The Grand Canyon Star Party (North Rim), 2010

I just returned to Cave Creek Friday night after a week at the Grand Canyon (North Rim) for the annual Grand Canyon Star Party. I returned as high as a kite and this post will explain why.

WHAT IS A “STAR PARTY”?

You may be wondering just exactly what a “star party” is, especially if you have never been to one. Think of a star party as you would any other party, except that instead of music, dancing, games or food being the focus, the focus (pun intended) is on the sky overhead. Amateur astronomers bring their telescopes and show the public the wonders of the night sky. People are free to mill about and take a peek at the sky through any of a number of telescopes that their owners will have trained on various night sky delights. As they take in the views at the eyepieces, the telescope owners will explain to them what they are seeing and how to get the most out of their view. (There is definitely a technique to seeing faint and ancient light in finely-figured glass!)

Read more…

Book Ready Soon!

The cover design for my new book, The HVAC Territory Manager’s Field Guide, has been finalized. Here is a sneak peek of it:

I hope to have a “galley proof” in my hands by the end of the week. After that, a few final edits and we begin printing. I hope to be able to announce the book for sale by the end of this month, so keep watching here for the announcement.

The book will be for sale on my web site and you’ll have the option to get an autographed copy if you prefer.

Stay tuned!

Tribute to My Friend

It is with a heavy  heart that I write this blog.

It is in honor of my friend, David F., who just passed away after a grueling battle with brain cancer.

David was a fellow astronomer and in my short time of knowing him (only about 15 years), he became one of my closest friends.  He was always known among our astronomy club (The Saguaro Astronomy Club) as a man of

teddy-bear friendliness, youthful enthusiasm, and almost religious devotion to observing the handwork of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He began experiencing minor problems with coordination as early as last October, but the doctors did not think it was anything that warranted alarm.  About Christmas time, he began to experience bad headaches, which the doctors thought might be related to his blood pressure and diabetes.  In January, he began to experience moments of confusion. (It was at this time that he called me one day with tears in his voice– he had just accepted the job as our club’s treasurer– and he told me that he just could not focus on the job, that the doctors were trying to adjust his insulin dosage, and that he wanted to get help with the treasurer’s job. I told him his health mattered more than anything, so we’d find another member to handle the club’s finances.   In fact, two members have stepped forward to co-shoulder that job for now.)

Finally, one day last month, he exhibited very odd behavior before going to his job at a local junior college (where he taught astronomy), and later that morning, his wife got a call from the school that he was in great pain.  She came to get him and took him right to the emergency room where the doctors performed an MRI and discovered two brain tumors.  The one on the front left of his brain was the size of a golf ball and came out cleanly.  But the one at the back of his brain was the size of an orange and had grown tentacles into the surrounding brain tissue.  It was removed, but found to be a stage 4 carcinoma.  This was a death sentence, as the tumor had already seeded itself into the rest of David’s brain, like a creeping weed.

David never regained consciousness.  I visited him twice in the hospital and spoke to him both times, hoping that he could hear me.  He did not make any responses, but one never knows!

The night he passed from us, I was assisting another club member with a star party for his Sunday School class.  A third member was helping us, and at the end of the night, we all decided to aim our telescopes at the galaxy M104, David’s favorite deep-sky object.  We agreed to look at it simultaneously as an act of honor to our friend and hoping that somehow, this act would be significant. Little did we know that at the very hour he was drawing his last breaths.

I pray for strength and grace for his wife and children, and want them to know how much our club in general and I in particular loved and respected David.  He was a class act and will always hold a special place in our hearts.

In am an ardent admirer of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler.  In the 1890′s, he wrote his Second Symphony, known as “The Resurrection Symphony.” It has 5 movements (an unusual thing for a symphony, but the norm for Mahler). The 4th and 5th movements contain vocal music– the 4th, an alto solo, and the 5th, an awesome and grand chorale finale. I end this blog by quoting the libretto.  If you can find a copy of the 2nd Symphony, you may want to listen to these two movements and you’ll understand why I think Mahler’s symphony is a fitting tribute to my friend:

[Alto]

O red rose!
Man lies in greatest need!
Man lies in greatest pain!
How I would rather be in heaven.
There came I upon a broad path
when came a little angel and wanted to turn me away.
Ah no! I would not let myself be turned away!
I am from God and shall return to God!
The loving God will grant me a little light,
Which will light me into that eternal blissful life!

[Choir]
Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you My dust,
After a brief rest!
Immortal life! Immortal life
Will He who called you, give you.

To bloom again were you sown!
The Lord of the harvest goes
And gathers in, like sheaves,
Us together, who died.

O believe, my heart, O believe:
Nothing to you is lost!
Yours is, yes yours, is what you desired
Yours, what you have loved
What you have fought for!

O believe,
You were not born for nothing!
Have not for nothing, lived, suffered!

What was created
Must perish,
What perished, rise again!
Cease from trembling!
Prepare yourself to live!

O Pain, You piercer of all things,
From you, I have been wrested!
O Death, You masterer of all things,
Now, are you conquered!

With wings which I have won for myself,
In love’s fierce striving,
I shall soar upwards
To the light which no eye has penetrated!
Its wing that I won is expanded,
and I fly up.
Die shall I in order to live.
Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you, my heart, in an instant!

Rest well, noble friend.  Oh, the views you now have of M104, and the other incredible displays of God’s handwork! Know that the day will come when we will join you and together, we will re-celebrate our great star parties, this time from observing fields of unbelievable splendor and grandeur!

