Catching up and Gran Torino.

Well, I journal-failed. I pretty much haven't really journaled in a few days, since the last time was yesterday morning attempting to describe the day before. Lol

Basically, I've not felt good the last few days. Just had a headache and a bit of a stomachache. Perhaps I'm not drinking enough fluids. I'd love for it to be something as simple as that. I'm feeling better now then I have been, but I still have a headache. Add to that the fact that yesterday morning I sprained my ankle falling off the back porch while bringing breakfast to one of Steve's workers, and I'm pretty much a mess. Ankle is feeling a bit better now, but still sore and tender to walk on. I basically wake up feeling “eh”, and then get better during the day, peaking around 7:00PM at night and rapidly going downhill. So right about now, I'm not feeling too dandy.

I finished all the computers today. I did a total of 9 over the past week or so. I have a 10-page report detailing all the changes I made to each computer on my computer and on Faith's computer. Sometime before I leave, we'll go over the report and see if she wants me to change anything and make sure she understands it all. I also have a spreadsheet on both of our computers that details each computer, the serial and product numbers, who the computer is 'registered' to, and anti-Virus info. That's basically been my work the last week or so. I've enjoyed it, and gotten quite a bit faster with each computer as I've gone along. Switching between three different operating systems is a bit confusing at times though, I will say.

Watched Gran Torino last night. Interesting movie. A LOT of language, in an attempt to accurately depict gangs. And in the end, Clint Eastwood (the hero of the movie) sacrifices his life to save his friends, doing so in a rather Christ-like manner. For all the good of the movie and its accurate depictions of real life, however, I am not too sure about it. I did not feel particularly edified by it, and I don't know if I would have felt comfortable watching it with Jesus sitting next to me. I guess it's something along the lines of “how much bad do you put up with to find the good?” I realize that Jesus hung out with former prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. He was at once in the world and at once not of it. If, in our lives, we are called to minister to what might be termed unsavory characters, then so be it. In fact, I would almost guarantee that most people that are Christians will find that ministering to the lost and delving into the dark, ugly, nastiness of this fallen world is quite necessary to fulfill the Great Commission's requirement of making disciples. But there is a difference, to me, of doing what is quite necessary in making disciples and watching a movie for mere entertainment purposes. Other reasons for watching it might be made, but I truly cannot think of any at this moment. It is one thing to hear language and see filthy things because of where Christ has called me and what He has told me to do. It is quite another to subject myself willingly to hearing that same language and violence in a film meant for entertainment. Even if that film, at the end, has a good message. Does the end justify the means?

I'm not much of a movie person, I guess. They generally don't leave me feeling very edified. Now, there are some movies which I enjoy watching for entertainment, and I don't believe that God means us to be stuck up prunes who never crack a smile. How to Train a Dragon was a fun film, as was Race to Witch Mountain. Lord of the Rings is an incredible story, and movies like Sergeant York are quite edifying. Why can we not have quality entertainment and good messages without all the junk? Now, I realize some messages would be difficult to get across without portraying the ugly nastiness that is this fallen world . . . and to that predicament, I have no answer.

I would like to point out that I don't think movies are inherently bad nor that people who watch movies with language/violence/etc in them are sinning. That, I think, is a choice that has to be made between that person and God, made as God directs and the Spirit convicts. I do, however, think that to fill your mind with entertainment without thinking about it is a horrible idea. There is a message to every article of media, and to not think through that message and be careful you are not being influenced by the world unknowingly is a rather poor testimony to Christ. Paul says that because we are not under the Law (Mosaic) of the Old Testament but rather under Grace, there is now no condemnation and we are free to choose that which we will. He also warns us that since we have that choice, it'd be a decent idea to not abuse it and to do those things which would honor God and love our fellowman.

Okay, off that tirade. Everybody watched a couple of episodes of MASH tonight except me. Viewing that movie left me with a non-desire for movies and entertainment for tonight, anyways.

Had a lovely talk with Steve this morning. It started to POUR rain around 3:30 this morning and didn't stop till 5:30. It was amazing. I got up around 5:30 and read my Bible and prayed for a bit. 6:30 or so, Steve and I started talking. We talked about Old Testament history, Early Church history, and other questions that I had from reading and thinking about Romans 8. I finished that conversation feeling quite encouraged. :)

Okay, I'm about to drop, and I've written a decent amount tonight. Time to go take a shower and hit the sack. At least I get to sleep in tomorrow. Yay for Saturday's!

