Paul L. McCord Jr.

It was interesting that on my last post I was complaining that we have not had any rain.  I was telling the world how dry it was here and that I still have not had to mow my lawn.  It has rained three times since then and is raining at the moment.  I am off work this morning and woke up at 5:30 AM and enjoying the wonderful weather.  I hope the rain continues.  I have been getting up at 4:00 AM for so long that I always wake up early, even on my days off.  I recently repaired the roof on the house where I had a leak.  After we have had several inches of rain, it is still not leaking.  What a huge relief!  A couple days ago we had several tornadoes that damaged a lot of property.  There were two people in my office that lost their homes.  There was another one that had $20,000 damage to his property from 4 1/2 inch hail.  I wish I could show you the pictures.  I think the hail damage was more impressive than the tornado damage simply because it was hail.  These huge stones went completely through his decking on his roof.  He showed me a picture of his gutter where the hail completely penetrated it and there was not even a seam.  I think he is fortunate to not be in the hospital or even worse.  I think these people need some prayer for the stress of losing their homes.    Thankfully no one was hurt.

Yesterday was an interesting day.  My wife and I were leaving for work at 5:30 AM in the rain when we noticed two suspicious guys trying to steal a motorcycle from the neighborhood Elementary school.  These guys accidently released the clutch too quickly and jumped out in front of us and went through the stop sign with no lights.  I called 911 and we followed them through the neighborhood and surprising the police caught them.  There is a lot of criminal activity that goes on in my neighborhood and I am getting tired of it.  I feel that if someone does not take a stand and report this stuff, they will get even worse.  This  made us over an hour late for work but my boss was understanding.

It seems like all of my online presences are coming due in the next couple of months.  This domain, our Del City ARC domain, and my Flickr account are all about to expire.  I am going to renew them one at a time.  My Flickr account will be renewed this weekend.  My domain has really gone up in price.  It has gone up more than 100% this year.  I think I will renew it for three years this time so if it goes up again, I will be able to lock it in for a while.  It is hard to believe that I have had my own domain for ten years.  I put up my first web site in 1995 when I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska.  My first domain was paulmccord.net, then I had www.k5glh.com, then paulmccord.info, and then back to paulmccord.net.  Our Del City ARC page has been www.delcityarc.com, then www.w5del.com, and then finally its current www.delcityarc.org.  At this point I cannot imagine not having a web presence of some kind.  Don’t worry, despite my lack of postings lately, I am not going anywhere.  For those of you that wish I would go away, I think I will stay around .  Time to get busy this morning so I will get this posted.

Over the last couple of months I have been pretty busy with work and trying to fix the house.  I have not really been inspired to post anything on this website except when I have been upset about something.  We have all heard the expression that says “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all”.  Well I have been following that advice when I have the strength.  Over the last month I have typed up ten or so posts that I never posted to the blog.  The passion was there for some injustice the government has done or anger at some story I heard on the news among others.  One of the posts was very long but I deleted it.

The truth is that I do not want to come across as some mean tyrant that is always mad at the world.  I know is appears that way sometimes because typing on the blog is actually therapy for me when I am in a bad mood or stressed out.  The funny thing is that later when I read some of the posts I usually find myself laughing at how angry I sound.  Although I usually still agree with my original point, I think there are more effective ways to get my point across without sounding off on a rant.

In a slight change of course I would like to say that really things have been going very well for us.  My wife got a new job that is a significant pay increase with better working conditions.  I got a promotion and a great evaluation at work with things working out better than I could ask.  The house repair is going slow but is actually coming together quite well.  Since I am not a carpenter or construction contractor I had very little confidence in myself in the beginning.  The more I do the more I feel like I can do anything.  Outside the house looks almost the same but on the inside it is very different.

On another note, our city is swelling up with civic pride thanks to our NBA team going to the playoffs in only their second year in Oklahoma City.

This banner above was posted on the Oklahoma City Thunder web site the day they made it to the playoffs for sure.  I had to make a screen shot to celebrate the moment.

In this photo you can see the Sandridge Energy building in Oklahoma City with the large sign on all four sides shouting out “LET’S GO THUNDER”.  Most of us are not expecting a Championship but just proud of how our team has gone from a 23 win season last year to a 50 win season this year.  We are proud of how our star Kevin Durant has beaten Michael Jordan’s record for the most free throws in a season.  He has scored more than 30 points scores of games this year earning him the youngest player to ever win the highest scoring player in a season.  We have another star in Russell Westbrook that often misses the well deserved attention because he plays with another star on the same team. Even the coach, Scott Brooks won the Coach of the Year award this year.  If they did not win another game in the playoffs our city can be proud of the way our players have played and represented our city well.

