I woke up this morning feeling a bit under the weather. There's some sort of bug going around. However, I'm trying to work this morning, since I've got a winter holiday coming up.

Makes the morning tough to get started though.

It's a slow start today. The weekend was stressful - independence in decision making on the part of teens and adults has its good and bad points. Particularly when people don't think all the way through about the consequences of their decisions.

thanksgiving?

Well, we spent a few hours with my family, then drove down to visit my wife's mother. One of the kids had the great idea to sneak some left over sandwiches from work with him in his backpack. Alas, they had mayo on them... when they ate them, one of the kids got sick and was sick all night, losing all their thanksgiving dinner.

I kept being called all night to get up and sit with the child as they puked their guts out. They appreciated the thought, but I ended up with little sleep. But I survived, as did they.

Thanksgiving. This year, I'm not feeling as thankful as I have in the past. It's been a dark and gloomy past few months, with some small pleasures but, in general, more pain than pleasure.

I feel so alone at times.

Well, watched some of Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi the past couple of days. Reminds me of some of the hokier series that ran in my day.

Also, had a weird experience with my TiVO . I don't remember if I've mentioned it, but I'm almost addicted to my tivo. I've had it a year now. In that time, I've upgraded it to 322 hours, and the family's easily filled that much space up .

Yesterday, I was watching some old shows when I first noticed that I was not able to delete things I'd just watched. In exploring that I also noticed that a series that I follow daily wasn't being taped.
I tried to directly record it, and that didn't work.

So I popped over into the recording history file to check on the problem. There I find that tivo is recording an "internal error 4" for recordings.
I decide to restart tivo since it was obviously not helping to just sit there.

I popped over to http://www.tivocommunity.com/ and found someone else giving that same advice, so I felt good.

I checked and after the reboot, deletes worked again as did record. Thankfully the show was rerunning later, so I was able to get the missing episode.

But wait - the weirdness continues! I decided to check to see how far back the problem had occurred.
I found that, around 1 pm yesterday, tivo was reporting shows were not recording because the power was off to the tivo.

Hmm - how does it know that - if the power is off?
I look back and see the same thing for the previous 3 or 4 hours.

Weirdly enough, my family that was at home at the time doesn't recall the power being off at all!

If you happen to run across my blog, and you also have a belief in prayer, then I would ask that, if you wouldn't mind, you offer a prayer for my family and I. We're in a bit of a crisis - something too personal for my blog. But prayer for my entire family would certainly be appreciated.

Well, this weekend a group from my church traveled up to Mt. Vernon Nazarene University to participate in the Tri-State Regional Teen Bible Quiz. It actually ended up having more than 3 states involved - I know there were teams from 5 states there (NY, PA, WV, OH, KY) and there may have even been more.

There's a bit of the background at http://www.kdconsulting.com/ (they apparently ran the quiz).

There were about 140 teams of teenagers. Our team had 1 or 2 first time quizzers and 3-4 quizzers with more experience. However, only one of our quizzers had ever attended a large tournament before.

Friday night they quizzed 4 teams, winning all 4 matches, and that put them in 10th place out of about 70 teams. Saturday was rougher, and they ended up with a record, I believe, of 4 wins and 3 losses. This put them in 12th place out of the 70 teams... quite respectible. Not only that, but the top quizzer on our team (which was one of the two quizzers on the team who happen to be my sons) ended up as the 16th highest quizzer in the section - that was out of over 200 quizzers (maybe over 300 ... I've not seen a tally yet).

Anyways the young people did well, and youth pastor Mike Rodgers and his lovely wife Amy (as well as the parents of some of the others) were there to cheer the team on.

Also, we got to see various friends from other teams and even among the student body of MVNU . So a good time was had by all, despite my personal woes.

This has been a week of stress and pain. My wife learned some info about a friend that resulted in her being upset. Then we learned some info about one of our kids that frightened and discouraged us. Then another of the kids was being secretive, trying to keep us from reacting badly to something he was doing. Then it has been raining several days, work is stressful... one of the kids from my teen Bible quizzing has found that school is stressing her out so she has quit the team right before a competition.

While several of these things sound perhaps unimportant, there are many aspects to them which I'm not sharing publically since they, for the most part, involve others, and even when it involves me, there are parts of my life about which I'm more private.
However, the reality of things is that I'm under a lot of stress. I was talking to my eldest son yesterday, and he started to make a comment about how he couldn't understand how one of the other kids could act a particular way... and then he stopped. I made some remark about how 'well, they are [a teenager] - you were the same way at your age'?

Life surely takes strange turns. Growing up, I had a few events that took me by surprise. I kind of freaked out a couple times when relationships grew more intense than I expected. I got myself fired once for letting the air out of a fellow employee's tire as a prank (done to 'impress' .. right... a girl), etc.

Since then, I've several times found myself in serious trouble because of bad decisions. And each time, life seemed really black as I searched for solutions or at least some sort of action to take in response to the troubles I had caused myself.

More recently though, I began going through various crisis events the cause of which are actions taken by my children.

These are a different kind of panic, one which is even worse in some ways, in that they have to be the one to ultimately take responsibility over.

There have been the poor choices of relationships, resulting in brushes with the law. There have been experimentations
with substances of which I don't approve. There has been poor study habits, resulting in inability to get into college or slow down the career advancements.

Now we are in the midst of another one of these crisis points. It's too personal, and I don't feel comfortable talking about it second hand. But it is painful to see my children be hurt and to hurt themselves. And it makes me feel the pain of doing an inadequate job preparing them for adulthood.

As the weather keeps changing around, the headaches continue. Yesterday was so bad I slept nearly all day, sick to my stomach and really out of sorts with everyone.

I'm up and around today, with a bit of a headache but able to function. This stuff is no fun.

Weather here in Ohio is cooling off.

Took my wife to the local second run theater last nite to watch Bourne Supremacy. Found the dialog for the lead to be nearly non-existent, but viewed as an action film, it seemed to work pretty well.

Still haven't seen Spider-Man II or iRobots yet...

Well, election day was yesterday. I first tried to vote at 6:30 am. But the lines were quite long - probably 30-50 people - and that would result in me waiting for at least an hour or more and I was wanting to get to work by 7 or 7:30. So I left with the intent on coming back at 4. During the day, I got a request from my daughter to pick her up from the public library at 5pm, so she could get ready for work. No problem, I thought. At 4:05 pm I arrived at my polling place, and the lines were not out the door and around the corner, which I took to be a good sign.

However, it turned out that there were quite a number inside the building. I finished voting and was back in my car by 4:55 pm. 50 minutes seemed like a long time to me - particularly since I had forgotten to take something to read or play with me. So I just listed to my mp3 player and chilled.

I was able to get the daughter near the pickup time and everything worked out relatively well .

Now, being in Ohio, we won't know the results of our voting for probably another 2 weeks. What a drag that is.