Backfield in Motion

I've spent most of the last week with my eyes glued
to Jeannette's rear end . . .

The Long and Winding Road Back . . . Day 3

After I waited for three hours and paid the Rexburg repair shop $38 to tell me that we didn't have to worry about the ABS and brake lights on the dashboard, we headed for Yellowstone, the first of three "tourist" stops in our itinerary. We arrived at the west entrance, paid our $25 per car admission fee and then immediately hit a traffic jam. So we pulled off the road to look at a stream and Jordan climbed up on a rock. MelodyJoy wanted to join him, of course . . .

When we hopped back in our vehicles, we quickly discovered what had caused the traffic tie-up, as a huge bison strolled right down the road past us . . .

Our next stop was at the Fountain Paint Pots. It was a beautiful day with puffy clouds against a bright blue sky . . .


Naturally, Old Faithful was our primary destination. We arrived just after it had geysered (is that a word?) so we had to wait over an hour for its next eruption. We sat down in a grove of trees to eat our peanut butter and honey sandwiches, then claimed some prime seats to await the big event . . .

Unfortunately, as we sat there, we could see the storm clouds start to roll in. Jeannette retrieved our sweatshirts from the truck and we waited in the drizzle, which gradually turned into a downpour. (When we were last in Yellowstone, in the summer of 1995 on our move to Kentucky, we experienced rain, sleet, snow and mudslides, so a little rain wasn't going to faze us.)

With the rain coming down, though, when Old Faithful did erupt (right on time), there wasn't much to see really. The rain caused lots of extra steam which threatened to obscure our entire view of the geyser.

We considered driving up to the canyon in the middle of Yellowstone, since the kids have never seen the Grand Canyon, but the rainfall dissuaded us from this, which was fortunate since it took us quite awhile to get out of the park due to road construction. We did make a quick stop at the Kepler Cascades waterfall . . .

And the boys and I made a brief dash through another geyser basin . . .

Our destination upon departing Yellowstone was Cody, Wyoming. This has been a challenging trip in some ways because we didn't know much in advance when we would travel or where we would need to spend the nights. As it's turned out, with only one small exception, our itinerary has been almost exactly as we planned originally. If we had known this would be true, we could have done better than a dumpy Econolodge for $175 a night! As it was, we tried to just be grateful to have any place to stay within 50 miles of Yellowstone.

From Yellowstone, we headed to Mount Rushmore, but I'll save that for tomorrow's post since it's almost 11:00 and I spent about nine hours today trekking all over the Noah's Ark waterpark in Wisconsin Dells, so I'm pretty whipped.

If this is what my friends think of me . . .

. . . I don't want to know what my enemies think. My "friend," Tim Fuller (see Dec. 28, 2006) wrote today that "there’s something about [David Wells'] face that reminds me of Palmer, albeit Palmer after years of hard living that added 100 pounds."

The Long and Winding Road . . . Back

Sorry for the lack of updates but life has been pretty crazy lately dawn to dusk. Last Monday, Larry the Wheaton Van Lines driver pulled up in front of our house with two helpers to load up our house. He arrived around 9:00 and estimated that it would take eight to ten hours to do. He questioned the estimate that we had 15,000 pounds of stuff.


Fourteen hours later, he was more agreeable to that estimate. He did not leave the house until about 11 PM. Which meant that we (Jeannette) didn't get to start really cleaning the house until Tuesday morning. After departing Klamath Falls, he was off to pick up three more households in Seattle for delivery across the country.

After having people tromp in and out of the house all day, it took Jeannette and Tami Mueller (and Jordan, Phillip and me to some small extent) until 3:00 to clean the place up. We had hoped to take off for Nampa, Idaho by 11 in the morning. Not a good start to a cross-country trip!

Through Eastern Oregon, we did see some nice scenery, most notably the stunning lake scene below . . .

When I drove to Nampa in June, I noticed this huge slide in Burns, Oregon, and thought we would have to stop on our way through town . . .
It's clearly from another era, when lawsuits didn't drive the design of playground equipment . . .

We didn't arrive at Eric and Kim Forseth's home until midnight. (I am discovering that Yahoo! maps drive time estimates are woefully understated when traveling with four kids in two vehicles.) Eric graciously gave us the entry codes, we snuck in through the garage and put ourselves to bed.

The next day, we drove to Rexburg, Idaho. On the way, Jeannette wanted to see Idaho Falls in Idaho Falls. Having lived the last seven years in Klamath Falls, which has no falls, I was skeptical . . . On our way to Rexburg, the ABS and brake warning lights came on in the Durango, so I spent three hours on Thursday morning sitting in a Dodge dealership while I waited to find out that it was just a worn out sensor that needs to be replaced. We took off for Yellowstone shortly before noon. If I have time, I'll post some of those pictures tomorrow.

