This fine day made me want to buy this bike. I got some money for my birthday, and I think I just might need a cruiser now. My old mountain bike is 15+ years old and makes some pretty sad creaking noises, and it’s time for a smooth flowing ratrod electra alluminum cruiser to hang at the beach I think!

Then Sunday was a jam packed day at church and on Monday I went with TJ to the zoo for his 5th grade trip. It was fun to hang out with him in what is sadly, his final 2 months of elementary school. As we get closer to graduation, my wife cries a little more each day. Her baby boy is headed for middle school and well, the tears are flowing.

I read this article in Time last week. It’s about the changes that founder of starbucks is instituting to get his company out of a financial slump. Here’s what’s in the mix:

• They are replacing all their espresso machines with ones that are lower so you can have eye contact with the baristas again.
• You may have noticed all their chalk boards have the same sign on them as of late- either we make your drink perfect, everytime, or we’ll make it again.
• They are returning to grinding coffee in their stores so it smells like a coffee shop and so stuff is “fresh”. I noticed a sign that says they are brewing coffee every 30 minutes now.
• Evidently smell is a big deal cuz they are also getting rid of those ovens they just put in to warm your breakfast sandwich… which is also going to go bye bye cuz they say they smell like a McDonalds.

And today, I just found got a pamphlet telling me that if I pay with a starbucks card that I have registered with starbucks so they can track my purchases and spy on me like a big market mogul, they will give me a free refill on my drip coffee, free syrup or milk changes on my espresso drinks, and a free drink if I buy a pound of coffee from them. So, I guess they can be big brother if everytime I buy my Hazelnut Americano- they are going to knock 40 cents off the price. 30 for the hazelnut and 10 because I bring in my own mug to honor God and waste less paper.

(Which by the way is my advice to starbucks.) Why don’t you have recycle cans for the cups? You serve like 2 million cups a day and all your paper cups and sleeves are 100% recyclable. I’m sure it’s cuz it costs money to save trees and cuz people are stupid and will throw all kinds of trash in there too, but there’s gotta be a way to recycle all that paper, even if most of the cups are leaving the store, some stay and drink them.

There you have it. Starbucks saves me money.

Now what can I do to help my local coffee shop that I frequent more often to hook a brother up and save me some money. I have to pay to park on the street in front of them (a buck an hour) and then they don’t give me a cup discount and they charge me for syrup. Oh the expense I go to for some local love. 🙂

I am planning a trip to Uganda this summer with our high school students and I have had to make a few international calls and faxes to set up an overnight in London and such. And, since I use Skype to talk to my sister and her family who live in Kampala, I never really have a need to do much international calling. In fact, since I don’t do a lot of international travel and since we have e-mail and since I have very few friends oversees and since I sound like a loser now…

I was stoked to find this site. You just type in the country you’re calling from, where you are calling to, and the number you want to call and walla… it tells you what to do and even what might be wrong if you’ve typed in a phone number that doesn’t seem right for that area of the world. So cool.

If you need some help. You should hit it up.

I’ve been reading some blogs recently and for whatever reason, I keep hearing puns and tongue-in-cheek jokes about churches doing helicopter egg drops for an Easter outreach event. I figured there was like one famous church that did this and made some CNN story and they probably had some guy on staff who flys a helicopter for fun and did it for free or something. So finally, feeling totally out of the coolness loop, I googled church helicopter egg drop and got 116,000 hits!!!! The first few pages of which appear to be totally on subject.

There are youtube videos of this.

There are legitimate news articles from papers and tv channels and stuff.

My friend Eugene ranted about it here. And referenced it again here.

• side note: about Eugene- – you should read his blog. The guy is an amazing thinker, a great risk taker, a man of faith, an inspiration to me, Spirit led, and gifted beyond most people I know. He’s a church planter, business man, entrepreneur, dreamer, and visionary currently in Seattle with his wife and kids. My favorite memory at Davis with Eugene —who was a double major and graduated in like 3 years- dude is smart and like never sleeps— anyway, he was an hour into taking a 3 hour final exam when he figured out he was super tired, and couldn’t think straight. So he leaned over to his classmate next to him and asked if he’d wake him up in 20 minutes. His classmate looked all crazy at him and said yes. Eugene is the only guy I know who has ever taken a power nap in a final. Crazy. I tell you the guy is crazy and you should read his stuff)

There are churches in Pennsylvania and in Sacramento, CA and well… all over that do this.

