Sunday Miscellany

Well, I said in the comments of my car post that I'd post the answer to what kind of car I traded up to, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow. If anyone else wants to take a guess and try for some asisaid points, now's the time. Perhaps I'll give points for the best or most amusing guess, if no one gets it right. If nothing else, I find it interesting to see how my writing impacts what y'all think I'll putt around in.

I had a pleasant surprise this morning. Last week, I went to Oak Hill Presbyterian Church to hear Dr. Alan Meyers, my professor in times past as well as present day advisor and friend, preach. Dr. Meyers is just as wonderful at preaching as teaching (which I've talked about before), providing interesting reflections and connections that draw out the meaning of whatever passage he happens to be preaching on.

He's the parish associate that fills in when the regular pastor is otherwise occupied. Their pastor was on vacation still today, so he was suppose to preach again, but I was not sure exactly what was up with the service today since the church is located in one of the hardest hit areas of St. Louis city from last week's storms. I should have called him to see if he was preaching rather than e-mailing, but I didn't, and so I did not know as of this morning whether there would be a regularly scheduled service this morning or not. I suspect perhaps his Internet is down, which would explain why I did not hear back from him.

As such, I returned to my church instead, rather than venturing 45 minutes to downtown only to discover that the power was out and the service canceled. While it is disappointing that I likely missed out on Dr. Meyers preaching, Greg, our youth and contemporary worship pastor, was manning the pulpit at my church, which was a very nice surprise. Greg just graduated from seminary and moved up from being our youth minister to this new, full time pastoral job. He has one of the best gifts for preaching I've ever heard — he is both captivating and sincere. I was glad I did not miss one of the rare occasions that he puts his talents to use.

All in all, that made for a good start to the morning!

I'm working on a computer for a friend who plans to give it to his son to use for web surfing and the like. It is an old, 1998-era Compaq, which is in fairly good condition, except that when it was purchased used it came with a pirated (and thus unupdateable) copy of Windows XP. I'm trying to install a new copy of Windows XP, but the system is too old to boot off a CD-ROM. Apparently Windows XP requires six diskettes in order to attempt to start setup via diskettes, so I need to stop by the office store to get some new diskettes tomorrow.

It just amazes me how little use I have for those once essential small black squares. My primary computers for the last two years have not even included a diskette drive! And I don't recall whether I bothered using the diskette drive in the computer before that either.