Groovy Sputum

We’re Online

I recently got the ok from Pastor Mike to build a website for our church and last night I got the ball rolling with the purchase of a domain name. I also loaded WordPress onto the server and set up the MySQL database, so we are ready to roll. At this point, we just have to settle on the content, layout, and overall look of the site. Since we are going with WordPress, this shouldn’t be too difficult.

I also discovered a little plugin that is handy if you use WordPress. It is called Maintenance Mode and when active, it takes your site off line and replaces it with a customizable front page. As the name implies, this tool is used when you are doing maintenance on your site. It is nice to be able to quickly take down the site and put up a temp page. It is also nice for visitors to see a real page while you are working and not get one of those nasty “server not found” message. Check out the site and see what I mean: clearforkalliance.org. I just put up the church name, location, and meeting times. It will work for now and we can be working on the build behind the scenes and as soon as we are ready to go live, we can deactivate MM and BAM!…have an official web presence.

I thought about putting a spinning gif of a stick man digging with a message that says “under construction” (demo), or simply this icon (I like the backhoe), but I thought the simple page was more appropriate. The sad thing is, even in my 10 minutes of work getting the site up, it is probably better than 90% of the church web sites out there right now. I particularly like this site (check out the dancing Jesus) and am thinking of contacting the web master for some design tips.

Trusses And Such

Valerie had her soup swap last night so I took the middle 3 kids out to dinner. They had never been to White Castle, so I thought I would try out the new one in town. It has been a while since I had eaten WC myself. It always seems better in your mind, doesn’t it?

After dinner we stopped by Lowe’s to get some prices on trusses and joists. Note: if you are in the truss or joist market, don’t go to Menards. Lowe’s was so much easier to work with. They had a price list and actually gave some numbers to work with, answered my questions, and took notes about the project so they could “run the numbers”, whatever that means. When I went to Menards a week ago for the same information, they took my number and said they would have their estimator call me. I’m still waiting for that call.

Anyway, I found out that Lowe’s gets their trusses from a manufacturer close to where our building site is, so I think I will call them directly and see if I can eliminate the middleman.

Pizza Pizza!

Friday is typically pizza night in our home and we normally either get take out or Valerie makes her homemade special. Since more has been coming out of our mouths than has been going in lately, we postponed our treat until Saturday. With Valerie still a bit under the weather, I decided to do Little Caesar’s…hot, ready, and most importantly, cheap. I took my oldest daughter along with me for conversation and pulled through the drive through to speed things up. Actually, it was because I was wearing sweat pants and didn’t want to go inside.

“2 cheese and a deep dish pepperoni,” I asked. “It will be about 10 minutes on the deep dish, but we have a pepperoni & sausage for the same price,” the guy says. That was fine with me, but when he didn’t return for a few minutes, I began to wonder what was going on. When he eventually returned, he informed me that they were out of cheese, too. I think he felt bad, but I pulled up to wait in the lot. When he came out with our order, he had the two cheeses and the deep dish, but he also had a pepperoni & sausage, a pepperoni & bacon, and an order of crazy bread. “Here you are,” he said. “Thanks. How much do I owe you?” I asked. “Nothing…it’s on us.” “Really? Are you sure?” “Yep…sorry about your wait.”

So, we drove home and enjoyed the feast. We quickly consumed the crazy bread, deep dish, and a cheese and a half and Valerie is heating the other two pies up right now for Sunday dinner. I’m not trying to take away from the manager’s generosity, but here is what I think happened: someone ordered the two specialty pizzas and the crazy bread but never came to pick them up. They sat under the heat lamp long enough and he was probably going to through them out anyway. So he decided to give them to the guy in the big van who looked like he had a bunch of kids. Then, since he didn’t have a cheese “hot and ready” when I asked (that’s their tag line), he thought he would just give the whole order to me free. He probably lost 8 to 10 dollars of product, but he gained a customer for life and some good advertising. Word of mouth is powerful, and here I am telling you my story. Plus, I will be a customer…at least until the next cheap pizza chain opens.

The Vices Of Our Day

The flu has been making the rounds in our family this week and Valerie is not feeling too well today, so I decided to take the opportunity to change the Saturday morning routine a bit with the kids. Normally, Valerie will fix breakfast and then the morning is a mix of cartoons, grocery shopping, or playing. I decided to dive headlong into some chores promptly after breakfast. I served up “dunky” eggs & toast, with bananas and apples, by the way.

