until a song comes on. Mostly because i have a hard enough time hearing the words over the mower, but this time i left it on. It was a sermon titled "Sovereign Grace". It was amazingly powerful - even over the distraction of the lawn mower and my meanderings around my yard. It has made me desire to be more broken hearted over my sins. Not to try and "own" them again - as a Christian i have entrusted my life to Christ - and He has paid for those sins in full. But it is so that i just appreciate more what it cost my Savior. That sin is not to be taken light hearted, or off-handed. There was a cost associated with that sin. And not just that "one", but all of them. If it were not for Jesus it would be me that would have to stand before God and ultimately be sent away. But it is because i do not see my own sin as severely as i should there are some sins i enter in almost with out thought. Sins that get repeated over and over because to some extent i have not truly repented of - and to me that is scary! Websters.com defines 'repent' as follows:

re⋅pent 1  /rɪˈpɛnt/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ri-pent] Show IPA

–verb (used without object)

1.	to feel sorry, self-reproachful, or contrite for past conduct; regret or be conscience-stricken about a past action, attitude, etc. (often fol. by of): He repented after his thoughtless act.

2.	to feel such sorrow for sin or fault as to be disposed to change one's life for the better; be penitent.

–verb (used with object)

3.	to remember or regard with self-reproach or contrition: to repent one's injustice to another.

4.	to feel sorry for; regret: to repent an imprudent act.

For the most part i don't feel that i regret my sins enough. Have i leaned on grace so heavily that i no longer feel the need to repent!?! Dear lord, please let it not be so.

And now for something completely different

Yesterday I was playing with my "Pet Dragon" over on Facebook (shocker, I know), who I loving call "Tron", I got to reminiscing about my youth. Specifically my days spending my quarters in the local arcade, and then about the video game "Dragon's Lair".
Well, to make a long story short, I kind of consolidated some of my geekiness I guess. I will name my "Pet Dragon" there 'Tron: the Singe Construct'! LOL

I was never very good at that video game because it was $0.50 - which was a lot of money to play one game - and I just never got good enough in the timing of the controls. Besides Pac Man, it was one of the earliest "pattern" games out there. There were books on what you needed to do for each screen. That is there might be a pattern of; left, left, up, sword, right, back, jump. Once you had the pattern, and the timing down you "owned" that screen. Once you knew all of the patterns it was just a matter of time. Sometimes the game would "mirror" a scene to throw you off though. LOL Still, this game is available for my son's Gamecube. Hmm.... lol

I was mostly a Pinball player in my day - which was pretty old fashioned for a kid growing up in the early 80's. One of my favorite Pinball games was "Black Knight" by Williams. When I ever I spied one out I would drop in a quarter even if I didn't have time to play a full game.

Now I like to collect P/C pinball sims. Some of the best out there were by a company that used to go by "Pro Pinball", and I have found out that some of their sims may be out for one of the game platforms. Hmm...

Who am I kidding. I don't get to play games anymore.

But my all time favorite game was "Cyberball". It was a game that I would sink quarter after quarter into. It combined some of my favorite interests... Football (American), Video Games, and Sci-Fi/Robots.

Ah, but we can never go back.
Verse for today:
Philippians 3: 12-16, ESV
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.