This morning, on the way to work, my little truck rolled over 300,000 miles.

I've passed the 300K milestone in only one other vehicle, our last Suburban, which cratered at 315K. My Nissan pickup, now at 300K, is showing no signs of slowing down yet. Sure, it has signs of its age, as do I, but it and I keep on going in spite of dings, dents, creaks and sags. 

It's a 1995 King Cab with a V-6. Prior to buying this one, I had always wanted a truck just like this one. I don't regret the purchase. The only thing better would have been if I had been able to buy it new. You see, I bought it used, with 94K already on it. It had been wrecked before, but had been repaired and looked and functioned as if it had never been injured.

I bought it from a Jordanian named Sonny in Arlington. He ran a tire shop/used car lot and was training to be a manager of a Chili's restaurant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I saw an ad in Truck Trader magazine and called him. Since the photos in Truck Trader were black-and-white, when I called I asked him what color it was. "Maroon," he said, rolling the 'r' with his strong Middle-Eastern accent. I believed it to be a good deal at the time, but never imagined that I'd put another 200K+ on it. Welcome surprises!

When I bought the aforementioned Suburban, it already had 140K on it. I've rolled several other vehicles over 200K, and I look forward to seeing my little Nissan pickup eclipse the Suburban and beat 315K. 

(Part Three in a four-part series on one of my favorite hobbies: pipe smoking.)

As for tobaccos, satisfaction has been more elusive. There are several blends I have grown fond of over the years, yet it is much more difficult for me to find satisfaction in tobaccos than it is for pipes. I'm relatively satisfied with my pipe collection as it is. I add one to it every now and then, often to commemorate a special occasion. My wife bought me a pipe of my choosing for Christmas last year in Grapevine. I just bought my most recent pipe at a fabulous pipe shop in Mill Valley, CA while we were on vacation. If I never bought another pipe, I would be quite happy with what I have. Yet tobacco is a consumable. It disappears over time and has to be replaced.

The plethora of choices of different tobaccos is overwhelming. And considering that you might spend $15-20 for a 50g tin of quality tobacco, you don't necessarily want to be buying something you won't like after one or two bowls. Yet experimentation is the only way to discover a future favorite.

One of the first things you discover is the complexity of pipe tobacco. The first level of appreciation of a tobacco is how it is in the pouch or tin. How it smells, how it looks. Then there’s how it performs in the bowl. How it burns, how it tastes, how it smells as it’s burning. The aroma a tobacco creates as it’s burning is called its “room note”.

 Every fact about pipes, tobacco and pipe smoking has its believers and skeptics. For example, I posted a response to a thread on alt.smokers.pipes about moisturizing bulk tobaccos. I mentioned that I had my bulk tobaccos stored in bail-lid jars, the kind with the rubber gasket to make it air tight. I also mentioned that I keep the tobacco at optimal moisture by putting a slice of apple in the jar with the tobacco. The moisture from the apple moisturizes the tobacco over time, and the apple eventually ends up looking like a leathery piece of mummy skin. Another fellow responded to my post, stating that this would make mold grow on the tobacco. I could have responded with a treatise on the biology of molds and spores and how they are generally unrelated to apple slices. I could have also brought real evidence into play, mentioning that this had been my preferred method of tobacco storage for years and that I had never seen the first sign of mold. Instead, I just let it drop.

Taking this disparity of opinion into account, there are many different "genres" of pipe tobacco, and many differing opinions as to what is good, what is bad, and what is a little of both. Some love English blends--the stronger the Latakia the better. Some exclusively smoke aromatics--the sweeter the blend, the sweeter the smoke. Some would sooner smoke sawdust than the bulk blends from brick-and-mortar tobacco shops. Others swear by these same blends, knowing no other tobacco than that which comes from a big glass jar or a Ziploc baggie.

