There seems to finally be a light at the end of the tunnel. It appears that I have found a job, and not a moment too soon.  I have failed miserably to keep this site updated over the past month or so, yet I have not given up on it at all.  My focus has simply not been on the turmoil of the political landscape while the threats were closer at hand.  Hopefully, I will begin to post more often now that I have some relief on the way.

As to other events, our soccer season is nearly at a close.  I have to say that I am very disappointed this year to see it end so quickly.  I have a wonderful group of boys on my team and cannot wait until the Spring season starts.  I have seen them grow so much in this short period of time and I am excited to think what we can accomplish next go round.  My daughter’s team is continuing to improve this season, but they still have a long way to go.  She has been amazing and it has been a real treat to see how easily she stepped into the keeper position and made it her own.  I have to continue working with her through the off-season.  She has her brother’s natural talent between the pipes, but she still has to develop it.  Our oldest has had quite the challenge this year, having only played his third out of eight scheduled games this past Sunday.  They keep canceling his games due to rain and wet field conditions.  It has been frustrating.  Top that off with him getting taken out by a clearly illegal charge on Sunday and you can see his frustration.  I have to say, I have never seen as reckless of officiating as I did from the Arlington officials on Sunday.  Our keepers were charged three separate times, all well within their box and all reckless shoulder charges when they attempted to play the ball.  The one that took my son out would have surely drawn a red card in most leagues, instead the forward was allowed to play the ball after dropping the keeper in mid-air and the score was allowed to stand.  No foul, no card, no nothing.  Nice.  Had it just been that one play, I would have chalked it up to the center simply missing the hit during play.  However, since they had already awarded a penalty shot to the opposing team for the first charge where an opposing forward impacted him while he was playing the ball well within his box and did not call a second shoulder charge on a keeper mid-air to the backup keeper that had to play when my son went down, I was supremely pissed.  As a certified UEFA/NTSA official myself, I understand that you should let the boys play soccer.  However, there are rules in place to protect the keeper from harm while playing the ball in his box.  As dangerous a position as keeper is, to expect one to engage a charging opponent with no protection from the officials is insane.  The rules governing keeper contact are designed to prevent exactly what was allowed to happen during our game on Sunday.  If a forward can simply take the keeper out with a dangerous charge while he is most vulnerable, such as when he is leaping into the air to stop a shot, what is to stop them from doing so and scoring, without regard to the safety of other players?  Nothing.  That is why the game forbids the sort of dangerous play that the center allowed to occur this weekend.  If it happened in our association, the center would be up for an A & D hearing before he knew what hit him.

Anyway, enough soccer talk.  My goal is to actually post something political tomorrow.  We will see how that goes. Until then…

It has been far too long since my last post. I apologize for my delinquency in maintaining the site, but things have just not been so great the past few weeks. I really had lost the desire to post or the will to even keep up on current issues. All of my energy has been focused on returning myself to the world of the gainfully employed and on getting another project off the ground that is related to the website. I have not had much success with the former, but the latter is progressing steadily.

I have also been quite busy in the evenings with soccer. I now have three children involved in the sport and I am more involved that I have ever been. My oldest son is playing in a competitive U12 Select league in Fort Worth and learning far more than I could ever teach him by having the depth of knowledge available in a competitive club. He has been getting to work with older keepers and is really focusing on more advanced techniques. He has begrudgingly earned the nickname ‘Air Bender’ from one of our rival teams in our indoor league, because she commented that he can jump in the air and bend in almost impossible ways to make stops. He was proud of that.

My daughter has decided to play again this year and finally landed on a good U9 recreational team. She even got to play her first games as a keeper over the past few weeks. She had begged to be put in the box and I was concerned as to how she would do, lacking the height advantage of her older brother. I was pleasantly surprised. Three games back, during a frustrating game against one of the best teams in her division, it seemed that the other team had our main keeper off balance. Our head coach decided to put my daughter in the game and see how she handled it. It was a pretty big gamble, since we had only just started working her in the box in practice, but it paid off. She even surprised me with a level of aggressiveness that I had not expected. She seemed fearless in the box… Too much so at one point as the only goal she let by her that half was caused because she came out way too far and ended up out of position. She was caught in front of her defense and the other team broke it past all of them. She learns quickly though. The rest of the game she started to manage her full backs, shouting positioning and coverages to them and then letting them do their jobs. She never left the goal open like that again. You could tell she had been watching her older brother. (Who is now proudly working with her on the skills and techniques that he is picking up.)

