Shopping for transportation

This afternoon, Carmen and I drove around town looking at potential makes and models of cars that would be satisfactory to her. She started out with a Jeep Wrangler because it is different from her friends and it ties her to her cousins Heidi and Bethany.

Seeing how Carmen doesn't like us to leave any windows open in the mini-van and likes to have the temperature "just right" all of the time, I'm not convinced that a Wrangler is the right car for her.

Her Uncle Bill, her mother and Carmen all went to a car show in Cleveland in 2004 and saw a Pontiac Solstice and her Uncle Bill believes that is the car for her. I think it is a nice looking car, but I can't find any that are five years old with 80,000 miles.

Seeing how I bought my own first car for $1,500 when I was a freshman at Purdue, I have a hard time looking at these prices...

Vehicle Description		Blue Book Value		Candidate Price	Candidate Miles
1999 Ford Tauras SE Sedan 4D		$3,625		$3,795	111,466
1999 Pontiac Grand Am SE Coupe 2D		$3,810		Not Priced	124,212
1999 Volkswagen Jetta GL Sedan 4D		$5,400		$7,450	88,732
1999 Nissan Altima SE Sedan 4D		$5,470		$5,900	127,473
1999 Volkswagen Passat GLS Sedan 4D		$6,745		$7,000	97,000
1999 Jeep Wrangler		$7,875		Not Priced	127,158
2006 Pontiac G6 GT Sedan 4D		$12,300		$11,950	49,035
2006 Pontiac Solstice Convertible 2D		$16,565		$21,977	16,517

She won't be able to drive by herself until April, so maybe I can buy a motorcycle and just let her use my Jeep.

Community responds to a Tornado

What a Weekend for Nappanee and NorthWood High School!

• Tornado Ravages Nappanee on Thursday night
• Band Places 6th at State
• Volleyball team won the sectionals (delayed to Saturday morning, and moved to Tippecanoe Valley)
• Football wins thrilling first game of sectionals (delayed to Saturday night, and moved to Bremen)
• 3000+ volunteers meet at NWHS on Sunday to help tornado victims

Wherever I have gone in the world in the twenty years since I have left, Wakarusa and Nappanee have remained home to me. One of the things that makes these Northern Indiana towns special is the community that is modeled to the world.

It doesn't matter if the community is modeled in the many small churches, a high school, a football team, an Amish heritage, a mega-size missionary church or the Amish people that still live simply and live at a pace that doesn't exist elsewhere.

Community springs to action when trouble comes.

Interesting links about the tornado and the community:

• National Weather Service description of Tornado
• Amish Acres: Mutual aid versus insurance

Celebrating Carmen's Birthday in Indiana

Bill and Cheryl invited us to the farm to have a hot dog roast on Friday night before the football game and then have a hayride on Saturday night and then have a family pork chop BBQ on Sunday afternoon after Dustin and Heather's first child Charlie was dedicated at Nappanee Missionary Church.

Those plans were adjusted by a Tornado, so we had a lot of extra time on Saturday.

I replaced a hard drive that was damaged due to the power outage and the phases of power restoration on a farm and Carmen washed Ben's steer.

Becca played with the goat.

When Jackie was Becca's age and Carmen's age, she cleaned the pig stalls in the pig barn that stood on the concrete foundation that now serves as a parking area in the background of Carmen's picture.

By Sunday afternoon, the tornado cleanup in Nappanee was well underway and four generations of the Mattern and Etsinger families plus three generations of Eby and McMillan families gathered in New Paris to consume a good portion of 55 pork chops cooked on the half barrels that crashed the hard drive on Saturday. (long story, involves a PTO generator and a welder)

Marcus has a great game against LTMS

One of the things that I looked forward to the most about Adam's 8th grade year was the chance for him to play with Marcus Wilkerson.

Marcus and Adam were together in Children's Church for five years and his Dad helped me teach the class the year before he left for Afghanistan.

In this first photo, Marcus is pulling the pile forward while the football is exposed and in a position to be easily stripped away. The right side line backer is no where to be found.

