Parole?

Watching the news is disturbing.

This morning on the Early Show there was a story about a man who, 22 years ago, was convicted of raping a 13-year old girl.  In the '70s and '80s he was a serial rapist who stalked women while jogging and then raped them, becoming known as the Jogger Rapist.  After his conviction, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  Now he's up for parole.  Here's the real kicker, and reason why this story completely pissed me off.  The parole board recommended that the serial rapist be paroled, despite REPEATED PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATIONS THAT SHOW HE IS VERY LIKELY TO REPEAT HIS CRIME.  Who is on this parole board, and would they mind if their 13-year old's rapist was let go if there was a 75% chance he'd rape other little girls?

K, that's my rant.

Bookstore an' more

I like it when my friends post new blogs every now and then, because it helps remind me that I have one too.  It also makes me feel bad for the millions of readers who every day hope to find a new blog post here at "Make My Life A Prayer to You" and are almost always let down.

The transition at the bookstore doesn't seem as bad, looking back, as it did at the time.  It was a tough week, no doubt, but now things are going pretty smoothly with the new folks.  The Denver Seminary Bookstore has always been a really great relational place, where knowing customers by name and discussing theology and having good conversation were prized above all else.  Our new management is done by a secular company, so naturally the goal is now more about making money than making relationships.  The biggest fear that I (and my fellow seminarians) had was that this new company would bring in Thomas Kinkade paintings and Precious Moments figurines and "Jesus Loves You" bumper stickers and cross pendant necklaces, turning it into a Christian trinket store rather than a seminary bookstore.  Today my fears were realized, though in a less terrible way than I thought they'd be.  The corporate office has ordered and sent us a good chunk of those kinds of items ("Christian crap," I've heard it called), but it seems like we'll be able to basically tell them that those aren't the kinds of items we want to sell in our store.  If all goes well (and it seems like it might), this will be the last order of its kind.  I feel like I'm really having to step up and  start becoming more aware of new books that are coming out that would sell in our store, so I can inform my manager and, in turn, the corporate office, so that we can continue to provide the wonderful selection that we always have.  The new owners don't know much about theologies and Bible handbooks and systematics, and they've never heard of Bruce Waltke, Mark Driscoll, Rob Bell, Wayne Grudem, John Calvin, Bill Mounce, D.A. Carson, Ben Witherington, N.T. Wright, or Tremper Longman.  Therefore, I'm working extra hard to educate my manager in the "ways of a seminary bookstore."

(note: It's perfectly acceptable not to know who those people are... but if you're going to own and operate an evangelical seminary's bookstore, you should start learning about them.)

In other news, Elizabeth and I are going to be making a trip to Iowa next weekend, and we're STOKED about it.  We're going to get to hang out with our 8-month old nephew who is way cuter than any baby you're related to.  This will only be the third time in his life we've been able to see him.  The first time lasted about 90 minutes, and the second time was for about two days... and he spent 90% of them crying or sleeping.  We haven't seen Joel and Pam since New Year's, and we miss 'em!

Unsettled

I'm not really looking forward to the next couple of days.

The bookstore where I work is coming under new management/ownership in a couple of days. I feel very unsettled about the whole thing.  I personally have a lot of things I need to finish up at the store before I'm really ready for the "transition."  The new folks aren't supposed to be here until Wednesday, but I found out on Friday that they'll be in on Monday and Tuesday doing some preliminary work too, so now I don't know if I'm going to have the time I need to get things straightened up.  On top of all that, I have a ton of questions that have not yet been answered, because communication from those who know the answers has been severely lacking in recent weeks.  I feel jerked around both by my current employer, and the folks that are "taking over" and will be my new employer, because nobody has been upfront and open about sharing information with me or my coworkers.  At a time when my wife and I have almost no money and we're trying to survive the summer, it'd be really nice to feel some security and peace in my job, and I don't.  It's terribly frustrating and I wish I could skip ahead a couple of weeks so I'd know what my job will look like in the near future.

In other news, we watched a really great episode of The Cosby Show today when we got home from church, which made me feel good.  Church this morning was refreshing too, because I was able to chat with some folks that I hadn't seen in awhile.  And our senior pastor was back in the pulpit after a couple of weeks off, which is always good.

Pirates

My mom and my wife are weird.

These two women are sitting here playing Dr. Mario on my Nintendo, and being weird too.  This post is written largely because my mom just started subscribing to my blog and I want to give her something to read.

"Ooooh, shnikey-poopins!" -- Elizabeth

I'm looking for a chance to take a weekend trip to Iowa sometime this summer... and so far nothing's really working out.  I also want to take Elizabeth to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah, but I can't figure out when I can do that either.  If anyone has a couple of weeks of free time, and a few hundred dollars cash to give away, I'm in the market.  I'll make you a good deal.

Krista, I'm really glad that you reply to almost all of my posts.  It makes me feel really good knowing that SOMEONE is reading this.  You're faithful.

