Tag Archives: indiana

We sold our house!

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We have had our house for sale by owner for four weeks now. It has been a big strain because we hoped for a quick sale and even thought we had it sold a few weeks ago only to have the buyers back out after 24 hours. Last Thursday I arranged for two showings of the house for Saturday, and drove down to Indiana early Saturday morning for that purpose. The second (and last) couple to view the house promptly made a good offer, which I accepted immediately. We signed a contract, they wrote a check for earnest money, and as far as I can tell, the rest of the process is going smoothly because they are preapproved for a loan and have already sold (and moved out of) their previous house. We are thrilled and thankful. It looks like we may be able to close on the transaction somewhere around Labor Day.

Each step of this very stressful and hectic transition has seemed impossible to us, yet at every turn, God has provided just what is needed. This has included the necessary income, extra help from family and friends, and many other examples.

Last night I unpacked all of my clothes and organized them in our large walk-in closet in the master bedroom. Michele needs to do the same for her clothes next, but the most important thing for us to take care of in the next few days is Keegan’s school registration. He starts school next Tuesday.

Back online again

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It is great to have high speed Internet again after being without it for over a week. We are settling in nicely here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. We all really like this location and we are enjoying the many conveniences such as tons of places to shop for groceries and other things. As an example of the benefits to living close to everything, Monday night, after a long wait, Comcast service people came to install cable TV and Internet access. I had bought a cable modem when we had cable Internet installed in our house in Indiana 3 1/2 years ago, and I assumed I could use that same modem here. Unfortunately, Comcast doesn’t support it and told me I had to buy a new one. I zipped down the road to Best Buy and found a nice Motorola cable modem for $75 (by the way, that’s less than half the cost of the modem I purchased from the cable company in Indiana when we moved there). The entire trip took only 15 minutes.

Another nicety? There is a Starbucks less than a block away. (Funny though, I have yet to go there.) I badly need a haircut, but the nice thing is that there are two barber shops within a stone’s throw of our house.

Status of our move

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We’ve been going through a lot of uncertainty about our move back to the Chicago area. For one thing the time it is taking to get our Indiana house ready to show to potential buyers is enormous. There is so much to do and it is overwhelming. My brothers Dan and Tim helped out tremendously when they came last Friday through Saturday to paint and clean up the yard, but there is still a lot to do. A lot of the burden has fallen on Michele because I have been at work and during off hours, I have been working on catching up with grading and other work for the class I’m currently teaching for the LEEP program at UIUC GSLIS.

I’m happy to note, though, that last week we finally found a place to live in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago. The town we will be living in has a wonderful location about an hour’s drive from my in-law’s, with great schools for Keegan (and Tristan, who will start kindergarten next year). Our house is across the street from the commuter rail station so it will be a short walk to take the train to my work. There is a Starbucks one block away. The nice public library is a short walk of about four blocks. We won’t have a yard of our own but there are lots of parks and playgrounds we can walk to. We really praise God for providing for us and we are looking forward to the move in a few weeks.

We have a local family coming to see our house early next week and we hope that they will make an offer on our house. That would be a real answer to prayer, also.

Struggling to finish

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Since deciding to leave Indiana, everything has been up for grabs and life is very stressful. Michele and I have spent most of the past week trying to get our house ready to put on the market. This includes new gravel for the driveway, new glass for one of the front windows, painting every room (including ceilings), new light fixtures, packing up as much stuff as possible, throwing away as much stuff as possible, and moving whatever’s left into temporary storage. It also involves cleaning up our large (almost one acre) yard. It has been hard work but we are pleased with what we’ve been able to do so far. Two of my brothers, one of whom is a painter by profession, are coming this weekend to help push us across the finish line. We really appreciate that.

We made an offer on a house in the far northwestern suburbs of Chicago and the offer was accepted, but we lost the deal earlier this week when someone else made an offer on the house that didn’t include a condition of sale of an existing house. We were pretty sad but we are convinced that God will provide us with or lead us to something better, somehow. I am struggling a lot with emotions about leaving my current job and just dealing with the worries and anxieties of yet another very major upheaval in our lives. The not knowing, the not being certain, about most things is pretty hard to deal with.