In the next photo, you can see that Marcus got safely to the ground without having the ball stripped.

If you look closely on the right side of the pile you will see Adam showing up a second too late to strip the ball away from Marcus.

Playing ultimate frisbee with these two allows me to know just how competitive they are.

In this particular game, Marcus probably ended up on top of the individual effort while Adam's team ended up on top of the scoreboard 14 - 7.

I'll keep pushing these two to do better until they have a chance to play together at Tates Creek High School in two years for JV and three years for varsity.

This last picture is Marcus with a solo sack for a 10 yard loss to end the first half of play.

Southern Football Game ( a defensive struggle )

Adam had another decent defensive game but the score was a lot closer than anyone expected.

From his position of outside linebacker on a blitzing defense, Adam gets a few sacks per game. On this play, however, he leaves the running backs ( #32 and #30 ) and goes after the sweeping quarterback in trouble.

A risky play if the quarterback is able to get a pass off. In this case, it pays off. Adam is all about taking risks.


The picture on the left side is a linebacker's dream picture.

You can see the running back coming through an open hole wrapping the ball up in fear of being hit. Adam is #64 and Tyler Morris is #4.

If both ( or really either of them) had any forward motion to match the running back, this play would have finished perfectly with a crushing collision and a cleanup hit putting the running back down for no gain.

Since both of them were on their heals, Adam took the legs and Tyler took the shoulders and the running back got a few yards out of the play and got up happy about not being crushed.

Jacob Ivey (#84)is the defensive end to the left of the play dropping back in good position to help out in case of a fumble or a broken tackle.

Adam "celebrates" his birthday at home

Celebrating your 14th birthday at home by blowing out candles on a cake has never been so exciting...

Ohio State at Purdue

Adam and I made a day trip to West Lafayette for Purdue's latest starting game in its very long history of football. Two undefeated titans clashed and Purdue ended up on the down side of the 23-7 score.

As we watched the two teams warm up from our lofty perch, we could tell that OSU was the real deal and it only took a few plays for the Buckeyes to demonstrate why they would again be #1 in the nation for a good portion of yet another season.

Purdue is a great team and they are having a great year, but it sure wasn't fun to watch them get beat that night. I bought a book about Joe Tiller to read a little more about the transformation that has occurred since he has been there. It is very interesting to hear about the poor boy from Toledo that went to Montana to play football.

Adam and I had lunch at Triple XXX Family Restaurant at Austin Mattern's recommendation. He said they had recently tried to upscale their food quality.

Before the game, we drove all over campus visiting bookstores to outfit our family's youngest Purdue fan and decorate his room. After accumulating more Purdue stuff than I have ever owned, Adam and I parked at the remains of the shuttered Smitty's Supermarket and played frisbee in the street for a while before heading to the engineering buildings and the fountain.

After the game, we drove back to Wakarusa to visit my mom who was recovering from back surgery. Adam and I got to the house about 1:30 AM and crashed in the basement.

After visiting with Mom and Dad for six hours, we headed back to Lexington. We were making great time traveling with the stereo blasting and all the windows open until we hit mile marker 141 on I-74 between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. While traveling along with speeding traffic and fortunately in the rightmost lane, the Jeep just quit on us.

A credit card and flatbed truck enabled us to get back to Lexington late that night.

Engineering Centennial 1888-1988

I took Adam to a lecture hall in the electrical engineering building and told him stories that I could remember.

Later, I took him to the basement to show him where the computer lab used to be ( and why there ever was such a thing as a computer lab ).

We were surprised to find a hall filled with pictures of Electrical Engineers from 1888 to 1988 and found my photo.

Here's the story behind the pictures:


1888 marked the graduation of Purdue's first two electrical engineers. In the next one hundred years, 20,272 men and women would join this select group granted Purdue Electrical Engineering degrees. Our Wall of Fame recognizes the first century of students to matriculate with bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees.


