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Visit to the Sorta White House?

This afternoon Mom and I made a visit to say goodbye to an old friend from KidPak.  Our friend Rex passed away last week, one of the pillars of our KidPak ministry.  Here's what I wrote about him in a text to the group at KidPak, many of who hadn't met Rex yet:

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For those in this group that do not know, Rex is a pillar of KidPak.  To me he’s sort of one of the “founding fathers” of this children’s ministry.

For background, KidPak started with karaoke worship: no musicians, but instead one lead singer that sang along with a pre-recorded track of music on a CD player.

Rex was part of a team that brought our worship to the next level.  I will always see him on our KidPak stage on one side, Chris Smith on the other, permanently establishing a live worship band that we could only dream of previously.  Ben Wood and his family brought us the ability to have a live worship band, but then Rex and Chris were there to make it what we have today.  

But he was more than just a musician.  He was a presence on stage and off stage.  He was a force of joy, hanging out with the kids in the classrooms or in the halls, because he was just a big kid himself.  Students knew he was the real deal.  I remember Summer Xtreme as his playground - he wasn’t afraid to get soaking wet, or even covered in pie.  He would do anything for this ministry - even as a part of the acting team for skits.

I’ll forever remember him with that huge sombrero on his head during one series of skits, a massive smile on his face as he yells out, “Whazzup!”  The kids screamed back and absolutely ate it up.  He was a rockstar, even without the guitar.

And then there was the weekend when my wife Zena had emergency surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.  Rex and others actually came to the hospital, all dressed as pirates, and made a raid on that hospital room, bringing so much joy to Zena and the rest of the staff.  It was such a hit with the staff that Rex and the pirates were immediately invited over to the children’s area to bring bright smiles to those young faces too.

Rex was a light unto the world.  I never remember a time where he walked into a room and darkened the atmosphere.  He was a servant to all, a shining example and challenge to all of what we should be.  He was a gift.  He made everyone’s lives better just by being here.  Someday I hope we can all sit down together in heaven, and just be a part of the crowd that’s listening to him play that incredible guitar with a worship band there.  He may already be jamming with them now.  

We don’t mourn like those who have no hope, but nevertheless, I can’t believe he’s not with us here.  It’s so tough.

I can’t wait to see him again.  I know the first words he’ll yell out to me when he sees me:  “Whazzup!”

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The funeral is Monday - the viewing was today.  We were there for the family, just as many, many others were.

On our way home from Lawrenceville, I had to stop by this one place I saw on Roadside America, a replica of the White House built several years ago as a bank.  Since then, the building has been purchased by a law firm, but it's right here along the road, this copy of the White House!

It was closed, so you couldn't go in, and honestly I probably wouldn't go in anyway, given that I don't need a lawyer for anything at the moment.  But the building looks really good, and around the Fourth of July is a great time to drop by.  Oh, and it's also a good time to break out the new bar of soap Mom got for me!

Liberty Lather!  Time to smell nice and patriotic!  Mom got me a few items recently, one of them a LEGO Moses to add to the LEGO Wilderness Temple!

Pretty cool, huh?  I'll have to open that package up and put him in the outer court somewhere!

So today Maddie was with Nate - after Team Edge practice - and the two of them were on a double date, and then just a nice afternoon at the house.  Meanwhile Mom and I were out on a date ourselves at a familiar location:

Mom and I were at Aurelio's!  That was nice, and Mom brought home some leftovers.  The rest of the evening was quiet, with Mom and I checking out the movie "The Sheep Detectives," and after that the Braves game on BravesVision.  It's been tough to watch this team the last few weeks - I think it would have been okay if we were this bad to begin with, but the fact that we all had such hope?  We're still in the lead of the National League East, but only because some of those other teams lost ten in a row to start out with and we had a really great head start.  Well, to sum up, we lost today.  Not entirely because of our pitching, but because we can't score runs.  We got shut out again tonight.  

Okay, enough of that.  My blood pressure goes up as these games goes along!  Time to get some rest.  We read tonight from our book, and then it was time for prayers, and some sleep.

