The Beginning of Year Fourteen

Four years goes by so fast, doesn't it?

Four years ago today, I wrote a blog post I titled "The Beginning of Year Ten" and the title then (as does the title now) referred to the beginning of a new year for me at Fast Cash, my current job where I'm office manager. Technically it would have been yesterday -- Thursday, September 18, 2003 -- that I actually started with my current employer Dakota Pawn in Minot, North Dakota because I worked my first day at our main office and the following two days (Friday and Saturday, back when Fast Cash was open on Saturdays) training with Mike who was the office manager here then. I must admit, I'm glad to still be here, and sometimes surprised!


Human beings never stop being human beings, no matter their credo, their ethic, their salvation.


A few weeks ago I was looking over that entry and wrote down a few epiphanies. Oh, I keep most everything I write saved but I don't necessarily read it again and again. I once had a family member look at me like I was crazy when I said I've kept a written (yes, in addition to this blog roll you're reading from I also keep a handwritten journal; done that since mid-1992) journal for why, in something like his words, would anyone want to remember their past? To paraphrase Henry Jones Sr. from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, I write things down so I don't HAVE to remember them.


Hence the reason we're asked to emulate someone, for we can only admire ourselves so much.True, it's sometimes more painful looking back on it. But regarding our weekend, I didn't bring Sarah and Jeffrey to Breakfast with the Boys this past Saturday because we could honestly use the rest. I pray that Martha is learning to, pardon the pun, husband hers because she's agreed to help open on Saturdays now at five thirty in the morning. After she came home in the afternoon with a sore on her foot -- it's never fun watching her walk with a limp -- we brought Jeffrey to his friend Jackson's birthday party that he'd been invited to. While that was going on in the back room of Gorilla Games at Dakota Square Mall, Martha, Sarah, and I went to Applebee's where we hadn't been in a while.


I strongly urge you to try the butcher's meat.


Sarah also had her first steak that I recall. She ate it but wasn't overly impressed by it. Friday she got back her travel brochure for Tenochtitlan the Aztec capital I referred to last week and she was especially anxious about. She got a perfect grade on it; she wasn't the chosen "tour guide", but we're proud she did an awesome job! She and Jeffrey were also in carol choir singing at church Sunday morning and had their first Sunday school class -- the non-family one -- of the year, with an all new curriculum. Oh, the Bible stories are still there, it seems though the bells and whistles won't be.

The puppets, the buzzers, and the cooking that is. So I hear.


I took time off from teaching this year because quite honestly I'd like to get in more on the business of the church or find out what's going on other than in one aspect of it. So in between cups of coffee and refilling everyone's cup, I was listening to Nick, a visiting delegate from the Western North Dakota Synod we're part of explaining where the percentage of our church offering (about three percent) we send to synod actually goes in terms of social programs and other improvements in mission fields throughout the world. It was also New Member Sunday where we formally inducted between the two morning services fifteen people! One of them was returning to Bethany, the church where she'd been married in 1949. Martha and I got married there in 2003, and two months after that I started at Fast Cash.


Since then it's really been an adventure,


David