Year / 2008

by Greg

Foreigners

I’ve been thinking about “home” a little bit recently. We were visiting family this weekend who live about an hour and a half from our home. I was thinking about how if we lived there, it wouldn’t ever quite feel like home. At least, to me. It would feel like we were always visiting. Never home.

A friend of ours is a native of Argentina, but also a citizen of Italy (and lived there for several years) and now resides here in New York. (Married to a US citizen.) So she has many homes, and in a way, often feels like she’s “not home”.

Home is interesting. It’s definitely a location, but it’s also a state of mind. The Bible says we who follow Jesus are foreigners. That we are never quite home. We read about the first disciples of Jesus today (the boys and I) who left everything at Jesus’ simple invitation to, “Come follow me.” He had no home, they had no home. They were travelers. Foreigners. Strangers.

Jen & I have also noticed recently how different we are. We are not like most of the people we know. Our priorities, what we want our family to live like, be like, look like. We’re different. We feel, quite often, like foreigners.

So, how do you endure that? I guess the way you do is to know that no matter where we are in this life we are always foreigners. We are never home. We belong somewhere else, and until we leave this life or Jesus comes back for us, we’ll always feel a little homesick.

With all the burdens of this foreign place that I am bearing lately, I am definitely “longing for home”. For peace. Rest. But, that time has not come yet.

For now, I enjoy the “home” that God has given me. My beautiful wife, and five amazing kids. And our little yellow house. 🙂 Oh that life were only that simple.

Perhaps it can be.

by Greg

Apple Event, Tuesday Sept 9th, 2008

Apple Event announced for September 9th
Given that I am now employed by Apple, I will refrain from speculating on any of the product or service announcements that will be made, but this invitation went out from Apple this week, regarding an event scheduled for next Tuesday morning (local time) in San Francisco. Looking forward to seeing what they announce!

(Believe it or not, even working for Apple, I don’t know any more than you do!) 🙂

by Greg

Are You Ready For Some Football??

NFLNFL football is back! The regular season starts this week with a game featuring the World Champ NY Giants and the Washington Redskins on NBC Thursday night, a full slate of games on Sunday (including the BILLS GAME!), and then a double-header on ESPN on Monday Night. I can’t wait!!

The Bills are looking really good this year. From the coaches and the offensive and defensive schemes, to the players, established and new… it really could be a fun season to be a Bills fan. (I know I say that pretty often, but… seriously. Just watch…) 🙂

The start of the season also means that it’s time for Dad & the Boys to make their weekly NFL picks! 🙂 I almost feel like I am looking forward to that more than the football 🙂 It was lots of fun last year, and should be even more fun this year! We’re doing the whole season this time!

There’s a cool Facebook application where you can make picks and compare your results against your friends… it’s called Pro Football Picks, if you’re interested.

So, just a few days away… let the games begin!!

by Greg

Not How I Planned It

Well, I just got back – AGAIN – from Buffalo. We spent the extra long weekend there visiting with Jen’s family, and came home pretty late tonight (got the kids in bed around 11pm) to find that I had forgotten my laptop there. An hour and a half away there. And, not only do I have a lot of work to do tomorrow (for which I need my laptop) it is also the only day this week that does not have something else going on.

This was not good.

So, I was contemplating when to fit in the extra three hour round trip I was needing to do, and decided to call my in-laws to let them know what happened, and that I would need to come get it. I talked to my father-in-law about it and said I’d need to either just come right then, or maybe get up super early in the morning, to get started on my work at a decent hour. I was leaning toward the morning, and told him so.

To my surprise, he called back about five minutes after we hung up and said they would meet me about half an hour closer to me as soon as I could make it there! That saved me an hour, so I jumped right in the van and headed out.

When I got to our meeting place (in about 55 minutes! Gotta love traffic at midnight on a Monday night!) there was my father-in-law, waiting for me in his car. I offered to buy him some of his favorite coffee to say thanks, but he declined. Instead, after saving me time and money by meeting me, he also gave me twenty bucks for gas! That paid for my unexpected, unwanted trip! Wow!

So, a bad situation was made nicer by the generosity of my second dad. That definitely made the late-night trip much nicer, and the end of this long day much nicer!

by Greg

Half Mom, Half Dad

We were looking at old slides last night at my wife’s family reunion. We get together every Labor Day weekend, and this time, at Jen’s request, Dad broke out the old slide projector and we spent an hour or so looking at old photos.

Almost every photo brought laughs along with a funny story or two. Sometimes it took a bit longer to remember a particular story, at least every detail of it. And often, someone would comment how one of the now parents look just like their offspring. Our little Kirstie looks a lot like her mommy used to!

But as I looked at the photos, I kept thinking, “It’s not totally like Kirstie…” (And not just because I think she looks like me…) 🙂 There was just something very different, even though there was a lot the same.