License Plate Puzzle

Maddie started this little patriotic puzzle yesterday - yesterday.  It's a 1,000-piece puzzle, one we've had for some time that's a collection of all the license plates in the United States.  She started again this morning, and would she finish it?

Yep.  Looks great too!  I actually have all of those license plates, one from every state in the Union, all of them hanging up in the garage.  

There was another virtual walk today - continuing up the virtual path to Mount Rushmore.  I got this post card, and while I was walking the television was showing a revisit to the Fourth of July fireworks there from six years ago.  

Today's date is 6-26, which of course makes it Stitch Day!  I was prepared, so I got Mom this fun gift this morning:

It's a set of plastic Stitch hands, their purpose to hold a cell phone up.  Mom was using it right away as you can see here.  Pretty fun!  Tonight we actually watched the movie, the animated one.  We hadn't see it in a while, but we watched it on Disney Plus, and we caught that one thing they changed early on where Lilo used to crawl into a dryer.  It's reanimated now so that she hides in a cabinet or something, I think to prevent kids from wanting to actually climb into a dryer.   

Maddie had taekwondo tonight, and that was fun for her.  A quiet night, but she enjoyed training with the team.  And after that, it was time to go visit Nate.  Nate and his family have been at Hilton Head all week on vacation, and so these two were happy to visit.

Mom and I were watching a Stripers game tonight, as the Braves game started later.  What a thrilling game it was against the Nashville Sounds.  The Gwinnett Stripers came back from 10-2, and wound up winning the game 13-10.  Each inning they'd score a few runs, and it came down to the ninth inning of course.  And that's when the Stripers scored another five runs to pull ahead - pretty exciting ending there!

The Braves won tonight too, which was encouraging.  It was good to see the offense actually hitting again, but we'll see if things can keep going.  It was a nice day today, although one thing I did today involved a visit to the doctor concerning an increase in blood pressure.  Trying to diagnose that.  My assignment is to do a log of the blood pressure the next few weeks or so, which should be interesting of course because Summer Xtreme is in there somewhere.

Anyway, we did our reading tonight, and then we said our prayers.  And then... it was time for the Plush Entourage to head down the hall and get tucked in for some sleep.

Walk to Mount Rushmore

This is a fun little image I had made.  I've signed up for the next virtual march here, and picked a bit of a patriotic theme.  The image above I had made for my account for this journey because I'm walking the 69 miles to Mount Rushmore.  Here's the racing bib:

I was watching a POV walk around Mount Rushmore, and here we go on another journey!  I've actually been to Mount Rushmore several times.  Famously when I was a kid, I dropped a pair of expensive binoculars immediately after my dad told me not to drop them because they were expensive binoculars.  They still worked, but they just got a little scuffed, and the story lives on.

Tonight Maddie and Mom loaded up the next two chia pets, one of them a Statue of Liberty and the other a hedgehog.  The hedgehog is a new one, a gift for Mom.  She and Maddie covered the areas with seed, and now we wait a few days to see the growth.  The Statue of Liberty will be growing all kinds of greenery just in time for the Semiquincentennial!

And speaking of which, you can see the puzzle that Maddie's been working on today.  She got a lot done on this one.  Like, wow!  This one will be a map of the United States, completely made up from license plates from the various states.  

Here's something else we did that's a little patriotic!  We made some ornaments for the tree using the "I Voted" stickers we recently collected from the last two visits.  We got some wooden disc ornaments that were just the right size, and then Mom got some ribbon for the top.  We have four of these on the tree now, a nice little patriotic decoration to add.  I remember coming out of the library after we voted and talking about how we could make these into ornaments, and here we are!

Maddie's classes upcoming are going to be English, Calculus, Science, and this other intro to Gainesville college class - things are lining up for her and she feels pretty confident about the workload upcoming.  It'll be here before you know it!

