BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

• Lost my Amazon gift card that was a B-day present. Very upset about this, making it hard to get my day started. #
• Interval training for 25 min this morn. Stepped up to the next level. It was fun and the good kind of painful. It is just beautiful outside. #
• Time to start rubbing the chicken and beef with famous Dave’s stuff from Sam’s. Looking forward to ppl coming over this afternoon. #
• Had some great food off the grill and chocolate cake. Now chillin out back w/ ppl until it gets too dark to stay outside. #
• Weekly meetings this morning. Not nearly as fun as the good times I was having with friends last night. #
• Jogged in the AM. Now I’m using lunch to collect info on fighting Human Trafficking. Any suggestions, especially for the Twin Cities. #
• http://is.gd/HfvW “Never forget: Justice is what love looks like in public.” Cornel West from Call+Response. #
• Gonna buy Battlestar Galactica the complete series on Bluray w/ B-day money. Then have a big party to watch it! http://is.gd/HutJ #
• Went to Jamaica and back w/o drinking any red stripe. But I have some in my house tonight. “Hooray Beer!” #
• Anyone want to do dinner w/ us @ the Town Hall Brewery 2nite? #
• Jysi just had her baby. 8lbs 15oz. Yay! #
• Chillin in Burnsville, waiting to see the new baby. For the record, I really dislike most the suburbs, good thing the ppl are alright. #
• For clarification, I really like that our church doesn’t feel as suburb-y, and I love the ppl there. #
• Sent out 5 emails to 5 big local churches that I know are into the abolitionist movement asking what they do – Got one email back so far #
• Spent the entire morning in a meeting w/ a vendor, and my boss was not happy w/ them. Lots of fun. I had other plans for my morning #
• Lauren is performing tonight at the Fallout Urban Arts center in Minneapolis. Event starts at 6PM. Come see, it will be great. #
• Stupid thing actually starts at 7. If you want to do something like this well I think more info for performers is preferred to less. #
• Made a cocktail out of gin, triple sec, brandy, lemon juice, & sprite. After 2 of those and a couple beers I’m on my ass. Live & learn. #
• Other than drinking a little more than I intended to, this has been a fantastic evening. Good poetry, good friends, and great TV on Hulu.com #
• Encoding Lauren’s videos from last night off the camera to put on iphones and youtube. Handbrake is awesome for encoding! http://is.gd/K07P #
• Looking up ideas for how to do-up a toga for the Human Trafficking awareness toga party tonight. 7pm @ Mercy Vineyard, come check it out. #
• Just placed my pre-order for Battlestar Galactica complete series on Bluray. Can’t wait for July 28th when it is coming out! #
• Picked up Serenity on Bluray for a pretty good price at target. Grocery shopping next, followed by toga party @ 7. #
• Global day of prayer meeting 2nite. 5:30pm Minneapolis convention center. Come to the church @ 4:45 or 5 @ my place to carpool. #

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In one of my favorite movies the main character has the following line:

We’re the middle children of history…. no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.

( Our Spiritual War and our Great Depression )
( The Starfish )
( Our Great War )
( Faith to make a difference in the face of impossibility )

This is a quick test post to verify that my LJ sync’ing tool works when I generate my wordpress post from my iphone. If this works it will be pretty sweet, and I’ll be contributing back to an open source project. Double-win for me.

\n

In the past I wasn’t a fan of affirmative action. Primarily because of my sense of loss that accompanied the idea that I could not be selected for a job or position solely on the basis of me not being female or a minority.

I still feel a twinge of that when I talk about this now, but I have a new feeling that I think is important as well. The feeling of “Can’t this just be over.” By that I mean that I want everyone to be equally treated, equally represented and this to be largely a non-issue. I think it is great to get the broadest ranges of backgrounds and cultures into the highest places in our society (the public and private sectors). I think a lot of people I’ve talked to that are younger feel similarly despite their political leanings.

But, my wish for things to be over assumes that everyone treats people from other cultures evenhandedly. That racism, sexism, and nepotism are things of the past, and their subsequent hangovers have faded out as well.

Since this obviously isn’t the case (look at the color in our upper echelon of business and government), I know there is an uphill battle ahead to get to a place where we are evenly represented in our captains of industry as well as our political leaders. I can see that sometimes artificial means must be put in place to help guide that, if only to undo the self-indulgent bigotry and misogyny that has and sometimes still does keep minorities out. This is simply because that process, while it was mostly without formal government guidance, was still just as artificial.

