Summer

My summers as a teenager were spent mowing yards in the neighborhood, chopping wood, clearing out weeds and other junk from a large shed @ my grandparents' house and 1 summer I painted their 4 bedrooms (all 16'X16') upstairs, plus my normal chores at home. I did that stuff plus Boy Scouts and church youth group and marching band practice for 2 weeks before school started.

None of this work was punishment. It was just work that needed to be done and I was the one who did it.

Kids now have no concept of what real work is. The funny thing is now that I look back on it, I guess I did a LOT of work growing up, but I still managed to have friends and have fun. I sure as heck didn't complain. I would have ended up with a warm backside and then go do the work anyway.

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The True Christmas Spirit

My wife and I had something happen to us a couple of days ago that truly has renewed my faith in other people.

The story goes like this. It was really cold and our daughter didn't want to wait outside for the school bus, so we told her we would take her to school. We get in the car and drop the younger 2 kids off at the elementary school.

After dropping them off, the wife notices that the car is acting a little weird. I get out to find that the left rear tire had gone flat and was starting to come apart.

I am not mechanically inclined, so putting the spare on was not really an option. We baby the car in to the Wal Mart down the street and do some Christmas shopping while we get a new tire put on.

We get done with the shopping and go back to the auto section to pick up the car.

That is when the amazing thing happened. There was a lady in front of us paying for something she had done to her car. The Wal Mart clerk pulls out our paperwork and I look it over. While I'm doing that, this lady who was in front of us asks if we were the people who had the tire blow out on us.

I say "yes", then this person I had never seen before in my life pulls out her credit card and asks if she could pay for the tire for us for Christmas. All I could manage was a kind of half stunned "yes, thank you". We didn't get her name, and we will probably never see this lady again.

As the song goes, there are truly angels among us, most often when you very least expect it.

Living Christmas Tree

We are going tomorrow night to the Knoxville Living Christmas Tree at Thompson-Boling Arena. The picture is from the 2006 production.

Thompson-Boling Arena and Neyland Stadium

TBA and Neyland Stadium
Originally uploaded by Michael Wender

One of the nicer shots of Neyland Stadium and Thompson-Boling I have ever seen.