The first item of business was to tidy up the kid’s bedrooms. This consisted of throwing away diapers, picking up trash, removing who knows what from under the beds, putting dirty cloths in the hamper, and putting toys, books, and shoes in their proper places. You would have thought I was a slave driver when the kids heard me ask them to do this. “Just because mommy is sick doesn’t mean that everything has to change,” cried one kiddo. “I never do anything but clean,” cried another. I quickly asked my children if they ever played with their toys, read books, watched tv, or played games on the internet, to which they were silent. “But it will just get messy again,” objected another child. “Yes, it probably will,” I replied, “but having nice things means taking responsibly to take care of them.” I was feeling pretty confident with my calm composure and insightful responses. “If you don’t want to take care of them, I guess I can pack them up and give them to someone who will,” I said. Needless to say, a few moments later four grumpy kids were busy in their room. We managed to get the bedroom straightened up and I even swept the floors of the main living area during this chore time as well.

My mix-things-up-because-mom-is-sick plan continued after chore time by having the kids put some puzzles together and having a short story time. I read the story of St. Valentine. It was pretty nice, but I couldn’t help get a bit tired of the kids griping and complaining. They weren’t outright asking to watch tv or veg in front of the computer, but I sensed that that was their ultimate desire. Sure, they enjoyed the puzzles and the story, and I think they appreciated having a tidy home, but given the choice, they would have chosen technology time.

That’s when it hit me: things have got to change. I know that we don’t let our kids watch tv or play on the computer as much as the typical household, but my kids still craved it and felt gypped if they were denied these things. I felt kind of hurt to know that my kids would rather spend time with Dora or Club Penguin than with me. Actually, it’s not just that…it’s that they seem to enjoy those thing more than they enjoy me. Punch me in the gut a bit harder, will ya?

So, I am taking a stand. Things are going to change around here. Sure, we will still have family time in front of the tv with Andy Griffith, The Waltons, and Little House, but we are going to stop using PBS and Noggin as a childcare provider. From now on, activities in this house will require personal interaction and not just be a client-server relationship. It isn’t going to be easy, but I hope that once the addiction is broken, my kids will want to do things with me first and the technology based entertainment will be something I have to force them to engage in.

Wish me luck.

Useful Plugins

I hope you have enjoyed reading my Top 5 Greatest OSU Moments the last few days. I have been doing some research about the WordPress platform and wanted to share some of the useful plugins that I have discovered and am using presently. I have found that these plugins really help me as I am blogging.

• Simple Tags: this is a great little tag manager. You can rename any of your tags globally (great for the times you misspell a tag and end up with 3 of the same thing, i.e. word press, Wordpress, and WordPress), have tags automatically generated for each post, or get tag suggestions from Yahoo and the web using the click tag feature.
• All in One SEO: this is a search engine optimizer, hence the name SEO. This will generate unique meta information in the header of each page of your blog based on the content of each page. For instance, instead of every page having the top 10 tags and basic blog description, each page will be tagged with the tags you created for that post and the page description will be the excerpt of your post.
• CyStats: logs just about every data you might want about your blog. Number of unique hits/visits, number of bot hits/visits, search query returns (both internal and external), page usage, trackback data, and on and on.
• WP-Polls: my latest plugin addition, this little guy enables internal polls and is very customizable. I am not a huge fan of external blogging services for things like polls, calendars, and galleries. I just don’t like to log in to a gazillion sites to do something simple.
• Search Everything: this extends the search capabilities of the standard WordPress search bar. The default WordPress search form only searches post content (as far as I know) but this plugin expands that form to tags, categories, image titles, post titles, comments, and more. Basically, it allows your viewers to search everything, hence the name.

If you have never used plugins on your WordPress site, I highly recommend trying them. They are easy to use, easy to install, and very helpful. One thing to note: it is a good idea to get your plugins (and themes, for that matter) directly from the WordPress web site. There have been reports of malicious code being inserted by third party download sites and that is no fun. Get the genuine stuff here.

