Well the title at least reflects the way I feel at this point. Many thanks to the Unfettered Monk for his valiant efforts in my absence!!

Vacation with Mrs. Rong was absolutely wonderful. We went to Orlando and while my colleagues in and around D.C. dealt with sub freezing temperatures we frolicked in shorts and t-shirts. The pool was a tad on the cool side but you could still go in without turning blue. We spent the majority of our time in the Magic Kingdom and while I can no longer enjoy the more adventurous rides I had a grand time going thru the Haunted Mansion, the newly refurbished Pirates of the Caribbean (Jack Sparrow now included), Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh and Snow White.
*WARNING – Snow Whites ride will scare the bejesus out of kids under the age of 8. The ride is all about the wicked witch. The fact that the trees come alive with waving hand like branches and glowing eyes will surely induce nightmares. I know I held tightly to Mrs. Rong during the ride.

Mini Y2K! Yes Monday greeted me with a bang. The various patches and registry edits made to our servers failed to take over the weekend and no one thought to come in on Sunday and make sure the server room hadn’t tossed a hissy fit. So Monday morning found us floundering trying to figure out why our internal domains servers were an hour off. Came down to the fact that Microsoft hadn’t created a patch for the Win2K servers but instead had supplied an executable file that would edit the servers registry settings. And of course the Primary Domain Controller for our internal domain servers is a Win2K server. The tool apparently did this correctly however the clock never ‘took’ the change. After 3 hours we stumbled across the fact that we needed to edit the time by changing the time zone. As soon as we flipped time zones and then flipped back the servers time took the DST changes. ARGH! I salute with much sarcasm my elected officials and their grand schemes – eesh!

On to something of a more serious nature…
Last night my son and I were having a devotional time and the question came up of how active God is in blessing and punishing a country? Many Christians would look at the current state of affairs in the USA and say that God is punishing America. My understanding (and I’m really looking for input on this) is that it’s not so much God actively punishing as it is God removing his blessings or figuratively speaking stepping back and letting us lay in the bed we’ve made. In talking with my son I said that I believed the manifestation of so much visible sin is the natural, progressive outcome of our countries lack of faith in God. It’s natural in the same way a forest fire naturally occurs if there has been a significant lack of rain. If you run with that analogy then, our country has lacked the Living Water for quite a while now – all it takes is a little spark and whole forest is on fire. Unfortunately, I think that just like Israel in the Old Testament, we’ve gotten too comfortable and our self assurance has lead us to rely only on ourselves. It’s going to take a forest fire for people to wake up in this country and turn back to God.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and as always I’m certainly open to correction.

Peace,
Rong