Luke’s Notebook

Tonight was a very significant night for our church, the Father’s House Christian Fellowship. We had been meeting and worshiping regularly for the past five or six years, but tonight was the night where we officially voted my dad as Senior Pastor of TFHCF.

We’ve been busily working on our basement, which will become the next gathering spot for the Father’s House. After that, we hope to be able to purchase some land as a church and build on that. The vision is to some day be able to have almost like a Christian campground or lodge. Of course, the main goal is to love people and turn lives to Christ. However God wills for us to accomplish that, that’s fine with us. But these are definitely exciting times.

The Montel Show is supposed to air in two days! Yikes! I’d better clear up my inbox to make sure it’s all ready to accommodate any e-mails that may come my way as a result of the show. In 2003, when we were on the show, I received quite a few e-mails. I wonder how this airing will compare with that one. I’ll soon know, I guess.

I realized I didn’t even really talk about the weekend, so let me fill in real quick.

On Saturday, we had a family from North Dakota visit us. Brandy and her four kids (aging two to eight years old) spent the afternoon with us, and her kids had a lot of fun playing with ours.

I spent a lot of Saturday transferring files from the old web server to the new one. Also, I spent time helping put together a new trampoline, assisting in the construction of a swingset, and other various tasks.

On Sunday, Brandy and her kids attended church and then stayed with us for a few hours as we grilled some hot dogs and hamburgers, and the kids just seemed to have a good time playing around outside, bouncing on the new trampoline. For lunch, Paul and I went to Subway. I got a foot-long Subway Club (turkey, ham and roast beef) sandwich — yum.

In the evening, Paul and I happened to play volleyball at the same time (though in different leagues), so the two of us rode together to Belleville. My team won all three of our games as did his. Not bad!

Today, Monday, was another busy day. I spent a lot of the day taking care of various details on the website, now that the transfer has actually taken place (or mostly, anyway — sometimes it takes a little bit for everybody to take note of the changes). More work ensued, and in the evening, Paul, John and I went to the YMCA in east Belleville.

After working out for a little while, we decided to try out their body fat analyzer, which is a little hand-held device that asks for your height, weight and age and then detects your body fat percentage. I hadn’t used one of those gadgets for years, and I think my reading when I last tried it was somewhere in the vicinity of 27%. Yikes.

This time around, I got readings from 9.8% to 12.8%. A lot nicer than the 27%! At the Y, they have a chart of the different percentages, and in my age group I’m in the “Excellent” category. So that’s really encouraging! It’s hard to believe it, but I guess I really have lost 15 to 17 percent of body fat. That’s a lot! But I guess it makes sense, seeing as I’m about 60 pounds lighter than what I used to be about four years ago. It just has never seemed like any sudden change. I suppose this has just steadily happened over time, and that’s why it doesn’t seem like any one-time shift.

Well, now I’m going to bed. The past two nights my average bedtime has been around 3:45 AM, so I’m going to try to improve that. Thankfully, I don’t have any more urgent website issues to attend to, so now I’m free to go snooze for a while.

Where do I start? Well, I guess where I left off with the last entry.

On Friday afternoon, I saw a bucket van from Wisper ISP pull into our driveway. I hurried down the stairs and went outside to talk with the two guys who had just arrived. They had come back here in order to re-test our house to see if we would be able to get a signal with a new yagi antenna connected to the radio.

First off, the one guy went up in the bucket, holding the big pole-mounted antenna in his hands. The other man was at a laptop in the van, calling out different signal strength numbers as the guy in the bucket would aim the antenna.

They were getting a signal to the tower some 4.3 miles away, but it wasn’t an idea signal. So they decided to try our attic roof, to see if that extra 15 feet or so would be enough. So they went up on the roof, hoisted up the antenna, connected it to the laptop, and….. success!!! We got a good enough signal from our chimney!

While the two guys were still on the roof, they asked if I wanted them to go ahead and install the service. I was very surprised that they could do it so soon, so I pulled out my cell phone and called my mom to OK it with her. She gave the go-ahead, and then they got to work.

They ended up mounting this radio to a metal pole, which is fastened to the back of the chimney casing. From that spot, there is a CAT5e cable running from the radio into a small hole in the chimney casing that they drilled. From there, the cable goes through our attic crawl space (the area above our attic bedrooms), and then I drilled a small hole in John’s closet, where the cable was then fed through.