07.27.2010 - Tuesday

This day has so far been just like yesterday. Worked on computers this morning, finishing up another laptop by 2:00. Then went back up to the house and worked on American History until the girls decided they wanted to go down and check their emails and facebooks. I'm down at the clinic with them right now, doing the same. So yeah, pretty much a flat-line day so far. No plans for tonight either.


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The end.

Oh, and apparently I got a day behind in my journal. I had the correct "day of the week", but not the correct number. I was calling Tuesday the "26th" in my journal, and had been incorrect for a week I guess. Apparently I corrected that mistake when I copied and pasted into the blog, cause I don't see any problems with my posts.

07.26.2010 - Monday

Apparently I forgot to journal yesterday.

Church was. . . incomprehensible once again. Something about me not being able to speak or hear Creole very well. I think he started out in Romans 8, so I decided to read it for myself and do some thought-writing on it. I got through 3 verses in the time he finished his sermon. I take a long time to think about stuff, apparently. *thinks deep thoughts*

Went down and facebooked/blogged/emailed in the early afternoon. Played some cards with Grace and Betsy after I got back up to the house. And now to the fun part of the day. . .

Steve let Grace, Betsy, and I take the four-wheeler up to some Haitian place that I can’t spell. haha. There is a lovely view up there. We parked the four wheeler at a church and then took a 10 minute walk up to the top of the hill/mountain. From there, you can see a couple miles of coast and several miles of coastal plains and low hills. Very pretty, and even more so as the sun starts to set. We stayed until the sun dipped below one of the larger mountains and then returned back to our vehicle.

When we got to the church and jumped off the 4-wheeler, we were instantly surrounded by several little kids who decided they were going to be our best buddies and walk us up the hill and stay there the whole time with us. There were maybe 6-8 young girls around 7-11 years old (my best guess, anyways. Lol) and a young fellow who mainly sat off the side and watched. Grace and Betsy (who know far more Creole then I do) spent some time singing songs with them (like Father Abraham and Head 'n' Shoulders, Knees and Toes). I finally decided to have some fun myself and started giving the girls rides on my shoulders and back. At one point, I had a girl on my back and a girl in each arm. I think they enjoyed it, or at least thought I was funny. Oh, and I did handstands for them too, and attempted to yodel. . . it came out more like a loud, high, and warbling scream. That rather frightened one of the girls. She jumped several feet into the air. :-D

After we got back to the house, we ate a late dinner and then listened to a Matt Chandler sermon that I had with me called Forgetting and Striving. It's a fairly good sermon, I think. :) I've listened to it several times, and always brought something new away. I wish we had time to go through his series on the Cross of Christ. It's absolutely phenomenal. Maybe I can convince them to listen to a couple of sermons every week for the next three weeks. At least the first one in the series, since I think that one is incredible.

7:00PM

The rest of last night was a bit different. I had a lot of lower back pain for some reason, and the pain was shooting down my leg into my big toe on my right foot. I know that sounds weird, but it happens to me. Has for years. I can remember being 10 years old and going down in the middle of the night to my parents room crying because my toe hurt so much. I think that was more from growing pains, whereas this was from tight muscles and vertebrae problems.

God worked on me last night. . . I'm really not sure what He was working on, I just know I got a bit humbled and cried for a while. I don't mind not knowing though, so long as I know He's working and I'm letting Him. :j

Today was a decent day, except for the lower back pain I still have. Worked all till about 3:00 on the computers down at the hospital. I think I have three laptops, half a netbook, and a desktop back up left to do. I should take it slow or I'll run out of work! :) I'm sure they'll find something more for me to do though. After I finished one of the netbooks and realized that all the other computers were in use, I came back up to the house and studied for my American History CLEP test for a while. Got through the early colonization period with my flashcards that I'm making. Tomorrow I will probably start on the Colonial Period.

After I finished studying, I laid down and took a nice nap before getting up to play basketball. It doesn't take too long when Grace, Betsy, and I go out to play for a bunch of Haitian kids to come out of the wood works. I played a game with two other Haitian teenagers. It was the two of them versus me, and I ended up winning. I think the Haitian young people that we play with think I play college basketball back in the States. They were insisting to Grace that I must. It's not that I'm very good, cause I'm not, it's just that I'm taller then all of them by a good bit and so can out jump and out rebound all of them. Match me against someone my height and I'm sunk. Lol

Here in a little bit we are going to watch the second disc of the Fellowship of the Ring. Looking forward to that. Then hopefully a decent night's sleep. **crosses fingers**

07.24.2010 - Saturday

Wow. I think the days are starting to roll by faster or something. Or maybe it's just that I'm at the end of a week, and the weeks roll by quicker for me. Monday marks the half-way point of my being in Haiti. It will be three weeks that I've been here. After tomorrow's church service, I only have two more to sit through. That makes it sound like I don't enjoy the services. Hmm. . . I do and I don't. Sitting in the hard wooden pew for a couple of hours and listening to a lot of stuff I can't understand is a bit trying at times. On the other hand, just knowing that Christ is being preached and being able to sit and study my Bible for over an hour is nice.