Life is going very well for us despite the world going crazy.  Yes I do have opinions on health care reform, our leaders (cough cough) and other big news stories but again I do not want to rant all the time.  I have chosen not to get caught up in the anger in the world.  Things are going too well to be ungrateful for what I have.  Sometimes it is nice to talk about good things.

I had a blog post typed up and was within a sentence or two of being ready to post when I decided to click “YES” on a request to reboot to complete a security update installation.  Wow!  That was not very smart because just as you probably guessed, the post was lost.  This should be common sense and I must be lacking any.   Well to sum up the post that was lost, it was just a year in review post.  I was telling how 2009 was a year of milestones in our family.  Many things happened that made it a very memorable year.  For example my wife and I celebrated our 20th anniversary.  I graduate the University of Oklahoma.  I completed ten years of service at my current employer.  My oldest son turned 18 years old. My family and I was able to visit my mom’s side of the family in New Mexico for the first time since 1989.  My wife and kids had never met them and so this was a huge moment for us.  I lost my mom in 2005 and as much as I miss her, I do not want to lose touch with her side of the family.  Also my sister moved back to Oklahoma for the first time in 31 years.  This was a rough transition but things are going very well for her as well.  On a sad note, I lost my grandmother in March when she died at 90 years old.  This was the last grandparent that I had.

Two of these events, namely my graduation and our trip to New Mexico was a little tainted because I was suffering from the worst case of poison ivy that I have ever had.  I helped my dad clean up some vines and brush that was growing on his fence line and three days later I found myself itching out of control.  Five weeks, three trips to my doctor and one visit to the emergency room later and I finally overcame this breakout.  My doctor gave me some medication that I was allergic to that made it even worse eventually resulting in my going to the emergency room in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  This was in May and June when this happened and to this day I still have some discoloration on my legs.  For this reason my wife ordered me to never go into my dad’s backyard again .  My graduation was supposed to be a glorious event though I could not enjoy it at the moment.

The National Weather Service reported that we had 14.1 inches of snow, later revised to 13.5 inches on Christmas eve.  Even after the estimated snow fall was scaled back it was the most snow we have ever recorded in Oklahoma City.  Here it is eight days later and we still have some snow on the ground.  This year has been very eventful and happy for the most part.  This year we have decided that we want to move away from my childhood neighborhood because the crime has reached a point that we want to have a restart.  We will not be moving until 2011 but we are currently restoring the house to make it sellable.  We are trying to go the extra mile so that we can get the most from our home when the time comes.    We are hopeful for 2010 to be a wonderful year for our family.  It will be difficult to match 2009 as far as impacting our family in a dramatic way.  I will keep you up to date and see if it lives up to the previous year.   I would like to thank all of  you for your making my blog a place to stop.  I really enjoy sharing our lives with the rest of you.  I wish you all a very happy 2010.

I have been so busy working and and working around the house that I just realized that it has been more than a week since I posted anything on my blog.  It is after midnight and I should be getting ready for bed but my kids still have company over.  I am starting to get a little tired.  With all the home maintenance going on, I am wore out.  I have been scraping and painting the house, repairing blemishes on the walls and floor among other things.  This evening, my wife and I worked in the garage for a while installing some peg board and some hooks to hang tools.  Now the garage is a mess and I will clean it up tomorrow. 

You may remember a week ago I posted on my blog that I was disappointed in Google Wave because they would not allow me to invite any of my family or friends.  This evening I was given eight invites to give to my friends.  I have given out four so far but I am not sure who to give the remaining ones to.  I want who ever I invite, to make use of it.  It does no good to waste my invites  giving to someone that will never even sign up.

Well today my Sooners lost their fifth football game of the year.  They have really been struggling all year and will likely continue to do so as many of their players are injured and cannot play.  I am hopeful that they can improve over the Spring months to come.  They cannot be good all the time and these lulls are typical with any team.  We have some fans that are so rabid that many will be calling to fire the coach.  It is sort of funny that many take a football game that serious.    Well I am really getting drowsy so I better get this posted before I doze off and my forehead lands on the keyboard resulting in…kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk…or something similar. I will try to post more often on here in the future so that everyone knows that I am still around.

