The Schwanz family is filled with world travelers. Some of these travelers also live overseas. I currently have six family members living in Uganda. Swanee (my dad’s next-older brother) and his wife Karen working on lots of stuff, including building church buildings. My cousin-in-law Matthew Robertson, married to my cousin Sheila (daughter of Swanee and Karen), is currently the National Director of Habitat for Humanity in Uganda. Matthew and Sheila have two kids, Karene and Samuel.

Well, 12 other members of the Schwanz family are currently in Uganda, visiting the six there, but they are also there to build two houses as a memorial for two family members. One is for my Aunt Nelda, and the other is for Grandma Myrtle. You can track the progress of the trip over here.

Have you ever been to Portland’s trendy NW 23rd Ave? Nice place to walk around and explore the various shops and restaurants. Well, a former professor at the college I attended was there with his wife. They were going into a restaurant for lunch when a man stabbed him in the back with a butcher knife! You can read the story on OregonLive.com here. Crazy.

Well, today is July 4. A day for fireworks and food. I’m not so much on the fireworks thing; I’ll totally sit and watch them — I enjoy a good bang — but I’m not big on purchasing stuff to just be destroyed. Now, the food thing is a whole different story

Today’s mid-day menu consisted of pork spareribs, shrimp, potato salad, and spinich salad, followed up with grilled peaches and vanilla ice cream. I took a rub recipe from Alton Brown, modified it some, then put the ribs in the oven on 350 for 1.5 hours. Then I put it on a medium grill for about 20 min basting it with the drippings that came out during the time in the oven. Very good. It was probably a little too salty for my tastes. We didn’t have kosher salt so I used regular salt, and we didn’t have onion powder so I used onion salt…I should have cut the amount of regular salt by about a tablespoon. Oh well, for my first rub ever I think it came out really good.

I’ll try to get some photos of the events up here sometime soon.

Check this out (it requires IE to watch the video). The more I see this guy in the media the more I can’t stand him. I will probably never see another of his movies.

I’m in Michigan for a conference. We flew into Chicago yesterday and then drove to Grand Rapids. It is very beautiful up here. The thing I’ve been the most impressed with so far happened last night (this morning) at 1a. As Dale and I were getting ready for bed the lightning and thunder started and it was majorly impressive. I’ve been through the Willamette Valley “thunderstorms”, but those are nothing compared to this one. Even as I tried to sleep — with my eyes closed and facing away from the window — I could still see the flashes of lightning. Some of the thunder wasn’t close, but there were some that sounded like it happened right outside our window. Amazing.

This is a cool article by Bob Woodward about how he met Mark Felt, how their relationship developed, and how Felt became Deep Throat.

I’ve put together an About Me page. That’s all my brain could come up with for now. I’ll keep working on it and try to fill it out even more.

Also, Dave Matthews Band released their new studio album, Stand Up, yesterday. I haven’t been able to give it a quality listen yet, but I’ve been playing it at work some. I’ll try to give a review of it sometime soon.

I’ve decided to revamp my website in a blog format rather than using the static pages that I’d used for a long time. I’ll try to keep this up to date with what’s going on in life. Hopefully I’ll do a better job of it than I had been doing with the old version.