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Remember that “mother’s day song” we sang as kids? “M is for the many things….”

This is about the 3 “moms” in my life… My Mom (Wanda), My wife (Pam), and Pam’s mom (Sandee)…

Where to begin… Obviously, the basic simple fact of life is that without mom (and dad too I suppose) I wouldn’t be here… But it goes beyond that. Without mom’s influence and impact in my life – who I am would be drastically different. She cared (and still does) about the little details in my life and that of my sister. She would occasionally work outside the home to help income or to do something different, but she concentrated on being home to make the house a home – a place of refuge from the world, a place to be safe and to know love, a place to learn and grow. She loves God, loves dad, loves her kids, and now the extended family that has grown since we’ve gotten married and had our own kids. She provided to me in her actions, not so much her words what to look for in a woman to spend my life with – and she approves of and loves Pam as if she was her daughter. She and dad taught me the value of commitment, standing by your word regardless, don’t lie, be nice, eat your veggies, don’t torture flies, snakes are icky, nature is God’s canvas for beauty, you can put sauerkraut in brownies to try and hide it from your kids but some of us CAN tell. She helped me memorize lots and lots of Bible verses, and would stick up for her family no matter what. She has become one of the great fine-art photographers and taught me alot!! (check out http://wandajudd.com) I Love you Momma!!!

Pam is…. how do I best put this…… simply the best gift God has ever, or will ever give me – aside from His salvation and gift of Grace!! Pam completes me. She makes me tingle, she helps me, she loves me, she loves our kids, she is self-less, giving, caring, calming, the best role-model for my son to compare to for his future bride, and my daughter to aspire to be like for her future husband. She is artistic and very creative. She is smokin’ HOT , she looks even prettier without makeup, she supports me in anything I try to do. She will fly in little planes with me, go SCUBA diving with me, ride my motorcycle with me, helps me when I go out to take pictures for people, and even rubs my head after SHE had a long hard day. She has a knack for finding cheap vacations, and is truly one of the smartest people I know. She takes up a challenge without letting on she’s a little scared and goes on brave as ever. She is a good cook, wonderful companion, and truly my better half. I could go on and on, but I need to save some material for more blog posts! LOL

I love you babe!! Thank you for being the bestest mom to our kids!!

Sandee (Pam’s Mom) is the model of perseverance and trust. The more I have gotten to know her over the years, the more I can see what Pam will be like as we grow old together, and I can see where Pam learned her grace, composure, and selflessness. Sandee lost her 1st husband, Pam’s biological dad, many years ago, when Pam was 8… She met and married Art Ireland, and they lived together until Art’s home-going in ‘05. Together Art and Sandee raised a mixed yours, mine, and ours household, and taught Pam so many of her life lessons, that in quiet moments of reflection, when Pam and I are talking, I can see and hear each of her parents… Sandee truly loves me and there is not the sit-com/stereotypical “mother/son-in-law” relationship at all between us… I am ever so grateful to her for being Pam’s guiding influence to be the woman she is. Love you Sandee!!

So to all the “moms” in my life, HAPPY MOTHERS DAY!!

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Well, not to be outdone by his sister, Spencer setup his own blog site last nite… But here is the difference – he was not content to use the resources I had setup on our Apple Server hosting the other sites— nooooo. He instead rebuilds his test box into his OWN CentOS/Linux server and installs MySQL, PHP, Wordpress, etc and re-routes the firewall rules to forward to his machine for his domain…..

That’s my boy!!!

He’s going to be making a page or so to his upcomming missions trip to Tanzania and will have geek things on other pages too — check it out

n0ctem.net

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Show of hands (that means use the comment link below!) – how many of watch “NCIS” and/or know what I mean when I reference “Boss Gibbs” slapping his team occasionally on the back of the head for semi-bone-headed reasons…?

Welllllll, last few weeks, I’ve been dealing with some major decisions, waiting for God to light up a nearby bush, zap out some writing on the wall with His finger, or , praying for peace, discernment and wisdom… Then I picked up one of my devotional books – the kind for “busy men” which means “we keep it short since you’re a guy” – Start reading a few days worth, and SLAP… huh? was that you Father?….. read the next “day”…. SLAP SLAP… ouch! oh, was that aimed at me? I was thinking this was perfect for __(fill in name here)__ they should read this…. ok on a roll… read another “day”… SLAP SLAP SLAP SLAP…. ok OUCH!! That hurts… wow, I guess this is ME in these pages…

Boils down to short snippets (for guys remember) about Joseph, Joshua, and others that were “Prepared to be God’s Answer for the Times”…

So… I’ve made one of those decisions… I had to put the book down before I got slapped again!

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Well, it was inevitable… my daughter had me change her website we made one rainy day as a father-daughter adventure last year into a blog site recently… and she’s posting some good content… she picked the domain name “Chicklets4Christ”… She’s got such a sweet heart for her King, and currently has some posts on how to study the Bible as a teen and things she finds interesting in her reading… I’m sure there will be teen-girl stuff I’ll cringe at and cover eyes and ears running away from the keyboard going “la la la la la… I am not accepting” (read that as “posts about boys”) but I know it will be a fun ride!!

