My Sype Status
 

Don’s Thoughts II

  
 
 
  • By Don Bell

    My ramblings as I move forward in my life Journey.




Planned books

Currently Reading

  • Augustine on Prayer/No.171/04 by Thomas Hand

  • The New American Bible for Catholics: With Revised New Testament and Revised Book of Psalms by Confraternity of Christian Doctrine

I’m back!! July 22nd, 2008

After an extremely long, longer than expected, abcense I am back at the computer. :) Over the next few days you should start seeing postings here again. :)

I did want to call attention to a very good friend of mine and his new Blog. Ed created a company a few years ago called Oasis International that distributes Bibles and other Christian based books to many parts of Africa. He recently went modern and created a Blog that I would like to share with you: http://oasisinternational.typepad.com/ Please drop by and check them out. If you can, help them acquire the building/compound they are currently in and about to lose!!

Stay tuned!

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Andre Rieu April 29th, 2008

This past Sunday I had the extreme pleasure to go to a concert put on by Andre Rieu and his Johann Strauss Orchestra.

While I have only been to very few concerts in my life, I very much enjoy most kinds of music, but especially classical and country. Some opera. This concert, by far, was probably the best one I have ever been too. The energy was outstanding, the music great, and the crowd enjoyed it as much as I did it seemed!

This is the first orchestra I have seen that actually smiled all the time, even when they were playing, seemed to know the music without looking at the music in front of them, and were pulling tricks on each other as the show went on. It was great! If you like classical music, and ever have the chance, go see Andre Rieu and his orchestra! You won’t regret it!

You can see several pictures here.

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Everglades Video March 31st, 2008

Well, with some tweaking and playing, I’ve added internal video to my web site. I will start it off with three short clips I took from my trip to the Everglades.

The first one is of two alligators coming to check us out:
The next is an alligator eating some dog food about 5 foot from the air boat I was on:
The last one is when we were leaving the swamp going back to the loading dock:

 
icon for podpress  Alligators in the wild on the move: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 
icon for podpress  Alligator Eating Dog Food: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 
icon for podpress  High Speed exit from Swamp: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Enjoy!

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My newest niece March 24th, 2008

Nine months ago my Sister, , adopted a 13 month old little girl from Guatemala by the (new) name of Sarah:


For my confirmation this past weekend, I had the pleasure of getting to meet her for the first time. She and I took to each other rather well and we had a blast going to the beach for her first time, coloring at a restaurant, and doing many other fun things together.

Here is a slide show of some of our events together!

She is such a sweet little girl and I had a blast. I hope she did too!

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FINALLY! March 22nd, 2008

For the past two years I have been wanting to go to Billie’s Swamp Safari and take an air boat ride. Well yesterday I was able to do both! I was also finally able to take a picture of a live, not captive, alligator:

I took about 60 photos, which you can see here.

I had a good time, enjoyed both the land buggy ride and the air boat ride! Next time I go, I plan on looking at the land attractions a bit more, we were a bit time constrained and didn’t have time to see it all, but I will! I will also go check out a couple of other such places and see which I like best!

*** Pictures were updated and added to on March 23, 2008!!

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RIP James M. Johnson March 13th, 2008

Rest in Peace Jim Johnson

Several weeks ago Mr. and Mrs. James Johnson asked me to help Mr. Johnson go to and from the Radiology clinic for treatments of his Type 4b Cancer. After 8 days of treatment Jim decided that the treatment was worse than the illness and put himself on Hospice.

After about 5 weeks of helping him get around, take his medicines, etc, he passed away this past Sunday at 1140 hours. He was a great guy, had a sharp funny bone and it was my pleasure to help him through his last days!

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RIP Gary Gygax March 5th, 2008

Many years ago a friend of mine introduced me to a game called Dungeons and Dragons. At the time it was a small boxed set game with some pretty shaky rules and not overly clearly defined. A “Cult” grew up around this game and my little brother (David) and I began playing the game pretty hard and creating non player characters. We were avid players for many years, and I continued on into the early 90s. (Then work got in the way.)

The game has gone on to grow and morph over time and spawned many new “role playing” games since then, with similar yet different rules bases.

The principle creator of this game is Gary Gygax.


GARY GYGAX

He passed away yesterday at the age of 69. May he rest in peace!

I had the pleasure to visit him at his home in the mid 80’s and he was a very nice man. His basement was a D&D world with it’s art, miniature gaming pieces, dragons, etc. A very interesting man that created a game that MANY have played, adapted and in many cases lived!

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That stinks… February 12th, 2008

Well that stinks… A while back I started adding video links to news stories that were of interest to me. For example this one. It seems they expire, and often times pretty quickly. So to me they are pretty much a waste of space. Don’t think I will be adding them again. And they had such potential..

Now, to find such a service that doesn’t expire their links… Bet there is one out there somewhere…. Anyone know of such?

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