Family

My brother is visiting this week.

I love my family.  All of them.  I had the best childhood I think anyone could imagine.  My parents were probably as perfect as parents today can possibly be.  As evidence, let me point out that my folks raised four boys, the youngest of which is merely 5 years younger than the oldest.  Then, as soon as their youngest graduated high school and prepared to move out, they left their entire life behind in Iowa to move to California in order to continue being parents to foster boys.  To date, they have parented something like 14 boys... and they've done impossibly amazing things with all of them.  My brothers have always been the best friends a guy could ask for.  When I was young and we would visit or be visited by mom's family from California, I wondered how in the world a family could end up living so far away from each other.  Now I know.  I miss them all.  All the time.  If time and money were of no consequence, I would choose to hang out with my family every weekend (or close to it).  As it is, I don't get to see them nearly enough... but when I do it's great.  Jase has been here since Sunday.  Even though my wife and I have work and class for about five hours every day, he hasn't yet complained about being bored.  He doesn't even seem bummed about anything (yet).

Mom is flying in late tonight.  We thought she was going to get to bring her youngest foster boy, but she is unable to.  That's okay, though, because my mom is the greatest person in the world.  I'm looking forward to her arrival, even though she's only going to be here for about 30 hours.

So anywho... I just wanted to write a little tribute shout out to my family.  They're fantastic.

Hillary

Hillary is kind of a moron, in my opinion.

I follow the political process fairly closely.  By that I mean that I read big headline articles from cnn.com every couple of days, especially if there are democratic primaries going on.  Hillary Clinton has virtually no shot at winning her party's nomination, but she won't back out.  With all of the unhappiness this country feels toward the current administration and republicans in general, there is only one way John McCain could win the general election in November... and that's if Hillary does exactly what she's doing.  The dems are going to head into the convention in AUGUST without having chosen a nominee, and then Obama is going to have two months to campaign against a moderate republican who's had about eight.  Hillary's hope seems to rest largely on her resolve to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida -- both of which were technically won by her.  One of the reasons, I would propose, is because in Florida Obama wasn't on the ballot, and another is that Obama didn't campaign in either state.  Why?  Because both of those states were TOLD THAT THEY WEREN'T ALLOWED TO MOVE UP THEIR PRIMARIES or else their DELEGATES WOULD NOT COUNT.  Now everyone thinks they should.  That's like parents who tell their kids that if they throw their food they'll have to go to bed early, and then not following through when their kid blatantly disobeys (and we wonder why there's a need for SuperNanny in this country).  I'm not even a Democrat, but I think Hillary is bitter and bleeding and refuses to just give up and realize that no one likes her.

EVICTED

Holy smokes!  How could I have forgotten?

Elizabeth and I had our very first eviction today!  It wasn't a particularly fun experience, but it's kind of nice to know what one's like.  This tenant in our building hasn't been paying rent, and he and his drug-doing friends have been gone for awhile... but the eviction process takes awhile. They took a good chunk of their stuff with them, but they left a bunch too.  So what happens is the sheriff shows up and knocks on the door and then lets you unlock the door and enter. Then he basically checks everything out and makes sure nobody's around while Elizabeth and I and a couple of guys from the company we work for started hauling stuff out and putting it on the lawn. People in the neighborhood have been by, picking through the furniture and stuff all night long. We're supposed to wait a "reasonable amount of time" before we throw all the stuff in the dumpster (I guess the idea is that the tenant can still come back and claim his stuff... which won't happen).  We asked what a "reasonable amount of time" is, and the sheriff said it can be anything from as soon as he's gone until three days from now.  So, it looks like Elizabeth and I will be stuck throwing a bunch of this guy's crap in the dumpster in a couple of days.  You wouldn't believe how some people choose to live.  We found at least three crack pipes (mom, don't freak out -- I only know what it was because I asked the sheriff).  Man oh man. Let me know if you want to know more about evictions.  They're interesting.

iWeb, you web

I have a lot to do before the end of the semester.

I guess that's not a profound statement or anything.  It's just that I thought I was in good shape and that I didn't have that much left to do... but then I thought about it for awhile.  Woops.

I finally got Microsoft Office installed on my new computer.  It's amazing how you don't really miss something until it's gone.  I was without Office for six days (the computer came with a 30-day test drive), and it was tough!  I couldn't figure out how to write a one-page paper for my class. And I couldn't open any .doc files.  Weirdness.

My friend Krista is having all of her friends blog on her blog this month.  It's really fun.  I'm getting to know all of the people likes (she only likes thirty-something people in the whole world).  I feel like this is a really stupid entry.  I'm not really saying anything substantive at all.  I feel like instead of blogging I'd just be better off suggesting other blogs you should read.  They're better than mine.  Seriously.  Oh well.

Oh!  I should say that I really want to start a website using iWeb.  I've been messing around with putting one together, but it can't get published online unless I buy this expensive program that I'm not interested in at the moment.  Elizabeth and I have bigger fish to fry.