The Long and Winding Road

Yesterday was quite the journey. It started at 4:45 AM as I packed up the last of my TUFW dorm room, put the mattresses back on the beds, tucked my extra suitcases in an empty office in Admissions and awaited the arrival of Chantler Thompson, chauffeur to the stars, at 5:30. He arrived promptly and we took off through the cornfields and small towns of north central Indiana, headed for the airport in South Bend . . . where I was scheduled for a 2:14 PM flight to Chicago. Yes, you read that right.

Our objective was to catch an earlier flight to Chicago, then hope to catch another flight ahead of schedule and finally, beat the odds to catch a third flight at an earlier time and thus get to Medford before 10:30 at night.

To make a long story short, I could not make the first South Bend flight but did make the next one. In Chicago, it took me four tries but I got onto the last flight that would have done me any good, whereupon we sat at the gate for forty minutes while an unruly passenger was removed and a late-arriving passenger in a wheelchair was accomodated. We landed in San Francisco at 5:30, at the gate next to the one for the 6:00 flight to Medford, again the last one that would do me any good. I was able to get on and 90 minutes later, walked into the Medford airport just as the kids themselves arrived. After the obligatory stop at Old Navy (as we have not yet wrapped our minds around the fact that there are actually stores and malls in Fort Wayne), I pulled into my old driveway at about 10:30, a mere twenty hours after starting my trek.

It was great to see Jeannette and the kids . . . and, surprisingly, MelodyJoy didn't even punish me for abandoning her for a month. It was wonderful to get her hugs again.

Hawk Nelson

Tonight was the Faith Night Baseball Tour at the Fort Wayne Wizards game, with Hawk Nelson as the headliners. Since TUFW was one of the sponsors for the game, I got a free ticket and ventured out to the ol' ballpark. The concert started at 5:30 with The Send, who I had never heard of. They were fairly good.

Several hundred people--maybe over 500--were in the crowd by the time Hawk Nelson, one of my favorite bands, came on but I was only about 15 yards from the stage. My ears are still ringing.

The lead singer looks like Jeannette's brother, Scott, when he's getting ready to go on an undercover drug bust. He needs to try the faux-hawk look.
He did a good job fronting the band, though his main shtick was kind of staggering around the stage acting like he was surprised to see everyone there. It was cute, cool and funny for the first two songs and then it was just lame. He needs to expand his repertoire. He was good overall.

The funnest moment in the show was when he invited a guy with a Canadians' hockey jersey up on stage, borrowed his shirt and let him play kazoo with the band.
One thing nice about a concert with a band that has only produced two CDs is that you usually know all the songs they play. Though they did cover a song by The Cars.

I only stayed for three innings and then came back to campus. When I left the park, there was still a huge line waiting for Hawk Nelson autographs.

PICTURES FROM HOME!!

Today I got an e-mail from Phillip with pictures from home, my first ones in over two weeks. Oh happy day! So I will share with you, not being the selfish sort . . .

Tough Guy

Cover Girl

Blowing Bubbles with Aunt Laura

Jameson's Funky New Glasses

Jeannette's Trendy New Glasses

Felipe and His Sis

Jordan Tearing Apart Our House

Melody Helps Pack

The Gift of Encouragement

First, my apologies for the lack of photos . . . frankly, the scenery here sans MelodyJoy and the rest of the family just isn't that attractive right now. Consider yourself lucky that I'm not coating this blog with self-portraits.

A couple weeks ago, I had lunch with an old friend, Jeff Berggren from Huntington University, and a new friend, John Paff, who also works there and whose kids attend Blackhawk Christian School. They told me about one of their colleagues, Lance Clark, who lives just a few doors down from our new place and whose kids also are at Blackhawk.

Tonight, I stopped by the house to check on the backyard's dimensions and decided to drop in on Lance and his wife, Mary. When someone opens the door to a stranger and before you can say a thing, the first words from his mouth are, "Hi, I'm Lance!" two possible thoughts go through your mind . . .

• Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.
• This guy's pretty friendly.

Okay, a third thought is "Gee, I hope this guy isn't psycho." And a fourth: "If this guy's so nice, maybe I can con him into shoveling my driveway."

Anyway, both Lance and Mary gave me such a warm welcome and spoke so positively about the school, the church, the neighborhood that I left feeling incredibly encouraged. It was great to get a taste of what may await us as we settle into our new home and neighborhood and I hope we'll have many more opportunities to spend time with them and their daughters.

