bierkergaard

This is the cover for my soon to be published book (all besides the Ph.D. part is finished...we just have to get the letters closer). Not that I really care that much but there are punctilious people out there who will focus on that and tsk...tsk. As if I didn't know better. The cover is the culmination of three years of writing the book. We wanted the cover to nail the message of college transition and it does. We had to go back to the drawing board or computer a couple of times to get it right but we did. My students at school have given it two resounding thumbs up. They get it. I think a book should be judged to some degree by its cover. And author worth his or her salt should work to express the message of the book visually on the cover. Presentation matters. It is not the only thing but it is important, especially in a visual age. I want the book to stand or fall on the merit of its ideas in the marketplace. What a radical idea. For people ...

Isaiah 64:6 But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. I don't know if you have seen those infomercials where the jolly, ADD, and hyper-kinetic man shouts that we should not waste our money on paper towels. Instead, we should purchase the uber-sheet of questionable composition that you can use over and over again without having to buy rolls and rolls of paper towels that get tossed. But, is not that the point of paper towels? Some messes are so odious that I really rather not have to rinse and repeat. Instead, I want to toss it into the abyss never to be seen or smelled again. For instance, I just cleaned my bathroom and specifically the inside and outside of my toliet. The inside I hit with a scrub brush and isopropyl alcohol. The outside, I bring the paper towels with the isopropyl to bear and ask that the paper towels to...

Hebrews 12:4 In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. During SAT administration, I was starting to feel a cold coming on. My Hall Proctor was sick with a cold and had hand-delivered the virus to me I surmise. My throat was getting scratchy and the sinuses started getting that feeling that they were under attack. "I must act now" I thought. All winter long, I have been able to keep the cold virus at bay. Usually, I gargle a shot of Jim Beam, known to me as Dr. Beam, and that generally supresses the incoming cold, along with my immune system in tandem. I respect the cold virus. It is a wily foe. But, here I was in the middle of the SAT administration as the Test Supervisor. Dr. Beam nowhere in sight. I was in the Seas of the SAT and was no due back to shore for several hours. I spied some of that anti-septic ethyl alcohol hand-spray on my desk. Schools are germ factories and it is wi...

1 Timothy 1:8 We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. If you have been reading this blog for a spell, you know that I donated over 90% of my books before recently moving. The remaining ten percent are the cream of the cream.  It was a rather fascinating process to determine which books that I had not read would be kept. The books I had read, I literally had a better read on. There were keepers and there were not. It still hurt to donate the books but it saved a lot of back-breaking labor where I could not afford to expend the extra effort of packing, moving, and unpacking them. I didn't have the room, time, or energy.     I decided to keep an unread book that a friend had given me as a present many years ago. It is an anthology of letters written from a Christian, some well known and others not, to another individual or group. It has been a daily devotional as it is formatted to start at Christmas and conclude at Easter (where the...