The nounsense is over

My A to Z Challenge  theme was nouns.

A noun is a person, place or thing.

My people were:

Allen Levi
Dave Ramsey
Frank Thomas
Hank Aaron
King Tut
Minnie Minoso
Nobody
Paul  Konerko
Jimmy Stewart
Bob Wallace

My Places were

Comiskey Park
Debt
Elgin
Illinois
Nowhere
Turkey
Uzbekistan
Virginia
Zoos

My Things were
Bibimbap
Discussions
Giraffe Poop
Jack & Diane
Library
Nothing
Oreos
Quinjet
Ragamuffin
Xanthosis
Yoyo

I enjoyed my time doing a to z blogging.

Here are three things I learned.

1) It is a lot easier to do a to z blogging as a full time home school dad than it is working outside the home.

2) I tried to do two blogs at the same time and had to give up on my  baseball one at U.

3)  Blogging here everyday for a month has gotten me more psyched for blogging than I have been in 2.5 years.  I am actually planning on participating next year in 3 blogs but have already picked my themes and hope to be much more prepared then I was this year.

I am sorry it took me a few weeks to post my thoughts.  But i went to Florida for 1 week right after this ended and it's taken me about a week to get back in the swing of things.

Speaking of road trips I am participating in the a to z road trip .  For more info click here.

Z is for Zoo (Place)

3 years ago when I last participated in a to z blogging.  I ended with this video my wife took when the kids were younger.  It feels like cheating to do it again.  But. it's eithe that or not finish.







For more A to Z blogging click here.

Y is for YoYo (thing)

i

When I think of the yoyo I think of the Duncan Couagempany and the yo-yo fad that started in the 1920's and the subsequent fads since then.  

Did you know that the yoyo is a Tagalog word?  Tagalog is a language of the Philippines.  The yoyo was used for 400 years in the Philippines as a weapon for hunting and fighting,  In Tagalog yoyo means come back.  The yoyo goes back much farther than 400 years and dates back to 500 years before  the time of Christ it was used as a toy in ancient Greece.  It was also used in China, before moving to Europe in the 1800's.  the toy came to the us in the 1860's with the British name bandalore.  In 1920 A Filipino immigrant by the name of Pedro Flores brought the name yoyo to the US and started producing the toy his shop on California.  His taught caught the attentiogin of Donald Duncan who brought the rights. to it.

A to Z blogging like the yoyo has had it's ups and downs for me.  But with one day left we are definitely ending on an up.

X is for Xanthosis (thing)

According to Merriam Webster, Xanthosis is ...

1

:  yellow discoloration of the skin from abnormal causes

2

:  a virus disease of the strawberry plant characterized by crinkling and curling, yellowing and dwarfing of the leaves, and stunting of the entire plant

Why did I choose such a noun? Because of the movie Akeelah and the Bee.  Before the scene we are about to watch, Akeelah and Dylan are talking about the word xanthosis and it is clear in the movie by the time of the spelling bee finals when they are the last 2 contestants, that they both know how to spell that word.  Akeelah has been observing throughout the movie that Dylan's dad is a tyrannical spelling bee Dad and only the championship trophy will be enough for Dylan to achieve.

Let's see what happens next .

If you have not seen this fine 2006 movie I strongly recommend that you do.  For more A to Z challenge click here.

W is for Wallace (Person)

Today's noun was going to be a place.  It was going to be Walt Disney World aka The Magic Kingdom.  On Saturday, 4/25 Robert Wallace passed away. "Mr. Bob" as he was known at Lake Zurich Community Church and the Lake Zurich Harvest, to generation after generation of AWANA kids was one of the kindest and Godliest men I ever had the pleasure of meeting,  He and his wife Lucille made every day living a ministry.  His life was spent investing in God's eternal kingdom, not a magical one.  He is there now, enjoying God's presence forever.

As this Father's day video shows,   Life does goes fast!  Bob is the last father featured.

V is for Virginia (Place)

V is for Virginia and it also stands for vacation it also is the roman numeral for 5.

