Random

Wow!  Where has the time gone!  One would think that not having school for a week, combined with a dead work-week would mean that I would have a lot of time to keep my postings updated, but somehow that wasn’t the case.  Part of it was pure laziness, but a good part of that is because things have been just as busy throughout the Thanksgiving break.  I hope everyone had a very nice Thanksgiving break.  Mine was fantastic.  It was filled with good food, good times with family, and a nationally-televised Broncos win on Thanksgiving day was the cherry on top!

It would be pretty boring to offer a play-by-play account of my break, but I thought I’d offer some highlights and updates:

#1 Update on the Drummer Wannabe Situation

I’ve made many postings about this in the past, but this an update on the situation we have in our choir with the tambourine player.  Well last weekend we played the Mass of a Joyful heart, which has been the primary exposure of this issue, so I asked the guy running rehearsal if we could go through the Mass parts (even though they’re automatic for us), and while going through I finally stood up between the songs, went up to the tambourine player and politely told her that she’s using the incorrect technique.  By not holding the tambourine with your stationary hand, you’re causing the instrument to rattle during the off-beats, which is what’s causing phasing between the group.  I then spent a few minutes and showed her the appropriate way to play tambourine (and yes, there is an appropriate way to play a tambourine groove pattern – you don’t just rattle it around).

At that point I felt pretty good about myself, I took a moment that has been a proverbial thorn in my side and turned it into a teaching moment that was constructive.  I know the other people in the choir appreciated it, because I got a few winks and nods from other choir people. 

Unfortunately, while this effort was productive, we did not produce the desired result. Drummer Wannabe seemed so embarrassed about the "incident" that she put the tambourine away, picked up her mandolin or midget guitar (or whatever it is) and played that instead..  Since then one weekend has passed and while we did not play Mass of a Joyful Heart (we won’t until 2006), she left the tambourine back in the storage room.  I’m happy that we not longer have this issue, but I feel a little bad about her being embarrassed about it.  At the same time I tried to do what I could to constructively resolve the situation, so we’ll see what happens.

#2 Tragedy leads to stupidity

Well tragedy struck on Thanksgiving – and the victim is none other than my iPod.  On the evening of November 24th I broke out my iPod to share some music with my family, only to find that when the iPod powered up it produced this winding sound, as if it was having difficulty writing to a sector in the iPod hard drive.  Hoping that this was caused by a loose connector, I decided to perform surgery on my iPod.  Using a plastic guitar pick as my scalpel, I opened up the case only to find that all the connectors were securly fastened.  This leads me to the conclusion that my iPod’s hard drive is corrupt and needs to be replaced.  Finding a replacement hard drive is easier said than done.  An exhaustive search over the Internet left me with a few options.  I could pay anywhere from $175-250 for an unofficial replacement hard drive that isn’t even guaranteed to work, or I could send my iPod in to be repaired (which didn’t even offer any pricing estimates).

So here’s where the stupidity comes in…  After weighing my options, and taking everything under careful consideration, I found myself back on the Apple web site Friday night, putting a new iPod video in my shopping cart.  I entered my credit card digits in, and by this time next week I should have the new iPod…

Ugh…  So now I’m torn.  It’s horrible that here I am at Christmas time – buying something for myself.  Verrry considerate…  Also, it seems pretty dumb for me to throw money at something that barely lasted over a year for me.  On the other hand, I thought I did a pretty good job of getting my money’s worth out of my iPod.  I take it to work with my every day and plug it into my laptop, blasting tunes while I’m working.  I use it when I’m at the gym (which I need to be doing more during this time of year – but that’s another situation), I use my iPod when I’m practicing drums, the iPod is amazing for car-trips, and when I travel on planes listening to all of my music has greatly shortened all of my flights.  So I built up a little case of justifications to soothe my conscience.  But I still feel guilty and a bit impulsive…

More to come..  This week I am going to have to have a discussion that I really don’t want to have – about NCSC, J23 and where everything fits…  Basically I’m going to have to convince our University/Campus Ministers that we need to stay involved with NCSC.  The fact that I even need to have this conversation is frustrating to say the least.  We’ve been members for upwards of 15 years, and now ignorance is causing us to lag in our support…  My hope is that this is another "teaching moment" where I simply need to help make them aware of NCSC and how it benefits our Campus Ministry.  My fear is that they’re intentionally withdrawing from programs like these, and I’m going to turn this into a Campus Ministry/Parish debate…  We’ll see how things go…

Another Sunday, another fun weekend ending.  I got lot of rest and relaxation in, but no where near caught up with everything that I need to do.