Whew!

Well, it's been a long week or so since the home inspector checked out our new home and reported that the roof needed to be replaced soon and he suspected radon gas in the basement--a suspicion that turned out to be true. After getting several estimates and going back-and-forth with the seller, we finally arrived at an agreement tonight. Tomorrow I'll submit the final page of the sales agreement addendum and we'll be done! It feels good to actually know what our address will be.

Now, if we can just get the movers to tell us when they'll deliver our stuff here! Oh, and sell that house in Klamath Falls. Sigh.

Video of the Chiswell House

If you're not Jeannette, you probably won't care about these videos, so just scroll on to the next post. If you are Jeannette, these will show you more of our new house, though not as professionally or attractively as the realtor.com "tour" did.

The front of the house and the first floor (the longest video) . . .


The second floor of the house . . .


The basement of the house . . .


The backyard. You'll get a view of the roof in this one. It did not pass the inspection so now we have to deal with that issue, but from just looking at it from the ground, it looks like it's in fine shape!


After we toured the house this time, we also went over to the rec center. This video is just of the pool area but the "golf course" and clubhouse are right there, too.

Prison Cell 104

Okay, I'll admit it . . . I'm feeling sorry for myself. It's Friday night and I'm holed up in my dorm room, RH104. I had a meeting that took up most of today so I ended up working past five and the next thing I knew, it was almost 9:00. I looked out my office window and thought, "Why is it getting dark outside so early?"

So I returned to Ramseyer Hall and heated up a Banquet microwaveable pot pie for dinner, then settled in with my only friend here, my laptop. Ah, woe is me!

Actually, this is my new laptop and I think it's going to work well for me. It's not set up completely yet to meet my needs but we'll get that done on Monday. I'm pretty happy with it. I enjoyed looking at some of my YouTube videos of MelodyJoy and the boys tonight.

This has been an interesting week . . .

On Tuesday, I was on my way to the house to meet the guy who was inspecting it and then to the bank to meet with our lender. About halfway there, cruising along at about 40 MPH on Lake Avenue, it felt like I had hit something. I looked in the mirror, thinking I must have clipped a mailbox or something. Nothing seemed amiss from that view but clearly something had happened. I quickly pulled into the driveway for the Catholic Cemetery and got out. My front right tire was flat, with a four inch gash in the side and the rim was bent. The good news is that one of TUFW's maintenance guys, JT, jumped in his truck and drove out to change it for me so I could get on my way without a huge delay or getting too sweaty and dirty. By the next day, I had a new tire on the car.

I found out the next day that Jeannette hit a deer at highway speeds this week while driving home from Albany. Fortunately, no one got hurt and (she tells me) the damage to the truck is very minor. So I guess both of those automotive incidents are bad news, good news types of events.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I spent all day in a Chancellor's Cabinet retreat for TUFW. Before you get a picture in your mind of us retreating at some resort in the hills of Indiana (what hills?), let me tell you that this "retreat" was in a conference room at a local church. But we did get all the mixed nuts, mini-peanut butter cups and diet soda we could handle. The retreat went very well, I thought. Frankly, it was exciting to be a part of substantive issues and to feel like [1] I was able to make a contribution and [2] people actually were listening to me. It was refreshing. There are some harsh realities that we must deal with but I think we are heading in the right direction. To a significant extent, it largely boils down to building TUFW's enrollment. Break out the Rolaids. Actually, it doesn't have me too stressed. As Dr. Kilty has said a couple of times, God didn't disrupt our lives to bring us to Fort Wayne and let us fail.

Today, Dr. Kilty and I drove to Upland to meet with Taylor University's president, Gene Habecker, and my counterpart on the main campus, Steve Mortland. This was my first encounter with Dr. Habecker (which should give you some idea of how autonomous the TUFW campus is, when they can fill a key position like mine without even involving the president of the university). Naturally, I was a little bit nervous, just wanting to make a good first impression. The president's take on things was pretty much what I had anticipated but I was especially pleased to see how much Steve and I appear to be on the same page. Over the course of our two hour meeting, I think we made some ginormous strides that will strengthen the university as a whole, the main campus in Upland and TUFW. It was a huge encouragement to me.

Nothing much planned for the weekend. Tomorrow, I am invited to dinner at Sharon's house. Sharon is the assistant to me and to our director of admissions. She and her husband live on a farm about five miles from our house. It'll be a nice break to have a home-cooked meal. And, for the record, Sharon would want me to let everyone know that she has invited me to visit her church. ;-)

Random Musings and Remarks from Fort Wayne

I've probably spent more time by myself in the last two weeks than I usually do in two months, which leads to plenty of opinions, day dreams and reactions. A few for you . . .

