I wanted to share our list (please remember that some of these shows are only for Amanda):

• 10 Things I Hate About you
• Being Erica
• Better Off Ted
• The Biggest Loser
• Bones
• Burn Notice
• Castle
• Chuck
• Community
• Cops
• Covert Affairs
• The Deep End
• Desperate Housewives
• Glee
• Greek
• Happy Town
• Heroes
• House
• How I Met Your Mother
• Huge
• Human Target
• John Doe
• Justified
• Lie To Me
• Make It Or Break It
• Minute to Win It
• Modern Family
• The Office
• Parenthood
• Parks and Recreation
• Past Life
• The Pretender
• Pretty Little Liars
• Psych
• Rookie Blue
• Scrubs
• The Secret Life of the American Teenager
• Solitary
• White Collar
• Wipeout

It should be longer because we’ve gone through once or twice already and purged things we didn’t watch anymore.

So here we are. One year into our marriage. Has it been easy? You know, for the most part yes. I’m not going to try and say that we haven’t had some disagreements, or that we haven’t gone through some rough times, but it has been very easy to live, talk, and do life with Amanda. I think that a major factor behind all of that is that Amanda is incredibly patient. She’d have to be to live with me, AM I RIGHT? Through all the ups and down with where we’re living, the money situations, how often I’m home, and my spiritual learning curve, she’s been really great.

I could on for hours and hours about how awesome my wife is, but that’s not really what the point of this post was intended to be. It’s more to simply just celebrate our first year together, pray for 50 or 60 more, and know that one year ago I got the better end of the deal.

So this guy Joseph was one of twelve sons and he was sold into slavery and ended up ruling over most of Egypt. That’s the short version obviously, but the main thing that I remember about Joseph is that he suffered without complaining.

I’m going to be honest, working in the restaurant industry isn’t the easiest business to work in. It’s highly stressful to put on a smiling face to every person that walks through the front door and give them everything they want so they will give you money. (Oh WOW. I just read that back.)

Anyway. It’s pretty easy for stuff to go wrong. You forget to substitute some food, or make a drink, or bring extra items, or the kitchen doesn’t cook something fully, or whatever. If your customer isn’t happy, it can be stressful. You can imagine that will all the stress that might occur with a shift, a person may feel the need to vent their frustrations to someone. On totally NOT the same level, I think I can learn something from Joseph. I don’t have to get caught up in the complaining at work. I don’t have to show how frustrated I am when a customer says they ordered a large but really said small. I don’t have to be upset when my tip isn’t 20 percent. I can suffer in silence and show people, through my actions, that I am different.

That’s my prayer for every day I walk through those work doors. Those people are my flock. I may not be a shepherd, but I want to be a good example.

And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, and Jehovah will be my God, then this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house. And of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee. —Genesis 28:20-22

It might be the Techie in me, but I’m really having a hard time understanding something. I read, IF God is with me and does this, THEN I will do that. That seems backwards to me. I feel like I’m missing the meaning because I’m caught up in the semantics of words. I feel like the real meaning, at least to me, should be interpreted as: SINCE God is with me and does this, I WILL GLADLY do that. Every other translation that I look at says IF-THEN.

What thoughts come to your minds?

“Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” —Genesis 22:12

I think the biggest thing that I got out of reading was that nothing is yours. Nothing is mine. Everything belongs to God. It’s only because of Him that we have any of our possessions. Abraham was called to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him. He led his son to an altar, bound him, and raised a knife in the air. That’s nuts to think about.

I wonder what the world would be like if everyone always acted like nothing they had wasn’t worth giving up for God. It’s a struggle for me to give 10 minutes a day let alone one of my prized possessions. I know we dedicate babies at church and I will probably do the same at same point, so I hope to be like Abraham and remember that it’s not mine anyway.

“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” —Genesis 1:4

God separated the light from the dark. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? I’m simply reminded of the amazing power that my God has. A power so amazing that he can separate light from dark.

And that’s awesome.

A little later I read,

“Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.” —Genesis 15:6

The Lord credit Abram as being righteous for simply believing what he was told. Made me wonder if I truly believe the words that God has told me. Whether it’s words He places in my mind or words that I read in the Bible. Either way, do I really believe everything that He has promised me? Yes. Of course. But it’s hard for me to really comprehend that. God will never leave me or turn his back on me. He was always love me and pursue me even when I don’t pursue him. That he will forever stand at the door and knock in order to come in and sup with me.

<sidenote>
After I told the wifey, she had the GALL to say, “IN 90 DAYS! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!”

Thanks… Thanks a lot.

I know she was just kidding. I know it totally came out wrong. I know she just thought it was ridic to try and read it in 90 days. I just wanted to share the story ;)
</sidenote>

Well, a fervent pursuit is supposed to be INTENSE or FIERY or GREAT. So here I am.