My youngest has been waiting for this season for a long time. He just started his first year of U6 developmental and is having a blast. I have to admit that I am as well. It has been a long time since I helped coach a U6 team and it was quite a large adjustment from coaching my U12 boys last year. I consider it a good practice when we can all stay focused long enough to learn one or two skills. If I can manage to keep the ice cream truck away, then we usually do just fine. I swear that guy preys on soccer practices… He was even diving through the parking lot at the game fields the other day. You know how quickly you can lose the attention of nine five year olds when they hear the music of an ice cream truck? Pretty damn fast, I can assure you. I have been really surprised by our success. We still have a tendency to degenerate in to a mass huddle on the soccer field, but other than our first game we have at least managed to get the ball moving in the right direction most of the time. I even noticed in our last game on Tuesday, that we are starting to learn our positions and actually stay in them a good deal of the time. Impressive for it just being our third game. We have actually won all of our games so far, although we don’t really keep track at this age, and it has been because of one little hispanic firecracker that we have on our team. This kid is amazing. He has scored 80% of our goals and kept more than a few from going in. He seems to be everywhere at once and has amazing control and shot accuracy for a five year old. The main thing though is to see how much fun these little guys are having when they are out there running around kicking and screaming. Makes it all worth the effort.

Me? Well, I am coaching the U6 team, assistant coaching my daughter’s U12 team and now I also referee for our association. I am living, breathing and bleeding soccer right now. Well, not so much bleeding as applying generous amounts of analgesic cream to sore muscles. Let me tell you, eight year old girls have far more energy, agility and stamina than I do. However, I do hope that this will help me to get in better shape. It certainly feels like it is after running around chasing plays for a couple of hours a day at least twice a week. My calf muscles are killing me, but it is all good.

Anyway, I completed my election judge training today and during the discussion about how important elections are, I started thinking about how lax I had been with the site. I will be remedying that immediately. Since I have the time, I will try to return to posting at least one article a day over critical current events. I have a wealth of material to work with lately and I only fear it will get much, much worse with the way this administration is pushing dangerous agendas upon the American people.

I have added an new section to the site.  In the top left hand corner you will find the Image Gallery button.  It is still a work in progress, but this page will contain any sets of images that I post up for articles such as the TEA Party events and other images that I have taken in general.

I have posted up the pictures from the July 4th, TEA Party in Weatherford and a few of my personal favorites for you to browse through.  I hope you enjoy.  There will be many more to come.

Weatherford 4th of July – TEA Party

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Personal Favorites

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Hopefully, I will be getting the chance to photograph more of a political race as it starts to heat up here at home.  A friend of mine is challenging Representative Kay Granger for her seat in Congress representing District 12 here in Texas.  His name is Mike Brassovan and he is a strong Christian conservative, who firmly believes in limited government and personal freedoms.  I encourage any of you locals to watch for this race closely and get to know Mike as a person and a candidate.  This man is no politician.  Unlike those we have come to expect to run, he has not made a career out of politics, but has worked hard provide a good life for his family and build a successful private business.  He is one of us.  He is a Christian, a husband, a father, an engineer and a businessman.  He is not a politician.  Just the kind of man we need representing us in Washington.

Ah, yes.  Yet another change comes to the Judging Truth site.  I have moved the site from a publicly hosted solution on WordPress.com to a privately hosted one on the actual domain of JudgingTruth.com.  I am now running my own private server which allows me to have direct and complete control over all content, including meida, posts, HTML, PHP and CSS styling.  This is hopefully the final change to Judging Truth and was made to test out the process of bringing her sister site on line. 

Within the next few weeks I will be bringing on line the Parker County Young Republican site.  This newly formed organization will attempt to foster strong conservative values in our local politicians and hopefully ensure that we elect strong conservatives who do not fear championing out principals in the face of ever increasing liberal socialism.  The site will hopefully be up within a few days, or at least a template there of.  I wanted to make the transition with Judging Truth first so that I could ensure proper opreation of a newly hosted domain.  Being thus far successful, it is time for me to begin building the new site and testing out some styles for it.

The transition of Judging Truth took the better part of the last week to do in my spare time (which has been sparse indeed).  I have had to ballance between converting the site from public hosting over to my private server while wrestling with a wounded server at work that is barely holding on.  It being our primary domain controller for the lab, has not made it any easier.  I have to admit that the system that keeps my company alive and doing business took complete priority over the migration of Judging Truth for most of the week.  I got a new system ordered to replace our failing server on Thursday and have been keeping it as healthy as I could, so last night I finally got a chance to solve some of the issues I was having an complete the migration.

Sorry for no posts during this time, but for about six days the site litterally existed at two different places.  It was at http://www.judgingtruth.com which is hosted on my private server, and also at http://blog.judgingtruth.com that actually was an alias for http://judgingtruth.wordpress.com/ hosted on WordPress.com’s public servers.  Due to this, I was not updating either site so that I could make sure I got all the content transfered.  You will now notice that if you try to go to the http://blog.judgingtruth.com site it properly directs you to the private host.  I will leave a copy of the site up on WordPress.com’s servers for a couple of weeks just in case I find something that I missed, but I will no longer be updating that site.

I will be making some minor changes that I have henceforth been unable to accomplish because of restrictions set on the publicly hosted sites.  Many of these will be transparent, but some will be increased content and features.  First priority is to get the new site built for the PCYR organization.  If anyone notices any problems or has any difficulties accessing anything on the site, feedback would not only be welcome but detailed feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, I will begin posting and updating the site again this week.  Look forward to hearing from you.