It's been one of those weeks that seems like there's been a lot of activity but not much got done.

The kid posted a 7-minute mile at track practice on Monday. On Tuesday, during sprint practice, it was confirmed that the Kid is the fastest sprinter on the team. Granted, it's not a very large team, but he was pleased to feel like there is finally something he is the best at.

We had a parent meeting with the track coach on Friday. We were told that if he wears underarmor for a meet, depending on the referee, he may be asked to take it off. I'm not sure what underarmor is. When I ran track in 8th...

I was up at 5 on Sunday morning, making a breakfast casserole for the church next door to serve at their Easter breakfast. A breakfast which, after the last time I ate there, I didn't attend.

This morning, I'll be at the St. Lawrence County Hospice's annual meeting and breakfast. It's at the Presbyterian church, and it's catered. I've been on the Hospice board of directors for a year now. My first term was 1 year, filling in for someone who had to quit. It's been a good year, so I'm staying on for another full 3-year term. I got involved with Hospice a few years ago when they contacted me abou...

It's Holy Week, for those of us in church land. It starts with Palm Sunday, then it's quiet for a few days. Thursday and Friday both involve special church services. Sunday is Easter. And April Fool's day: the weather report is calling for light snow, so the joke's on us.

On Monday, I changed the church sign for the occasion. The sign has changeable letters on both sides, so people can see the message from both directions. It took 2 tries. On the first attempt I switched two letters on one side so it read "EATSER WORSHIP". One of the church ladies pointed it out to Brooke. I got it right on th...

When I picked the kid up from school on Tuesday, he told me he had had "an incident".

"Oh? Had an incident?" I said.

In second period, during tech class, he had been standing in the classroom listening to instructions when all of a sudden he felt a little dizzy, and his hearing became muffled, and his vision got blurry. His friend took him to the nurse's office. On the way, he stopped at a drinking fountain. By the time they got to the nurse's office, the spell had passed, but he stayed there lying down on the cot for about 10 minutes before getting up and going back to class. He said he still...

After last week's spring cleaning winter set in again. Tuesday night into Wednesday morning dropped just over a foot of snow and bought us a school snow day.

Our old friend, Regina Haag, came for a visit on Sunday and managed to get out before the snow started on Tuesday. When we lived in Glens Falls, we got together frequently, along with her husband, Dennis, and son, Andy. Then we moved north, and they have since moved south, to Old Chatham, NY. We'll take a turn to travel and make a trip down there for a day or two in April, during the school's "spring break" week.

Between things, I managed...

It's been a spring cleaning week, even though we've had snow nearly every day. (Here in the far reaches of northern New York, it's not been the kind of snow that has made the news. Just a couple inches of wet slushy mess.)

So vacuuming, laundry, making runs to the bottle return, scrubbing down counter-tops, dusting all the horizontal surfaces. We would have used the wet mop, except that the mop head needed replacing and they change the mops every year or so in order to make sure the new mop heads will not work on the old mop poles; the replacement mop head we had on hand was useless, so we'll ...

On Tuesday I got an invitation to become a contributor to the Beans Wordpress Theme project. A mentor and friend, Tonya Mork, is one of the project leads, asked if I'd be interested. In spite of the odd name, Beans is something that has been on my list of things to look into. The invitation gave me the excuse I needed to do it, and to put another notch in my website development belt at the same time.

When I got the invitation to join the project I thought there would be a large crew working on the project. It turns out there are only 5 other contributors, all of whom are people I have looked u...

This week was "Winter Break Week". School was out. It was also the first full week of Lent, which for pastors means additional mid-week church happenings. So, while several of the kid's friends were off on week-long vacations -- warmer places like the Dominican Republic -- we remained close to home.

On Monday, the one day when neither Brooke or I had to be in town, we took a day trip to Syracuse. We left mid morning and got into town in time for lunch at the Dinosaur Barbeque. Then Wegman's. And for the afternoon we caught the 3:15 showing of The Black Panther on the IMAX screen.

Black Panther...

Wednesday, Valentines Day, my mother called to remind me that she'd ordered us bagels from the bagel shop down the street. These, in lieu of the traditional box of sugar cookies that usually comes a day or two before minor holidays. We're not complaining. The bagel shop makes great bagels, and they came with two different flavors of cream cheese spread. In all, we made out like bandits. Of course, we've been eating them every morning since, and they're gone. So it was glorious, but short lived. Thanks, mom!

Wednesday was also Ash Wednesday. It's the first time I remember the two coinciding. Fo...

My picture was in the paper this week. Since the beginning of the year, I've been getting out more.

When I'm not out more, I've been reading more. This week I read Orwell's 1984. It's been on my list for more than a year, but it's never on the shelf at the library. Somehow or another I got to pick a few free books on the Kindle app and 1984 was one of the options. So I even got to read it for free. The irony is having read it on the Kindle, so Amazon knows what I've been reading. Orwell predicted Big Brother. What we got instead is Big Data.

I'm not worried about Amazon having a record of what...