I guess watching a helicopter bomb a field in eggs is a draw for thousands from the community. I’m not sure what they are made of, but evidently they don’t break from 2000 feet up.

I found this church blog post where the comments say that people were pushing, stealing eggs from little kids, and leaving crying due to the fact that they had 3000 people more than they expected and only 18,000 eggs to drop and not enough for a kid to feel blessed by the Jesus Helicopter Bunny thingamajig. Happy Easter!

Craziness. I’m gonna pitch this in our next staff meeting as an idea for 4th of july. Maybe we can helicopter bomb the 1.2 million people who will be on the beach with little church pamphlets explaining how to get over a serious hang over and what to do if you end up drunk and naked in the morning and don’t remember how you got there. We could be a full service church then.

I just finished reading How Full Is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and the late, Donald D. Clifton. It’s a book that’s been out for several years, first printed in 2004 and per my dust jacket on the printing I have, it has sold over a half million copies. So as always, I’m a bit behind the curve on this one. It’s an easy read (110ish pages) and ignoring the fact that I’ve had it on my shelf for close to 9 months, I read it in a few hours today.

The book has a basic premise:

Everyone has an invisible bucket. This bucket is filled by encouragement and positive experiences and drained by negativity and destructive experiences. Every interaction we have each day either fills a bucket or drains one- both ours and the other(s) with which we are interacting with.

The principle is fairly simple then. The more you can do as a parent, coworker, boss, spouse, friend, etc… to encourage the best in others, the better all of you will feel and the more productive, enjoyable, and effective your lives will be. The authors do recognize that some constructive criticism is needed in all our lives, but they argue that studies prove that reinforcing the positive in people will result in quicker, more long lasting changes in the negative behaviors than harping on the bad stuff, any day of the week. So, bottom line, learn what fills and drains people’s buckets- including
your own- and start filling today.

So, as I read the book today, and as I cleaned and organized my garage, I pondered my bucket. What drains it. What fills it.

DRAINS:

• money- managing it, spending it, saving it, counting it, entering it in my computer, paying bills- pretty much anything money related I hate and drains me.
• messy, unorganized spaces
• managing the clock
• doing what we’ve always done
• tyranny of the urgent
• working on a team, but feeling alone
• haunting tasks I can never seem to get to, but need to be done
• negative meetings
• academics without application
• criticism without context

FILLS:

• laughter
• time to think and plan
• soccer
• hazelnut americanos
• peppermint stick ice cream
• leisure reading
• clean, well organized spaces
• agenda free time with family and friends
• get away weekends with Shannon.
• time with my boys- where we get to be boys.
• being outside, especially in the mountains, near a lake, or by the ocean
• building stuff. Pretty much anything will work. But I like to build stuff. I think if God ever calls me out of full time working with the local church, it will be into Habitat for Humanity. I love to build stuff.
• creating things
• pictures
• naps and rest
• turning something unwanted into something beautiful
• writing and developing
• future thinking
• the vision of what could and should be
• teamwork
• teaching when it helps people to “get it” and results in action

EVIDENCE OF THIS FROM MY DAY TODAY:

• When my mother-in-law offered to feed the boys, make lunches, and drive them to school so I could sleep in, my bucket began to fill.
• When I woke up at 10am and then made some coffee, ate some cereal, and read for an hour, my bucket kept filling.
• When I built new drawers and cleaned my garage, my bucket got fuller.
• When I shut the garage door and went for a drive with my wife, got an iced hazelnut americano, and picked up our kids from school, my bucket was doing just fine thank you.
• When I ate dinner with my family and gave the boys hair cuts, my bucket kept rising.
• When I ignored my e-mails and phone and went for a run, my bucket was almost full.
• Then when I turned on my computer and made the mistake of checking my e-mail and found one from someone wanting to meet with me about a complaint…. my bucket sprung a leak.

Suck. I hate it that negativity can so quickly drain. Why is it that my bucket fills by a trickle and drains like a rushing river?

——–

SIDE NOTE: In the last chapter, this book offers 5 suggestions as to how to fill up people’s buckets, including your own. Interesting enough, several of them parallel Gary Chapman’s 5 love languages pretty easily.

1. Prevent Bucket Dipping (this one doesn’t fit any one of Chapman’s 5 very well)
2. Shine a light on what is right (this is Chapman’s words of affirmation.)
3. Make best friends (this chapter is written close to Chapman’s time spent)
4. Give unexpectedly (this is Chapman’s gifts in kind )
5. Reverse the Golden Rule (this is basically a call to learn the love language of others around you and to give affirmation to them in that language)