That got me to thinking about how we are all a mix of half mom and half dad. (And all of the people that went into that before them!) There’s one part of dad and one part of mom, so I suppose that’s true. Even still, when you look at some people, you can’t help but say, “Wow! You look like your mom!” (Or, Dad, as the case may be.)

So where does the other half go? 🙂

I have also noticed lately a pretty cool (and sometimes hard) thing about kids. Not only do they get physical traits passed down through the generations, they also get personality traits. Inside stuff that is harder to see. I think that’s so fascinating. I like to think that I just am who I am. And, certainly that’s true. The combination of “traits” I have from my parents and all my ancestors makes me unique, just like everyone is unique. But partly, I am also just like my mom, dad, grandmas, grandpas, etc.

How crazy is that? 🙂

So somewhere in that little Kirstie who looks so much like her mommy is half of her daddy. I’m sure some of it can be seen in physical traits, but it will be interesting to watch her and see myself in her mirror. Hopefully she got mostly my good traits. 🙂

by Greg

RE: Blogging

What I have noticed over my five years of blogging is that blogging is very much about the moment. If I try to get to something later, maybe even get a few paragraphs into a draft version here, it never happens. Or, if it could, it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. (To either reader or writer.)

That’s one reason why this blog has been so silent lately. It’s not that there are not things to comment on, or discuss… it’s just that there is never enough time to sit down and post something “in the moment”. I really thought there would be more here as I am taking several days off in a row, but there has not been. My days used to freer somehow, and I was already sitting at my computer… so posting to the blog in a sort of “stream of consciousness” way was very natural. Not so any more!

I have thoughts on the whole political race. Actually, much of what I think of senator Obama remains true. Read here and here if you are interested. (Posts from March and April of this year.) I have been working on our Buffalo Bills Show. Super fun stuff going on there! And I would love to share more stories from our family… always learn a lot from interaction with my kids!

I could also tell you about the crazy environmental “humans are bad” speech we got at the aquarium yesterday during the sea lion show…

But… at least… not right now.

So, from experience… never. You’ll have to hear that one from me in person. 🙂

The blog will roll on. Life will shift again, and there will be moments to jump into the e-stream of consciousness. There are still plenty of thoughts from Greg’s Head… but the “moments” to share them have been fewer and much farther between!

Stay tuned…

by Greg

Now I Know What To Do

This morning, while I was checking email on the laptop and watching the kids play in my in-laws’ driveway, Kirstie stopped by to ask me a question.

“Dad, how do I stop if I’m going down a fast hill on my bike?”

Puzzled by the question I asked, “Well, what do you mean? Why do you want to know?”

“I just want to know what to do if I’m going down a fast hill and I can’t stop,” came the matter-of-fact reply.

“Well,” I began, “I guess if you try your brakes and they don’t work, then you would just try and get to the edge of the road and sort of lean over so you could fall off the bike on the side of the road. Or, if you could… maybe just jump off the bike.”

She was listening intently to all I was saying, and then when I stopped she just got back on her bike and began to ride away. About ten feet away she said a very cheerful and satisfied, “Thanks!”

I laughed and said, “For what?”

“Well,” she said, “Now I know what to do when I’m going down a fast hill on my bike!”

by Greg

Five Years of Blogging

August 26th 2008 - Five Years of BloggingBelieve it or not, I have been at this “blogging” thing for five years now. Today. August 26th, 2003 was my first post, and now almost 1400 posts later, I’m still at it. (Albeit, quite infrequently this past month or two!) I love this avenue to share thoughts, start discussions, share links and information, and even post photos and family news to the world wide web of internets. I imagine I’ll be doing this for another 5 years at least… unless of course this is true. 🙂

Over five years I have shared the stories of not one, not two, but three additions to our family, I have told a few funny stories from the many children who inhabit our home (like this one, and this one, and this one) and even shared the emotions of times of very difficult loss, and the aftermath of that.

We have an amazing God, and I have loved sharing so many thoughts on life with him, as he leads me along, helping me know him more, so I can trust him more – rather than keep trying to trust in myself more. I even made that one of the main tabs above, Life With God.

Thanks for visiting GregsHead.net over the past five years. Blogging is a conversation. It’s a conversation starter, and the beauty of it is that you can actually respond inline to the conversation. Add your comments below anything I publish here. I love that. Life is a journey, that’s meant to be shared. (Oh yeah! I also have published three books along the way! A Journey Shared, Life in the Rearview Mirror, and There’s The Steeple… Here’s The Church.

This post is getting longer than I thought it would, but that’s because I am trying to cover five years worth of stuff in a few short paragraphs! If you’d like to read more, you can actually access the archive directory directly right here. Just click on any month from the previous 5 years and you’ll see all the posts from that month.

Thanks again for joining me for the past five years (or however long you’ve been here). Once life settles down for me (and I can figure out where to focus my energies) I should have the time and energy to share my thoughts here again, and continue the conversations.

Looking forward to that.