We’re doing the natural birth at home. On that note, I had an epiphany one day. I think many people have the wrong attitude about pregnancy and birth. Pregnancy is not a medical condition. Birth is not a medical procedure. It’s a pure and natural part of life. It can become a medical emergency, therefore requiring a medical procedure. That’s when the doctors should get involved. Doctors and hospitals love birth because they make a lot of money off it. Now that they’ve figured out that they can talk people into inducing and elective c-sections, they can even schedule the births around their rounds of golf. I will rant no further on that topic. I will only say that we worked so hard to get to where we are. After more than 2 years since we started trying to become pregnant, we desire nothing less than perfection for our daughter.

If you know me well, you know how important my faith is. I believe that God desires to have a personal relationship with every person and I’m happy that His grace is big enough that it allows me to be close to Him. Without grace, I’d be doomed. I screwed up a lot of stuff in my life. I will never deny that.

When I was young, I was given a call from God to “ministry”. What does that mean? For a time, I believed I was to be a pastor of a great church. Then I saw the great mission field and thought maybe I was supposed to be a missionary to foreign lands. As I became more involved in music and my band became rather popular (locally), I believed that I was to play music and share the message of Christ’s salvation and redemption through my music. I was a Worship Pastor at a local church for 3 years or so. Then my world kinda spiraled out of control. But it’s better that I don’t have control, that’s what I’ve learned.

For so long it was all about MY ministry and what I was doing. Today God is teaching me, it has nothing to do with me. It’s all about what God is doing. He’ll use me if I’m a willing vessel but if I stop, He doesn’t. There’s a lot of work to be done to share God’s simple love with the world. Each person has an opportunity to take part in sharing that love. The problem is that we all want to push our own agenda. We want to make sure that others recognize what we are doing.

God is calling me to become more humble. It’s not about me. It’s not about who I know or what I know or what responsibilities I’ve been given. It’s about sharing God’s simple love and His simple love is simply this: God loves every single person so incredibly much and He loves them just the way they are. There are no conditions to His love. It’s so simple. He just loves.

Right now I’m praying about ministry, not my ministry but my place in His ministry. God’s given me an amazing church at Access. He’s put me in a position to serve others. Some days I’m an usher and I help people find seats. Other days I change the slides on the screens. It’s not rocket science. I don’t need theology to perform it. It’s simple, basic “I love you” ministry. I’m grateful for it. It’s where God is using me today. If He can’t trust me to be faithful with this small task, He’ll never trust me with any thing else.

I started with a disk I’d made about a week ago. When I booted it up though I got an error “Could not find kernel image: linux” So I went back to Astaro.com and downloaded the newest version dated 31-Oct-2008. That time it worked just fine. The trouble I ran into after that was connecting to the WebAdmin. I didn’t read the instructions so I wasn’t aware that it needed to connect on port 4444. So I tried to figure out why I could ping the server but not connect via the web browser. Once I read the setup guide, I connected with no problem. I have one other minor issue to resolve, but I won’t go into that here. For all intents and purposes, I’m connected and our home network is useable and very secure. I value security.

Enough with that. My tenant had moved in at the duplex. I’m pretty much done over there now. I planted some new shrubs in the front. Hopefully she keeps them watered over the next couple days so they don’t die. I’ve asked her to help me with that, but you never know. Luckily it rained a little yesterday and it’s supposed to rain a little bit today.

I also bought a battery charger and maintainer yesterday for the scooter. It stays plugged in to the battery and maintains a good charge when the scooter isn’t in use. So by now, it should have a really good charge. Unfortunately, the ignition switch broke again though.

You can see here just under the seat the broken switch. It’s a plastic switch and this is the second time it has broken, so I’m not buying another plastic one. I went by Lowes last night just to see if they have one but they didn’t have any “momentary” switches. I’ll try to find one Monday. This switch was installed by a prior owner when the main ignition button went bad. Apparently it’s a couple hundred bucks to replace the main one, so he installed this. But this plastic one, purchased at Advanced Discount Auto Parts isn’t quite sturdy enough. After all the trouble I had getting it running this past week, I think the battery maintainer will help. I also bought some more starting fluid, which will hopefully help it get going a little quicker on cold mornings.

