Okay, so today is my 30th birthday.  Three decades following my birth, I sit here, still at the starting line of a new life as I remarried just 43 days ago.  In the last decade alone I got my first “real” job when I was hired by Electronic Payment Exchange in New Castle, Delaware as a Web Developer; I moved into a place that was truly “my own,” at first sharing it only with my first wife and then our daughter, as well — had my first kid, obviously, so that’s another item on this list; I moved more than an afternoon’s drive away from my brother for the first time in my life on June 9th, 2007 when I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina; I became separated from and subsequently divorced my first wife; saw my daughter off to her first day of (pre)school; met, courted, pined for, fell deeply in love with, temporarily “lost” and then totally and wholly found, engaged and married Christina; and here I am today…

…Saying a final and fond “farewell” to InvertedMind, a site I created and have maintained with waxing and waning readership over the last 10 years.

Why?  Well, for one thing, just count the posts over the last three years.  Also, I created a persona, not very different at all from the person I am in “real life,” as if the site hasn’t been a large part of my “real life” all along.  Over the last 10 years, I have grown and changed as a person, hopefully mostly for the better, while InvertedMind has stayed the same.  It’s stale and does not accurately reflect “me” anymore.

But not all is lost.  You all know I am outstandingly opinionated, often times to my own detriment.  But I need to get my thoughts out someplace, so there has to be an outlet.  While I am not yet prepared to give specifics, I can say that there is most definitely a replacement for InvertedMind.  It’s just that I am opting for a new, fresh start.  And that is precisely the reason I am creating Caffeine and Hot Sauce!, a new blog that will have the freedom to grow and change with me, because it’s not going to serve as a sort of “alter ego,” but rather simply an outlet for my thoughts and opinions.  Its topics will be varied, from my faith in Christ our Savior to the Steelers to NASCAR to politics to the completely outrageous in life and in my mind.

Thirty is not an end, although I am closing the final paragraph on a chapter of my life that has spanned 33 percent of it thus far.  Instead, it’s a very new and very exciting beginning to many chapters in my life.  See you there.

I know I haven’t written in three months. I have a wedding to plan, and I have been considering “reinventing” InvertedMind anyway.

But that’s not where I planned to go with this post. Today, I am posting as a warning.

Christ is coming back. Soon.Okay, I’m not going to be one of those nutcases who claims to know the exact date Jesus will descend from the heavens to conquer Satan and set up His new kingdom. We aren\t supposed to know, so we won’t know. But if you have paid attention to the world around you, it would be obvious that we are descending into the sort of oblivion John — and a bunch of prophets — described in the Bible.

What got me thinking long and hard was a little Android application that alerts me every time there is an earthquake in the world. In the last five days there have been nearly 1,000 quakes. I don’t know how close that is to normal. But I am fascinated by the end-times prophecies — enraptured by the rapture, you could say. Based on the recent tectonic activity, its obvious that the Earth, she’s a-singin’. And she’s joining an ever-growing chorus that, in a subtle way, is singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty — who was, is, and is to come.”

If you haven’t been on your knees before the Lord already, I suggest you do it now. Christ is coming back on a day and at a time we will never foreknow. And you don’t want Jesus to catch you with your faith down.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

It\’s snow here in Raleigh for the second straight day. Coming out of Target after some Christmas shopping, H.C. kicked the Cute Meter through the roof:\n\n\”Daddy, I love the snow. It tickles me!\”

H.C. has been a quotefest recently.  And it only gets better with time..

The moon hung almost eerily low in the early evening sky, orange as cheddar cheese and appearing about three times its normal, late-night size in the sky.  H.C. and I listened to Harry Connick, Jr., because it’s after Halloween and, according to my admittedly childish calendar, time to start ushering in the Christmas Spirit.

As we drove into the neighborhood, I spotted our Lunar neighbor in the eastern sky.  I sat in awe of its appearance for a moment, then pointed it out to H.C., who could see it clearly through the windshield from her seat in the back of the car.  Without further adieu (or setup for the punchline):

Me: “Punkin, do you see the moon in front of us?”

H.C.: “Yeah.  It’s really big!”

Me: “It sure is!”

H.C.: “Daddy, how did the moon get so big?”

Me: “I don’t know, Punkin.”

H.C.: “I know, Daddy!  The moon ate everything up!  That’s how come it got so big!”

I don’t create this stuff, folks.  I just report it.

H.C. attends a very ethnically diverse school, and I am thrilled about that.  She is exposed daily to numerous cultures — black, Hispanic, Asian…

Sometimes, though, we’re surprised by what she has learned.  I, for one, can vouch for the fact that the King of Pop is never — never — played in this house.  Pre- or post-mortem.  I swear.  But last week Christina ad I were blessed with this gem as we worked on reorganizing some parts of the house.  Namely, we were finally cleaning all the papers off the table, floor and desk in the dining area and putting them in the new plastic drawers I bought to place under the desk in a pseudo-filing cabinet sort of role:

Me: “Here’s a drawer for me, one for things I want you to take a look at, one for Kaylee’s school papers…there’s even one to put your receipts in.”

