Category: La Casa

Across Two Februaries

Oh come on, I’ve made worse references.

Tonight I did some dp.n maintenance. I now own my domain for at least the next two years. I have no recollection of whether my hosting package automatically renews or not, so the site may still dissapear in five more days. I’ll try to pre-empt that.

I also upgraded my WordPress software. That’s basically everything that you’re looking at. I used to write 100% of my own code, and now I’m lazy and let blog software handle my posts, layout and pages, subpages, and photo gallery. Do I feel any less hack? Not really. I could still do it the hard way if I wanted.

I backed up my entire website, plus an additional WordPress backup, PLUS I imported it to my wordpress.com account (the software comes from wordpress.org, which is functionally an entirely different entity). I was getting ready to manual install the software and then I had an incredible idea. What if my host’s control panel would do it for me automatically? Turns out my hunch was right, and rather than spending the next three hours hacking away at code and uploading it all, here I sit with a new install of WordPress on my server, and all it took was three clicks and about 40 seconds.

At any rate, it probably looks no different to you. No changes even for those (few) of you who login to leave comments. My control panel is organized a little differently (different, not better). My posts will have a couple more categories to go into (I had reached the limit of number of categories I could have in the previous software version, but that number has since been increased). But no automatic aesthetic differences.

So was I prepared to upgrade, even before I knew it would be easy? Well, basically the entire reason I upgraded my software was to get rid of this annoying little message that told me every time I logged in that I needed to upgrade from version 3.1 to version 3.7. And the first thing I did when I finished was login to WordPress and glance up at the top of my dashboard.
Frakking message is still there. It now just says I need to go from version 3.7 to 3.7.1. Manually. Yeah right.

In fact, it will probably be right around February 2011 that I bother to make any major changes, when domainsite and intersabre start reminding me that my domain is going to expire again. But it has definitely been fun to look through all my files as they downloaded through my ftp client and take note of all that I’ve written, all that I’ve learned about web hosting, software, plugins, and writing since February 16th-ish last year. And certainly to think about all the things I’ve had to write about since then: Hospitality, smiles, children, airplane rides (ten), different countries, states and a districts, a dozen new best friends in an 11-hour range of time zones, a jungle, unexpected returns to favorite places, a new instrument, a new language, brothers, a brother, my brother and bros (nope, not a typo), and the Truth that permeates every one.

Lacking a "Linebacker"

First off, this will make a lot more sense if you’ve seen the “Evangelism Linebacker” video. YouTube address (dispite my loathing of YouTube for a multitude of reasons all stemming from their liberal interpretation of handling copyrights) is below. For posterity (you know, if my dream ever comes true and there is a Constitutional Ammendment to ban YouTube) just search for “Evangelism Linebacker” and I’m sure you’ll find it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvYFvhx1dcY

Blog entry proper:

I’ve not been the most patient person lately. I want everything to fall into place for Ecuador this summer. I want my International Teams fund raising account to hurry up and catch up with the count in my head. I want to be done with work and exams already so I can go to the beach, or maybe Vermont. I can count twenty pleasant things I’m eagerly anticipating and fifty more unpleasant ones I’d like to be over with.

But as much as I want work to be done with, I’ll feel like there’s so much I would rather be doing myself than delegating when I drive by Albemarle Music. And I’ll miss everybody there. Well, not John. (Just kidding, John. I know you account for 80% of my readership by yourself). And much as I want to be in Ecuador, I’ll miss Adan, Bayron, Brittany, Damaris, Eddie, Eric, Jesus, Joe, Luis, Melany, Vanessa, Aaron, Bart, Ben, Carrie, Cynthia, Derrick, Jason, Kos, Susie, Tina, Wade and everyone else that make my “day off” a learning experience and a joy.

I think I forget until each Tuesday that I can still grow in Elizabeth City, despite feeling like I have accomplished what I set out to do when I came back here. I forget to take Qui-Gon Jinn’s advice and focus on the “here and now,” though (being a good Methodist) I’d call it Prevenient Grace rather than the Living Force.

The other six days of the week, I think I need a “Patience Linebacker.”

“Boo-ya, baby! Concrete tastes the same in both hemispheres! Don’t be so anxious, I’ll blow you up anywhere!”

Life Lessons for the day:

“What can we do to show God we love Him more?” -Toni
“Pray once a day and twice on Sundays!” -Cynthia

“[In God’s time] everything falls in place.” -Julie (incidentally, my fund raising is finally where it is supposed to be, thanks to Grace alone)

[unspoken implication that guys should not have long fingernails] -Wade

Huevos de Pascua

We had an Easter Egg hunt today at La Casa. (For those of you who don’t know, La Casa is an after-school ministry for Spanish-speaking school kids, held at Christ Episcopal Church two days of the week). Miranda and I went out to the side yard/playground and hid (roughly) 130 eggs1 for the kids to find. I doubt we even knew where they all were by the time we went back inside and upstairs.2

Once all the kids were finished with homework, coloring, and snack, it was egg hunting time. They bunny-hopped from the parish house to the playground with makeshift Easter baskets (plastic Food Lion bags) swish-swishing around. I even noticed one particularly adorable second-grader actually skipping through the yard, bag in hand, waving in the air as the egg-collecting began.

You just really can’t hide 130+ brightly colored eggs very well in a maybe 20×50 meter fenced-in yard. But even with half the eggs scattered around the ground or along the brick wall or other painfully obvious places, the kids had a blast. I don’t even remember the last time I skipped around doing anything. I think the joy of watching them actually dwarfed the feeling of them actually (for once) listening to me give directions before we went outside. I love kids.

1We didn’t know until later that we were supposed to count the eggs. This resulted in guesstimating how many eggs we had to limit each kid to finding. (Although several went over the alloted six by bagfuls, which itself resulted in the re-hiding of some eggs).
2As I told Miranda, I thought you had to be a lot older before you could hide your own Easter Eggs. I was mistaken.