Digital Cowboy

My bathroom reeks of fruitiness. There are multiple fluffy robes hanging on the back of my bathroom door. I have plants hanging - hanging! - on my porch. There’s stuff in my shower that I can’t even identify - and a lot of it. There are curtains now and everything has been rearranged. I don’t know where to find anything anymore and I’ve been informed that I’m supposed to stay out of the kitchen - I don’t belong there.

Also, most of my stuff is crap and needs to be taken to the dumpster (by me, of course) whenever the pile at the back door warrants a trip.

Hannah Montana seems to always be playing somewhere in my house. Not just the show, the music. And not just in the house. It’s on Mommy’s iPod so we can listen to it in the truck, too. Suddenly picking songs on Daddy’s iPod in the truck isn’t great fun, it’s old news. Daddy’s iPod doesn’t have any Hannah Montana or Emily Osment. Mommy’s here with the good stuff.

My youngest daughter has informed me that I’m now outnumbered and the girls are in charge. In fact, she says, “Girls go to college to get more knowledge and boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” (I’ll leave that irony to the reader and address it with her later. For now I just respond with “Boys rule and girls drool.”) I get no love around here anymore. Those cute little ones that used to crawl into my lap a couple times a day for Daddy hugs are now threatening to throw me out if I don’t shape up.

I thought we were getting Mommy back. Now I see that they were planning a coup. I just respond by telling them that if I don’t start getting the normal daily dose of hugs and love from them that I’m accustomed to, I’ll throw their mother out and when Mommy’s living in a box under a bridge it will be all their fault.

For the love of all that’s holy: I just broke the kitchen rule and went to make coffee… My prized Hamilton Beach Brew Station - the best thing I ever bought for my kitchen - smells like… like… Oh, God help me. The coffee maker smells like vanilla. Sure enough, after I got it cleansed and disinfected from all of the “girl” on it, I went to make coffee and there was some foil pouch of “Vanilla Biscotti blend” where my COFFEE is supposed to be! (Fortunately, I found actual coffee right next to it.)

On the flip side, I never cared much for the kitchen anyway. Also, not only have I not been going hungry lately, I’m eating better than I have in years.

I could do a whole separate post on that. That woman ain’t just eye candy in a kitchen. She’s a creative genius there. She concocts things on the fly that I would pay extra for in a restaurant. Most of what I eat these days has no name - “This is delicious, Baby. What is it?” (her laughing) “I dunno. Something I threw together. I just call it ‘My Mexican Chicken Shit.’ You really like it?” (What perplexes me is that she often does it just with stuff I already had here and makes it look easy.)

I have to admit the place looks a whole lot better, too… if you can block out all the yucky GIRL stuff everywhere. I only just now noticed that the coffee maker smells of vanilla because I haven’t made my own coffee in weeks. And I’ve never asked for coffee; it’s just been made by the coffee fairies while I sleep, I guess. It’s just there when I wake up, usually. Sometimes the fresh coffee smell is accompanied by the smell of frying bacon when my eyes open. (Bacon fairies? Who knows? No tellin’ what she had packed in all those boxes when she moved in.)

I complained to my mother about some of this girly infestation recently and she said, “You’re not foolin’ anybody. You LOVE it!”

She’s right. This briar patch is so awful. I demand that for all my sins and in the interest of justice, I be sentenced to remain here forever.

“When they carve my stone
All they need to write on it is
‘Once lived a man
Who got all he ever wanted.’
Tell me something: Who could ask for more
Than to be livin’ in a moment
You would die for?”

I’ve said nothing here recently and probably won’t soon.  There’s too much to say. Respect for the privacy of others prevents me from saying most of what I would like to.

I’ll tell you quickly that the legal conflict is over and I picked up my daughters last Tuesday morning. We’ve been home since Wednesday night. We had a hearing in court last Monday afternoon in Augusta, GA and it went exactly as I had declared in prayer that it would.  No surprises there. (I wanted to make that public because so many have expressed concern and I appreciate that more than you know.)

That’s good news, but it was expected - at least by me.  There’s far, far better news that was surprising to me.  I’ve expected it all along but I wasn’t expecting it now.  I knew that I knew that I knew…  I didn’t know when.  So it was a pleasant surprise Tuesday morning.  It’s also the part I can’t write about here yet.

In January of 2003, an atheist issued a challenge to me: “When [things go the way I predict] and you don’t get what you are praying for will you admit that your God doesn’t exist and prayer is a foolish waste of time?”

I replied, “Certainly.  But only on the condition that when [things go the way I predict], you’ll bow before my God and admit that He answers prayer.”

He accepted.

I’m currently holding my breath while waiting for that admission. Resuscitate me when it comes.