Well it is a nice Saturday morning that is missing something huge and I just cannot pin point what it is.  Oh wait… I remember now… My wife had to work this morning and I wish she was here.  She is a hard worker and very dedicated to what she sets out to do.  It has been a nice week with cool, overcast weather.  Now that it is weekend, the clouds are gone.  I love the cooler days though they are coming earlier than normal.  Maybe that holocaust snow storm that we missed last winter will be coming this year.  It is always nice to get a free day off from work.  As I said in an earlier post, I put the rest of the blog on private because I have not felt like arguing but that will not likely last.  I have posted several years on here and as crazy as I have been on occasion, I still like to look back and see what mood I was on on a certain day.  I really do not like getting caught up in politics because it is all consuming.  I do have very strong feelings about the leadership of our country and the direction they are taking us but there is not much I can do until election time.

This would be a great day to get out and take some pictures but I do have a lot of things to do.  Where do I begin?  I am going to repaint the rest of the house but I do need to do some more scraping.  I also need to take an antenna down on the back of my house so I can repair and paint the fascia board.  I was going to mow the yard but this cool week has slowed the growth.  It is looking like I may only have one or two more times at mowing to go this year if the weather continues to stay cool.  That is not likely though because I hear tomorrow is supposed to be 91 degrees.  The Oklahoma State Fair ends tomorrow and I did not go this time.  I just do not enjoy things like that as much as I use to.  In fact I use to go every year but I have only been once in the last 20 years.  It is hard to justify paying $10.00 each just to walk around in mobs and crowds.  If you choose to stop and get something to eat, you may want to check your credit rating before doing such a radical event.  It cost $8.00 for one turkey leg.  I do love the food out there but you can spend $100.00 on food alone in one meal if you take the whole family.  Nevertheless the fair does have a unique atmosphere that is hard to duplicate. In that regard it is fun and since it is not an everyday occurrence it is not that bad.  With an almost empty nest, it is not the same going out to do these types of things these days.

I am still wondering how long it is going to take the University of Oklahoma to send my diploma.  I graduated on May 16th, and after a month, I contacted them to see how long it would take to receive my diploma.  I was told that although I had completed all my requirements, there was no application for graduation for me on file.  My response was “What?!?”  Somehow in that packet they sent me, had applications for convocation, commencement, alumni, cap and gown but no graduation application.  Then she told me that since the deadline had passed, that I could go on the August list if I turned in an application.  Then she asked for my address to send it to me.  Well August has come and gone and I still have no diploma.  I spoke to a coworker engineer that also graduated in May and he told me that his May graduation resulted in receiving his diploma at the end of August.  If I use that as a gauge, then I can expect mine to arrive sometime in November.  I am beginning to think I will be done paying back my student loan before it ever arrives.

It looks like the entire city of Del City is allowing free garage sales this weekend and so my dad is having a garage sale.  I hear it is going well on the second day with over one hundred customers.  I think if he were to start selling crack he would have a significant increase in a customer base.   Just kidding.  I often joke that our ice cream van is really a meth dealership on wheels.  It was funny last Saturday when we had a van with all the yellow paint comes by real slow playing “Oh Come Let Us Adore Him” and five minutes later I see a white ice cream van speeding down the street going the same direction.  It looked like the head drug dealer was going to discipline another dealer who was encroaching on his territory.  We’ll have none of that even if he is playing Christmas music!  Again, I am only kidding as our ice cream truck only sells Marijuana and would never stoop to selling crack or meth.

I guess I better get this posted so I can get some things done around here.  As much as I will things to pick themselves up and put themselves away, they are very resistant to those techniques.  Please pray for the hostile spirit of rebellion that my dishes and clothes have.  I should not have to break from sitting on my back side on the computer to do chores.  It is time for them clothes, and dishes to step up to their responsibility and put themselves up and put themselves away.  Okay, I will cut it out.

Thanks for stopping by.

This has been an unusually busy month with many high priority things going on at once.  I am on the home stretch with my University of Oklahoma degree as I just received my graduation application yesterday.  This month is the busiest month of the year at my work.  We have a conference that lasts this whole week with people coming from many different bases.  The preparation for this conference has been intense with a lot of research, documentation, editing and then presentation.  There is a lot at stake in this conference where some high ranking officers will be there.

For the next two months our lives will continue to run at a very high pace and that is why my presence on this blog has been very limited.  I do have time to post to my Twitter as they are small posts that take no time to edit and post.  You can read my Twitter posts on the right side of this blog.  Also I do use my Facebook as well as I can post to it via mobile phone just like my Twitter. 