It didn’t take that long for the guys to set up the antenna and to give me instructions on connecting it to our network. As soon as they left, I got to work on getting us online. After maybe 10 minutes of work, we were surfing!! Somehow, in a matter of hours, our situation went from having a small chance of getting some sort of expensive connection to all of a sudden HAVING a high-speed wireless Internet connection running!!! Praise the Lord!

The speeds are great. The downloads and uploads aren’t quite as fast as some of the faster cable/DSL packages, but this is so much better than satellite Internet. Websites start loading almost instantly, checking e-mail is a breeze, chatting — all that. The big difference so far in performance is the upload speed. Our upload speed was awful with Direcway, and I’ve been impressed with the upload speed we get with this new ISP!

If you can’t tell already, I am absolutely thrilled. I did not expect this to happen at all on Friday. These guys, who had been so difficult to get a hold of, just showed up out of the blue, and, amazingly, we were able to get a good signal. I can just see the fingerprints of God all over this situation. Fingerprints of God? How? It’s just a connection to the Internet!

Reason One: We found out that our family is going to be on the Montel Show on Good Friday, March 25th. With satellite Interent, it would be very difficult to deal with the ensuing e-mails and website changes that would be a result of the show’s airing. This week, I have been making many phone calls, trying to see if there’s anybody who can provide us with a fast, reliable connection. Initially, I had a few leads, but then they started to fade, and it was looking more and more like even if there WAS a service available (which was looking less likely in the past couple of days), the prices would likely be pretty high. So I had pretty much given up on the possiblity of having a different connection by Montel time. I figured that we would just somehow have to deal with the e-mails and site changes with out satellite connection.

Reason Two: It just so happens that our 15-month contract with Direcway expires on Monday. We got this service installed three days before we were able to ditch the dish. What amazing timing!

Reason Three: In order to accommodate many new visitors to the site, and as a result of our current server’s recent instability, we have decided to move famteam.com to a new server. I figured that this would be a huge challenge while on satellite Internet, but we were going to go through with it anyway, possibly using Grandma and Grandpa’s cable Internet connection in order to upload the website files to the new server.

What I failed to realize, though, was how much I would have to be involved in the process — meaning it would have been so extremely difficult and awkward to take care of the switchover from their house. I didn’t even think about that downside, but we were going to have stick it out anyway, since we feel like we need to move to a new server that can sustain a lot of new traffic to the website. Guess what! It wasn’t even an hour after I decided who we were going to switch the website to that the Wisper van pulled in. Since then, we have been up and running, and I have managed to upload our entire website and have made countless spontaneous changes — all from my computer! I just imagine how difficult this would be if it had to be done at somebody else’s house, even though my grandparents were more than happy to let me use their computer and Internet connection.

I’m still kind of overwhelmed by God’s goodness. He knew everything that was going on, that the Montel show would air in a few days, that the website transfer would be very difficult to do from another house, that our 15-month term with Direcway was expiring. What amazing timing!! I’m just so thankful, and it’s things like this that always fascinate me how much God really cares about His children, even in the extremely practical situations or needs. What an awesome God we have!!

My! Oh my! We got it!!! We got it!!! Broadband!

It’s just that I’m really busy and have been pretty much all week. In between ironing things out with our web server, looking into possibilities for new servers and also new Internet providers and also just the daily work activities, it’s been one busy week. Oh, yeah, and our family is supposed to be on Montel in a week. That reminds me — check your local listings! We’re supposed to be on on Good Friday. I wonder how it will turn out.

But for me, it’s back to work. I’ve been juggling a lot of things lately, and it’s time to resume the juggling.

This evening, I went over to my grandma and grandpa’s house in order to begin backing up our website. Since they’re on ultra-fast cable Internet and we’re on slower (and much less reliable) satellite, it made a lot of sense to do the backup from there, especially with the size of the website — hundreds of videos, thousands of pictures, and much more.

Anyway, as the download was proceeding, their Internet connection conked out! Charter Cable was having some problems, and evidently lots of folks in the area were without service. So it was kind of strange that their connection just happened to go out when I was there, and it essentially froze the backup process. Thankfully, Grandma and Grandpa are back online now, so tomorrow I may be able to go back to their house and finish the backing up. After that, I plan to burn the files to a DVD for safekeeping.