I don’t bring this up to boast about winning a bet.  I point it out to brag on my God.  He answers prayer and He does so every single time.  I had pastors tell me that I was nuts and should give up.  The more time that went by, the less I told “new” people in my life about what I was believing for.  ”It’s been HOW LONG?!?!”  ”Oh, Honey, you need to move on.”

Patience is hard.  It can also be lonely - almost everyone thinks you’re crazy.  I speak from experience.  But don’t you ever let anyone move you off your dream.  If you have a Word from God and even if you’re the only one that believes it, anything is possible. When you serve at the feet of Love.

You’ll never find anyone remembered as great in the Bible that took a poll or allowed themselves to be influenced by popular opinion and general consensus. What you find over and over and over are courageous people that refused to be moved, acted alone in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and we now consider them great because of their faith. (Recommended reading starts in Hebrews 11 and the part about Abraham in Romans 4 is a next step.) Whenever you find yourself in agreement with the majority in any situation, it’s time to re-examine your premises.

“Never” rarely lives up to its hype. It’s not over ’til it’s written in stone. On a grave.

I’m not even completely convinced that it’s always over then.

I’m currently fighting yet another legal battle. This time it’s in two states, a thousand miles apart, to get my children back from a kidnapper.  I offered visitation to which my children’s mother was not entitled and then gave her gas money to get home because she “didn’t budget for the horrible gas mileage” she got on her trip to get them.  (I’ve had custody for nearly four years and she’s never paid a dime in child support, by the way.)

My reward was that I was served with papers 8 hours before I was to leave to drive 1000 miles to get my children.  The papers informed me that I no longer had custody of my daughters.  A Georgia judge that has never met me, my children or their mother gave her the benefit of the doubt when her newest attorney alleged a whole slew of things she has tried - and failed twice - to convince a Texas court that I’m doing… or not doing.  She has no evidence and thus presented no evidence.

What she’s done is a violation of Federal law - forum shopping across state lines.  She could do time for it.  I pray that doesn’t happen.  I wish her well, to say the least.

But, it’s not just me.  I have a friend that has been attacked over the legal custody of his daughter.  In his case, he was never married to her mother and she surrendered custody - in writing - in the hospital at the child’s birth.  The child is now seven years old and her “mother” has never been anything but an occasional visitor in her life.  The child has been raised by her father who places her above every other priority in his life.

Yet another acquaintance - a single father in my church - has recently been accused of horrible things by his recently teenaged daughter.  The girl has been a rebellious child for the last year or so to the point of being violent towards him.  The child’s mother is a known prostitute and drug dealer. She lives with drug dealers.  With one call to Child Protective Services, she temporarily over-rode court orders and terminated his parental rights (temporarily).  When CPS started investigating, they discovered multiple warrants for arrest for the mother and others living in her house.  With the children.  There is also great natural evidence that the teenage daughter’s story is fabricated.

But he is still fighting to exonerate himself and get his children back.  He’s considered guilty until proven innocent.  Because it’s all for THE CHILDREN!

A caring friend recently asked me if she and the rest of The Body of Christ had been, and were, letting “you” down.  By “you” she meant single fathers.

I responded, “I don’t think so, but I’ve never thought about it in those terms.  I can tell you this:  Being a single father is a far, far more difficult experience than being a single mother.  I never whine about it and I’m only talking about it now because you asked me.  But the fact is that everyone respects and admires the struggle of a single mother.  Everyone feels sorry for her and has sympathy.  Single fathers are looked upon by most of our society as freaks at best and perverts at worst.  We’re always suspects and we’re always vulnerable to wild allegations from any source.”

I’m not interested here in pointing fingers or going on a rant.  But I want to say that the tables have been turned by feminism (defined properly here as:  anyone with a uterus shall be permitted anything her emotions or hormones dictate but shall never have responsibility for anything) and it’s not a good thing for THE CHILDREN!!!!!  I only appeal to that because it’s true and nobody gives a damn about men.

When I was growing up in the 70’s it seemed that most divorces were because selfish men left their families. That was probably true - then - and certainly awful.  But now feminism has turned the tables completely.

Women have become selfish.  (I think they call it “empowered.”)  ”No fault” divorces are now initiated by women more often than men, by a large margin.  (There’s no such thing as a “no-fault divorce.”  If you’re initiating it without a reason, YOU are at fault.)  Both the society and the courts generally justify the childishness of these women while at the same time both of the former are still stuck in the prejudice of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.  As a result, we have an entire generation of men that are doing their best to raise children alone.  Yet they are viewed as undeserving victors when they get custody and then they are under constant scrutiny, always vulnerable to as little as a phone call or a court filing to upset their lives and the lives of the children for which they are working so hard to provide stability.

I’m not optimistic that government will ever fix this.  It’s never done anything else worth while.  So maybe my friend was on to something.

Maybe The Body of Christ needs to be more aware and attentive to this.

