Monthly Archive for September, 2009

When You Reach A Dead End Or Roadblock

Posted September 30, 2009 at 10:59 am // 3 Comments

You can’t continue driving down a closed street.

There is always an alternate route to one’s destination. Might have to cross a few dangerous intersections, navigate some blind curves, there might be water over the road in places and you just might have to drive through a horrible neighborhood — but in the end, it’s worth it.

Maybe the road is unfamiliar and you hit another dead end on accident. Or maybe you just get completely lost and have to ask for directions at a convenience store you happen upon.

It’s not exactly the way you imagined your trip to go, but a detour was necessary. Doesn’t help much to stay and wait until the authorities unblock the road, or construction crews build a new stretch of asphalt — if they ever do.

You might be late according to your standards, arriving at your destination, but by the grace of God, you got there. And that’s all that matters, right?

As for me…

I just hit my fourth dead end and I’ve decided to stop in a Plaid Pantry and ask for help from someone I don’t even know.

Two Websites You Have To Bookmark

Posted September 30, 2009 at 4:10 am // 1 Comment

I’m always one to give a shoutout to my friends who start up new blogging ventures, so here’s an opportunity to give a couple of them some exposure.

First off, allow me to introduce you to Rec Specs Online, a high school sports blog for Springfield, Missouri that is the brainchild of my friend and former colleague at the Springfield News-Leader, Allen Vaughan. Allen brings a wealth of Ozarks prep sports knowledge to the table, having just left the N-L after six years in the newsroom. Support his new adventure and visit Rec Specs Online often…you can also find him on Twitter at @recspecsonline.

Secondly, but definitely not least, my friend Noel Cameron has started a blog about a tremendous adventure she has embarked on. Noel recently traveled to South Africa to work with Youth With A Mission for a few months and hopefully stay aboard during the World Cup. A tremendous opportunity for sure and a good way to share the love of the Lord with the folks over there…find out how you can support her if you feel so led on her blog.

You’ll be able to find links to Rec Specs Online and Noel’s blog on the right-hand sidebar from here on out. Welcome to the blogosphere, lady and gentleman!

God Has A “Will” For Each Person! Or Does He?

Posted September 29, 2009 at 2:39 am // 10 Comments

Here’s a shock phrase for my Christian brothers and sisters out there: God may not have a “will” for your life in the traditional sense that we hear it said quite often.

I’ve been told that God has a will for my life so many times, that I’ve even been taught by many to seek God in earnest to guide and direct the most minute details of my being.

Have I been taught wrong?

Upon reading the Word, I’ve found it clear that God has the same exact will for everyone, and His will is plainly outlined in the Bible: Accept Him as your Savior and live for Him, take His gospel message to the masses, and love everyone as you love yourself. That is Biblical — God doesn’t dictate the minutiae of your life, but he does want you to be an effective Christian in your words and actions to reflect Him to the world.

Everything else in your life, from where you decide to live and what job you decide to pursue, down to what clothes you choose to wear for the day and how to reach your destination is entirely your choice.

I do believe there are a smattering of events in which God directs certain things to happen, that point us to make a decision or could be the effect of a decision we have made in our lives. Or He could use a situation as an opportunity to witness the Gospel to someone. Even for me in a personal circumstance, God had me in a place somewhere to physically save my life in Iraq.

God can even bless decisions we make because He loves us and wants us to prosper in the sense that we have our needs met and can meet the needs of others. If he doesn’t bless a decision we make, it’s not necessarily because we “operated outside His will.”

It actually upsets me greatly to see people sit around and not take action in important decisions in their lives because they’re praying “God’s will over the situation.” They sit and wait, ask people to pray, wait some more and pray. Instead of taking action, they sit and wait.

All the while, they receive no answer…the answer was already spoken when God breathed life into us, created a brain and enabled man and woman to make decisions in good faith they would enrich their lives.

That grieves me to no end, and it makes me feel so horrible that I honestly can’t put it into words. Since when did God call us to be inactive, ineffective, and inefficient?

Time itself is a precious gift from the Father above. The more we waste it, the longer we stay stagnant…but if one steps out in faith and tries their darndest to achieve something, I believe God honors that.

I’ll bring a personal example into this…

I was laid off from my previous job three months ago. I’ve sent out numerous applications to prospective employers in the hopes I could get hired somewhere, but so far to no avail. A friend of mine asked me a couple weeks ago how the job search was going…I told him I had a few bites but nothing major at the time. He then turned around to tell me that he thought I wasn’t hired anywhere because I didn’t seek the exact job God wanted for me, and that I was looking in all the wrong places.

I apologize, but the last thing I remember reading in my Bible is that you have to work to eat. That means anything, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the Word of God. God can bless me in my job search, but it doesn’t mean he has one specific job picked out for me. He can open doors and close them as He chooses, but it’s my choice to walk through them…and I don’t necessarily think I’d be outside of God’s will if I didn’t.