We’re leaving Indiana

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I’ve been silent for a long time now. Just a note to explain part of the reason why: I have decided to leave academia once again and go back to my old job at Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. We are shopping for a house somewhere in the west or northwestern suburbs of Chicago and hoping to get our current house ready for sale soon.

Yet another anti-blog statement by a “librarian” (Updated)

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[Update: I feel obligated to add a bit more to my posting on this topic. See changes/additions in brackets below.]

I haven’t joined the hundreds (thousands?) of others who commented negatively on Michael Gorman’s well-publicized anti-blogging diatribe a few months back[, until now.] I know [just] enough about him and his background to not be surprised by anything he has to say. I am just about as anti-ALA (American Library Association) as you can get. The fact that this guy is that organization’s incoming president is more proof (not that I needed any) of its need for reform. There are some areas of ALA that are notable exceptions such as LITA, but my experience after having been involved in a number of areas for years has been [pretty] negative.

As an aside, the recent angry row in ALA Council over the “audacity” of giving Laura Bush an honorary award is yet more proof that this organization is [dysfunctional]. Yes, I am conservative in my views in general, which automatically places me on the extreme fringe of librarianship. However, even librarians from the more liberal side who are heavily involved in ALA (see here and here) have figuratively rolled their eyes over this.

I heard today (see link above) about an editorial written by Blaise Cronin, dean of the library school at Indiana University, that criticizes blogs and bloggers in much the same dismissive tone as that used by Gorman. This is another guy whom I’ve never taken a liking to, although unlike Gorman, I know next to nothing about him other than that he tends to be controversial. If I were an Indiana student, alum, or faculty member, I’d really be cringing right now.

[I should make it clear that this is not a knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of a form of communication that I like and benefit from. Actually, I don't object to criticisms of blogs and blogging. There are problems or weaknesses that reasonable persons can see with this mode of communication and publication, so there is a grain of truth or substance to some of the criticisms I've read. What I do object to, though, is the over-generalization to which many critics like Gorman and Cronin seem prone, as well as the rather arrogant and dismissive tone that tends to be used. Sure, blogging is faddish right now, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously or that it doesn't have value. A recent online article I first heard about at It's All Good, published by Knowledge@Wharton, made a good point (among others) when it stated that while blogging almost certainly will lose some of its current trendiness, blogs will "continue to be disruptive to traditional media."

Blogs, to me, are a true "killer app" -- an indispensible way for me to keep more readily informed about what's going on in areas that interest me. Knowledge is power and blogs, even with their inherent biases or singular points of view, are an incredibly valuable resource that helps me do my job better just about every day.]

Attack on pundit at Earlham College

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Pundit Faces Pie Attack in Speech at Earlham College

I have no idea who William Kristol is, but apparently he is a conservative commentator who made a speech this week at Earlham College. In the process, an Earlham student threw a pie in his face.

Now, Earlham is a consortial partner with my institution and it has a well deserved reputation of excellence. (Actually, Indiana has, I think, a disproportionate number of highly regarded liberal arts colleges considering its population.) It is a Quaker institution that adheres to a pacifist tradition.

One can have some fun with this incident. Does that make the student who threw the pie, a “Quaker Baker”? A “Pert Pacifist”? A “Pundit Pie Polluter”?

When you don’t fit in

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When You Don’t Fit In

This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye today. Although the details are somewhat different, the reality is the same. Michele and I definitely do not fit in here in rural, east central Indiana. I wonder sometimes if we ever will. Or if I even want to fit in here. Like the author of the article, I am up for tenure next year. I’m not at all a fan of tenure. It’s not that I mind the requirements. I’ve been there, done that, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I’ve published, presented, become deeply involved in professional organizations, taught a graduate level LIS course (and will do that again in a few months). I’ve done more, professionally, than many people I know who have tenure. The only piece I am missing at this point is another advanced degree, and again, I am planning to pursue that anyway because I want to, not just because it’s a tenure requirement.