There’s definitely a need.

My two beautiful little redneck girls and I went to the Major League of Monster Trucks event last Saturday night at Texas Motor Speedway. I didn’t especially want to but we made a deal and they earned it. I’ve always found monster trucks to be fascinating… for about 15 minutes at a time. I was not willing to make the drive or spend the money for that reason, except that they were excited and wanted to go. So they earned it and we went.

I enjoyed it far more than I expected. If you’ve never done this and have the slightest interest, DO IT! Just GO. Those trucks, in real life, that close, are absolutely amazing. I found myself sitting there feeling like a little boy, giggling and thinking to myself, “Only in America! This is why the terrorists hate us!” Then I would giggle some more after each time that thought went through my head.

It’s the sort of thing that a thinking man looks at - in the midst of enjoying it - and says to himself, “Why?!?! This is ridiculous.” The answer of course, is “Because WE CAN!”

I think there’s a deeper lesson in there, certainly for me and I think probably for many people. I don’t have to justify what I find amusing. Or fun. Or pleasurable. It does not make me some knuckle-dragging, mouth-breather if I enjoy a display of redneck engineering. Furthermore, it most certainly is a display of great engineering. Those who would dismiss “those rednecks” have very much underestimated them.

Yes it’s silly. But not nearly as silly as “modern art.” Monster trucks - for that matter NASCAR - are amazing displays of the extremes possible with very practical mechanical engineering. Most art is worthless for anything except basic snobbishness. On that basis, I would argue that NASCAR and monster trucks are both far more useful and valuable than “art” and the ignorant ones are those who invest their time and energy into vacuous pursuits that serve no purpose except to make themselves falsely feel superior.

In fact, I would go a step further and say that anyone who does not see a monster truck as practical - and amazing - applied art is fundamentally ignorant and lacking a basic understanding of how the world works.

It is nothing short of amazing to see an 8-ton-plus vehicle using ~1500 horsepower to launch 30 or 40 feet into the air.

We were fortunate in that even though it was quite crowded already when we got there and we had to sit way off from the center of the grandstands, we got seats in the second row. Then, after the event began, the kids were allowed to move down into the unoccupied seats that had been reserved for the handicapped. So I watched from row two and my girls were in row 0 - in front of the front row, right at the fence.

Being off-center turned out to be a blessing. When they got ready for the Freestyle round - the best part - they brought out a giant forklift and started moving vans and a bus to set up… RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. A large portion of the big action in the Freestyle competition happened directly in front of us and only about 50 feet away.

I put a few pictures up. The first page of thumbnails is all mainly pics of my kids with the trucks. The second page is purely monster truck action. The first 6 pics are not of a “real” monster truck. It’s a truck we parked near in the parking lot. In the pictures you’ll notice Texas plates on it. It’s street legal. In Texas anyway.

(There are a few pics in the gallery that have boldface titles underneath. Those pics all have description text if you click on them to view the larger version.)

Behold the power of a catchy jingle. This is an accurate recreation of what I listened to tried to block out for about 15 solid minutes recently during breakfast.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon on a number of other occasions since, as well. I’m sure the Vonage marketing droids would be thrilled.

My five year old has recently taken to coming into my office while I’m working or reading online and reading “over my shoulder.” (She actually stands next to me between me and the monitor; she’s a little short to literally read over my shoulder.) A few days ago she did this while I was working. I happened to be at the jQuery web site reading the developer documentation for a plugin to that excellent Javascript library. She understood none of it but, much like her Dad, it’s unnatural to her that words within her range of vision should not be read.

So without missing a beat, she just started reading out loud, “Using jQuery.extend to extend jQuery itself. In the above section, we checked if any options are given before we applied jQuery.extend(settings, options). The reason for this: If you specify only one parameter, the jQuery object itself is extended with the given object.”

She never so much as struggled with any of it, reading it almost as quickly as I do. (As an excuse, I’ll say that I read it slower than I could because I’m trying to actually comprehend it and she’s not. So there! Thfffttt!) She even correctly read the oddities in the first line, a section header, as “using jay-query dot extend to extend jay-query.”

No matter how many times I see her do these things, I still find it amazing.

That night, I was reading Opinion Journal’s “Best of the Web” while the kids were getting ready for bed. She came in and again automatically began reading. This time, I decided to record it for those who don’t have the opportunity to witness firsthand what home education can do.

That was completely impromptu. She had no preparation and had never seen the text before. The SMOG calculator says that the column she was reading is at grade level 13+ and the section she reads in the recording above is nearly grade level 12. You can hear me helping her some in the audio but what you hear is all the assistance I gave her. I was not helping her in any silent way.