Click here to see it, and if you have teen girls, have them comment and share.  If you have teen boys, don’t <grin>… I am praying for her future spouse, and so far I ain’t got a clear picture who that is……. click click (shotgun, shovels, and 5 acres… all I am saying…) – heh heh

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this is from tooconservative.com

While I am flattered (he he he), I know Steve Osborne meant my dad – CHARLIE… Dad loves the commonwealth and this country, loves helping people, loves his Lord, and loves politics… I grew up with such a fantastic tutor in that “eat your own and ugly” world and enjoy supporting him with the skills and talents God gave me, but he’s the true political junkie in the family!! < grin >

I learned from him to jump in to any situation and learn its system. Knowing a system (processes of tasks) can make you a master of many things in short order. I also learned leadership modeling and courage against the unknown. I also learned I loved to work with him… We were business owners and partners on a varitey of ventures spanning over 25 years… Integrity and loyalty were not just “preached” but practiced!

Here is the snippet from the blogsphere – just for fun…

 

(snip)

How about this, we remove Jeff Frederick and replace him with a conservative like Chris Judd. Whould that be exceptable to you Loudon Insider?

[... rest edited out for here]

- Steven Osborne

(end snip)

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Here are some classic moments from SNL… had to share.

We found these on Hulu after watching an NBC special on SNL Moments the other evening all gathered around and laughing as a family… Good times… Now we’re heading back from the house deep in the trees and low-lands of Hilton Head to home… Took lots of pics, and actually have a few keepers, will post soon as we have a reliable net connection.

Enjoy the clips…

The lost ending to It’s a Wonderful Life
President Reagan as the mastermind

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I’ve redone some of the servers @ home while snowed in… Now have a Linux box running IPCop as the firewall, a Windows 2008 server running VMWare and a few XP and Gentoo VMs (seperating functions like Torrent server, email testing server, data backup servers, etc)… a Windows Media machine still tweaking it, and the newest member of the “rack” is a Mac OSX Server machine.

I still have a few legacy Linux boxes running email I need to virtualize and move on to one of the host servers.

With the exception of the firewall box, all are now 8Gig, QuadCore, multi-terabyte beasts… grunt grunt grunt!!!

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Well…. We’ve adopted a new puppy from the Humane Society in town, he is a cute little “mix” (mutt) but appears to have a lot of terrier in him. Scotty sniffed him out a few days before and appeared to approve… His name is “Zeke” (pronounced Zeeeek, like some old-fart miner in the wild-west). He was abandoned and left for dead by his previous owners…jerks. He’s so full of life and energy! We are assembling the training cage, puppy food, chew toys (this boy has SHARP puppy teeth), and so on now.

But we begin a new “Circle of Life” cycle with a puppy…. it’s almost like an older couple having a baby again… and not the grand-baby kind you can hand back to the parents when the fun wears off either…

We get to pick him up after the infamous ’snip snip’ and shots this Thursday (in: 6 days, 21 hours, 30 minutes ago)

We are also looking for another smaller puppy too, yorkiepoo-ish kind… Let me know if you know of one!!

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scottyYesterday was one of the most mixed emotional days in my life and that of my family… we put to rest our “man’s best friend” and family member “Scotty Montgomery Judd”… he was a joy in our lives and will be missed and remembered for all time… he was 11 years old, and had developed a cancerous lump on his butt that wieghed in over 10 pounds and was just making his life un-fun….

But we all knew, Scotty included, that it was time to end the pain and send him on ahead of us.  So we spent his last few days when he had a good hour or so of play in him, to feed him his very own steak dinner from Applebees, play outside, let him get filthy and roll in the leaves, even help pick his “spot” and come by as we dug it out to get a rough size of the hole needed – he of course would sniff around the hole, poke his head down in it some, then look up like “needs to be bigger dad”…

When we got to the vet, he had a little pep still in him as he bounced around the office and had that panting-almost-talking-excited voice… We lifted him up to the table, and he was hurting so much, back muscles so tender… he got his shots and in seconds you could see a wave of peace come over him as he began to feel no more pain… his eyes stopped looking like “why do I hurt all the time daddy” and instead looked at us with “thank you, I feel good, you are my best friend, thank you”, his shaggy eyebrows flicking up and down, back and forth as he moved his eyes in his ever so expressive manor…. and then he slipped away into such a relaxed sleep, and he was gone…  Happy and scruffy to the end…….

They wrapped him in his favorite blanket – ours too that he took over – that he used to lay in the landing window near the front door and watch the world, barking at the UPS and FedEx guys, and the ultra-evil mailman… protecting us from those that got too close to “his house” and “his peoples”… We brought him home, gently placed him in his spot, and quietly reflected on his life and passing… crying, hurting, aching deep within. I tried to say a few words to help and “be strong”, but I could not say many… we each slid in a little dirt, and I let the family and friends gathered go inside while I finished…

Before everyone got home and we took him to the vet, I snapped a couple of pix with my iPhone while we waited, check them out in the gallery link at the top of the site – this head shot you see here and a good profile of the lump… will add others we took as time and emotions permit… am a basket case now… I cried for hours after everyone left home today… am drained… I keep “seeing” him out of the corner of my eye, looking for him in his usual lazy lay down spots, going thru the old habits of checking the door to see if he wants back in from going outside yet, dropping little crumbs and such thinking “oh, Scotty will get that”, and hearing sounds like his collar/tags clinking together as he walked…

I used to poke fun of people that would remark “my dog will be in heaven”… that was when I was a “cat person” many years ago… But after living with Scotty for these 11 years, and the joy he brought to our family and the part he played, I can’t help but believe now, that God will allow us to have things that made us happy with us in Heaven…

Thank you Scotty, for being part of our lives.  Thank you for the fun, for the good times and the bad (only as a puppy – wink).  We love and miss you!!

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Am tweaking and brushing up some sites… works in progress.  If you feel compelled to comment, be nice <grin>

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