This morning I did something totally crazy.

I met a friend for breakfast.  Not the crazy part.  We met to catch up and “do” accountability.  Not the crazy part.  It was 7AM, before work.  Not the crazy part.

I got a club sandwich.  The crazy part.

It was totally premeditated.  I told myself, as I was driving there: “Now, you know what diner breakfast does to your system.   It does bad things.  Bad bad things.”

So I stuck my nose up at everything that is good and decent, and ordered a club sandwich for breakfast.  It was the single best decision I have ever made in my life. 

Well, after accepting Christ I guess.  And marrying my wife.  And choosing Jif.  I guess.

So, yeah, it was the fourth best decision I have ever made in my life.  It was crispety.  It was crunchety.  It was baconety.  It wasn’t peanutbuttery, but there’s always next time.  And the best part?  It didn’t make me run for the … border.

Sometimes, we need to switch it up a bit.   Routine can give you the runs. 

Pray for someone you don’t know.   Read your Bible on your lunch break.  Actually give the dude a dollar instead of saying no.  Flip the roll around.  Whatever.  Just don’t let the routine overshadow the reason. 

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever had for breakfast?

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Tell me if you hate the mobile theme.  It looks ok I guess, but I’m bummed you can’t reply to specific comments.  Click on “desktop site” in the footer to access the full DrMo goodness if you’re on da mobile device.

So, I’m kind of not funny anymore.  I mean, I was never Steve Erkel or anything like that, but I had a few good ones now and again.  I’m not sure how I lost it, but, especially the last few days (weeks), I’ve been feeling decidedly unfunny.

I don’t think it’s the baby, because he’s a laugh a minute. Between him and my office mate, I should have enough poop and pee stories to keep you rolling in the aisles.

Don’t think too hard on that one.

Once, when I was shoveling snow, I accidentally buried my phone, and couldn’t find it until my mom called to say she was cold. I’ve been doing a lot of shovelling lately (in between puddle-hopping), so maybe I lost my funniness there?

When I don’t feel like myself, I get insecure.  I question the worth of whatever I’m doing, whether it’s engineering work at my job, graphics and projects for church, stuff with the baby, work around the house, loving my wife, or those cussed-ly addictive CrowdSpring projects. 

One way this insecurity has manifested itself is that I’ve stayed away from my blog, and, maybe worse, YOUR blog. I haven’t done much reading or writing since last Friday, and while for some this is no big deal, it is for me. 

My journal tells me that this has probably been building for awhile.  I need to set myself free from expectations and imagined judgement.  I need to live my life, love those around me, and provide for my family.  I need to spread the good news, hug some folks, and live a life worthy of the gospel.

But, I’d still like to find my funny.

Are you with me? 

Have you ever felt insecure about something?  And, any idea where my funny went?

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I mentioned in my launch post about CopyMo (the business I started on, um, Monday) that I’d put off doing it for 2 years.  This is partially true, but there’s something deeper that I thought about during a late-night shower recently.  Yeah, I kinda take a lot of those these days.

I got the idea in summer 2009, then worked on the idea and site off and on for about 2 years.  To be sure, there was frustration, procrastination, and even a little carbonation.  By the time I pulled the whole site down and moved it to a new CMS (Joomla to WordPress), I had most of the content written.

So, in fact, over those 2 years, I actually did a lot of work.  I refined text and graphics over and over again, to the point where, when the final version came together, I had a lot of the content done.

Sometimes we think that we’re not going anywhere during a seemingly quiet period, but in fact we are preparing for something down the line.  And all that prep pays off big-time one day.

I became a Christian after 2.5 years of being witnessed to by friends.  I wonder if they ever thought they were wasting their time. 

I also wonder if John the Baptist ever wondered if he was eating locust and honey hotdish for nothing.

In the end, big things come to those who wait.

What’s something that had a lot of silent preparation in your life? 

Are you preparing for something now?  Dream Big!

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I have a confession to make.  No, I’m not the one who’s been stealing your newspapers.  Your, um, digital newspapers, since no one except Grandma gets real newspapers anymore.

No, my confession is that I’m a secret eater.  It’s a shameful thing, and this is as much a confession to myself as to you all.  Up until recently, I didn’t know I was a secret eater.  It was only after careful review of my eating habits that I realized I was a secret eater.

