Awards Night

A few days are like eternity to boys...

Thursday night it was like the end of the world. Friday night, they had all recovered from their emotion draining loss.


Receiving the National League Season Record Champion Trophy helped the recovery:

Grandma Eby is 70 Today!

Happy Birthday Grandma!

My mom was busy all day long getting things done on her birthday. Three people at the doctor's office sang Happy Birthday to her. One of the people was the wife of a boy that went to school with Keith.

She has enjoyed the day.

Pirates are out of the tournament

The Pirates put up a good fight against themselves tonight while playing the Royals, but they just couldn't get anything started. There were several kids hurting from the Angels game and some more sickness and some of the kids just didn't have the energy to play the game.

It was a depressing way to watch the end of a great season, but at least the team won't look back on this night years from now and blame any single person for their loss in the tournament.

It was ugly.

To make it worse, the Royals are a tough team and they played very well. At the end of the game the scoreboard read 9-0, but it seemed more like 90-0.

Pirates win Game 2 of the tournament

It was a grizzly fight. Many of our players were hurt going into the game. More were hurt during the game by the Angels pitcher that was pitching harder than anyone in the league this year. Battered, beaten or not, the Pirates prevailed 5-4 in the sixth inning.

Buster made it to the first tournament game and was hoping to make it to the second. He got all dressed up at home trying to convince Mom that he could help out the team.


Adam was one of the players hurt before the game. He and Stephan collided in warmups and Adam ended up with a black eye. Earlier that afternoon, Adam had rubber bands put in his mouth to separate his teeth for braces and took some Tylenol for the pain.

Adam went 3 for 3 with two doubles and the game winning single to right field with two outs, and two strikes in the bottom of the sixth.

It was a night game, so I didn't have my camera. We had to get this photo of his black eye after he got back home.

Father's Day Weekend

So far, I've had a great Father's day weekend.

Saturday:
1) The front landscaping was weeded by Jessica
2) Adam led the way on cleaning and organizing the garage. ( and did an awesome job )
3) Robin joined us for burgers ( really late )
Sunday:
4) Jackie made muffins and coffee
5) Michael Lamb (a father) showed up at church in need of help
6) Carmen picked out my Father's day present ( A DVD: End of the Spear )
7) We sent Becca off to Bluegrass Christian Camp with Emily.
8) We watched the movie I've been wanting to own for a long time, but didn't tell anyone.

God is good in the way that He meets all of our needs through family like those that have crossed my path this weekend.

Pirates move on to Tournament

The pirates completed their season this last weekend and the team is really playing well together. They finished the season at 18-1 which makes them National League Champions.

This morning, they played the Red Sox in a close game in the first round of the tournament. Here are the pictures that took this morning: Red Sox Slide Show

Of all the many challenges this team has faced, I like the challenge of loving the game and playing as a team above winning. I think they have done this well. The coaching staff and players have kept this goal high and the parents have followed along as well. None of us have a perfect record, but we are understanding what teamwork and community is all about.

Wouldn't it be amazing if ....

God had used the grandfather of a boy that I grew up to help pave the way for Dr. Scott and Dr. Kim to reach the Awa in Ecuador?
Engineering Mission Center for HCJB

Richard Moore in the center of this photo, played defensive tackle in front of me. His father Clyde Moore was the son of Clarence Moore who was one of the key contributors to HCJB in Ecuador.

Crown International and the Moore family got me into engineering. Their radio station (WFRN) kept me focused on positive Christian music and their amplifiers busted my ears in a Larry Norman concert at the Notre Dame Convention Center. To this day, their Crown amplifiers are powering God's message in the church I attend in Lexington.

Stephen Phipps on the left, played nose guard and gave me the title "Glory Grabber" because the better he executed, the more tackles I got. He was a friend that rode bike with me nearly every Sunday afternoon. Due to the biking, he and I could squat more weight than anyone else on the team.

His father, Ron Phipps, was a pastor in the missionary church and sponsored a few cross country bike trips. I think the group was called "Wondering Wheels" and then changed to "Out Spoken". I also told Steve that I got a better work out than he did because I rode a Sears Free Spirit while he rode one of the high end, foreign, super lightweight bikes with more gears.

Both of these guys made a significant impact on my life.

Church around the small world

Today, Dr. Kim Hind and Dr. Tim Scott headed for Ecuador to help take care of the medical needs of the Awa. Dr. Scott has been doing mission work like this for years and has a good relationship with missionaries in different areas of the world.

Why do I call it a small world?

Dr. Scott started out as my doctor, but I only visited him once when we first moved to Lexington. About ten years later, he and the pastor of new church plant and their wives visited Tatesbrook as they were waiting on the Lord to provide a church sponsor for their plant.

Today, I still rarely visit Dr. Scott at his practice, but we pray together nearly every Monday night. He and I share many common desires. We both love Michael Card. We both love to serve. We both came from rural communities. We both care for the weak. The biggest difference I see is his wisdom vs my self confidence and his peaceful nature versus my disturbing nature.

