Tag: family

Farmers’ Fine Arts

A.K.A. The Indiana State Fair.

More on that in a minute. First, some real Fine Arts results.

Ashley Pounders performed her Sign Language Solo today and did an absolutely fantastic job. At least, as far as I know, since I don’t know sign language. I honestly had no doubt she would receive a “Superior with Honors” rating. However, I was wrong, and she only received a “Superior” rating.

Along with that, Shae’s Book Chapter also received a “Superior” rating. I have no idea why it wasn’t a better rating, because it was a great piece of writing. Yes, I’m biased.

Aaaargh.

But at least there was the fair.

After a day of watching Fine Arts events and walking around the exhibit areas and time practicing, we headed to the opening day of the 151st Indiana State Fair. It’s a very large fair. We saw pigs and cows and a donkey competition and horses and mules, we walked through the midway, and rode the tram around the grounds, and rode go-karts around a track.

Then there was the deep fried Pepsi. And deep-fried Oreos and deep-fried Snickers and deep-fried Reese’s. Not bad.

There was dancing and corn and the world’s largest boar and the world’s largest strawberry shortcake and a very scary baby rattler. (If you see Sam, ask him about it.)

I think everyone had a good time. Now a very tired group gets ready for another big day tomorrow.

(Pictures: top-Ashley, Shae, and Sam try the deep-fried sweets, including Pepsi, Oreos, Snickers, and Reese’s; middle-Sam and Evan; bottom-Adam had the fast car at the track.)

Summer @ Eleven

It’s one of those big days around here.

Summer is eleven today. Time flies. It seems only last week we were celebrating her fifth birthday in Rock Springs, Wyoming. (Never forget that big cowboy hat.) Of course, that was six years ago.

But she still has the big grin, unlimited energy, and wide open nature. We celebrated with chicken quesadillas and dirt cake. Then she opened her presents and was brought to tears by her new fish – the most recent names given to them were “Jess” and “Leslie”.

She is a blessing to our family, and true summer sunshine when she smiles.

Have a great birthday, Summer!

A Call to Prayer and Fasting

The following is a letter Trudi recently wrote:

I received a phone call this week that distressed me greatly. A marriage was falling apart with a spouse choosing to break their promise and walk away. This is always a troublesome thing to hear, but even more so now. It was the fifth call my husband and I have received in the past six weeks. In every case but one, these couples actively attend and are involved in a home church where they live. My heart’s cry is ENOUGH! Satan has always attacked the home but seems to be doing so at an increasingly aggressive rate. He knows – where there is division, there is weakness. And where does he desire for there to be weakness more than in the body of Christ?
In praying for these marriages, I felt God leading me to call for a day of prayer and fasting. I haven’t done anything like this before, but I’m proceeding as obediently as I know how. I asked God to lay the names of twelve women on my heart to join with me in this endeavor. That is why you are now receiving this letter.
First, let me say you may not be able to join me or have a desire to join me and that is perfectly okay – you owe me no explanation. You can still pray. However, if you can join me, I’m asking that you respond either by phone or by e-mail using the information below, so I know that at least twelve will set that day apart for this specific purpose. Feel free to invite others, both male and female, to join us for this special day of intercessory prayer.
I’m not setting specific guidelines for your fast – whether it is one, two, or three meals; full fast, partial fast, etc., – that is between you and God. But use this day to focus on Him with this clear purpose in mind: waging spiritual battle for homes and marriages.

Since she wrote this letter, we have heard of several more couples in the same situation, and even more people that are very concerned about the marriages of friends and family members whom they know.

The original 12 have told their friends, who have told their friends – at this point we don’t know how many people will be joining in this effort, but we know the number is growing.

I talked to someone Sunday whose marriage is in serious trouble. I was able to tell him – you’re not alone; there are people that are praying; God is about to do something that will surprise you.

I believe God is ready – but are we willing to seek Him? Are we willing to make the effort?

This is your invitation to a day of prayer and fasting, to wage spiritual battle for homes and marriages – Monday, July 30th.