Secret eating, also known as grazing, is eating done without people knowing, possibly including yourself.  It’s not limited to sleep eating, which occurs when you eat mashed potatos hidden under your pillow while you sleep.  It does include that though.

The more usual cases of secret eating include:

• Opening the fridge for no reason and grabbing the first thing you see
• Grabbing, opening, and eating NutriGrain bars in a single fluid motion (and single bite)
• Popping off sweet potato fries that are stuck to the cookie tray on the stove, and didn’t make it into the leftover container in the fridge.
• Eating things alone that are usually reserved as condiments or ingredients, like baco-bits, croutons, French’s fried onions, chocolate chips, chicken broth, and/or flour.
• And such as.

Secret eating can also involve hiding food (like the aforementioned mashed-potato-pillow), but that’s a whole other level of dysfunction that I won’t get into here.  (seriously, if you’re hiding cans of SPAM in the toilet tank, please leave my blog.)

The funny thing about my extra-meal eating is that I didn’t realize I was doing it until I started using this tracking program on my phone to keep a food diary.  Then I realized that my secret eating was routinely involving 500-600 extra calories per day!  Talk about fourthmeal. 

Sin is like this too, especially with me.  There’s normal, three-squares-a-day sin that you recognize you struggle with. And then there’s secret sin, which creeps into your life when you’re not expecting it, and weighs you down without you even knowing.  I was reading about some sins that God hates in Colossians 3:  anger, rage, malicious behavior, slander, and dirty language.  And luckily, I don’t do any of that stuff, so I’m good.

Except, wait, yeah I do. With the exception of Rage (i think), those are all secret sins that were revealed as I took a few moments to think about it:

• I’ve gotten angry at people for letting me down just in the last 2 days.  This morning even.
• Our postdoc inconsiderately left a sample in the glovebox antechamber for 3 days, and I accidentally opened the door, ruining it; I kinda knew it was in there, and didn’t care because the rest of us needed to get in . That’s malicious behavior.
• I recently called someone’s sincerity into question in a conversation with another friend.  Pure slander.
• I’ve gotten caught up in conversations I should have walked away from at work. Not foul, but not edifying either.  Dirty language.

Wow, there you go.  I’m a secret sinner.  But I’m also forgiven, and now I know what to look for.  Join the awesome club and take some time to track down your secret sins — they could be weighing you down in ways you don’t recognize.

What are your secret eating habits?  Or, if you dare, your secret sinning habits? 

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Sorry guys; I’ve started and killed a few different draft posts, like ugly Play-Doh monsters you smash back into the container.   Things got unexpectedly crazy and I haven’t been able to sit down and write anything.  Barring this, of course.

I slept through two alarms yesterday, meant to wake me up early so I could write.  What’s weird is that I don’t even remember doing it.  Does that ever happen to you?  You wake up late, only to scratch your head and wonder how it happened?

I think sleep-stress situations are made even more difficult than normal when you haven’t slept enough.  Just like life-stress situations become so much bigger when you haven’t been praying enough.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking when I sat down to bang this out:  every day situations become a lot harder when we haven’t prayed enough.  Small disagreements become big fights.  Small misunderstandings become huge insults.  Small pains become large wounds.  Small illnesses become show-stopping.

So pray more than you think you need to.  Sleep more than you think you need to, if that’s possible.

Have you ever done anything weird on too little sleep?

I’m taking a chance today, going live with something I’ve been working on for, well, several years.   No joke, God gave me this idea on an airplane 2 years ago, and I sat on it for a long time.

I’m a believer.  I’m an engineer.  I’m an artist.  I’m a programmer.  I’m a husband.  And I’m a writer.

I figured if I was going to start a business, I’d hit up that list in backwards order.  So, to address a need I’ve observed for a long time, I decided to start CopyMo, an online copy editing and authoring service.  We specialize in church promo, technical writing, blogging, and professional representation (resumes and cover letters).

If business explodes (dare to dream), I may cull that list a bit.   To be sure, there are other similar services, but none offer the targeted approach that I think CopyMo will offer.

There’s still some work to do.  I need to run through a few more samples, and probably clean up some stuff.  But, I think it’s time to launch; I’ve put it off long enough.

