Day 11 - Nov 30

My friend Ed Lawrence called me this morning. Was great to hear from him. He’s the first person outside my wife or boss to call me. Started my day right.

I decided to change it up this morning and not listen to music on the way to work. Usually I listen to Casting Crowns. Today, I decided to listen to one of Buddy’s podcasts. It was the start of the Live It – Tell It sermons. Today it was about praising God when you go thru trials. As it says in James – “count it all joy my brothers when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” Before I came over here, we went thru a lot – basement flooding, money problems, preparing to move to Italy, being sick and hospitalized – and I kept praising God. I come over here and get lonely and I stopped praising God. Oh, I was still going thru the motions somewhat – I was reading scripture and listening to stuff like “Praise You in the Storm”, but wasn’t acting like it. I’ve been doing a lot of “woe is me” stuff. I wasn’t practicing what I preach. I AM gonna praise God in this storm. I’m thankful for what I’m going thru. I’ve asked God for wisdom to see his plan, not mine. This too shall pass. I shall build endurance. There may be another trial right after this one. I’ll praise Him for that too.

Note, that I type this during the day while I work.

Went to get my permit to stay here. There was a problem with my insurance thing not being right. It finally got approved, but the supervisor that could sign it was in a meeting, so I have to go back again tomorrow.

I went to try and use the Internet at lunch and ran into a guy in the hall that I worked with out on the project in Arkansas. He introduced me to some project manager and now all of a sudden they want to put me on a real fun project. God is good! And, the project manager speaks very fluent English.

I spent the afternoon watching people use their computer. They’re having a problem with the new release. I make suggestions, but they don’t trust me yet, so they’re discarded.

Had a lonnnnnng conference call where I didn’t say anything. I had a meeting earlier where I made some suggestions on how to do something different. The conference call, all they did was tell the company on the phone about my suggestions and why we needed to do it that way. Conference call ran past 8, so someone had to give me a ride home. The bus to my house stops running at 8. There are buses running all night, but they change numbers, so I didn’t know which one to take.

Had potato chips (patatine is the Italian word on the bag) and M&Ms for dinner. It was all I had in the apartment. I wanted to order pizza, but there are about 100 places that deliver and I didn’t know which ones were near me. Not like Dominos or Papa Johns. I tried calling a couple, but the numbers didn’t go thru.

Watched Poseidon. Decent movie. Probably not realistic, but who knows. Only got to talk to my family for a couple of minutes.