5 years ago our family went on vacation in Virginia and 5 years ago we went into Washington DC and flew kites.

 

 

Flying a kite on the mall in D.C.
Posted by David Roller on Sunday, April 25, 2010

For more A to Z blogging click here.   

 

U is for Uzbekistan

For  Friday Fragments I thought I would go back in time  and look at 3  increments of 5 years starting in 1993 and telling you what  late April of those years may have looked like.


Fragment 1 :  22 years ago  in Tash Kent
Family Status: Single as they come
Employment Status: Southern Baptist Missionary


In  April 1993 I spent a week In Tashkent, Uzbekistan.  This was right after it had become it's own country after the breakdown of the U.S.S.R.  I was living in Russia at time as a Baptist missionary/English teacher and was spending a week in Tashkent to observe how ministry with Korean Russian youth was going since the team leadership aspect of the ministry in  Tashkent would matc hopefully to what we planned to do in my city of Khabarovsk.

I don't remember a lot about my time there.  I helped with English classes, church services, and also spent time enjoying the city.  I had a caricature of myself drawn at a sidewalk cafe which I gave to my folks upon my return.  My time in Tashkent was as close to a business trip as I've ever been on.

Fragment 2: 17 years ago in Hickory Hills
Family Status: Newlywed
Employed at Dovenmuehle Mortgage

In  April 1998, we had just moved into our apartment after getting home from honeymoon in TN.  We were very busy with our church, work, and being madly in love.  I was working in the phone center at the mortgage company and had only been there since December of 1997.

We ate out a lot, but also spent a lot of time with friends and family.  We started a tradition of visiting our living grandparents about once a month.  Those newlywed times will always be precious to me.  Every day was an adventure and I am glad to say that it still is.

Fragment 3: 12 years ago in Carpentersville, IL

Family Status: Married 5 years and had 3.5 year old girl and 1.5-year-old boy
Employed at Dovenmuehle Mortgage

By April 2003 life was getting back to normal after an eventful 2001 and 2002.  I was working in the research department at my job mostly handling presidential correspondence.  We were attending church in Crystal Lake

For more Friday fragments

T is for Turkey (place)

I went to Turkey for two weeks in 199 for a short term missions trip.  We took a team of 6 adults  and our baby daughter. I'm going to give you some brief observations from my memories of our time there.

• We spent a majority of our time in Istanbul, which is a city on two continents (Asia and Europe)
• People  on the streets of Instanbul would take our baby daughter out of our hands hold her for awhile and give her back.  We were warned about this in advance so it would not freak us out.
• In 1998 cell phones while common in the U.S. had not yet exploded to their current popularity. In Istanbul, everybody had a cell phone and were constantly on them.  Again, this seems commonplace in the US now but it wasn't at the time.
• Istanbul has a rich heritage and was the capitol of the Byzantine Empire when the city was known as Constantinople.
• Turkey is the home of some ancient biblical places like Ephesus.

Let me show you 3 visual highpoints of Istanbul, The Blue Mosque, The Hagia Sophia and the Grand Bazaar. All places that we visited.  

The Grand Bazaar is one of the oldest and largest covered markets in the world.  It marks it's beginnings from 1445.

 M o

The Hagia Sophia was built under the direction of the emperor Justinian in the 6yh century.  It was an  Eastern Orthodox cathedral from 537 to 1453.  In the 15th century when Constantinople was invaded by the Ottoman Turks the cathedral was turned into a mosque.  It remained a mosque from 1453 until 1931 when it was converted into a museum.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosques known as the Blue Mosque because of the blue tiles on the inner walls of the mosque ws built 500 years ago.

For more A to Z blogging click here.   

S is for Stewart (Person)

I am something of a Jimmy Stewart fanatic.  I have seen many of his movies.  It's a Wonderful Life is my favorite film of all time.  Mr.  Smith goes to Washington is also in my top 10. He was in so many great films.  So when I decided to watch 12 movies  this year that I had never seen before it didn't surprise me that a Stewart film would make the list.  What did surprise me is that it would be a Stewart film I had never heard of before.

