There was a haiku contest at BarCamp. Here, from memory, was my entry:

My door prize ticket
Flew away on crimson wings
I can win no swag

I don’t know if I would have won or not; it probably doesn’t matter, because I think you had to be present to win the prize.

The haiku was about the fact that I misplaced my red door prize ticket shortly after going through registration. I went through my pockets, through the tote bag that each attendee received, and through the pages of various handouts in said tote bag. I couldn’t find the ticket anywhere. And there were some good door prizes, and lots of them!

At about 2:30, I realized it was an hour until the only remaining session that I was interested in seeing — and I wasn’t interested enough to kill the hour. So I got in the car and headed home.

Just now, I dumped out the contents of my tote bag, and do you know what I found? You guessed it. Ticket #284037. It looks like I had not won any of the prizes announced at the time of this blog post.

Anyway, I’m very glad I went. I saw some terrific sessions in the morning and early afternoon, and I got to have lunch with my Mountain T.O.P. buddies Gavin and Erin Richardson and Chris Smith, all of whom were at BarCamp. I knew Gavin and Erin would be there; Chris, who now works for a company that designs web sites for recording artists, was a pleasant surprise. Chris and his wife Amy gave me a brief introduction to geocaching a few years back, and so we talked about the huge geocaching event that will take place next year in Bell Buckle.

I plan to write news stories about at least one, and possibly two, of the sessions. I may also look at setting up a Twitter account for the Times-Gazette.

I was also near sports royalty and never realized it. BarCamp was held in meeting rooms at the Sommet Center, the home of the Nashville Predators. A well-known Nashville blogger posted on Twitter that he had seen Terry Crisp, the former NHL manager who is now the beloved color commentator for the Preds, walking down the corridor next to the meeting rooms accompanied by … Gordie Howe. Depending on which of the meeting rooms I was in at the time (or perhaps I was elsewhere in the corridor), I couldn’t have been more than 50 or 100 feet away.

“It looks like gas prices are the new ‘Joe the Plumber’ at BarCamp.” — Christian Grantham.

When I was in Costa Rica this past summer, I had access to cable TV for pretty much the whole trip — it was almost surreal to be watching Letterman during a mission trip.

The CBS feed that is on the cable systems in Costa Rica is sort of strange, however. It’s a CBS affiliate in Pennsylvania, except that part of the local newscasts have been replaced with a Caribbean weathercast. The weatherman is named Joey Stevens. He gives the weather for a dizzying number of different Caribbean islands, some of which I’d never even heard of. He was sort of silly in that expected weatherman way — I believe he had a rubber parrot on his shoulder most of the time. But he seemed to have friends on many of the islands, and would give shout-outs to various bars, restaurants or friends on many of them during the course of his weathercast.

I don’t know what made me think of him tonight, but I’ve decided that Official Weatherman of the Caribbean is my new dream job.

Gail Drake, co-founder of LEAMIS International Ministries, the group with which I take my foreign mission trips, and Frank Schroer of the LEAMIS staff stopped by the Mountain T.O.P. Adults In Ministry weekend I attended. Gail’s father founded Mountain T.O.P. and she was its director of adult ministry for many years, and Frank worked for a good while with the AIM home repair ministry. So it was a great chance for them to catch up with old friends whom they don’t see that often. I enjoyed sitting with Frank at dinner.

At one point, Gail came up to me in the dining hall.

“When do you rotate off the Mountain T.O.P. board, John?” she asked.

“I rotated off at the end of last year,” I told her.

The next thing I knew, I had agreed to serve on the LEAMIS board of directors. My first meeting will be at the end of the month.

Laura at Fixin’ Supper, were your ears burning this morning at about 11 a.m.?

Former Shelbyville mayor Geneva Smith has a weekly cooking show on WLIJ-AM (1580), one of our two co-owned AM stations in Shelbyville and the one with most of the local programming. Each week, she has a guest who talks about several of their favorite recipes. I was her guest this morning.

Mrs. Smith had asked me to bring several recipes to talk about on-air. I went looking last night for good ones to bring, and Laura’s Ro-Tel Risotto leaped out at me. It was the first recipe I talked about this morning, and the one that Mrs. Smith — not to mention my co-workers back at the paper who had been listening — seemed most interested in making. I did give you credit, Laura.

