My Son is going to Hell

People handing out candy in our neighborhood today, received what seemed like a cute gift in return. A boy, maybe 5, was giving out one million dollar bills, as repayment for candy. I thought it was so cute, that I gave him extra candy. I thought it was cute until the misses got home and looked at the bill, advising that on the back was some sort of religious statement.

Since I am not one to get my religion from a fake million dollar bill, I didn't bother reading it. Until my son after reading it exclaimed he was going to hell. This declaration made me wonder what was on the back of the bill.

So here goes....
The Million dollar question : Will you go to Heaven when you die? Here's a quick test. Have you ever told a lie, stolen anything, or used God's name in vain? Jesus said, "Whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Have you looked with lust? Will you be guilty on judgement day? If you have done those things, God sees you as a lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterer at heart. The Bible warns that if you are guilty you will end up in hell. That's not God's will. He sent his son to suffer and die on the cross for you. You broke God's law, but Jesus paid your fine. That means he can legally dismiss your case. He can commute your death sentence. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life." Then he rose from the dead and defeated death. Please repent (turn from sin) today and trust alone in Jesus, and God will grant you the gift of everlasting life. Then read your Bible daily and obey it.

After reading this out loud to my wife, my son said, "so then I am going to hell." I advised that it seems that he could turn to Jesus, repent, and read the Bible every day. To which he replied, "Straight to Hell"

Happy Halloween!!!!

An Open Letter to Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama,

I voted for you today. I went to the polling place and voted early. I wanted to be sure that I was able to cast a vote for you in this Presidential election. I take voting very seriously, it is not an honor that evey nation gives it's people. I feel that my vote today, may be the most important of my life. I know for a fact it is the most important vote I have placed thus far.

That being said, if you are elected, you have to deliver on your promises. You have to leave partisan Washington politics behind, and truly bring the change that you have talked about during your campaign. If your Presidency turns into empty promises and failed initiatives, you will have wasted my vote, and the vote of millions of other people.

You can not go down in history as just another President. You need to be the catalyst that takes our country beyond what is imaginable.

I have done my civic duty, and hopefully helped helped you reach the Presidency. Please don't let me down.

Respectfully,
Eric Powers

Kids keep you busy

It has been some time since I have wanted to take peices of my free time to sit down and blog. The past week was my first week back at work after having three weeks off. While Sophia has done a good job of sleeping at night, she is still under a month, and needs to get up to eat. Since I can't do any of the feeding at this point, I try and get up, and change diapers, burp the baby, help out where I can. Since work frowns on people who nap at work, I have been fairly tired at night, and instead of blogging, have taken to sleeping. So since I am home ill today, I thought I would take some time to catch up on blogging. Well, that and planning my first cub scout meeting. 40+ scouts and parents all looking at me, wish me luck.

Happy Birthday Mandy

It is my lovely wife's birthday today. So I wanted to take a minute and say Happy Birthday!!!

Colin Powell

Colin Powell, a Republican, African American, and the Secretary of State under George W. Bush, today has come out and endorsed Barack Obama.

I won't dwell on what he said other than this. Something that I think more people should be saying. I will try and find a slimmed down clip, the peice I keyed in on starts at 4 mintes 27 seconds, if you would like to just skip to that.



I wish more people would come out and say this. While I understand that there are people of the Muslim faith that have done some horrible things, and it is a faith that a lot of people (including me) do not know a lot about. Someone being of the Muslim faith should not disqualify them from anything (I guess other than being a Rabbi or Priest). If you decide to start looking at religion, and what has been done in the name of religion you stand on the edge of a very slippery slope.

Dragons or something profound

I've been meaning to write a really deep and profound post for some time. Nothing that will change the world, but something that will rattle some things. I thought that being off for three weeks would allow me to sit and create. My time to sit and ponder things bigger than me is wrapping up, and still nothing.

So let's talk about Dragons.

For those of you who don't know this about me, I love movies with Dragons in them. I just watched Reign of Fire, which is awesome...and has dragons (and Christian Bale which makes it awesomer).

I prefer movies with talking Dragons, if they can be voiced by Sean Conner, bonus. Maybe it started with Pete's Dragon. I believe that is the first dragon movie that I saw.

My favorite Dragon movie would be Dragonheart. It's cheesy, has Dennis Quaid, Sean Connery as the Dragon, and they go around hood winking people. You can't help but love some Dragon shennanigans.

If only they made a Muppet Movie with Dragons. Have I mentioned that I also loved the Muppets? No? I will have to save that for another post.