Magic Town (1947) is just that. I had a month free trial of  Amazon prime and was looking for a Jimmy Stewart film I had not seen before and when I found Greatest Show on Earth,  which I had heard of previously but never seen,  When I found it was not available I went with Magic Town.
I did a little researching and found that It's A wonderful life (1946 pictured above) and Magic Town  were back to back box office failures for Stewart.

The main difference between the two is that Magic Town is well deserving of it's failure.  It's A Frank Capra like film , which is  not surprising as it was written and directed by long time Capra collaborator Robert Riskin.  The end result of the reteaming of Riskin and Stewart without Capra is expressed quite well in an IMDB review by Mario Gauci ...

"... while the plot is typically original and engaging, somehow it lacks Capra's cinematic expertise in putting over Riskin's ideas: the tone is too often syrupy and sentimental while the  hero isn't made to face formidable villains such as one finds in Capra's work."

Stewart is not at his best in the movie.  His portrayal of a pollster trying to put a magic formula to work, lacks the multilayered nuanced performances he so often achieved. Jimmy Stewart was in many great movies prior to 1947. If you are looking for better Stewart movies from the 40's, you might want to try The Shop Around the Corner or Rope instead of this slightly above average comedy drama.

.

R is for Ragamuffin (Thing)

R is for Ragamuffin

In 2014,  the movie ragamuffin about Rich Mullins came out.  I only have 39 minutes before my R is late for the A to Z challenge.  So I will let this clip stand on it's own.







For More A to Z blogging click here. 

Q is for Quinjet (thing)

Q is for Quinjet (Thing)

I know no thing can be as strange as giraffe poop.  But you are probably wondering what a quinjet iso and I'm just the guy to tell you,  Actually, I'll show you.



A quinjet is a  fictional jet with 5 turbo engines.  It exists in the Marvel Comicbook Universe and can also be seen in the Avengers movies and the t.v. show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It was first used in Avengers # 61 which came out in 1969.

In the Marvel Universe, the quinjet was originally designed by Wakanda Designs Group, has VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) and is capable of reaching Mach 2.1 or approximately 1,600 MPH.

The quinjets are primarily used for by the Avengers and are also used by SHIELD.  More often than not, quinjets are destroyed in action.



Cover ofAvengers # 61
book included  first appearance of a quinjet


For More A to Z blogging click here. 







P is for Paul Konerko (Person)

P is for Paul Konerko

Pauly Longball

Paul Konerko retired from the White Sox last year.  The class act that he is stayed 1 more year in 2014 and took a drastic cut in pay and reduced playing time and mentored Jose Abreu in his rookie season.  If you look up class act .  in the dictionary you won't see Konerko's picture because class act is not in the dictionary but if it was, you would.  I took this video in 2013 on Paul Konerko Bobblehead day.  Please appreciate that I called the play and filmed it.





Go to my sports blog to see about Konerko's HR achievements for the Sox.

For more A to Z blogging click here.  

Correction.  I went to My Merriam Websters dictionary and there was a definition for class act and pauly's picture was not there.  So I put one there.  

O is for Oreos

It has been a while since I participated in Friday Fragments at Half-Past Kissin' Tim. So I thought I'd give it a try.  If you are not familiar with Friday Fragments, last week's offering is very typical of the genre: a few short fragments of posts that don't have any cohesiveness or unity.  I am also doing A to Z blogging this month, so my first fragment will be a thing that begins with the letter N.  This is in keping to my A to Z theme of nouns

Fragment 1: O is for Oreo.

When I was a kid there were sandwich cookies like the kind my parents brought at grocery store and then there were Oreos.  Boy were they different!  The sandwich cookies didn't look like Oreos,  hey didn't separate like Oreos and they sure didn't taste like Oreos. Oreos were reserved for special occasions because the store brand cookies sure didn't cost as much as Oreos.

