About a month ago, my friend Olivia picked me to do one of those tell-everyone-about-yourself posts which I never did. But now I shall ...  so here goes:

1. I am the youngest of seven children. I have three brothers and three sisters. Interestingly, my sisters each have four brothers and two sisters. I also have two step brothers.
2. My parents separated when I was 12. They divorced over a decade later. I was married and had a daughter by then.
3. I became a born again Christian when I was 13 on April 7, 1979. It was the best decision I've ever made in my life.
4. I had a knife accident - a friend accidentally stabbed me in the left arm with a large kitchen knife slicing the ulnar nerve - in May of 1979. Because of the wound and the injury, I can't put my all my fingers together on my left hand and the sensation in my left hand is a little weird. I took physical therapy for about a year to rehab for this. For a long time the pinky side of my hand was completely numb.
5. Bev and I married when I was 19. I've told her many times that next to Jesus, she is the best thing that ever happened to me!
6. I have four children plus we have one in heaven from a miscarriage. We wouldn't have Greg if we had that child. Consequently, our emergency room expenses would probably be much less!
7. I was a full time youth pastor in Clermont, Florida for seven years. Since then I've been a part time and volunteer pastor. I'm currently one of the two men who are the acting pastors in our local church.
8. I talk too much. I always have. My Mom tells me that the other kids used to say, "Make Brian stop talking."
9. I don't seek conflict and I get worked up a lot when I know I have to have a conflict, but I will debate and argue anything I think is true. My sister-in-law says that all of us kids are like that. She says we all like to argue and we all think we're always right. I believe that debating for the truth is one of the skills that the Lord has given me. It's not always a good thing though.
10. I've owned 14 dogs in my life. Eleven of those have been since Bev and I have married (some were short timers). About six of those have been in the past five years! Bev is a dog nut. We currently have four - two very cute Bichons, a blind chihuahua and a Boston terrier.
11. Speaking of dogs, Bev, all our kids and I are the same in that we're shocked if a dog doesn't like us. We try to pet every canine we see. It's really funny.
12. I can drive a stick shift.
13. I like teaching and preaching. I also enjoy hunting (not fishing, Paige ) and I'm getting into playing paintball. I've always been easily hooked on video games (Asteroids in the old days; Halo now) and superheroes. I guess the reason for my Xanga name is pretty obvious.
14. Sara Groves is my favorite musician.
15. I'm hooked on anything Celtic, and especially Irish. I can't wait until we can visit Ireland. Apparently I have some famous Irish ancestors. The Irish are awesome.
16. I'm a published author. I used to write a weekly article for teens in Florida and I've had articles published in national magazines. I don't write as much as I'd like.
17. I don't get embarrassed talking about bodily things (although I don't like potty humor at all). Since I have three teenagers and one of them is a nurse, our dinner conversations contain a lot of things that would scandalize some people. I've also worked with teenagers for almost 20 years, so talking about sex, body parts, female reproductive functions, etc. doesn't faze me.

Well, I guess that will have to satisfy your thirst to know more about me - maybe much more than you wanted to know. I don't know who to tag so we'll do it on the honor system. If you haven't done a survey like this, tell us 6 things about yourself that we might not know. Then comment and tell me that you did.

HeyJulieBaby asked me who would play me in a movie. I would think a younger Harrison Ford, mostly because of the types of movies he did and the fact that he did most of his own stunts. I don't think I'd do a movie without doing my own stunts. That would be boring.

So here are the two questions for you to answer:

• Do you have any suggestions about who would play me in a movie?
• Who do you think would play you in a movie?

On Sunday afternoon, I was trying to prepare for our small group Bible study that was to happen that evening at church. My dear Mom stopped over to deliver my birthday card since she had been traveling and didn't make it to church in the morning. She stayed and talked for a little while.

After that, another friend stopped by to talk to Bev and me about something else and also stayed to talk for a little bit.

After this, Dylan asked me to do something with him. I told him that I still had some things to finish. Here's the conversation between my five year old and me:

Dad: Maybe if all these people would stop coming over, I could get finished.
Dylan: Just ignore them. That's what I do.
Dad: But they're coming over to see me.
Dylan: Well it's your birthday. Duh!

Apparently I've got a five year old teenager at home!

I thought this week was going to be pretty bad. I was pretty much right. Sigh. 

But I am feeling a little weary.

Last week was kind of a mess at work. About a year ago, one of our servers (remember that I'm a network administrator?) had a problem and trashed a bunch of data. I spent hours trying to dig out from that mess. We had data corruption and other unpleasantness.

Guess what episode repeated itself last week? On Wednesday I got a call in the morning that "the computers are messed up". Normally not a real big deal. I travelled onsite (about 30 minutes away) and didn't get home until 2:30 Thursday morning! My boss was kind enough to bring me a hoagie for supper. Friday I didn't get home until about 10:30 pm as we replaced that server with a different one. Today was spent trying to recover some trashed data, which will not be completely recovered. That makes me unhappy.

The rest of my week will be pretty hectic too. Consultants coming in Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to do network troubleshooting or server setup. Those are good times to learn and work, but it does interrupt normal things.

I had a fairly long meeting this evening at church and Wednesday is our church's Grand Prix. I run the computerized finish line for that.

Anyway, that's my week as I see it from here. It's also bitterly cold out.

I'll try to update again with some important and significant changes in my life, plus our latest ER visit. Guess who that was!

I liked all the comments (even if half of them were Narelle being silly!).   I'm trying to get back into the Xanga swing of things.

Hello dear Xanga friends. I haven't died or moved to Australia (sorry Narelle). Things have been so hectic, but I will try to update very soon. If you leave me comments, I won't feel like I've lost my online friends and it may encourage me to write even quicker!