Posted by Jonathan Wise on Dec 24, 2006
Well we pulled it off. Two services at the new campus down, two to go. The first was pretty rough but we got pretty much all the bugs out for the next one. In between services the staff all look as exhausted as I feel, but we pull it together cause for many of the people who come, this is the only picture of Christ they’ll see all year.
This campus has been a series of small miracles, combined with some incredibly hard work by the volunteers and by the staff — as our pastor says: God’s Super with our Natural — but it happened, and it was so awesome to see the place packed out.
Posted by Nicole Wise on Dec 24, 2006
Ok…so you have all probably heard that Jon wouldn’t let me put up our regular Christmas tree. Now some might be able to see his side but for those of us that love Christmas time don’t since I am the one to normally put it together and decorate it! Since it is a 71/2 foot tree I might be able to see where he is coming from given that we are in a very small apartment this year. Unlike our good friend Libby, who when she first walked into their new home already knew where all the Christmas items would go, I totally forgot about where I would put our Christmas tree when we were looking at this apartment. If we put it up in the living room it would block the front speaker, part of the TV and all of the electronic devices when sitting on the one couch. The only other place to put it would be in the hallway by the washer & dryer but then it would be very crowded their. So I decided to go and buy a 3 foot tree with lights already on it and I think it has turned out ok, less hassle later when putting it away since the baby is likely to be here by then. Even though I didn’t get my regular tree up I am still pleased with the overall outcome of our apartment.
Posted by Nicole Wise on Dec 23, 2006
Aaahhh….now I know what they look like, very ugly and not so much fun to walk on. So the last few weeks are turning out not to be as much fun as my weight is constantly increasing so is my belly as you can see from previous pictures, which is always getting in the way, but now my feet and ankles, or lack there of, have also decided that they want to join in the fun. This is not so much fun for me since now it appears that none of my shoes fit me except some sandals, which are not December weather worthy especially when the snow arrives, and of course my slippers. I did try on a pair of Jon’s shoes and they fit but they just make me look like I have clown feet! I can’t even wear socks because some of them cut off my circulation too much. Because I don’t seem to have any ankles left and my legs are also starting to swell…when will this stop ;-P.
Posted by Nicole Wise on Dec 22, 2006
I thought I would write about one of my jobs that I do once every two months. Not because it is interesting just because I really wanted to take a picture and what would I need a picture of this for except to maybe to write about it. But now that I am writing I don’t really know what to say except that I get to read the meter, which by the way is for hydro or ‘electric’ as they call it around here. (Don’t want to confuse any of our American readers!) Then I get to enter the numbers on the NYSEG website and submit them….sounds exciting doesn’t it. Not really since the last time I read the meter it was pouring rain and it was the last day to read it….my procrastinating showing there! It is kind of a neat picture but a very boring post…
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Dec 22, 2006
Still don’t have a better way to do this, but we’ve had some requests for pictures…
This is Nic and her pregnant friend Brooke, having a belly-off. Nic wins!!
This is the final version of the nursery, cleaned, stocked and ready to go!
My crash course in phone networking — it was like that when I got there, honest!
And this is where I’ve been every spare second of this week, but it’s all gonna be worth it real soon!
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Dec 21, 2006
Well I wasn’t able to find an Internet connection in or near where our baby will be born, and given that the average first labor lasts around 12 hours, I knew a solution would have to be found. Fortunately WordPress has functionality for MoBlogging (blogging from a mobile device) and a nice plugin adds image support. I picked up an old Treo 600 online, and voila! I can blog from anywhere!
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Dec 20, 2006
In 4 days we hope to open the second campus of Northway Church. Volunteers have pulled out all the stops, working practically around the clock to drywall, paint, wire and clean, transforming a former gym into God’s house. Before this week, I hadn’t been able to spend a lot of time over there — with a gimpy arm, and mostly construction work to be done, I didn’t have much I could do, so I’d been spending most of my time working on network infrastructure to support a second location. This week, however, I finally got a chance to serve at the new campus, and I have been just amazed at what I’ve seen. The scope of the project is overwhelming, to say the least, but the dedication of the people there tops it. Not since Easter at the Pepsi have I been so floored by what God can accomplish through His children when they obey with every ounce of energy they have in them.