Boy have things changed! These days store like Target and Aldi have their own brands of sandwich cookies.  We call them Fake Oreos.  They still don't cost as much as Oreos, but I am happy to report that they look like Oreos, separate like Oreos, and they even taste like Oreos.

Fragment 2 K-Love Pledge drive

Our family really enjoys listening to Christian music and the station K-Love is often on in our car as we drive back and forth through that thing called life.  A few times a year they have a pledge drive.  I have a strange sense of humor, and like to over analyze things.  So I pulled my vlog Dave Out Loud out of mothballs and made this video about K-Love and the pledge drive.

Pledge drive, in all seriousness has been fantastic this year.  God is doing so many wonderful things just through people listening and giving to the station.  To give K-love a listen click here..

Fragment 3: Age of Ultron

I was looking through some old posts this week and I came across this one (also a Friday Fragment post) from 4 years ago entitled I thought Super Hero Movies wer for kids.  Just like the fake  Oreos situation,  things have got better for kid-friendly super hero .  Since I wrote that movies like Thor, Captaian America, and Avengers have produced movies I enjoy and will allow my kids to watch and love.  Avengers 2 comes out in 14 days and  a majority of our family is psyched.  Here's a short featuette that came out on youtube yesterday ...



Fragment 4 Imago Film Festival

I promised before the A to Z challenge started to tell more abot ut my experiences at this year's Imago Film  Festival.  Here is the trailer for Believe Me, a film I saw at the festival.



That's all the fragmments we have time for today. Go back to whence you came by clicking on A to Z Or Friday Fragments we have time for today.

N is for Nobody (Person), Nowhere (Place,) and Nothing (Thing)

Negative Words Can Have a Positive Meaning

You may wonder what I mean by that title.  How can negative words have positive meaning?  First, let's define terms.  I am not talking about discouraging speech.  These words are nobody, nowhere, and nothing.  Wait, you say, those words don't have a negative connotation.  They just describe absence.  They do that.  But also they certainly can have a negative connotation at times.  Just listen to this common self-talk:

                                    Why would THAT girl talk to ME?  I am just a nobody with a job that's going nowhere. In short, I'm a real nothing.  


Today, I want to use those words for positive emphasis by looking at the story of Jonah for the Bible.

1. There is NOBODY that God doesn't care for. 

 In the book of Jonah, God sent Jonah to a place called Nineveh to preach repentance.  The Ninevites were not only an enmy of Jonah's people but were thoroughly wicked.  If there was eve ra group of people God couldn't love, the Ninevites would certainly be it. Yet God loved them enough to send a prophet to them to warn them of their need for Him.  God had created them just like he created Jonah, me, and you.  He loved them and wanted them to have a relationship with him just like he loved us.

2. There is NOWHERE on Earth you can hide from God.  

God no only created us.  He created the world and the creaturs of the world.  If God calls you to do something and you go the opposite direction, do you think God won't find you?  That's what Jonah did.  He didn't love the Ninevites like God did and did not want God forgiving them so he split.  Jonah was called to go to one end of the known world.  So, Jonah quickly booked to the opposite end of the known world.  Hiding from God is something that so many of us do, one way or the other.  In the end, God finds us.  That's definitely in the job description of one who came to seek and save the lost.

Because God found Jonah and sicked a storm on him, we may think that God is out to get us.  And, He is.  But not to get us like punishment, but get us like--bring us home!  When the others on the ship heard Jonah's testimony about serving the God who created the universe, and then saw the power God had to bring and calm a storm, many of them found him, and worshiped him for the first time.  So after Jonah was found in the ship, God again "found" him in the fish and brought him back to the purpose he had called him for.

3. There is NOTHING you can do that God can't forgive.  

Jonah goes back to Ninevah and preaches repentance to the people of Ninevah.  The Ninevites, if you remember, were wicked people.  But Jonah chapter 3, says that the Ninevites believed God.  In Jonah chapter 4, Jonah says, "I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love."

