Moving

Don't worry. I'm staying in Kokomo for now. But I pretty much don't use this thing anymore. I've moved most of my activities to Facebook and Twitter. paulweavertweet The thing that I'm thinking I'll like about twitter is using being able to use my phone to do it and people will be able to get text updates when I do use it.

Backpacking

I've spent the last two weeks backpacking in Kentucky. First week was with guys. Second with girls. What a difference. I'm really tired. I sprained my right ankle about 4 miles into the first trip. It's still swollen. I have about 10 chigger bites. It's very good to be home.

Where have I been

I haven't posted in forever. I'd say I'm sorry but I'm really not. I've spent almost all of my time online looking for a newer car. I want someone to sell me a $50,000 car for $5,000. I exagerrate but not by much. So let's see what did May hold? I ran a half marathon and wanted to die afterwards. I met my goal of running the whole time but was pretty slow. I also took Colleen to Carb Day down at the track. We had a good time. She still loves cars. This month has two backpacking trips and possibly a short mission trip for our college students. Oh and I need to find a car.

Myrtle Beach

We made our usual trip down to Myrtle Beach. Steph's uncle has added a hot tub and it's a great addition. We play Man O War golf course. Plenty of water means plenty of lost balls. There were back to back island greens. Laura cracked me up. She really knows how to play her dad. She wanted to go putt putting. I asked her why trying to talk her out of it. She said "It's a tradition". So we went putt putting. It was a little cool but we had to go to the beach. I found a really awesome sharks tooth while I was wading in the water. I have to convince people that I found it. It's so cool they think I bought it somewhere.

And of course here are pictures of girls at the beach.

Ugh

So I ran today trying to get ready for the mini. I am way off of my training because of being sick. I ran 10 miles. I wanted to quit after 6. Luckily I ran way out in the country so I would have to make it home. Then after 7 miles it hurt again and I wanted to quit again. 8 was a little better. 9 was awful. I got home and hurt bad. My stomach hurt so I thought maybe it was because I was thirsty. I drank some lemonade. Then I ate some watermelon. Neither of those helped. I took a bath and then a shower and everything felt better except for my stomach. Then about an hour and a half after I got back from running I threw up. I feel better now. I'm worried about getting 13 miles in in a couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll make it.

Day off

I went golfing for the first time this year yesterday. The very first shot from the first tee went up nicely and then started to slice. It flew across the road and then hit a house. That's a great start. I also did our taxes yesterday. When I was all the way finished Steph pointed out that I had used 2007 forms for the Michigan taxes. Nothing like feeling like you're finished and then seeing you have to start over.

I'm finally feeling better

It's been a long week but I'm finally feeling better. I'm nervous about how much this may have knocked me back running wise. I hope I'll be ok. I had a weird episode at the hospital today. I almost passed out. I was there visiting a guy from church and almost went down. I had to sit down for a while. After I regained myself I had a weird line across my vision for about a half hour afterwards. I think I'm going to be ok. Weird.

Sick

I've been sick all week. It feels like someone is squeezing my lungs only I can't cough anything out and it doesn't feel like there's anything in there to cough out. This isn't good timing for the mini. I needed the runs this week. I was going to do a 9 miler. I hope it doesn't set me back too far.

Genius

I'm tired of hearing all the politicians and people upset with the bonuses at AIG. Why do they assume that if you take a company that is making bad decisions and failing and give it billions of dollars that all of a sudden they will make wise decisions? You don't fix any problems by throwing money at them. If anything you encourage the wrong behavior by taking away the consequences.

I ran 4 miles yesterday. I'm going to try 8 on Thursday.

17.4%

The unemployment rate in Kokomo is now 17.4%. That's crazy. People need to start buying Chryslers again or something.

7 miles

I did 7 miles today. I had to stop a couple of times. Once I saw a friend from church and I had to talk to him for a couple of minutes. The other time was on the way home and I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I didn't know if I'd make it home. So I stopped at the church. I felt pretty good. I think I could have done the 7 miles without having to stop. And yes daylight savings time does give me another hour. That's why there's global warming. The sun is up an extra hour every day. If we'd just get rid of daylight savings time we wouldn't have to worry about any of that.

4 miles

I ran 4 miles yesterday. I had a huge lunch a few hours before and felt like I needed to burp the entire time. It was miserable. I was slow but I didn't stop the entire time. Wednesday or Thursday I think I'm going to try for 6. Tonight I'll use the elliptical if I have time. I probably won't get home until after 9 though. I have a counseling appointment at 5. The girls school world's fair after that and then a school concert thing at 7:30 that some youth group kids are in. Not much time for running in there.

5 miles

I'm sitting on the back porch. I love our back porch. Well I used to. When we moved in last May or so there was only 2 dogs in this neighborhood. And both were well behaved inside dogs. Now we have 7. And 2 are very loud and 1 keeps jumping the fence into our yard and barking at us from our own yard. That is really bothering me. I went over and talked to the owner and hopefully they do something about it.

I ran 5 miles today. I walked half a mile in the middle but made up for it at the end. So I went 5.5 miles. I've got a long ways to go before I'm ready for the mini and I'm running out of time. I have to make it though or I'll let Dan down. I'm hoping that the time change will make it easier to find time at the end of the day.

Running

Running hasn't been great lately. It's been really hard to find time for it. I ran 4 miles Wednesday. I used the elliptical yesterday. Running isn't something I really look forward to right now. Maybe as the weather gets warmer and the sun stays up longer I'll start to enjoy it more. I hope. I have the mini to get ready for.