I have seen tenure (or its equivalent) abused too often, in all of the places I’ve worked, to think highly of it.

To quote from the article:

If it doesn’t feel like home by now, when will it?

Wonders of technology

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Tonight I proved the wonders of technology. I video chatted (is that a word?) with my wife and kids in the Chicago area, then video chatted afterward with my family in east central Illinois. All of this done from the comfort of my own couch at home in Indiana. Made possible by iChat AV and iSight on my PowerBook G4.

It’s 2005 and I resolve to be more positive

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OK, so it is now 2005. Ho hum. One of my unspoken resolutions of the new year is to be more positive ;-) In that spirit, here are some nice, happy, positive things to write about:

One of the positive things that’s happened lately comes out of a big negative. We were told a few weeks ago that our van, a Honda Odyssey, needed a new catalytic converter. The price to fix it? A cool $1,200! (Why so expensive? We were told that it is because Honda’s catalytic converter contains precious metals like platinum.) We don’t have $120 extra to spend on anything, let alone $1,200, so this was a very big setback for us. The dealer told us that although the catalytic converter wasn’t clogged, it was very close to being clogged and we shouldn’t travel anywhere. We had to cancel our plans to visit family during the holidays because of this. At the dealer’s suggestion, we contacted American Honda to ask if they could help us out at all with the cost. I was very skeptical about this possibility, frankly. I called Honda last week and they promised to investigate the situation and give us a call back with their decision early this week. Lo and behold, we got a call on Tuesday from them, saying that they had decided to waive the entire cost of the catalytic converter!!! All we would have to pay would be the labor cost of installing it. I couldn’t believe it. Would an American car manufacturer do a thing like that? I wish I could say, YES, but I greatly doubt it. I have been a huge Honda fan for years since buying my first Honda in the mid 90s, an Accord, and I am more “sold” on Honda than ever before because of this. Anyway, I took the van in to the dealer yesterday and they installed the new part and all I had to pay was $76 for the labor. Good deal!

What other positive things can I start the new year with? Well, let’s see…I finally managed to clean out our garage. If you had ever seen how messy it was, you would be amazed at this incredible feat ;-) We can now park our van in the garage, which makes things much easier for everyone, especially in inclement weather.

Another positive thing is that after cleaning out the garage, we finally got around to unpacking a lot of our decorative items like family photos, knickknacks, paintings, and such. This, almost three years after we moved to Indiana. It was like having Christmas all over again as we rediscovered so many of the things that we hadn’t seen in years, many of the things that hold special meaning like framed photos from our wedding, as well as many of the wedding gifts that we received. The downside is that we have to figure out where on earth we are going to find space for some of the knickknacks in this house. Maybe Michele and I will finally feel at home here when we find places for all of these personal belongings and see them displayed around us.

One of the many nice presents I received for Christmas was something I had wanted for a long time: an AirPort Express base station with AirTunes. Talk about cool! I’m using it to extend the range of our AirPort Extreme base station, and I also set it up to play music on our stereo system in the living room via iTunes. I copied all of our CDs onto the PowerBook — about 1,200 songs in total — and we can now listen to all of our music or whatever combination of songs that we want, from the equivalent of a gigantic jukebox. How cool is that?

Another Christmas gift was the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I have already watched it and am generally pleased with the extra stuff in there. Now I have to figure out what I am going to say about it for my invited presentation at the upcoming C.S. Lewis Society meeting!

Finally, the most positive thing I can write about is that I am blessed in so many ways, with a wonderful wife, and four great children. Yes, there are some sacrifices and some trials here and there, but I still find it amazing that God has given me so many good things. Over and over again, He does what I think is impossible. In the midst of this world’s troubles — especially thinking about and grieving over the terrible devastation in Southeast Asia right now — I am so thankful that Jesus Christ took my sins upon Him and bore them on the cross, paying my debt for sin. I struggle all the time with accepting and enjoying what I do not deserve, and God knows I surely don’t deserve such an incredible gift. But this is exactly what He loves to do: to rescue and bless and be in relationship with those who don’t deserve it. Amazing grace!