Happy New Year!

I guess, over the years, I’ve become a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to New Years hoopla. It’s been decades since I stayed up till midnight on New Years Eve except for one time when friends invited us to their house and we went over there to honor their request and our friendship. We stayed up late with them because we enjoy their company, not because we wanted to see the ball in Times Square do its annual thing. Almost everyone gets all excited about the start of a new year and the end of the old one, but the truth is that a new year starts and an old one ends at every moment of every day. Not only is today the first day of the rest of my life, this second is the first second of the rest of my life. And that will continue to be the case, moment by moment, until I die.

Yet, there is an intrinsic thrill in watching the odometer click over from 99,999.9 to 100,000 (Remember when odometers clicked over instead of lighting a different element on an electronic display?) It’s a milestone that seems to apply to time as well as distance. In First Samuel chapter 17, Samuel set up a stone between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer. He said, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” But God didn’t help Israel out of the blue. They had been disobedient and God had been punishing them at the hands of the Philistines. When, at Samuel’s instruction, they set aside their Baals and Ashtereths and began to worship God alone, He weakened the Philistines to the point where it was easy for Israel to conquer them. I hope to be able to look back on my life and see Ebenezers all along the way, at various times of each year, commemorating countless times when I will have obeyed God and He will have helped me.

We spent our New Year’s Eve Day helping the Mittens move into their larger and new-to-them home. It’s a much nicer place than the original house and we are all thankful it became available. The owner is a friend of HRGS so we’re excited about that too. Mildred and I will be headed over there to help them some more later on today. I don’t think I did a lot for the move yesterday, but I did get one important thing accomplished for them. I learned the hard way that the neutral wiring in their house was not bonded to ground. I was in the process of changing their refrigerator doors around because the hinges needed to be on the other side. I was lying on the ceramic tile floor in my sweat soaked tee-shirt getting ready to remove the bottom hinge. When I put the wrench to the screw my yelp made every head in the house turn my way. I’m sure glad it wasn’t little Caroline who got that jolt. At first I thought that the outlet was wired wrong. Then I saw that it was wired correctly, but that all the white wires in the house were hot and all the black ones were not hot. I learned a long time ago that when weird stuff happens (and that definitely qualifies as weird), it’s probably a loose or broken neutral wire. To make a long story short, in the process of checking that out, I learned that the actual reason was that the neutral was not connected to ground – not a good thing. That was an easy fix.

This was not a week of big events, other than getting one of the hardest electrical shocks I’ve ever received. There is one breakthrough that I’m celebrating, though. Our audio from the studio gets converted to digital and sent over a wireless computer network to our transmitter site about four miles away. Then it gets converted back to audio and fed into the transmitter. The codex’s that do the conversion have USB ports and the one feeding the transmitter is supposed to be able to play MP3 audio from a thumb drive if the regular audio source stops. The idea is that if something in the studio breaks, or the network goes down, we will stay on the air with music and announcements from the thumb drive. I’ve been researching it off and on for months, but not finding a way to make it work without losing the functions we need under normal conditions. Well, the manufacturers finally offered a firmware upgrade that makes it all possible. So I upgraded the codex’s and, after some fiddling around with file names and paths, got it working. Now we just need to record the announcements and put them and the music on the thumb drive. It’s a great relief to me to finally have this figured out and have about as much protection from “dead air” as we can get.

Well that’s about it for this New Years Day. In spite of my curmudgeonly comments above, Mildred and I both wish you a wonderful 2010 and many happy returns.