• You can waste a lot of time on Facebook if you're not careful.
• It seems like almost everyone in Fort Wayne has a big screen TV. The dorm I'm in even has one hanging on the wall. It's easy to lust after a 50" plasma but is it really a necessity? At $1000+ . . . I'm thinking "no." And at this moment, perched on a couch twelve feet away from the screen, I'd trade it for a regular old 24" TV with a remote!
• Speaking of television, I'm watching Al Gore's big Live Earth concert. With the exception of Madonna--who is awesome tonight--it's been pretty boring so far. But they have used up a lot of energy telling us how we shouldn't waste energy.
• My initial impression that the people of Fort Wayne are very nice still stands. They seem friendly and approachable. (I love talking to Gabby and Elizabeth who clean the offices in my building at TUFW. They are from El Salvador.)
• Still, I've been a little surprised that no one has gone out of their way to invite me to visit their church or anything. Tomorrow I'm planning to check out two churches near our new house.
• I still feel like there's no other job I'd rather have than this one.
• This is definitely going to be the most diverse city that we have lived in as a family. I'll be a little interested to see how the kids respond to such racial diversity. Of course, I guess our family itself is a little diverse. What's caught me by surprise at times, though, is the diversity ethnically . . . at the fast food Chinese restaurant where I had dinner last night, I was thrown off when the white girl behind the counter pronounced "broccoli" with a distinctly different accent ("bro-cali").
• Jeannette would be proud of me . . . I'm trying eat halfway healthy, even if it costs a little more.
• The family is going to eat up the activities here . . . a Target within five minutes of home, Red Lobster ten minutes away, dozens of movie screens, at least two really nice malls, a zoo, Fazoli's, minor league baseball. After seven years of living hours away from such conveniences, I bet it's going to be an easy adjustment.
• One of the malls, Jefferson Pointe, is an outdoor mall like what you would find in SoCal. Not sure how that works in December here! Last night, I stopped there to eat and it took me ten minutes to find a parking place. Not a good parking spot, mind you . . . any spot. It was packed out for a free concert.
• For such a big city, it's not too hard to get around. Working with only a little, photocopied map of Fort Wayne, I've been able to make my way around with little difficulty. The streets do curve and change names and some are one way, so that's a pain, but we'll get used to it.
• This is called the City of Churches and rightfully so. There are at least five within five minutes of our house, plus a big Christian bookstore and coffee house. Moreover, many of the churches are eye-catching. While my experience is limited, I think the churches are more beautiful than any I've seen all in one place.
• Banks are open on Saturdays here. Everyone thought I was weird because I thought that was weird.
• Gas prices seem to really bounce around here. When I arrive last week, they were in the low two eighties and now they are almost three bucks a gallon. Arggh.
• I still hate sales tax.
• Family is important. I do pretty well, really, when I'm on my own but there's not much point to working and living without having family to share it with.
• Friday night, I saw an older couple (i.e., older than us) walking with a little Chinese girl in their arms. She looked to be only ten months old or so. I followed them around until they went to their car.
• Okay, we've seen that God probably delayed the sale of our house in order to influence which home we would end up with here. Now that He's made that point, what's keeping it from selling now?!
• What did we do before cell phones?
• I have never slept so poorly for so long. Regardless of what the day has been like, what time I go to bed, what I've been doing, it is taking me an hour or more to get to sleep. Two nights ago, at about 2 AM, I pulled the other mattress onto the floor. It seems to help a little . . . but last night I found a pea underneath it, so that may explain all my tossing and turning.
• I visited a small church today and the people were very friendly. When they sang "There's within my heart a melody" and, at the end, "This is the day the Lord has made" (which we used for the recessional at our wedding), I thought perhaps it was meant to be for us to attend there. But then they announced that their youth pastor was leaving and I just find it hard to believe it's going to meet the needs of our family.
• I went back to the Panda Grill Chinese buffet today for lunch. A family came in with two Chinese girls. I struck up a conversation with them and learned that they attend Blackhawk Church, which is certain to be one of the churches we'll try. They live in one of the subdivisions that I considered in househunting and their daughters will be in 2nd and 6th grades this year (the same as Jameson). They also told me that the church hosts a Chinese school where kids can learn Mandarin.

Going, Going, Gone!