I am hopeful that I will be able to finish the last part of my thesis paper with no hiccups involved.  For some reason the closer I get to the end, the more difficult it is to find the motivation.  It defies logic as  you would think it would be easier.  I am so close but feel so far.  I hold the graduation papers in my hand but seem like I can never muster the strength to work on this paper.  I will succeed though and this challenge will be over.  This is going to be over in two months and life can continue as it did before.  If you do not hear from me much, that is what I have been up to.  You can always contact me via if you need to get in touch with me. 

I can get use to these long weekends.  Today is a holiday and Friday I took off work making this a four day weekend.  It is  hard to go back to work after being off for several days off.  My class actually begins tomorrow so next weekend I will have to get busy with my paper.  I have been trying to enjoy these long weekends while I have them.  On the bright side, once I get started on this paper I will be one step closer to being finished.  I have been dreading this but I should be looking forward to getting it behind me.  I am very much looking forward to that.

I think I will be watching a lot of DVR television the next few days as I really do not want to watch the television journalists all goo goo over Obama.  I am low on my nausea medicine so I do not want to do anything  that would make me sick.  I realize this is a big moment but sometimes I am not in the mood to listen to kissing and smacking sounds that are sure to come from my TV speakers.  Just about time for dinner so I better get this posted.

Last night we went out to the Warren Movie theater with the intention of seeing Paul Blart Mall Cop but ended up seeing Bride Wars.  The movie was pretty slow in the beginning but it was a bit funny.  Clearly this was a girl movie as I was only one out of about six other guys in the entire theater.  With the exception of the two gay guys sitting behind us the only other guys were clearly their with their wives or girlfriends.  This made it a little awkward but I enjoyed being with my wife.  This movie could not begin to approach the weirdness of going to see High School Musical 3.  I went to see that with my wife, son and his girlfriend.  That movie was sort of like being stuck in a room with 600 teenage girls.  The way I knew it was 600 is because there was a guy that came in there with a microphone saying the movie had sold out all 600 seats so everyone needed to move into middle and fill all seats.  There were a couple guys in there that were clearly as uncomfortable as I was.  I jokingly told my wife they looked like hostages.  I am not kidding you on this. The High School Musical 3 movie was as awkward as anything I have ever experienced.  They even had someone walking around the theater with a microphone asking people if they wanted to sing songs from part one and two.  This movie theater has 20 screens while two of them are very large. 

We had a nice evening.  My son and his girlfriend saw the Mall Cop show and the Dog Hotel movie.  We had taken them and dropped them off.  By the time it was over my wife and I decided to go see one ourselves.  We had to pay for them to see a second movie so we could see one.  It was a great evening and we will have to do that again soon.

In the world you will find that everyone has an opinion whether you agree with them or not.  I frequent blogs, news pages and all sorts of message boards.  Sometimes I agree with the points of view and sometimes  I do not.  There are places that you can post dissenting opinions and others you can’t.  Sometimes it is because of policy while other times it is because the atmosphere it is so hostile that you cannot post without being attacked.  I am very passionate about my beliefs and sometimes I am right while other times I know I am off my rocker .  There are times where I see something on TV that drives me crazy and I just want to vent.

This is my place to be able to to vent my frustration or speak what I want without having to be worried about hurting someone’s feelings or being politically correct.  I know there are times that I get so worked up and post something that later I read and feel like an idiot.  That is okay because at that time I meant every word.  I know I offend people on here occasionally though that is not what I set out to do.  As bizzare as some of my rants may be at times I have a very strong sense of right and wrong.  When a situation is too much for me to deal with I often resort to sarcasm in an attempt to make a joke out of things.  This is when I am most likely perceived as some nut case.

I have found that having a blog is therapy for me when I am stressed out about things.  It is a way for me to speak my mind because the truth is that I am very uncomfortable being around people.  I know this is very strange but it is true.  There is nothing more uncomfortable for me than to be in a position where I am in front of others.  This is an awkward position when I have such strong feelings about things.  As much as people are offended by some of my rants at times, I do have a silent group that returns despite their silence.  I often check my page statistics and find this page gets so much traffic that I had to change plans to handle the excessive traffic.  This is not bragging but rather telling how people like to see the bizzare.  It is sort of like a car accident where people cannot help but to watch.

