Some people say that I “love Windows”

I don’t know if I shared this one before or not. But a while back one of the guys around here had too much time on his hands and redid our photo that we keep here on the blog:

Just for the record: I have found pros and cons to all the operating systems I work with and yes, I own a Mac but I run more than just the Mac OS on it.

More family arrived

More family has arrived. Krista’s sister, her husband and three girls all arrived yesterday. We now can say we have a full house. Two of our nieces we have never met before so it is exciting getting to know them. Alex and his oldest cousin have been having a blast playing together and running around playing dress up. This morning they were dressed up as king and queen when Alex told her:

Above is Alex holding his newest cousin: she’s only 2 1/2 months old.

The old Desiderius Erasmus saying…

Women, can’t live with them, can’t live without them

Yesterday we were in Basel and went to the church where Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus was buried (that’s his tombstone pictured to the right – all in Latin of course). He was the one responsible for the quote above. Here in Germany, a friend told me of a similar phrase:

Die Frauen sind zu mir gleich die Luft aber ich muss immer die Luft atmen

(please forgive my German here – I’m trying to remember what was said). Anyway, for those that don’t know German and for those that do and are saying to yourselves – WHAT? This is translated (or should be in English) - “Women to me are like the air (i.e. “nothing”) but I must always breathe the air.”

As men, I guess we should never forget the importance of women in our lives (wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, etc) as it seems we usually forget the importance of air.

Twinkle in Matt’s Eye

Just found this old Photoshop play time I did about a month ago and thought I would share. This is a picture of a friend of mine with his wife reflected in his eye. I was working on my “cutting people out” technique. I still have a lot to learn.

A Toilet to Stand Up For

Above you see a traditional Ukrainian toilet. No, you don’t sit on it! This is how most of the public restrooms are here and honestly, it took me a while to figure out HOW to use them and I’m still not able to really USE them. Unfortunately, I get a leg cramp.

Thank you to all of you who prayed for our eLC Directors Conference that eDOT sponsored this last weekend. There was a great exchange of ideas and it was awesome to get updates from many of the elearning centers and hear more about how God is using their computer ministries within their communities. I hope to share more of these stories later.

Half of our team left today and returned to Germany. There are three of us still in Ukraine as we are working on installing a new configuration of an eLC. In the past, our eLCs have been either all Linux based or part Windows and part Linux. This new configuration is an all Windows based configuration. After spending several days trying to get Windows 2003 Server loaded and configured, we figured out that the server we were using was designed for Linux and will not support Windows 2003 Server. So I am taking this moment to write to ya’ll while our partners here in Ukraine are running the server back for one that will run Windows 2003 Server.

So please pray for us as we are suppose to leave tomorrow for the location to where we are to install this new eLC which is about 300 km from Kiev. We are scheduled to fly back from Ukraine on Friday and so we really need to finish up the configuration tonight (sleep, not needed right? We can sleep in the van on the way there!)

Also pray for our families as this has been a long trip with little communication (we have been in areas without Internet access and what access we have had has been very slow). We are at that point in our trip that we are missing being with our families.

Thank you and God bless. Oh, and remember us the next time you are able to SIT on the toilet.

Laughing while in the toilet (WC)

I was in a public bathroom recently and I must say the decorum was quite intriguing. Each of the bathroom stalls had a picture on the door of various people laughing and having a great time. They didn’t seem to have any reason that each of the pictures (which take up the whole door, kinda like wallpaper) were what they were about. One of the pictures was some women in a circle drinking and laughing, another was a couple signing some papers, and the other was a group of party go’ers.

So when I went into one of the stalls, I thought it was interesting that when I sat down on the toilet to do my business, I looked up to see this life size picture of a couple staring at me – laughing. I then had to use another stall that had a picture that just wasn’t as intimidating.

My thoughts are like lightning

My thoughts are like lightning – great flashes of light from heaven; with long spans of darkness in between.

- Larry, fellow eDOT’er

From Courtney: I would agree with this statement.