Back in the day...

For the last week or so, my office has become the central processing center for a local church project. If you need to know anything – ANYTHING – about the First Presbyterian Church of Olney, Illinois just stop by. I can show you photographs and bulletins from the last 150 years. Mixed in the all the liturgical history I found three albums full of photos featuring the local Boy Scout Troop 211. The troop has been sponsored by the church for ever.

Now, back in the day I was a boy scout. Stop laughing. STOP IT! If you don’t stop laughing I will freaking tie you up in a one-handed bowline knot. Ok. So yes, I found numerous pictures of me. Good memories. I loved our camping trips.

Several of the pictures were from Summer Camp. Wow . . . the lake, the dining hall, the road that looped all around the camp . . . I was sitting in my office and it all came back to me. I remembered the Amish girls that worked in the kitchen and how we used to pine over them. I could see the road that looped around the entire camp. It started at the dining hall, then dropped down the hill to the lake before rounding into the main camp sites. Just past site #7 the road turned to the shooting range and then rounded to the parking lot and back to the dinning hall. There were the endless nights at the campfire, the bad jokes from our leaders, and cold mornings at the lake.

Ah, I could go on forever. It was nice to take a break today and step back into a very nice period of my childhood.

Andrew and His Evening of Diplomatic Immunity

I was called out to work last night around 9:30. Nothing odd about that – it is my weekend to be on-call. I put on a shirt and tie, drove to the office, and pulled the ‘company car’ out of the garage. I had been dispatched to the local Emergency Room. I pulled up in front of the hospital and rolled my cot into the hallway in the ER.

“Can I help you?” said a nurse.

“Yes,” I replied, “I’m from [funeral home], and I’m here to pick-up Mrs. Smith.”

By this point, the attending doctor and nursing coordinator stuck their heads from out of their office and gave me an odd, what-the-heck-are-you-doing-here look.

The nurse returned. “I’m sorry, sir, but there is no one here by that name that…um…requires your services.”

As the nursing coordinator was making phone calls to see if I was needed in another section of the hospital, I decided to call headquarters to see if I was even at the correct hospital. Oops. I should have been dispatched to the hospital one town over. I ventured back to the company car and I was on my way.

My job is not time critical. A few hours isn’t going to make things too difficult. But seeing how it was getting late in the evening I decided to make haste in my travel. When I’m driving the company car I tend to drive like I have diplomatic immunity. Come on, who’s going to pull me over? After making terrific time, I calmly walked into the Emergency Room of the correct hospital like nothing was wrong at all.

All in an evening’s work…

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For a complete archive of Andrew’s bloggings, please visit http://wasptiger.livejournal.com/

The Cross-over / Sail Fixed

I have been 'blogging' for years now . . . but I have been doing it on livejournal
So for the next few entries, I will be posting to both before making the cross-over to blogger complete. I'm not really sure if I even have any blogger friends. I should find some. The following is my most recent post.

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Kahlil Gibran once wrote: “Your reason and your passion are the rudder and sails of your seafaring soul. If either be broken, you can but toss and drift or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining. And passion unattended is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”

I have felt for a long while now that I have been stuck at a crossroads. I was wrong. The crossroads are still farther down the road. The difference? I now have a positive direction and when I do get to that crossroads I will be able to make an informed and educated decision. I have taken the first steps that will allow me to be able to do something that I want to do. I’m excited