Archive for the ‘General’ Category

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Need Career Advice

Monday, September 7th, 2009
God’s purposes will ripen fast
Unfolding every hour
The bud may have a bitter taste
But sweet will be the flower!

The house fell through. That’s the first thing you need to know. The second thing is that we’re going to have another baby.

When Gideon was confronted by an angel with the task of throwing out the Midianites, he asked for a turn of Providence to make his path clear: He’d throw out a lamb fleece with a challenge: one night, make the the dew fall on the fleece, but leave the ground dry. The second night, make the ground all dewy, and the fleece dry. There’s been a lot said lately against the use of “fleeces” in determining the will of God, but I find that, understood correctly, a fleece can be a very useful thing. In Gideon’s case, attacking the Midianites would have been a very, very foolish thing – apart from a miracle of God. So asking for a little token miracle in advance seems quite reasonable. Of course, most of us aren’t putting our necks on the line for a miracle, so asking for a sign on the same order of the miraculous would be a little presumptuous.

But what’s wrong with taking a few hints from Providence? For instance, if God makes a path clear for you to buy a house, it seems reasonable to conclude that you ought to live there for a year or two. In fact, only sheer bullheadedness would make you even consider taking up a chance to move. On the other hand, not buying a house… makes mobility more of an option. So it is clearly possible by a house to be fleeced. (more…)

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Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

I’ve been cited in a newspaper article!

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No Other Fish

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Okay. So I should have been blogging on the house all along. Apparently, buying a house is way more interesting than joining the army, because the response on the last post has been off the charts. (It probably also has to do with the fact that I specifically asked for advice – for which I am very grateful.)

But I wanted to address a line of thinking I’m having a hard time with, but which seems to be very popular. It’s the “lots of good fish in the sea” argument.

Skipping over for the moment the fact that I’m not sure I want to compare buying a house to finding a wife, and the fact that the “plenty of fish” model didn’t really help my romance life in the first place, the truth is there aren’t all that many good fish in our part of the ocean. There are lots of bad fish, and a few really rotten ones, and only one or two fish that are passably acceptable. “Good fish” are out of our range.

Whenever we talked about eventually buying a house Valerie and I have always imagined that we would get something in the average to fair condition range, something of a fixer-upper in need of a few modest repairs that could be done over time while we lived in the house. We’ve never been interested in “flipping,” or in new houses with springy carpets and crown molding.

We also have a limited purchase range, because of our school loan constraints. The money we have available for a mortgage payment is essentially the same as the market rate for a 2-bedroom apartment. Any more than that, and we don’t have anything extra for repairs or for paying down debt at an accelerated rate.

Within those limitations, it shouldn’t be a surprise that every house we’ve looked at has been a foreclosure, and all foreclosure homes have difficulties. It just so happens that this particular house is the best on the market for our price range at this time. There are no other fish. If we don’t buy this house, we rest for a few months, and then we rent. We save up, and try again the next year.

We do want to make sure we get the best possible deal in the process of buying the house, and there are legitimate concerns that absolutely must be corrected if we are to buy. If we really do come to the conclusion that the problems are not worth the risk, we are absolutely willing to just walk away. I can do that. Really.

But to return to the dating model, there’s a difference between amicably ending a relationship that is clearly not going to result in a happy marriage, and dumping a girl at the first sign of trouble. There are steps to go through, even in a buyer’s market, and I want to go through them.

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Need House Advice

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Hi folks. I need some advise on this house we’re looking at buying.

When we first decided to make an offer on the house, we had an inspector come and inspect the house. Essentially the original house is in fine condition, apart from cosmetic needs like carpet and paint, but the addition, which is two floors and includes the entire kitchen, was in the words of the appraiser “all wrong.” There was wiring and plumbing funkiness, the wrong kind of insulation, wrong kind of studs, etc. But most importantly, we were told that 1/4 of the foundation under the addition was essentially nothing: cinder blocks on card board.

Our realtor advised us that a house with these kinds of problems would not pass FHA appraisal, so we got a contractor at our church to give us an estimate of what it would cost to brink the addition up to code. Estimate in hand, we proceeded with the FHA appraisal, with the expectation that the seller (a bank) would make whatever repairs necessary to pass FHA standards and sell the house.

Sunday we heard back from the appraiser that the house would need two things to qualify for our FHA loan: new flooring and new paint. No mention of any of our concerns about the addition. No mention of the foundation (or lack thereof). I don’t know if that means the appraiser just didn’t notice, if he considered it none of his concern, or if he thought the foundation was actually fine.

So my question: obviously, I’m not buying a house with no foundation. I think there’s a verse in the Bible about that. But I would like to buy this house. So how do I go about ensuring that the addition is in fact safe? Do I simply lay down at the seller that we’ll buy the house if they fix the foundation? Should we get the addition re-evaluated? I’m not sure what the proper way to proceed is, and I’m open to any suggestions.