One of the most peculiar things about pipe smoking is how I, as the smoker, can’t discern the room note whilst I am smoking. I could smell tobaccos that others might be smoking, assuming I wasn’t smoking the same thing, but I couldn’t smell my own tobacco as it burns. Strange. Another peculiarity is how tobaccos taste. They rarely taste like they smell. For me, this is fine. I just have to enjoy the tobacco on two different, unrelated levels.

(Pictured:  My most recent pipe acquisition, a Stanwell Nordic #254; also below, some of the tinned tobaccos I'd recommend--Blue Note, MacBarens' Vanilla Cream, and G. L. Pease's Haddo's Delight and Piccadilly [the only English blend I've ever liked]. My source for most of the tinned tobaccos I've smoked is cupojoes.com. I also bought my Peterson Aran 80S there.)

(To be continued.)

(This is the first part in a four-part series on one of my favorite hobbies: pipe smoking. Enjoy.)

The year was 2002, if memory serves, and I was on the cusp of a journey to a wonderful land. It is a land sparsely populated with wise, thoughtful people, a group whose number I gladly joined and among whom I've dwelt ever since. It is the Land of Pipe Smokers.

My father and I had taken my grandmother on a field trip to her home. She was living in an "assisted living center" at the time, and we thought a trip to the old home place would be just what the doctor prescribed. The validity of our observations I will not discuss, except to reference the old saying: "You can never go home."

As she was in another room with my dad, going through closets and drawers, searching for happier days, I was rummaging through a dresser drawer full of things long forgotten. In that drawer, I found a pipe that had belonged to my grandfather. He had been a pipe smoker in his earlier days; I remember cans of Sir Walter Raleigh sitting around their house. I pocketed the pipe with little else planned except to take possession of a missing part of my past.

The pipe sat around for a number of weeks. I noticed a faint voice occasionally calling to me from the direction of my grandpa's old pipe. I didn't understand the language of pipes then, but intuition told me it wanted to be smoked. Not knowing what else to do, I went to Walgreen's and purchased a pouch of Captain Black.

My initial pipe experience was like many initial experiences that later prove to be enjoyable: it was fraught with mistakes and unpleasantness, rooted in ignorance. Undaunted, I set out to educate myself on the wisdom of pipes and pipe smoking.

(Pictured: Peterson Aran 80S, Shape: Bent Rhodesian; one of my collection)

To be continued...

There's a verse in I Corinthians (1:18, to be exact) that reads, "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." 

This is full of meaning--practical meaning--and truth. We that not only consider ourselves believers but have allowed the gospel to fill and shape our lives understand what it means. Yet the concept of the cross, of its sacrifice and of the power of that sacrifice and of the resurrection, sound like a silly tale to many people. The notion of such a thing is strange to some people because they don't acknowledge the need for such an event. To believers, it's not silly. To believers, the crucifixion and the resurrection are God's greatest work, and, according to scriptures, it's something that He planned from the beginning of time.

Reflecting on this fills me with an awe and wonder that I cannot describe. God's power, focused on one moment in time, accomplished a feat that could be accomplished in no other way. It's magnitude is not lost on me. This event will continue to cascade throughout time and eternity and will never be eclipsed, never overshadowed, by any other thing. There is nothing else that will ever command the awe and wonder that the cross commands, and those who fail to bow to its purpose will spend eternity regretting that decision.

Phillips, Craig and Dean recorded a song, "Crucified with Christ", that codifies this feeling for myself and many others. It testifies to the awe-inspiring work found in the cross and the desire it creates in believers to sacrifice our own lives daily, not on a Roman cross, but in relinquishing our will to see His will done.

 As I look back on what I thought was living
I'm amazed at the price I chose to pay
And to think I ignored what really mattered
'Cause I thought the sacrifice would be too great
But when I finally reached the point of giving in
I found the cross was calling even then
And even though it took dying to survive
I've never felt so much alive.

