Yes, I guess it's that time again.

Life has been pretty busy lately.

Christmas was a fun time to spend with family up in Michigan. Unfortunately, there was no snow! This has been the first green Christmas up there that I remember. We left on Christmas Eve after our afternoon church service. On Christmas day, we went to my Aunt Sue and Uncle John's house, as is tradition. I helped fix his Macintosh computer, which I've never used before. At my grandma's house, we went out into the woods for a short time. It was muddy instead of snowy, which was a bummer.
Then we went to my mom's side of the family. We had fun and Philip and I played pool in my grandma's garage.
I got some neat presents. Some clothes, some videos, some money, some noise-canceling headphones, and that's about it.

This week has been crazy and stressful at work. I worked a few hours of overtime. The stress pushed me closer to my limits.

On Friday (yesterday), my dad and I went to a college alumni fellowship meeting. Basically, it's a preaching meeting. It was in Akron, Ohio at Community Baptist Temple. There was some excellent preaching and singing. Pastor O'Donnell preached about Soul-winning, and Pastor Thayer of Massillon Baptist Temple spoke on missions, followed by Pastor Huth of Stow Baptist Church. I had a great time, as it was like a big Christian family reunion. I saw many friends.
Then my family and I went to my brother's basketball game. The JH boys team lost their game by 1 point! If they would've made their last free-throw, they would have tied and gone into OT. The Varsity boys game beat their opponents 63-58. It was quite intense for the last few minutes. Then the Varsity girls played and soundly defeated their opponents, almost tripling the score of the other team. After the game, I joined my brother and part of the team at Pizza Hut, where we acted like immature adolescents. :)

Today will be busy as I'm preaching tomorrow and have several things to get done on my to-do list -- which probably won't get done...

Hello! I'm writing this entry on my dad's laptop in a parking lot inside our van. I happened to find a WiFi hotspot in Marion, Ohio at Meijer. I believe the connection is coming from a hotel about 100 yards away.

It's pretty exciting!

Gotta go. CYA.

Last Saturday, my parents went out to do some clothes shopping. I didn't feel like going, so I stayed home with my brothers and sister. We got McDonald's for lunch, and they got my order wrong. How strange! McDonald's would -never- do that! They gave me a Big Mac instead of what I ordered. Over the countless times I have eaten there and the fact that I worked at the Big M Supper Shop for nearly five years, I have never desired to eat a Big Mac. Much to my surpise, it was edible. I won't say it tasted great, but it was OK.

A few days ago, I cleaned my room. It was getting too messy for me to look at. It looks much better cleaned.

My sister gave me her birthday wish-list. It's coming up in a few weeks. I'm probably going to get her a CD player. She's been wanting

Something humorous to check out --> Top 10 Linus Crashes & Top 10 Blue Screens of Death (BSOD's)

My latest coding projects have involved PHP. I was working on my brother's guestbook ( http://philiplance.is-a-geek.com/guestb ... stbook.php) because it was getting spammed a LOT. The funny thing was that they were posting HTML code. They all used a div tag and styled it to be hidden! How strange. Anyways, I added my own unique captcha system (without session ID's) to defeat automated submissions. Spammers also get a nice little message.
The other project concerns bbcode. What is bbcode? Click here. I've extenively modified the code listed at the wikipedia page. It supports many more things. It's still a work in progress. If my other computer's on, you can access it at http://stephen.calvarybucyrus.org:1000/ ... e/test.php.

Anyways, off to watch TV for now. CYA.

The weather certainly has changed from summer! The trees are eliciting shades of orange, yellow, pink, and red. With that turnabout comes the cold weather. It's been much cooler lately, and frost is making its entrance.

I've been playing around with my blog setup for the past couple days. Notice the different colors and style! I like the blue theme. I hope to put a fresh face on my website's homepage soon. It needs a new layout.

Another major goal met was getting my room clean! Seeing all that mess really started to bother me, so I finally got it taken care of.

Right now, I'm working on upgrading our web server. Yes, the one you're viewing this page from. I have a 1.2 gHz AMD computer that's getting XP on it right now. If it shows itself more stable than the current server (Win98SE), then it gets the job!

Sometimes, it's quite ironic that people think a pastor's life is a cakewalk. They think he spend a few hours a day in his office, gets his sermons off the internet, and plays games a lot. That couldn't be farther from the truth!
I'm finding out how busy the little things can keep you. My dad (http://calvarybucyrus.org/pastor) has been giving me more responsibilities as youth pastor. I'm working more with children now. Though it gets busy, it's fun.

My todo list getting quite long! I guess that's from spending too much time on the little binary box!

This year is just flying by! It'll be 2007 in less than 100 days! Nine months are down and there are three to go.

Early in September, my sister flew back to Florida for year two at Pensacola Christian College (http://www.pcci.edu). She is already getting extremely busy as the homework and class projects stack up. I remember that feeling almost all too well. :) She switched her major from criminal justice to missions this year.

On September 18, I got hired in at Baja. I've been working the past three months there with the temp service. So I move from $9/hr to $10.48/hr for starting wages. I'll move to $11.02, then to $11.59, to $12.18, and be making $12.75 next September! It's really a pretty good job. I'm enjoying my bank account balance rebounding up and up! College drained it pretty good.

I'm getting my hopes up for winter! It seems to be coming fast. The weather forecast (weather forecast) predicts that there will be frost on the ground tonight! The low is in the 30's.
No, I don't like winter's cold weather, but I do like snow! I hope December 18 greets Bucyrus, Ohio with a foot of snow. Then I'm going to get a big snowblower and we're going to make a snow fort again.

Philip's last soccer season is going alright. He has a game today that I'm going to. That'll be fun.

I went to Pennsylvania for the first time last month. The college I went to (http://mbcaf.org) has Alumni fellowship meetings 3 times a year, and this one was in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. We had preaching services in an open-air chapel that was originally a horse house (I think). I enjoyed seeing my friends from college (Jon, Josh, Justin...) and spending the night there.

Anyways, that's all for now, folks!