Worship Time in Santa Cruz
Worship Time in Santa Cruz Originally uploaded by phoutz
First Night: Vintage Faith
First Night: Vintage Faith Well, we’re on the road again with the high school group. Tonight we stopped at First Presbyterian Church (aka Vintage Faith) for pizza dinner and time to bone up on our personal stories. The old Fellowship Hall has been converted into a coffeehouse. A group called Jesse’s Pride played jazzy testimony-rock…
GPS School of Hard Knocks: #3 Battery Life
The other day I set out with a noble goal–to find and map a better local hike than Ventura’s two trees. Midway in my exploration rats! My low battery alarm went off. Today’s hard-knock lesson is this: always bring fresh batteries on a hike. Doesn’t matter that you’ve got a GPS unit with the highest…
Dogs on the Grotto Trail
To the person who wanted to know if dogs were allowed on the Grotto Trail: the trail is posted no dogs, no mountain bikes. Truth is that you really wouldn’t want to take a dog down there anyhow, unless you’ve got a champion boulder-hopper. Once you reach the grotto the trail gets sketchy. Not to…
Happy Easter
I know one little doggy who will be having an Easter hangover–the cocker spaniel just wolfed down four cranberry-orange scones while the “Easter Bunny” was hiding eggs down in coyote-ville and marking coordinates on his handheld GPS. The things we do for love. (Mind you, this is to delight the married daughter. The little princess…
GPS School of Hard Knocks: #2 Finding the Best GPS for Hiking
Without doubt the best GPS unit is the one that you don’t have. My Garmin eTrex Vista HCx was barely out of the box before I started wondering if maybe I should have taken a closer look at the Magellan Triton 500. You see, the Magellan will download maps from the National Geographic Topo! Backroads…
The Social Jeep
The folks at Jeep Forums have a new gig, kinda like MySpace for the Jeeper crowd. Their promo emails bill it as: JeepSpace.com – Online social network for Jeepers to meet and interact. Blogs, videos, groups, forum and more! I poked in and found it a little cumbersome to navigate. I have some of the…
Dispatches from the War on Crap: Shitstorm
Yesterday the cocker spaniel (somehow) got two loaves of Irish Soda Bread off the counter and consumed both. The results were not good. The soda seems to have reacted badly with her delicate digestive system. The dog’s sides filled out to the point where she was nearly spherical. Normally athletic, the dog could barely pull…
You Climb Like an Eight Year Old Girl
Saturday is the worst day to go to Vertical Heaven, the local climbing gym. Saturday is Birthday Party Day, and the gym is likely to be filled with grade school grommets, running, jumping off stuff, throwing chalk bags at each other. The kids aren’t the problem. They zip about like supercharged neutrinos, never colliding with…
GPS School of Hard Knocks: #1 Why Buy a GPS?
People who know the outdoors will say that you’re better off with a good liquid-filled compass, a map, and a little know-how than with any whiz-bang GPS unit. After a year or so of scrambling around in the sticks I’m here to say that they are right. If your goal is to orient your self…
War on Crap
This is my official declaration of war against the forces of chaos, crapitation and lassitude that threaten the free world of my life. This isn’t just Bushian rhetoric, this is an announcement of full on storm-the-beaches-at-Normandy style conflict. It’s also make-believe. I’ve decided to invoke the powers of imagination in my jihad against the clutter…
The March Hare
Near the end of his book Waking the Dead, John Eldredge invites his readers to ask God what they should do to care for their hearts. Eldredge believes that God speaks to people today through Scripture, through mythology, and through others. For instance, over the course of a few days Eldredge had a number of…
Status Check
It’s been a rugged month, pouring on the overtime at the Evil Day Job from Hell. Server installation gone bad. Migration to a new content management system that gobbles up man hours the way the Devil snacks on the souls of young teens. The only thing that comes to mind when I get home from…
Photo Bonanza – Library of Congress Posts Public Domain Image Archive
If you’re looking for royalty-free public domain photos for your blog or other project, you’re in luck. The Library of Congress just uploaded 3,000 vintage photos to Flickr, like the photo above, free for the taking. These pics are all first-class in terms of composition, lighting, balance and they look like a huge boon to…
How to Buy a Refrigerator Online (Part Deux)
Something that a reasonably smart person could overlook when buying a refrigerator online is to compare the measurements of the fridge to the measurements of the space in the kitchen where the fridge will go. If you are placing the refrigerator in a space between a wall and a cabinet, don’t forget to account for…