One good thing, at least for me, is that it’s setup to send daily emails to people letting them know whether or not I completed that day’s reading. If you’d like to be apart of my accountability list, just get a free account on YouVersion and start “following me” (pretty much the same as Twitter following someone).

When asked to think about how I’m feeling lately: nervous.

To me, there are two way sto interpret someone that is nervous. One, a kind of happy and anxious nervous. Two, more of an uncomfortable, fearful nervous. Mine is the later. I feel a new season of life coming and it makes me uneasy. I don’t like saying that I feel uneasy about life. Why should I be? I have the God of the universe on my side. Nonetheless, I do.

While sharing a little bit about how I’m feeling, my buddy Joe mentioned that Jesus going to pray in the garden at Gethsemane popped into his head. I tried to look through the Gospels for scripture surrounding Jesus’ trip to The Mount of Olives that would speak to me about how I was feeling—I couldn’t really find anything. I started looking through 2 Timothy and found a verse in chapter 4:

Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.

I thought this verse was pretty spot on. What’s more is that I like it better read backwards with each semi-colon being a separate thought.

Anyway, after everyone shared and wrote down their verses we put all the verses in a bag and blindly picked out a card. Would God produce another verse for each person or help us see something else in another verse that we didn’t see in our own? I picked out Joe’s verse. Coincidence?

And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground. Luke 22:40

Joe’s complete passage was verses 40 through 46, but verse 44 was probably the one that stuck out the most. While being in agony, Jesus prayed fervently. Fervent—exhibiting particular enthusiasm, zeal, conviction, or persistence.

My goal for the next day, or week, or month, or as long as I can: pursue fervently.

(for the entire set of pictures, click here)

Born on Thursday, May 27, 2010, at 7:43pm, weighing 7 pounds and 15.4oz, and laying 20.75” tall.

Congrats Anna and Kris!

The first roadblock came when I tried to implement the “latest post” callout on the homepage. The function that loops through all the posts only does so much by default. Any modifications to the query that retrieves all the information you want creates a huge hassle for doing anything technical like pagination.

The second issue I had was just wrapping my head around each individual page I needed to create. Each theme has specific page names in the theme folder that WordPress looks for to do certain tasks. So I had to spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what to name my files to that I could overwrite the default behaviors that are programmed in.

Other than that, I really do think everything else was pretty straight forward. But even though it seemed to be pretty easy, it was definitely tedious. There was a long checklist that I combed over many times to make sure that I had covered all the bases as far as “theme development” does.

Anyway, with that being said, I hope you like it when I make it available for download. Please let me know if you see anything that looks out of place or completely broken. I tried to do as much testing as I could with what OS and browsers I have available to me at home.

I hope that this will open many doors for me as far as development goes. That was one of the biggest reasons I did this. And with THAT being said, I am now open for business doing WordPress themes.

Adios for real now.

Since I got a new laptop to help me to do freelance website work, the “old” EEE PC is going to be used by Amanda now.

Overall the process was pretty easy. I didn’t really know if I would be able to do it without any help, but turns out it was a lot easier than I thought.

1. I Googled for tutorials on how to upgrade the EEE PC and found this one. It helped me figure out that we may want some new parts as well as let me know that I should probably upgrade the BIOS.
2. We took a trip to Fry’s Electronics and picked up the stuff we needed pretty easily. Compatible with the EEE PC, we found a 32GB Patriot Lite SSD drive and a 2GB Kingston RAM chip.
3. Easily found the BIOS on the ASUS website. Put the .ROM file on a USB drive (correctly named as 900A.ROM), booted from the USB by pushing ALT + F2 during startup, and it automatically detected the USB drive as well as the new .ROM file. Then I rebooted the computer to make sure the new BIOS worked.
4. I took out the battery and popped off the back panel and put in the new chips with a Phillips 0 and 00. Put the battery back in and we’re almost ready to turn it back on.
5. I grabbed the latest release of Ubuntu and put that on a large USB drive so I could install it on the EEE PC. It was difficult trying to figure out how to put a .iso disk image on the USB drive, but I was able to find a nice little tool called UNetbootin. It “allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD.”
6. Plugged the USB fit with the lastest copy of Ubuntu into the EEE PC, made sure the power supply was connected, and turned it on.
7. Started pushing ESC (as read on this site about installing XP on the EEE PC) in order to boot from the USB drive. Some very-easy-to-understand text-based prompt came up and I selected to boot from my USB.
8. The .iso file of Ubuntu loaded onto the screen and I clicked the icon to “Install Ubuntu 9.10″ to the EEE PC. The steps to install are pretty straight forward and you just restart the computer when everything is done.

I hope some of this helps someone. If you have any questions about my process, just let me know. I wanted to take more pictures of each step showing what the screen looked like at different points in time, but I really seriously just forgot.

WHAATTTTTTTT?

The most recent stresses have been with my newest job. I have to go in at 4:00PM four days per week. Sometimes I forget to eat dinner and I have to work a 6-7 hour shift. It’s important to me to not be down or disgruntled or in a bad mood when I go to work. Last week at small group I had some thoughts while pondering over 1 Peter 5:2-4.

²Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; ³not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. ⁴And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

I’d like to think that every verse in the Bible has something to give. Regardless of who or what the verse is about, wives or children or anything, I would like to think that I can learn something from everything. So here, I’m trying to understand who my flock is. Where in my life can I be a shepherd to others?

Coming full circle now, I think work can be one of those places. That’s why it’s so important that I’m upbeat and sociable. I want people to know that everything in life can be dealt with and that I can overcome anything. Everyday before I go into work I pray for the strength to not get hungry and upset and the strength to keep it together when things start to fall apart.

Amanda was entering our finances into Quicken and the power went out. I went outside to go knock on a neighbors door to see if their power went out too when I saw a Georgia Power truck. I went around to the side of the building and started talking to the employee. He was replacing a defective meter — our defective meter. In order to replace the meter, they have to cut the power. I asked him if he usually knocked on people’s doors before cutting the power to their house. He said they usually don’t and he took it for granted that their might be someone home. I politely made him feel bad for cutting our power in the middle of Amanda doing some work and went back inside.

Dear Georgia Power: Thanks for the warning.

Jerks.

PS — I wonder if we’ve been overcharged all this time. I should probably call them. Might be cathartic to complain a little bit too.

Because I was only going to be there for three days, I chose to focus on a few key rooms instead of taking on the whole house. I decided on the half bath, guest bath and bedroom, dining room and living room. It was a lot of work but we were able to get all rooms to about 90% complete except for the guest bath. Pictures and figures of the guest bath will be coming soon.

1/2 Bath: $79

Before                                                              After

The half bath was a lot of fun. It was very plain and had dated brass fixtures and accessories. I chose a nice tan color to give the room a little warmth and oil rubbed bronze fixtures to replace the brass. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a bronze faucet that was within the budget, so I told Jenna to search online for a better deal. For the mirror,  I chose a dark frame that complimented the fixtures and had a lot more presence than the frameless oval one. I also wanted to update the light fixture, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money so I spray painted it. When I was done, it looked like a completely new fixture.

-Paint: $12
-Spray paint: $7
-Mirror: $30
-Accessories: $30

Guest Bedroom: $45

Before

After

Updating this room was really simple. I just painted the bookshelf black, decluttered, and added some accessories. A lot of rooms have everything you need to make them look really great with minimal work. It’s just a matter of decluttering and finding potential in the items you already have.

-Paint for bookcase: $9
-Mirror: $24
-Flowers: $12

Dining Room: $198

Before

After

The dining room was one of the most dramatic before and afters. It was also one of the more challenging rooms because of the house’s open floor plan. There really is nothing that separates it from the rest of the house beside the wall between it and the kitchen. I really wanted to make it stand out, so I added  chair rail, crown moulding, and the tan paint from the half bath. I also  picked out a new chandelier, but due to the ceiling height, we weren’t able to install it ourselves.

- Crown Moulding: $39
-Chair Rail Moulding: $23
-Paint: $23
-Chandelier: $89,  (coming soon)
-Flowers and vase: $24

Living Room: $24

Before

After

The living room was one of the easiest rooms to update. I painted the fireplace to make it pop, rearranged the furniture to make it feel bigger, and added accessories they already had. That’s about it.

-Paint: $4
-Flowers and container: $20

Cost of Supplies: $80

Total Cost: $426

Now that’s a deal!

(WREK product placement FTW)

I immediately pulled over to (have a hissy fit and) make a few calls to Amanda and the insurance company trying to figure out what the best thing to do was. Our insurance company gave me a few glass companies that they recommend since our deductible is much higher than the cost of fixing it.

First call: Marietta Toyota
In shop repair for $850 + labor + tax.
HAHAHAAHAHAH AHAHHAHAHAAH *click* #toyotasucks

Second call: All American Auto Glass
Mobile repair Wednesday for $230 (includes labor) + tax.
WAYYYY better, but I still have more calls to make.

Third call: Safelite Auto Glass
Mobile repair tomorrow for $226 (includes labor) + tax + free lifetime warranty.
They came down to that from 236 after I mentioned my previous quote. Better, but let’s keep going.

Fourth call: Executive Auto Glass
Mobile repair tomorrow for $207 (includes labor and tax) + life of the vehicle warranty.
Hooray!

Fifth call: Safelite already came down once, so I gave them the chance to do it again.
In shop repair tomorrow for $190 + tax.
I also double-checked that they were using OEM glass and asked them what their warranty covered exactly.

Sixth call: Why not give Executive Auto Glass a chance to price match?
Mobile repair tomorrow for $196.30.
Not only does Executive Auto Glass offer a warranty for the life of the vehicle (follows the VIN number in case we ever sell the car), they use OEM glass.

I guess if we have to spend money, I feel like I got a really good deal.