For I am crucified with Christ and yet I live
Not I but Christ that lives within me
His Cross will never ask for more than I can give
For its not my strength but His
There's no greater sacrifice
For I am crucified with Christ

and yet I live

As I hear the Savior call for daily dying
I will bow beneath the weight of Calvary
Let my hands surrender to His piercing purpose
That holds me to the cross yet sets me free
I will glory in the power of the cross
The things I thought were gain I count as loss
And with His suffering I identify
And by His resurrection power I am alive

And I will offer all I have
So that His cross is not in vain
For I found to live is Christ
And to die is truly gain

© 1995 by Randy Phillips, Denise Phillips, Dave Clark and Don Koch. From the Phillips, Craig and Dean album, "Trust".

There are always lessons in life, put there for our benefit, which we can either ignore or benefit from. Sometimes, we learn from them but have a hard time retaining that knowledge and repeat them again and again. Sometimes, we refuse to learn the lessons and they are repeated again and again until either a cleft is formed in our thick skulls or we move on into the next life, having learned nothing.

As I wander through life, I try to learn and try and apply that knowledge in making my life, the lives of my family and friends, and the world in general, better. The operative "try to" should not be overlooked. I succeed. I fail.

At the moment, I am nearing the end of a project that has spanned the last several months. Our church has done some extensive remodeling that has encompassed the better part of the last year. Part of that renovation has been the replacement of the sound system, much of which has fallen to me as the resident "expert". I built a sound booth, from design to brushing on the lacquer topcoat. I am presently wiring the sanctuary for the new sound system. I will, in the next week, help another man finalize the installation. This, not being my day job, has taken virtually all of my free time during this period. I'll be glad to see it done. It has been rewarding, but also taxing. I'm ready for a break.

I've reflected on lessons I've learned in this project and others like it. I'd like to share those here:

1. Do the best work you can do, no matter what the job. - It's always easy to slacken when you think no one will notice or you think the outcome doesn't matter. I've been tempted on many occasions to take short cuts. Resist the urge. Give it your absolute best effort. Push your abilities to and beyond their limits. When you get to the edge, create a new threshold that makes you a better person and hones a new edge to your skills.
2. Realize that doing your best work takes more time and more effort. - There is a direct relationship between the quality of a job and the time it takes to do it. Time is one of the primary costs in doing a job well. Unfortunately, we don't always have the luxury of factoring that into our work. Forced deadlines rob us of the ability to do a better job and to do our best work. We should see time as a constraint in the same way we see our abilities and cost as a constraint. Do the best job you can, within your ability and the time available and the constraints of cost. Laziness is the worst enemy of quality work, so banish laziness from everything you do.
3. Let doing a job well be its own reward. - We're often tempted to let someone in on everything we put into a project to make it happen the way it did. We don't want our hard work and our attention to details to be wasted and unnoticed. Fishing for compliments or saying, "Look how hard I worked" can make us look small and insecure, or worse, can make us look like someone whose primary purpose for existence is self-promotion. Resist the urge to toot your own horn so loudly. Keep those little jewels in a chest that only you have the key to. In the sound booth project, I discovered that a previous contractor or worker had taken some shortcuts in wiring a bathroom in an earlier remodel. This was, most likely, because of laziness, but definitely reflected a rather low standard of what "a job well-done" means. I corrected the problem, making it as it should have been done in the first place. My goal is to keep that to myself, not to publicize it in such a way as to malign the other fellow's character or to puff mine up in any way (other than sharing it in this venue, which no one reads anyhow).
4. Don't be afraid to share credit or glory with someone else to see the best job done. - Initially, I had anticipated being in the lead of the whole process, including the design of the sound system itself. However, the Powers-That-Be decided to bring in a consultant to recommend what equipment we should have and how it should be installed. At first, my feelings were bruised, however, I soon realized that we just may get better equipment through this consultant than we would if I were doing the design (I would have been tempted toward frugality for the benefit of the church). As it is, I was correct. The overall quality of the install has been improved by having this fellow come in and steal my thunder. I have also seen that I have still had input and my opinions have been taken into consideration throughout the project. It was silly and childish to take offense in the first place.

So there you are: pearls of wisdom I've harvested from the Oyster of Life, and all of this at no charge to you.