Tonight we were watching the Super Mario Galaxy movie, research for work.  It wasn't as good as the first Mario movie, but we still enjoyed it. There might be a message in there - we'll be working on that soon enough.  In the meantime, the other three messages for our "At the Movies" series in July are lined up.  I was working on that today, and a fun semiquincentennial trivia game.  Got a lot done today!

We did our reading tonight, and we're learning more about this mysterious Mr. Nutt.  What kind of creature is he?  And could he be a great football player?  I don't remember what happens next, but it's been fun reading this.  We said our prayers after this, and yes, it was definitely time for bed.

Hydroponic Update

The hydroponics garden is growing well as you can see here.  The lettuce is looking fantastic, getting bigger each day!  All we need to do now is build a boat ride through our house, and it'll be just like The Land pavilion at EPCOT!

Quiet day today.  Maddie went with her friends from high school for a day of fun - they had some coffee at Starbuck's, and they also went over to the Oaks mini-golf and had a great time again.  And yes, that's two trips to the mini-golf for Maddie in the last two weeks.  And once again, Maddie won the game, although this time a little closer with the score.  Speaking of scores...

It's as if the Braves team is completely collapsing, offensively and defensively.  Very difficult to watch, but here we are, the faithful fans watching and wondering what the heck is going on.  We're still in first place, because we had such an astounding start to the season.  But the last few weeks have been really tough.  There are highlights here and there, but we're losing a lot of games and a lot of ground.  Hopefully things can turn around here.

Check out this swag for our upcoming Summer Xtreme!  It's the same logo as 2019, Maddie's last year.  We never finished that video back in 2019, so Josh is working furiously on finishing it up finally - this dormant project with voices recorded seven years ago, animation work done seven years ago... finally released this year.  It'll be great.

Mom got the new dryer today, and we have a windshield getting replaced on the RAV, but if you knock off two big projects, two new bigger projects show up.  In this case, a huge hornet's nest - or something - has developed atop our house, much to our dismay.  We have to do something about that one.  The other issue is the AC in the main floor of the house.  Fortunately, the temperature is not terribly hot at the moment, particularly at night, so we can live with the one thing until we figure out the plan.  As for the hornet's nest, or whatever that monstrosity is up there.

Mom's put out some great decorations for the Semiquincentennial!  Our whole house has hints and flavors of patriotism all about.  It all looks great!

Tonight we read from "Unseen Academicals" and the whole Plush Entourage was there.  It's quite a spectacle gathering them up and herding them back down the hall to Maddie's room.  But after prayers, we did just that and tucked 'em all in, ready for a good night's rest.

Toy Story 5

Summer Xtreme Coffee Meeting!  We were doing a bit of writing this morning at Farmhouse, part of a longstanding tradition of meeting at a coffee shop to get some writing for Summer Xtreme hammered out.

It went well - we've already gotten a lot done previously, but this was all about enhancing it and adding flavor to the existing scripts.  Should be fun in the long run! 

And here's the final picture of Shrek Chia for the 2026 run.  We've done this a few times now, but it has run its course and besides, it's time for some new Chia pets.  We officially have four now, and one of the others is a patriotic one - a Statue of Liberty.  The final one is new, a hedgehog that I got for Mom.  We'll set those up this week.  And speaking of vegetation...

Our hydroponic lettuce is doing really well, growing pretty quickly.  The arugula didn't really work out - those are to the back and right there in those pods.  But the other plants are coming along nicely!  It's exciting to see the progress each day.  

We had work at the office today - after the coffee meeting of course - and that's where we decided some movies for our "At the Movies" series, amongst some other things related to Summer Xtreme.   Oh, and the Forward Conference too.  We just might use this one stinger I made up to play before the "Rock, Paper Scissors" tie breaker.

I was doing some other soundtrack things too, but I'll pick up on that later.  For now, it was time to head off to do some other research and watch the movie we're going to see at Summer Xtreme this year.  That's right, it was time for "Toy Story 5."

I had my Pizza Planet gear on, and we were ready to go!  As shared on this blog so long ago, the first movie Maddie saw in theaters was "Toy Story 3" way back in 2010.  And amazingly, the last time we did the "Summer Xtreme Unleashed" theme was in 2019, and the movie we saw that year was Toy Story 4!