Friday night Bethany and I had a pretty quiet evening, relaxing at my place.  I’m sad to admit that I have a new TV/DVD addiction: 24.  My friend Matt has been raving about it for the last few weeks, and Bethany has been a huge fan, so due to the peer pressure I managed to get a DVD from Season one into my Blockbuster queue.  It came in Thursday and Bethany and I decided to watch it Friday.  Now I’m hooked, we killed all four episodes on the disc in one night… And I’m also pissed.  The show always ends on these huge cliff-hangers, and now I’ll have to wait at least until mid-week until LackLuster video sends me Disc 2 – that is if they don’t’ screw it up and send it out of sequence.  We’ll see how things go.

Bethany and I also had fun with some of the recurring themes & events in the show, by playing a drinking game where we would each take a shot for each time someone shot another person on the show.  Luckily we were just drinking Tequila Rose or else we really could have gotten messed up.  A warning to those who want to also make the show most interesting: don’t do "1 shot for each time the phone rings".  You’ll be trashed in one episode.

Saturday was a really good day except for the fact that I got no cleaning done around my apartment.  I set out this weekend to really clean up my apartment.  I have my NCSC Regional Team coming next weekend and with all of the guys staying with me, it’s imperative that I clean up my pig-sty.  None of that happened Saturday   I did go play at Mass though, and it was a really nice liturgy, especially compared to last week’s Mass.  I had a nice night afterwards as well.  My friend Shannon turned the big 2-1 on Friday so we went and celebrated at everyone’s favorite watering hole – Old C’s.  It was a really fun night.  However, my "I’ll have a quick dinner and get back to cleaning" turned into me not coming home until 2am…

Sunday wasn’t much better.  My sister was in town from Boulder, so our family had brunch, then I had to go back over to church for a meeting*.  The freakin’ meeting lasted more than 2 hours, so when I got back home I was only able to clean the downstairs area this afternoon.  I have yet to tackle the disaster that is my room.  It’s going to be a long week.

A few random thoughts…

*Meetings – This is not going to be a fun week for meetings.  As of right now, I am scheduled to be at church for 6 straight days, each time pretty significant (at least 2 hours).  Normally this wouldn’t be bad, except for the fact that most of those days at church are going to be spend doing things I’d rather not be doing.  Today, day #2 began a series of crappy meetings – this one is over all of the choir confusion going on with our Music Director leaving. Since my last posting a slew of emails have gone out – 36 – since our music minister announced her registration.  Most of them with people opining on how things should move forward, and some of them offering their own selfish and disrespectful ideas.  One of the most popular ideas kicked around has been to forgo hiring a music minister for three months and defer their salary to purchase new music.  While I don’t think the idea itself is a bad one (although I do adamantly disagree with it), I think the timing couldn’t be worse.  The music minister isn’t leaving until early January, and right now it just feels like a family discussing how they’re going to spend a relative’s inheritance when the relative is still alive.  To me, nothing could be more professionally disrespectful than telling a departing member that their position really wasn’t needed, and for someone to suggest drastic changes at this point in time is disrespectful to say the least.

This is only the tip of the ice burg with the music ministry troubles…  So today they had a meeting with representatives from a few choirs.  While people felt that there was progress made, I wish that more would have been resolved.  I’m disappointed that we did not leave the meeting with intentions well-defined, preventing someone from pursuing their own agenda.  I’m also disappointed because the Pastor did not seemed pretty resolved to deferring the hiring of a music minister, and was not interested to expedite the search process.  I understand that a search for a part-time candidate in the middle of the school year will only get you so far, and if you do want to make a quality hire you’ll wait for a sufficient candidate pool – but if you’ve already resolved yourself to delay you’re going to subconsciously work towards a delay.  I’m troubled because there are too many similarities in this situation when compared to our failed Director of Campus Ministry hire.  My prediction that of not hiring a music minister still stands.

Monday night I have a Pastoral Council meeting, which could either be very interesting or really boring depending on where discussion takes us.  Right now Music Ministry isn’t the only parish group bursting at the seams.  I fear that our community is headed for a crisis, but I’m not sure if the key leadership recognizes or realizes they should address the issue.  I’ve planned tomorrow night’s agenda to create a forum for such discussion, but we’ll see if other members of Pastoral Council & parish staff are willing to engage in a discussion.

Tuesday I was planning on going to TNT, but at this point Tuesday is looking like the only possible evening that I have to clean my apartment, along with transport beds from my parent’s home over to my place…  I think I’m going to take the night off from church, so instead of 6 consecutive nights, I’ll be at church 7 out of 8 days.