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Ambitious discontent

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

My greatest difficulty at present is that I am afflicted with too many ambitions. In the past 24 hours I have:

  1. Wanted to be a college professor,
  2. Felt called to prison ministry,
  3. Wished to start a Christian high-end grocery store,
  4. Debated whether to join the Army as enlisted or an officer,
  5. Imagined starting a young married couples ministry at my church,
  6. Re-structured my morning devotionals (twice),
  7. And planned a novel series.

Every one of these was a serious consideration, and not a passing whimsy. It’s like I’m suddenly seven again, except that I was never like this, even at seven.

What I can’t decide is whether this sort of ambitious discontent is from God or somewhere else.

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Final Fallout – Army Enslitment pt. 6

Friday, July 31st, 2009

I came home with all these documents about writing essays and getting recommendations, and with questions about how far my life could stretch at one time, and if it was worth it. 6-9 months is a long time. On top of that, the recruiter’s job is to make things happen. So just as I was deciding that officer school was perhaps a bad idea at this juncture, my recruiter came on location at my work in full camo and asked me to meet with his commander that evening to see if we could push through all the paperwork and have my review board by Wednesday. That was Monday. I balked, said it was too fast for my wife. They said it was okay. I scheduled a new day to finish my counseling at the MEPS. I couldn’t do it by Thursday, so I went for Tuesday. This time, no monkey business with the hotel.

Tuesday rolled around, and I got up at some ungodly hour, showered and dressed, and was standing in line with a new set of recruits at 6:00. I went in, documents above my head, put my things in a locker, and headed to the career counselor’s. She smiled at me, remembered my name, looked down at her appointment book and said, “What are you doing here?” The recruiter commander was called. There had been a mistake.

It turns out that Thursday, the one I couldn’t miss work for, was the last day to sign up for Army Reserves for the 2009 fiscal year. Apparently everybody has signed up for the reserves, what with this recession they got going on, and in my dalliance, I had missed the cut. See, this is the part where different departments having different information comes in. The recruiters didn’t know about the deadline until the deadline had passed. Who knows what the MEPS people knew. Thursday, when the recruiters had learned of it, my guy had given me a call to say not to show up on Tuesday. Except he didn’t. I mean, he called, but he didn’t say not to show up. What he did was to leave a message. The message he left was the same message he leaves every time he leaves a message – “Hi this is Sgt. B—-. Give me a call when you get this message.” Since it matched every other message I’d gotten from him, I didn’t realize it was a new message. I’d thought that it was the old message I’d received a week prior. So I’d deleted it. So now, no enlistment at all. The officer option was still open, but with the same misgivings about time.

But it’s not like the Army doesn’t want anybody more in the reserves for all time; just for 2009. So here’s what they did. I came in later and signed up for something called the Delayed Enlistment Program. It’s designed for college students, so they can enlist immediately upon graduation. We picked a career, and dates and locations for basic and tech school. It turned out, after careful research that the only openings available will be for medstaff and civil affairs, which is what I was looking toward in the first place. Of course, it’s all hypothetical, because the enlistment isn’t real. It’s a reservation. Come the new fiscal year, which starts in October, I’ll have to go to the MEPS and start all over again. With any luck, I can avoid the hotel this time.

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Big Frothy Mess

Friday, July 31st, 2009

I continue to be perplexed by the subtleties of the will of God. That’s probably a bad sentence to start on, but the other openers I thought of really weren’t much better.

I’ve just finished reading, at a friend’s request, a book on finding the will of God, and why you shouldn’t. It’s literally titled Finding the Will of God: a Pagan Notion? by Bruce Waltke. But it’s not nearly so bad as it sounds. He’s mostly against something he calls Christian divination – that practice of fumbling about looking for cryptological Providential hints God might have hidden concerning any major decisions – which admittedly sounds more like perusing the horoscopes than any faithful pursuit of God’s plan for your life. He also seems to be against asking God to communicate directly to you about your plans (a point on which I differ), mostly I think because he believes God does that relatively infrequently, and only on His own schedule.

The odd thing has been that, as Waltke pounds out his method of Biblically and theologically ciphering the will of God, he keeps undermining himself. And I don’t mean that he makes arguments I don’t like to support positions I don’t care for. I mean that, in the process of making a point with which I expect to agree, he makes frequent use of non sequitur and choppy reasoning. So by the time he gets to the finale of a point where I expected to agree with him 100%, he’s so bungled it that I end up suspicious of myself for intending to agree with him. It’s made it really difficult to finish the book. But finish I did, all the while dreaming of writing my own book, which says all the things he said, only… better, and in the right order.