As for "Toy Story 5," the movie was fun, more of a focus on Jessie than others, and that's not such a bad thing.  It's just that the core group has gotten lost in things, and I'm sentimental towards that gang - and I get it that some of those classic voices have passed on.  But there are a lot of new toys gathered up with each release, and it was like an avalanche of toy characters here.  Again, it was a fun movie, and we all agreed it was a step up from "Toy Story 4," certainly.  But nothing may ever top the original three.  For now, it's just great to spend time with these toy friends once more - it was nice.  One final note:  the closing credits song grabs a bit of the melody of Amy Grant's "Father's Eyes."  Those of us that grew up with that song can't unhear it! 

We got home and watched a bit of the Braves game before going to bed.  They lost again, but there's a lot of learning going on, and we're still six games ahead in our division, so there's plenty of time to get things addressed.  I believe a second wind is on the way!

Anyway, we read some tonight about Mr. Nutt and the game "Foot-the-ball" in the Discworld, and afterwards, we said our prayers.  Time to get some sleep!

National Onion Rings Day

Maddie has been accepted to Gainesville University of North Georgia, or GUNG maybe?  One could say she's "GUNG HO," which here in the US means she's enthusiastic, eager or energetic.  In China, where the phrase originated, it means she's simply "industrial cooperative."  Regardless, she's at GUNG, and not DUNG quite yet, which beyond being an acronym for Dahlonega University of North Georgia, has an entirely other meaning.

Anyway, she's excited about that, and today we decided to drop by with a few more questions, specifically some directed at financial aid.

How funny that their entire office was decorated - at one point completely overboard, I might add - for Star Wars.  There were Star Wars items all over the place like Christmas decorations.

We talked for a while and Maddie's got some forms to fill out and so on, but we're moving forward.  I even asked about finishing up a few classes myself, something I'll have to see another advisor about soon enough.  Maybe.  

Anyway, while we were out, we were sure to drop by a few locations - we got lunch at Zaxby's which does not serve onion rings, by the way.  Desperate for onion rings, we went across the street afterwards to Burger King, and yes, there we got ourselves a few orders of onion rings.  And why this obsession with onion rings?  

Today is National Onion Rings Day!  We made sure to stop and celebrate this important, landmark holiday with some proper onion rings.  We were almost as obsessive as the Onion Ringwraiths!  

Tonight Maddie had taekwondo, and the Edges are back from their holiday - no, not National Onion Ring Day.  They're back from vacation, and they're well-rested.  Maddie drove us over there to taekwondo, and while we were there, the rain just suddenly started pounding the area.  It was a super heavy downpour.  And then, just as suddenly, it was gone.  We've been seeing a lot of deer in the area on the way home.  We got back, and I had a walk to finish:

That's right, I finished the Mt. Everest climb today, and I did so while watching another guy ski down Mt. Everest.  This one was more recent that the Japanese team's effort in the 1970's, and I'm not sure how much of the mountain was actually skied down, but the idea was that basically he climbed to the top and went to the bottom entirely on skis.  One may ask the very important question:  why?  I have no idea.  Anyway, it's been great education and a great theme climbing upwards in the Himalayas, learning about the surrounding mountains, the culture the process of climbing up Everest with sherpas and so forth.  I've always been fascinated by this climb, and the idea of the beautiful desolation up in a place where you can be away from everyone else.  The lack of oxygen part is probably one big reason why.  And the cold.  It takes a special type of person to do this sort of climb, that much is certain.  I was just happy to do it all virtually.

Moving on, we read tonight after watching a few Clone Wars episodes.  The Braves game was late, so we didn't catch all of it, but it's okay as they're in this offensive skid lately, not collectively hitting the ball anywhere near as well as they were earlier in the season.  Hopefully they can shake themselves free once more.  They're still in first place by a decent margin, but they're not making it easy on themselves.

We read, and then said our prayers tonight, and after that, it was time for some sleep.