The "Nice Guys of Eta Kappa Nu" began producing class composites as a service project to the school using pictures taken from the Purdue yearbook, "Debris." Kent Fuchs, department head, had the composites installed in the hallway of the Electrical Engineering building in 2000. This pictorial history grew and became a source of enrichment to visitors, alumni and current students. Comments like, "Is that grandpa?", "Look, I can't believe my hair!", "I didn't know the school existed back then!" could be heard as people viewed the classes.


While the composites are impressive, they are incomplete (only including those people in yearbooks) and sometimes inaccurate (people appear in yearbooks other than their official graduation year). When it was decided to include the Wall of Fame on the Electrical and Computer Engineering website, Engineering Computer Network's Marian Delp agreed to manage the project and worked with students for forty months to scan 79% (16,014) of the images.


Difficulties were abundant as efforts were made to assure name and picture agreed. For example one record might list a person as "L. T. Smith" and another as "Lewis Tobias Smith" or "Lew Smith." Or the yearbook has a fall picture for "Sheila Marie Jones" and the registrar has a May graduation record for "Sheila Marie Wolfe," reflecting her married name. Placement of upper and lower case lettering was also inconsistent between sources: Dewitt versus DeWitt, or Del Costa versus DelCosta. Is all of the information accurate? Perhaps not, but as alumns submit correct information about themselves on the website, our accuracy can only improve.

My Brother: Deputy Travis Junior

This past Sunday, Kent Billingsley told me that I looked like Deputy Travis Junior on Reno 911.

Since I have intentially deprived my children of cable TV in order to accelerate brain cell growth, I had no idea what he was talking about.

After a little research, I think that he could be my long lost brother. What an AMAZING story!

Carmen's Tates Creek JV Season is over

Carmen's sophomore year was packed full of games with playing time at the JV level and sitting time at the Varsity level.

Unlike last year when the same six freshmen played together every game with the same rotation to go 13-4, this years JV was an exciting different combination that varied depending on the level of competition, the availability of freshmen and sophomores that play varsity, and chances to develop varsity players in different positions. All in all, it was a very exciting year and winning games helps make it more exciting. The JV team finished with a record of 21-5-1.

Having completed five seasons of volleyball, there are plenty of roles that are not exciting. No one can make them look less exciting than Carmen.

I love jobs like score keeping, line judging, or running the scoreboard during games.

Worship Philosophy

At our life group ( aka small group ) ( aka cell group ) (aka shepherd group ) meeting tonight Kent asked us all to write down our worship philosophy and share it. I thought this was an excellent exercise since each individual has a very unique perspective to anything that occurs in the church. This is true whether it is something spiritual, something doctrinal, something religious or something trivial like the color of the carpet or something major like sitting in a pew that belongs to someone else.

So here's the way I see worship today:

Worship is a celebration of Christ that unites us with our creator.

We can be united or restored in isolation or in mass gatherings of strangers at coliseums. Our hearts can receive peace in coliseums and rejoice in solitude.

Creativity and worship can occur without Christ as the center, but it can not occur without Christ. After all, where does creativity come from if not from our creator?

The opening ceremony at each Olympic gathering is an example of a highly technical, complex, amazing worship of the human spirit, but it falls short of the Glory of God that exists when Christ is worshiped from our hearts.

Becca's first year of LTMS Volleyball

It is hard to remember the level of play that Carmen's team had in the sixth grade four years ago. I think Becca got more touches than Carmen because Becca's diminutive stature relegated her to the setter position.

One clear difference is that the officials have to stop the game to remind Becca that line judges can not cheer for their team and to stop using the line judge flag as a pom pom.

As seen in other posts, Carmen shows absolutely no excitement or motion when line judging. Drawing the attention of an official probably would have crushed Carmen.

Becca enjoyed playing with a few neighborhood girls that attended Veteran's Park elementary school with her. Volleyball seemed to help the transition from elementary to middle school.

One thing about the kids going to LTMS is that is so close to where I work that I can make more of the 5:30 games. I'm not sure if I ever made it to any of Carmen's sixth grade B Team home games at Southern. By the time I fought through traffic, it always seemed to be time for the A team to start playing.