Fred and Valerie

Phil Cooke’s Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don’t is a fairly quick read, mostly because he does a great job of weaving information and examples in a seamless and effortless way. The topics of branding and marketing aren’t typically associated with faith-based organizations — in fact, many would argue that they have no place in faith-based organizations — and Cooke does an excellent job of explaining why they should be and, maybe more importantly, how they can take a faith-based organization to the next level in reaching their goals.

Ultimately, any church or nonprofit that wants to better reach their target demographic in a better and more meaningful way would do well to read Cooke’s “Branding Faith.” Doing so will likely open a lot of eyes.

Next Up: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Finally, it’s back to Harry Potter! I can’t remember how many times I’ve read “Order of the Phoenix” before, but it’s at least twice… I think. I know I mentioned how many times I had read the previous books in the series in earlier posts, but I’m not sure that’s accurate because I know I read them initially and I remember reading them all again before Deathly Hallows and now I’ve read them again. However, I think I may have read the first five before Half-Blood Prince and the first four before Order of the Phoenix. But, I can’t be sure. The only thing I know for sure is that I’ve read them a lot.

Five months later, I’ve finished The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History. However, I haven’t finished it because I made it to the last page. No, I’ve finished it because I just can’t stand to read it anymore. In fact, I haven’t read a single word of it in something like three months.

It’s time to give up.

The idea of “The American Plague” is a good one. A story about a disease that ravished our country, yet few people understand it or even comprehend what it did to our nation.

However, the book never delivers. At least not in any meaningful way soon enough to keep me interested as a reader.

I constantly felt like the author felt it necessary to have a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter. Even a Charles Dickens novel, written in serial form for magazines, has fewer cliffhangers than “The American Plague.”

Seriously, here are the ending sentences to the first four chapters.

Part 1, Chapter 1

In Memphis, Tennessee, their attention was turned not toward disease or death, but just the opposite: a carnival.

Part 2, Chapter 1

On board, hundreds of mosquito eggs lay ready to hatch.

Part 2, Chapter 2

In the summer of 1878, the Mississippi River, the great artery of North America, would carry death in its bloodstream, spreading the worst yellow fever epidemic in American history.

Part 2, Chapter 3

[The declaration of a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis] was two months after Mitchell’s ill-fated battle for quarantine; one month after the fever’s first victim.

And I didn’t really make it much further than that. It felt like every chapter, and most sections within the chapters, were written to end with some ridiculous B-movie horror sound effect and that’s not what I desire from my reading material on a regular basis.

Plain and simple, great idea, but bad execution.

Next Up: Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don’t
I’m actually reading this at the request of the pastor of our church. He’s interested in writing a book and we’re on the committee-like group that is trying to figure out how to make that happen. After that, it might be time to return to Harry Potter…

A powerful storm, said by many to have been a microburst, hit Charlottesville on Thursday, June 24th, just before 5:00 pm. We were still at work at the time and it was quite a scary experience.

I managed to shoot some video with my phone during the last part of the storm, which was quite a bit less severe than the initial impact.

The storm caused extensive damage, including downing many trees and leaving over 40,000 residents without power.

When we went to work the next morning, most of the University of Virginia was still without power, meaning there was little to do except to walk around and take photos of the damage.

• March: 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book
• April: Virginia/Georgia Tech Baseball
• April/May: Sonja and Sonny’s Wedding
• May: Vermont Road Trip
• June: Cincinnati Reds/Washington Nationals Baseball
• June: Virginia/St. John’s Baseball

“Texas Native” on a car with Virginia license plates, sporting a South Carolina emblem (the palm tree and crescent) sticker, and a Key West bumper sticker.

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics are over. Despite starting with a lackluster opening ceremony amidst the grief over the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Games themselves proved to be spectacular in many respects.

Early on, the story of these Olympics was when, not if, Canada would win their first gold medal as a host country. Having failed to win any gold medals during the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics and 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, Canada was focused more than ever on standing atop the medal podium. Alexandre Bilodeau led things off for the Canadians with a gold in the Men’s Moguls event and several other Canadians followed so that Canada actually finished the Olympics with the most gold medals of any country.

While Canada finished first in gold medals, the United States finished with the most overall with 37 medals, breaking the previous Winter Olympics record set by Germany at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. And Germany was close behind in second place with 30 medals.

There were several big stories being played in the US media about the US Olympic Team leading up to the Games. Among them were Lindsey Vonn’s pursuit of Olympic gold following back-to-back World Cup championships, Bode Miller’s attempt at Olympic redemption following a controversy-filled 2006 Olympics, and several others.

However, the major stories after the Games included Apolo Ohno becoming the most decorated American Winter Olympic athlete by winning a silver and two bronze medals for a total of eight, the US Men’s Hockey team winning silver after scoring a goal with just 24.4 seconds left to send the final game against Canada to overtime, Johnny Spillane winning the first ever US medal (silver) in the normal hill Nordic Combined, which he followed up with a second silver medal in the large hill Nordic Combined, and another silver medal in the team Nordic Combined.

