Untitled.

Today was a good day. Got up at 6:30 and and had a very leisurely morning. As in, I literally just laid on my bed with a blank mind for the first half hour or 45 minutes. No reading. No web surfing. Nothing.
At 8:30 I left the house and drove down to K-Mart where I parked for free (as opposed to the ramps downtown) and walked the 10 minutes to the office. At work yesterday I was invited to sit in on a board of directors meeting as a team of urban designers went over a powerpoint presentation of the latest and greatest Master Plan for downtown Rochester. It's pretty interesting, and I think they have some good ideas, but a LOT of it is based on the idea of less motor vehicles coming into the downtown area. The words "bicycles" and "cyclists" were used roughly 490 times in the hour long presentation. I was wondering why nobody was asking questions like "what about during the 7 months out of the year when the weather is too cruddy to use a bike in Rochester?" or "With the Mayo Clinic as a medical destination where sick and disabled people come, shouldn't we be taking into consideration the needs of their patients?"
I have a little bit more to say, but its highly unlikely that anybody actually cares to read about it (in fact it seems like nobody really reads this, period). So I'll move on.
After the meeting was out at 10:30 I walked back to K-Mart and bough myself a new leather-bound journal, which I am excited to start using! Keeping a daily journal is something I've been hit and miss with the last year or so, but I'm hoping to make more of a point to do it now that I have a fresh journal. I especially want to do it through the school year, writing out my thoughts on classes, relationships, being an RA, what God is teaching me, etc. Is there something ironic about blogging electronically about keeping an old school pen-and-paper journal? Hmm.
This afternoon I went on an invigorating and sweat-inducing 14 mile bike ride, covering a lot of southeast Rochester via streets, neighborhoods and bike paths. I stopped by the post office to mail a textbook I sold online, and then swung by Crossroads and said hi to my friends who are living and working there over the summer, and then got an email on my phone reminding me that I needed to take care of some things for Thursdays on First for tomorrow, so I came back home and did that. I was gone from 1:30 until about 4, and from 4-7 I relaxed and split time between Facebook, online news stuff (this story is particularly interesting) and the Bible. Read through the Old Testament prophet of Zephaniah and LOVED these verses.
Ultimate Frisbee is on Wednesday nights, so around 7 I drove down to East Park. Unfortunately we didn't have enough people to play until about 7:45. Unfortunately we only got to play for about a half hour before two of the 7 folks playing went down with injuries! Nothing super serious I don't think (a hamstring and something in another guy's side), but it was a bummer to have to stop because of that. Praying they're alright.
Tomorrow is another Thursday! I'm excited! Unfortunately the weather looks like it could potentially get kinda nasty later in the afternoon (as opposed to the morning, like last week, heh), so we'll see. :/ I'm optimistic it will be a great day though. You should come on down!

Another Monday post

Man, the weeks just fly by. Especially when I look and see that it's already been 7 days since my last post. Hmm.

Well, I guess a lot of things have changed, or at least happened, since my last update. Wednesday the 9th I played a sweet game of Ultimate Frisbee with a group of people, one of which I really knew, some of whom I vaguely knew, and most of which were total strangers who became friends by the end of the night. I love ultimate frisbee. Playing with people who love playing it makes it even better. I told myself going into it that I shouldn't push myself too much, that I should hold back on some of the crazier things I've been known to do when playing, and try to take care of my body and not break anything in lieu of Thursdays on First starting the next morning, but I didn't listen to myself. I ran, jumped, dove, grabbed, slapped and yelled like I didn't have to get up at 5-something the next morning. And I loved it. :)

Thursday was the first Thursdays on First & 3rd of the year! This is what my whole internship has been based around and gearing up towards. I was excited, but a bit apprehensive heading into it, being a very visible leader of the event but having no hands-on experience with it before. From my perspective, it went great! We had a decent number of volunteers who were great to work with and enjoyed being there, and the vendors (at least the ones in my area) didn't cause any trouble or make too much of a stink about anything. They're pretty much all great people.

Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate very well, and it rained off and on (mostly on) from 11am through 3pm, causing most of the lunch crowd to stay indoors, leaving many of the vendors with some long faces. My boss was |this| close to calling the market off because there was some danger of high winds which could really wreak havoc on the 10x10 tents the vendors set up. Fortunately, she decided against canceling the evening portion, and all the bands played. People responded, and the evening crowd was quite a bit heavier. I enjoyed a vegetable panini from Martinis at the Kahler Hotel. It was good!!

The band stopped playing shortly after 9pm (which I think is about half an hour later than they were supposed to) and I ran around all over the place making sure all the vendors were getting things taken down without any problems. My night ended around 9:45, making for a day of slightly over 14 hours. I loved every minute though, and can't wait to do it again this week, though hopefully with better weather!

Friday morning I slept in until about 10am. It was my birthday, and mom made me a 3 egg omelette with peppers, onions, mushrooms and cheese. It was delicious!! While it was being prepared, I admired and inspected a birthday poster that mom, Johanna and Cassia had made for me. It said "Happy 22nd birthday Christian" on it, with the word "happy" hidden 22 times on the poster. I found 17 of them the first time through, but had to look a bit more carefully for the other five. Good work, Team Family. I spent the rest of the day at home, playing baseball, mowing the lawn and hanging out with Johanna while the rest of the fam ran errands for the weekend's festivities.

Saturday night I had a party with my college friends. Sadly, a majority of the people I invited were unable to attend, but a number did come for a short while. We had a hoot playing some crazy tennis, a "closest to the stump" golf shootout, and some great food and games of Apples to Apples and Uno. My dear friend Laura was the only one who stayed the whole night. Knowing that she drove down from her home north of the cities for my party was a tremendous blessing to me, and really meant a lot to me, since most of my friends couldn't make it. Praise the Lord for His blessings. :)

Sunday ushered in party # 2, this time with all my Scout Troop friends. This one was pretty much a Troop 102 reunion, with 12 of us joining together for a bonfire and a creepily hilarious game of Apples to Apples that lasted somewhere around 3 hours. My green apple card winnings pegged me as being "intelligent" and "sexy." What more could a man want to be? :P

Today it rained all day, and accordingly I spent it curled up in a chair reading from 8am straight through to 1pm. I finished Anne Graham Lotz's The Magnificent Obsession. The last 60-75 pages were mostly decent, but I still won't recommend the book to anyone. Way too much speculation and conjecturing of biblical figure's thoughts for a Christian Living book for me. I also finished Skye Jethani's The Divine Commodity, which I found to be a thoroughly engaging and culturally accurate and relevant book that I will soon be recommending to a couple of the pastoral staff at church. I recommend it to you, dear reader as well. Find this book and read it.

I'm also now about a third of the way through Emily Bronte's sole work of fiction, Wuthering Heights. Such a turbulent book so far!! Love it though; really intriguing character interplay and intertwining. I also started a biography about George Frideric Handel. I've wanted to read a biography for a while, and for some reason I just had it in my head that I should read about Handel. We'll see if anything jumps out at me as I work through it's 175 brief pages. I also started Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution. Looking forward to digging into this much-talked about book!

That's about it for now. Looking forward to Thursdays on First again this week, and then a trip to Lake Mille Lacs this weekend! First time up there for the summer, should be great. Gonna do some serious reading/fishing, hopefully. Then the weekend after that I'll be flying down to St. Louis for the CBA convention! I went in to Christos this afternoon and talked with my boss there about that. Sounds like it's going to be a great time!!

Monday... That's my Funday!

I was going to write last night, but the site was down for some maintenance or something.

The last couple days have been great! :) Saturday was a busy day at the car lot, and even though we didn't sell anything, we got a few good leads for the week and had quite a bit of traffic through, so it was fun. Church was good too. I skipped the service and locked myself in the bookstore to read my new books! I got the following titles:
-The Complete Signature Classics by C.S. Lewis (7 of his most famous titles all in one gorgeous hardback volume. AHHH!!!!!)
-The Divine Commodity by Skye Jethani
-The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne
-Stuff Christians Like by Jon Acuff
I'm 1/5 through the Jehani book and LOVE it so far. The Acuff book I just tossed in my glove box in my car, planning to just keep it there so I have something to browse when I've got some dead time somewhere.
Sometime when I have more energy maybe I'll actually write about WHY I bought said titles and what I think of the ones I've read. Ha.
Over the weekend I also read a book written by Sherwood Eddy called Religion and Social Justice. The interesting part about it was that it was written in 1927, so it talked about things like the horrible pay for factory workers in the U.S., and the effects of the prohibition of alcohol. One of my favorite parts of the book was this quote:

"Were we not so accustomed to war, as once our forefathers were to slavery, we might see the folly, the futility and contradiction of trying to live our lives in water-tight compartments, half pagan and half Christian; at one time believing in the sacredness and protection of human life, at another preparing for its fi...erce destruction."

