Today, on the first day of spring, I mowed the grass for the first time this year. To me, mowing the grass is a time when everything going on around me is drowned out by the drone of my 3.5-HP Briggs & Stratton and I have the chance to think.

I felt puny last night, and when I woke up early this morning I felt worse. So I took a sick day. (I only have 2,400 more sick leave hours left.)
It was a day when I slept a lot, watched an old movie, did the dishes, sunned myself with Oslo and Zora (household cats that own Diane and I) and had a PB&J sandwich for lunch. It is good to take a day to recharge.

I love spring.

I love everything about it. I love the budding trees, the anxious bulbs that all too early push their way up through the earth–I love the idea of spring. The season of death has past, stand back, life is about to explode once again in color and fragrance. Even though my wipers were push bits of frozen flakes off my windshield this morning on the way to work, in my heart it is once again spring.

Did I say I love spring?

I’m not a big football fan, (or even a medium football fan) but Diane and I will be watching the end of the Seahawks-Bears struggle on Sunday (after meeting with the folks of NAC). The Seahawks are the home team, and I can’t help but love the underdog. We can only hope for another satisfying come-from-behind victory in the waning moments. Go Seahawks!

Sunday Update:  OK, we got our exciting finish–it’s just the wrong team won.

While browsing at Borders for a present for my lovely wife, I happened on a book by Jim Palmer: “Divine Nobodies: Shedding Religion to Find God (and the unlikely people who help you)”.
Intrigued by the title (publishers tend to rework titles to entice our wandering eyes) but I did the random read test — open book to random page, read. It passed the random read test with flying colors. I also liked the two (yes, 2!) introductions, and two (yes, 2!) author bios. Jim Palmer is self-deprecating (a quality I appreciate in people) and willing to share with the reader the not-so-pretty details of his life — which has value in describing God’s grace, mercy and love for us. I read it in a few sittings, which is not normal for me. I usually have to re-read a book to remember what I have already read the last time I picked the book up. Another reason that I like the book is because of the Bible verse that is up in the right-hand corner of my blog:

Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”?
1 Corinthians 1:27-28, The Message

Divine nobodies make a big difference in the lives of the people who meet them–they love, instruct, guide, bind-up and encourage with the life God has planted in them–that’s what makes them divine, and because they know that it is God’s life in them that makes the difference (not their own life) that’s what makes them nobodies.
I want to be a divine nobody.

Diane and I are suffering from a bad case of ‘Holidays Hangover”. (No — not that.) We are in need of rest after all the dinners, late nights, traveling here and there, more meals together and on top of it all we have returned to work. The rude awaking yesterday at 5:30 in the AM was most un-nerving! I'’ve got to work a nap in somewhere today!

After bumping into this thing called WordPress through Jeff Smith and investigating it on the net I’ve pressed the button and here we are — a new blog with me sitting at the controls.
That’s scary.
Now I guess I’m supposed to start putting stuff here.