Ever discover an old pile of books or something? I have them all over the place. I’ll read a book and then just put it on the bookshelf. If you do that for a few years you end up with quite a little collection of books!

Well, I’ve decided to start unloading some of that old stuff. Within a few minutes I had listed 20 items on Amazon.com’s marketplace. All you have to do is put the ISBN number and your selling price and wham-O… It’s for sale.

So far I’ve sold 2 books and made about $15.00. It’s not much, but it is turning dust collectors into greenbacks. Not bad, eh? I highly doubt this will ever become some sort of income… But there are a lot of little things you can do or sell that if put together do amount to something.

It’s a tiny bit, but it is profit. I’ll take any kind of profit I can get these days!

As much as I had fun with the 8 Crazy Nights theme… I am very happy to see everyone get back to the routine of going to school. Likewise, I’m fairly pleased to have the Light Force schedule scale down to 2-3 events a month outside of regular meetings.

Oddly, I am also looking forward to the self-torture of school myself. I’ll never get over the irony of paying someone to torture me with more education. Why don’t schools pay me to take classes? It seems only fair… Unless you are a teacher.

Megan with her prized Christmas present… the elefun game! 

this is Paul doing one of his favorite tasks lately… destroying the cabinets! 

this is the pool table I’ve been trying to refinish. it’s at about 90% complete and should be done Sunday afternoon at the latest 

It seems the number is going up all the time. The scope of this tsunami is so large it is hard to contemplate a number that large. 120,000 people is about the size of the city I grew up in, South Bend, Indiana.

As this article notes, the news from Southwest Asia put a major damper on celebrations throughout the globe and certainly in the U.S. It was very noticeable that the major TV networks were downplaying the New Year’s celebration. Likewise, there were no major celebrations mentioned on the local TV channels.

Somber start for 2005.

After a lot of fiddling around and hand wrenching about it… I finally moved the youth group page off of the churches website and onto it’s own domain.

The hope for this is that it will help to create an online community of sorts. That may be a long shot, but that is the goal. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be purchasing new and better software for creating, updating, and maintaining the churches sites… this is a big part of it.

One of the other deep dark desires is that we will be able to create a blog of our Northern Ireland team as we prepare and tackle this massive project. Of course, there are other fish to fry as well in Light Force and in my own life.

But it is nice to see little accomplishments along the way.

Just as the the ball in Times Square was being prepared to drop and all is finalized for our Northern Ireland mission trip, we’ve added the 8th and final team member.

Presuming all are accepted, the team will consist of 6 females and 2 males. Interestingly, only 3 team members will be attending high school after the trip is over.

With exactly 5 months to go, we only need another $15,600. Not too shabby, eh?

I got about as far as I expected to on the pool table. The main sanding is complete and a coat of primer now covers everything.

Since the primer for the orange part is really peach… The pool table looks like it belongs in a candy store. Hopefully tomorrow I will make some serious progress and maybe even get it done. I think I have about 3-4 more coats of paint to go. So far, so good.

That’s right. Today is one of those rare double days off. I get the day off because it’s my scheduled day off plus it’s a holiday so I get the day off.

At Blue Cross [my former employer of 7 years from 95-02] I would get an extra day off when this happened, but in ministry this usually means I don’t take a day off at all. Funny math, eh?

Today, I am having breakfast with a deacon. (I enjoy that greatly) Then I am off to the LF room to work more on the pool table. Hopefully by the end of the afternoon I’ll have it all sanded and primed. Then later tonight we are going to a friends house from the church for a big New Year’s bash. Something tells me there won’t be any booze at this? I consider it half work and half fun since there will be tons of students there and their parents. This will hardly be a rest.

I’m not mad about the no day off deal. In all reality it is my fault. I made the choice to schedule these things and I am happy with it. If I really wanted the day off I could take it.

This is the joy of having a super-flexible work schedule since I can work as much or as little as I like.