The “God has a will for everything in your life” belief is a dangerous thought process that has permeated Christian circles, and it honestly makes me sick. Asking God to direct every single event in one’s life is tantamount to trivializing the Lord and making Him a personal genie.

In which case, you need your own…personal…Jesus. Someone to hear your prayers. Someone who cares.

:)

Seriously though, God has given us all a brain, a free will to roam this earth and make our way as we so please, as long as we follow His plan for all His children.

I believe — and I can see physical evidence of such — why many people get absolutely nowhere in their spiritual and physical lives is because they are too busy seeking the Lord for direction on the most trivial of things, when He has already mandated for them to get up off their knees and take action.

The big picture is that God can definitely place us in certain events “for such a time as this,” but ultimately (I honestly believe this) he could care less exactly where we choose to live, where we go to church, what we choose to eat, etc…as long as we’re effective for Christ according to His Word and striving to further His cause, we’re in God’s will.

Period.

Scenes From A Decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant

Posted September 28, 2009 at 2:54 am // 4 Comments

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Above: The parking lot is all that remains of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant’s Visitor Center, just off U.S. Highway 30 near Rainier, Oregon. Click the photo to get a bigger view.

If it weren’t for a rather controversial energy project near Rainier, Oregon, my hometown would have forever been a small blip on the state map.

The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant singlehandedly drove the economy of our small town from the late 1970s to the early ’90s. A cracked steam tube spelled the end of the power station’s life in 1992, and ever since then, Columbia County has had a massive eyesore in its backyard that Portland General Electric continues to clean up to this day.

Not to mention, Rainier is suffering from no longer receiving the tax revenues generated from Trojan’s operation.

My family and I used to visit the park in the shadow of the power plant on occasion, and I vividly remember riding bikes with my brother Jason down the path while Mom and Dad would walk. Once we reached the back area of the park, it was amazing to stare nearly vertically to the top of the 499-foot cooling tower…I’d get dizzy just looking up there.

To take you even further back in time, I believe I was around eight and Jason five years old when Dad took us for our only visit to the Visitor Center. I remember the interactive displays of how electricity was generated, and I remember sitting in a theater seeing a Disney short film with Mickey, Minnie, Goofy and the gang talking about safety tips and how nuclear electricity worked.

The Visitor Center, coincidentally, was the place I first heard a track I wouldn’t find again until last year. The muzak system in the lobby was playing Grace Jones’ “Don’t Cry, It’s Only The Rhythm” and I remembered it instantly once it popped up in a YouTube video I found last year.

Even until I graduated high school, most of the facility was still intact, at least from what we could see. The cooling tower still towered over the Columbia River and shone its aircraft beacons by night, the reactor building idly sat, and the other buildings visibly began to rot and decay.

1998 saw a monstrous project as the reactor core was floated up the Columbia to Hanford in Eastern Washington. Last I heard, it’s awaiting transport to Yucca Mountain, Nevada for its final burial.

And it was in 2004, with the demolition of the Visitor Center that sat just off Highway 30, that PGE seemed to begin the process of demolishing the remaining visible sections of the power plant in earnest. Two years later, the large cooling tower was demolished, ensuring no more children would grow up in the shadow of the concrete giant.

I paid the Trojan grounds a visit the other day as I headed from Portland toward Longview to take care of some business, and it looked vastly different from the facility I remember.

There is only a small section that is open to the public, such as the grounds of the former Visitor Center and the Training Building, as well as the Administration Building in the distance. The rest is fenced off, apparently with security guards still patrolling the site as there are spent fuel rods still on site. Yeesh.

I was only able to traverse the grounds from the Visitor Center to the Training Building, but I did what any good human being would do: I took photos.

I promise I’ll go back soon and check more of it out. I was in kind of a rush, but it was amazing to see the cooling tower gone, the reactor building gone and many other outbuildings in the process of being demolished or simply taken apart piece by piece.

The decommissioned Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, one of the more interesting places to visit in my childhood, is still dying, but only as quickly as contracting crews can work to take it apart. I wonder what it will look like in another twenty years.

Here is a gallery of the photos I shot during my short visit to the former Trojan site. Check them out and read the little anecdotes under them for some added info.

Also I have two important requests I’m going to throw out there to the general public…here goes.

1. If there is anyone who has previously worked for the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant and has photos they would like to share, please leave a comment (to do so you have to leave your email address that is visible only to me). I will then correspond with you via email.

2. Secondly, if anyone knows anyone at PGE through whom I could set up a short tour to grab some photos of the site, please also leave a comment and I will email back ASAP.

Also, if you have any memories of Trojan you’d like to share, please leave a comment as well!

US Highway 30 Near Sauvie Island, 9/23/09

Posted September 24, 2009 at 4:02 pm // 5 Comments

A momentous occasion for the Brewer Mobile Dancefloor!

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Now, exactly WHERE was I going? I’ll have photos and a summary later.