We have a house! Our offer on the Chiswell Run house was accepted today! I'm very excited, especially because [1] the seller agreed to close on August 1 and give us occupancy the same day and [2] the price we paid was almost $20,000 less than they were asking when I first looked at it in early May.

Now, who wants to buy a beautiful house in Klamath Falls from us???

Fence Buildin' Boys

Phillip sent me a 4th of July gift today . . . an e-mail with pictures of Jordan and him building our backyard fence last week and a video of MelodyJoy singing the B-I-B-L-E. Here are some of the photos he sent . . .

Measure twice, cut once, Phillip.

Jordan drills down.

Say good-bye to your beloved barbed wire fence, Dad.

Okay, I'll admit it . . . this fence looks way better than the old one. I'm very proud of you guys, Jordan and Felipe. Thanks for your good work.

We Have a Winner (We Hope)

Well, we may be nearing the end of the househunting journey. I sure hope so. As has already been reported, I spent about eight hours on Saturday looking at about ten or twelve house, narrowing our list down to four finalists.

Last night, I went back and visited each one on my own. This turned out to be an extremely helpful exercise as it gave me a much better idea of drive times and the neighborhoods. At each house, I walked the surrounding streets. I was able to get a better sense of the area. For instance, for the Greythorn home, I realized that the neighborhood was a little isolated and that many of the homes were kind of "bare" with regard to trees.

In any case, I narrowed it down to two places . . . the two that really have been at the top of our list since I came out to look at houses in May: Oakbriar and Chiswell Run.

This afternoon, our realtor and I visited those two homes again and really looked at them in great detail. First we went to Oakbriar. Again, it struck me as just very beautiful and classy. There really was nothing at all wrong with it. By comparison, my second look at the Harbour Bay house just exposed a lot of faults in it and showed it wasn't a good value. (Turned out that it didn't matter anyway as we learned today that it is ready to go into foreclosure and so it's not an option because banks don't respond to offers very fast.) The neighborhood again seemed very nice and I even got to talk to some of our potential neighbors. In other words, we drove away thinking that it was still a very viable choice.

From there we went to the Chiswell Run house. When I visited there last night, I was reminded that it is on a fairly busy, narrow neighborhood street . . . not like a city street but not as quiet as the other homes. But I also took time to walk some of the walkways that crisscross the neighborhood behind and between all the houses. (One weird thing . . . the house behind us has four dogs but they all have really hoarse barks, like they've had their vocal cords removed or something.) Anyway, it's a very different type of setting when compared to other places we've lived. There were lots of kids out playing in their backyards and riding bikes on the paths and adults sitting on back decks and mowing their lawns. Jeannette had said that this was really appealing to her but until I walked around, I didn't get it myself.

Touring the house today, it wasn't as pristine and perfect as Oakbriar but it was very nice. Interestingly, while there are a few more "rough spots" in this house--little things that ought to be touched up to make them "right"--I don't think we would have to spend any money to get it ready to move in while the Oakbriar could require some new carpeting.

Well, Chiswell is the choice. Basically, it boiled down to several things:

• It is very close to Blackhawk Christian School (about a seven minute drive) and not too far from TUFW (20 minutes max). There have to be at least ten churches within ten minutes, too, to choose from.
• The walkways are really cool.
• At the risk of sounding like a senior citizen prematurely, I realized that if we end up staying in this house for 20 or 30 years, it could be very nice to have everything we would need on the main floor of the house so that we didn't have to worry about stairs.
• Theoretically, we might be able to expand the half-bath on the main floor to a full bath.

The capper, though, was the neighborhood association itself. I knew that there were recreation facilities and stuff but hadn't seen them and didn't expect them to amount to much. Well, we looked around a bit and it turns out that the association has a number of tennis courts, a nine-hole par 3 golf course, two swimming pools and a wading pool, and a clubhouse with pool tables, racquetball courts and a room where events can be held.

When Jeannette told me there were two pools, I was kind of like "yeah, a couple of plain ol' pools behind a chainlink fence, whatever." I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the pool area. It was staffed with two or three lifeguards plus a couple other workers (Jordan, maybe you can get a job there someday!) and the pools are very nice. One has competition lanes and two diving boards. There are lounge chairs around the pools. So while I personally really couldn't care less about swimming pools, they are something that the rest of the family will really use and enjoy . . . at least for the three months or so that they're open each year. So the pools kind of "sealed the deal" for me.

We put together an offer tonight and the seller has until noon on Thursday to respond. The Oakbriar house is still a great option if Chiswell doesn't work out, but I'm pretty excited about this place.

Now . . . to sell our house in Oregon . . .