Last night, my dad said something inspiring. He was helping me pick rocks out of our flower garden, and as he went to leave, I thanked him again. And he said, “You’re welcome. I just want to try and be helpful like my dad (my grandpa).” As most people in our church know, my grandpa never passes up an opportunity to help. He’s had a quadruple bypass surgery, and has every right to take it easy, and relax. He’s just not wired that way. God has given him a servant’s heart, and to sit idly by and watch others do the work just doesn’t do it for him. Our pastor is moving in a few days, and I mentioned to his brother that I would probably come and help load up. He said, “Don’t feel like you have to. If you don’t, your grandpa will.”

My dad is always helping me around the house, and it seems he enjoys helping me more than going home and doing his own yardwork sometimes. Even when it’s just picking rocks out of the garden. I want to be like my dad (and my grandpa): helpful.

As many of you might have noticed, I’ve been sick lately. Normally, that’s not blog-worthy, even if it is a rare occassion. However, this morning was the first time I had been to church in three weeks. I was up front playing guitar with the worship team and started to sing along with one of the songs (sometimes I’m concentrating on the guitar too much to sing), and that’s when it struck me. I missed this. Yes, I missed church, and yes, I missed playing guitar for worship, but the thing I missed the most was just singing to God. My throat had been so raw for the last two weeks, that I hadn’t been able to sing (I tried once, and it was a pathetic sound).

Then something else struck me. I wasn’t the only one. God missed it too. The ruler of the universe; the creator of everything; the omnipotent God who controls everything. He missed my worship. God wants, desires, even longs for the worship and adoration of his treasured creation, mankind. And yes, I know, worship is more than just singing and music, but for me, that’s the way I worship God best. When I lose that, I feel like a part of me has died. This morning, though, it was revived, and wow, did that feel amazing. Yes, it even drove me to tears as all these thoughts came rushing at once. I just had to share that with all of you.

A bunch of my family members use Multiply for posting blogs, book reviews, photos, and links. It’s kind of like Facebook or Myspace, but slimmed down, and geared more towards blogging. Several of them have recently joined Facebook, and yesterday, my aunt asked me an interesting question. Is there any way to integrate the two sites? I knew there had to be, but it took me a while to think of how to do it.

So, here it is: On facebook, go to your Profile, and make sure you are on your Wall. Right below the ‘Write something…’ box, there is a Settings button. Click that, and the top section will say ‘Stories Posted by You’. As you can see, Multiply isn’t listed, but there is one called ‘Blog/RSS’. Click this, and it will ask you for the Public URL of your blog. For my Multiply site, it would be nosilver4u.multiply.com. Fill in yours, and click the Import button. Now it will automatically post anything from Multiply on your Facebook page. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way to go the other direction. This will also work for any other blogging site like blogspot, livejournal, or wordpress.com.

The other day I found out about earth hour. You can go read about it, but I’ll give you the short version. At 8:30 P.M. turn off all your lights for one hour. They are aiming for one billion people participating this year (last year was 50 million). I’m not huge into all this ‘global warming’ stuff, but I do think we need to do a better job conserving energy, and this is one way to help make that happen.

As some of you probably already know from Facebook, we have a new addition to the family. It’s a girl! She is a 3-month old Labrador/Border Collie that we adopted from the Eastern Montana Humane Society. At three months, she’s obviously not as well-behaved as Scooter was when we got him last year, but she’s picking things up quickly. It seems pretty amazing that we’ve only had her a week.

Her name, as you might have guessed, is ‘Roo’ of Kanga & Roo fame from Winnie the Pooh. Watching her and Scooter interact has been quite fun, and they are certainly getting plenty of exercise too. We’ve had to give her a couple baths, as she has some sort of skin infection. When she comes out of the bath, her scent is masked by the shampoo, and Scooter always thinks there’s a new dog in the house. Eventually, her scent comes back, and he figures out that it was his sister all along.

As always, there’s pictures in the gallery, and I’ve even uploaded a video for your enjoyment.

Nothing would be the same without my darling one and only. Today marks four years since she said, “Yes.” I love you, and you’re still my favorite. It also happens to be the day to remember Saint Valentine. Whoever he was.

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We now have real pictures of the house we bought in Glendive. Or, as Amanda likes to call it, our ‘cottage’.

This last weekend we had a Bishop family reunion. Most of my aunts and uncles were there, with a few grandkids, and even a few great-grandkids. In all, there were about thirty of us there. My cousin Brett got a hold of my camera, so there are a lot of pictures.

Reminds me of another time when he took almost two hundred pictures with it during Thanksgivining. It was shortly after I got my new camera, and I wanted to see how many pictures could be taken on one set of batteries (rechargables, the alkalines never did more than twenty or thirty).

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, except I missed out on the bowling, because it got too late (I know, I’m getting old). One thing I am quite excited about is that my aunt Debbie got a lot more old pictures to scan, so I’ll have more to add to the Bishop Family History section sometime in the near future.

I also finished a video project that I had been working on, with completely free and open source tools, but more on that later.

Today is our third anniversary. So…

Happy Anniversary from your favorite nerd

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Tomorrow, I embark on a new journey. I’ve been working at an office supply shop doing computer and network service for the last few months. It’s been fun, but there’s just been something missing. My coworkers are great (they’ll probably never read this). I’ll miss Tom, Jeremy, and even April too. Denny…not so much. Actually, I go to church with him, so it would be tough to miss him when I still see him.

My new job will be as Technology Coordinator at DCC, our local community college. I’d give you a link to their website, but I don’t want anyone to see it yet; at least not until after I’ve had a chance to clean it up a bit. I’m pretty excited, as there will be a lot more of what I like to do there, but most importantly, its where I believe God wants me to be right now. I can’t ask for anything more than that (and I won’t).

So, farewell, old job. Hello, new job!