Life under the pastor's desk. part 4

When we weren't on the road in the Super Tortoise on a concert trip, the motor home remained parked in the driveway beside my church's office building. The office building was actually a single level house that the pastor used to live in before it was converted to offices and classrooms. Since I was paying $30.00 for electric the church allowed me to plug my motor home in to their exterior wall so that I wouldn't have to run my generator. For only paying $30.00 a month a got a lot of perks. I was told by the pastor that I could use the bathrooms in the church office to shower, shave, and all other bathroom functions. The pastor also mentioned that I could use the church kitchen whenever I needed to cook something. I kept pretty wierd hours since I was a young bachelor and we often returned home late from concerts so the church staff got used to seeing me stagger into the office half asleep to shower or use the bathroom. The staff got thought it was funny that I would shave my head in the bathroom and come out and ask the youth pastor if I missed any spots.
There were a lot of fun memories of the church office as the youth pastor and I hit it off very well and we liked a lot of the same things like golf, music, and eating. He taught me how to cook different meats, even beef jerky. He and the rest of the office staff thought my food choices were funny. I was a young bachelor and a starving musician and I was trying not to mooch off of Mom and Dad as much as possible so I was very creative with my grocery shopping. I remember when the grocery store ran a special on Kraft mac & cheese for $0.39 per box. I decided to do the right thing and stock up while it was such a bargain. I bought 72 boxes of mac & cheese and I also picked up some packs of white boil-in-bag rice. I usually ate 2 boxes of mac & cheese per day and on occasion I would eat a plain bag of rice with maybe a little butter and salt.
I would say that most memories of living outside of the church office were good, but I could feel some tension building from certain staff members that thought I was not being very responsible with my life and schedule (since I slept til mid-morning).
The Super Tortoise remained parked outside the church office for almost a year. so believe me there are many more stories to come. Stay tuned because we're close to finding out why I call this Life under the pastor's desk.

Netflix Rocks!

My family loves Netflix! We watch all sorts of movies from new releases to old ones. One of our favorite things to get from Netflix is tv on dvd. We love 24, House, Two and a Half Men, The New Adventures of The Old Christine, King of Queens, 7th Heaven, Cosby Show, Boy Meets World, and many more! We're on the 3 dvd's at a time and unlimited per month. So we pay less than $20.00 per month to have 3 dvd's at home at a time. As soon as we're done with one, we drop it in the mail and within a few days we've got another one to replace it. If you haven't tried it, you really should as it is great affordable entertainment! We love Netflix!

My dream girl

I have the greatest wife in the whole world. Not only is Shelly beautiful, but she is loving, caring, and fun to be with! Shelly knows that I do my best to help out around the house, but she's so understanding that my time is limited from working 2 full time jobs. She keeps our house so clean and neat while also doing a dynamite job of running our eBay store and advertising the store anywhere and everywhere on the web. I thank God every day for leading me to such a wonderful woman. I love my wife!

Online Groceries?

I'm amazed at how far our culture has come so quickly with technology. I am now an online grocery shopper. If you're in an area where Peapod by Giant is offered it is certainly worth a try. Their website is www.peapod.com I know for a person like me who has next to no spare time, having someone else do my shopping and driving the groceries to me is a major help. I am also a dedicated coupon cutter and I've found that online grocery shopping helps utilize more of my coupons than I would in a traditional grocery store. I go through coupon by coupon and check on Peapod's website to see if they offer that brand and product. I've found this service to be very affordable and very enjoyable to use. Peapod's service level has been great too as we've only had 1 egg break so far and all of our items have been 100% correct on all of our orders. I'm glad to be part of a technological culture.

This is why its called Happy Valley.

Do you have a place that you love to go that never gets old and never loses its appeal? I know I do.




I absolutely love going to Beaver Stadium in State College, PA to watch the Penn State Nittany Lion Football Team! Every time I go to a game I get an adrenaline rush as soon as I enter the parking lot. I can feel the electricity building as I walk past all of the tailgaters. Some tailgaters are eating feasts, some are throwing footballs, others are razzing the visiting fans. I feel myself walking with my head held high because I know I'm part of the Blue and White. As I walk past the statue of a living legend (Joe Paterno) I stop and stand for a moment. It is amazing to see all of the plaques on the wall beside his statue showing all of his teams records from his countless years as head coach. As I enter the stadium goosebumps cover my arms, not from being cold, but from the power that this stadium has. It's not a dark power or a spiritual power, but just a power driven by pride, electricity, tradition, and a love of the game.

As I take my seat the marching Blue Band takes the field and the electricity continues to build. The drum major does his 2 traditional front flips and the Nittany Lion Mascot brings the crowd to a frenzy. With only a few minutes left before kick-off the band plays the National Anthem and again the electricity is amazing as I'm almost drawn to tears hearing our Nations song being sung by over 100,000 fans. As the band exits the field the goosebumps return as the white helmets with the blue stripes emerge from the tunnel slowly. The cheerleaders get the players fired up by getting the massive crowd to chant WE ARE ........PENN STATE..........WE ARE.............PENN STATE! The players stand there taking in the atmosphere and the electricity and their adenaline is running high. They start to bounce in excitement and they finally run out of the tunnel and flood the field in blue jerseys. The crowd erupts and it is sure to be an exciting 4 hours from start to finish. Win or lose I know that this will be another 4 hours of my life that I will not forget. WE ARE...........PENN STATE!

