Ok, I'm going to bump my blog by cross-posting some messages I have been posting on a Christian discussion forum. There is a semi-popular forum on the internet called "Christian Church Today". Someone started a thread there that was very anti-Masonic. Then, many more people piled in and posted a lot more of the same. I have been amazed by the extent and degree of missinformation and hostility in some of these messages. I realize I am walking a very, very, thin line, but I have been attempting to respond to the messages posted there with a great deal of calm and reason. There are some people who become unbelievably incensed if all you do is say that Freemasonry is something 'good'. The thread may degenerate fairly soon and I won't be able to stay involved in it any longer. However, it has been more or less positive to date. I certainly feel like is serves as a form of 'Freemason FAQ' since, apparently, these are the kind of questions that some Christian...
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I am having a relatively quiet and uneventful Christmas. I figure I will make a brief blog entry but, seriously, there isn't much to say. On Wednesday our lodge put on a 3rd degree. I acted as senior steward during the first section. Right now I am focusing on learning all of opening and closing for all parts so I can help out at Naphtali lodge where needed. On Thursday evening we attended the DeMolay meeting and began work on our program for the year. On Friday, well, not much happened. On Saturday, Christmas Eve, we went to my parents house in Jefferson City and exchanged gifts. On Sunday we went to my wife's family for Christmas Day; again, uneventful. On Monday I took Alex to see "King Kong". This film has, without a doubt, the greatest special effects sequences ever created on film. That said, if they had cut about an hour out of the film I think it would have been twice as good. I enjoyed it, but could have done without 'Bowling for Brontosauruses'. On M...
A brief, and boring, blog update. However, I might as well record what I did this weekend. Sadly, it will have to be in words and not pictures since I didn't take any. (Actually, though I didn't take any pictures, apparently one of the guests did. He uploaded some, so here is the link. ) On Friday night my daughter had her first big gift exchange Christmas party. She had about 25 people show up. They all played Texas Hold 'Em to decide the order of gift opening. They arrived about 6pm and we wrapped up the poker game promptly at 9:15. The poker games ran really smoothly. we had three packed tables running at the start. The gift exchange was a great deal of fun and when one guest showed up very late wearing her cheerleading outfit, and without a gift, I forced her to perform a 'cheer' to earn a free present. This turned out to be a lot of fun as well. The 'big gift' was a giant pimped out remote control car that was about the size of a sawed off Miata. Ok, ...
My nephew Charlie sitting in the Senior Warden's chair in the West. It's a shame it came out a little bit blurry because it would have been a nice shot. Right Worshipful Brother Chris Newbold sitting in the Worshipful Master's chair in the east. Some interesting paraphanalia over a century old. A view of the main lodge room. A view of the altar and the worshipful master's chair inside the main lodge room. My daughter Lauren playing the piano at her last party. Ok, now that I have a web counter on my site and realize I am getting 80 hits a day, I figure I better feed the monkey with a new post every now and then. Even if the post is just trivia. And pictures too, let's not forget the pictures. This Saturday I took my nephew Charlie to attend the Sword of Bunker Hill at the incredible Freemason lodge in Louisianna, Missouri. It was the first time I got to go inside the main lodge room and it one of the most impressive I have ever seen. The pillars at each end ar...
Well, a few days ago I set up a webcounter on my site. I was curious who, if anyone, actually visits this site besides Adam, John, John, Rob, and a few of my other friends. Typically I don't even update my weblog very frequently, though I have been updating more of late. I was rather shocked to find out that over a several day trend this weblog is getting something like 80 hits a day, which seems remarkably high to me. I get the bulk of my visitors from the United States, with a substantial number more from Canada. Then there are some from Switzerland and Sweden, where we have offices, so I guess that makes sense. But, for the life of me, I'm not sure where the bulk of the traffic is coming from. I do know that Google owns Blogger and probably has a perference for website rankings. I know that the number one hit on Google for my name has been this site for quite some time. Perhaps a lot of the traffic comes from people who are just doing websearches. I know I have been involved...
Well, I had a nice weekend and I'm pretty sure I'm ready to get back to work tomorrow morning. Both my wife and myself came down a little bit sick this weekend, but it was one of those things where you don't feel all that well but you can still function. We had a big fancy black-tie affair at the Shriner's Christmas Ball last evening. We didn't know exactly what to expect, but we were looking forward to the experience. In the past we have spent a lot of money attending Christmas events and have been generally disappointed with the quality of the dinner and entertainment for our money. Well, all I can say, is that the Shiner's sure know how to do it right! The cost was only $65 a person, which seemed fairly reasonable considering all that the evening entailed. We knew right away that it was going to be a special event when we pulled into the parking lot and we were greeted by a stunning horse drawn carriage to bring us from the parking area to the front door. Now...