Great OSU Moment #1

2003 Fiesta Bowl

The reason this moment tops the list for me is because it was the first national championship that I ever saw with my dad. It was also the last. I remember thinking at the time how cool it was that we were able to share that experience. The Burtons have been Ohio State fans far longer than I have been alive and Buckeye football has always been something that brought the family together. On top of that, when the Bucks made it to Arizona in 2003, it was a the first time that OSU had done so in my lifetime. Sure, dad had seen Woody Hayes win 4 or 5 titles during his tenure, but this was a first for me. I had no idea that Tressel would lead the boys back in ‘07 and ‘08, so I was determined to enjoy the moment. For all I knew, this wouldn’t happen again for another 25 years.

I remember watching the game in dad’s unique way: weird food, radio turned up loud, and the tv sound turned off. He preferred the radio play by play over Mr. Woah Nellie, and I can’t say I disagreed with him there. I don’t recall specifically what he snacked on that evening, but I can tell you that it probably involved some unique combination of items that, individually would be delicious, but put together was sure to raise an eye brow or two. Sauerkraut juice and V8, or pancakes with olives in them. Maybe it was something sweet, chocolaty perhaps, with a big old jalapeño on it, or some kind of dried mystery meat with a stinky, moldy cheese. He had his ways of doing things.

Dad had just put in a hot tub on his deck and I remember sitting in it at half time and watching the steam rise from the surface of the water. We lived in Plain City at the time so enjoying the hot tub was not a regular thing for me. I tried to convince dad to hook up a tv in the corner of the deck so I could watch the whole thing out there, but that didn’t happen.

There was, of course, the ceremonial blasting of the marching band music, the buckeye necklaces, and dad yelling at the tv, as if the players could hear him. “Come on, Bucks!” or “Get ‘em!” or even “Break his leg!” The last phrase was always qualified with, “not seriously, though,” a few moments later. I think he felt bad for thinking that way, but he couldn’t control himself. I find myself shouting these same things as I watch football. I guess the intensity of watching football is genetic.

The game went well into the night and I remember the excitement of it all as I finally fell asleep. If I had known that this was the last championship game I would share with dad, I may have stayed up a bit longer and let the moments linger. I love to see the Bucks win and I love to see them play for the crystal football, but if I could watch OSU football with dad again in exchange for the Bucks never winning another game, I would take that trade in a heartbeat.

Great OSU Moment #2

Field Side Seats And Parking At The Shoe

I said earlier that 2007 was a banner year in my OSU football memory book. The icing came to my pigskin cake when a student sent me an email asking if I would be interested in 4 tickets to the final game of the season. They would be out of town and knew that I was a fan, so they offered. I kind of knew that I wasn’t interested…I mean I had season tickets and would be going to the game with my friend Scott anyway. I really didn’t have $400 to drop on four more tickets. Politely, I asked how much they wanted, just to entertain conversation. Their reply: free! Plus, they had a parking pass they would throw in. Wow! How could I refuse.

I quickly called my brother and brother-in-law and lined up people to use the extra tickets, not knowing exactly where they were located in the stadium. When the USPS overnight package arrived the Tuesday before the game, my jaw dropped. These weren’t just any four tickets. These were field level seats on the 30 yard line. And, if you have ever been to an Ohio State game, you know that 99% of the people sit on aluminum bleachers. Not exactly the height of comfort. Our seats had backs! Actually, we were in folding chairs in a railed off section that was wheel chair accessible. After talking with the ticket owners, I found out that they had been getting season tickets for years and years and someone along the way was disabled. OSU has reserved these seats for this family and they have been siting there ever since.

And the parking pass? Well, let’s just say that my walk to the stadium was about 50 feet from the east lot. Our tailgate party was literally in the shadow of the rotunda! This was very nice and allowed us to have a great party with the whole family before the game. I loaded up Moby (my 12 passenger van) with kids and were in our spot by 11:00. We grilled out, played cornhole, and caught the Skull Session. Then, we loaded the kiddos back up and Valerie headed home while the guys (and Paul’s wife) stayed for the game.I mixed a video for your enjoyment, but I am still new to the streaming world, so the mpg1 file format may not be the best quality. You will get the jist of the day, though. Good times…good times.