By the way, tomorrow some guy from O2 Connect in St. Louis is supposed to come out to our place to see if his company is able to provide us with wireless Internet. Since the guy from Wisper in O’Fallon has been just so difficult to get a hold of, I’ve been searching out different ISP’s in the area, and O2 Connect is a wireless Internet provider that may just be able to service this area. I should know much more by this time tomorrow!

But it has been a crazy week. FamTeam problems have been really frustrating, but it looks like we’re all but out of the woods in regards to that.

There has been plenty going on, but I’ll just have to wait until a better time to write about it. Since it’s been over a week since my last entry (though a couple were lost due to server problems), I know I should do some more writing. But, exercise patience! I’ve had to make myself do that a lot lately.

Good night!

The diet now comes to a close. Yesterday I hit 1,475 calories, and I weighed in at 187 yesterday morning. That’s good enough for me, and now I’m going to try to maintain this weight and turn my attention to building more muscle. I don’t think I really have much fat left to lose, and I definitely don’t want to become skinny.

I’m happy that I was able to successfully make it 14 straight days without going above 1,600 calories. I had to survive bouts with Cici’s and Red Lobster, but I managed to fight my way through.

Foods that were really helpful in the past few weeks were salad, zesty Italian dressing, broccoli, bananas, Fuji apples and grapes, green beans, many kinds of cereals and low-calorie popcorn (260 calories a bag — not bad).

So, that’s the end of the diet. It didn’t last as long as I expected, but that’s just fine with me. I plan to continue to work out — probably even increase the weight-lifting — and, I’m also going to try to do lots of exercising with the jumping shoes. I’ve already noticed an improvement in my jumping!

Well, I must go. I’m in the middle of a workday, so I ought to go take care of a few things. By the way, we won all three volleyball games last night! We’ve been on a hot streak the past few weeks. I hope we can keep it up!

I didn’t even write at all yesterday. It was a busy day, it was. I spent some time out side, as we were moving some logs from the creek and throwing them onto a bonfire. Some logs and fallen branches, trees, et cetera, had sort of dammed up part of the creek, so we went down there to clear it up. We removed quite a few fallen branches, and now it looks much nicer and water flows better.

Yesterday, we also rented a trenching machine in order to dig a four-foot ditch from the finger of our pond back to our creek. The idea is to lay an underground pipe that will prevent the pond from overflowing. We have the ditch dug, and now we just need to figure out how to get the pipe to fit in the narrow ditch.

The calorie total for Saturday was 1,375, and I did 25 minutes on the cross-trainer in the morning.

Last night, I watched The Negotiator with Mark and James. It’s a really good movie. I had seen it once or twice before, but it had been a while, and I had kind of forgotten how it went. It was fun to watch it again!

I’m going to go now, but I’ll probably write more later to give a recap of today.

Though it wasn’t easy, particularly because this afternoon I went out to lunch at Red Lobster in Fairview Heights. I had grilled chicken, roasted veggies, a garden salad and baked potato. I also tasted some squid — a calamari dish, it was. Not too bad! I managed to control myself and only eat one of Red Lobster’s delicious Cheddar Bay biscuits, which are quite possibly the best biscuits in the world. But, at 160 calories a pop, I just couldn’t let myself eat five of them.

The calorie total from Red Lobster was 1,250. So it was a bit difficult thereafter, with all of a sudden just a few hundred calories remaining. But I managed to make it through, and tomorrow I’ll have a fresh 1,600 to play with.

By the way, as far as the duration of this diet, I’m not completely certain how long I’ll keep up with it. If I had to guess, I would say I’ll keep going until Sunday the 13th. It may be a little longer, but I doubt that I’ll end it sooner than that. I’ll just have to see what kind of progress I’ve made. I realize that I really don’t have much at all to lose. What I’ll try to focus on also is building more muscle. But the actual diet part may come to an end somewhat soon.

1,600 calories is not a whole lot, and I’ve basically been treating this like a sprint. I wouldn’t want to do this for a long-term fix, but I think I can survive three or four weeks of it, and then I’ll have made a lot of progress.

Ah well, I’m going to get to bed now. I’m pretty tired — and sore, too. My legs have been pretty sore. It must be from the cross-trainer and the hopping, both of which I plan to do more of tomorrow.