Quick Trip

It was a quick trip Saturday night to see Rick, Cherie, Autumn, Tammy, Terry, Luke, Mom, and Dad. If you don’t know, that would be my brother-in-law, sister, niece, sister, brother-in-law, nephew…and I think you know the rest.

Due to a pre-arranged friend’s birthday ice skating party, we were unable to spend the day in Lakeland with the rest of the bunch, instead leaving just after 3:30pm for a quick and rainy drive. After a few hours and a couple of pieces of pizza with the fam – plus a plethora of pictures – it was back in the van for the return to North Fort Myers and a 11:30pm arrival.

5:53am came early the next morning, but we had fun and it was good to see everyone and T&T’s new house.

(Pictured: l-r Dad, Autumn, Cherie, Luke)

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Thanks to you if you voted on the Web Site poll. Time is running out, so please vote before it’s too late. Thanks, again

Fireworks and Loud Music

Fireworks and loud music.

I’m sure that’s what every signer of the Declaration of Independence had in mind 231 years ago.

On the philosophical side of things – isn’t that the way it is with most things? No matter what the original purpose and intent of your actions, there are always unexpected consequences and tangents that are created later because of what happened.

Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving…I’m sure that everyone that first celebrated those events – from the early Christians to the Pilgrims and others – would be astounded on what happens on these holy-days. Likewise, many of the things we take for granted as being part of the Independence Day tradition weren’t even dreamed of back then. Hot dogs. Baseball. Lee Greenwood. Mall parking lots.

So, there we were last night – the 3rd, not the 4th of July – in the parking lot of the Miromar Outlet Mall, listenening – and sometimes trying not to listen – to very loud blues, jazz and rock ‘n roll by the Mambo Brothers Blues Band, waiting with thousands of other people for the fireworks. It was scheduled for “dusk” – which really meant 9:30pm.

<---Mr. Happy smiles for the camera.

It was a very good show, when it finally started. These are a couple of pictures from my iPhone.

After it was over, and we got back to the van – it was another 45 minutes getting out of the parking lot through the mass of cars. We were very glad we went. Another great family outing.

Happy 4th!

Below: Trudi, Shae and Sam put up with Dad, although Sam can’t figure out what I’m doing.

Hello

Yesterday was a good day. Today might be even better.

Sam and I went with our friend, Gene, to Miami last night to see the Braves and Marlins. Sam and I are big Braves fans. Gene is a Yankees fan, but loves baseball. We had GREAT seats. (Section 142, Row 1, Seats 5-7). Gene gets the tickets, I drive and buy dinner.

The only drawback was that we had planned this months ago. As it turned out, this was also the day of the big iPhone release, I was seriously considered getting one, but then June 29th ended up being the release day, and I was going to a baseball game.

Oh, well. Baseball first.

The Braves hammered the Marlins, 12-3. We had a great time, getting back home just after midnight.

So, this morning I went out to see if there were iPhones left. At minimum I wanted to hold one in the store and try it out.

First stop – the AT&T store in Cape Coral. It is the closest to home. They were out. So, I crossed the bridge into Fort Myers and headed to the Fort Myers AT&T store.

Again, no luck.

I called Trudi (with an in-store iPhone, because I had inadvertently left my phone at home) and she offered to call the Apple Store in Coconut Point to see if they had any left.

While I was waiting, I was listening to a VERY disgruntled new iPhone customer complaining about not being able to sync to iTunes like he was supposed to, and the AT&T manager trying to explain that iTunes is Apple software and she has no way to help him with that.

I stood there remembering some of the negative posts I read before leaving the house, and wondered if it was even a good idea to get one yet.

But, in the end, I ended up going to the Apple Store, where the phones must have been plentiful. And, yes, I ended up purchasing this very expensive phone.

And, yes, it is very cool. The picture was taken with the phone’s camera. Not a great camera, but I wish I had had it at the ball game last night.

Mother Needs a New Dress


Shae and Sam returned this afternoon from Youth Camp, speaking high praise of the camp speaker, Jason Maupin. They seemed to have a great time. Hopefully the spiritual content was rich.