Having been a fan of the Olympic Games for quite some time, it’s great to see the US finally being truly competitive at the Olympic Winter Games. The US has always been competitive at the more-overall-medals-available Olympic Summer Games, not having fewer than 90 total medals since Rome in 1960 (excluding the 1980 Moscow boycott). However, before 2002, the highest total number of medals for a US Winter Olympic team was 13 in 1998 at Nagano and 1994 at Lillehammer. But when the US was host in 2002 at Salt Lake City, they won 34 medals and then they followed that up with 25 medals in 2006 at Turin. Now, with 37 medals, there’s no doubt the US is on the Winter Olympics map, which is nice for a fan like me who prefers many of the sports of the Winter Olympics.

Now the Winter Olympic torch is passed from Vancouver to Sochi, Russia. If you’ve never heard of the city, fear not. It’s 2006 estimated population was a mere 395,012. Surprisingly, Sochi beat out the more familiar Pyeongchang, South Korea and Salzburg, Austria despite not having any world-class level athletic facilities as recently as 2008. The Russian Federation certainly has its work cut out for it and the $12 billion investment package might be just the beginning of what is necessary to create Olympic-caliber venues. Only time will tell.

For the third time, I’ve finished J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And just like the previous two times, it was an excellent read and journey. As with the first three books that I’ve recently re-read, even more details have been made clear to me and even more foreshadowing has become evident to me that I didn’t recognize previously.

A great example of a bit of foreshadowing that I missed the previous two times, particularly because it specifically related to events that took place in Book 7 (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) and this is the first time that I’ve read Book 4 after having read Book 7, is the following event that took place towards the end of Book 4:

“He said my blood would make him stronger than if he’d used someone else’s,” Harry told Dumbledore. “He said the protection my — my mother left in me — he’d have it too. And he was right — he could touch me without hurting himself, he touched my face.”

For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes. But next second, Harry was sure he had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as Harry had ever seen him.

The inclusion of Harry’s blood in his own becomes a crucial part of the plot near the end of the final book and ultimately begins the final downfall of Lord Voldemort. That Dumbledore had “a gleam of something like triumph” shows that he had an inkling of what Voldemort’s use of Harry’s blood signaled and he was right.

Those five words hold so much weight when viewed in the entirety of the Harry Potter story and yet most, if not all, readers probably had no idea that they meant anything at all the first time they read Goblet of Fire. It’s seemingly insignificant writing like this that turns out to be so enormous that makes the entire Harry Potter series beyond phenomenal.

Next Up: The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped our History
Another small break from the re-reading of the Harry Potter series. I’m going nonfiction because if I wanted fiction, I’d just keep reading Harry Potter.

Yesterday, last night, and today, we were supposed to receive upwards of 8–12 inches of snow as of yesterday morning’s weather forecast.

The snow was supposed to start at 10 am, but looking at the radar, that didn’t seem like it was going to happen, so we went to work and waited for the snow to start. We waited. And we waited. And we waited some more.

By the time 4:30 rolled around, it was time to go home, regardless of snow… or not. The snow did begin falling right around 4:30 and we had a snow-filled drive home, but the roads were perfectly fine, so it was no big deal.

We got home, did the usual stuff, and waited for the snow to show up. By bedtime, the snow was still not falling as promised. In fact, by that time, the forecast had already been updated a second time for the day from 8-12 inches to 3-6 inches, to 1-3 inches.

When we woke up this morning, there was about 2 inches of new snow on the ground, but the worst part was the roads. Apparently, the high winds were causing a lot of drifting snow from this past weekend’s storm to cover more than the actual falling snow did. With that, road conditions were pretty bad, so we stayed home.

One of the smallest snowfalls we’ve had this year and yet it kept us home when other, more intense snowfalls didn’t.

A time-lapse of the One Foot of snow that fell on our area this past weekend.

There’s a 100% chance of snow tomorrow and tomorrow night.

With each update to the forecast, the predicted accumulation grows. The latest forecast has us at 5 to 9 inches of snow just for Tuesday. The snow is supposed to continue until approximately noon on Wednesday, though no accumulation forecast exists for that far out.

The Winter Storm Warning says a total of 5 to 10 inches of snow, but it seems we may end up with more than that if the storm does hang around until mid-Wednesday. With most of the snow we got this past weekend still on the ground, we could end up with a total of two feet on the ground, much like it was after the mid-December storm.

No matter what, it seems like we will once again escape the brunt of the storm as the DC area is predicted to get 10 to 20 inches of snow. With one city in Maryland reporting 40 inches of snow from this past weekend’s storm, this latest storm could cause massive issues for that area.