I know that not everyone that comes to this page is offended but it is interesting to see how many hits this page receives despite the lack of comments by the visitors.  I sometimes think that it is my abrasiveness that scares some people even though I do not intend to be that way.  I remember one time when I was just a Senior Airman in the Air Force I had a Technical Sergeant (TSgt) tell me the supervision was scared of me.  That has stayed with me for a long time.  I thought he was joking about this at first but he reiterated himself.  It is strange that I come across this way because that is not who I want to be.  There are times when I get so worked up or indignant over injustices or my perception of injustice that I tend to lash out at people without even meaning to.

For this reason I usually keep to myself most of the time.  I know I make people uncomfortable when I am around them so I am most a peace when I am at home with my family.  I sometimes think that it is my abrasiveness that caused my son to run away.  I only wanted the best for him though he apparently did  not see it that way.  This is one of the reasons that I have a blog.  I can say what I want and be totally honest about it.  I can post exactly how I feel at that moment and not worry about how it is seen.  Sometimes I just want to be able to fix things while the world has gone mad.  While right has become wrong and wrong has become right in the world I can still speak the truth on my blog.  People may disagree with me or I may even be wrong but I can speak what I think is the truth.  For those of you that have never tried it, I would give it a try. 

It is actually interesting to see people’s responses whether they agree with you or not.  The good thing is that you have moderator capability and you can always respond to those posts that you disagree with.  You can also use this opportunity to learn from those you disagree with.  As I said I am wrong at times and when I am in a rage I seem to lose all sense of reality but that is fine.  It is my blog and I can be right or wrong.  I do not want to be wrong but if I am, I can learn from others once I cool down.  I find that having a blog is a good way to share your life no matter how it is.  The good and the bad can be shared.  There are enough political blogs on the left and the right.  There are tech blogs and there are any number of other blog subjects out there.  This one is my blog and about what ever interests me this day. 

You can be successful at your own blog as long as you post regularly.  I am definately not the example of a success story but I do know this web site gets a lot of traffic even if it is just curiosity.  It is the bug that cannot help but to fly into the blue light.  It is the cat that must jump on the leaf blowing across the porch.  Start up a blog and post on it regularly whether anyone posts on it or not.  I have found that as a ham radio repeater owner you have a similar situation.  When we use our own repeater all the time and talk on it, people just show up.  People show up where they hear people.  How many times people have told me they scanned across our frequency and heard voices.  The same concept works with your blog.  You post on their regularly and people will just show up because their is current activity even if it is a car wreck.  I think it is really fun and I would recommend it for everyone.

I took this photo at the corner of Sunnylane Road at Reno Avenue in Del City, Oklahoma in the 35 degree cold wind.  This is the OG&E power plant that feeds my house with electricity.  This busy picture has been a description of our lives the last couple years.  With trying to go to school full time, work in a new job and have a family life it has been pretty busy.  With my graduation only four months away I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.  It is funny how our human nature tends to see the negative in just about everything unless you make a conscious effort to see the positive.  I have found myself actually a little sad that my kids are growing up and as soon as I graduate, my kids will be grown.  It is almost as if I have been experiencing the “empty nest” syndrome before it happens.  The truth is that we have a lot to be thankful for.  God has blessed us in many ways.  It is sad that despite these blessings we often only see the negative in the world.

This morning I submitted my proposal for my final thesis at Oklahoma University (OU).  I am sort of excited to know I am on my final paper and ready to graduate.  It would have been nice to have the Sooners be the national champions the same year I graduate but that is okay.  I did not watch much of the game though because they keep putting these games on in the middle of the night when I have to get up at 4:30 AM.  After seeing the results I do not regret not watching it.  I wanted to spend some time taking pictures today and I did for a while but it is too cold to spend too much time outside.  It was 75 degrees yesterday and a cold front came through just about the time the sun set.  The wind peaked at 53 MPH at the Oklahoma City airport last night.  This morning I woke up with garbage blown against my fence.  Who knows what county that came from . 

We did get the car out of the shop this weekend after the wreck in December.  It drives pretty good and it is sure nice to have it back.  The impact of the increased insurance premiums has not hit us yet.   Our renewal will be in March so that is when we will have to get a second mortgage on the house to pay are auto insurance .  Hopefully it will not be too bad.  My son Kevin was hired at the Del City Wal-Mart yesterday so he is pretty excited about that.  It is close to home and he knows many people there already.  I went up there with him around midnight last night to check it out.  I have to admit that I am excited for him because he is only 17 years old.  Tonight I am in for a very relaxing evening watching television and having dinner with my wife.