More remarkably, when I dropped them off Monday morning to board the bus, Shae handed me $40. “This is the ‘Mother-needs-a-new-dress Fund’.” Apparently, the four kids were disappointed that even though their mother got really nice jewelry for Mother’s Day, she didn’t get a dress. So, they each chipped in, and wanted me to go buy her a dress for this Sunday.

I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to. I wanted Trudi to have new clothes – I didn’t really want the kids to have to pay for it. I decided that it was a great thing for them to do.

But this week was busy. So I waited until today, and when they got back from camp, I took Shae to the store so she could pick out the dress.

Trudi loved it. She looks great in it.

We’ve got great kids.

Home Again


We arrived back in Fort Myers late last night after a good trip and good conference in Chicago. It got off to a rough start, because of my mistake.

Originally, our group was to include Ray, the guy who heads up our set construction for Scrooge. I had Ray scheduled for set building workshops at the Arts Conference. However, things changed for him, and he had to back out at the last minute.

So, we added Mark, our music pastor, to take his place. But AirTran wouldn’t let us simply change the name on the ticket – we had to cancel Ray’s ticket and purchase a ticket for Mark.

I had been through the process of purchasing a ticket for Mark twice before actually attempting to purchase – first, to check the price, and second, to re-check the price. On my third time through I was going to purchase, but something happened in the system and it gave me an error message. So, now it’s my fourth time through, I’ve picked the correct flights three times in a row, so I don’t look too closely at what I’m selecting. My time is running out and I need to get home to pack. Bang – I get the tickets, send Mark a copy of the confirmation and run to get my stuff so we can get to the airport.

When we get to the airport, Mark has to check one bag, and we all go to the gate to wait for our flight out of Fort Myers. That’s when Mark discovers that although we are all on the same flight to Atlanta, his flight to Chicago is TWO HOURS after ours. We are scheduled to arrive at 9:30pm – he’s not scheduled to arrive until midnight.

We didn’t have time to address it, because boarding began, so we figured we’d fix it in Atlanta. In Atlanta it just got worse.

That’s where we found out that once you check a bag, you can’t change flights. I should have remembered that from an episode of The Amazing Race.

Then delays started happening. Our flight got pushed back – but so did Mark’s.

In the end, we landed in Chicago about midnight. Rich and I took everyone to the hotel – about 50 minutes from the airport – then returned to the airport to pick up Mark, when his plane landed about 2am. We got in bed about 3am – 4am our time.

Thankfully, things improved from there.

I told my nephew, Luke, this story. This was his reaction.

Christi


Christi is the sister of my wife, Trudi.

Is.

She died a year ago today, succumbing to a brain aneurysm.

But I won’t say she was Trudi’s (and Julie’s) sister. She still is.

Not only is she still alive with Jesus, but I see her quite frequently in the mannerisms of Trudi and my three girls. (Yes, Shae, you, too.) You can hear her in the inflections of their voices, especially when they are excited about something. I see her in the intensity my girls sometimes display when happy, angry, disappointed, or delighted.

We see her all the time, yet we still miss her.

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ThoughtStream

Happy Birthday!


I’m in another airport. Atlanta Hartsfield. It’s 9:15pm – our flight was supposed to leave at 8:10pm – and we’re waiting for some sign that we might leave soon.

But this post is for my sister, Tammy. Happy Birthday, Tam! This is the only picture I have with me – I offloaded all my other pictures onto an external drive that’s not available at the moment. She’s probably glad I don’t have access to any of those. [EDIT: Looking back at this post, this is hilarious. That is NOT me. It’s my brother-in-law, Terry. I have no idea why I said it was me. -Tim 5/9/22]

I won’t say how old she is, but 1970 was a long time ago.

Like I said in my last post, I seem to have an overload of birth and death things on my mind at the moment. That’s not a bad thing. Thinking about life and death in a healthy way can keep you focused on what’s important. It doesn’t have to be morbid.

Birthdays – rather, your original birth day – is one of the beginning steps to your death day. Okay, that might be a little morbid. Trite, but true – you don’t live forever – at least not in this life.

But your birth day is also one of the beginning steps in your forever days. Eternity is out there. The only question is how you plan to spend it – with whom and where.

