Iced Tea Forever

Last weekend I went out to Wooster, OH, to the BMA convention. My wife didn’t go, she had to work all weekend.

Said hi to lots of people I knew, and met a few new ones too. Sang in the choir and met Nic, he’s a good dude, and he likes to sing.

Speaking of the choir, my buddy Brandon Mullet from Faith Builders was there for the weekend leading the music during the general sessions, directing the choir, and doing a music workshop Saturday afternoon.

I was accosted by several people I didn’t know either questioning or stating “You’re Iced Tea Forever!” That’s always fun.

I enjoyed the weekend, but there is one minor problems with the convention. The sessions are too long. Can I get a good Mennonite non-clapping amen?

The fact that we’re sitting in those awful auditorium flip-up seats doesn’t help matters. They definitely were not designed to accomodate anyone over 5 feet or 140 pounds. Of which I am both. My goodness. But I digress.

A general truth I have observed is that 97% of preachers and speakers tend to talk about 15-25% longer than would be most effective. Add that universal truth with a lot of announcements, special music, testifications, a few reports, sundry ceremonies, and various other miscellanea, and you’re left with some very cramped legs and a sore posterior.

I think a number of shortcuts could be made without harming the overall content quality, but I’m not holding my breath. Your average conservative Mennonite feels cheated if a service lets out early!

This weekend my wife and I are going to Mikie and Deb‘s wedding in Pennsylvania. As I said before, her parents made chicken for me once late at night, and I think there may be chicken once again this weekend.

So years ago back at Bible school where we met, we went on choir tour. One day on the bus, somebody took a picture of me and the girl I was sitting beside (my future wife, though of course none of us knew it at the time!). When the “film” was “developed” what did we find but Mikie and Deb sitting behind us with big cheesy grins pointing and gesturing at us with unrestrained glee.

Ha ha! Joke’s on them!

Today I ran across a recipe calling for couscous. What in the world?! I never heard of the stuff. I have no idea what it is. I looked it up, and I still have no idea!

Don’t know how to pronounce it either.

It’s something in the pasta family, maybe? If so, then it’s not worthy of any further pursuit anyway.

One of the few things the Amish and I have in common is a great appreciation for Wal Mart. However, Wal Mart doesn’t have a special parking area dedicated just for me.

Here’s a picture of the special Amish building on the edge of the Wal Mart parking lot here in Goshen.

And I hear they even have their own secret lane to Wal Mart! Fascinating.

That’s a pretty nice hitching post. You probably wouldn’t want to go too close to it without your boots on though.

Newegg and UPS wasted no time in delivering my new hard drive. They were fast! I was very happy with them all. However, I was not happy about my computer refusing to acknowledge that I had installed the new drive.

I slopped around in the BIOS, making sure SATA was enabled, but it all made no difference. Nothing I did would open the computer’s eyes to the new hard drive resting in its bowels.

After much pounding head against wall, I finally discovered a forum page discussing a problem just like mine. There I learned that my motherboard chipset was first-generation SATA, my new hard drive was second-generation SATA, and the motherboard was blind to it.

Western Digital themselves addressed the solution and explained the reasons for the issue. All I needed to do was install a jumper on the new drive to put it in SATA I mode.

Suddenly the motherboard realized what was going on and accepted the new drive with open arms.

And now I am wallowing in 300 extra gigabytes.