Kim Bell visited Tatesbrook as a medical student who knew the remarkable Dr. Eric Bandy, who attended a youth group led by Mike Brady as teenager. When Eric headed to UK, he attended Tatesbrook and brought a few of his fellow college students.

As we grew to love the very special Kim Bell and her friend Angela, we prayed for her boyfriend who lived back in New Mexico. Kim loved him, but she did not want to further a relationship with a man that was not equally committed to Jesus Christ.

It was with great joy that Kim told us one day that her boyfriend had committed himself to Christ and asked her to marry him. A group of eight people headed down to Albuquerque for the wedding. ( a good section of the "Old Mules" of Tatesbrook )

Returning to Lexington, Dr. Kim and Matt Hind settled into a home in a nearby town that split the commute between work and church. Over the years, Matt has served in many roles and has found his calling as our youth pastor.

Matt is one of my greatest friends (outside of my family) today. I know that I can count on him for anything. He is one of the few people that can convince me to exercise when I think that my old body needs to rest. Matt and Kim both love to mountain bike. In fact, Kim's brother started me on mountain biking on the day of Matt and Kim's wedding. ( lots of stories there, but I'll save that for another time )

I trust Matt and Kim with my children, they are doing a wonderful job.

As I write this, in this small world, Dr. Tim and Dr. Kim are together serving the Lord at the equator near the edge of a different mountain range and you can read about their experiences on their blog: Ecuador Mission Trip (Kim & Tim)

My life as an engineering geek...

Last week, Adam and I had the opportunity to meet Rich Moore in Versailles while he was in Danville, Ky for business. Rich played defensive tackle in front of me our senior year (1984) for NorthWood High School. Spending a few hours with Rich last week brought back a lot of memories.

Rich's father, Clyde, was President of Crown International, a company founded by Clyde's father Clarence, a Christian missionary to Quito, Ecuador. Clyde was a deacon at the Wakarusa Missionary Church and we always had the best sound equipment. My brother-in-law was one of the volunteer sound technicians that operated the massive sound board. I occasionally sang in choirs, quartets and duets and always wanted to get my hands on the sound equipment, but never did.

During high school, I developed an interest in programming as a freshman, then later an interest in electronics. I was almost certain that I would attend Purdue University to get an Electrical Engineer degree and return to Elkhart and work at Crown on audio equipment. There were a couple of significant events that drew me in that direction.

1) I went to a Larry Norman concert at the Notre Dame Convention Center with Clyde and Rich. Clyde took us up by the power amplifiers and showed us that most of the serious concerts were powered by Crown.

2) A day here and there with Rich in his mother's music studio. My family had a Wollensak reel to reel player that recorded significant events. Rich's family had a wall mounted rack of all sorts of equipment. The perks of having a room full of electronics was a big draw.

Once I arrived at Purdue, I needed a job or two, so I started working at Lafayette Instrument Company and worked on several of the companies' first embedded products that are no longer available. There were several little projects ( Vertical Jump Height Detector, Skin Calipers, Flicker Fusion Device, others using a 68HC11 ) but the project that I worked on the whole 2 years that I was there was the embedded thermal polygraph. The first and only of its kind. Some of the prototypes were demo'ed at a convention and our salesman promised the end of messy, swinging ink pens and ink bottles in the future.

Alas, the feeding of thin thermal paper was more difficult than anyone expected so the product was never marketed beyond a 10 minute demo from time to time. I enjoyed learning about the physiology of a liar and measuring things in chart form.

The traditional polygraph came as a 4 pen or 5 pen or 6 pen model. The digital embedded (Rockwell 6502 processor) version that I worked on offered up to 8 expansion slots and you could adjust the baseline height and amplitude of the signal anywhere on the chart. I even developed a font generator and a remote (via serial cable) operator panel that allow the interviewer to silently mark the charts when Response or Control questions were asked and Yes or No answers were given.

If you look on the company website, you will see the embedded digital technology never made it. The dime-a-dozen Windows computer programs took over in 1995. Host based polygraphs are now the poor man's version of the original mechanical device that professionals still use today.

In my senior year at Purdue, I still had thoughts of returning to Crown, but my interviews with Delco Electronics and IBM offered differences that I hadn't considered before. After much prayer and council, I decided to work on embedded controllers in printers for IBM in Charlotte, NC. There, I was sure I would be able to be paired with enough mechanical engineering resource to feed paper, even if it had to have holes on each side to keep it feeding straight.

To this day, 20 years later, I am still absorbed by a passion to mark paper... whatever the technology.

Church at the Park

We probably have not sacrificed as much as the folks wearing black and white sitting in 90 degree heat last week in Indiana, but we certainly had fun today. After the worship service and teaching this morning, we all packed our lunches to Shilito park for a picnic. We played corn hole, hillbilly golf and football. Dr. Scott even brought horse shoes so we could play the same games as the Amish, but I didn't see anyone dig them out.