I have returned safely from Paris. The trip was remarkably uneventful, which was a relief. I read two books along the way, "Angels & Demons" and "The DaVinci Code" by Dan Brown. I waited as long as I could before reading them but, eventually, I felt compelled to know what crazy ideas this man was putting into everybody's head. "The DaVinci Code" was just stupid; while "Angels & Demon's" was both offensive and stupid. It is understandable why people have read the books. No matter how stupid an action movie is, so long as something keeps happening every sixty seconds, you find you end up watching the entire thing. After all, we accept comic books on their own terms and both of these books offer up excellent examples of comic book logic. The "DaVinci Code" is relatively harmless, if not ridiculous. The central character is faced with one stupid and pointless 'puzzle' or 'riddle' to solve after another, all t...
Ok, I'm tired of Paris. I'm homesick and ready to come home. I worked all day yesterday and then decided, at the last minute, that I had to 'do something'. Since I arrived I have had the romantic notion that I would go to see an Opera in Paris but, apparently, there is no opera playing until December. In desperation I decided, on the spur of the moment, to go to the "Moulin Rouge". I have no idea what I was thinking, because it was just a waste of my time and money. Now, don't get me wrong. There is nothing particularily 'wrong' with the Moulin Rouge, so long as you like big Las Vegas style dance show productions. Now, I like dance, but my taste runs a litte more along the lines Twyla Tharp, not small chested topless girls with giant feathered hats. Now, I suppose I 'knew' this is what it was going to be, but it just wasn't a good way to spend the evening. Had I been there with my wife I think it would have been more fun. The...
Well, here it is Saturday morning. I have now been in Paris for one full week. It feels so much shorter than that. The time has been flying by! I have been making good progress with the work I was sent out here to do. The office I am in is very nice and the people are very friendly. I think I commented previously that Parisians 'look miserable'. This is simply not the case. They are just in a hurry to get somewhere. My wife often complains how fast I walk and leave her unable to catch up. Here in Paris I am constantly mowed down by people walking at something just short of a jog. The Parisian lifestyle is amazing. And, I have been living it for the past week. Having a coffee in the morning, showing up at the office at 10am, working till about 1pm. Around 1pm the office often goes to lunch together, choosing one of the seven trillion resturants in a four block radius. Lunch is leisurly and a great pleasure. (On other days instead of going to a resturant we simply...
Ok; here I go fast! I am on an French keyboard in my hotel in Paris and I only have 5 minutes left on my ten dollar an hour internet access to post this message. Ok, that took one minute. I have only this to say then. Paridise is in Paris. And, Americans sold theirs to Walmart. I see this is no great revelation to the world. However? it is new to me. I will try to explain more later. Perhaps Paridise is bought upon the heads of riotors in the suburbs. I cant say. Perhaps they should eat some more cake? All I knozw is the bread tastes better at the patisserie than from the man named wonder?
Well, here I am in Paris and back to work. Right now my work machine is trying to sync enormous amounts of data, and it looks like it is going to be a few hours until I am even begin to be productive. So, I figured I would post a brief message about my weekend. I spent much of the weekend lost. On several occasions I 'thought' I was going a particular direction but I was not. Even when I would refer to my map I could rarely find the name of the street I was on. On Saturday I went miles in the wrong direction to the point I was actually outside the 'inner ring'. When I entered a neighborhood that looked like cars may have been burned there recently I decided I ought to figure out where I was. I went into a hotel and that is when I found out how off track I was. I had walked so far in the wrong direction I nearly could have made it to the Eiffel tower had I gone the other way. The trip wasn't a completely wasted exercise. I did walk through a number of outdoo...