Nice to know people "got it" back in the 20's, too.

Other highlights of the weekend included a great game of kickball at pastor Dan's house, attending the wedding reception of a friend I know from Fusion who is the driving force behind GFC Media, the film company that I worked with when I played the role of Billy Boy Scout. If you click the GFC link you can find that particular film on their video page. Good memories.
I also had a great cup of tea with my dear friend Emily. We enjoyed the beautiful sunshine and discussed the pros and cons (well, mostly we just discussed the cons) of "seeker-friendly churches." Good stuff.


Today I got up around 9:30, ate a leisurely breakfast, spent some time in the Word, and then Julia and I went downtown to see Monroe Crossing play at the Peace Plaza! It was my third time seeing them, and they have yet to disappoint. Such tight-knit talent!
After that I took Julia to her flute lesson. I then ran some errands, during which I swung by First Alliance Credit Union, where I broke the door handle off their front entrance. I'm a pretty enthusiastic person, especially when I'm having a day filled with stuff like God's Word, live music and sleeping in, so I was feelin' it. I walked up to the door and gave it a rather authoritative tug. The handle snapped right off! It seemed to have been loose before, but I still felt pretty awesome.
There was an employee who had just walked out the door and when she realized what had happened, she took care of the issue and put the now detached door handle to a back office somewhere. We had a good laugh about it.
I spent 3 hours at Christos and then went to Panera for supper with Bob, after which I went to Soldier's Field to see if anyone was playing Ultimate. There was a group, and I jumped in. I played barefoot, since I was only in flip-flops. I enjoyed the exercise, but when your ears get dirtier than your feet, it's not as fun. Stupid cussin' high schoolers.

Tomorrow will bring about my last RDA work day before the Thursdays on First summer market kicks off!! I am really excited for everything to start up, and hope to see many friends, family and acquaintances downtown over the course of the summer.

For now though, I've written enough, and I can hear books calling my name. I'm in the middle of three right now. the Anne Graham Lotz book I've mentioned before, The Divine Commodity, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which I started on a whim last night.

P.S. I love that one of the tags I can use for this post is "accidental vandalism." Bahahaha.

It's almost 10pm. I've been up for almost 19 hours. You do the math.

Today was a bit atypical. I woke up at 3am and left the house at 4am, taking dad and Elise up to the Minneapolis airport. Dad bought a car online in Colorado Springs, and so they flew out and are currently in the midst of driving it back.

I got back to the house at 7am, leaving me 20 minutes to do whatever before getting out the door to walk to the bus stop. I made good use of the time, making sure I had everything in my bag for the day, cooking two eggs and making a full lunch to take with me for the day. All in under 20 minutes. Score.

I intentionally left all my pleasure reading at home today, intending to get some actual work done. Which I did! I finished up the book report for the R.A. book (Fireseeds of Spiritual Awakening) and got that sent in, caught up on some emails, and got a good chunk of processing done on what I want to write my Old Testament papers on this summer. I should leave my books at home more often. Hmm.

Now, typically I only work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so with it being Wednesday, that was another thing that was atypical. Well, today was our volunteer training day for Thursdays on First (TOF) volunteers. We had two sessions, one at noon and one at 5:30. There were 7 people at noon and 5 at 5:30. TOF starts one week from tomorrow, woweee! I think things are going to come together well, and I'm excited for them to do so!!

Going to the Honkers home opener tomorrow night with a group of great friends, really looking forward to it! I love me some outdoor baseball!

