May, 2006

I’m a little late for the “ping homily this month](http://9rules.com/en/browse/featured/archive/96/, but it’s something I wanted to write anyway. I was thinking about aesthetics recently in general and beauty is a big part of that. Aesthetics, officially, is the philosophy and study of beauty. John Keats once said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is [...]

This took me a minute to get. I saw this in my stats as a link people were hitting on my site. I thought, “What? Is that a new kind of spam?” Nope. Just me in Spanish. Someone was viewing the Spanish translated version of my site so Estándares para la vida means Standards for [...]

Jonathan Renich is a college student who has started a project called eduRelief to raise money for education. Having a mother who teaches 5th grade to lower income kids, many of whose parents are not involved in their education I know the need for a good education. Of course for me it was because my [...]

!(shadow-l)/images/archives/218.png! Now this is a wild small world. A few years ago I sang with the worship team at Maranatha Chapel in San Diego under “John Wickham](http://www.maranathachapel.org/about/staff_directory/john_wickham.html of “The Way](http://tinyurl.com/ef4e7. His son Philip often sang too. In fact, after I moved to Indiana I kept watching the services online and I often saw him leading [...]

There has been some “recent discussion](http://wisdump.com/notes/redesigning-give-your-old-template-to-the-masses/ lately (“maybe it’s been going on longer](http://avalonstar.com/2006/05/17/this-is-not-a-wordpress-theme/) about releasing an old “template” once you’re done using it following a redesign. I’ve thought about this myself and though there are some pros, the cons for me are heavy enough that I just don’t want to get started down that road. [...]

My daughter has this pop-up book with a jungle theme which I thought would be great for a color scheme. I’m a really neutral color lover, always dressing in soft blues, greens and browns, and would drink a Black & Tan if I drank. I often find it difficult working with bright colors, which also [...]

Is there such a thing? Stacy Harp posted an article from the NY Times and I’m so glad to see it. There are so many people today who believe that divorce can be accomplished with little or no damage done to the children. As a product of a quiet divorce and a witness to many [...]

In his article “Any Ol’ Worldview Won’t Do,” Chuck Colson (Jubilee Extra, May 1996) argues that a major problem with Christians is their inability to carry over their beliefs about morals and ethics, marriage particularly, into their everyday lives. He suggests that these Christians might as well be secularists themselves for all the good their [...]

Inspired by “Bryan’s post](http://avalonstar.com/2006/05/17/this-is-not-a-wordpress-theme/ and “Matt’s anwswer](http://www.mattbrett.com/faq in his FAQ, I’m going to answer this question publicly so there’s no confusion.

In the design community you’ll find some nice designers who occasionally share some source code or a blog theme here and there. These people are going way out of their way in doing that and [...]

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I see a lot, I meanA LOT, of people writing the word loose when they mean to say lose, so in case there is any “confusion about these words](http://www.re-vision.com/spelling/looselose.html, loose means that something is about to fall out of its place, and lose means you need to find something. LOOSE — TIGHT, LOSE — FIND. [...]

Now that my layout is wider, I realized I need much more space in my admin write area too. I also had a problem with the preview tab because the preview was dependent upon Textpattern’s stylesheet instead of mine on the front end. So, here’s how I fixed both of those problems.

Preview Style

For the preview [...]

I’ve typically refrained from political discussion, partly because I don’t douse myself in political news and partly because there’s nothing new that’s not being said by all of the political blogs already. However, there is one thing which has crossed my mind more than once over the past four years since I voted for Bush [...]

I was watching CSI Miami the other night. The groom and I used to watch all the time just to poke fun and David Caruso’s overacting, but we’ve fallen behind. So I caught an episode last night. It was all could do not to fall off the bed laughing. I know that’s probably not Christian [...]

1. List three words that describe your faith. Deep. Mine. Immovable. 2. Describe one belief about which you are very certain and one belief with which you struggle. a) Jesus died for my sin, rose from death and ascended to Heaven. b) Occassionally I find things I might question for a moment, but I can’t say I struggle. I [...]

I feel compelled to share something with you this morning. It’s simple, and not very compelling at first glance, but I hope you’ll take the time to consider this. I was never a practical, list-making type of person, but I was told that sometimes making a list of pros and cons can help solve a [...]

You know, Natalie is a pretty unique name, at least it used to be. When I was growing up it was pretty rare to hear someone call out “Hey Natalie” and have that NOT directed at me. As I got older I noticed this beginning to happen more often. More frequently I’ll hear my name [...]