This would be the Rev part of RevMcGator – are you living right now with your eternity in mind? Live everyday as a birthday – a new birth day, in the realization that every day God gives us the opportunity to live out the reality of the new birth of grace we experience in him.

{We finally left Atlanta just after 10pm. But the rest is a story for another day.}

Odds and Ends

Thanks to everyone who has expressed their opinion in the current poll (The big blue one on the right side of the main page.) There’s still time to vote. I’d love to know what you think. About this.

Thanks to Shae, I’ve changed the settings on this blog so anyone can leave a comment, without having a Google account. Love the comments. The one restriction I have is that I moderate every comment. That just means that I make sure no one is spamming the blog – I won’t change anything you write.

Don’t know how you feel about it, but an unnamed family member is a little skittish about the whole blog thing and the posting of family pictures and names and such. Hmm. I obviously don’t agree, but I’m not willing to start a fight, either. I’ll have to think some more about that.

In the meantime, thought I’d post one more family pic.

Our Place

No picture with this post – but there is a new poll!

The question I asked myself was – if our family were to have a website, what would the name be?

For some reason – I can’t remember why – I went to bed last night wondering if my name was available as a dot com domain. That is, is TimMcDaniel.com available? (It’s not, although no website comes up when you go there.) How about McDaniel.com? (No.)

That made me ponder…if our family – me, Trudi, Shae, Sam, Summer, and Sawyer – were to have their own web site, what would it be called? So, I set some ground rules…

– It would be a .com – not a .net, .org, or any other dot something. A website with a .com just sounds better.
– It has to be relatively short. You don’t want to have to enter a long name. That eliminates TimTrudiShaeSamSummerSawyerMcDaniel.com. That was Summer’s first suggestion. (It’s available.)
– It has to be easy to understand when you say it. You don’t want to have to spell it out every time you say it. FamMcDan.com is short, but you would definitely have to spell it out when you’re telling someone about it. (Say it out loud. See?)
– It has to be easy to spell. Shae’s favorite was MassPandemonium.com. Could you spell it without looking at it?
– It has to relate to our family somehow.
– It has to be available.

With those basic ground rules, I came up with a short list of possibilities and created a poll for everyone to vote on. That’s what you see on the right side of this page. Here is a brief explanation or comment on each choice.

– McDanielTribe. I think that was a Shae suggestion.
– McDanielNation. Like GatorNation.
– McDanielCentral. Basic.
– McDanielSix. It’s already Trudi’s web address, so we have a connection.
– TimandTrudi. Eventually the kids will be gone and have their own web sites.
– GatorMonkeys. On the other hand, they’re still here, and they’ve always been my little monkeys.
– SixMcs. Pronounced “sixmix”, thereby violating rule #3, but it sounds nice.
– Other. That’s what you choose when you have a better idea.

So?

Please vote. I’d love to know what you think. And if you come up with a better name, let me know. Either send me an email or post it in the comments. Don’t know that we’ll ever use it, but it’ll be fun for me to think about.

(The poll generator lets you vote once a day. The poll results page comes with ads…not mine, just part of the poll generator.)

…and Onward!

I’m Mr. Mom for the next couple days as Trudi helps her Mom in Wildwood.

Today’s picture is of Summer, the dodgeball queen, and Sawyer, the 7-year-old princess. I was picking them up from Upward camp at the church. After a rough first day of camp – neither of them wanted to go back – they have enjoyed the rest of the week.

Sam has also been there, working as one of the camp leaders.

Growing Up


[With this post I will attempt to make it standard practice to include some piece of media (picture, video, cartoon, etc.) with every post. This was suggested by Jason Van Orden in one of his recent podcasts. Good idea.]

Congratulations to Nathan and Brandi on their recent engagement. For those that don’t know, Nathan is my nephew and Brandy is his lovely Oklahoma bride-to-be. (Notice the multiple spellings of Brandie, since I don’t know how she spells it. Maybe I should just wait until she spells it M-r-s G-r-i-e-p-p)

Yes, that’s Nathan on the right.