The official grand opening isn’t until January, but the goal is to be ready in time to have 4 of our 7 Christmas Eve services in the new campus. To that end I’ve had to be creative in solving some technical problems. We subcontracted a company to run voice and gigabit ethernet cable throughout the building, but they don’t have us on the schedule until well after Christmas. The phone company came in and installed our 3 lines (voice, data, security) but left two of them as raw wires at the breakout box (along with the mess of a hundred other wires that were set up previously). Our church uses a fantastic online database, called FellowshipOne, to handle nursery check-ins (among other things) for the protection of our families and their kids, but obviously we need an Internet connection to make that work. And our media team uses more technology than the starship Enterprise, so trying to pull off a production without a network would be like trying to run a marathon without legs…
I arrived on Monday, thinking that the network and telephone lines were installed. After plugging the modem into every phone jack in the building, and finding out that not a single one of them was hot, I started to realise that I had my work cut out for me. I hit the Dollar General and bought myself a $5 phone, then headed back to the utility room where the raw phone lines were coming in. I found one line with a normal jack in it, and started to set up the DSL modem. I had a dial-tone but I couldn’t get sync, so I called the ISP and found out that my one working line was not the one they were delivering our service to. Enter Jon Bates, Navy Nuclear Engineer and uber geek. We stripped the wire bare on a DSL filter and attached it to my $5 phone to make ourselves a linemans handset, then started jamming the wires into the breakout box until we found a hot connection. Jon held the wires in place while I called my cell phone to find out what number we’d found, and we both sighed in relief when it showed up as the data line. There was an old wallplate in the wall, presumably coming from some old inactive phone line, so we ripped out the wires and used the scrap to connect the breakout box to the jack, then plugged in the modem… only to find out there was no power to the outlets in the room.
I won’t go into details on how we got that working, cause that was a little scarier. Fortunately Scott cleaned that up for us the next day. We connected the modem to a WRT54G which effectively covered half the building in WiFi, and yesterday I ran a 100 foot ethernet cable through the drop ceiling to another WAP to cover most of the rest of the building, getting us online for the weekend.
In a couple weeks we’ll have a real network, which some nice switches and some good fat pipe running into every room. We’ll have proper graphics cards for our media PCs, instead of the hack-job I had to do to make a normal sized card fit into a low-profile computer. We’ll have meeting rooms for the staff (for the first time in months) and a break room for the volunteers who work 4 services in a row without complaint. We’ll have a beautiful new campus, number two of only God knows how many, where people can come and feel at home and feel like God cares about them…
This weekend is gonna be a little rougher than that, but God willing, and with the city’s permission, we’re gonna have an awesome Christmas together in a church built with love and obedience and joy. And I can’t wait to see how God works in that gym.
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Dec 18, 2006
Our office has two sets of doors at each entrance. The outer doors are open most of the time, while the inner doors require a key card for access. This is true from 7:00am to 6:00pm. Outside of that time frame, however, the outer doors are also locked. My new schedule has me at the office from 6:30am to 4:30pm most days, meaning there’s a half hour window in which the normally unlocked outer doors are locked, requiring either a card swipe from the outside, or a button press from the inside, to open them.
Unfortunately, due to a system-wide incompatibility with being awake before 7:00am, this is the same half hour window in which the requirements of my bladder are the most urgent and unpredictable. Couple that with an only partial consciousness, and you can understand why I might have a large bump on my forehead later today…
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Dec 17, 2006
Dad (Watters) you would be proud of me. I put the snow tires on the car by myself.
And I’m not sure which parent ingrained this in me, but I figured out a great way to save money/play the system.
See, getting tires installed costs $15 a tire, or $60 total, at a garage. Your quickie oil and lube place will rotate your tires for $12. So I install the tires myself, tighten up the lug-nuts with all my weight, and then go get the oil changed — and while I’m there have my tires rotated/re-installed.
I just saved myself $48, plus I feel really manly fixing the car myself and getting all greasy.
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Dec 15, 2006
OK, really missing eXpression today. Haven’t quite figured out a good way to post a bunch of pictures to WordPress, so here’s a post full of them. Click the image to see a bigger version…
The Nursery Painting Crew
The Dresser Building Crew
The nearly finished nursery
Christmas Party - Northway Style
And finally, here they are, the Vertical Production Team. Yes, I have a mexican moustache drawn on my face… Don’t you?
