Do you believe in divine intervention? I do. God exists, and is always looking out for me. Normally, when I sense His presence, He is helping me avoid situations where I could be harmed or worse. I'm sure you've had those times when you were about to do something, and for no rational reason, you stopped to take another look, or you found an obstacle in your path, and in clearing the obstacle, found something dangerous.

Well, I have those types of things happen to me all the time, and this morning, it happened again. It was more subtle than usual, and the stakes were not as high as usual, but He came to my aid nevertheless.

Today is call-in day, where I'm supposed to call the unemployment centre (MARVIN) to claim for the past two weeks. It's only my second time doing this, and I wanted to make sure I'd be awake for my time period, so I went to bed early. This morning, I woke in plenty of time, fully rested, and had a couple of hours to kill before calling. So I went to my computer and started working on my Java lessons. After a while, I got bored with those, and turned to Fox's 24 bulletin board. For fans of 24, last night's episode was a real kick in the teeth, and I wanted to see what others thought about it. Well, there were lots of comments and theories, and as usual, I got involved in the discussion - not only reading, but replying to many of the posts.

Then, for no apparent reason, a click on some benign URL caused my computer to reboot. OK, so rebooting on a Windows computer is nothing new. But things like that generally happen when the machine is totally screwed up (memory leaks, etc.). I had already done a "preventive" cold boot earlier this morning, because my browser was behaving sluggishly, and I hadn't done a reboot in a few days. Anyway, back to my point. The computer did a reboot, and while it was going through it's "cleanup" process, I glanced at the clock. There were eleven minutes left in my "window of opportunity" to file my claim. I have no idea how I'd managed to piss away a few hours on the computer, but one thing is clear... had the computer not rebooted, there is absolutely zero chance that I would have thought to look at a clock, and remember what needed to be done.

Thank you, God.

When something good happens to me, I feel a need to repay the favour. So, after calling in, I decided to do something I would never have thought to do. Our home has a downstairs half-bath, and the previous owner (or perhaps the one before him) had put a small built-in countertop/cupboard in the bathroom to hold the sink and have room for stuff under the sink. Whoever installed this unit did a very sloppy job, and a good deal of epoxy had been left all over the counter surface and inside the sink. Although it was an ugly stain, at least the stain was brown - which matched in colour the faux-marble look of the countertop. When we first moved in, I tried scrubbing the stains, and using every bathroom-cleaning chemical I could think of to get it off. It hadn't budged. And to make matters worse, when we painted the downstairs bathroom (back in the days before we hired professionals to do such things), we added to the mess by dripping paint in various places along the lip of the countertop.

Today, I got the idea to use a fine chisel blade to try to scrape off the glue and paint. I had to be very careful, so as not to mar the finish, but after 1-1/2 hours of painstaking and backbreaking effort, I managed to remove virtually all the epoxy, and all the paint. To add to the look, I thoroughly scrubbed down the front face of the unit, and you'd almost think it was brand new. Add to this the fact that I finally got the sink to stop dripping (I think it's been doing that for nearly 7 years), and it's the first time this bathroom has looked and worked the way it should. All in time to put the house up for sale.