You know Mr. Cheetah Guy in Hawaiian Shorts I wrote about yesterday? He’s not a cheetah. He’s a serval, as he would tell me last night.

Leave it to a furry to know much more about animals than the TV news reporter who interviews him.

I looked closely at the news footage, and I found that the serval’s name is Darrien Lightworker. Once I had his name, I searched him up, and looked on his profile for the groups to which he belongs. He belongs to the Vine Christian Prayer Group, just like me, and he also belongs to several Green Lantern groups that protect residents on Second Life from criminals much like the Guardian Angels Safety Patrols do in real life.

I’ve seen him before! I know it!

Picture what Sonic the Hedgehog would be like had he joined the Green Lantern Corps. The green and black tights, the power ring, the “In brightest day, in blackest night” GL Oath, the whole nine yards. That is what Darrien looked like to me several weeks ago at a discussion group hosted by Grace Cuthbertsson.

I decided to IM Darrien, who happened to be online last night, and asked if he’s going to be at tonight’s Vine meeting. He says he still has the serval avatar. Maybe it will show up.

NBC Nightly News: “Religious Experience”

In my search for articles about Second Life and how it made news on the big television networks, I stumbled upon this interesting article:

Now that I’ve sampled churches in both Second Life and “meatspace”, I’m still convinced that there is no adequate substitute for a body of believers that meet in a brick and mortar building. I still go to Christian Assembly, in spite of the fact that it’s still a music/dancing church with very little to do for the writing/drawing member. I’d love for them to promote their web site, at least once.

As for the new congregation I’ve found, Vine Community Christian Church in Second Life, I’m highly curious about that church, too. We’re still trying to feel our way around, and invent ways to worship our Lord. I’m finding it a very fascinating exercise for my God-given problem solving skills. I can’t wait to see what will happen tonight.

I’d like to meet Mr. Cheetah Guy in Hawaiian Shorts, and try to find out from him why he thinks his SL church is the only one that seems to be accepting of him. I can’t help but wonder if there’s some brick ‘n’ mortar church out there that really dropped the ball in how they treated him.

There’s so much more to this story than the sound bites tell us.

Family Dollar is offering a digital still camera for $10 and a small digital video camera for $40.

Should I bite? After all, I do fancy myself a citizen journalist. Such gadgets would be a boon for my blogging.

I got my pay for the week, and bought myself earbuds and a supply of AAA batteries for my MP3 player. And a 10-pack of socks. I don’t feel right unless I have a strong supply of AAA batteries for both my Palm IIIxe and my MP3.

Scratch that. I need a strong supply of everything. If you were to look at my apartment, you would notice an oversupply of paper, both plain copier and college-ruled notebook. In the bathroom, I usually have more than one bottle each of  shampoo and body wash. What I’m not oversupplied on is toilet paper and dishwasher detergent, and I’m thinking seriously about getting such tomorrow morning. I have an extra cartridge of black ink for my printer, even though I don’t use it that much, and I’m starting to feel a strong cry toward getting more colored ink.

And I feel the need to pay the Internet bill off early, too. God forbid I should run low on that. Oh well. Pay the bills when I get home.

I don’t have a whole lot of life before and after each work shift at the Department of Health. At best an hour after I get up and begin that pivotal Final Hour Before Leaving and four hours after I get home, during which I do some Second Life. I leave for the Northern Lights Shopping center 15 minutes earlier now, to have more time to go to a thrift store and peruse its wares. Earlier, before catching the bus to work, I bought a sling messenger bag and a Beethoven CD.

The things I’m doing on SL nowadays are Bible studies and discussion groups at 8:00 PM SLT (translates to 11:00 PM Eastern). Helps me to feel spiritual, but I honestly don’t think I’m putting enough into it. Of SL and this blog, I’d have to say it’s Big Skye’s Country that is my biggest outreach. Here I can speak my piece for God and get away from the keyboard before anything in the way of negative feedback comes.

But then, ministering through SL … on second thought, I really must stop calling it “ministering”, because that’s speaking Christianese. It makes what I do sound more mystical than it really is. It’s a code talk understandable only by those on the inside and dismissed as fakery by those on the outside.

I want to be understood. When I start talking in some kind of hokey insider language of any kind, I ask you, dear reader, to have the courage to call me on the carpet for it. It’s a bad thing indeed.

