Tag Archives: harrisonburg

Church and a Lawnmower

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Yesterday I mowed the lawns around the house. Usually my brother-in-law does it, but he was busy helping his girlfriend and her mom do yard work at their house, and after being offered the chance to try last week (and enjoying it) I decided to take the opportunity again.

I got out my iPod and started the Christian playlist, thinking I would have my own mini-pentecostal service while mowing the lawns. I thought that an awesome song would come on, that I’d just rock out thinking how awesome God is. I thought that God and I would have a moment, and how cool it would be to blog about what happened. I mean, it’s not the most normal place for God and Man to connect..

But it didn’t happen. I guess God knew that I would have used it for a completely wrong purpose, making it about me rather than about him. Don’t we do that all too often? When things go wrong, it’s God’s fault. When things go right, we’re such awesome people that do such a good job. Right? How often has God done something good in your life and you’ve shifted the focus from the greatness and awesomeness of God onto yourself, whether it be by taking all the credit or by focussing on how funny it was to happen when/where it did, with the intention of building self and intentionally or otherwise detracting from whatever it was that God did for you.

Yesterday I got my full Virginia drivers license, and am now fully prepared to drive to work in Washington DC alone every day (assuming I get the job I’m interviewing for tommorrow morning). Speaking of which, I’ll have another 4 hours tomorrow to church alone (well, with my wife), and if I get the job I’ll also have 4 hours a day to church (really alone!) as well.

In other news, last night I made two phone calls to New Zealand, the first being to my Mum, and got to talk to my Dad and my brother as well. Mum was doing well, Dad was getting over a cold/flu thing, and my brother was doing pretty well also. I asked my brother if he had given any thought to what he wanted to do in the future (work/study-wise), and he said “Film and Media, or higher English” and on asking to clarify the higher English, he suggested he would like to write fan-fictions (fiction stories using famous characters in a prequel/sequel-type situation, think a continuation of Star Wars or the Matrix, or episodes of CSI or Law and Order). I suggested he could try to create his own characters and write something original as well, or even go so far as writing stick-figure based cartoons, since he described himself as a poor drawing artist.

The second call was to my only living Grandma (my Mum’s Mum passed away nearly a year ago now), again to wish her a happy mothers day and to catch up a little. She also had a chance to talk, for the first time, to her grand-daughter-in-law. I was worried about calling them after Dad mentioned that my Grandad wasn’t doing well mentally, warning me that “..if the man who answers the phone sounds like Grandad, but doesn’t recognise or seem to know who you are, don’t be surprised or upset..” He’s in his 9th decade (80’s ;-)), and after a stroke or two these things tend to happen! I was rather pleased when he did answer and was very quick at responding to what I was needing, seeming at least to recognise me (may have had something to do with sounding like my Dad and calling him Grandad?)

We’re also house-sitting for a friend (who was housesitting and had to go to New York with her family for the weekend). It’s a pretty awesome house, we’re planning to take photos of some cool things we’d like to try to make or remember when our turn to decorate comes around. They don’t have a lot of things on display, so there is minimal clutter, but what they do have is high up and generally pet friendly.

Lastly I wanted to mention that we’re going to stop in at Front Royal on the way home from the interview tomorrow and check it out for size and shopping facilities etc etc. It’s apparently somewhere between Broadway and Harrisonburg for size with a population of around 13-14,000 people and we wanted to get a feel for what was there and what was close by compared to what we would have to drive for.

Anyway, thats more than enough rambling from me for another day or two. Happy Mothers Day!

Community-Based ISP’s – Could This Catch On?

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I was stumbling around the internet the other day when I came across this article about Wilson, NC. It reports that the small city of Wilson was sick of the phone/tv/internet services being provided by the options they had, so they started their own. My question is, could this take off throughout the country? Comcast, Time Warner, all the other cable and DSL companies have been screwing the country over for a long time. Maybe if more community-based providers come up, it will force the big boys to lower their prices and improve their services. By the way, if anyone in Broadway/Timberville/Harrisonburg/Rockingham Co is interested in starting something like this I’d be keen to join in wherever possible. Whether it would be in a server/services administrative role or something helpdesk, I’m interested!