Then I turn to the last chapter, an afterward, and everything changes. (more…)

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Career Counseling – Army Enlistment pt. 5

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Here’s the part where I blew it. Sort of. It was odd. I sat down at a desk across from a counselor, reviewed my work and school history with her, and then she handed me a form that said that, considering my degree, they highly recommended I apply for officer school. Wasn’t ready for that. Every other branch I’d looked into had pushed me toward officer training right up until they heard what my degree was, then hey, presto! I was gone. No calls from my recruiter. So when I went to the army, I told them I just wanted to enlist and that I’d worry about officer training later. So here, right in the process of finishing up, I didn’t want that to happen again. And that’s what I told them. The career counselor checked; they didn’t care what degree I had or if I was over the legal age to go to Officer Candidate School. If I had a degree and wanted to be an officer, they’d make me an officer. All right then, it pays better and it’s better suited to my temperament anyway, so I signed.

But that paper sent me off on a goose chase. Phone calls were made to the commander of the recruiters. My documents were gone over with a fine toothed comb. They began initial research for security clearance. The commander showed up, took me into a back room and asked me, “what happened?” Turns out that signing that document was a YES, and my enlistment stopped.

Officer Candidate School, OCS, is a whole different ball game from enlistment. You have to have recommendations; You have to write an essay; you have to have a spotless criminal record; and you have to go before a review board that meets only once a week. Oh, and OCS is an extra 14 weeks of school. You have your basic, and you have your tech school, and OCS fits neatly in between them, making a neat 6-9 months away from your family. Maybe that was something I should have checked with my wife before signing?

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Physical – Army Enlistment pt. 4

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

This was the strangest part of the medical examination – the physical itself. First I had a desk interview with a doctor who took me at face value while I said I had no known illnesses of any kind. I had heard horror stories about being challenged at the least falter, but apparently I look as healthy as I feel.

Then I was sent into another room, and when I opened the door I stopped in shock. There was a bench something like a waiting room at a sauna, and lined up on it were about 8 adult men, each wearing nothing more than some boxers to cover the unmentionables. Directly in front of me was another large man, in little more than what God gave him, arms extended full tee, while two men in cammo took his measurements. I was sent to the bench, told to strip down and wait. After a few minutes, we were lined up, told to adjust our shorts so as not to advertise, and brought through various strange physical exercises (including a duck walk) to prove we had our full range of motion.

Then back into the doctor’s office for the physical proper: he listened to heart and lungs, looked in my ears and at the back of my throat, checked prostate and proctology. At that last, my 83 year old doctor complained more than I did. It was required, and he didn’t much appreciate it. My best personal guess about the wherefore is that the proctological exam is the military’s answer to “dont ask, don’t tell.” They may not be allowed to ask, but they can sure verify that you haven’t had your anatomy destroyed by debauched behavior.

On the ear inspection, I failed. He couldn’t see the drum in my left ear. But they have a waiver for that too. In my case, they squirted some solvent in my ear, waited a few minutes, and hooked me up to a tool that squirted water in until the wax came out. I was afraid at first I’d get hurt or at least be stuck with swimmer’s ear. In fact, the water pump managed to scratch that little spot between your ear and your throat that itches sometimes but you never can quite get to because it’s in the middle of your head. Ah that was a relief.

All in all, I was gratified to learn (again) that I was healthy.

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Medical – Army Enlistment pt. 3

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

This is the creepy part of the process. It’s also funny, if you’re not there for it. We had to get everything tested. On the way out of the classroom we were given breathalyser tests (I came back clean). Then we went through a battery: reflexes, eye test, hearing test, urine sample, blood sample.

Now backwards – on the blood sample, I’m still getting over a hatred of needles, so I looked away while I was being pricked. A few seconds in, I said calmly that I wasn’t particularly enjoying the experience, at which point the medic cried, “now why did you have to say that. The minute you said that, you dried up. Nothing’s coming out.” I looked down and saw that the sample bottle was huge and quite suddenly felt sick. It was a few minutes before they were able to try again.

The urine sample was not like your ordinary urinalysis, outside of a prison. We were taken, three at a time, into a room with urinals, but no parititions, where a medic handed us a cup and waited. And he had a bad problem with fidgeting. And tapping his foot… Let’s just say that peeing in public is just not my thing. If I gave you the vulgar details, I promise you’d be laughing till you cried. It took two attempts and over two hours before the pain in my bladder exceeded its shyness. It was the defining issue of the day. It’s something I definitely have to get over, and I really don’t have a clue how to practice.

The hearing test involved sitting in a soundproof room with earphones on and tapping a special button when you heard various beeps at various frequencies. It was… amusing. They eye test involved both correction testing and testing for colorblindness. It turns out that I’m not colorblind, but I’m still not legal to drive without glasses.

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