Life under the pastor's desk. part 3

Just when I thought I had found all of the cool features on this motor home I found some red hoses and horns under the hood. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what it was used for. I went into the cockpit and found an unlabeled button. I pushed it and it made a horrible noise that sounded like I had hit a flock of geese. I found a spot to add a little bit of oil and soon my motor home sounded like the General Lee (Dodge Charger) from The Duke's of Hazzard. This horn was extremely loud and you could hear it echoing through the valley after you blew it.

Needless to say my fellow bandmates loved the musical horn. We once took it to concert that we were playing about an hour from our hometown. We were playing with a couple of groups such as 40 Days Tempted and Zilch (DC Talk's Musicians). We were the opening act, but the guys in my band thought that it was cool that we had the big motor home while the other groups had vans and cars. They decided that they wanted to feel special when we were getting ready to leave. We were signing some autographs and the guys asked me to go get the motor home and pick them up at the front door. As I was rolling up to the crowd, a few of my guys motioned me to blow the air horn. As soon as I did everyone stopped and stared. It was really funny and the guys felt special as they had their moment leaving our fans and leaving in class.

I'm sure if you're reading along, you're probably thinking I should change my posts to life in the Super Tortoise, but trust me this will all head for the pastor's desk very soon.

Life under the pastor's desk. part 2

Ok, so the "Super Tortoise" got its name for more than one reason....... it would get you there eventually, but lets just say it wasn't the quickest mode of travel. I remember soon after I bought the Tortoise I was driving down the road and the steering wheel started shaking and the motorhome felt like it was going to shake us into a thousand pieces. I took it to be looked at and the mechanic said that since the former owners had put non-radial tires on the front (steering) axle, it would take a few minutes for the tires to warm up when traveling down the highway and until they warmed up the motorhome would shake uncontrollably if you went over 35 miles per hour. This may seem like a pretty bad thing, but I was willing to live with the problem considering the Super Tortoise had all of these other great features:

Brown Shag- The carpet was thick brown shag and I loved it. The dirt didn't show up too quickly, but when it did I got to bring out the next great feature.........

Central Vac- There was a central vacuum built into this thing! It was great, but being a bachelor I obviously didn't choose to use it very much. Not to mention if I ran out of bags for the vac I wasn't even sure if they still sold extra bags for it since this motor home was vintage to say the least and eBay wasn't around yet.

Brown Woven Blinds- Let me just say I have never found a place that I could sleep better than in the Super Tortoise. Why? Was the bed that comfy? Not really, it was more because at any time of day I could drop the brown woven blinds and make this place pitch black for sleeping. This was a very good thing, but at times my deep sleeps in the motorhome were a bad thing as you'll find out in future episodes.

Built-in TV Console- I quickly removed the black-and-white tv that didn't work from this built-in console area and replaced it with a 19 inch color tv and also made room for my Sega Genesis. My bachelor pad was slowly coming together.

A built-in makeup desk - Since this was more of a convesation piece I showed a few people how it worked and then I never lifted it up again. I wasn't the type to wear makeup so I soon got my computer from my parents house and mounted it and my printer to the counter. Not that I had internet access, but I thought I was pretty hot stuff with a computer in my motorhome.

Full kitchen - Ok, so I didn't cook a lot of meals in the motorhome, but it did have a fridge, stove, oven, microwave, and a built-in blender. Surprisingly I never made milk shakes or smoothies with the blender, but again it was a cool conversation piece.

Full Bathroom - It had a throne and a shower with a nice big closet as well. There are some funny stories to come in future episodes that involve this area of the motor home, so don't miss a single episode.

A Roll-Out Awning and Green Carpet - So I rolled out the awning one time and put out the green carpet, but when I found out how much work it took to do so I never did it again, but hey I could still tell people about the cool feature to my rolling bachelor pad right?

And last but not least the 440 - The Super Tortoise was powered by a Dodge 440 engine. I thought that was cool to say, but all I knew was the engine sounded good, but it sure was slow. I also soon found out that it was prone to vapor locking, which was not much fun, but I'll tell you more about that later.

And you might still be asking yourself, what in the world does this have to do with a pastor's desk? Come read along next time and we might get that much closer to an answer.

Life under the pastor's desk. part 1

Welcome to part one of many in a series of true stories of how my life took an interesting turn once I graduated high school and entered the real world.


I had moved from Ohio to Pennsylvania during my junior year of high school in 1995. I was the drummer in a Christian rock band named eden Regained.



After school ended every Friday I drove 4 hours to Ohio to play a gig with the guys. I continued this routine for my junior and senior years of high school. After graduation, I moved back to Ohio to take the band more seriously. After living a few months at the lead singer's house (not pictured above, and actually it was his parents' house). I felt I was starting to wear out my welcome. I didn't see it at the time, but I was eating all of their food, wasting all of their hot water, and not taking any responsibility around the house.

My parents came up with a shocker of an idea and said that since I was putting college on hold to pursue eden Regained as a full-time ministry, I could take my college money that was in my money market account and buy a motor home. That kinda blew my socks off since my parents had preached college, college, college from day one. So, I took my money and bought a 1977 Vogue 32ft motor home. This motor home was soon to be named "The Super Tortoise" because the guys said it was like having our home on our back and we could pick up and move wherever we wanted.



I asked my church pastor if I could park my motor home at the church and live in their driveway. Surprisingly he agreed and told me that I would only have to pay $30.00 per month for electric.

You might be asking yourself why this post is called life under the pastor's desk, but you'll have read my next blog entry to find out why.