Driving home on the interstate this morning I was doing my usual 65 or so with the other traffic. Then these kids zipped by. I looked at my speedometer and guestimated they must be going more than 80. But I also noticed that, in my car, 70 MPH has the speedometer needle pointing straight up.

My speedometer goes to 130MPH!! Now, I don’t drive a big Mercedes that has to survive on the German autobaun. I drive a Saturn. I think it would fly apart above 100. I only use the first half of the speedometer dial.

I just don’t know what possessed the designers of the car to make the speedometer go that high. Another of life’s mysteries.

Looks like I’m spending the next few days painting. The remodel has reached the point where the walls are plastered and textured. We asked for some painting bids and they all came back between $2500 and $3500. That seems like a LOT of money to paint three rooms that are still in construction phase (no carpet, no trim, plastic already over windows from plasterers). So, I’m doing it myself.

I’ll go to work next week paint splattered.

Land line phones are a complete rip off!!!

I’m paying the phone bill and, with two phone lines and DSL, it comes to over a hundred bucks. But the phone lines cost $18 each and the DSL is $32. Hummm. How is that over $100? Well, there are $30+ of “Taxes, Fees and Surcharges”!!!! “Federal Excise at 3%”, “Franchise at .3%”, “State 911″, “Federal Universal Serv Fund”, “Oregon Universal Service Surcharge”, “Oregon PUC fee”, Federal Universal Serv Fund Private Line” (again??!!), “Residential Service Protection Fund”, “Federal Access Charge”, “Federal Access Charge Additional Line”, “Federal Charge Service Provider Number”.

And that’s for the basic phone service. The long distance carriers have their own special categories: ?Universal Connectivity Charge”, “In-state connection fee”, Bill Statement Fee”. That last one is $1.50!!! One fifty to send me a bill!!

I might be getting rid of my phones.

We’ve been down for a day — the DSL failed. Bummer.

I finally got a simple enough network setup at my end so my ISP would talk to me. They required a single computer with a crossover cable plugged into the modem before they wanted to talk to me about line problems. I guess they get enough problems with people’s home equipment. So, they finally decided that my computers were outputting ARP packets and they were responding to them but I was not receiving any of their packets. Time to call the DSL provider — Qwest.

I’ve heard bad things about getting technical support from the phone companies, so, with trepidation, I phoned the tech support number. Pressed “2″ to say I had DSL. Pressed “3″ to say I was not using Quest as my ISP, Pressed “2″ to say this was a new problem. And I was talking to an actual human!!!!! No waiting, no hassle. Wow!!! I explained that I’d talked to my ISP and they said to call Qwest. He typed for a second and said “yes, you do have a problem”. “There is a tech on the way to fix it”. One hour later the connection was running again.

So, there are a lot of terrible stories out there, but this is a good story about DSL and phone company technical support and it has a happy ending. And now I have connectivity so my life can go on.

This is something that needs a full scale article/rant but, for now, I will drop this rantette.

Living Reflections From a Dream pointed me to a Soapbox article at What The Hell Happened Last Night where btzera talks about the latest Roe vs Wade chapter — it seems that the origional “Roe” is now an evanglical Christian and has asked the court to reconsider it’s ruling since she now believes that abortion is murder.

An interesting belief for her, but it brings me to the subject: separation of church and state. Most of the current arguments about the separation of church and state seem to be about the wrong end of the argument — there’s a lot of talk about whether the government should give any money to churches or whether the ten commandments should be displayed in schools. But, for me, separation means more about where laws come from.

The radical idea that our forefathers promoted was that the government enforces the laws of man and not the laws of God (or the laws of God as interpreted by some believer). A secular goverment does not base it’s actions on holy laws — murder is not illegal because it is sinful, but because a civil society cannot be held together if people are murdering each other.

There are immoral and sinful things. But you don’t refrain from doing then because they are illegal. You stay away from sin because of what you learned in church and what you believe in your heart. The church’s job is educating and enforcing God’s laws. That is not the job of the State.

It seems to me that church people trying to use the government to enforce God’s laws shows mostly the failure of the church to rule the hearts of men and women. You do not make moral people by setting the police upon them.