Weekends are nice, since we really don't 'do' anything. Not normal things, anyways. Weekdays (LOL I'm listening to this donkey that's outside and who is braying like Chuck Norris is after him. Quite hilarious, and quite loud) are more structured and orderly as far as what happens, when it happens, etc. Weekends are just kind of free for all days, where breakfast could be served quite late and dinner eaten early. In fact, that's generally what happens.

I spent about 6 hours today at the clinic working on computer maintenance. It's slow going, since I'm working primarily with Windows Vista right now, and I know nothing about that. Each computer is also different as far as what comes already installed on it and what it might need. I figure since I'm here that I might as well do thorough work on all of them, so I'm taking my time. Two laptops are complete after nearly 10 hours of work and two more are about half way. The two I'm working on right now are the desktop and one of the netbooks. I'd like to reinstall Windows XP on the net book, but it doesn't have a recovery partition or a CD as far as I know. Besides the fact that I don't have an external drive to use anyways. I suppose I'll ask Faith about the CD tomorrow and use the CD/DVD drive from the desktop if I need to. The net books are both refurbished, and I'm thinking perhaps they didn't come with CD's. Guess I'll find out tomorrow. :)

Watched the first disc of The Fellowship of the Ring tonight. Good movie. It's been a good solid year since I've seen them, as my brother took them (since he owns them) when he moved out-of-state to go to school. I remember now why I love those movies so much! They are just phenomenal. I played quite a bit of a massively multiplayer online role playing game (mmorpg) Lord of the Rings Online the past 6 months, and it was really super cool to be able to imagine where the hobbits were as they moved through the Shire and to Bree-town. I can remember standing on Weathertop in-game and looking out over the landscape. Imagining Strider and the Hobbits running through that area was easy. Then when Arwen (Glorfindel in the books) takes Frodo from the Wild (which I think is in the Lone-lands or in the Trollshaws. . . ) to Rivendell, and crosses the Brunien River at the Fords of Brunien, I could easily imagine that place. Anyways, having played the game and recently read some of the book, it made the movie definitely come to life for me.

After we got through the second disc, Steve checked the battery power and discovered that is was on 11% or something. We'll watch the second disc tomorrow night probably, since we've finished the Truth Project.

Okay, time to shower and get to bed somewhat early tonight. Oh! I trimmed by beard by a substantial amount tonight. It was about an inch long, and it's now about a ¼ inch. I still need to trim up around the edges, but I'll do that after my shower. Steve was gracious enough to lend me his trimmer. It only had once length setting, or I would have kept my beard a bit longer, but I can't complain. It feels better then the bushiness it was before. I have a cowlick below my jawline on the right side, and sometimes it looks rather annoying. :p

07.23.2010 - Friday

Went down to the clinic again this morning before breakfast. I have kind of gotten into a habit of doing so. I enjoy checking my email and facebook and just having some quiet time to start the day. I will say that I probably won't do that tomorrow morning though, as I'm ready for a day of not getting up quite as early.

After breakfast, Faith asked me if I could do maintainance on every computer that the Leach's or the Hospital owns. She basically wants me to do a spreadsheet containing information such as make, model, OS, product number, serial number, and Trend Anti-Virus information of each computer. Then she also wants me to make sure Trend is up to date, the computers are defragged, and that there are not unnecessary things running on it. It's kind of a challenge for me. :) I did two laptops today, recording the initial boot up speed, how many processes were running on start up, and what sort of maintainence I did on them. There are three computers I also will back up to an external drive. I'm keeping a Word document that details everything I am doing to each computer (and an explanation if needed) so that after I am gone, it will be (hopefully) fairly easy to see if I did something that needs reversing. On one laptop, I decreased boot up time from over two minutes to exactly one minute. It's amazing what a little work can do. :-D

That's basically all I did all day. Tomorrow I'll go back and keep working on them. They'll be all super fast and awesome after I get done with them! I hope. . .

We were going to watch The Fellowship of the Ring tonight, but it rained for quite a while today, and the projector takes a lot of power to run. We decided to watch a romantic comedy called Blast From The Past. . . it was...interesting. I fear I'm being corrupted by these movie hungry missionaries. :p I will say that the movie did an excellent job of promoting the old ideas of chivalry, manners, proper behavior, etc. It was quite nice.

