Adam Copeland
http://adamray.wordpress.com/
A friend from church who has recently been called to Iraq.  Pray for him and his wife through this time.  He’s a cool guy and all that trash.

Joey White
http://journeytolife.wordpress.com/
He’s our campus pastor at First Baptist McKinney – North Campus.  Don’t let the clipboard fool you, his work is harder than most will ever see.

Jon Glidden
http://jonnysteele.wordpress.com/
A good friend at church.  His wisdom and honesty are very important to me, and his heart for God is contagious.

Todd Benson
http://www.teb5.com/
Todd is a friend from church who, like me, has been in the blogging game for a while.  I’ve never seen a man play so many roles.  He makes the kids laugh and holds the setup team together.  Todd’s the man.

As you can tell, I respect each of these guys very much and would recommend that you add them to your favorite’s list.

The second thing that takes a while is public transportation.  Alina, Rachael and I went to meet my family at the Dallas zoo last weekend, and it just took forever.  We got to the train station just in time to watch the train the we were supposed to get on mockingly depart the station, but at least it was only 20 minutes until the next one.

So we bought our tickets (not knowing which ones we shoud get we went ahead and got the most expensive ones: “platinum” sounded good and hey for $4.50 it wasn’t too bad anyway).  You mathematicians out there should be able to figure out that if we put a twenty into the machine, it should give us $11 in change (Rachael rode for free), well the machine didn’t see it that way.  Apparently the machine thought we said “keep the change,” so it did.  The machine must be plagued with problems because it had a phone number taped to it for technical assistance.  We found out that to get our $11 back it would take an act of congress and a blessing of God.  So at this point we are still waiting on the bureaucracy of public transportation.

That machine not only took our money, but it also made us miss the next train, and I tell you, there is nothing more exciting that waiting on a train at a station with such a motley group of people.  Once we finally got on the train it took over an hour to go about 25 miles, which is super fast for people that don’t have their own vehicles, but we do and it felt as if it would never end.  When we finally got the park we paid $9 each (again Rachael was free) to get in, and then met my family inside.  The informed us that they had already seen all that there was to see and that all they had left to do was ride the zoo tram.  “Oh sweet, another train.”  Break out the wallet again, because apparently it isn’t good enough to pay to get into the park, you then have to pay for some old man to tell lame jokes.

Once that torture was done, everyone decided to go home.  “Yay, we get to get right back on the train.”  This time I think it took about an hour and a half.  Public transportation takes too long.

From the train station we went over to Alison’s house to hang out for a while which was fun.  Oh, and happy birthday Andrew.

It’s not just him though; I am just getting tired of attitudes of some of the people I work with who are just so good at being miserable that it drives me crazy. My life; my wife, my daughter, my family, my friends, and my job take up so much time that I don’t want to waste any more of it with anybody who doesn’t have anything productive to say.

Anyway, I’m done with pointless arguing and being miserable. I just want my life to be full of the things that make me happy and productive, not sad and miserable. I do hope that we will get to see Stephen soon and that we could just have a fun time to hang out, without any arguing or complaining.

From here on out, I’m hanging up on arguments and miserable attitudes to be happier and less stressed.

If you thought that driving at eighty or even a hundred miles an hour on the freeway or through the streets of your hometown was fun, you could be truck driver material. If you think that it is OK cutting people off at these speeds, you could be a truck driver. And if you have no regard for life (yours or others) then truck driving might be the thing to consider for you.

I can’t tell you how many times on our drive out to Texas that we got cut off buy some truck driver who would speed up to 90mph+ to get by us. Next time we make a long trip (and don’t get any ideas, it won’t be a move back to CA) we will have to not only generally pray for safety, but we will have to specifically pray for safety from truck drivers as they are nuts.

Not only did we have to keep our eyes peeled for the next truck to cut us off, but in Oklahoma, we had to fight the storms that sweep away large buildings (< — obvious exaggeration). Joking aside, these were very strong storms the kind I haven’t seen since my days in ‘Nam (<– another obvious exaggeration). You know how when you watch the lightning at home that the lightning crashes and then you count the seconds to the thunder to figure out how many miles away the lighning struck? Well, we were going to do that, but before we could get out the “o” in “one” the thunder shook our cars. It was pretty frightening.

All in all, we did make it all of 1500 miles safely thanks to God (<– obvious understatement, as we wouldn’t be breathing today if it weren’t His will).

Send me an email at dustin@thewrightlife.com if you want our new contact info.

- dustin