Today we’re skipping church. I’m actually very sad, for the first time in a long time, that I’m not going to church. Jessica hasn’t been feeling well at all this weekend. We’re supposed to go to see her brother this afternoon. I know she really wants to see him so I do hope she’s feeling better and up to it in a couple hours. So for now, we’re taking the morning slow and just being lazy.

I haven’t worked on my Linux course in a couple weeks. I’ve had plenty of things keeping me busy. I do plan on getting back into it though. I’m also hoping to find time soon to switch my security gateway or UTM (unified threat management), which ever you wanna call it. Currently I use Untangle and I want to switch to Astaro.

Untangle is great, I’m not saying I’m unhappy with it. I uses many of it’s great features. It’s open source and free for anyone to use. I’ve been glad to have it. I run this computer without any anti-virus (yeah, I use windows…don’t hate) and I’ve never had to worry. I run frequent virus scans just to see how things are going and I must say I’ve had no problems. I also use the VPN to connect my office computer to my home network and access my FreeNAS server. I also use that in order to backup my server daily to a hard drive at my office and to back up extremely important work files to my home servers as well. That way I always have 2 copies of every file and both copies are at different locations. So if my house burns down, I still have my files. If my office gets burglarized, I have my files backed up. Ok I won’t preach at you about the importance of backup files.

Astaro uses open source and non-open source software so it’s not free for commercial use. Astaro is free for home users though. You have to install it on your own hardware (which you also must do with Untangle). I’m not changing because I think Astaro is better, not at all. I’m changing to check out Astaro. The guys I know who have used it, swear by it.  Ok, I also won’t preach at you about the benefit of gateway security over local security. (update – if you are interested in reading more, go to Jet the Nerd.)

I thought I’d throw that at ya. Since I spent so much time fixing the problem with posting pictures on our blog, I had to post at least one picture. So remember, Don’t Panic.

I am still planning to keep learning though. I have found this great Linux course online (and it’s free). It has a basic, intermediate and advanced level. I am starting the basic course this week. I’ve wanted to get really good at Linux for a long time. So I’m gonna focus on that, keep helping friends and friends of friends to make some money here and there (and I can actually keep 100% instead of only 50%). I’m trying to see if one of the other Nerds wants to buy the Nerdmobile. So that’s the story I guess.

In other news, Jessica and I have found a church that we love. We’ve spent time with the pastor and his wife getting to know them. I feel really comfortable and I think it’s somewhere we can start to build a foundation for our family. I’ve fought it for a long time, being filled with fear and confusion after what happened in my past. I never blamed God, but I did have a very hard time understanding and accepting that sometimes you just don’t understand everything. I’m so glad that we found this church too. The pastor graduated from Southeastern, so I know he’s got a similar background and belief system. He’s actually a couple years younger than me. It’s a young church but doing very well. I know that I will be able to get involved when I’m ready. Right now, my prayer has been “God, I just wanna be friends again.”

Speaking of cruise, I can’t freakin wait!

So have I mentioned how much I love my wife? I love her. She is so good to me. I just wanted to make sure and share that with the world. It also helps that she’s incredibly beautiful too.

It was so nice to ride a little earlier. It was slightly cool and less humid. The sun was just starting to come up as we were riding. Although near the end of the ride it was getting hot and humid, it was definitely a good ride and a nice change from our usual ride.

It was as the sun was coming up that I had the best idea. I remember seeing the sun just as it came over the trees. One large part of the trail has a huge pasture to the east. The sun was just illuminating the grass and it was so refreshing. I thought, how awesome would it be if we had a digital ultra-high def camera in our eyes. You could see something like that and take a picture. Then you had an SD card slot in your head where you can store the pictures and then transfer them to your computer and share them with the world. Then this post would just be filled to the rim with great pictures from this mornings ride. But maybe I just need to learn how to paint pictures with my words.

In all it was a lot of fun though tiring and of course, great exercise.

I finally have an appointment with a dermatologist. I have a nasty mole on  my back that I’ve needed to get rid of for a long long time. So the day after my birthday, I will get it looked at. Yay.

Tomorrow I will be officially inducted into The Rotary Club. I’m pretty excited about this. I’ll have to write all about it later.