Wednesday I got roped into volunteering to catalog our music for choir.  I’m basically eating my own words here, or putting my money where my mouth is.  In the email discussions the one email I wrote (and yes, I only wrote 1 out of the 36), I attempted to validate the original music suggestion by declaring the idea as worthwhile and volunteering my time to help catalog.  Well I was taken up on my offer, so 7-10pm I’ll get to sort music – how exciting…

Thursday night is UMAC, and after last month’s meeting it will be interesting to see what the future of UMAC will be.

Friday I’ll be welcoming members from the Western Region team.  I’m really excited about this coming up, but am nervous when I realize just how much work I have ahead of me this week to sufficiently prepare for this event.  I’ll be glad when it gets here.

Well that’s it for now…  More thoughts to come!

It’s been a long and crazy week, hence no posts.  Things are only going to get crazier, so I thought now would be a good time to capture some big reflections before they escape my brain.

Last weekend I went to one of the coolest Broncos games I’ve been to, one that I’ve been looking forward to going to for years.  Broncos, my favorite AFC (and overall) team, playing the Eagles, my favorite NFC team.  This is the first time since 1998 that they’ve played each other, and will be one of only 2 times every 8 years that they’ll play each other.  So you can bet that I was excited to see this game go down.

Being that the Broncos are my first and all-time favorite team it was no doubt that I would choose my Broncos jersey over my Eagles jersey, but I still wanted to show some kind of allegiance to the Eagles, so I decided to sport my Eagles hat in combination with my orange John Lynch jersey.  The other reason this game was so amazing is because of where I got to sit.  My good friend Emily invited me to sit with her in her family’s seats – on the 30 yard line, 4th row, behind the visitor’s bench!  It was sooo freaking cool.  I managed to take my camera down there and take some pictures to give you an idea of just how close I was.  It was freakin’ sweet!

We actually didn’t get into those seats until the 2nd quarter, as one of Emily’s friends had asked to switch seats with us for a quarter. Emily, being a good friend, agreed, so we spent the first quarter in the nosebleeds in Section 518, only a few sections over from where my normal season tickets are.  That first quarter experience was an adventure in itself: the right side of the section was all Broncos fans, but on the left side of the stands there were 3 rows worth of Eagles fans.  I’ve meet individual Eagles fans before, but this was the first time that I’ve been them collectively, and I was extremely disappointed.  These guys were almost as vulgar and belligerent as Raider fans – and that’s the standard for savage fans.  These guys didn’t limit their smack talking to football, they were cussing up a storm, flipping everyone off and then saying things about people’s mothers…  What a bunch of jerks! 

They were most arrogant and out of hand at the beginning of the game.  Then the Broncos stormed down the field and scored on their first drive.  They were still jerks. Then the Eagles went 3-and-out on their first drive, and as they were punting the Eagles fans started to quiet down.  When the Broncos stormed down their field the second time in the row the Eagles fans finally shut up and just looked really somber.  At that point I said one of the funniest things that I’ve said in a long time.  One of the Eagles fans got on his cell phone and started talking away on it, at which point I decided to yell loudly "Eagle fan, are you calling your mom to come pick you up?", the whole section of Broncos fans erupted with laughter.  It was awesome   Then the quarter ended and we left and took our seats.

The game turned out to be very exiting.  The Eagles began to stage a come-back in the 3rd quarter, but their hopes of winning were squashed by a Broncos interception in the end zone.  At that point the Broncos just piled on and drove the score to 49-21.  It was an awesome win

One of the best parts about sitting in Emily’s seats was the fact that you could heckle the visiting team, and they could actually hear you.  It was awesome!  We spent pretty much the entire second half heckling Terrell Owens (or "two") as I call him (in defiance of everyone calling him T-O).  At one point during the 4th quarter he starting yelling back and it was freaking awesome.  The rest of the time Two just went around and yelled at everyone else.  He always needed to complain to somebody, but when it came time for him to make a play, he ended up dropping some key passes during the 4th quarter.  Two did end up scoring a touchdown, but it was up against a hurt Champ Bailey.

One of the funniest parts was at the end of the game when the crowd sang "Kiss Him Goodbye" to the Eagles…  Knowing that they heard every word of "Na-na-na-na" was just awesome.  Then one of the fans in the next section over started flapping his arms in the ear like an Eagle would flap it’s wings – right in front of their defensive linemen – it was hilarious.

Overall it was one of the funnest Broncos games I’ve been to, and I can’t be happier that the Broncos are 6-2.  I can’t wait until next weekend when we punch the Raiders right in the mouth!

This morning while I was in my staff meeting (which was a phone conference), we heard a lot of background noise going on.  Just when it was about to get unbearable, the high-up manager chimed in "Guys, I’m really sorry for the noise.  I’ll be honest, my son just got sick and threw up at school, so I’m picking him up."