And I’m really excited that we have put our first minority into the White House, which required the people to act and respond. Now, we need our leaders and embattled institutions to follow suit. So that in our childrens lifetime, especially our daughters, we will have had several minorities of different backgrounds at least having vied for the same opportunity. So that it is no longer note-worthy when we do elect a woman or minority to our highest offices. Much like how the congress has become more multi-ethnic I think this can and will be the reality of our future.

So I’m really pumped to that end today that Obama announced a Latina woman as his nominee to the supreme court. I don’t know her background and will be looking into that in the coming weeks. But I do know that I’m excited to see the beginning of the destruction of white privilege in our government, and I look forward to the opposing viewpoints mixed cultures, sexes, and backgrounds playing a more regular and larger part of judicial discussions.

• Apricot burnon BBQ glazed pork chops, rosemary thyme sage and oilive oil grilled potato wedges. Not a bad follow-up to cruise cuisine. #
• Listening to This American Life podcast & being disappointed in stock ‘Christian’ answers to life’s hard questions. #
• Working on a small group discussion about being filled with the Holy Spirit. Any good scripture suggestions? #
• Small group was good. Thnx for the suggestions. Ministry time was improved by some feedback from Dale (given at the national conference). #
• My brain matter is turning into a mushy goo even without hulu.com – need a nap so I can finish this list up before I go home. #
• Kicking it at the Breaking Free fundraiser. Looking forward to getting to know some of these people and help pol get get of prostitution. #
• Paid $200 for 24 bottles of wine. All the money went to help fund women getting out of prostitution. A good deal for all! http://is.gd/Cfah #
• Pondering how to write a blog about culture wars and how silly they are w/o being overly inflammatory. Result hopefully posted this weekend. #
• Put the hammok up today and cleaned the garage. Now grillin dinner and watching Mad Men. BTW, memorial day grill-out @ my place, 3pm. #

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Current Mood:  mellow

Well, having returned from vacation I figure it is time for a blog-series documenting and reviewing various aspects of our trip.

Sunday the 3rd we flew out in the morning and into Houston TX. We stayed at the Alden Hotel and at their really fancy restaurant *17. It was some of the best food we have ever had. And the hotel room was super amazing to boot.
( On to the conference )

• Hello USA! I didn’t miss you and want to go back to Jamaica. #
• 89 new emails in gmail, 1 of them personally sent to me. Thnx Caleb. 5 new voice mails, 4 from the same person asking for computer help. #
• Gonna try to get a flight back earlier. Here is to hoping that HOU to ATL is not crowded and we can get standby seats all the way home. #
• Had to pay to go back early, but through crazy random happenstance Aaron is going to be arriving in ATL at the same time. Yay lunch w/ bro! #
• Home again, home again, fiddlity dee. Ate, showed off some pics, now doing laundry & unpacking. #

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• Planning a fairly twitter-prolific week during the national conference – You have been warned. #
• http://is.gd/wxLT I can’t stand microsoft – If they lose they still have to try to screw their competition. Adopt, extend, destroy + FUD=MS. #
• Mmmmmmm Texas BBQ. Now to visit the Fry’s electronics a couple blocks away from here. #
• Can’t get KDE to host an adhoc network, so no liveblogging the conference. Also no cell service in our venue, so no twittering either. #
• Conference I starting out awesome! Jeremey Riddle led worship, Burt Wagner spoke on becoming heroic leaders in times of change. Very great. #
• Conference is rocking pretty hard. God showed up, and it was probably as cool as it ever has been for me. #VineyardUSA #
• Free beer, drinking on a patio over looking the ocean, fun outreach to help Galveston – Easily in the top 10 birthdays ever. #
• Holy crap this hotels internet is fast. Just downloaded xbmc at 1.8MBytes / sec! #
• Just sent an email to my boss about not calling me during vacation. Pretty freaking nervous about the fallout from that now. #
• The conference was awesome. Enjoyed the last session – interview style on loving your neighbors by a Palestinian Christian pacifist. #
• The Sun: Hello white boy, you would look really good in red. Let me help you with that. (Sunscreen runs away because it is scared) #
• Hanging all day w/ Bryan and Jammie from Bluer Vineyard. Beach, lunch, Star Trek, and Dinner. Good times w/ great ppl. #
• Oh the burning!!!! Hopefully this lays down a good foundation for the cruise, assuming I don’t still want to die by then. #
• Wondering what good things there are to do for very sunburned people in Galveston, TX. #
• I think Lauren is questioning her Puerto Rican heritage a little now that she has experienced the worst sunburn of her life. #
• Waiting to get a table at the Saltgrass steakhouse in Galveston TX. We will see how this TX steak compares to other regions. #
• Today is cruise day! I’m offline when the ship get far enough from land to stop getting cell phone signal, so have a great week everyone. #
• Dear TX, you need to do better @ labeling your roads and engineering your on/off ramps. You suck. Kthnxbye. #
• Ate steak and BBQ, swam in the ocean, got burnt on the beach and have served hurricane victims. Think I’m done with TX for a while. #
• Participating in a lifeboat drill. Gonna take some pics and try to put them on facebbok b4 we depart and I loose cell signal. #
• Sailing away from the USA! Goodbye Internet and 24-7 connectedness. Hello boozed up seaside party. #

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• Monday status update meetings are never fun for me. I always get assinged a bunch of new stuff that I wasn’t planning on doing this week. #
• Earning announcement for the quarter at 5pm. Internal action plan announced 20 mins ago. I am less than pleased (trying to avoid profanity). #
• Spent the weekend entirely in Linux, and it felt good. The newest ubuntu and kubuntu are almost mac pretty, and I dig that. #
• Corporate conference call to discuss yesterdays announcements… Fun. It seems to hurt more the more they talk about it. Salary cuts suck. #
• Interval training for 25 min this morning. Not bad overall. Who knew techno was good for more than writing code. Thnx couch 2 5k podcast. #
• 2nd time out for interval training and don’t want to die. #
• Jailbroke my iPhone. Can now tether the phone to the computer – very nice! #
• So annoyed, can’t get mythtv to play 1080i content on my 1080p TV w/o being stuttery on olde-rish hardware. P4, 512mb ram, geforce 6200. #
• At the church for ‘the fold’ our fusion of awarness for human trafficing and the arts. Lauren is performing a spoken word piece. Come see @6 #
• I wonder if God allows children to be born into devestation to give us a another reason and opportunity to stop the cycle of injustice. #
• 140 char prayers: God make us foolish enough to walk into impossibe situations, hopeless injustice, and believe we can enact mercy for you. #
• God, you gave us, gave me, the power to create and destroy. Give us wisdom and strength to tear down evil and create love in the darkness. #
• Please make what is invisible plain 2 us. Put terrors and wonders in front of our eyes. Always seeing both, never blinded by either side. #
• Deuteronomy 24:17-21 – Who is my widow or foriegner today? What about next week? Show me God how to leave my fallen wheat for others. #
• Aside: I wish I could communicate this better, but the vastness of the digital divide is one way we have picked up that fallen wheat. #
• 2nd aside: An idea – supporting, using, and participating in development of open source software is one way to leave the wheat fallen. #
• God, your churches kinda suck at playing well with eachother. Help bring us together to create change, bring healing, and love eachother. #
• There are no less than 4 established Vineyards in the Cities. Why does it take a conf. in TX for us to do ministy together? God pls help us. #
• Sorry, that was my cynical side coming out there. Those two issues really tweak me tho. God, help me see where you are uniting us. #
• Waiting for my plane in MSP. They made us take 15lbs out of our giant checked bag First time I’ve checked a bag in a long time. #
• Turning the iPhone to ‘airplane mode’. See you on two weeks Minneapolis and St. Paul. #
• Lay-over in Atlanta. Wish of was either A) shorter or B) longer so ok could get a late lunch with my bro and his wife. #
• My interpretation of the news that I’ve been watching lately: Joe Biden hired another RIAA lawyer to tell me airports cause swine flu. #
• About to take off for Houston! Yay fun in TX! Where is the best steak place in town? #
• This avid place needs more people manning the rental station. I hope having a reservation makes things go faster. #
• Just dropped a fat wad of cash on dinner at this hotels resurant in downtown Houston (Alden). Worth every penny – fantastic food. #
• And have booted into kubuntu, and will hopefully stay that way for 2 weeks! #

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