I think everybody thinks that they've blown it at some point.  That they've done something so bad that if anyone were to find out, no one would be able to be in the same room with them.  They feel separate, alone, and utterly unforgivable.  Guess what?  They're wrong.  In every instance, God knows exactly what they did, and has already died to forgive their sins.  Our view of justice gets in our way of accepting that. This was true of Jonah, as I said before, he didn't think the Ninevites deserved to be forgiven.  He was right of course.  None of us do.  But God loved us SO much, he chose to forgive us anyway.   As Judd Hirsch famously says to Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People, "You can live with that, can't you?"

For more A to Z blogging click here.

1/2 way point at A to Z blogging.

13 letters done. 13 letters to go.  In the first 15 days of the A to Z Challenge I have shared videos, thoughts, information and anecdotes for 15 nouns ( 5 people, 5 places, and 5 things.).

I have set my schedule for the rest of the month and have posts about 15 more nouns.  That's right 5 more people like Allen Levi, 5 more places like Comiskey Park, and 5 more things like Giraffe Poop  (Actually I hope there are no more things like giraffe poop.).

Come back later today for my post featuring the letter N.  It has a person (nobody), a place (nowhere) and a thing (nothing).  Until then you can head back to A to Z blogging for more fun and adventure.

M is for Minnie Minoso( Person)

1925- 2015

Orestes "Minnie" Minoso broke the color barrier for the Chicago White Sox in 1951.  While played for 3 other teams than the White Sox but played most of his career in Chicago.  He played with them in the 50's 60's 70's and 80's.  On March 1st of this year Mr.  White Sox passed away. He had played, coached and been an ambassador for baseball his entire life.   Click here to read about his homerun prowess with the Sox.  Click here to go back to Blogging A to Z.

L is for Library (Thing)

Today's letter is L.  I have documented over the years that our family loves libraries.  Here is a you tube video from another of my blogs Dave Out Loud.






For more A to Z Blogging click here.

K is for King Tut (Person)

This classic Saturday Night Live skit was a jr. high favorite of mine.

Click A to Z to get back to the alphabetical disorder.

J is for "Jack and Diane" (Thing)

Welcome to 6 word Saturday/A to Z blogging.

slash what a great word. sa-lash!

Here's my 6:

John Cougar Mellencamp is a liar.

In the summer of 1982, John Cougar Mellencamp lied to me.  He did so daily, sometimes 3-4 times a day.  Even now sometimes  in an elevator, at a grocery store, a dentist's office or on pandora he continues to lie to me.

He says in his song Jack & Diane that life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.  When I was 18 and I thought about John, Jack, Diane, The Tastee Freeze et. al.  I just assumed that John was right  and  at some point the thrill of life would eke out and I should enjoy life while I could.

33 years after that song I must say that while life indeed goes on, it does not and did not in my case outpace the thrill of living.  I believe major events in 1982, 1990, 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2005 and other smaller events scattered throughout my life have helped the thrill of living live on in my life.  These years are all the beginnings of important relationships in my life.

1982.  I became a Christian.  Some people view embracing Christianity as a get out of Hell free card.  To me, it gave life a purpose that continues to this day.  That purpose is to love God and live in a way that glorifies in him.

Sa-lash!

1990.  I made a life long friend.  That friend and I could laugh together shop together, play and watch sports together and in the years we were in different states and or countries exchange meaningful correspondence and stay close even though apart.

1998.  17 years ago today, in fact, I married that friend.  As long as I have Amy by my side the thrill of living is alive and well.

1999.  Our first daughter is born.  2001,  Our son is born. 2005.  Our 2nd daughter is born.

When you have kids, you see the thrill of living again through a fresh set of eyes.

So, John Mellencamp, know this.  Holding on to 16 is one thing, never losing the joy, curiosity and zeal for life is quite another.  I'll choose the latter.  But a chili dog does sound kind of good about now.

Click A to Z or Six Word Saturday to return to their  respective abodes.

I is for Illinois - (Place)

Six word Saturday and blogging from A to Z combine for these 6 words:

More people know Chicago than Illinois.  

For more Six word Saturday click here. For more A to Z Challenge click here.