Some good things have happened recently:
Last night, Mary, Helen, and I got to return to one of my old churches, Winchester Church of Christ, and update them on the ministry here. They have been supporters for many years. It was good to see old friends and have them 'ooh' and 'ah' over Helen. She does that to people.

Yesterday I got to introduce a new Ethiopian student to Wal-Mart. He loves the place. I'm taking him back today to get a bicycle. The highligh of my day was hearing him call home from my office. "Hello, Mama..." and then a bunch of words in an African dialect I don't understand. But the feeling of joy in his voice was evident. It was the first time he'd been able to call home since he arrived last weekend and his family was worried.

I have weekly lunches with a Chinese guy at, surprise, a local Chinese restaurant. I'll blog about a recent conversation we had sometime soon.

My parents are coming to visit tomorrow and spend the night. Its all because of Helen...

I'm preaching at our church this Sunday, both services, which will be around 1500 people. That's something like 5 or 6 weeks worth of preaching in Moulton.

BK is venturing guesses on the big University of Florida-University of Tennessee game this weekend. I say it will be 21-18 Vols, but I wish they could both somehow manage to lose. I'll go ahead and pick South Carolina vs. gators to go to the Gamecocks by a TD. The real test will be to avenge the loss to Mississippi State on homecoming.

And in the 'stuff that gets on my nerves' department... I hate it when headlines are misleading. Today, for instance, on the Drudge Report, the headline read 'US jobless claims at 10 year high', which is incorrect. The correct statement is that the jump in jobless claims (because of the hurricane) was a 10-year high. The headline comes from, who else, the BBC, and whoever did the reporting obviously failed to understand the numbers reported because six paragraphs down the story correctly states: "The total number of claimants in the week ending 10 September was 398,000 - its highest level in two years. "

More Helen pictures:

She loves to put the sunglasses on now.

Feeding herself some yogurt

As promised, here is a pic of Helen. It's one of her one-year-old pictures.

I'm glad to see that the Pahl's, the Canadian family who is following in our footsteps by moving to Birmingham, have arrived and are officially blogging their adventure. Welcome to the Brum!

I'm sure my English friends, especially Jon and Mark, participated in this thoroughly English event on Sunday (I hear it was the most exciting thing to do in the UK over the weekend).
Don't all English people love black pudding?









Its always tough when you move to a new place and have to find a barber. I opted for the cheapest in town - $4 - at the Boro Barber School. The catch is that you get your haircut by a student. The girl who cut my hair did a good job.

Here's a fascinating article written by Salmon Rushdie, yes, the Satanic Verses guy, about the need for reform in Islam. He's right.