H.C.: “Why are you talking about Michael Jackson?”

…I’ve got nothing.

This is a bit late in posting — as in about three weeks late — but it’s too funny to never post.

Several weeks back, after picking up Her Cuteness from school, we were driving home talking about her day.  For one reason or another we got on the subject of God being everywhere, and in everything.

I told her, “Do you see those trees?  God is in those.  He’s in our car, he’s in your carseat, and he’s even in you!”

She smiled sweetly and laughed her cute little laugh that says, “Daddy, you’re funny!”

After a few minutes of listening to what was probably either Mozart or Rachmaninov, I hear from the seat behind me, “Daddy, I feel Jesus in my chair!”

How I ever managed to keep from swerving off the road laughing, I will never know.

This is a new category devoted entirely to the increasingly humorous things my daughter says.  Enjoy!

Today at school, Her Cuteness got a strawberry Laffy Taffy for her Friday prize.  She was excited and wanted to hold it while we drove home.  Recently, her class discussed the many varieties of apples.  She apparently confused the picture of a strawberry on the wrapper with the image of an apple — but that’s not the funny part.  What made me almost pull the car off the road to laugh safely was when she, in all seriousness, pointed at the wrapper and asked, “Daddy, is this a Grammy Smit?”

InvertedMind once referred to quarterback-then-former-quarterback-now-quarterback Michael Vick as an “a**hole” for his forray into being…well…a moral-less, heartless, scumbaggyish butthead who hated dogs and may very well have regularly thrown kittens against brick walls for some sort of perverted kicks and giggles*.

It’s hard to forgive someone for some sort of heinous crime, be it against yourself, a friend, or even just against humanity.  In this case, Vick gave the entire world population a black eye by showing that, even though we’ve come a long way from stone tools and living in caves, we can still be barbaric.  It’s especially difficult when we are, in no way, close to the individual; love is something that is formed and nourished through intimacy, not through news clips and sports highlights.  When there is no positive emotion in that space between you and another subject, negative emotion is likely to fill the void.

But, as a Christian, it’s my duty toward God and my fellow humans to forgive.  As much as we all tend to believe that a person cannot change, that is proven, time and time again, to be an falsehood based solely on ignorance and short memories.  More often than not, because of the good in all of us through the grace of God, a person does learn from his or her mistakes, and grows into a better steward for the Lord because of it.

Is Vick a Christian?  I don’t know; but that should never be a basis of my forgiveness.  The Bible clearly states that, if I harbor animosity toward other, I cannot possibly draw close to Christ.

So, on that basis, InvertedMind has forgiven Mike Vick of his transgressions.  And, no, this is not some holier-than-thou post where I make you look bad for still holding his past against him.  Rather, it’s to call out groups like PETA (already a horribly misguided group that puts animals above human beings when Genesis clearly states that God gave us animals for numerous uses, including for food).  There are marches scheduled tonight as Vick takes to the field for the first time since his arrest, protesting his involvement in the game, and in life in general.

I, for one, applaud Vick for at least trying to look as if he has changed; and until proven guilty again, he remains innocent in my eyes.  I wish him the best of luck, and I hope beyond hope that he has, truly, changed not just in his actions, but in his heart’s desires.

* – This is pure speculation; InvertedMind has no way of knowing what the walls were made of.

In roughly 10 minutes I will leave for a visit to my back pain doctor for a procedure that is just painful enough to qualify for sedation.  Anyone who has experienced sedation knows there is one universal rule: no eating beforehand.  Let’s face it, no doctor wants to perform medical procedures with a smock full of your lunch.

So, I’ve been starving myself since a triple-decker PB&J around 10:00 last night.  For anyone counting, that was 13 and a half hours ago.  By the time it’s all said and done, it will be at least 2:30 before I can eat something, putting it at 16.5 hours.  I’m starving.  I’m famished.  I’m wasting away.

I’m hungry.

Of course, to top it off, I had a long meeting this morning.  Nothing says “GET ME OUT OF HERE!” like being hungry during a meeting.

Then, suddenly, because I apparently did something to tick someone off, in walked one of our project managers, carrying a gift for everyone in the room.

A tray full of cookies.

That was the point at which I passed into a coma.

Because I apparently have time for everything but writing posts, I present to you “InvertedTwitter!”

If you look in the sidebar, you will notice a Twitter logo and some blue text, along with a few other paragraphs in gray. These are InvertedMind’s three most recent “Tweets” on Twitter.

So enjoy. I tend to update that a little more regularly than I post — but not by much.