the tindog coffeehouse

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, probably the greatest holiday dedicated to the mass consumption of food ever. Except of course that it’s not really about the food, per se, but a time of, well, giving thanks. We all know that the holiday dates back to the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, which celebrated the Pilgrims’ first successful growing season since arriving in America a year earlier. (And actually the tradition dates back to the Pilgrims’ days in Leiden, Holland, when the Dutch held a Thanksgiving feast every October.) But what’s cool — to me, at least — is that my ancestor was one of those early pilgrims.

From everything I’ve researched and read (and admittedly I’m not a genealogist, so I could be completely wrong), the first Spooners to arrive in America landed at Plymouth in 1637. Ann Spooner (born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1598) arrived with her young sons William (my ancestor, age 16 at the time) and Thomas (age 14).

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Hi and welcome to the newly relaunched blog! Which just happens to look exactly like it did a couple of days ago. Except that it’s now on a different server.

I decided to move to a new web hosting company after my old one kept going down. Every day. Multiple times a day. Now granted, I don’t get a lot of traffic here, and most likely no one but me noticed the outages, but it really ticked me off. I mean, if I’m gonna pay for a service, I kinda expect it to work. That’s not too much to ask is it?

So everything’s been moved over, and as far as I can tell, it seems to be working fine. There may be a few kinks that still need to be ironed out, but I think we’re good for the most part. The new host seems to be a lot faster, too, which is nice.

It’s hard to believe I’ve had this blog for almost four years. And actually, I’ve had the domain since 1998. The first iteration of tindog.com was a really bad personal home page built with FrontPage 98. How bad was it? Well, the fact that it was built with FrontPage should give you a clue. And I think I used Comic Sans for the font. And there might’ve been a picture of Mao Tse-Tung on it (for some unknown reason).

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I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, home of Buddy Holly, cotton, and endless miles of flat dirt. Which means I also grew up as a Texas Tech fan. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of going to the Tech games with my grandparents. My Papa would always wear his red and black cowboy boots, and I’d cross my fingers and hope the Saddle Tramps would throw a little red football my way. Then when it got cold, we’d huddle under a blanket and drink hot chocolate out of a Thermos and ooh and ahh over the Goin’ Band from Raiderland. On a field trip once, we got to run out onto the field at Jones Stadium, and it was like a dream come true.

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As a father I’ve tried to prepare for the delicate, difficult, and even sometimes embarrassing questions that my kids will inevitably ask. Ask me anything related to religion, morality, or the human anatomy, and while I may not have all the answers, I’m at least not surprised to hear the question. But nothing — and I mean nothing — could’ve prepared me for the question Megan asked me last night:

“Daddy, what would you do if I went to Texas A&M?”

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Last September, our pastor challenged the church to read through the Bible in a year, something that for some reason I had never done. I had read much of the Bible but never the whole thing and never for a whole year straight. I decided it was time to change that, and so I took the challenge.

And three days ago, I finished it.

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I’m thinking about quitting Twitter. Along with any other social network I’m on. And no, I’m not joking.

Of course, I know I won’t. But maybe I need some time away, an extended break from that online world that may or may not be reality.

Truth be told, I’ve been struggling lately. I touched on some of it in my last post, but honestly, that’s just barely scratching the surface. I feel like I need to talk about it or at least vent some of my frustration, but Twitter isn’t the place to do that. And really this blog isn’t either. So I’ve been kinda quiet lately, not wanting to say something online that I’ll regret or that could be misinterpreted.

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