Take a look around. Hopefully the site’s not a disaster on older browsers.  I’ve only really checked newer versions of IE, Chrome, and Firefox.  Hardly anyone’s reviewed it, which is completely not the way to do something like this.  But, whatever, I’m tired of waiting and tweaking with it.

Oh, and for Pete’s sake, if you see a typo, please let me know!  That wouldn’t do at all.

So, pass on the word, and keep your eyes open for more promotion.  Oh, and feel free to hire me :)   Here goes nothing!

What do you think?!  Does the site work ok for you?  Do you have an idea you’re sitting on?  Did I already ask that?!

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I wonder what that would look like inside…

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Please please please…caption this gem.

I played saxophone for a pretty long time when I was a kid.  I was no [insert famous sax player here], but I was ok.  My biggest problem was that my saxophone wasn’t in very good shape. 

No, seriously, I’m not just blaming the sax as an excuse.  It had issues.  The pads stuck.  The mouthpiece was rusted.  The base had a big dent.  A few of the tension springs were always out of alignment.  The body was made of dark chocolate and tended to get all melty.

And such as.

So as I got older, and the music got more complicated, and everyone around me got better, I got frustrated.  I didn’t practice much, I attended rehearsals half-heartedly, and, predictably, I quit when I entered high school. 

I remember the day – I was so frustrated, I almost threw the thing out the window.  This was 14-year-old me.  I wasn’t a violent kid; I was a good kid.  The kind on bread packages.  But I lost it with that cussed sax, and it was about 30 seconds from defenestration.  Look it up.

I didn’t do it, but I slammed the case shut and literally didn’t open it for 7 years.  One day, on a whim in college, I opened it. And then promptly shut it again.  Since that day when I was 14, it had probably been opened 4 times. It was like a bad report card you keep around to scare your kids.  I finally sold it last summer. 

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d have been a little more patient.  If I’d petitioned my dad a little harder for a new sax, or at least some repairs.  I’ll never know, because I hit my breaking point.  Unfortunately, breaking points are unpredictable, but when you hit them, you know.  You feel like throwing something out the window, or at least slamming the case shut. 

But I think maybe we can do a better job of pushing through those breaking points, and preventing them from breaking us.

What are your favorite verses for patience?   And what’s something you quit, that you kinda which you’d stuck through?

So, a fun day arrived yesterday.  I’d been waiting to free up some funds to sponsor another kid from Compassion, and I finally got it straightented out. Our first child, Elinah, was mostly my wife’s pick.  In fact, I kinda had no idea what was going on at the time except the cost.  Yeah, I’m a real humanitarian.

This time around, I was excited because I was kinda going to get to chose!  Plus, Elinah will now get a new friend on the fridge.  Fun, right?! 

Wrong.  When I started looking on the site, I found the process of  “choosing” a potential child quite distasteful.  Shocking?  Yeah, it was for me too.

The problem is that there are so many kids, and it’s impossible to shake the feeling that you hold a lot of power at that moment. Picking one means like 2000 others won’t get picked.  It’s like a perverse game of kickball or something. And it made me sad for all those faces.

Except, in the end, at least one kid has his life changed, and that is worth the discomfort of wading through countless faces.  Prayer is really the only way to go, because any other method of chosing would drive me mad.

I’m thankful that we have a God who cares about these children:

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. (Ps 68:5)

And I’m thankful that God puts desires in our hearts and commands in our minds to care for them. 

In the end, we will probably pick 2 children.  A young boy in India, and maybe an older child (thanks Bowman) somewhere else.  And that makes for a pretty good Friday.  And two new friends for Elinah.

But we should remember the rest of the kids in prayer.  There’s nothing wrong with lifting up crazy vague prayers for the “children.”  In fact, I’m touched when someone new in faith says something like “I just want to pray for the world, and that they find Jesus” during a prayer meeting.  I’ve seen this 3 times, and your first instinct is always to smirk.  But…why shouldnt we be praying giant prayers?

Compassion’s website is simply: http://www.compassion.com.  It’s $38/mo to sponsor a kid, and it’s legit.  That’s all I’ll say about that.

[insert poop joke here] because this post wasn’t very funny.  Have a great Friday!

Have you ever thought about sponsoring a kid? Does the process of choosing a kid feel as strange for you as it does for me?