I need to borrow Steve's facial hair trimmer at some point, because my beard is growing a bit long. It would be nice to get it trimmed up and looking a bit better.

Read the story Beauty and the Beast tonight out loud to the family. It was from The Book of Virtues. I like story-telling, although I know I need to work a lot on annunciation and slowing stuff down.

I am enduring my second round of poison oak. I seem to attract it. I'm using a topical cream to treat the itchiness and calm it down a bit. It's helping some, although at times it still itches like crazy. Scratching it is bad though, since the oil spreads easily if you break the surface of the rash.

I tried blogging today, but it was giving me fits yet again. The problem I'd been having was that when I copied and pasted from my journal, it would either give me a META problem or the text would be the same color as the background of the blog. The META problem I took care of by copying and pasting to a Google Doc and then copying and pasting it from there to the blog. The background problem I took care of my putting up a new template with a different background color. But now the text color is a problem again. Oh well. I'll work on that more tomorrow while I'm waiting for a laptop to finish running a test or something.

Speaking of tests, I took one of my three American History (pre-1877) CLEP practice exams. I haven't studied much except up to the time of the American Revolution. I got 45/120 right, which equals approximately 51 on the CLEP score, or barely passing. Hopefully with some more studying, I can bring that up a bit.

07.22.2010 - Thursday

I'm pretty tired, so I think this will be short. The Wilson's left today, and the house feels rather empty now. Having half as many people around the dinner table seemed rather weird. I didn't do a whole lot today. No clinic work at all, although I did go down for about 20 minutes to check my facebook and email with my iPod. I did study for the American History (Pre-1877) CLEP test though. That will be my focus now. I'm hoping to take that when I get back from Haiti.

So yeah, other then that, not a lot when on today. Played basketball tonight with Grace and Betsy and some Haitian boys. Grace got proposed to (not an unusual thing around here. Lol). We had baked ravioli (yummmmm) and left over pizza for dinner. We were going to watch a movie tonight, but decided to wait till tomorrow. There was a bit of a lightening storm going on outside, so all of us ended up going and sitting on the porch (on the van bench that serves as the outdoor patio couch, haha) and talking for well over an hour. That was a blast. :)

It's been raining here a LOT for the time of year it is. Steve is loving it. It rained almost all last night and a some tonight too. I think it's done for tonight though.

I didn't sleep very good last night, for some rather annoying reason. I woke up after about 3 hours of sleep and never really got much continuous sleep after that. Every 45 minutes or so I would wake up. Finally just got up around 5:30. Which means I'm tired now. So. . .off to bed I go.

07.21.2010 - Wednesday

Sitting down to write tonight, I find my mind strangely blank on what happened today. :p

I sat in on consultations with Scott again today, for the last time. Tomorrow, the Wilson's leave at 11:00 in the morning. They have a 2:00 flight out of Mole. Nothing too exciting happened today. Fellow came in that had a catheter. . . had a HIV+ patient, but that's not too unusual.

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11:45PM

It's raining, lightening, and thundering outside right now. There is a nice, cool breeze flowing through the window. In short, it's awesome. :) The Leach's are expressing amazement at the fact that it has been raining so much, as we are at the very end of the rainy season, and there is generally not this much rain. I love it, except for the mud. :p

After consultations were finished in the afternoon, Grace, Betsy, and I went back up to the house and watched The Epitome of Hyperbole by Brian Regan. Great comedian. :) After we watched the whole thing, we also listened to four audio clips of him that I had on my iPod that weren't on the show we watched. I think most people enjoyed him. :)

We had the Catholic Sisters over for dinner today. Woohoo for pizza and coke!! :-D And then peanut butter and . . . I can't remember the other type of cookie that was made. . . but we had those for dessert. :)

After the sisters left, a few of us started discussing stories that we grew up with, and I found that many stories I remembered came from a book called The Book of Virtues. The Leach's and the Wilson's both seemed to know some of the stories also. We found the book in the Leach's library and I read two stories out of it outloud. By the time I made it through the first one, St. George and the Dragon, the entirety of both families had gathered in the dining room/living room and were listening. After that tale, I also read How Much Land Does a Man Need?, which I was shocked to discover was written by Leo Tolstoy. We will definitely have to read more out of that book before I leave. :-D

Mafia, Hearts, and Dutch Blitz filled out the rest of the night, and now I think it's time for bed. Good night, all! :-D