Well, I'm typing this blog entry from an internet cafe in Paris. For once my flight went smoothly and I arrived safely early this Saturday morning. The internet cafe is pleasant and they are burning incense which gives it a nice vibe. I'm not able to check into my hotel until 2pm, and I arrived at 8am in the morning (without sleep of course) so I'm wandering around Paris aimlessly until later today. I tried to ride the subway but the attendant didn't, or wouldn't, speak English and I just decided to walk. I'm going to be here for two weeks so I might as well get the hang of the area. This evening I would like to go to some kind of a 'show'; afterall it's Saturday night in Paris. I only have 4 non-work days for my entire trip and I want to get something out of them. I have no real agenda, but I plan to spend a very, very, very, long day at the Louvre tomorrow, looking at everything which interests me and at my own pace. I know it is cliche and a...
Sheesh, my calendar is out of control. On Thursday we had a Thanksgiving dinner at Troy, DeMolay. We appointed committees and selected a chairman for each. On Friday I had an out of town visitor at work and numerous meetings. Then came Saturday. I went down to the Scottish Rite on Saturday morning to receive 'Dad' training in DeMolay. After that we attended Squire's inititaion, DeMolay initiation, the DeMolay degree and the flower talk and then dinner. After that we had state installation, awards, ceremonies and speeches. Only then did we finally have a dance. Today, on Sunday, I took my whole family to the St. Louis Symphony at Powell Symphony Hall. We got to hear a Mozart Piano concerto and Beethoven's 7th. Oh my God, was it awesome! If you ever have the opportunity to hear either the 7th or the 9th you should do it! It was an incredible experience. All my daughter could say was how badly she needed to get to a piano to start playing as soon as possible. T...
Well, I haven't posted in a few days. Things have been, and continue to be, very busy at work. My office is going to be sending me to Paris for a little over a week next Friday. I'm pretty excited about the trip. I know there is all that trouble in the news about the riots but, from what I hear from people who are there, none of this is affecting daily activity in Paris itself. At any rate, I am hopefull that things will be under control when I get there. My job is to integrate some of our technology into a customer's product. A task I think I can be fairly competent at. I intentionally decided to take the trip over the Thanksgiving Holiday. Since we had no specific plans for Thanksgiving this year this time turned out to be the least disruptive. My calender is certainly getting full otherwise. I'm genuinely excited about being in the Shrine. It's a fantastic organization with so many opportunities to have fun with your whole family, all of the time raisin...
Ok, I have spent a few days trying to gather together my photographs so I can upload them to my website. I ran into a few difficulties. On Friday my hard drive decided to crash. It is still running, kind-of, but with intermittent and random failures. I bought a new hard drive but I want to get everything backed up off of my old one as best I can before I install it. I tried gathering all my photographs from the past two years between both my wife's camera and my own. I know I missed a bunch along the way but, nevertheless, the photo album is more or less representative of the past two years of my life, or at least the parts where I brought a camera and remembered to take a photograph. I have not annotated the gallery yet, that will take yet a bunch more time. I ran into another problem when I tried to upload the photo gallery. My ftp site seems to keep stalling out every time I load 15-20 files. So I have been uploading them piecemeal. Right now I have uploaded the entire H...
Ok, a lot of people have been wondering why I haven't updated my blog since my trip. I haven't updated it because I haven't had the time. My intention is to make a single, very large entry, that covers a lot of material. My primary goal is to upload a large photo-library of not only my trip but other activities in recent months. I did end up getting to Zurich and, yes, I did miss my tours. However, on Wenseday, which was my birthday, we ended up doing the tour I originally planned. We held our meetings on the train and at a cafe in Lucern. It was well worth it, because Mount Pilatus was breathtaking. I took many photographs which I plan to upload. However, the simple fact is, that when you take something which is so breathaking as the natural beauty of the Alps looking like they are floating in outer space above the cloud deck, and then try to cram it onto a flat photograph it does little to convey the majesty of the scene. My friend Simon and his lovely girlfriend was so k...
Sigh, I'm supposed to be on an airplane on my way to Zurich Switzerland right now. Instead I find myself sitting at home rather bummed out. I am supposed to be in Zurich on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week for a series of business meetings. So that the trip would be a little extra fun I booked it so I could be there for part of the day on Saturday and a full non-jet-lagged day on Sunday. I had two tours booked, one of the city of Zurich, that included a ride on the lake, and a big ten hour tour on Sunday was going to take me through Luzern and then the alps. Now I will be unable to use either tour and the money is non-refundable. Instead I'm going to frantically try to fly out tomorrow in a hellacious day of travel that will start early in the morning, have a six hour layover (if I'm lucky) and end up finally coming out of customs late in the morning on Sunday. And all of that, if I'm lucky enough to get there at all. Apparently there is a tropical sto...