Great OSU Moment #3

$10.00 Tickets

In 2006, my brother Paul came to Ohio to take his kids to an Ohio State football weekend on campus. It was a noon game and we decided to drive down early, take the band practice in, hang out in front of St. John’s Arena for a bit, and then head home to watch the game on tv. I took a few extra buckeye necklaces with me to sell while the kiddos watched the cheerleaders on the lawn. When two fathers and their school age kids asked me how much the necklaces were, one of the kids asked me if I wanted to buy tickets. “He doesn’t want tickets, son…he’s selling necklaces,” one of the fathers said. Curious to know what the going rate was this time of year, I asked him, “how much?” He kind of paused and shrugged his shoulders and half heartedly replied, “I don’t know…20 bucks?” “Each?” I inquired. “No, for the pair,” he said.

The next few seconds were like time stopped and the camera man in my mind did that zoom thing close into my face…you know, where the rest of the world is all blurry behind me and my thoughts echo in my head. I wanted to say, “Man are you crazy? Don’t you know you could get $125 a piece for these things?” but I actually said, “sure…I guess I’ll take them.”

I rushed over to where Paul was and showed him my find. I figured we could do one of two things: find someone to take care of our kids for the afternoon and go to the game, or sell the ticket and walk away with a few hundred bucks. I gave my mother-in-law a quick call and she was gracious enough to swing by for the kids and we were off. Our seats were in a perfect place for that day: D deck. Normally, I wouldn’t want to sit that high up, but there was a stiff, cold wind that was blowing that day. We didn’t even feel it.

One other thing to note about that day: Jack Nicklaus, one of the greatest golfers ever, dotted the i in Script Ohio that day. If you don’t already know, dotting the i is one of the highest honors at Ohio State. Only a handful of people have been allowed this honor. It was neat to see.

Great OSU Moment #4

Season Tickets

2007 was a banner year for me in my Ohio State football story. It started when mom came home from school and asked if I was interested in buying tickets to the game the following weekend. A colleague had season tickets, mom thought, and was wanting to get rid of some. When I found out that she actually wanted to sell the ENTIRE SEASON…WITH a parking pass by the Towers…Duh! Of course I am interested!

I ended up buying the season and was able to treat some of my closest friends & family to some games. I know what you’re thinking, “But, Luke. I didn’t get invited!?” Well, maybe you should try to be a better friend. Valerie and I caught a game on our fall retreat weekend, too. After the game we stayed an an old restored log cabin bed and breakfast south of Columbus. It was neat.

The thing that made this season the most exciting was that I had no idea that I would be able to go to every game until 2 days before the first game. Having no expectations made the find that much sweeter. Another cool thing about this season was that I was able to make and sell enough buckeye necklaces on campus to offset the cost. I am hoping to be able to get these tickets on a yearly basis and make memories for years to come. We’ll see.

Great OSU Moment #5

Meeting Stanley Jackson

My good friend Joel invited me to a men’s meeting tonight at his church called “Pies & Guys”. It is a new thing his church is trying in order to get guys together for encouragement and to hear challenging speakers. Tonight’s speaker was none other than Stanley Jackson, the former Ohio State quarterback who was part of the two quarterback system under John Cooper. If you remember, Jackson was the captain of the 1996 Buckeyes who went 11-1 and played in one of the best Rose Bowls ever, beating Jake Plummer and the Arizona State Sun Devils in Pasadena.

His message was simple: God has created everything, but Satan has taken over. It’s time for the men of Marion to take those things back and truly live an excellent Christian life. I would say that it was primarily geared toward fathers with kids still in the house because he stressed the idea that there are many more challenges in our culture that fathers need to be aware of. Our kids are facing things like corruption on tv, the internet, things in music and movies that we never had to deal with. We can’t be slack in our spiritual walk if we want to influence our kids for the Lord. Our culture is not getting any better and we need to step up to the plate and get in the game. Yeah, I am sure it is pretty much what is heard at nearly every men’s meeting now days, but it was good to hear. It runs along the same lines of my post yesterday, if you want to know the truth.

Anyway, as I was sitting there, I thought, this is one of those special Ohio State moments. I mean, this is Stanley Jackson! Honestly, how often do you get a chance to meet a former OSU great? They guy has his own Wikipedia entry for crying out loud!

So that got me thinking about other great OSU moments that I have experienced. I decided that I am going to post for a few days about these moments with this evening ranking at #5. Let’s see how well you know me…can you guess my top 4 greatest OSU moment?