What’s With The Springfield News-Leader Exodus?

Posted September 24, 2009 at 3:52 am // 2 Comments

Even though I was RIF’ed by Gannett in July, I still take a keen interest in what’s going on at the Springfield News-Leader in Springfield, Missouri because I still have friends who work there.

I hope I can still say so in a few months.

Relax, the newspaper’s still there and will be in some way, shape or form for awhile, but I was shocked to read and hear accounts of many of my former colleagues who have voluntarily left the paper or will be doing so shortly.

Ever since I was laid off on July 9, the SNL has lost a good crop of reporters, which I believe to be in the following order (this is all public knowledge, and if it’s not, you can do some digging and find this all out yourself):

1. Jaime Baranyai, Metro (city beat, I believe)
2. Matt Baker, Sports (Cardinals beat, small colleges)
3. Allen Vaughan, Sports (Lead prep reporter)
4. Dirk Vanderhart, Metro (Courts reporter) *
5. Greg Trotter, Metro (Education beat writer) *
6. Kerry Leonard, Metromix.com (Local entertainment writer) *

* denotes me finding out through the job listings at JournalismJobs.com. They’ve all been posted in the last day or two.

That’s three people gone from an already-scarce Metro desk, a fourth of the full-time Sports desk gone, and the lead Metromix person leaving. That’s downright scary to me.

Which begs the question from myself, and I’m sure from the public soon: what could possibly be going on at the News-Leader to lead afore-mentioned reporters to leave voluntarily all at the same timeframe? Personally I have an uneasy feeling about the overall state of Gannett, and not being an insider anymore I am prone to worry about my friends (especially the photojournalism department there) in Springfield.

I just hope the paper there isn’t going to hell in a handbasket, and I hope all my friends are okay. To those moving on, if you guys read this, God bless your new endeavors.

UPDATE: As described in the comments, it is confirmed that Business reporter Kathleen O’Dell will be leaving the SNL tomorrow, bringing the total number of reporting staff who have voluntarily quit since the latest round of layoffs to 7.

Kanye West’s Opinion Of The Atlanta Flood

Posted September 22, 2009 at 7:07 pm // 0 Comments

I can’t help it. I got this off teh internets.

Ladies And Gentlemen, My Profuse Apologies

Posted September 22, 2009 at 2:22 pm // 8 Comments

Wow.

That’s all I can say after nearly three whole days of my blog being offline.

The Reader’s Digest version of the Reader’s Digest version of what happened is basically this: My domain name (chris-brewer.com) expired and the hosting company, Bluehost, never let me know of its impending removal. Therefore, my site went down around 10 p.m. PST on Sunday and we were all blindsided by it.

I called in Monday morning and Bluehost told me I needed to pay $80 to re-activate the domain name because it was in something they called “redemption,” basically where they hold it for an extra 30 days before someone else can bid on it. I told them the $80 charge was crap because they never notified me of the domain’s expiration as per their company policy…an already non-well-versed-in-English call center rep kept claiming he didn’t understand what I meant and referred me to the Billing department.

That got me nowhere and I would have had a more fruitful conversation speaking with an apple. I relented and paid the $80, but promised to fight it.

After two days of receiving less than stellar phone support, I got on the horn yet again early this morning. The call center rep I got this time sounded less than amused that he even had to answer the phone for anyone and wouldn’t put me through to a manager, and said that even though I had paid the $80 fee to get my website back, there was no one there that could take my site out of “redemption.”

At this point I called BS on the guy and asked him why, if he is working in the support department, can he not take care of my problem. I then asked the rep for his employee ID number and to speak to his supervisor…upon which I was put on hold, and something strange happened twenty minutes later.

The technician got back on the phone and said that everything should be fine, they got it fixed. That quickly.

Lo and behold, here we are. And I’m out $80…still fighting it on the phone as we speak.

Moral of the story: never do business with Bluehost.com. They don’t deserve it, and if the call center reps were any indication of their company, their corporate office deserves a Molotov cocktail or two thrown on their front lawn.

It’s good to be back!

More To This Life

Posted September 20, 2009 at 11:30 am // 0 Comments

I heard this song on the radio early this morning as I woke up and I thought it might be a blessing to all my readers today. It certainly made me think, especially in light of my current state of being.

Steven Curtis Chapman, “More To This Life”

I Can’t Believe They Tecmo-ized This Already

Posted September 19, 2009 at 3:25 am // 1 Comment

Remember that crazy play on Sunday, the Kyle Orton tipped pass to Brandon Marshall that the other Brandon (Stokley) ended up catching and running in for a TD?

Here it is, as seen on CBS:

God bless Gus Johnson, by the way.

Okay, here’s what’s TRULY amazing…someone has already made a Tecmo Super Bowl re-creation of the play. Major props to whomever did this…it hasn’t even been a full week since it happened and they nailed it.

My mind is officially blown.