Sunday blogging

Holy yard work, batman!! Memorial day weekend is upon us, and today was spent in the following manner:

Slept in, and was woken up by someone ringing the doorbell around 10:30. The fam was at church, and I was in a just-woken up stupor, plus in my pajamas, so I didn't answer the door. I tip-toed down the hallway to see who it was, but whoever it was walked away before I could get a good look. Plus I was still rather bleary eyed, so I doubt I would have been able to see anyway. Ha.

Enjoyed some home made chocolate chip banana bread (reason # 1,345 I'm glad to be living at home for the summer), and then read several more short stories out of my Mark Twain book. I'm over 3/4 of the way through it's 480 pages, and still loving it. So great.

The fam got home from church and we ate lunch. The dinner table conversation drifted into a serious discussion of what various items we wanted to achieve in terms of home maintenance/improvement over the summer, specifically in terms of yard work. I grabbed a notebook and we came up with close to 20 items, from small, one person jobs like clearing up a pile of branches along one of the fence lines, to bigger projects like organizing the north shed and painting all the gates (we decided on a nice red color, which I strongly approve of). After discussing, we said a prayer, asked the Lord to bless our plans and our work, and then went to it. We grabbed wheelbarrows, pitch forks and shovels and headed for our goat pen, adjacent to the north shed. It hadn't been properly cleaned out in... well... really not since we'd gotten goats. There were several layers of hay and poop on the ground, all packed tightly into probably a 2-3" deep mess. It was incredibly heavy, soggy, dirty, and smelled utterly horrendous. We did that until it started raining (it had been threatening to since we started), accomplishing about half the job.

Of course the rain stopped as soon as we had got everything put away, but we were all tuckered (and grossed) out, and moved on to lighter work. I used the electric hedge trimmer and shaped up our shrubberies along the front side of the house while Elise, Julia, Mom and Johanna all worked to pull weeds in the various flower beds, rocked areas and shrub lines around the house. We worked from 3ish until close to 8pm, and got quite a bit done! There is now a rather substantial pile of hedge trimmings, overgrown weeds and dried out logs, sticks and twigs in our fire pit. It'll make for a great birthday bonfire in a couple weeks. :)

Post-yard work we had a great supper and then had a hilarious time playing with gummy Peach rings. The game was to tilt your head back, put the candy on the top of your forehead, and then try to get the candy into your mouth without using your hands. It was hilarious, because the best method was to rapidly and fervently raise one's eyebrows up and down to get the peach ring to slowly but surely make its way down the forehead towards the bridge of the nose, where it would inevitably fall into one of the eye sockets, covering the eye. Then, it would just be a game of chance, whether the contestant would successfully corral the candy into his or her mouth by use of tongue and gravity, or whether it would fall off the face and onto the floor, from which it would be hastily retrieved to do the whole thing over again. Watch for a video on facebook soon (hopefully). It was hysterical!!

Tomorrow being Memorial day, I'm guessing we'll spend most of it outdoors doing more yard projects. The weather looks promising for said activities, so I'll be rather surprised if anything else happens. Yay summer!

This is a happy blog post.

This weekend has been good. Spent Friday night at the mall with Anders, mostly perusing Barnes and Noble. It made me want to buy books and books and books and books and books. Especially that whole shelf stocked with classics by Dickens, Austen, Poe, Kipling, Dickenson, Twain and more. Ahhh!

Speaking of reading, I'm currently one chapter through Ann Graham Lotz's best seller, The Magnificent Obsession. It was given to me a couple weeks ago by my mentor Bob. It's had some good things to say, so far. It pulls from Abraham's example of faith. The one thing that kinda bugs me though is that when she goes into "I wonder what his peers were thinking at this point in time?" mode, she makes them all think distinctly modern-day, western-style thoughts, which then distract me and make me say to myself "actually, I'm almost positive that's nothing like what they actually thought." Oh well. Like I said, I'm only one chapter in.

Post-mall hanging, I went back to Anders house and was pleasantly surprised to discover Austin was home for the weekend, so I got to see him. The three of us, plus Scott, James and True David all played this (admittedly nerdy) roll-playing game called "We're All Gonna Die!" (click link to see rules). I was pretty skeptical that I'd enjoy myself heading into it, since RPG's of any sort are definitely not my usual cup of tea, but it was actually pretty fun. Mostly because Anders and True David are hilarious.

