A Good Way To Go A Long Time Without Blogging…

…is to have an incredibly busy summer.

I’ve had several topics I want to blog about, but simply haven’t had the time to sit down and write. The variety of things keeping me busy include:

• A couple of months ago Caroline found out that she is pregnant, and we will be expecting the birth of a daughter in December. This is exciting news, but it has led to a lot of doctor appointments and other baby-related activities.
• Also, after renting a house for the last 2 1/2 years, we decided to purchase a home of our own. After looking around we didn’t find much that we liked, so we ended up having a house built. It only took 60 days, and we successfully closed on our house last Thursday. This is also exciting news, but it has required a lot of work, meetings, phone calls, etc.
• I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling this summer as well: frisbee tournaments in Nashville, Tennessee and Madison, Alabama, a week at Green Valley Bible Camp, a week of vacation in Port St. Joe, Florida, and then a fun but stressful summer youth group trip in Dallas and San Antonio, Texas.
• As a youth minister, summers are always busy with youth activities. I already mentioned camp and our summer trip, but there have been a host of other activities including devotionals, game nights, a High School Graduation Banquet, and Vacation Bible School.
• I also have to head to Memphis in a week for a grad school class, so lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading to prepare for that.

I’m sure the busyness will continue over the next several weeks (it seems like it always does!), but I know that my life always calms down somewhat after the end of August, and I’m certainly looking forward to that.

New House: When A Garage Can Be A Bad Thing

I haven’t written about this much, but back in January, Caroline and I moved from the apartment where we had lived for the past two years to a 3-bedroom house that we are renting.

One of the more pleasant benefits of our new house is that it has a 2-car garage. Being able to enter the house basically via remote control is nice, and not having to scrape ice of your windshield in the winter is completely awesome.

However, having never lived anywhere with a garage before, there are some things about having one which I’m learning as I go.

For example, back when we had the big ice storm in January, we lost power at our house, the garage door no longer worked automatically, and I didn’t know how to get the door up so we could leave. I figured it out eventually though.

Yesterday, upon returning home from work, I had another lesson in Garage Ownership 101. On the way home, I had been listening to some talk radio, and as I pulled into the garage, I was interested in what one particular caller had to say. Without thinking, I closed the garage door and sat there for several minutes with the car running, listening to the radio.

Of course, I’ve seen enough movies to know that leaving the car running in the garage with the door down is a popular suicide method, but that didn’t occur to me until I finally got out of the car and was assaulted by a garage full of my own exhaust fumes. I began to cough and even after entering the house, felt light-headed for a while.

So here’s the lesson: apparently filling up your garage with carbon monoxide fumes really is a bad idea. I don’t recommend it. If the radio’s really that interesting, turn off the engine and sap some battery power.