It was good to hear from you again, even though your comments were a bit aggressive.  I’ll respond to them eventually.  There’s some truth to what you have shared and I hopefully will share more about what God is doing in my life.  But there are many things you said in your comments that I will challenge and I’ll share why.

Sorry I haven’t seen you in so long.  My customer that was up in your neck of the country had sold their business to another larger firm that didn’t need my services, so I don’t have any “business” reason to come up there.

Let me know if you need Marian’s contact info, but based on some of the things you’ve said, it sounds like you have been talking to her.

Or more precisely, I need to get him to forget his name and learn a new one.

I’m home alone as I have been for a few days.  And during this time I have been having random worship times where I put on my headphones and stand in the middle of the living room praising God with my iPod.

And during this time, my dog, affectionately named “Lord” by previous owners, sits quietly on his bed minding his own business and keeping his thoughts on how weird his owner is to himself.

Randomly the song “Shelter Me” comes up, which begins with “You oh Lord” which I call out at a loud volume because I’m wearing headphones with the volume too high and I’m quite familiar with this song.

Poor dog, he jumps up and comes running up to me, tail wagging, “He loves me, he wants to pet me, come on, pet me, I heard you call me!”.

Sorry buddy, while you were nice to have around in this storm, it’s not you who I consider to be my harbor.

Marian’s in Tennesse for the next few days and I knew I would need a friend. So I went out and acquired one.

His name is Lord. I’m not kidding. The people who gave him to me apologized saying it was the name given by the people they adopted him from. During the drive to his new home, I happened to have Todd Fields’ “Lord We Praise You” in the CD player. I bet he was thinking, “I could get used to this!”

If anyone can help identify the type of breed, I’d appreciate it. The previous owners brought him here from Israel and only knew the Hebrew name for his breed. He’s about nine years old and seems to be perfect for the Koster family.

UPDATE:  I can now identify Lord.

We were anticipating my mother coming up to visit us this week, but it didn’t happen.  Since it was just the four of us, we decided it’s impractical to try cooking a big meal since we’d have too many left overs (and honestly neither of us felt like cooking).  So we headed out to Golden Corral for our Turkey Day feast.

After eating two platefuls, Nate said he wanted ice cream, but his stomach was hurting.  We assured him that he can wait a few minutes for his stomach to settle and he can have the ice cream when he’s ready.  But over time it didn’t get better.  He slumped in his chair and even yelled “My stomach hurts”, mad that we weren’t fixing it.  He earned our sympathy and we tried comforting him, but eventually he got to the point where he insisted “No talking”, just wanted to be left alone.  That’s when we knew this got serious and I encouraged him to come with me to the restroom.  But he refused and tried getting as comfortable as he could in the chair.  Not two minutes later he says “I have to throw up” and begins to do so.  Our waiter earned every penny of his tip as he tried to help out and insisted he didn’t mind cleaning up (said he had 9 children of his own).

So would I be a horrible dad if I had forced him to the restroom before things blew up?