Back to Work

Today is the offical last day of my "bonding time" with Sophia. Come Monday I am back at work. Since my first go round with a newborn took place while I was a sophmore in college, I didn't really go through this. While I was away at times, I was home a lot as well. While I enjoy my job, I am not looking forward to having to go back to work.

This is the first time that I think I have really though that I would love to be a stay at home dad. If I was independantly wealthy, I would be taking the next five years off, to hang out with the kid. While babies are great. The thought of getting to spend a lot of time with her while she is 2-5 would be amazing. When she is learning to walk, talk, and put her stamp on the world.

The time would also give me the time to get into shape, read more books, write a book, meet more people in the community, and still have the same time for the rest of my family that I do now.

I am not independantly wealth, so it is back to work for me.

Joe the Plumber in 2012

I think we just all watched (well those of us that watched the debate) the launch of a new political career. If Joe the Plumber does not run for some sort of political office, Senator, Assembly Man, Dog Catcher he is waisting this golden opportunity. In at least a third of the questions asked tonight, Joe came up in some way shape or form. He is going to be swamped by all of the major news organizations with interview requests, and can become a folk hero for the working class.

Go get'em Joe!

Dear John

Dear Senator McCain,

Up until the last week, I may have disagreed with your campaign, but I believed that you were still a good person. You served our country not only in the Vietnam War, but as a member of the Senate. You cared enough about our country to serve it in one form or another for many years.

This past week though, your campaign has taken, what I feel is a dangerous turn. You have tried to peg Senator Obama as someone whose judgment you can not trust. In doing so, you have brought up his connection to Bill Ayers, who at one point in his life was a domestic terrorist. What Bill Ayers did and was involved in was horrendous, this is not a letter to defend his actions, but to discuss my disappointment with yours.

The anger and hate that this strategy has unleashed among your supporters is incredibly dangerous. When a member of the crowd at one of your campaign stops yelled out "A terrorist" after you had asked who the real Barack Obama was, you were presented with the opportunity to put an early halt to the boiling rage of some of your supporters. You chose to ignore the comment.

It took a woman at one of your rallies calling Obama an Arab for you to speak up and try an put a stop to these dangerous antics. While trying to explain to your crowd that Obama was a good individual, you were booed, or at least the idea that Obama was a good person was booed.

It is the year 2008 and we for the first time will either have an African American President or a woman as Vice President. It should not matter the color of a candidates skin, their gender, or sexual preference. We should be looking at issues, and discussing the future of our country. What gets me more than the accusation that Obama is an Arab, is that to this woman, him being an Arab was a bad thing.

I understand that you can not control what people at your events say. These things were not said though until your campaign starting the accusations of Obama palling around with a terrorist. The negative tone that your campaign took, has given credence to the negative feelings of some of your supporters.

It should not have taken a woman with a microphone for you to step in. You should have done this the minute your crowds started shouting "terrorist". Your campaign has unleashed some potentially harmful feelings, feelings that if acted upon could lead to violence.

With the election less than a month away, I should be focused on looking at your plans for economic recovery and reestablishing our relationships with foreign countries. I should not be chastising you for fostering hatred towards your opponent.

I am disappointed with where your campaign has gone, and hope that in the remaining weeks you decide to refocus on the issues. You are currently at a crossroad where you can continue to take a stand against your supporters and quell a very dangerous storm that is brewing, or you can decide to watch the storm come.

Please show me that their is some good left.

Respectfully,

Eric

100

So it seems that this is my 100th post. Which seems pretty crazy to me. Not only that I have had enough to say to warrant 100 posts (though some may argue that I have not had enough to talk about to warrant 100 posts)but that I have stayed at this long enough to reach 100.

To commemorate my 100th post I tried to think of what approach I wanted to take. Should I work it like a clip show, and discuss previous posts that I enjoyed. Such as my post about mermaids or bigfoot or Sarah Palin. I thought it may be a bit of a cop out though. I always hate clip shows.

Then I thought I could talk about being a father. Now that I have a complete set of children (one boy and one girl) I feel that I am filled with insight into parenting. Not only am I dealing with an eight year old, who I see slowly turning from a kid into a pre-teen, but I am going through the night time feedings (not so much me doing the feeding) and diaper changing that comes with a newborn. It is two very different times in each of their lives, and it sure keeps me on my toes. I didn't set out to make this a blog about my life as a dad, so many people do that much better than I do.