While on the phone a few of us were IM’ing back and forth, saying how bad we felt for her son, then one of my co-workers mentioned how embarrassing it must be for the kid.  "Probably the most embarrassing thing that could happen to you at school."  At that point I started thinking WAAAAY back to when I was in elementary school.  Is getting sick the most embarrassing thing that could happen to you at school?  From this spawned my list of most embarrassing things that could happen to you during elementary school.  Getting sick ranked #2.

So think back to when you were really young, and in that mindset, what are some of the worst things that could happen to you?  Maybe some happened to people you knew, or maybe you were the unfortunate victim of one of these incidents…  As you start forming your list, check out mine.

10. Showing up with a lame lunchbox

9. Getting Nerdy Glasses

8. People finding out about your 1st crush, or worst yet – your 1st kiss!

7. Getting kissed by your parents in front of everyone

6. Getting caught snapping girl’s bras

5. Major food spillage

4. Getting sent to the principals office

3. Forgetting to button your fly, or having your pants ripped in a revealing area

2. Getting sick and throwing up

1. Having a "bathroom" accident, soiling your pants

I know, I probably left off something majorly embarrassing, so make to make any additions/revisions to this list in the comments section!

Another busy week down, another week gone by with virtually no posts…  This last week has been an attempt to plan and schedule my time effectively, fail at doing so, then just putting out fires that need to be put out.  I had a few big deadlines at work that needed to be met, and I was lucky to get them in under the wire.  So with that, I had a very nice and relaxing weekend, and a few "Weekend Warrior" stories to share…

Friday Night – The Fritzler Maize – For those of you who don’t live in Colorado (or any other areas where corn-growing is prevalent), you probably don’t know about Corn Maze’s.  Essentially, it’s all in the title, an entire maze, made up from a corn field.  Oftentimes the maze is created with a special design that can be viewed from an aerial view (this year’s design were pictures of Ray Charles & Elvis).  During the day it’s a very interesting experience, at night it can get downright scary (think of the movie Signs).  Throw in a bunch of people going through the maze dressing in black, wearing masks, then essentially having a Haunted House in the middle of the maze, it turns into a night of Halloween entertainment.

The key to going to a Corn Maze is to go with people who get scared very easily (especially if you’re someone who really doesn’t get scared).  Part of the fun is watching them scream at every turn, squeezing your hand, and then watching them get freaked out when you ditch them in the maze.  In our group of 5, two people fill the role very nicely and made it funnier.  The actual haunted part was pretty neat, they had a haunted school bus, this big circular tunnel that made you dizzy, and of course, lumpy ground with a chainsaw guy running after you.

Something interesting/weird that happened that evening.  As we were going through the haunted part of the maze, Shannon realized that she no longer had her cell phone.  We then began to go back in an attempt to retrace our steps (not at all easy to do in a maze) and try to see if we could find it .  We also started calling it over and over again, hoping that it would ring/glow.  Then after our third attempt to call the phone, someone picked it up.  Michael (who was on the phone) started asking him questions to see if there was a place he could drop the phone off, or perhaps meet him.  Then the next thing we realized is that the guy on the phone was on the other side of the corn hedge talking to us.  Shannon really lucked out, I didn’t think she was going to get her phone back (at least not that night anyway).

Overall, not a bad way to spend a Friday night in October.

Saturday was a relaxing day for the most part.  I got to sleep in, play some Madden, and enjoy a peaceful afternoon before church.  I did manage to get one productive thing in – working on my T-shirt design idea.  I’m trying to do this play off from the iPod commercials.  Let me know what you think…

Saturday night Bethany and I went out to dinner and saw Flightplan.  It didn’t really live up to any of the hype.  Basically the whole movie ended up on the plane, and if you’ve seen one airplane movie you’ve seen them all.  The plot wasn’t very complex, and you spent the last half of the movie saying “Get to the point already!”.  The only cool thing about the movie was getting to see the new double-decker plane.  It looks really sweet!

Another Sunday, another day of football – I love Sundays in the fall.  Matt, Amanda joined Bethany and I as we went to Wild Buffalo Wings to watch the Broncos game.  We are all such Fantasy Football junkies that I brought my laptop and we were taking advantage of the free wireless over at Wild Buffalo, hence the random posting yesterday from the bar.   I love going to the bar to watch football games.  It’s so neat to watch everyone get excited when something big happened in the Broncos game, but it made losing all the more worse.  When Toomer caught that last touchdown with 5 seconds to go, people just filed out of the bar in droves.  It was most depressing…

So those are my “weekend warrior” stories, ready to kick off another busy week!