Here’s the link to the article:

http://consumerist.com/5224578/time-warner-cable-cannot-possibly-compete-with-the-small-city-of-wilson-nc

NZ Roads are Better than VA’s

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New Zealand roads. They’re often considered not great by New Zealands inhabitants. The tar and gravelled roads are poor on tires, the purely tar-sealed roads are slippery in wet. Most peple can think of something bad to say about them until they drive overseas.

Having lived in New Zealand since birth, and driving regularly since I was 19 or 20, including two trips from Wellington to Hamilton and back, I consider myself fairly experienced. I’ve lived in Virginia in the USA since April, and if there is one thing that scares me more than anything, it is driving at night in the rain.

catseyesSee, in New Zealand we have cheap little things all over the place called reflectors. Red ones either side, and white or yellow ones in the middle (signifying whether you can or can’t pass, respectively). Here? There are just lines painted on the road. That is perfect on fine days. It’s even pretty good at night. Sometimes during the day when it’s raining. Couple together darkness and road surfaces, and the paint is almost invisible. There are NO reflective markings whatsoever, unless you happen to be driving on a major road like the interstate. We regularly drive on a Virginia highway (VA-42) but there are no reflective markings on this road. I’m also not aware of any reflective markers in Harrisonburg, either on US-33 or US-11. I really don’t know how people here manage to not have serious accidents more often.

The other reason I say NZ’s roads are better, and this one may not be so fair as the reflective markers, but the Interstate roads in parts of Richmond, and in parts of Washington DC the road surface changes from tar-seal to concrete. I understand concrete may be cheaper and quicker to set on such busy roads etc, but is it REALLY that hard to CLOSE A LANE to reseal it properly? I would hazard a guess that they don’t need to be resealed any more than once a year, I’d suggest they take a summer night to reseal a lane at a time in 100 yard stretches. Close a SINGLE LANE between say, MIDNIGHT and 6AM. You could probably even have it closed another hour or two if it was facing away from rush hour.

So, New Zealanders, be very happy with your roading system, and be patient when Tranzit or the local council decides to close a lane of road during the off-peak so that you can have a more pleasant driving experience. Cliche as it is, there are people in other countries who have it worse off than you, and I don’t mean in the 3rd world.

Danger! Danger! Lights and Sirens!

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EDIT: This was found this morning: http://www.rocktownweekly.com/news_details.php?AID=32235&CHID=1 – We’d suspected he’d gone to 259 to try and go for the West Virginia border, but he didn’t make it that far.

So tonight, after watching American Carol (funny movie with an interesting message, btw..), and visiting CiCi’s pizza (and not eating much), and socialising with my in-laws, Kel and I dropped by the apartment to grab some things before coming up to Broadway for the night.

That was all well and good, got the laptop and some clothes, etc. Anyway, we were leaving our street, and turning right onto Mount Clinton Pike, and a black SUV with blue lights flashing comes past towards VA-42 at speed. We’re just thinking “Wow…thats weird…”, and turn to follow a little, and hear lots of sirens coming at us from the opposite direction. There was a white Bronco came up Mt Clinton with a large amount of smoke coming out.. followed by approximately 8 police cars of various descriptions. We were nearly hit by the first SUV as it U-turned on Mt Clinton to join the chase.

We carried on toward 42, where a further 4 police vehicles were encountered – a black SUV which took the right-turn at speed (crossed the center line in front of us), a cop with lights off sitting in a parking lot, a state cop and a city cop with crossed the tracks and turned onto 42-North (later U-turned to go south and up Mt Clinton Pike as well).

We continued driving, expected it had moved away from us. Anyhow, arriving in Broadway, about 15 mins later, 2 cop cars were sitting at the South entrance to Broadway on VA-42 conversing, and about 4-5 minutes after passing them (and parking up, discussing what had happened with Kelly’s parents and brother who were a couple of minutes ahead of us) we heard the chase come back through Broadway heading North – this time vehicles sounding in much worse condition.

I’ll be watching Google News a lot, as well as keeping an eye on the news sites (CNN as well as more local places), but if anyone has any idea what was going on, it would be interesting to know! There is speculation it was drug related, and there are reports within the last 24 hours of drug busts made this week, but whether this is related or another matter entirely remains to be seen.