Whatever it is I end up calling it, it’s a new thing. It’s very hard to measure the effectiveness of what I do. It’s very hard to decide what I should be doing more of and what I should be doing less of. The stand-up comedy I was doing I was doing out of being an attention slut and perhaps God is putting a merciful end to that misbehavior by closing down all the available comedy clubs.

I need to sleep on this and pray over this.

Work at the polling place

I bought me one of those digital photo frames at lunch yesterday. You know, one of those newfangled LCD screen things for showing everybody photos of the grandkids. Only I don’t have real photos in mind for this one. I’ve been meaning to use it as a kind of digital billboard.

You see, for several months now, I’ve known how you can export presentation slides from OpenOffice Impress into JPEG files and upload them into Second Life for use in presentations there, but it wasn’t until about about two or three days back that I would want a digital photo frame for slide presentations in real life.

I was pondering getting me another one of those electronic scrolling message badges and then thought better of it. What a ripoff! This is something that can only show four alphanumeric characters at a time, and takes God knows how long to go through my badge name, hotel room number, and cell phone number! Why not something that can show presentation slides, charts, graphs, graphics, the works?!

So I picked up a Philips Digital Photo Frame at Wal*Mart for some $85. Trouble is, now I can hear the Employment Gods whispering into my brain, “You know, after a ‘hanging the queen’ purchase like that, after throwing away all that food and clothing money, you realize we’re going to have to fire you from your job, right?”

I’d show you a photo of it doing its thing, but I had to plug into it the memory card and USB cable that came with my camera, and now I don’t have memory for my camera.

My 13 hour work day at the polling precinct went by pretty fast, and it was busy, even busier than the presidential election one year ago. We didn’t have much in the way of dead time; there was almost always somebody at at least one of our six iVotronic machines. I guess the voter mobilization battle going on between the pro-casino AFL-CIO and the anti-casino United Methodist Church brought all these people to our door. While I was voting machine judge again at this election the three teenage ladies from Youth at the Booth handled the bulk of showing voters to the iVotronics.

The technical problems we had to deal with in the morning were one machine that couldn’t detect its tape printer that prints out the paper record of each ballot, and a bad electrical outlet in the back corner.

While Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the fat cats at Penn National Gaming are probably lighting up the first of many big cigars now that the business plan of their new casinos are chiseled into the marble of the Ohio Constitution (nothing the state legislature can do about it now), and they can start exacting their terrible toll on people who are poor at math, I’d like to point out that Issue 3 got spanked in our two little precincts by 110 to 50 something. I don’t remember the exact numbers. At least my neighborhood is not beaten and bloodied enough by the economy to accept a questionable source of jobs and revenue.

Apartment in Saralis

I think the Lord has given me the gift of tech support. And I think He’s found me a way to use it directly for His work.

This morning, I wrote a notecard which will hopefully be distributed with worship animations that gives some tips on how to use the Second Life avatar in one’s worship.

Pastor Grace Cuthbertsson preached live through Voice Chat and made her sermon notes available through a notecard distributor, which I think gives the Lord’s Chapel a leg up on such other churches as ALM Cyberchurch and Calvary Chapel of SL, which play pre-recorded sermons.

Elsewhere on the grid, there is the strong possibility I could be moving to a new spacious two-room apartment in Saralis Village in Irutsk in another week, for not much more Linden than I’m paying for the two-room cabin in Upper Peaks.

I love the new digs. It promises to be a delightful new headquarters for this angel bear. And when you get right down to it, that’s all you can ask from an apartment in Second Life, a personal HQ. A storage place for news and information.

Gadget supply

I should hopefully get a small bunch of CR2032 button batteries that I can use in my electronic scrolling message belt buckle. I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting myself another one of those scrolling message badges,  but I think that for the amount of info that I would want to display on my person, I’d be much better off getting an 8″ digital picture frame. I know how to export slides from OpenOffice Impress as JPEG images, so it’s a piece of cake to turn it into a $30.00 digital sign.

Assuming the bid I just made on eBay holds up for the next 5 hours.

Base of operations

Man, I hate those alternative life dreams, where I’m driving a different car, living in a different house, and have no idea how I got there.

But then maybe that raises the question, “Do I have any idea how I got here? Do I have any idea where I’m going? Do I?”

Kind of reminds me of that song by Diana Ross called “Do You Know”.