Granted, the SMOG rating is the grade level at which one understands everything they have read and I’m sure she didn’t understand what she read. Then again, I’m not sure anyone including Dubya understands the current Iraq policy. (HA! couldn’t resist!) Anyway, I suspect that is what the ignorant/evil critics of phonics are getting at when they say comprehension suffers - it’s because phonics allows one to read way beyond their level of understanding. Help me understand how that’s a bad thing.

She had real trouble with the words “Rwanda,” “Sunnis,” “ideological” and “Shias.” My guess would be that many high school graduates in this country would as well. Other words, such as “century” and “nonstrategy,” she had to work at but she got them on her own. (It should be noted that “nonstrategy” isn’t actually a word either.)

She made a few mistakes, too. But as someone that has seen her do this frequently, I can also say she wasn’t in her top form when I recorded her. It was past her bedtime and she was very tired.

This child is not yet six years old and would be two months into kindergarten if we had not chosen to educate her at home. Incidentally, my older daughter can read just as well but usually doesn’t. She’s an artist and not as interested in reading so she tends to get in a hurry and guess at the words instead of actually reading them.

Many of you have asked how life on the ranch is going. It couldn’t be better and it’s been quite busy lately. In fact, I have some big news to report. As of Sunday afternoon, I now have a bonafide rodeo champeen living at my house! My oldest daughter Katelyn took first place in the mutton bustin’ competition Sunday. She was the only competitor that wasn’t afraid at all. Some of the kids chickened out completely once the sheep was brought out and the ones that did ride required a lot of coaxing to get them on. They also all cried when they fell off.

Not my cowgirl! Monty, the cowboy running the event, told me later, “She was the only brave one and she was fearless. She hopped on, grabbed hold and when she looked up at me she had that look in her eyes that I see with the ropers when they’re ready to have the gate tripped - ‘Let’s get it on!’” (I have another picture of her where you can see that laser focus while she’s riding but I didn’t post it here because it’s hard to see unless it’s at full resolution.)

She rode for well over 10 seconds and she was the only one that didn’t get “bucked.” When she hopped off and came back to me she said, “Daddy, I could’ve gone longer but they told me to get off.” I said, “That’s fine, Sweetheart. That’s like makin’ the whistle at a bull ride!” “Well, can I go again?” Monty told me later that he told her to get off because the sheep was tiring out and it looked like she could ride all day.

Besides the trophy she won, the event payout was a big ol’ bag of candy and this was the real deal - in a rodeo arena with a crowd of spectators cheering. She even got to pick up her winnings at the pay window just like the cowboys do when they win the ropings. The trophy says “Mutton Busting - 1st Place 2006 - Covenant Ranch.”

Now she’s bugging me about building her a trophy shelf in her room. She’s certain that this is just the first of many rodeo trophies she’s going to win. She’s probably right. She’s also trying to use this new status as leverage around the house - “Well, Daddy, I am a rodeo champion!”

“Uh-huh. Get your room cleaned up, rodeo champion.”

Tonight on the way home from the grocery store I had the following conversation with my daughters:

“I wish Mommy was here.”

“Why, honey?”

“Because then you could do your work and she could take care of us.”

(The child is only five years old and understands better than her mother does.)

“Yeah, that would be nice, dear. But that’s not how it is right now. Remember what I taught you about poker? You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

“I know. (long pause) I wish we had a step-mommy.”

“WHAT?!?! You want a step-mother?!?”

“Yeah. At least there would be somebody to help you. She could take care of us while you did your work.” (Judging by her tone, I think she was more concerned about me than herself.)

(Other daughter) “But I wouldn’t want a step mother unless she was really nice, like Carol.” (Carol is the woman next door.) “I mean, we have a step-daddy in Georgia and he’s just mean. I like it here better.”

“I really just wish mommy would come back.”

Me, too, dear. Me, too.

If anybody knows what I’m supposed to say to that, please enlighten me. My daughters are priority number one to me and I often find myself in these situations where I’m left speechless because everything I want to say is inappropriate.

What I want to say is, “Tell your mother! She did this and it’s entirely up to her. If you’re suffering, it’s her fault!”

I give up.

Today we got a box from grampa that contained $20 worth of junk food and cost nearly $15 to send.

Among the mess was a can of spray cheese.

Enough said.

(Except that I’m not really giving up. The only fight that I will never quit is the one to protect my daughters.)

I’m long over due for a haircut and the last one I got was so bad that I can’t imagine anyone could do worse. So tonight, as I was putting my daughters to bed, I asked them if they wanted to give me a haircut tomorrow.

Initially I was joking, but they were so excited that they could barely go to sleep. So now I’m stuck.

That’s OK. As I said, no one could do worse than the last one and I would rather see their smiles than pay someone that’s not even more skilled than them.

I’m willing to live with whatever they end up with. Worst case, I might have to shave it all. That’s fine with me, too. If that’s what it comes to. They’re bound to have fun regardless.