One Step Closer to the TM Field Guide!

It has been a busy month here at Lake Wobegon!  (Sorry– I could not resist a parody of Garrison Keillor!)

I  have been busy completing the details on my first book (click here) and have been working like a one-armed paper hanger in a hurricane behind the scenes on my second book– a book I am tentatively calling “The HVAC Territory Manager’s Field Guide.”  (My editor may suggest a better title, so for now, this is a working title.)

I finalized the paperwork on the contracts over the weekend, and we should be in print in about 90 days +/-, so expect it to be ready in mid-June of this year!  (Just in time to help rescue your career from a worsening economic nightmare…)

This is going to be a huge book– the manuscript is 564 pages long!  It will also have a CD-ROM as part of the project, and there will also be a Sales Manager’s Guide (on CD-ROM only) for sales managers who wish to take their sales teams through the process.

Here are the chapter titles for now… Read more…

My New Book is Available!

This will come as perhaps a surprise to some followers of this blog, but I have a new book out on building a glorious church.  It is published by InterMedia Group and can be ordered by following this link.

It reflects my passion as a Christian to see the church assume her rightful and glorious place as the steward of the Kingdom of God and how we as Christians can cooperate with God in that awesome project.  (If there is one thing that melts my butter more than the HVAC business, it is my life in God and its expression in my local church, Church for the Nations.) Read more…

Lessons From the Desert

My wife got me a new book for Christmas- The Secret Knowledge of Water, by southwestern explorer and writer Craig Childs.  (A friend, Lynn Blackburn, highly recommended the book, and after hearing him read a few passages from it, I decided I had to get it.)  I cannot recommend this book enough to lovers of the Southwestern US!  His style is poetic and earthy at the same time, and you can almost feel the loneliness and ancient mystery of the Sonoran desert (and other sites in Arizona).

Childs writes this chilling line in the introduction:  “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning.”

Most people get the first option; few understand the second.  But the fact is, every year, Arizona has brief but furious rains and the washes (gulleys), which are normally dry, quickly fill with raging flood water and can become lethal to anyone unlucky enough to be in a wash when a flash flood comes galloping down upon them like a thundering herd of wild stallions.  (Another of his books, The Desert Cries, recounts a summer in Arizona where over 20 people died in such flash floods, including a hiking party caught by a killer flash flood in the awesome Antelope Canyon, in our state’s northeast corner).

But what many people don’t realize is that the desert holds a surprising amount of drinkable water (even though you may need to filter it and treat it with purification tablets) if you know where to look for it. Read more…

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us!

Like Pogo, the famous swamp creature of Walt Kelley’s comic strip of the same name, we may have met the enemy and found that he is us!

I was watching a report last week on The Fox News Channel (yeah, I’m one of THEM) about the bowling industry in America– or rather, what USED to be the bowling industry in America. At one time, almost all of the bowling equipment sold in the US (balls, pins, machines, shoes, uniforms, bowling alley furniture, etc.) was made by either AMF or Brunswick.  But when NAFTA was passed in the 1990′s, the factories went to Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor market.  Why?

Because American bowlers were demanding cheaper and cheaper gear, and it could not be produced in the States with our higher standard of living (and attending wage base).  So the Mexicans celebrated as they inherited hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of factories, development, and expertise.  There were fiestas down south as plants closed up north, and several small US towns hat depended on AMF and Brunswick were decimated. Read more…

Just in Case You Think You’re Normal

It’s been a while since I last posted to my blog.  The end of 2009 was hectic!  First, my desktop computer hard drive decided to start decomposing on me, so I had to scramble and get a new desktop (and wow, what a machine!  1 Terabyte HDD, the newest Intel chip, so fast that when I enter data, I get the answer YESTERDAY!  Thanks to Chris Long at Computer Troubleshooters in Phoenix for putting it together for me.)

I then decided it was time to go ahead and get a new laptop as well, so I got the latest Lenovo Think Pad.  The thing is so fast and powerful, it can launch and guide a rocket to Alpha Centauri!

Both have Windows 7 (in my opinion, a VAST improvement over XP and a huge improvement over Vista).  However, there is no upgrade path from XP to W7 (there is from Vista to W7), so I had to install all my software again, etc, and that took a few weeks.

Anyway, I’m back for the year, and ready to go.

So here’s my first blog post for 2010.  You ready for this?

When you were a little kid, did you ever wonder if you were “normal” compared to your classmates?  Maybe some were taller than you—a lot taller.  Or smarter. Or better looking.  Or better athletes. Most kids, at some point, wonder how they compare to everyone else. It’s normal. Read more…

What Would Peter Do?

My recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) had a cover that really caught my eye.  This year (2009) is the centennial year of the birth of management guru Peter Drucker (who passed away in 2005).  In my mind, Mr. Drucker is one of the heroes of business, along with men like W. Edwards Deming (the American who introduced total quality control or TQM to the Japanese after World War II because Detroit wanted nothing to do with it) and Thomas Watson (the founder of IBM). Read more…

The Sorry State of Financial Savvy Today

While reading a recent issue of The Harvard Business Review, I came across an article titled “Are Your People Financially Literate?” by Karen Berman and Joe Knight (October 2009, page 28). The title woke my curiosity since I am an advocate of business people knowing the financial ropes as well as they can. The article was stunning. The research at their web site (http://www.financedog.com/blogs/18) showed that only 38% of those they have tested made a passing score. (Even I did poorly on the six-question sample test the site offers as a teaser to buy their services.) Read more…