Today I slept in until about 10:30, an event which has occurred with a fair amount of regularity since school got out. I am most pleased about this. For the most part, today was fairly lethargic, physically, mentally, etc. I read a bit and then plaid some super slacker tennis with Johanna and Cassia. After they left to go wherever they went, I chilled in my room and watched this video lecture about the fashion industry and its relationship with Intellectual Property. Interesting stuff.

Then I headed to a friend's grad party, where I chilled for a couple hours and enjoyed the food and conversation. It was a PSEO student from Crossroads, so I got to see a lot of my college friends there, including Levi and Jerod, which was awesome.

Picking up Matt and heading for church followed the grad party. Steer gave a great sermon on the joy of prayer. Prayer is one of those topics which has come up in several different places in my life recently. It's definitely prompted me to take a closer look at my prayer life and re-examine the frequency, duration, variety and nature of my prayers.

One of the highlights of the service was definitely the SEPTUPLE BABY DEDICATION! Six parents had seven children dedicated to the Lord during the service. I love baby dedications, it's so cool to see parents taking such a public step and saying "Hey, we love our kid, and we care about his/her upbringing, and we want to show the world that we are going to strive to be intentional about how we raise our child." Love it, love it, love it. Plus the baby pictures they show on the screen are always adorable. :-)

Post-church, Matt and I drove over to Crossroads and walked from there, all the way around the southern portion of the Zumbro trail, from school out to Mayowood Road down by the closed bridge. We then walked along the road back to school. Total trip covered probably 5 miles at least. We had a great conversation covering life, relationships, politics, false religion and true religion that didn't stop until I dropped him off at his house a bit before 11pm. It was a great night!

I just checked my calendar a bit ago, and saw that I have absolutely NOTHING on it for tomorrow OR Monday. Sweet. Feeling some reading coming on, and possibly an attempt at finishing my mammoth goal of organizing the family library. Weee shall seee.

Work, gardening, life

Still feeling the high of passing the test. Or it could be the sugar buzz from these amazing brownies Julia made tonight. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Yesterday was good. Didn't do too much of any real lasting consequence, but did make a fun video with my sisters. If you haven't seen it, it's on facebook.

Today was good. Utterly beautiful weather!! Slept in, and then finished reading Fireseeds of Spiritual Awakening, by author Dan Hayes. The 2010-2011 R.A. team has been assigned to read it over the summer. It's a quick read, 150 pages. Good book, got me thinking about a few things for the school year, and for me personally.
Went in to work for my internship at the RDA this afternoon, and had a reasonably productive afternoon there. My supervisor is an incredibly dedicated and hard worker. She spent the first part of this week in Chicago, and because of a flight delay, came directly from the airport to work. Her suitcase was in her office when I walked in. Yeahwow.
This evening was great. Got home from work around 4:30, and had a great cup of Tazo tea, orange flavor. Sat alone with my thoughts outside my room on my little secluded porch and just took it all in. Lovely.
After that Julia and I went for a bike ride for probably an hour or so, covering quite a bit of ground. When we got back it was just about time for supper (stir fry, yum). After supper I did some reading from my Mark Twain collection that I bought in Omaha on choir tour, and then helped plant cucumbers in the family garden.
I clearly see the incredible value, both monetary and otherwise, of home gardens; heck $2.39 bought us enough cucumber seeds to give us a crop that will easily last the entire year. But even with helping in our garden every year, I've never derived that much enjoyment from the activities involved in gardening. I delight in dining on fresh fruits and veggies, but haven't ever really willingly tread the path from the house up to the garden to put in the work that ends in said results. I wonder if it's because of the size of our garden. It's, I believe, close to an acre in size, so no small little thing. Perhaps something smaller might be more enticing, knowing that I don't have to spend hours upon hours in the dirt. But I remember when we had a smaller one at the bus garage growing up, and I don't recall being particularly enthused about working in that either. Hm. I've never really had an interest in actively participating in agriculture/planting/gardening, I guess. I help when asked, but don't foresee having one for myself.

On the docket for tomorrow: Reuniting with a good friend from my scout troop, Anders. Should be fun. :)