Two Love Stories

I came home last night from youth group and Steph was watching the end of Amazing Race. I still think it would be a fun show to be a part of. My dad and I or Tobin and I could do ok at it. So I saw the elimination part of the show. A husband wife team was being eliminated and you could tell the husband really didn't want to be eliminated. He was crying. Apparently the wife made a bad mistake that led to their elimination. His reaction was awesome. “I couldn’t imagine running the race with anyone but Linda. If anybody in this world has got my back, it’s her. When you get down to the root of it, we’re deeply in love.” She said, “The thing I love about Steve is how much he loves me. I’m really fortunate to have somebody like that. That doesn’t come along every day.” I was very impressed. Today I saw a link to this story and the again I was impressed. Check this out. It's good to hear these stories.

More love

So I've been continuing my study on love. You already know I was looking at God's love and I John says it great when it says "God is love". So anyways I think God loves loving. More even than I can understand. Ephesians 3:18. I love football. I love food. Because I love those things so much I'm always trying to convince people that I love to enjoy those things with me. I want them to enjoy those things as much as I do. I think because of God's love for love and for us he wants us to be able to love as well. God knows that if we try it we will enjoy it. So one of the things it's talking about in Genesis when it says we're made in his image is the ability to love. I firmly believe that love involves a choice. We have to choose to love something. We also have to have the choice not to love it. People can choose not to love football. Many people choose not to like bratwurst. I choose to love my wife. If I was forced to love my wife then it wouldn't really be love. I think God wants us to really enjoy love and so he gives us the choice. He knows that if we choose love we will enjoy it all the more. So when he gave us the ability to choose to sin, he did it out of his love for us. He knew that it is so much better for us to choose love instead of sin. But for it to really be love we had to choose it over something else.

Love

Hey I'm working on some lessons again. So here's some of my thoughts. I John 4:8 says "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love". I hate when the Bible uses words like "does not know God". I want to know God. So I need to make sure I don't fall into that category. So I think this is a serious question. Do I love? I've started studying love to find out if I do it. In order to understand love I'm looking at the perfect example of love. Since it says that God is love I need to study him and his love. I want to learn more about how to love him as well. So the first place I landed was Romans 5:8. "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." I started thinking about why God made us in the first place. I'd always said it was so we'd love him. The Westminster Catechism says it is to bring God glory. I think maybe it's different than that. I think maybe it's because God is so full of love that he wanted an outlet. Beings that are full of love never run out of things to love. God wanted something to pour out his love on. So he created us. He always knew that he would. He always knew that we'd break his heart. But he created us to love anyways. And he loved in such a selfless way that he died for us. "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins". I John 4:10 Crud. The more I study love the more selfless it looks. I don't do many selfless things. I show love a lot of the time to get love back. Which I guess isn't really love from me at all.

The Super Bowl

I love a good game. That was a ton of fun to watch. I am disappointed that they didn't review the fumble at the end of the game. I think if you have review then you have to use it at such a crucial spot. I think the review ref dropped the ball on that one. We had about 70 people watch the game with us. Well they started watching the game. A good chunk of them ended up in the gym messing around before the game was over. There was a bunch of food. The sad thing is now we have to wait until fall for football again.

The knee update

I ran 4 miles today. It's the first time I've run since my knee went funny. Partly because of the knee, partly because of the snow, and the rest because of the busy schedule. We had back to back weekends with youth retreats. We also had a state pastors and wives retreat that felt much more like a conference than a retreat. But anyways you're probably wondering how the knee held up. It was snowy and slippery. My shoes kept gathering snow under the ball of my feet making it really awkward. But the knee felt fine. It was very encouraging.

Ouch

I think I've had my worst week running. Monday was snowy so I went to the YMCA to run on a treadmill. I only had a short time to run so I could watch the girls while Steph went to praise team practice. When I got there every treadmill was taken. When I finally got on I noticed that there is a half hour limit to the treadmill. Lot's of people were breaking the rules but I felt like I should follow the rules. Maybe that has something to do with me being on a free 2 week pass. I can't run 6 miles in half an hour. So I only ended up getting 3 in. I decided to make up for it on Tuesday. I wanted to run 5 miles. My route was shorter than I though and I only ran about 4. I felt lousy enough I didn't extend the route. Thursday I was supposed to run 8 miles. I wasn't hating the thought which is weird. But then when I started I got what James and I call tree trunk legs. It feels like you are just swinging tree trunks that are attatched to your body. It's just crazy heavy legs. Sometimes I can run through it sometimes I can't. I decided I was going to run through it on Thursday. However during my third mile something went wrong in my knee. I could barely walk much less run. I tried a little of both on the way back to the jeep but the pain was awful. It started to hurt again really bad after I went to bed. This morning I woke up figuring I was just a wimp but I went to shovel an old widow's driveway and it really hurts when I use it as a plant to lift heavy snow. I'll give it a few days off and try again Monday. But this has been a pretty bad running week.

This one's for you Burrill

This weekend we took the youth group up to Lake Ann Camp for a winter retreat. The snow was plentiful and beautiful. I like snow, up there. Unfortunately, right now we have it down here and it's messing with my running. Anyways, while we were up there we took a group to The Homestead to do some skiing. I haven't skied in years. But I had a ton of fun. I stayed away from the black diamonds but did everything else. I even caught some air off of a mogul I didn't see and landed it. One of the other youth leaders saw me and thought I did it on purpose. The view of Lake Michigan from the top of the hill is beautiful. The wind was cold and strong enough that it hurt my face. But besides that we had a great time. I need to catch up on some sleep so I can do a Jr. High Retreat next weekend. Woohoo.

Internet

It's back. I'll try to post more often now that we have wireless again. We're laying in front of the fireplace right now. School let out early and everything at church was cancelled today because of the snow. It's been a really nice evening. Does anybody still check this thing? Sorry I was away for so long.