Maybe I’m holding myself accountable for stuff only God can do. I read an interesting series of blogs over the past days about how life in Christ is like life aboard Noah’s Ark. The Ark was basically a big floating box, without sails or a rudder. No way to propel it, no way to steer it. It goes only where God would have it go. It does just enough in keeping me out of the drowning waves of God’s judgment. I’m out of line to ask more from it.

Pretty much gone are my dreams of being a semi-famous comic on Second Life. Not that I wouldn’t have done well at that sort of thing, it’s just that the audience for such a thing just dried up and perhaps wants to be entertained in some new way. Where are they going?

My job and the fact that I commute to and from it using a bus to downtown has pretty much shifted my base of operations to the Northern Lights Shopping Center. The groceries come from the Kroger down there, what little I need in stationery can be found in the Family Dollar a few doors up.

I eat out a lot more, which is probably to my detriment. Mostly at Subway.

Subway is showing up a lot anymore in my checkbook. Subway is the only fast food place that dares to openly show its face in the stretch of North High Street between Nationwide Boulevard and Broad Street. There might still be a Wendy’s down south of State Street, but I’ve yet to actually go down there. A couple of weeks back, I walked down to the Statehouse grounds, and I was disheartened at all the empty storefronts down that way. The recession has taken a lot of scalps along that road.

The Mandura drink

My Mandura fruit drink arrived off the UPS truck this morning. I didn’t immediately get into it as I was thinking that a product of its alleged medicinal properties ought to be handled like a medication, with meticulous attention given to reading and following its directions.

Its directions say, “Serve cold.” Into the fridge it goes, not to be seen until I come home from work tonight.

I’m still leery of it. $30.00 plus shipping for a 32 oz. bottle is a bit too much to ask for a bottle of fruit juice, no matter how much of an exotic superfood it is. When I drink it, I had better be turning cartwheels. The most satisfying thing I consume right now would have to be the $5 footlongs from the Subway down the street, and those cost only … you know the rest.

The expiration date

I had an interesting call at work today. A county health department—I will spare them the embarrassment of naming which one—vaccinated a lot of people until every vial they had of H1N1 vaccine had been tossed away into the biohazard bin. Then came the time when they had to account for their activities at our web site, and they found to their dismay that our web site demanded the expiration date and would not let them proceed without it.

Oops! Nobody said anything about writing down the expiration date. They were really in a pickle. They called the ODH for help, and got me.

I had to spend some 15 minutes anxiously tapping my toes while my supervisor Jason hunted down the phone number of the vaccine’s manufacturer, then talked to somebody at the manufacturer and fed them the vaccine’s lot number to get the expiration date.

Sigh! The things we do for taxpayers.

Q: How many Ohio State football fans does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: 15, broken down thusly:

• 1 to actually install the light bulb.
• 11 to bitch and moan that the light bulb could’ve been screwed in a quarter turn tighter and to call for the installer to be fired, in spite of his getting light out of the damn thing.
• 1 to say that the installer hasn’t the foggiest clue what to do with the clearly superior compact florescent bulb that was given to him.
• 2 that aren’t really fans, they just want to ridicule the other 12 for following such a blatantly, consistently overrated light bulb installer.

‘Nuf said.

I’ve filled out and mailed in my absentee ballot for the next election.

I already voted against Issue 3 because it’s a referendum probably written up by a casino developer outside of Ohio and that very idea stinks. Also, once the four casinos are built and operating and the 33% tax is later found to be insufficient, there’s nothing our state legislature can do about it, as it would take another amendment to the Ohio Constitution to fix it.

You might get the proposal to raise the tax on the casinos on the ballot, but do you honestly expect to outspend the casino owners for TV advertising? I’m sick to death of their Yes on Issue 3 ads getting in my face every 15 minutes.

The very reason Issue 3 is on the ballot is that Penn National Gaming is expecting Ohio voters to be clueless and unwilling to do homework compared to the Ohio legislature. I’m not slamming Ohio voters; they were smart enough to defeat Issue 6 last year. Personally, I’m too busy telling people over the phone how to navigate the Ohio Department of Health’s H1N1 web site to do my own lawmaking, and 90% of other Ohioans are too consumed with doing other jobs, too.

Give me an amendment issue that provides for a gaming commission in Ohio, with enough legal authority to put the fat cats in their place as needed, and I might be inclined to support it.