Book: Don't Make Me Count To Three

"Don't Make Me Count To Three" by Ginger Plowman takes the principles of "Shepherding a Child's Heart" and makes them even more accessible. She does a great job of helping parent's work on their children's hearts while employing Scripture and providing training. I like this book more than "Shepherding" and would probably use it in any class I teach on parenting children. I highly recommend this book, particularly for children 6-12 years old.

Photos: Playing at the playround

There's no place like a playground for taking pictures of kids, both young and old. After getting dinner and watching the train last Friday, we stopped by the playground near the seminary to play for a bit.

Photos: On the Train Tracks

We went back up to Wake Forest for dinner on Friday night. Just as I took out the camera to take a few pictures, a train came through town. So I took some shots around the tracks.

Photos: North Hills Mall

Ann had a gift card to Penny's, so we went down to North Hills Mall to do a little shopping. It's an outdoor mall with plenty of water fountains and a small area for the kids to run around. I took the camera along and got a few pictures of the family.

Fireworks

Reading is good for you. And sometimes it gets you free tickets to a soccer game. Ann took the kids to our local library on Monday, and they were giving out tickets to the Carolina Railhawks, a local USL soccer club. So we drove Thursday night down near Cary NC and watched them play to a 2-2 tie. Not a bad game. Certainly a cozy little stadium. And the fireworks afterward weren't too bad.

On the fourth we went to Zebulon NC to watch the Carolina Mudcats, a double A team affiliated with the Florida Marlins, play a little baseball. It was a solid game, and the Cats crushed the opposition 6-0 on the strength of three homers. The fireworks after the game we even better. You can find more pictures on our Flickr site.

Photos: Historic Oak View County Park

We took Monday off for another Garriss family day. We went to the Historic Oak View County Park on the east side of Raleigh, NC. It's a restored cotton farm, complete with cotton, goats, and a fruit orchard. We enjoyed learning about life a hundred years ago, but the most fun was had by Emmy as she fed the goats. Enjoy the pictures.

Commentary on Genesis: Chapters 48 and 49

Our church is writing our own curriculum for teaching in the ABF classes, and I was asked to help write a handful of the lessons. I've recently finished the last two, Genesis 48 and 49, and added them to the OT section of our family website. I realize my studies in Genesis are incomplete, but these were the texts I was given. Maybe some day I'll come back and fill in the gaps.

Photos: Yates Mill

Thursday was family day. We drove south of Raleigh to Yates Mill, a restored corn mill. They have done a superb job turning it into a state park, where you can see the mill, walk around the mill pond, hike through the park, and explore their small museum. We had a picnic on the grounds, and there were boatloads of butterflies to photograph.

We also swung by nearby Lake Wheeler and found a couple geocaches.

10 minute mail

There are a lot of annoying web sites. I'm referring to those sites who have some great service to offer you, but they require you to give them an email address first. Well, certainly I'm not going to give them my real email address; hello spam city! In the past I've used a gmail account for these things, but now I've found 10 minute mail. You go to their site, and they give you an email address good for 10 minutes. You sign up for the service at some website, check the email at 10 minute mail for the link, then you forget about the email. Cool. I don't know how 10 minute mail's gonna make any money, but I'll use them while they last.

Windows or Mac? Yes!

I have a Mac. Specifically, I have a 20 inch aluminum iMac running OS X Leopard. I love my Mac, but there are two really good pieces of software that I've been missing. One is Microsoft Word; I think I've got that one fixed. The other is good Bible software. I love Libronix. I use it every day for Bible study. I tried MacSword, but, well, it's pretty lame. Yes, I know Logos is working on Libronix for Mac, but they've been doing that for what, 4 years? I need something now. So I installed Parallels Desktop for Mac. It allows me to run Windows on my Mac, as if it were an application. So now I run Libronix on my Mac! Not the perfect solution (installation was a bear!), but it works pretty well. And it's darn cool.

It's a small (coffee) world

I like Caribou Coffee, more than Starbucks even. We recently bought a bag of Ethiopian coffee beans called Yirgacheffe. Good stuff. Sorta dark, with a strong hint of blueberries. The other night we had a couple from our church over for dinner. Turns out that Yirgacheffe is the name of an Ethiopian village, and this couple had lived in a nearby village. It's a small world.

Bats in your...basketball?

Monday morning I took the kids with me to the SEBTS gym where I play a bit of basketball with some guys. While there, they found a couple baby bats in the gym. They were alive, but weren't old enough to really fly. The kids had a great time picking them up (using an extra shirt), tossing them into the air to watch them fly, and seeing them scamper up the brick walls. Eventually they turned them loose outside.

Book: Isaac Backus

I just finished reading the biography of Isaac Backus by William McLoughlin. Isaac was a preacher in New England in the 1700's. He went from the established Puritan church to the Separatist church to the Baptist church. It was a very interesting read, part biography, part Baptist history, part Revolutionary War history. I was most intrigued to hear how so many of the issues of his day (antinomianism, pastors in sin, lack of church discipline, etc.) are still issues today. It seems human nature doesn't change much. I recommend this book.

Office 2008 for Mac coming

I have tried to like NeoOffice, really I have. You see my 3 most-used programs are my email client, a web browser, and a word processor. I write documents all the time. So when I got the iMac, I needed to get a good word processor. I've used MS Word for years, but trying to keep things free, I tried NeoOffice, a Mac-specific version of OpenOffice. It works, sorta. But it's slow and clunky and some stuff (like footnotes) doesn't work when I transfer files back and forth to a PC with Word. It's just frustrating to use. I even tried the newest OpenOffice beta, which has a native Mac interface. No different.

I thought about buying Office 2008 for Mac, but it's $130. Then someone pointed me to the software portal at the company I work for, The MITRE Corporation. Turns out they have an agreement with Microsoft that users can install Office on their home computers if they buy an extra copy of the media. So for $21 I have a copy of Office 2008 for Mac coming. Schweet! Thanks, MITRE!

Photos: Our Townhome

In the last day I've added 7 new pictures of the townhome we are now living in. You can see them on our Flickr page.

These pictures are the first ones I've taken with my new lens, a 17-50mm lens that I bought used from a friend. The 17mm is really handy when trying to make everything fit into the picture.