Finally have my pictures of my running in the Helvetia Half Marathon. I’m doing better today than one would have thought.

I took the boys to see The Matrix Reloaded tonight. It was a Regal Cinema which is one of those gigantic theatre chains. The notable part of the experience was the 20 minutes of commercials that came before the movie — from television programs to XBox games — and then the 12 minutes of previews before the movie.

People didn’t seem too upset about all the previews but the television commercials before elicited the comment “I could watch television at home”.

Harry Potter arrived! There on our doorstop when we got back from the half marathon was a box. A FedEx two day Saturday delivery box. The Harry preorder had arrived. That must have been quite a contract for FedEx and they must have hired extra people. Quite a job to just get a book out on Saturday.

Everyone in my group was out of town. That means hours of quiet. Hours of no voices over the cubical walls. Hours of focusing on one task after another without interruption. Hours of completing one thing and then working on the next to completion.

What a strange and rare experience.

The wedding pictures are finally up.

Good luck, my daughter, in your new married life.

Happy Father’s Day to my father. A good man who lived a life of quiet service. We stuffed a gigantic church with people who knew of you, appreciated your work and were sad to see you leave.

I miss you dad.

I did get my 8 miles of running in this morning. And now off to a day of activities culiminating in my daughter’s wedding. Pictures will probably be up later this evening.

I live in a fairly large city (a few million people) so we don’t consider Portland, Oregon too far out in the boonies, but this story on Yahoo tells of a tragic boating accident off the Oregon coast. But the byline is for Palo Alto, California and, although the accident happened near Tillamook Oregon (think cheese ), the article reports it as “near” Portland and then even has a picture of Oregon in relation to Washington state so readers can know this little piece of geography.

I guess Oregon is the boonies.

The plaster board fellows showed up at 7am this Saturday morning to finish nailing plaster to the walls and ceilings. As we were about to leave to run, my wife mentions that she wanted two lights on each side of the bathroom sink rather than just one overhead. Oopppssss.

So a quick trip to the hardware store and some wiring and hammering and trying to stay ahead of the plasterers. Now there are two but it didn’t make up for missing my morning run. I’ll have to run tomorrow morning. So much for sleeping in.

Plaster board is going up. Two days of pounding and crashing as they throw the stuff on the wall starting at 7am. This is happening on both Friday and Saturday so there will be no sleeping in this weekend.

The remodel is taking shape and it now looks like construction rather than destruction. The walls are all up and the insulation is in. Pink everywhere.

Yesterday’s marathon training run was 12 miles around downtown Portland but, because of security around the fleet that is docked downtown and the setup for the Grand Floral Parade – all part of the city’s Rose Festival – we ran south from downtown through the beautiful Clearwater Corridor.

This is a 40 mile loop bike trail that goes along the Willamette River. The section we ran (no, we didn’t do the full 40) was along the east side of the river from downtown to the Sellwood bridge. Green and lush with eagle’s nests on the tops of power polls and attractions like the old fashioned amusement park Oaks Park.

Except for the heat, it was a beautiful and good run.

Look out in the Pacific Northwest — there is a blimp on the loose.

With this hot weather, when I get up in the morning, I open the patio door and start a large fan to get some of the cool air outside inside. The other morning, after running the fan for a while, I found my remote controlled flying saucer outside in the trees by the patio. It would seem that the air currents pushed the floating craft around the livingroom and eventually out the patio door.

This morning I wasn’t so lucky as to find the craft in the trees. I’d forgotten about the tree incident a few days before when I set up the fan this morning. So now, floating in the skies far above our town, must be a radio controlled blimp enjoying it’s freedom in the wide open skys.

Smog advisory in Portland in early June!!! What’s that all about? I grew up in this town and have enjoyed the gray skies and the trees and the green and the weather. But this year, we’ve started the summer off with 100 degree weather and smog!!! We don’t get smog here!! At least, we didn’t used to.

Too many people have moved here. It’s time to move farther north.

We normally think that terrorists and people who support them are poor, down-trodden people with nothing to loose. As this is researched, we discover that the “down-trodden” is the most important part and that the supporterd tend to be educated and not necessairly poor. A good article on this (with good comments) is at the Buzz Machine