So I thought I should go back and recap why this blog came about. It started as a combination of my attempts to lose some weight (and by doing so winning a competition) and crossing off items that I wanted to take care of before I turned 30. While I didn't accomplish my weight loss goals (still planning on hitting them though) I did win a spot on a dinner cruise. I slowly am chipping away at my list of 30 things as well. Weight loss and exercise get me closer to the physical list items. I have traveled to see the Pacific Ocean, seen some of the movies I wanted, and laid the ground work for others. My blog has grown to be more than just a recap of these endeavors. While it started out that way, I didn't want to go back to pigeon hole myself.

I then thought I could make a long and well thought out commentary on our current race for the White House. I could talk about the issue I want someone to raise. I understand why McCain is bringing up William Ayers. With the images of 9/11 burned into all of our brains, terrorist is a label that incites more feelings than it used to. I get why he is trying to link Obama to him. If this connection was so bad, and we should all be so worried, why hasn't he brought it up sooner. Why didn't either McCain or Palin talk about it a month ago at the convention. Was it because was not politically safe for them to go that negative at that time? If a campaign is doing okay, that it is to risky for them to talk about Obamas past, but now that McCain is behind in the polls, including in some that are typically Republican strongholds. It is okay for them to bring up Ayers. If this is as big of an issue as McCain wants us to believe (I don't think it is) he should have been shouting this from day one. I can't believe that the issue is of any importance to me, if you were holding it as an the ace up your sleeve if things go bad. Though once I get going on these things I get all worked up, so I won't.

I then thought that maybe I would just to a little of everything. So I did.

My Friends

If you are a debate watcher, as I am. I urge you to watch the final debate on CNN. They have a group of 25 people who declare themselves as undecided voters. They give them all perception analyzers (dials that they can turn up or down based on their reaction to what the candidate is saying)that chart on the bottom of the screen the reaction of the group.

It is very interesting to see how people react. One thing that I noticed was anytime a candidate mentioned the other candidate, mostly to bring up their record, the peoples perception of them went down. Which goes along with the conventional wisdom that negative campaigning typically will back fire.

Overall I took that Obama typically had higher ratings over the course of the debate. Especially with women.

Anyway, I like debates, but the perception analyzer added an interesting twist.

Baby and Bear

Elizabethan Collar

This post will not be discussing 16th century wardrobes, but the ridiculus cone that my dog has to wear. She seems to have some sort of inflamation of her front left paw. Licking it seems to make it worse. Since it is her front paw, keeping her from licking it is near impossible. Thus enter the Elizabethan Collar.



I have also found that not only does it work as a deterant from licking, but it also makes her very easy to keep track of. Since she has had it on her, she moves around very little. I am sure that it takes a little getting used to.

While discussing this with a friend of mine, he mentioned how he had to put one of these on his Guinea Pig. It had something that made it eat it's own skin. I think it was barbeque sauce or something. Dosen't really matter. The part that matters is that I think that would be the funniest thing I have ever seen. Did at anypoint he think, this is hilarious, I need a picture of this to show my friends. No, he did not. No visual evidence that he had a tiny collar on a tiny pet.

Brewers

I have been a Milwaukee Brewers fan for a long time. To be honest I am not sure where I get it from. Other than my Grandma, I don't really know of any adult in my adolescence that liked the Brewers. Regardless of how it came to be, it did.

I remember going to County Stadium as a Cub Scout, and yelling until I could not yell anymore. One game was in early April. It was freezing out, probably in the mid to low 40's. In one of the first innings, the guy behind me spilt his beer all over my feet. The Brewers won though, which is all that mattered.

I remember listening to games on the radio and writing down the lineups so when I would play baseball in the yard the next day, I could pretend that I was on the team. Paul Molitor was my hero. I still have his poster in my basement. I haven't put it up since the day he left the Brewers and signed with the Toronto Blue Jays. I couldn't believe that he left, but he did. I remember watching Robin Yount, Jim Gantner, Pat Listach, Teddy Huigera, Chris Bosio, Gary Shefiled, Rob Deer, among others. I remember watching young players develop and get traded away. I remember losing seasons, a lot of losing seasons.

Tomorrow I get to go to Miller Park, and see my Milwaukee Brewers play in the playoffs. Before I go further I have to thank my wonderful wife for letting me go. Sophia will be one week old, and Mandy will be going it alone (aside from Trevor, who may be help or may cause more problems) for the day. I know it seems silly, but this is one of the best things she has ever done for me.

Tomorrow that boy listening to Brewer games on the radio, gets to go see Brewers Playoff baseball.

GO Brewers!!

Finally Home

After six days, five nights, a 9 pound baby, lots of dirty diapers, 48 hours of IV antibiotics, two spinal taps, and getting to know about every nurse and nurse tech we are home.

Everyone is happy and healthy. Here are some pics.