Here’s a little paragraph about the economy from perhaps the greatest history book ever, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, by Dave Barry:

THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE CRASH
The stock market of the 1920s was very different from the stock market of today. Back then, the market was infested by greed-crazed slimeballs, get-rich-quick speculators with the ethical standards of tapeworms, who shrieked “buy” and “sell” orders into the telephone with no concern whatsoever for the nation’s long-term financial well-being. Whereas today they use computers.

The last time I posted here about Charlie’s Soap, I wrote that I had no connection to the company and didn’t benefit in any way from praising them. That was an honest mistake. I had forgotten that they do have a refer-a-friend program, so that if someone who read my post became a new customer and voluntarily gave them my name as the person who’d referred them, the company would send me a little sample-size package as a gift.

That’s exactly what happened, a week or two later — I got a little sample-size bottle of their liquid cleaner in the mail. But I had no idea who had bought the product and given them my name, until tonight.

Turns out, it was my sister-in-law.

Well, after my trip, I’m going to have to mark some of my more than 200 Google Reader posts as “read,” but happily I looked at Newscoma, where I found out about a ticket I think we can all get behind:

Brak-Obama 2008

Here’s some brakground — er, I mean background — for those who need it.

I had a terrific time. Here are some highlights:

I was on a great MPT, and it was a wonderful weekend, a time of spiritual renewal and a great time with old and new friends. But it was long, and tiring, and I’ve spent part of today over at my parents’ house with my sister and her kids — also a wonderful time. I’m pooped, and glad I don’t have to go in to work tomorrow. But I do have a lot to accomplish in the next couple of days: work on my sermon for Sunday, work on my lay speaking lesson for Wednesday, get ready for a radio interview I’m doing on Wednesday morning, and try to clean up the pigsty that is my apartment right now. Some vacation!

Emotionally, I felt at times like I wasn’t contributing enough at the job site today — but I sure am tired this evening.

We were working on a very small trailer, and at times there just wasn’t enough room for everyone to be inside and busy. Early in the morning I took it upon myself to cut the linoleum for the bathroom, and I spent several hours after that worried that it would be wrong — and we know Mountain T.O.P. is trying to make the best use of materials this time of year, and another job site was waiting on the other half of our sheet of linoleum. Happily, it all worked out. I was very pleased.

Unfortunately, not everything in the bathroom was as successful. We had trouble re-connecting the3 sinks, and with a bad leak right at the time we had to leave we had no choice but to leave the water off at the job site. The woman for whom we were working was fine with that, but her son, not so much.

We had to rush back to camp, and I was scheduled to host a table for dinner tonight. I didn’t have time to shower before dinner– I just changed T-shirts and hoped I didn’t offend my guests too much.

Gail Drake and Frank Schroer were visitors at dinner tonight, and it was nice catching up with them. I sat next to Frank at dinner.

I’m here at Camp Cumberland Pines in Altamont for my Mountain T.O.P. weekend. It’s a good group. I wound up on a team with Andy Borders from my church — normally, we try to keep too many from the same church from serving on a team together, but in this case it worked out. I think it’s a great team, and we have a lot on our plate for Friday and Saturday, including drywall and linoleum.

The black print on my Kodak printer has stopped working. Happily, it’s still under warranty, and after walking through the troubleshooting on the web site, I was promised that they would ship out a new replacement printhead. I had to laugh, though, at this message:

Thank you for using our online form to request a replacement printhead. Your new printhead will arrive within two to five business days. You will not receive another confirmation for this request, so please print this page and save it for future reference.

That’s right. I’m supposed to use my printer — which isn’t working — to print out the confirmation number for my new printhead.

I actually have been quite happy with this printer — a Kodak 5100 All-In-One. It’s a copier, scanner, plain paper printer and print-size photo printer. The nice thing about it is that it uses Kodak’s new ink technology, so the ink cartridges cost literally half as much as the ones for my old HP inkjet printer. I can literally buy new Kodak cartridges for less than I was paying at Walgreens to refill the HP cartridges.The cost-per-print is supposed to be significantly less than other brands; the exact margin depends on whether you’re talking about black and white, color or photo-quality printing.

This is really the first problem I’ve had with the thing, and I had no grief whatsoever about getting a new printhead sent out.

I saw this at Gavin’s site and thought it was hilarious. Here’s what would happen if one of the great music videos of the 1980s had been really, really literal: