Seeing Stars

Music Year In Review

2009-01-01T11:46:00.003-05:00

The topic comes a little late (seeing as how it's 2009 now...) but I figured I'd give my rundown of my favorite new albums from 2008. These are new releases that came out this past year. The usual links, with a couple songs to take a look at follows:

Honorable Mention: Ever Stays Red - On The Brink Of It All
It's hard to say that a voice is distinctive, but this band certainly has a voice that does not seem to fall in the usual categories. Combine that with some inspired melodies, and some great hooks, and you've got yourself a great album. With 12 tracks of songs that will lead you to think along with some quality lyrics, you really can't go wrong.

Download: On The Brink Of It All, Can't Explain, Look To The Hills
Website: http://www.myspace.com/everstaysred

10) Jeremy Camp - Speaking Louder Than Before
Jeremy Camp has consistently been one of my favorite artists since his debut album in 2002. Now on his 5th studio album, he has managed to find a few new things to try out on his latest effort. While there are the mainstays of his power ballads (Capture Me), and a few rockers (Giving You All Control), he's also brought in a full choir (There Will Be A Day), and enlisted the help of his wife to add some depth to some of his most heart-felt worship (Surrender). Another solid effort.

Download: There Will Be A Day, Capture Me, Surrender
Website: http://www.myspace.com/jeremycamp

9) Sanctus Real - We Need Each Other
Having not really heard much of their music outside of the hit single "I'm Not Alright", I figured I would give their newest album a shot after hearing previews. I was rewarded with 10 tracks of thoughtful rock and worship. With an opening 1-2 punch of "Turn On The Lights" and "We Need Each Other", it's really hard to not be drawn in to the album, and worship highlights such as Whatever You're Doing (Something Heavenly) show what these guys really are all about. Plus, pick up the album anywhere, and get free access to two additional songs for download.

Download: Turn On The Lights, We Need Each Other, Sing
Website: http://www.myspace.com/sanctusreal

8) Tenth Avenue North - Over And Underneath
The first of 3 debut albums on my list this year, and we find the worship band Tenth Avenue North. While most of the songs fall in to the mid-tempo rocker range, there are a few deviations that occur, such as the high-energy "Break Me Down", and the acoustic-driven ballad "Times". In my opinion, the album could have used a few more up-tempo moments, but the thoughful lyrics, and the overall album theme that points to Christ which is extremely evident makes up for this.

Download: Love Is Here, By Your Side, Hallelujah
Website: http://www.myspace.com/tenthavenuenorth

7) Remedy Drive - Daylight Is Coming
What do you get when you have 4 brothers who all love music? You get Remedy Drive. The 4 Zach brothers have been playing as an indie band for the past 5 years, and have now released their debut full-length album. While a little on the short side (35 minutes), the album certainly doesn't leave you disappointed when you reach the end, except that you are probably wanting more. With an overall vision of hope for the future, Daylight Is Coming will certainly leave you feeling better than you did before you gave it a spin. A fantastic debut.

Download: Stand Up, Daylight
Website: http://www.myspace.com/remedydrive

6) Anberlin - New Surrender
What it year it has been for Anberlin. If you read my music year in review for 2007, you will see that they were my number 1 last year. The stellar success that they had with their previous indie label propelled them on to the radar for the major labels to come bidding for their services. Universal music won out, and just over 18 months after their last full length studio album, here we have New Surrender. A look at the track-listing will make you think twice, as a track from their sophomore album (Feel Good Track) seems to have been ported. It has, and yet it hasn't. There have been some changes, but nothing that takes away from the song, and in fact, the hook is even better in my opinion. The inclusion of this song was the band's decision, as they felt that it was not given enough prominence on the previous release.

The album as a whole, however, continues the strong work that Anberlin has been known for over the past 6 years. The opening song "The Resistance" immediately grabs you doesn't let you go for the rest of the album. Ballads such as "Retrace" and "Breathe" really highlight Christian's vocals, while rockers such as "Disappear" and straight-up pop as heard on "Haight St." show the band rocking with the best of them. The album closes with the epic 6 1/2 minute "Misearbile Visu (Ex Malo Bonum)" which draws it's inspiration from Revelation, and is hautingly beautiful. Another fantastic effort, and a great step for a band as they continue to grow.

Download: Breaking, Breathe, Haight St.
Website: http://www.myspace.com/anberlin

5) Leeland - Opposite Way
For a young band, they really know what they're doing. These 11 tracks show a maturity and thoughtfulness that many cannot quite come close to. The intensity of the music on each of the tracks really plays in to the passion that they have, and the lyrical quality throughout is outstanding. After their critically acclaimed debut Sound of Melodies they really had their work cut out for them, but have come through the test with flying colors on their sophomore effort. With the theme of wanting to be going a different direction than the rest of the world permeating the disc, it's an uplifting disc to play through. Couple that with beautiful melodies, and a passion on display on each song, and you've got yourself a quality album. Wherever these guys are at now, look for it to only get better.

Download: Count Me In, Opposite Way, May Our Praise
Website: http://www.myspace.com/leelandmusic

4) Kutless - To Know That You're Alive
One of my favorite bands, and one of my most anticipated albums of 2008, these guys really know how to rock. I saw them live at Winterfest in Gatlinburg way back in January, and they played a preview of their new album back them, and got me excited to see what was on the way. 6 months later, in June, they released their album, and I was not disappointed. The opening 3 tracks (not including the extended-intro instrumental Sleeping City) just leap out and grab you, with the party-anthem "The Feeling", and the in your face rockers of "To Know That You're Alive" and "The Disease & The Cure". Ballads have been something Kutless has always done well, and tracks such as "Complete" and the minimalistic "You" highlight their ability to set a worshipful tone in the midst of the chaos. They also tread in to some rather dark territory on songs such as "To Know That You're Alive" and especially on "Promise You" about a woman that is being beaten. Kutless has frequently worked and helped raise money for battered women's shelters and similar types of orginizations, so you know that this is a song that really comes from their heart. In my opinion, probably their strongest album of the 6 they have released. If you don't have them in your collection and want to start, pick up this disc.

Download: To Know That You're Alive, Promise You, I Do Not Belong
Website: http://www.kutless.com, http://www.myspace.com/kutless

3) David Crowder Band - Remedy Club Tour Live
There probably isn't a more prominent worship band out there than the David Crowder Band. After their monster album A Collision they really have exploded in terms of popularity. Their 2007 release Remedy was another stellar entry in their library, and with the popularity of their albums, it was only a matter of time until a live compilation was released. Being a fan of live music, I'm always interested when an artist that I enjoy listening to is putting out a live cd/dvd album, as I feel like it really shows you the artist, much moreso than a studio album, if nothing because of the unpredictability of a live performance. Filmed in High Definition, the Remedy Club Tour Live CD/DVD album highlights the David Crowder Band in a live setting, with the album taken from two separate performances and edited together seamlessly to create a fantastic picture of what their live show is like. Their stage is covered in Macbooks which they use to play as instruments, and David Crowder even breaks out a guitar hero controller that has been programmed with the chord progressions and loops to play one of the songs with. With 90 minutes of music, worship, and rock, as well as tutorials, a behind the scences video, and instrument breakdowns for each and every song performed in the concert (for the guitar performer in you), there is plenty for music-loving individuals to pour over. The accompanying cd has all 16 songs performed from the dvd spit-shined to perfection. In all honesty, the superb technical performance from the band makes it hard to tell that it's a live album...at least until the audience kicks in. An excellent addition to anyone's live collection.

Download: The Glory Of It All, ...neverending..., Foreverandever Etc.
Website: http://www.myspace.com/davidcrowderband

2) Safetysuit - Life Left To Go
In one of my wanderings through Best Buy, I heard a song being played over the in-store radio that I actually really liked. I heard the name of the artist, and then did something that I rarely do, which is to make a purchase based on one song of an album. You know how this can end up most of the time; you like the one song that you heard, but the rest of the album is not at all like what you would have expected based on that song. Thankfully, this album was not at all like that, and turned out to be one of my favorites from this past year. The debut album from Safetysuit is an all-out pop record, but man do they know how to play. And I've been hard-pressed to find an album of 12 tracks that are as insanely catchy as these twelve. From the opening guitar hook of "Someone Like You", the repititious "whoa-oh" of "Apology", the vocal hook of "Something I Said", to the emotional closer "Life Left To Go", it's hard to find fault with the album. There is not a weak song on the album, and every song will have you singing along by the time the song is finishing, with the melody stuck in your head for days. The closer, "Life Left To Go" is perhaps their greatest song on the album, and also the one that is most different from anything else that they have on offer. The song tells the story of someone who wants to end their own life, and the call of someone who cares enough enough to tell this person that they matter to them. With a strong melody, and some vocal distortions that offer a different approach, it really stands out as an album highlight, and a fantastic choice for an album title. A sure winner, and well worth the purchase, this album has not been out of my player for the past 6 months.

Download: Someone Like You, Apology, Stay, Life Left To Go
Website: http://www.myspace.com/safetysuit

1) Disciple - Southern Hospitality

In the year 1992, I would have been 9 years old. I would have been playing AYSO soccer, piano, and attending elementary school in the 4th grade. In the year 1992, the band Disciple was formed. 16 years later, they are releasing their 8th full length studio album, titled Souther Hospitality. They have come a long way in their 16 years, with the jump to a major label about 3 years ago coinciding with the release of their self-titled album that has really brought them success. 2006's Scars Remain cemented their position as one of the most prominent hard-rockers in Christian music, with their song "Game On" being heard in sporting stadiums and highlight shows around the country. 2 years later, they return with their latest album, which also happens to be probaby their most melodic album ever. 12 songs inspired by their southern roots (they are local Knoxville, TN natives), the boys from Disciple have brought a different sound to their album, but still keep the rock coming.

For those that are fans of their older albums, this is almost a complete departure, as their is hardly any screaming (with the excpetion of their new "Game On" titled "321"), and melody is really the forefront of each of their songs. Title track "Southern Hospitality" opens with a little groove from the guitar, and slowly builds in to an infectious rock track. "321" will undoubtedly be the new song in sports-arenas that get the fans and team pumped up, while a song like "Liar" comes from the heart of Kevin Young, the lead singer, who was struggling with forgiveness of another.

One of the things about Disciple that has always impressed me is their strong knowledge of the bible, and if you look at the liner notes with the lyrics, you will see countless references to scripture that permeate each of their songs. The song "Whatever Reason" is the story of the prodigal son, told in Luke 15:11-32, and serves as the entire inspiration for the song, and is written from the point of view of the father, or God. "Right There" takes it's inspiration from Deuteronomy 31:6, 8and Hebrews 13:5, with lyrics like "There's nothing that's been stolen that I can not replace (1 Peter 5:10); Fear is just a distant memory, when you find love surrounds you (1 John 4:18)". If you need inspiration, you need not go any farther than listening to and reading these lyrics that Disciple writes.

The album closes on probably my favorite song of the year, "Savior". In my opinion, it is essentially the band's view on Christ, and what he is capable of doing in the lives of someone who is hurting and broken. If someone thinks that you cannot worship with instruments, this would definately be one of my first exhibits to show them that you can. Moving, heart-felt, and honest, it really speaks to their belief and love for Christ, while showing everyone what is possible. Here are the lyrics, and the song is in the sidebar.

Laughter, that's so part of her
Is something that we haven't heard
in such a long, long time
Replaced with crying, long sleepless nights
She needs your power Lord (Psalm 145:11)
Pour it all over (Joel 2:28-29)
In her darkest hour Lord (Psalm 18:4-6)
Pour it all over

Chorus
'Cause I know You love her more than I could love her (Ephesians 3:18-19)
You've already given more than I could offer (1 John 5:11)
So I put my hope in You (Psalm 39:7)
'Cause I know You can save her (John 3:17)
Jesus, Savior (Matthew 1:21)

The problem hidden inside
Is screaming something's not right
And I would lay down my world
To reach out and fix what's broken in her

Deep within every stripe is the hope that I find within You (Isaiah 53:4-5, 1 Peter 2:24)

Big News

2008-12-23T10:27:00.003-05:00

So, Mandi and I are engaged. It became official on December 14. I'm happy. That's really all that needs to be said.

Beginning And The End

2008-11-22T21:29:00.005-05:00

So the big news of the day is that Dustin has gotten himself a job. Exciting stuff, huh? He'll be doing air emissions testing down in the Gainesville, FL area. Essentially just testing the emissions from different companies and entities to ensure that they're within environmental guidelines. He's excited about it, and we're excited that he's gotten himself this job. It'll be interesting to see how things go. He starts training on Monday up in Cleveland, OH which will last for a month before heading back down to Florida to stay there for good. Did I mention that he just got back from Japan?

I've spent the last two weeks running back and forth between my place and the parent's house as they both, along with Dustin, took a two week vacation to Japan to tour as well as see my Grandmother who lives over there in Tokyo. From what I've gathered in the past couple days (they got back Thursday evening) they had a great time, and got to experience a lot of fun things. My dad finally saw Mt. Fuji (it took 6 trips before they could see it), and Dustin thought that they saw the next Amazing Race filming going on at one of the locations they were at. He and my dad couldn't think of anything else that required teams of two to be followed everywhere by a camera-man while they frantically ran around a park and rowed in canoes out to a little island in the middle of a large pond. I never watch it, so I wouldn't have any idea if it shows up in the future...but if they have an episode based out of Japan in the future, my family saw it happening for real.

All the while, it has been busy elsewhere. A couple weekend's ago I went to the youth retreat for our church just to hang out with the kids and help in whatever way was needed. They have it at a little camp that is specifically set up for youth retreats just outside of pigeon forge/Gatlinburg in the Smokies. It was an intense weekend for everyone involved, and I really hadn't seen so much outpouring of emotion at one of these things before. Our youth minister really is doing a fantastic job with the kids. And it wasn't a "everyone get baptized" weekend or anything like that, but just really a weekend to push them spiritually from wherever they were, and encourage them to grow. Probably the most intense part came for the high schooler's where they had a feet washing ceremony where they were all allowed to choose people's feet to wash as a showing of their love for them and their desire to serve. It was really neat seeing how they all responded to that invitation. I hadn't seen anything like that done before, and it was really quite moving. All in all, a great weekend.

I also went with Mandi up to Nashville for a weekend while she was in class. I had told her I would go with her and drive her to give her a break from the practically constant driving to and from that she has to do, as well as just to allow her time to rest since she's pretty much been going non-stop since the start of October. It was a good weekend, as I had time to work on some church things that I had been asked to do (speaking of which...I need to get that to them...) as well as a few other things over the course of two days, all while allowing Mandi time to rest instead of driving. Something on Lipscomb campus that I found amusing (as it was incredibly similar to Harding) came on Friday when I was just wandering around the campus to see what it looked like since I'd not really had the time to do that before. I sat down in a kind of square with a clock to relax, and saw some students coming out of a building. I looked at the clock and saw that it was about 35 after and just assumed that classes all got out around that time. There were quite a few students coming out of this building and going on to the student center or dorms or whatever, so I didn't think anything of it. About 15 minutes later, the campus seemed to explode as all sorts of students began pouring out of the other buildings. I turned to the first building that had emptied, and laughed to myself as I saw that it was the business building that had gotten out early. I guess some things just don't change.

While Mandi wasn't in class, we were able to spend some quality time with the Boren's, who we stayed with, and who I grew up with and practically serve as my 2nd parents. I hadn't seem them in almost a year, so it was really great catching up with them. Mandi and I also went to the ICE! exhibit which is on display each year at the Gaylord Hotel and Convention center. They hire a whole bunch of sculpters, bring them to Nashville a month before-hand, and they carve an entire exhibit out of ice. It's absolutely incredible the detail that you can see when you get in there. I had never been before, but had heard about it, and figured that this was the perfect opportunity. If you're in the area, you should really check it out. This year's theme is the Grinch and Who-vill, along with a spectacular Nativity Scene on your last stop before the door. Be warned, though, that they keep the building at a balmy 9 degrees, so take gloves (and your camera). I think that I'm ready for the holidays now.

Piano Time

2008-10-24T23:28:00.005-04:00

So this past week has been interesting. I got a call a week ago from a lady that works at the local YWCA. They were needing music for a benefit dinner that they were putting on, and the band that they originally had asked to come and play canceled on them. She happened to know some friends of ours from church in Oak Ridge, and I was recommended to them, so I got the call. In the end, both my brother and I went and played at the dinner for about 2 hours tonight while they were mingling around and eating. The dinner was a benefit for the YWCA where they honored local women in Oak Ridge in different fields that they thought had done outstanding service work to the community. It turned out to be a pretty decent evening, and we had dinner to boot.

(Seeing as how I'm editing this 3 weeks after I started...I'll just move on to the next post).

Balloons?

2008-10-06T20:06:00.003-04:00

The other day, they were having a hot-air balloon festival, I guess you could say, so Mandi and I decided to go on over there and check it out. It wasn't really anything more than a bunch of local artists setting up their shops to sell some of their home-made items, and having about 20 balloons or so set up and lit-up once it got dark. It was a fun time, and we actually got in at quite a discount since we ran in to a church friend who was one of the people taking payments as people were coming in. How great is that? Here's a couple pics, including the Energizer Bunny hot-air balloon, which they said is currently the largest one in the world.

Soccer has been ongoing, and our team is doing alright so far. We didn't play all that well yesterday, but still managed to pull out a 2-2 draw. Mandi has been playing quite well recently, and even completely schooled a guy on the other team a couple weeks ago. I don't think he really did much else the rest of the game after that. I have to say that I was quite impressed. It's still been fun, which is really the main thing, although there seems to be more and more teams that are really complete jerks. And not just the guys either, but even the girls on the teams are jerks. I'm really not liking the fact that everything was combined in to one league like it was, but what can I do about it? At least our team is pretty cool.

Other than that, not a whole lot else going on. Dustin is still looking for a job, so keep him in your prayers as that goes on. Work is going without too much trouble. We're busy, but not overwhelmingly so which is really about where we want to be at. We're having an open house this week in honor of the company being around for 10 years, so I spent a lot of the past month taking pictures of people and all the instruments at work that I'm allowed to for displays that were set up and such. I guess it really is a big deal to have been around for that long, especially with the start that they got. It should be interesting. Just have to see how many people actually show, considering that they sent invitations out to probably around 1000 people. Should be a good time, nonetheless. One thing is for sure though...we won't be working hardly at all that day.

Pain

2008-09-24T22:46:00.004-04:00

This past weekend was spent in Tuscaloosa, AL at the 2008 Club Sectionals Ultimate Frisbee tournament. Unfortunately for me, given untimely injuries in the previous months, I was not able to participate as a player, although I still wanted to be there to see friends and just enjoy a weekend away. I assumed "coaching" duties, and basically handled everything off the field to try and help play go without too much of a hitch. The subbing and such seemed to work well, and it seemed like everyone was alright with how I handled it, so hopefully that was the case. The team did well, finishing 5th out of 12 (our highest ever), even with finishing our last game with 8 players (when you play with 7) since a number of our team had to leave to get to the airport in time to get home. For having not played together in so long, our team played remarkably well for a number of games, with quite possibly our best games coming in the morning, which is absolutely unheard of. We destroyed the 2nd-ranked team in our pool 15-5 on Sunday morning, which for an Apocalypse team is absolutely huge. All in all I was quite pleased, although I wish I could have been playing, but I'm glad that I was able to do my part. Hopefully everyone on the team that played has mostly recovered from their injuries and sore muscles at least most of the way by now. For your viewing pleasure, here are a couple pictures and a video of the action.

3 Months in Review?

2008-09-14T23:01:00.006-04:00

Man. I don't even know where to start. I'd actually completely forgotten about this over the past few weeks...or months apparently. There has been a lot going on though...let's see.

The first was the trip to Mexico in late June. The trip ended up going quite a bit better than I had thought it might. I rather enjoyed going, and look forward to going back again. Mandi and I met a professor at the college of Monterrey, who just so happened to be a physics professor. He wanted to give us a tour of the college, and we ended up seeing where he worked, both at the college and at the local high school. His boss also ended up offering me a job should I want to go down there at some point. How crazy is that? It seemed more like just a nice comment, but while we were walking out, the professor said that she was serious. I guess things are just a little more laid back down there. It was a great trip though, and it was good working with the church and the kids especially during the VBS. I ended up driving while down there (that's quite a trip), as well as leading singing for the VBS (in Spanish no less). Mandi and I also got some good time working with the members from the church and the kids that went along. All in all, an excellent experience, and one that we hope to go back on next year...although there are a couple changes that we both hope would be made.

Dustin has completed his internship working with me this summer as of Friday. He's now in to the fun phase of hunting for a job. Hopefully he'll be able to find something that he's looking for and excited about soon, but in the meantime he'll continue to stay here and look around.

I made a trip to SC to visit a Mr. Paul Murphy and hang out for a day or two while Mandi went to see Tara. It was nice to go back, seeing as how it had been quite a while, and I even got to witness how a Murphy vacation gets underway. It's really quite impressive when you sit back and think about it. I'm assuming that it ended up going well.

The summer was spent playing soccer, and getting injured in the process. Unfortunately, that is ruling me out of the frisbee tournament coming up this weekend since I haven't been able to really run or anything for a bit. It's healed up now, and I've slowly gotten back in to running and stuff for soccer, but it's too early to get back to it. Plus, I haven't touched a frisbee for about the whole summer, so I'll be going as the official subber for the team. I guess I'll fall under the idea of a coach. That sits fine with me, and it will definately be good to see some old friends that I haven't seen for a while.

We're once again coming up on the new soccer season with the Champions League getting underway starting tomorrow, and European leagues having been in action for a couple weeks. I'm looking forward to it, as usual. World Cup qualifying is in full swing, with the U.S. team having posted 3 victories in their first 3 games of the semi-final round of CONCACAF qualifying. They are definately struggling when it comes to having any quality forwards...but for the time being it's not as pressing an issue since the competition is still fairly early. However, once the finals roll around later on next year, they'll need to start producing the goods. Hopefully they'll be able to pick it up, and get the offensive end going better.

The new TV season is about to pick back up. Say hello to House. Mandi and I just got through watching most all of season 4 on DVD over the course of the past week or so to get her caught back up, so I'm excited to get things back under way. Last season ended under some pretty strenuous circumstances, so it will be interesting to see how things get resolved with the new season.

One of my most nerve-wracking moments of the summer came a couple weeks ago when I ended up speaking at church on Wednesday for our class. As things are currently, we have all the adults (i.e. college and above) in a single class that has a speaker that rotates around between different members of the congregation each week. I spoke on the need to have a song in our hearts for God. I basically took some of the church's most well-known songs (Amazing Grace, Just As I Am, and Take My Hand, Precious Lord) and by telling the story behind why they were written, showed how people need to have a song for God through how they live. The video is what I played at the end just to try it all together. The video is taken from David Crowder Band's Live DVD, with the Scriptures added in by me, plus I just wanted to try and see how the video thing worked. It's just a taste of what I attempted to do. Overall it seemed to go alright, so hopefully it was able to make something of an impression. The song's title, "I'm Just Trying To Make You Sing" basically sums up the message that I was wanting to get across. Enjoy.

The Month In Review

2008-06-21T21:39:00.004-04:00

Hello again...another month has absolutely flown by. What might have been happening you might ask? Quite a lot. Let's get started.

First off has been soccer on the weekends. Our team ended up second in the league I think, after getting wins for the past 4 or 5 weeks in a row. Mandi had quite possibly her best game ever this past weekend with some stellar defense. She even set a pick on someone on the opposite team. Quite impressive. On a much grander scale, the Euro 2008 tournament has been going on, with quite a few excellent games (Turkey vs. Czech Republic being one). There is one more team in the semis to be decided with Spain playing Italy tomorrow afternoon (ABC 2:45 ET). There have been a number of surprises so far (France's no-show, Turkey's continued escapes, 0 free-kick goals) and it has been exciting, so I'm looking forward to seeing who makes it on past tomorrow. It should be a good game.

A major event that Mandi and I participated in late last month was a week-long kayaking clinic. Over the course of the week, we worked on all things kayaking, and got to the point where both of us could flip up from an upside-down position while underwater. The end of the week trip was going down the Hiawassee river on about a 6-hour trip filled with rapids and playtime. It was a good week, although it definitely had it's rough moments, but all in all turned out well. Given my dreams of drowning and death prior to it starting, it worked out alright I guess.

I have been drafted in to play softball for our Oak Ridge church league team over the past couple games. This has been interesting given the fact that the last time that I played softball was about 3 years ago. Suffice it to say that I figured I wouldn't be doing all that much, but then I got stuck at 2nd base. Apparently I've got more softball skill than I gave myself credit for, as I've managed to get a number of nice plays in each game on defense. The same cannot be said of my hitting ability though. Basically, my hitting strategy is to make contact, and then out-run the play to first base. Since it's not an overly competitive league, this generally works out all right since you can count on at least 1 bobble of the ball before they can get the throw off. Just don't get me up to bat with 2 outs since...well, I'm by no means a guaranteed man on base.

My brother has also been golfing a lot recently, so today Mandi, Dustin and myself hit the driving range since there was no ultimate being played like they thought it would be. It was quite humorous to start with, although by the end of our buckets I would say that we were all hitting them fairly well. At least for once a decade golfers. I bet anyone that actually plays would have been watching us and wanting to kill us for our lack of technique and whatever else, but we had a good time killing an hour hitting.

We also went camping with our church group near a friends house that has some property by part of a lake. It was a fun couple of days with swimming, grilling, badminton, some diving for frisbees off of docks, fishing, and general fun just hanging around outside. The pic is just a little panorama shot I was playing around with on my camera. The function would probably work a little better if I had a tripod to keep it steady on, but oh well. Here's also a picture of some fire, since you really can't go camping without a fire. Although, I guess when it's 85 degrees outside you probably don't need a fire, but it's still good for making s'mores. Or for recalling funny stories about fires not being lit by fireworks for big camp presentations.

These pictures were taken with my b-day present, which was a new camera. It's a Canon PowerShot S5IS. I had been wanting to get a digital camera for a while, but had never really seriously looked around for anything about one. However, when my b-day rolled around I figured that it was what I was going to get. I've been quite pleased with it, as it's got a quick shutter, so there isn't a lot of blurred pictures, even during action shots, it has a 12x optical zoom so you can get far objects large in the frame fairly well, it's got some cool features that have to do with accenting or even eliminating colors, the cool panorama feature, and it even takes video with stereo audio included. All in all, it's been a lot of fun playing around with it and taking pictures and videos just to see how it holds up. The only thing that I really have yet to do is to use the cables included and hook it up to a big-screen tv and see how the picture and video transfers when seen on a large set.

So...I think that's just about all the high points from the past month of action. I'm thinking my next post will be on what Luke questioned about regarding US soccer players, especially with the more engaging World Cup 2010 qualifiers coming up (after the exercise tomorrow against Barbados).

The Finals

2008-05-18T21:14:00.005-04:00

This past weekend marked the end of the middle school soccer season (as well as my birthday, coincidentally enough). The weekend was spent at 4 soccer games in a tournament setting. Saturday went well, with the team playing alright and soundly beating our opponents. So much so that we could play everyone, which is always nice. Today, however, was a different story. Everyone seemed a step slow, and didn't seem to have the desire to win. We barely scraped in to the final with a 2-2 draw in the morning game, which allowed us to advance on tie-breakers. The final started brightly enough, with our team getting 2 goals in the opening 10 minutes. After that, it was all down hill though. I think the team figured that they were going to coast the rest of the way, and allowed the other team to get a goal back before half-time. After half, our team just didn't show up. We ended up losing 6-2. What can you say though...sometimes it's just not your day. They had a good season though. We had a 7-1-1 record, and scored 56 goals. I can't say that's all that bad.

Due to Whit's questions regarding how the leagues around Europe interact with the Champions League, I'll go in to a little explanation. I think it's fitting, seeing as how the premier European club competition has it's final on Wednesday at 2:45 ET on ESPN 2. The first all English final features Manchester United and Chelsea. There really isn't a whole lot between the two teams, with United just beating out Chelsea to the English Premiership title, although if Chelsea wins the Champions League, I think they will be alright with losing out. It might not be the most exciting of matchups, although an early goal will open the game up. I'm hoping for an early goal, and a United win.

But how did we get to this point? The process really starts two seasons earlier. UEFA (the European governing body of soccer) assigns points to the individual leagues around Europe based on the performance of the individual teams in European tournaments. I guess it really starts even earlier, since these points are determined for the previous 5 European seasons. They are given points (2 for a win, and 1 for a draw) in competition, with the point total then divided by the number of teams from the country participating. So, if 3 teams from Spain played, with a 6-2-4 record, they would have 14 total points divided by 3, for a coefficient of 4.667. Each country that's a member of UEFA is totaled this way. Then, based on their coefficient, the number of teams that are allowed in to the competition are decided. The top 3 get 4 teams, the next 3 get 3 teams, the next 8 get 2 places, and everyone beneath gets 1 place. To make things even more complicated, there is a second tier of tournament competition in Europe known as the UEFA Cup. The point totals are used to determine placement for this as well. That means that the number of teams from a league are determined based on how the teams do 2 seasons prior. In other words, the points are determined in 2007, in order to be used for the 2008-2009 season, and not the 2007-2008 season. For more in-depth discussion, see the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_coefficients#League_coefficient.

Now, the top teams from the coefficient calculation are given 2 automatic places into the competition. These are determined in the previous league season, with the top two teams at the end of the season given the automatic berths. If that's not incentive to play in every single game to win during your regular season, I don't know what is. Did I mention how much money a team gets for being in the tournament? The next teams down play in a play-off with top qualifiers from other leagues that didn't get an automatic berth. Convoluted, huh?

After the qualifying rounds are played, we have the group stage draw. The top-seeded teams are placed in a bowl together, followed by the next group in their own pot, until all 32 teams are accounted for. This is to help keep the stronger teams from being placed all in the same group. Each group of 4 plays a home and away series over the course of the first half of the season. Matchday's 1-6 are played from late September until late November/early December. After these games, the top two teams from each group advance to the knock-out stages. which kicks off once February rolls around. The 3rd place team from each group drops down in to the UEFA Cup competition at the mid-point of that tournament. The 4th placed team is finished in Europe.

The knock-out stages are where the tournament really kicks off. The teams play a home and away series, with the winner advancing to the next round. For the duration of the knock-out rounds, away goals count double in the event of a tie. In other words, this encourages the visiting team to go on the offensive. For example, say the first game of the series ends in a 1-1 draw. The advantage here is with the visiting team. In the second leg of the series, all they need is a 0-0 draw or a win to advance. However, if they draw 0-0, the visiting team is at a disadvantage. Their home game requires a victory, as any sort of tying draw will see the visiting team go through. This set-up really leads to some intense matches, where people know that they either score or go home. Even with this set-up, there are draws where away goals scored are equal. In this case, the second leg of the series goes to a 30 minute overtime period, followed by a shoot out if the scoreline hasn't changed at all.

The round of 16, quarterfinals and semifinals all follow this format, with the winning teams advancing on. The final, played in mid-May, is a one-off game, with the winner taking all the glory. Victory allows celebration for the night, but no guarantee of being back in the competition the following year as that is determined by the final league standings of the individual countries. It really makes each team play for the whole season, as not finishing in the top 2 or 3 teams means that you most likely won't be playing in Europe, at least on the big stage. This tournament really is the best of the best, as it is the solid performers from the individual leagues around Europe that were able to play at a consistently high level throughout their entire season. It's what makes it the best club soccer tournament in the world, at least as far as European teams are concerned.

Hopefully that was a semi-coherent explanation of how the tournament as a whole comes along. It's hard, especially in comparison to American sports, to think how the way your team, and really your entire league, finished 7 seasons earlier can affect your placements so much. If you want to see some great soccer, tune in Wednesday at 2:30. I know I will. At least by recording it.

For future reference, the US Men's National Team has some great games coming up against England at Wembley (May 28), Spain (June 4) and Argentina (June 8). All these games can be seen on the ESPN family, either on Classic or ESPN2. Plus, this summer marks the European Championships, played every 4 years, where 16 teams from around Europe will play for national pride. The entire tournament will be broadcast for the first time on ESPN in the US. Here's looking forward to a great summer of soccer.

The Feeling

2008-05-08T22:51:00.004-04:00

Dustin's graduated. It's pretty crazy to think that my brother has finished up his undergraduate college education. I spent this past weekend in Gainesville, Florida in order to attend his graduation ceremony. They split up the college of liberal arts, since it would have been about 2000 people total going in one ceremony, so we had the early session. Now, I don't know exactly how many people graduated at Harding during my walk, but I figured this had to be just about comparable, and I felt like my graduation took about 3 hours. Well, they defied my expectations...and managed to do everything they needed to do in 2 hours. I was impressed. I hadn't heard names read that quickly as students walked across the stage at any graduation I've been to before. The students all had a card with their name on it, getting rid of the need to have a specific list and order to go by, and they simply handed the card to the reader who would spout it off as quickly as possible and move on to the next one. The ceremony started at 2, and we were out the door by 4. I think more graduations should subscribe to the auctioneer style of reading off the names.

Today we drove back down to Atlanta to drop Dustin off for his final national frisbee tournament. He was flying out to Boulder for the week before college nationals kicks off next Friday. He won with Florida in 2006, but they lost last year at some point around the quaterfinals I believe. He's fairly certain that they've got a good shot again this year, but of course they'll have to play well as always. We'll see what happens when next weekend rolls around. Speaking of frisbee...I need to go and vote about captains for the team for the upcoming club sectionals...in September...since when did we do stuff early?

Since we were in the area, we went to the Georgia Aquarium, located in downtown Atlanta. This is the only aquarium in the world to hold whale sharks, and it has 4 of them. They are housed, along with a number of other fish and small sharks, in a tank that contains about 6.2 million gallons of water. The wall of glass holding this in is 2 feet thick, and consists of 6 panels about 50 feet high that were molded together by heat once they were brought on site. It really is a pretty spectacular place to go see. It was even featured on the Today show a number of months back, so if you're ever in the area, I would certainly recommend it. Plus, just across the street, you can go to the World of Coca-Cola if you so desire.

I'm fairly pumped about the next few months of music, as there will be a number of releases which I am looking forward to (in case you hadn't seen the ever-growing listing on the right). Right near the top of that list is the new Kutless cd which releases in about a month on June 24. They released a single for download for free on their website yesterday, so off I went to get it so I could get a little sneak-peak at the album. I'm a fan of it, so check it out if you've liked any of their stuff before. It'll take about 2.5 minutes of your time...or probably about as long as it took to read through what I've written today.

The European soccer season is quickly drawing to a close, with many of the final round games being played either this weekend or next weekend. In Spain, Real Madrid has already clinched the title, and they were applauded on to the field by the arch-rivals Barcelona. As if that were not humiliating enough, they were trounced 4-1, allowing Real to sweep them for the first time in about 20 years. Ouch. The English Premiership also has a day of tense games tomorrow, with the title and relegation teams being decided over the course of hours. Manchester United and Chelsea are tied on points, with United having the lead based on goal difference. Should United win, they will retain the title they won last year. Any other result would require Chelsea to not win in their final game. At the other end of the table, 3 teams are battling to keep from being relegated, or sent down a division. There are 2 more relegation spots left, with each team needing a win to keep from going down.

I would like to see something similar to this in American sports. There really isn't any drama at the end of a season, except for who will/will not make the post-season. Sure, it's disappointing if your team doesn't make the cut for the playoffs or whatever, but there's always next year. There's no threat of being sent down a league and having to play your way back up, you just are humiliated for a season at not advancing out of the regular season, and come back again next year on level terms with everyone. I know nothing like that would ever happen...but I think it does make for a better over-all season, knowing that every result counts, and that not getting the results can see you demoted.

At any rate, it's nice to be back home, as it's been an incredibly long week. It was non-stop at work from Monday at 7 through about Friday at 3:30 or so...and I'm just worn out. It's time to just kick back and relax for the night, which is quite an inviting proposition.

Never Going Back To OK

2008-04-22T20:57:00.004-04:00

It's strange, how stuff really can get in the way. Some of it is important, and some of it really doesn't matter at all. Things have been going well for the past few weeks since I last posted a quick update. Work is good, if slightly on the stressful side due to the volume of work expected of us recently. There are just projects that continue to come up, with little or no time to take a breather. It's good, as a whole, since that is what makes the company money. It's bad, from a personal standpoint, because there is never any time to further train me on things that they are wanting me to do. All 3 of us are essentially running around like crazy all day, with me doing the surprisingly large number of things that I can do on my own, and my two bosses more or less trying to keep their heads above water as people keep coming to them with rush work needing to be done in a day (or even less). Hopefully there will be something of a break in the near future, as one of my bosses will again be out of town, and there are a number of things that I'm needing to learn how to do to be able to help out more. With how things are going right now, though, I don't really see that happening.

Soccer is actually going surprisingly well. We are 4 games in to the season, and have won all of them, with scores of 6-3, 6-3, 4-0, and 5-2. They seem more like a set of tennis box scores for the end of a match. We're (the coaches) are not entirely sure whether our team is a lot better than we would have thought, or if dropping down 1 division from where we were last year put us with a bunch of teams that are not anywhere near as good as they were last year. It's a strange predicament. I think we have a better team this year, but not to the point where we're scoring 4 or more goals per game. It's a good place to be though, as the kids are having fun, and we're able to play everyone, whereas should things have been like they were last year, there would maybe be 2 subs out of 5 that we would play, with the other three never getting in. So I guess for all involved, we're doing alright. The soccer that I am playing (along with Mandi) has also finally gotten under way after all the weekends rained out. Unfortunately, they've scheduled many of our games at 5, so we only play a half, but it's been fun nonetheless.

Probably the biggest news to have occurred in the past few weeks is that I will be going with our church on a mission trip to Escobedo, Mexico. I'll be having to work extra before and after since I don't officially have any time off, but we'll be down there for a week working with a church that our congregation sponsors, and putting on a VBS. I've heard that I'll even see Whit while I'm down there, although I wasn't sure if he would still be there come the end of July. It just kind of came up as an opportunity, and I thought it would be one that would be worth taking advantage of. Now, for next year, to have some vacation time and squeeze in camp as well as this would be fantastic.

It has certainly been an interesting couple of months. Although it's been somewhat sporadic due to scheduling conflicts and events, I have been teaching our small group on Sunday evenings. All of you that know me know that I am of the quiet variety and often do not speak. It was difficult at first, but has gradually been getting easier. It's a lot like it was for teaching labs at UT while I was there, in that you're pretty nervous your first few outings, but it gets better as time goes on. I've been teaching on prayer, and it's been a good study for our group, I believe (certainly not based on anything that I have done personally). Some people have been turned off by it I think, since our numbers aren't as big as they are on Sunday morning, but a lot of it, in my opinion, is that a number of people in our group don't want to get in to anything except the superficial. Mandi and I both get that impression a lot, just based on how things go in class Sunday morning, and discussions that have ensued. We've also discussed it a lot between ourselves on how it seems that few people wants to be pushed, but simply show up and have a good time, and throw in a little "spiritual" discussion on the side.

I don't know, but it seems like that is such an easy place for everyone to slip in to. It's like those "highs" you get when you go on a mission trip, or to a retreat or something that is a little out of the ordinary that makes you feel so different for a while...and then it's back to your usual self. The fire that you had is gone, and everything just degenerates back to where you feel comfortable, which is an area where you aren't pushing yourself to grow or to think, but just to go through the motions for another day. I'm not saying that I'm always on a spiritual high, since I know that is not how things go, but it does seem hard for people, in general, to want to get back up to those peaks without some extraordinary event. I don't know if it's even a general trend for people to not want to be pushed while at church or devos or whatever...

I have to say, that doing these lessons, and needing to take time to study and prepare and everything has been a good experience for me. I'm even to the point now that I'm enjoying teaching and stuff, and hopefully I'll be able to do more of it in the future. I just hope that the feeling that I have while I'm doing it doesn't wear off the second my time to teach is done. I know it's impossible to never go back to OK, but I hope that, at some point, I'll be able to find a way that I can keep it from happening so easily. And maybe that will encourage others to strive for more as well.

Move Me

2008-03-28T20:18:00.003-04:00

Once again, it's been a while. However, as I type this I am sitting in my new apartment that I have been moving in to over the past couple weeks. Slowly, but surely, things are starting to get settled in. There's still a lot of boxes laying around, and I'm finding random things that I had forgotten I even had, but it's starting to get cleaned up. So that's essentially the thing that's been going on. Couple that with the usual work, as well as soccer coaching and stuff, and well...the weeks just fly right on by.

Work is still going quite well. It's been busy this week, although not quite to the point that I thought it would be since my boss has been out of town all week visiting his family. We've gotten some new instruments to play around with at work which has been exciting. It's an updated system to what we've had before, but it makes everything easier, so now things that needed to be done with polaroids and a ruler can now be done all on the computer screen while you're working with a sample. It's good stuff. I've also been running the project that was assigned to me a couple weeks ago to do on my own, so it's enough to keep one going through the day without realizing where the hours are going.

Soccer has improved since the incidents of earlier in the month. The team still isn't as good as you would think a group of middle schoolers would be, but we've come to realize that and are just trying to make it fun, while hopefully getting the ones that really are far behind in terms of skills a little bit better. We'll see how it goes. There are possibilities for it to be a good year, but just as many for it to turn out pretty horribly. We're just really hurting at a number of positions that are key, such as not having a true forward, and a goalie situation that really is not all that great. But what can you do?

At any rate, just wanted to throw something up here. I've got the weekend to get things cleaned up some more with Mandi at a girls retreat for the weekend, so I'll be cleaning and relaxing for the most part I believe. Hopefully I'll get back to putting up some things of substance in the near future.

Dizzy...

2008-03-04T21:15:00.002-05:00

Wow...I hardly realized that it had been a full month since I've updated this thing. Times around here have been busy, for both good and bad reasons I guess. To start, middle school soccer is going...but not well. We had to cut the JV team after having them practice for a month due to a number of kids just quitting, and mostly down to people not turning in paperwork to commit to the team when we've got to have all the info and money turned in by this Friday. And, of course, we've now got the angry JV kids parent's emailing us about why we don't have a team and how come we can't keep both. It's really not that hard, when you're required to have 15 players to make a team, 8th graders must be on varsity, and you have a total of 29 people signed up with 13 of them being 8th graders. There just isn't a way to make it work. Last year, we didn't have any problems with the parents, they were all nice, they were supportive, they worked with us. This year, I guess they figure since we did it for a year we're pros with nothing else to do, and they complain non-stop about every decision and how we're not in constant communication with them 24-7 about why their kid isn't on the roster. I don't know. I realize that parents want their kids to be amazing at everything...but we're not going to put 6th graders on a varsity team with 8th graders that are 2 feet taller, especially when the 6th graders, quite frankly, really don't know how to play soccer for the most part. There were a number of 7th graders that we were sorry to cut, but when you have to cap your number at 18...there's only so many you can take. The head coach just about quit last week because of the constant complaining for all the parents...it's just ridiculous. If they want it done better, they should do it themselves. Sorry, just venting there I guess.

The other thing that has taken up my time has been the whole being sick thing. I'm pretty sure that most everyone in the country was sick this past month, and I was one of them. I'm still coughing a little bit, but it's substantially better. I'm guessing that it's not good to cough for a week straight, but I hate going to the doctor, and then there's that whole insurance thing. On the bright side, I've made it through most of the past few days without really coughing any, so that's been a definite bonus. Boo on being sick.

Tomorrow is a big day, as far as work is concerned. I get to go out and be a project lead on something, which coincidentally enough is for SRS in Aiken, SC. So, perhaps in a couple years, if we continue doing work for them, then I might have a couple contacts down there if we decide to head that way. It's doing micro-hardness testing...which I won't go in to detail about, since I really don't know anything about it. The idea is basically that you're looking at tiny areas (microns), and seeing how surfaces and substances react to having a load (weight) place on to them. It'd be like taking a slab of concrete, setting it up, and then dropping a 500 lb mass on it, and seeing how it deforms. Just on a micron scale instead of something you would see out in public. It should be interesting, and I'll get to play with some expensive equipment.

In church news, I'm leading our Sunday night small group study, which is focusing on prayer. It's been good, I hope, and we've gone through about 2 weeks thus far. (On a side note, I just got interrupted by another irate parent. I don't even know how he had my phone number.) It's been good stuff in the group, and I've managed to steal a few ideas from things that went on at Harding. So it's been good stuff, and certainly something for our group that I don't think many of them have experienced before. Hopefully things will continue to go well. At any rate, just wanted to give an idea of what's been going on.

What Could Be Better

2008-02-05T22:10:00.000-05:00

Man, I sure am doing horribly on keeping this thing updated recently. It's been busy, but then again, who hasn't been busy. The job is still interesting, even after a month, and I've been doing a little bit of new stuff every day, which has been good. This past week was especially hectic as one of the 3 guys on the team (including me) was out of the office for 4 days (that was not me). He was on an interview up near where his family lives, so hopefully he can get that job and like it and move up there to be with them. That meant, however, that I got to do a lot, and basically was more busy than I have been at any other point in my time there.

Soccer with Cedar Bluff has been going for about the past 3 weeks now as well. It's looking shaky at the moment as far as getting two teams goes. We've got 27 names of people that have showed up at some point, but only about 21 are regularly making it to practice. We need to have 30 consistently in order to have 2 teams, so hopefully we'll make it. Otherwise we'll have to cut a number of people, and that will not be any fun. Good thing I'm not the head coach that has to make the final decision though. Haha!

The thing that has been taking a lot of time up recently has been the planning of this 55+ dinner that our young professionals group is hosting. It's going to be a lot of fun, but Mandi and I are having to spend a lot of time getting things organized and finished up in order to get it moving. We're slowly getting there though, as we'll have invitations and stuff ready by tomorrow, and I'm working on the slideshow as we speak . I haven't ever used Windows Movie Maker, but it's a pretty handy little gadget, as far as basic video editing is concerned. Hopefully it'll turn out well in the end. The main thing will be getting pictures from all the couples attending to include in it, since the theme of the dinner is "Remember When...". So we're wanting pictures from their wedding and recent pictures as well at this Valentine's dinner. It should be good stuff.

And on a completely random note, how about them Giants? I caught the last 2 minutes of the game, but that was enough for me. I'm just glad they beat the Patriots. Then again, who, outside of Patriots fans, isn't? Note this day, as it'll probably be the only day that I talk about football.

Island

2008-01-22T22:19:00.000-05:00

As many people who write these things probably do, I had grand schemes of posting more consistently, and further even having compelling things to blog about. And here we are 3 weeks in to the year, and I've failed miserably in both aspects. Even tonight, I really don't have anything of interest to talk about. I just felt compelled to put a little bit up here since it's been right on a week since I last updated. How lame.

The past week has been busy as well. The job is continuing nicely, although today was quite slow. I put together a long string of left-over paperclips from all the paperwork that I go through while I'm there, I read the news (a lot), I went to a training meeting which lasted for about 30 minutes, and then I started playing around with new computers and equipment trying to get it working. I also saw how you etch a surface of a metal (you get cool chemicals like HF, HCl, and HNO3) and place it on top of the metal, and let it eat it away. It's used to see the grain boundaries (the way the material is fitted together I believe) in a failure analysis, since they're investigating a piece of something that broke during use. Pretty intriguing stuff. Tomorrow morning we're bringing the heavy-duty stuff. I've also been sick with some sinus/head cold symptoms, although it has finally passed I believe.

On a pretty exciting front, our small group is putting on a dinner (for Valentine's day, but not until the 24th) for the 55+ group at church. We're cooking for them (there's a professional chef in our group), and having some games, a slideshow, and pictures of each of the couples that comes that night. I think that it will turn out to be pretty cool stuff. Mandi and a couple of the other people in the group are planning, and I'll be helping out with some of the slideshows and game things. Speaking of games, we're putting on a Newlywed Game type thing with a few of the couples, and a couple from our own group and seeing how they do. So if you can think of any good questions to ask either the husbands or the wives, let me know.

It's been bitterly cold here the past few days. Really since about last Thursday. I know, it's really nothing compared to those northern states, but for getting down to 12 and 13 degrees around here, it's getting pretty cold. I envied the Murphy's in AmSam when they posted the other day about the temperatures. Those were days that I wished I lived on an island as well...Hopefully, in the next few days, I'll have a post of substance. But until then...

Say All I Need

2008-01-15T21:24:00.000-05:00

It's been hectic. I've felt as if I should put something on here many times the past few weeks, but just haven't had the time/energy to do so. Work has been going exceptionally well. In the past 2 weeks I have learned how to use a plasma etcher, coat samples in carbon, prepare samples for viewing in a TEM (transmission electron microscope), prepare bulk samples of asbestos (which comes in a variety of sizes), get some basic introductory walk-throughs on using the TEM and the SEM (scanning em), basic training in working with hot (in the nuclear sense) materials, as well as some of the entry-level stuff of logging samples, and handling the paper-work. It has been action-packed almost every day...except on those days when they're working on the classified work they are contracted on...in which case there are some interesting articles on Google news, and some not-so-interesting articles that hold some special kind of appeal on those days. All in all though, it's been a lot of fun.

I had another company calling today wanting to talk with me about possibly working with them, and I've been trying to interface with them, but with being at MCL from 8-5, it's hard to find a time to contact them. We're working on setting up a phone interview I think, but given the relatively short amount of time before my trial period is over...I don't know what will happen exactly. But I guess it doesn't hurt to keep the options coming until I've got something firm. I feel like we're just about there though...

I'm signed on to once again coach the Cedar Bluff Middle School Giants Soccer Team. Man, that's a long school name. But if it's anything like last year, it should be a blast. The only difference being that this year I'm working at a real job, which I don't know if they'll allow me to take off at 3:30 on practice days...hopefully I can find some kind of schedule that will allow me to leave early on those 2 days of the week and let it work. If not...I guess I won't be able to coach. It would be a shame as well, since I really did have a lot of fun last year, and there will be a number of the same kids coming back to play since I think that we only had 3 8th graders. And we've apparently got some incoming 6th graders that are pretty good and have played competitive for a number of years...so we should hopefully have a very good pair of teams. I'll just need to find a way to bargain for my working hours.

Last night was fairly interesting. As I think I've mentioned before, I've been playing basketball fairly regularly (at least once a week) with some people from church and elsewhere that play in a 3-on-3 league. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am absolutely awful at basketball. I have managed, however, to see some signs of improvement. Yesterday was a fairly significant step forward, as I managed to score about 10-15 points per game (we played 4 on 4 full court to 50), and was fairly consistent at hitting my lay-ups off of steals and quick breaks. You may laugh, but those lay-ups were pretty dang hard to hit...when I was all by myself...standing still beneath the basket...and had about 3 attempts before someone caught up to me...yeah... But last night I was actually making them on the dribble, and I even got my 3-pointers to go in. Now, I have a terrible shooting technique, since I shoot from my shoulder. I think Mandi told me that I shoot like a girl...and I probably do. But I make it work, and nobody outside of brother has blocked me yet, which is strange since he's the shortest person that I've played against. At any rate, my "signature shot" is dribbling across the top of the arc from left to right and putting up my shoulder-level shot which banks in off the backboard. I guess it's pretty unconventional, but I get it to work about half the time. That's about what MJ shot from behind the arc, right? I actually have no idea on that one... At any rate, it is turning out to be a lot of fun, now that I can actually contribute in some way besides turning the ball over after missing easy shots.

I'll try and update the rest of the stuff on the page over the next couple days as it is fairly dated, but for now, I've said all that I need to say. Enjoy the new song by OneRepublic.

Here It Goes

2008-01-04T21:47:00.000-05:00

Usually, when there is a long break in posts by someone on a blog, it means that they have been exceptionally busy. For me...that usually just isn't the case. However, in this one particular instance, it really can be attributed to that. Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

About 3 weeks ago, I sent in an applications on the recommendation of a friend. While I was doing that, I happened to see another position that I thought I might be semi-qualified for. So I sent one off for that as well. I wasn't expecting to hear much, with the Christmas holiday coming up, and figured they would end up like many of the other things that I've sent off. I'd picked up dog-sitting for a family from church for the Christmas break as they were going to be in Europe, so we (my brother and I) head off to go to the house and see the dog and let them explain to me everything that they're going to want me to do while they're gone. While there, I get a phone call, and it happens to be from one of the employers that I had just sent a resume to. They wanted me to come in the next day and meet with them to discuss possibly working with them. Of course, I'm thrilled, so I go in the next day, and after about 3 hours of talking with a number of different people, they say that they want to bring me on. It's a small company, and so they want to have a trial period to allow both of us to feel out the position and see if it would work. They ask me to come in on January 3rd to get started, and I agree, going away happy.

The next morning, I wake up and get a phone call from the other company wanting me to come in for an interview with them as well. This position is with a large coke-producing (the burned coal variety, not the beveridge) company called SunCoke. I went in for my interview with them on the 2nd of January, which worked out nicely. I would be working with them as an enviornmental engineer, doing some management work, and travelling to their sites in Indiana, Virginia, Ohio and Brazil to see that everything is being done correctly and that everything is being done in an enviornmentally safe way. They said they'd get back with me in a couple weeks time either way. At this point, I don't really know what I would do if they offer me a position as well...it's kind of a good position to be in I guess.

The small business is called Materials and Chemistry Laboratories (MCL), and they are a small forensic research company. Basically what that means is that they find out what things are that people don't know. Or maybe people do know what it is, but they want to know the exact composition of the materials. Really, it's just a bunch of work to tell people that they have certain metals, radioactive elements, asbestos, or whatever else they can manage to fit into things these days, inside of their buildings, samples, or any other thing that they send us. It's a bunch of chemistry (I know, I'm a physics major...), but it's been enjoyable for the past couple days. I've already prepared samples for a TEM (transmission electron microscope), which is a multi-step day-long process, I've atomized carbon to coat samples, and of course I've done the grunt-work of logging in samples and updating the computer files. But it's been fun, and I think that I would enjoy working there for the next couple years.

The reason for going to the second interview is that the position at MCL that I'm in currently is classified as a temporary full-time position. As I said, it's about a month-long trial period, although I really feel as if I've fit in over the past two days. The people are also training me on just about everything, and not just having me log data, which I would have thought would have been the majority of the work if it was more trial than just a safe-guard for their overall business and everything. I guess you can't really hire on full-time with a substantial salary if they're not sure the person will stick with it or work well for them. So it does open up the option of taking the other position if they decide to hire me...it's really a tough call. Mandi and I had a good discussion about it the other night for a couple hours just weighing everything, and didn't even really get to a conclusion. It's just a lot to think about, and will be even more to consider if it does end up that I get an offer for the other one. I guess that it's a lot better position to be in than I have been for the past 6 months though.

Throw in New Years Eve celebrations (I'm going to have to get pictures off Mandi's camera of our "Ugly Christmas Sweater Competition" sweaters and put them on here), time with the family, hanging out with Dustin, playing some volleyball, Mandi's upcoming birthday, and just all around general holiday craziness, and it's not all that hard for me to see where the past week has gone. It's been a good Christmas/New Years, and it's been a good week, albeit a very busy one. A belated Happy New Year to all who read this. I, for one, am looking forward to what 2008 has in store. So, here it goes.

Frank Caliendo

2007-12-27T15:36:00.001-05:00

My brother showed me this impressionist, and I've always been a fan of people that can do good impressions, and this guy is great. Check it out for some great impressions of John Madden, Al Michaels, Pat Summerall, George W., Jeff Goldblum, and even Letterman and Paul from the band. It's great stuff. In addition, I put in my favorite song from my best album from this past year in the player. Check that out as well. I hope that everyone's had a great Christmas, as mine was fantastic. There have been some excellent developments on the job front, so I'll put up a little about that in a couple days. In the meantime...brainificate on this.

Music Year In Review Pt. 2

2007-12-22T20:04:00.000-05:00

We now move on to the conclusion of the two-part music series. As before, a brief description with a few download-worthy tracks, all for your future listening pleasure.

Honorable Mentions (Part 2):
Rush of Fools - Rush of Fools
Another debut CD (I think I got a number of these this year apparently...), with a lot of potential. It's hard to appreciate how quickly things moved for the guys in this band, and they are all still quite young, from what I know. But seeing the results gives them a solid stepping-stone for future work. Mostly worship-oriented, the guys do a solid, if not spectacular, job, with a couple gems thrown in the middle of everything. Another group to keep an eye on in the future.
Download: Undo; When Our Hearts Sing; Already

Fuel - Angels & Devils
They've been out of the picture for a while, and after their lead singer quit the band, they went on a long hunt of finding a replacement, with a well-known decline from American Idol contestant Chris Daughtry. In the end, they finally found a singer, and with the songs already written, went right in to the studio. I liked this album better than the previous releases, if only because the production seemed to be cleaner, giving a better feel for the melody. Again, many of the lyrics are throw-aways...but what do you expect these days? For some solid rock sound, though, it's works fairly well.
Download: Gone; Wasted Time; Scars In The Making

Relient K - Five Score And Seven Years Ago
For a band that's been around for a long time, I hadn't ever really heard of anything until this album was set to come out. It makes for an enjoyable listen, with a number of catchy tunes, and a fair amount of wit within some of the lyrics. Even so, you can still see the message that they are trying to convey. This is a band that I can see growing on me, and maybe one day I'll pick up some of their previous albums.
Download: Must Have Done Something Right; Come Right Out And Say It; Devastation And Reform

5) 12 Stones - Anthem For The Underdog
When Mandi first put in one of their albums one of our caravaning trips back home from Harding, I basically had the same thoughts that she did. They can write some good stuff, but there's too much screaming and pointless overly heavy stuff in there. Fast forward about 5 years, and you've got their latest release, which has effectively eliminated the screaming, and replaced it with some solid songwriting and hooks. This album hardly bears any resemblance to their debut effort, and is the better for it. It's hard to find a weak spot in this album, as each song is performed well.
Download: Lie To Me; Broken Road; This Dark Day

4) Matchbox Twenty - Exile On Mainstream
This is probably more from personal bias than anything, because who would think that a compilation album would be a top album of the year? At any rate, this was one of my most anticipated releases for this past year as they are a band that I've always liked since I first heard them. Many will remember their singles Push and 3 AM from the late 90's, and from that fame, they held a high degree of popularity for the years to come. Even after 5 years, and no subsequent releases, this greatest hits package still came out at #3 on the Billboard best-sellers the week of it's release. For anyone that's been a fan, the main draw is the 6 new songs, while anyone that hasn't gotten any of their previous albums can get all 11 of the radio hits that this band put out over the past 10 years. If the 6 new songs are any indication, the next full length album they put out will be some of their best work yet.
Download: How Far We've Come; These Hard Times; All Your Reasons; Push; 3AM; Unwell

3) Mainstay - Become Who You Are
This band was an exceptionally pleasant surprise when their debut CD came out last year, so it was somewhat unexpected when I learned that they were going to be putting out their sophomore disc this year. When it did come out, I ran out and got it practically the next day. This album differs quite a bit from the first in terms of the material used in the writing process. This one is a much more personal album from the perspective of the writer and lead singer. There are songs about his family, his thoughts, and his personal beliefs, praises and struggles. It's mellow for the most part, and just an all-around good listen for a bit of praise and encouragement.
Download: Become Who You Are; Where Your Heart Belongs; Island; When You Come Down

2) Dizmas - Tension
Their debut was a disc that I personally could have cared less for. It was all screaming, not very melodic in my opinion, and just didn't seem like the type of band that I would come to appreciate. With their second release, however, I was surprised (as were many others, no doubt) by the change in their direction, and the level of musicianship that immediately became noticeable; what had been obscured by the screaming in their first release came to the front. What came out of it was 12 songs with infectious hooks and strong melodies. While some of the lyrical content can be vague, and sometimes plain silly (Dance, Shake It Off), there are just as many that have excellent meaning with a little thought. Again, for those long trips at night, or the late-night study/work session, you can't go wrong with Dizmas' Tension.
Download: Play It Safe; This Is A Warning; Sun

1) Anberlin - Cities/Lost Songs
I'm cheating here and including 2 CD's that were not released at the same time, but they make a solid double-album impression, and given their overall stellar quality, I felt they both merited an inclusion. When I first heard Anberlin earlier this year, I had no idea about them. They were simply a band name that I had seen, looked at the back of the CD, and read some of the names and saw that they were associated with a number of bands that I am a fan of. I went back, and listened to the most recent album they had put out (Never Take Friendship Personal), and was immediately hooked. Here is a band consisting of Christians that is able to make music that is open for everyone, without completely bashing the listener with theology. They have toured extensively with a number of well known mainstream bands including Fall Out Boy, which allowed them to share the message of Jesus over the course of the tour with them.

Back to the music, though. Cities is an impressive 12 songs, ranging from infectious (A Whisper & A Clamor) to epic (*Fin - which runs almost 8 minutes in length). It's a solid rock record, and while some of the lyrics will make you wonder, there are just as many that will make you think. This has constantly been in my player since I got it back in February, and it's one that I have yet to tire of. Lost Songs, on the other hand, is a collection of rare and unreleased tracks that have been compiled to finish contractual obligations before they move on to a major label this coming year. There are a number of B-sides from each of their CD's, acoustic cuts that are probably the most impressive, some fun covers off of bands that I don't really know, and a couple demos that don't really vary that much from the album cuts. Even with these demos, the album is surprisingly strong for a compilation CD of rejected cuts, with some stand-out tracks that make you wonder how they weren't initially included with the CD they were written for. All in all, for some solid pop/rock with strong melodies and excellent overall quality, you really can't go wrong with these guys. Look for their next full-length album of new material in the middle of 2008.
Download: Cities - A Whisper & A Clamor; Inevitable; The Unwinding Cable Car; Dismantle. Repair.
Lost Songs - The Haunting; Dismantle. Repair. (acoustic); Naive Orleans (acoustic), Uncanny

So there you have it. My top 10+ albums that I've gotten this year. Get you some. Oh, and a Merry Christmas to all...(if I don't post again soon).

Music Year In Review Pt. 1

2007-12-20T11:20:00.000-05:00

And now for your reading pleasure, the first in a two part series. Being that I am certainly someone who loves music, and loves listening to music, I'm once again giving some of my top album purchases from over the past year, as well as a few that I found on the side or through other people. I figured I'd do a top 10, with a little review of each individual album, along with some honorable mentions. I'll also list a couple of the tracks I would recommend for downloading if the artist appeals to you. If you like anything that I've had in the player the past year, then most of these songs will be coming off of those albums. Of course, I know that not everyone has the same musical taste as me, so this is probably more for my own personal benefit than yours...but I'll do it anyway. So here we go. My personal top 10 albums of 2007 (with a few bonus cuts).

Honorable Mentions (Part 1):
The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum Soundtracks - John Powell
Composer John Powell did some excellent work in these two films, providing an exciting musical score to go along with the frenetic action shown on the screen. The Bourne theme (instantly recognizable in 'The Drop' on the Bourne Supremacy) is followed throughout on both discs in many different variations. When I watched the Bourne Ultimatum, I was as stoked about the music accompanying the scenes as I was about the non-stop action. That's saying something.
Download: Supremacy - The Drop; Berlin Foot Chase
Ultimatum - Tangiers; Waterloo

Barenaked Ladies Are Men - Barenaked Ladies
In disc 2 of a two part presentation (Are Me and Are Men), we find the Ladies back to some of their wittiest, most fun pop/rock. In my opinion, this is the stronger disc of the two, with their lyrical goofiness and touch for a melody supremely evident. After their mis-step (in my opinion) on their album before these 2, this shows them back to their best. For me, any band that can put out 30 quality tracks in 5 months has more going for them than simply the ability to craft a catchy tune or two.
Download: Angry People; Maybe Not; Why Say Anything Nice?

Maroon 5 - It Won't Be Soon Before Long
This one is almost like a guilty pleasure. After their smash debut, they took 5 years to record their sophomore album. It's the same approach, with Adam Levine's smooth voice going over groovy beats, mixed in with some songs that up the ante. Granted, most of the lyrics are throw-aways, and some of the songs just really don't do much for the album (Kiwi, anyone?), but it's hard not to get caught up in the beat and groove of the other songs. When the lyrics don't take away from the song, there is a good, easy melody to ease you through the day, and I would challenge you not to be tapping along by the end of the disc.
Download: Nothing Lasts Forever; Goodnight Goodnight; Back At Your Door; Makes Me Wonder (Clean)

Alter Bridge - Blackbird
You would think that a band composed of 3/4 of Creed wouldn't really be anything worth talking about. But Alter Bridge, with the addition of Myles Kennedy as the lead singer, is anything besides Creed 2.0. Their sophomore album follows in the vein of their debut, with melodic rock that's nothing more, and nothing less. With some slick guitar solos and great melodies, as well as some fairly insightful lyrics, you get a new band that has gone and made everyone forget what band they used to be in.
Download: Brand New Start; Before Tomorrow Comes; Blackbird; Watch Over You

10) Thousand Foot Krutch - The Flame In All Of Us
This is one of those bands that I didn't really think I would like all that much the first time I heard them. They were too much of a rap-rock, almost screamo type band, of which I have a hard time appreciating. However, with each release, they have transformed from the rap-rock they used to pursue to more of a simply hard rock vein. And while I am not huge on ultra-heavy rock, these guys manage to make it fun, and even have good melodies to go along with their lyrics describing their spiritual journeys and thoughts. And even though they are known as a hard rock band, I am always a fan of their ballads that are, to me, incredibly insightful and sincere. An excellent way to keep you awake if you're making a late-night drive, and almost impossible not to sing along with.
Download: Falls Apart; What Do We Know?; My Home; Wish You Well

9) OneRepublic - Dreaming Out Loud
For a debut CD, these guys have been around for a while. They are one of the most popular bands on MySpace, and they had a hit single when Timbaland remixed their song 'Apologize' early on in 2007, except that they didn't have an album out to take advantage of their new-found popularity. Dreaming Out Loud remedies that problem, giving 12 tracks of melodic, piano-driven pop/rock. It's a testament to them that 'Apologize' in it's original form fares far better than the remix version, although if you pick up the disc you will get both and be able to decide for yourself. While very reminiscent of The Fray and Coldplay, they do just enough to be their own band, while crafting a number of memorable songs. Look for this group of Christian guys to do big things over the next few years.
Download: Apologize; All We Are; Say (All I Need); Goodbye, Apathy

8) Jimmy Eat World - Chase This Light
This band has been around for a while, yet they didn't make it big until 2001 when 'The Middle' hit airwaves. After the last album's mostly dark approach, things are brightened up again for this 11 song journey. Described as emo (does anyone really know what that means?), the majority of the songs focus on relationships. Then again, what songs don't focus on relationships? Jimmy Eat World still knows how write a hook, and on practically every song you get drawn in immediately from the get-go. Ranging from the fun of Electable (Give It Up), to the huge album closer Dizzy, there is a little something for everyone in this one.
Download: Carry You; Here It Goes; Chase This Light; Dizzy

7) 33Miles - 33Miles
It's not often that you get a band that has more than a taste of country in the Christian Music scene. 33Miles, hailing from Nashville, changes that with a record that is more or less country, right down to the fact that the majority of the songs are ballads. The lead singer does not possess any type of twang or drawl (which I appreciate), but the musical arrangements will definitely remind you of some of the more contemporary country artists out there. For a debut CD, this is a solid effort, and there is certainly potential, as their musicianship really shows throughout in outstanding melodies and excellent harmonization. Throw in strong lyrics, and you've got a great disc. Look for more from these guys in the future.
Download: What Could Be Better; Stand Amazed; I Can't Deny; When I Get Where I'm Going

6) Lifehouse - Who We Are
They've gone through quite a few changes since they first came on the scene with that song that you couldn't get away from back in 2000. It was called "Hanging By A Moment" if you've forgotten. However, the past 7 years have seen numerous changes in the make-up of the band, with lead singer/songwriter Jason Wade remaining as just about the only focal point of the band since then. The past 2 releases have seen Lifehouse moving from the more grunge inspired rock of No Name Face to a more piano-driven sound. In my opinion, it's an improvement as this has allowed the song-writing of Wade to shine through. The melodies are clearer, the hooks are better, and the lack of all the guitars has given a cleaner sound to everything. With Who We Are, I think they've found a balanced mix of guitar-driven songs with the more laid back ballads. This album also contains one of my favorite songs of the year in Storm.
Download: Disarray; Whatever It Takes; Broken; Storm

Part 2 will follow in the next few days. There has been a development on the job hunt front...so hopefully there will be good news to talk about soon.

The Big 100

2007-12-17T01:03:00.001-05:00

After a little more than a year, this becomes the 100th post on this little blog of mine. Kinda crazy, thinking that I had enough things to write about that it would take up this many posts. In celebration, see one of the craziest light shows that I've seen (set to music no less) in the Christmas spirit.

The past few days have been exciting, and tiring. Mandi and I went to Charleston to hang out with Josh and Amber for a few days. It was 75 and sunny on Friday, so we went for the beach, and Fort Maultrie to hang out, take pictures, and generally just enjoy the afternoon. Then we went to Sweatman's BBQ, which I highly recommend for anyone that might be in South Carolina. It's only open on Friday and Saturday's, it has no phone, no reservations, and you essentially are eating right in front of the smokehouse where they are bringing in the meat. It was fantastic, and we all stuffed ourselves on their buffet. It was really quite amazing. Saturday we went downtown in the morning, walked around the market, and ate some lunch, before coming back and heading for home. Again, the weather on the drive home was horrendous, as there was constant rain, and the roads were terrible in that you couldn't even see the lines.

One incident of particular note was the high speed chase that went right past my car. Driving westbound (this is important) as I reached Sevierville, TN, I looked over into the eastbound lanes and saw about 4 cops with their lights flashing flying down the road. I figured that something had happened close by, and turned to look back up the road only to see headlights coming at my car from the shoulder. It turns out that some idiot, fleeing the scene of a wreck, decided to go down the westbound interstate going east at about 100 miles an hour on the shoulder for the most part. He eventually ended up crashing about 5 miles down the road from where he flew past me, with only minor injuries being reported. Truly, we were being watched over.

Today was a good day. Lunch with the grandparents, which is always fun, followed by candy making with Mandi, and then having to put together a devo for the youth group, our group, and a number of adults for tonight. I was informed that I was doing this devo this morning during church, so I was kinda stressed on getting it ready. I talked about the importance of communication...I'll possibly post some thoughts on this later. It ended up going well though. After that, we just came home and relaxed. It's been a crazy few days. Enjoy the lights.

I'm Dreaming of...South Carolina

2007-12-13T12:40:00.000-05:00

This afternoon Mandi and I will be heading to South Carolina to see Josh and Amber for the weekend. It should be some good times. It'll be nice hanging out with them, Josh will have just finished all his finals, and Mandi will have a long weekend, so we'll just get everyone re-energized before the holidays arrive late next week. In addition, by the time we're back home, my brother will be home for Christmas break as well, so we'll hopefully be getting some good volleyball action going at church as well.

It would appear that some of my wishing for colder weather might be happening, as they are predicting some snow and such in the mountains this weekend. I don't really have hopes that are all that high, as this happens all the time, with predictions of snow, people freaking out, and then it turning in to a nice summer's day, but it does seem as if it will cool down a little. It's going to have to do so pretty quickly as a number of us are wanting to get a ski trip for sometime in January, and well...with pictures that they had from the mountains around us, the hills are nice and green, which the last time I checked, wasn't very conducive to skiing. But then again, it is Ober, and you can't really base your idea of good ski conditions on them...

As we just had our monthly "guys night" the other day, I got to thinking about the movies that we'd seen over the past year. Since that's about all that most of them are interested in doing, we just go out and eat, and then go see some "manly" movie that's out playing. The ones that I can remember off the top of my head are: Hitman, The Bourne Ultimatum, American Gangster, The Kingdom, and 3:10 To Yuma. All of them, with the exception of Hitman, were fairly good, although I didn't really care for American Gangster all that much either, although that fact that it's based on a true story is interesting. I'm kinda hoping that they'll get to a point where they might want to do something instead of just watch a movie, but the last time I suggested that it was almost like nobody heard the suggestion and just kept on deciding which movie we'd go see when nobody really wanted to see any of them in particular. Oh well. At any rate, it's time to get packing; South Carolina is beckoning.

House-sitting

2007-12-10T15:34:00.000-05:00

The weekend provided an unexpected getaway with me house, or rather, dog-sitting for some friends from church that were going to be gone for Saturday night and would need someone to look after him so they wouldn't have to put him in a kennel for the entire weekend. I obliged, and it was nice to just have some time to myself and everything yesterday. I also got to spend some time working on my Guitar Hero abilities in practice for the New Year's Party that our small group will be having replete with XBOX and Wii. Should be good times when it comes around. But there's lots of stuff in the meantime, such as our impending trip to Charleston this weekend. I'm looking forward to it.

Of course, when you think about Christmas, one of the things that always comes to my mind at least is snow. I love it when it snows. It's all sorts of fun to play in, it cancels anything that you're obligated to be doing for the day, it's just all around good news. One of my most vivid memories around the holidays was during the "Blizzard of '93" where we got all sorts of snow here in East Tennessee, and I think that schools and everything else were closed for over a week. Now, for some people, that probably doesn't sound like much, but for Oak Ridge schools, that was huge since we were usually the only ones going to school when everyone else was out with some frost on the grass. At any rate, we were back at the house, and with a huge hill and a steep driveway directly next door, it became logical to start sledding down this driveway.

Across the circle that we live at the end of is a bunch of forest area with large trees, and a fairly substantial drop-off (especially when you're 10). But at any rate, that didn't really concern us. As most boys will do, we (my brother and I) decided that it would be spectacular to create a ramp in the circle that we would attempt to hit and go flying off in the wild blue yonder. So off we go constructing our ramp, and proceeding to go even higher up on the hill before attempting to hit it as fast as we can. Over the course of however long we were out there, the snow was gradually turning to ice due to our constant sliding down it. As we continued on, we figured out that you go faster if you're both on the sled. As we careen down the hill, which was essentially packed ice now, we start to think that it might not have been best idea. Once we hit the ramp, we know it wasn't a good idea. I'm pretty sure that Dustin flew off the sled in mid-air and landed somewhere in a snowdrift up against a tree, and I proceeded to fly down in to the ditch and in to a tree myself, cutting myself right above the eye. We got some nice air on the jump, but, needless to say, we got quite a scolding from mom when we came back in later.

The possibility of snow is not looking all that promising given that it is currently 73 degrees outside. I'll keep holding out for it though. Hopefully at some point it will actually feel like winter and there might be a chance at some snow. Given the overall hatred of the Little Drummer Boy, perhaps I'll fare a little better with the 12 Days of Christmas? Here's hoping.

Party Time!

2007-12-07T16:45:00.000-05:00

So tonight is Mandi's company Christmas party. I'm not entirely sure what to expect, and I don't think she does either, but all I know is that there is lots of alcohol and some food or something. Oh, and a dance floor, although I'm not sure how many of the drunk co-workers will be able to dance. I don't think she's all that excited about going as she felt more obligated to go since she's on the event planning board rather than specifically wanting to. But at the least, we'll be able to sit around and mock all the people that are making fools of themselves, and Mandi will have some laughter throughout the year whenever she sees any of them at work. Apparently it's going to be a relatively small group this year due to the fact that it's not at a hotel, which means people can't get quite as trashed since they'll have to drive home instead of getting a room with 3 or 4 other couples...which apparently happens to save money or something...

As I mentioned in the last post, I'm a big fan of the Little Drummer Boy. Well, at least of the song. I think probably every kid at some point or another had to sing that song in some Christmas play or skit...in my case, I had to play it on the piano at some recital. But it's always been a tune that I've enjoyed. Of course, I don't know where Pa rum pum pum pum came from in terms of lyrics...but what can you say? It's been around for close to 40 years, along with a number of the other songs that people can't really get through Christmas without hearing. I've got a version by Jars of Clay in the player that I've grown to like quite a bit over the past week or so while listening to Christmas music off and on. I would suggest that you have a listen, and while you do that, I'll be getting ready to laugh at a bunch of people making complete idiots out of themselves. Should be good times.

A Guide To Marine Life

2007-12-04T20:24:00.000-05:00

The weekend at Searcy turned out to be quite a bit better than I had thought it would be. I had an enjoyable time, even though I didn't really play all that much frisbee. I got to see Doc, which hadn't happened for a while, and also see his two daughters (he didn't have any when I left). He was doing well, and he's going to be moving soon. Crazy stuff. I spent Saturday playing on and off with a team from Little Rock that Jordan and Brett play on, and in between watched Mandi play with the girls team, and got myself a haircut so that I can look professional when I (hopefully) go in for an interview or two in the coming days. Sunday was spent watching and talking with people for the most part...at least until one of the torrential downpours that Arkansas is known for decided to hit Searcy. Now, on it's own that wouldn't have been all that bad, but once we started on our way home, it decided to follow us. So for 9 hours, we drove through pouring rain. I think it had to be one of my worst weather condition drives home from Searcy in all of the times that I've made that trip. In the future, when attempting long trips, check the weather, and if it's possible to not be driving in a hurricane by leaving a little earlier...make sure you do that. But we made it home, even with all the rain, and were certainly glad that we had made the trip out there.

On the job front, I've talked today with the guy from AGT in one of those initial phone-screenings, so hopefully once he's talked with a few other people they'll decide to bring me in for an interview at their company. I'm cautiously optimistic on at least getting that far. I'm still waiting to hear back from Aerotek regarding the position that they've submitted me for. Given the lady's stringent policy on what she's looking for, I'm not as hopeful for that one...but you never know what will happen. At some point, everyone has to hire for the positions that they need. I'm just hoping one of those will end up being me.

Today it kind of clicked in to being Christmas. My dad and I put the lights up on our tree, which I always enjoy looking at when it's dark outside and seeing the lights on in the living room. It's cool, just going through that each year, and having this massive temporary decoration in the middle of the house. I'm sure if I googled or wikipedied the origins of putting up trees at Christmas I'd learn something new. It's neat though, to look back through the trees that we have put up. There have been smaller ones, bigger ones, some bizarre shaped ones, but they've all looked nice by the time they're all decorated. And of course, there are always the favorite ornaments that you always look for once you've got them all put up. At my grandparents house, it was always a game when they first put the tree up to go and look for the ornaments that played music. They had 3 specific ones that all played songs when you pulled the strings, and we'd come in and immediately go and look for them, and not do anything else until we found them. In fact...I still do that. At our house, there was a bizarre light on one of the strands that we'd hunt for. It really looked like an ice cream cone covered in sprinkles almost. And then there was a musical one hidden away somewhere.

There is also the requisite Christmas music. I've always liked the Little Drummer Boy, Do You Hear What I Hear, and of course, the 12 Days of Christmas. I'll put up the Relient K version in a while when we get closer to actual Christmas time. Christmas also signaled the year-end Christmas Recital for piano, where we'd play some songs for our parents and any other students parents. There was usually some standard classical fare, and then some fun Christmas stuff mixed in with some sing-along material. I generally liked this recital the best out of the yearly ones, I guess just because it was more laid back and mostly about having fun rather than putting on a good performance. And besides, how can you be nervous when you're thinking about having a holiday, and presents, and food? I think pretty soon I'm going to have to go find our Christmas music books and bust out some songs.

But here it begins, the countdown to yet another year. The theme for the rest of my posts this year will probably be recollections from the past year. And Mandi, no comments about my inability to remember things.

Strangeness...

2007-12-01T00:52:00.001-05:00

I'm sitting here in Stone and Whitey's apartment dining room, and it's really just kind of strange. Brett and G-Dub are here as well...and while it's not like when I was big on the frisbee team, but it's almost the same. We've just been sitting around chatting and laughing and everything, and now they've got the TV on, so I figured I'd do a little typing and check all my emails and such. I think there will be more people coming back, like Jake Beveridge and Luke Dockery, so it should be good times. I don't really even know if I'll be playing tomorrow, as I don't want to play on the Harding team since they have their own thing going on and I don't really want to interfere with that. There might even be enough to sort of form an alumni team...but we'll just have to see at some point.

There's been a number of things that have changed in the past year since I got here. The construction that was going on as soon as you got off Interstate 55 was finished, with a 4 lane road going on for about 4 or 5 miles once you first get off the interstate. There's a new Burger King across the street from the McDonald's on Beebe Caps and there's an IHOP next to the Wal-mart. That's about all the changes that I can remember right off the top of my head. I've been here for about 6 hours or so, and the first bit of it was spent just lounging around. I went with Brett to a concert in the Benson with a singer that I've never heard of before. She was pretty good, and it was mostly just mellow, bluesy, piano-driven ballads. We only stayed for about 4 or 5 songs, and then went for Sonic.

The drive down was really enjoyable, as I finally got to spend some time with Mandi and talk with her for more than a few minutes at a time or on the phone. It was good times, and probably one of the quickest drives down here to Searcy from Knoxville in a long time. It's really been a long time since Mandi and I were able to spend some time together like that, so it was really a good thing. After this weekend, back home for a couple, and then off to Charleston.

There has been some movement on the job front. I've been called by a company in Knoxville called AGT (Atmospheric Glow Technologies), and they were wanting to talk with me about a position that I applied to on Sept. 3. I haven't actually gotten a hold of anyone to talk with them yet, but I should on Monday, so maybe something good will come out of that. Just have to wait and see. I think it would be pretty cool, although I don't know if I really qualify as a Senior Technician...but maybe they'll have something that I can jump in with.

Last night was excellent. I didn't really know what to expect from the concert, but Keith Urban puts on quite the good show. He's one of those people that knows how to engage an entire arena. I had a good time there, and I'm pretty sure that Mandi did as well. As that was only my second concert, I'd have to say that I've been to 2 excellent, if rather different, concerts. Maybe I'll be able to go to a few more in the coming years if I can get myself a job and make some money.

I just realized that it's already 1:00 AM. And we got up way to early this morning after our late night...and all that driving...I'm out.

Excitement All Around

2007-11-28T10:39:00.000-05:00

It's been a crazy week, and it's looking to be another one coming up. Of course, with Thanksgiving, we had family in town, and we all went to my grandparents house for a Thanksgiving dinner with my aunt and uncle and 3 cousins from Nashville. Speaking of the 3 cousins, they are all just about taller than me. The first is 6-3, the second is 5-10 or so, and the third is about 5-3 (and he's just 10 years old). I don't know what they're feeding them up there, but they're giants. My aunt and uncle on my mom's side from Missouri also came in for the weekend, so we got to spend some good time with them, and played lots of cards with my uncle as that is something we always do. Dustin was in for the weekend as well, so there was some good volleyball action going on as well. It was an excellent (tiring) weekend.

I don't know if it was out of stupidity or being tired or what, but I thought it would be fun to get up ridiculously early on Friday and go and see what specials we could pick up. There were a number of good deals that I saw in all the ads that I thought would be steals, so I suggested it to mom, and after talking for a bit, she got excited about the idea, so off we went at 4:30 in the morning to Knoxville to the shopping area that every guy would probably like to live in the middle of. You've got Dick's Sporting Goods, Best Buy, Lowe's, Circuit City, and 4 or 5 restaurants all in about a 300 yard circle. We just went and parked and then went to wherever we wanted to go. We waited outside Best Buy for about 45 minutes, which wasn't anywhere near as long as I thought that it would be, and managed to get some steals on electronic stuff and DVD's and such. Circuit City proved to be the longest wait of all, mostly because the store is small and so they couldn't have a lot of people in there at a time. I think I've gotten my share of this early morning shopping for a while...but who knows. Maybe next year it'll be the same. I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I'm camping out on Thursday afternoon to get in though...

This weekend will be my first trip back to Harding since Mandi graduated. We've decided that we'll be heading back to Armageddon II, mostly just to see friends and such, although I'm sure we'll end up playing some as well. I think I'm staying at Whitey's place with Stone and about 7 or 8 other guys that are going to be there for the weekend. It's going to be crazy. We're also going to a Keith Urban concert tomorrow night here in Knoxville, which should be good times. And a couple weeks from now I'll hopefully be in Charleston, SC if it works out with a place to stay and such. I'll need to get with Josh on that one...

The job hunt is going...slowly. I've had a little response from a recruiting company called Aerotek who has a few places that they are looking to place people that thought I would be a good fit for. They're currently compiling info on me to send to these companies and then reviewing it with them, and hopefully I'll be able to get an interview with one of them and maybe get myself a job here in a month or so. In the meantime, I've been looking for some type of temporary or part-time stuff, but nobody really is looking for any as far as I've found yet. Who knows. Hopefully something will come up soon in some fashion or other. I'd take rejection letters now just to know that it's actually being looked at. But oh well...I think this is probably the hardest part, just getting that first job. Once you've got some experience it surely can't be this hard. Oh well...it's back to the hunt for now.

Before Tomorrow Comes

2007-11-21T12:48:00.000-05:00

The holiday season is here. In what is probably many people's favorite time of the year, we have almost a month where there are family get-togethers, an abundance of food, gift-giving and receiving, and just a general time of joy. It's funny, looking back at these times over the years that have passed, and just seeing how much has happened. At the same time, there's a lot that hasn't changed either. I just looked back over some of the things that I wrote about this time last year. Speaking of changes and everything...this time last year, I was finishing up some big projects for school, I was grading lab finals, I was playing in a frisbee tournament in Knoxville where Jake got his face busted, and Mandi was still at Harding. I am definitely looking forward to the end of this year though, and all of the things that will be happening over the next month.

Luke's last post on gratitude is an exceptional little piece on what we as Christians feel towards Christ for what he has done. I suggest you head over there and give it a read when you get the chance. Being as it is the Thanksgiving season, it is especially appropriate...which I figure is the reason that he wrote it. And there are many things to be thankful, and grateful, for, such as family, friends, and the many multitudes of blessings that we enjoy every day.

Along the lines of what Luke was saying, these blessings, and our own feelings about them, should compel us to make a difference. Something about Mandi that I've always admired is her desire to do something that will change the world. And I don't say that in a flippant manner, as it is something that she truly wants to do. And the more we've talked about what she wants, and the types of things that she's wanting to get involved in when she's finished up school and everything, I've seen just how much this means to her. I think that she sees how blessed she is, and she wants to go out and make a difference for people in any way that she can, wherever she can. She will do great things in the future.

I'm sorry to say that the attitude she exhibits is one that does not come easily to me, but I can't help but to be excited about it and want to help as well whenever she does talk about it. I have no idea what I will do that will have a huge impact, or whether anything I ever do will have what could be described as a huge impact, but the important thing is to get out there and do something. I have to thank Mandi for making me realize this. Given our incredible blessings, we should feel moved to go and make a difference for others who are not as fortunate as ourselves. Does that mean we need to move around the world in order to do this? Not necessarily. Does it mean you need to get out of your comfort zone? More than likely. All I know is that I need to take steps to make a difference. Before tomorrow comes, you could change everything. There's only one way to find out though.

Sun

2007-11-14T13:43:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to mention, there's the question on the side panel now. If you feel like it, you're more than welcome to pick an answer. After a week I'll change it out and put up the answer to the previous week's question. We used to have the random mind-teaser thing a while ago, and I thought it might be fun to have it up again. I put one up last week...but it wasn't really that great of a question. This week's is quite a bit better I believe. It even appeals to Paul's history side. And who doesn't like something that involves Hannibal anyway? Just to clarify, we're not talking about Anthony Hopkins' character...in case that needed to be pointed out...

From a purely astronomical point of view, the sun is fairly average. It's of average size, it puts out an average amount of heat, it will live an average lifetime for a star. Taken in context with all the other stars in the universe, there really is nothing special about it. If you look at what it does for this particular area of the cosmos, however, you realize that it holds a very significant role. Were it not for the star that we call the Sun, there would not be life on this planet. There would just be no way that we could have survived. Granted, there are a number of other factors, but it just doesn't fit with what I'm trying to say to go in to all of those. I admit, I'm a fan of the sun. I love sunny days, especially in the fall and spring when it's bright and sunny, and yet not so hot that you start to sweat from walking out the door. I love days when you go to the beach, or to a park, or hiking in the mountains with a beautiful blue sky and the sun shining down. Sunsets can be some of the most beautiful natural events that happens so often that we easily come to forget about how pretty they really are. And even with how simple it seems from down here (we just get up in the morning, and up comes the sun for another day), there really is quite a bit going on to make it all work so that it actually emits energy that we get. There's so much that is still not understood about it. But it's still appreciated, and many times simply forgotten about as we expect it to work.

I have an album called Tension by a group known as Dizmas. Quite a strange name, and according to the band, "Dizmas is Greek; a lot of historians and theologians of the Bible believe that Dizmas was the name of the good thief on the cross next to Jesus. It's not biblical truth, so for us as a band, we don't necessarily claim it as absolute truth. The reason we decided to name ourselves Dizmas is more so that whenever somebody did ask us that same exact question (where did your name come from?), the first thing that we have to refer to is the day on the cross when Jesus Christ, in this guy's last breath, gave him a chance and gave him hope, and basically said "today you will be with Me in paradise." Just the hope for the thief that he had in those last minutes. That's kind of what we're trying to do is express hope to people found in Christ, and that's why we are named Dizmas."

The final song on that album (which is in the player coincidentally) is called 'Sun'. Now, if you listened to the song, and knew that the title was called 'Sun' but not the spelling, I think you would do as I did, and think that it was called 'Son'. Take a listen (it's about 2 minutes), and pay attention to the lyrics. I think that it's really easy to take God, who has made us and given us all these blessings, and to just get up in the morning and assume that he'll just keep on doing his 'job' while we go through our day. There is the easy trap to fall in to to just take the distant approach to God, and then say that there's nothing really all that special about it: 'Everyone has something that they believe in, so if yours is God, then that's great, for you'. And I think that's the approach that many now take today. But if you look closer, and move in for a more intimate view, you see that God is indeed special. He sent his Son to bring light to the world. His Son gives everlasting life. And His Son came willingly for us. We should be striving every day to serve Him because he deserves that from us. And because we should feel the need to serve Him, to show him some semblance of the love that he's shown us. How lucky we are, to have a Son do that for us, to show us that love in an incredibly personal way. Do I make you proud?

I'll Put Him In The Wall

2007-11-08T10:57:00.001-05:00

Geico has always had fairly funny commercials, and this is probably one of their better ones, in my opinion. The first time I saw this I laughed quite a bit.

A Few Nights of Culture

2007-11-05T11:11:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was quite busy. On Friday, I got to spend most of the day with Mandi for the first time in a while since she didn't have to go to Nashville for classes. It was a welcome break for her, as she's done for the semester. Just has a paper to write in the next couple of weeks. To celebrate, we went to Taste of Thai...possibly the best restaurant ever. At least when you're looking for Asian food. Josh, next time you're around here, we'll go to Magic Wok and then we'll go to Taste of Thai. You just can't be disappointed.

Saturday was filled with more work on the new additions in the house. Dad worked on getting wall studs put in so that we can put up electrical boxes for the room, which will allow electricity for the lighting and hot tub to get put in. I put on the second coat of paint in the room while he was drilling holes in the concrete floor. Maybe tonight we'll finish up some of the wall things in order to get the switches and such put in. It's coming along though. That evening, Mandi's dad had got tickets to a surprise something or other. I didn't know I was going, but at about 3:45 Mandi calls and says that there was a misunderstanding and I was supposed to be going with them. So I get going and show up to their place, and we leave about 5:40 with these mystery tickets. It turned out that the Knoxville Opera was doing a performance at a church in town, and since Mark's company was promoting it, he had gotten tickets for everything. So we were there from about 5:45 to 8:30 that night. Not the best example of opera as it was just piano and singing, but it was alright. Certainly nothing compared to Carmen that Mandi and I saw earlier in the year.

Sunday was a good day as well. Church in the morning, where we're doing an interesting study through the book of Acts. Yesterday's discussion centered on the story of Annanias and Sapphira. You remember the story, where they sell some land and bring the money, but falsely claim that they are bringing the whole amount that they received. They are both struck down and die immediately after they lie. The question that was discussed was mainly, why such a harsh punishment for this act? And how much blame could really be given to Sapphira who either had the choice of hanging her husband out to dry, or lying to Peter? Was she completely at fault herself? Or was it because she was married to Annanias and therefore was sort of brought along due to his sinfulness and harshly punished? It was interesting to think about.

Lunch was a spectacular Indian curry that Cathie made. I had not been a huge fan of my previous experience in Indian cuisine, so it was a pleasant surprise at how good this was. Actually, I think she said she got the curry from people from Qatar. So Qatar curry I guess is more appropriate for a description. The evening was finished off with a chocolate fest as one of the ladies in our small group was celebrating a birthday, so we brought all sorts of different chocolate desserts to the party. There was chocolate cheesecake prepared by a chef in our group, we made chocolate-peanut butter pie, there were cookies, chocolate fondue, ice cream cake...I'm pretty sure we were all on a sugar high. That might help explain some of why I'm not feeling all that well this morning...but it was worth it last night.

Something pretty cool that my mom does is the Foothills Craft Guild. Essentially it's a bunch of artists from around the area that are in this guild to show their crafts and artistic abilities. They are having a show this weekend where they are all displaying and selling their creations and such. It's really pretty neat. Mom will be displaying her Temari balls and her baskets that she makes, so she's pretty much frantically working on getting some things together since she's only been home for the past week or so. I've never actually gone to the show before, but Mandi and I plan on going this weekend at some point to look around. Should be pretty cool to see some of the things that people are making in the area. With all this culturizing (is that a word? I don't think so...) I don't quite know what I'll do with myself. I'll have to hold off for a while after this thought I'm thinking. Even so, in honor of culture (somewhat), the music in the player is from the Transformers movie score.

High on Paint

2007-10-31T00:02:00.000-04:00

I have to say, I never thought it would take so long to paint such a small room. With the new additions to the house completed, and in an attempt to get most of mom's plants inside before the cooler weather kills them, we kind of went in to a frantic cleaning mode yesterday when the temperature was predicted to reach right around freezing. Brrr. First time all year, so off we go on a mad scramble to get room to move mom's plants in to the garage. In the two hours that we had, we were pretty successful. Of course, we didn't want them in the garage, so we failed miserable in that respect, but the addition requires a little work. First up is some waterproof sealer paint to be applied to the concrete blocks. So up I step to get this stuff painted. I think the room is maybe 10 feet by 18 feet or something like that. I figure it shouldn't take too long...but it took about 4.5 hours. And the latex paint that dad got was really pretty strong in terms of it's odor. My nose has been giving me this weird burning sensation all night. And I've felt a little weird...hopefully we'll be all good by tomorrow. Of course...there's the still the second coat to go.

Tonight I went with Mandi and her family down to Lauren's college (Bryan) in Dayton, TN to watch her in her last home volleyball game. They trounced the team they were playing 3-0 in a best of five series, and these were the conference champs. The college is quite small, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 students. The camps looked nice from what I could see of it. It's up on a hill, and I would imagine it's got quite a nice view if you have the chance to walk around and see it. It's just strange to me thinking of going to a college that has less people than the high school that you attended had. It seems like a nice school though, and judging by all the banners in their gym, they've got a pretty strong athletic program for such a small school. They even had Men's soccer. Take that UT.

Speaking of soccer, I added a Game of the Week description on the sidebar where I'll just put up a little blurb each week about the game that I'm most interested in from any of the leagues in the upcoming weekend. There's also a poll if you'd care to vote on it where you can pick who wins. So for the 5 people who regularly read this, there's a little something for you to do if you'd like. I was thinking there could be some cool prize or something, but there's not a whole lot that I can do in that department. I could perhaps proclaim your greatness on this blog the following day or something. How's that for incentive? Maybe we can even bet on it. This just keeps getting better. I just don't know how I'll get people what they've won. I guess if you vote and you're correct, you can have bragging rights or something. And I still need to implement a score guessing tie-breaker. How about if you actually do vote, post your score prediction as a comment, and we'll see how things go. Hoo-rah.

All Your Reasons

2007-10-30T00:01:00.000-04:00

We've been having some very interesting discussions at our small group on Sunday nights. Our topics have been, well, the controversial ones I guess. The things like drinking/drugs, divorce, how to give, music in the church, etc. etc. I think next week is women's roles in the church. Although I'm not sure about that...it might not have been suggested actually. But at any rate, it's basically just a way for our group to discuss these types of issues, not with a goal of coming to a conclusion that we all agree with, but just to hear different people's opinions and other viewpoints that we might not have heard before. It's really been pretty neat, since there are a number of different backgrounds in our group, and getting to hear those differences, as well as just learning about new ways to view these things, has been pretty cool.

I think that one that surprised me a couple weeks ago dealt with giving. Apparently, this topic is quite a firestarter for some people, and I wouldn't have really guessed that. Some of the older people in our group have witnessed some heated debates about how to give, meaning, whether you should be putting something in the plate every Sunday, or whether you can give one lump sum one Sunday a month for the same amount. I wouldn't have really thought that it was an issue at all. Or whether you are obligated to be putting something in the plate every Sunday in the first place, since it's certainly not the only way that one can give. Am I saying that you should never put anything in monetarily? Absolutely not. But I certainly don't think that you should feel like you have to if your circumstances don't allow it.

Now, I know, we're certainly the most financially blessed nation, and even when we feel like we've got no money, we're really incredibly well off. I liked how our de-facto leader put it, when he said that giving comes of our abundance. And more importantly that money is not the only thing that we should be giving...it sadly just gets the most attention. I don't know...it's just been intriguing hearing these opinions, and all the reasons that people give for doing things a certain way.

One of the better things we've talked about deals with where you fall when the Bible is silent on an issue. You either see silence on a subject allowing you to go on with something since it is not expressly forbade, or you see it as a stop sign which you cannot cross. I think I fall in to the former category, although we've been in classes with other people that certainly fall in to the second group. And when you get in to these topics like divorce, or instrumental music, you get these viewpoints of what exactly we're supposed to do. Some will say that it's not mentioned that way in the Bible, so therefore we can't do it. Other's will say that the Bible is not our manual of minutiae and therefore shouldn't be expected to give example for every single little detail of our lives. (I'm not really entirely sure where I'm going with all this rambling...)

I guess in the end, for me at least, I just figure that you need to at least know all your reasons for doing and believing something. I don't think there will be ever be two people who will agree on all aspects of anything, whether it's religion-related or not. But if you know why you believe something, and you have your personal study to go with it, who's to say that you're wrong on something that's not said to be one way or the other in the Bible? I think on the whole the CoC is getting better about the "we're right, you're all wrong" thing that has given us the stigma that many others place on us. It's sad that it happens as that whole grace thing gets forgotten a lot it seems, but it's not like these types of issues will just go away.

I think what I'm learning is that I don't need to post stuff where I need to think this late at night. If this was incoherent, my apologies. Oh, one other thing of humor/surprise/shock. So, I go to church on Sunday, and I'm looking through the reading material during the slow periods (the announcement sheet) and see that church service for Wednesday has been switched to Tuesday. Now, we meet at the local YMCA, so you might think there would be a pretty good reasons, like maybe they were holding some meeting or the building was going to have some work done on it or something. Nope. They've moved it since Halloween is on Wednesday. I guess they wanted to make sure we work the Halloween spirit in to our week.

Different Directions

2007-10-25T11:43:00.000-04:00

The camping trip that was last weekend was quite a bit of fun. As I said, it's weird being able to go camping and have it not get below the mid 40's up in the mountains in the middle of October. It was good times though, and having never really been up to Cumberland Gap it was pretty cool. There's a nice overlook where you can see Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee all at the same time. I would not recommend eating too much before you make the drive up to the top of the mountain though. At least, not if you're easily prone to motion sickness. Like I am. Ugh.

So, while I'm waiting to find out stuff from the UT interview that I had over a month ago now, I'm signing up to be a substitute teacher at the Oak Ridge schools. It's a pretty involved process, as I'll be going to get fingerprinted later on today, and I've apparently had a background check done as well. I guess they need to nowadays. But it should be fairly interesting. I don't know if I'll actually get around to do any teaching, as it depends on how quickly the UT stuff comes through and whether I get it or not, but as it seems like it will be at least 3 more weeks, I might be able to pick up a few extra bucks on the side. I don't really know how much preparation teaching a couple labs for a couple years gives me...but I figure it can't be that much different. Except that they'll be 12-18 years old instead of 18-19...I guess it's not that much of a difference. And besides, it never seemed like subs did anything except give an assignment and sit there and make sure they didn't burn the room down. We'll just have to wait and see how things go.

Speaking of substitutes...I'm sure everyone can remember the sub that was hated and dreaded above all subs when you were in school. I can't really remember having a cool sub...but then again, they don't get much of a chance to make an impression outside of reading the instructions and telling you to be quiet repeatedly. But there was one that everyone feared having, and that I honestly don't know why she kept up with it since she always seemed to be angry. And everyone always gave her grief as well. First, her name was Mrs. Muckenthaler. I think you can imagine where that might have been taken by a bunch of 16 year old guys. Second, she was older, so she had a hard time hearing anything. Third, she had a propensity for sending people to the office. I think I was in a class once that had 6 people sent there during one period. That had to be some kind of record. Oh well...hopefully those situations won't be what I'll be getting in to.

There's something a little different in the media player. It's a piece off The Bourne Supremacy soundtrack. Good stuff.

The Angel of the Lord

2007-10-19T14:10:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned on Wednesday, Patrick Mead was in town giving some lessons over the course of the last week. Unfortunately, I had to miss the first 3 sessions (4 if you count Sunday morning class). Luckily, they are all taped, so I should be able to get some copies and listen to what he had to say at those times. But Wednesday's lesson was really quite interesting to me, as it was focused on something that I hadn't quite heard before. It dealt with the Angel of the Lord (otherwise, this post would be titled something different.

He started in John 1:1 where we learn about the Word being with God, and being the same as God and being there from the beginning. Of course, we know this to be Jesus. He then said that the first time Jesus had been on earth was not when he was born in Bethlehem, but rather from way back in Genesis. If you go to Genesis 16, you see that the Angel of the Lord appeared to Hagar as she was fleeing from Abraham and Sarah. He talks with her, and sends her back to them. The time that I think his point was most apparent to me was in 2 Samuel 24 when David directly disobeys a command and counts the men of Israel. When David realizes his sin, God presents him with 3 options for punishment (vs. 13). David chose to suffer the plague rather than be turned over to his enemies. After 70,000 people had died, it says that the LORD was grieved and told the angel of destruction to stop. It says that the angel of the LORD was at the threshing floor of Araunah (vs. 16).

Of course, I'm not doing the argument any justice, since I'd only heard it one time. His argument was that the translation that we read as "Angel of the LORD", the Word, and Jesus are really all the same thing. The reason for John using the term "the Word" is because of how it was described in the Old Testament when referring to the "Angel of the LORD". He had a fancy word that I can't really remember at the moment for this particular idea, but it made equivalent John's description with those of the Angel of the Lord in the OT. I thought it was a pretty neat concept to think that Jesus had been on earth before he was born in to the world, and that even then he was interceding, and helping those in need of help. I really wish that I could do a better job of explaining it...maybe after I have the tapes and am able to hear it again. I will say that if you're ever in the area where he's speaking, it would be worth your while to go and hear him.

As a side-note, dad made it home fine yesterday after being in the air for about 15 hours, and awake for something closer to 30 probably. But everything is fine on that front. Mom comes home in a little over a week. On the agenda for this weekend is a camping trip with our small group from church up in Cumberland Gap State Park near the Kentucky border. Should be fun times. Who would have thought you could go camping in October and do fine in t-shirts and shorts?

Youth Retreat

2007-10-17T16:23:00.000-04:00

I had the privilege of going on our church's youth retreat this past weekend, and basically spending the whole weekend playing around. I didn't really go on all that many youth retreats growing up since most weekends were usually spent either at soccer tournaments or piano related things, so I didn't really have the experience from a child point of view. But working at PBC and this past weekend has shown me some of the things that I probably missed out on. Our "your professionals" group had about 6 of us out there just helping out with our main purpose to be there and to hang out with the kids. The majority of the group was comprised of middle school aged kids, probably about 2 to 1 for high school aged people. The theme was following the voices you hear, related to sheep and their shepherds. This was used to facilitate building relationships not only with the elders of the church (who were out there for the majority of the weekend as well), but in also realizing the importance we each have in helping guide every other brother and sister to be more like Christ. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend.

One thing that I learned not related at all to spiritual matters is that Mandi is ruthless at Knockout (where you've got 2 basketballs and the person that shoots second tries to make their basket first and get the person in front of them out). She went on a hot streak, and got about 7 people in a row out (including me) on her first shot. She'd just step up and drain it. She ended up winning that round, but it was pretty impressive. And it's not like she was just beating up on the 6th graders, as there were adults playing as well. I also learned a game called Ha! Yeah, that's the name. I can't really explain it on here...it's basically just a game of reactions with as many people as you want. And weird posing. And lots of yelling...like a ninja.

Patrick Mead is here this week at Highland View in Oak Ridge. I had heard him last spring when he had come to Farragut and really enjoyed his lessons. This week he is talking about the Battle being the Lords. We missed Sunday (due to the retreat and soccer), and Monday (since we were getting Mandi a new car). Yesterday's talk was on the Lord of Hosts and basically was about how there are times when God is that kind, meek person that you see depicted so often, but that at many other times, he is a warrior, a general, who commands legions of angels behind him to do his bidding. He's Irish, funny, engaging, and usually puts a new spin on things that you've heard many times before. I look forward to his lesson tonight on the Angels of the Lord. For a glimpse in to what he's like, check out his blog.

Dad gets home from Japan tomorrow at 5 PM, probably after flying for about 24 hours (or more depending on delays and such), so remember him if you could in your prayers. Mom comes home about a week and a half later if all goes to plan. My reign of terror at the house is coming to an end. I better get to work on getting things looking like a semblance of how they were before they left. It's really not that bad, I promise.

Selling It

2007-10-09T14:05:00.000-04:00

I've been looking through a few Consumer Reports issues over the past few days seeing if Dad had saved any regarding cars (no luck on anything relevant for what I needed), and this back-page section caught my attention. You usually see things like this on Leno or Conan or something when they highlight humorous ads that seem pretty ridiculous. I guess sometimes you just have to do everything you can to get ahead in the world of advertisement.

Outside of that, things have been fairly low key. I was in Nashville on Friday/Saturday to watch some of the guys from Harding play at Itchfest, where they eventually got 3rd place. Not a bad weekend, and especially more-so after going undefeated on Saturday while playing against Vandy and UTK. There was even a sighting of Rufio somewhere in there, but it was hard to tell because he was wearing a black shirt...

I really hate this job hunting thing. It's been about 2 weeks since I've heard anything regarding the position that I interviewed for, and over the past couple days have tried calling and sending an email to get some more information on where the process stands and everything, but nobody answers the phone or responds to the email. Frustrating. On the bright side, I guess they would have called and said no thanks if they had moved on (you would think, anyway), so it's not all lost. I was just hoping that it would move along faster than this. Oh well. On the agenda? Guy's night tonight, which means wings at Wild Wings Cafe. Excellent. Helping out for a day at the church youth retreat this weekend. And then finding ways to help Mandi relax and enjoy her first weekend where she won't be traveling in probably about 2 months. Good times.

These Hard Times

2007-10-02T22:39:00.000-04:00

It's been a rough day. Mandi has had bad news about her car, and I believe that I pulled my hamstring tonight playing frisbee in an attempt at a D. At the moment it doesn't feel too terrible, but I have a feeling that tomorrow will be quite a bit worse. For the moment, though, it's sleeping with it elevated, and putting ice packs on it and attempting to stretch it. I've never really had a pulled muscle in all my years of sports, which is quite surprising because I am certainly not a very flexible individual. I've had all sorts of problems with cramping, but never a pull. I guess I just don't really know what to do, but we'll see how it goes. Maybe it'll turn out that I just tweaked it a little, and I'll be good as new tomorrow. One can only hope.

Being one of the 3 shows that I watch on TV on a regular basis, I was remiss in not inviting all who read this (I'm sorry if you're among those...) that House started again on Fox last Tuesday. Seeing as how it is once again a Tuesday, the second episode of the season aired tonight. It started quite promisingly last week, and for those of you (Paul) who failed to see the end of last season, you'll probably be confused at what is going on (but rest assured when you get back I'll hopefully have all the episodes from where you left off). But it looks like it's going to be a good season, and who can really not love the character of House anyway. Hugh Laurie is quite the actor, and I'm inclined to think that I should maybe see some of the other things that he's been in. If you're new to the show, let it be known that he's British, and if you hear him speak on the show, you'd never guess. In addition to being a talented musician, he's a skilled actor who really makes that show tick. Catch it if you have the time.

The UEFA Champions League continues with Matchday 2 today and tomorrow. It's unfortunate that ESPN2 has been stuck with some pretty boring games the past 3 broadcasts. Not that it's their fault, as Manchester United is a potent attacking force with some brilliant players, but they have failed to spark the imagination this term, and has led to some rather slow games. Tomorrow is Liverpool vs. Marseille, but I don't know if it will be much better given Liverpool's previous outing. Of more interest are the games on ESPN Classic that air at 5 ET that show Barcelona and Real Madrid playing. It is still early in the season, so it can only get better from here though.

In music news, today was the release of the matchbox twenty retrospective album "Exile On Mainstream". This is exciting for me since they were the first band that I actually bought an album of, and the fact that I like their music, and they haven't done anything new for 5 years (their last release was in November of 2002). If you head to their web-page you will get to hear the 6 new tracks that they've written for the album (including the track for the title of today's post). Of the 6, I probably like All Your Reasons the best, but all 6 are good. They are certainly different compared to their earlier songs, mainly due to the fact that the band as a whole is writing the songs, rather than their lead singer Rob Thomas writing everything on his own. I think the collaboration does the band well, especially since Thomas has a successful solo career as well after his 2005 release. At any rate, I'm excited about the new songs, and looking forward to what they do in the next couple years.

I got to see one of the funniest Sonic commercials to have come out for a while last night. It was the husband-wife team, with them enjoying the new ice latte's I believe. So they're drinking them, and the wife says, "Ha! I've got a mustache!" The guy casually continues drinking his while saying, "You can only see it in direct sunlight." The wife glares. And I can't stop laughing. Classic.

A Little Humor...

2007-09-28T19:19:00.000-04:00

I don't usually post twice a day, but I completely forgot about this little clip that Mark Pratt showed me the other night, and it's really quite hysterical. It's a guy on the phone calling a buddy of his and he witnesses an accident. You'll have quite the laugh listening to it as well. Trust me, it's funny.

My Home

2007-09-28T16:22:00.000-04:00

For the next 3 weeks, I have the house. It's just me and the cat running the whole place. I'm sure my mom is terrified. She kept telling me that she wanted it all to look the same as it did when she left...I don't know why she's personally so worried about it. It's not like I'll be calling up all sorts of people to have wild parties out here and everything over the next few days...or will I?

That reminds me of a classic story from the days of 1106 where the Murphy's and some other good friends lived for a year. It involved the "Shaggin' Wagon", a Friday evening, and some girls at Harding. Seeing as the 1106 guys were taking it easy on this particular Friday evening, they decided to go out and about in Paul's affectionately remembered minivan. It was amazing how long that van ran for them. I think it's still going somewhere. At any rate, they all piled in to the van and went driving around. I think some of them might have even had some goodwill suits on (although I might be confusing that with another story). As they were driving, they happened across the girls laundromat on campus, and seeing as there were a number of women inside doing their laundry (on a friday night?), they thought they might go in and ask them if they'd like to go and hang out for a while. How serious they were about this proposition, I don't really know, but it elicited a classic Harding response. After the question was asked if any of them would like to go out and party and have some fun, one of the girls said, "We don't party here". Dejected, the guys in the shaggin' wagon had to spend the rest of the evening by themselves. At least, that's how I remember it being told. You'd have to ask P-Murphy himself for the actual account. Mandi and I frequently joke about "not partying" in mockery of that whole story. I mean, I know sometimes you just have to get the laundry done...but really. And who wouldn't want to hang out with the guys from 1106 anyway? Well, maybe not the present occupants, but the ones from 2 years ago were certainly top-notch.

The song that's in the player now reminds me, however, that my home is not this earthly place that we inhabit at the moment. Our home is with God and Christ, and that one day we will be reunited with him. It's essentially the same theme as the classic hymn "This World Is Not My Home" but...rockified? And different lyrics. Here they are:

This place is many things, but I'd never call it home,
It's just a building in a city, everywhere I go
This place is many things, but I can't call it home,
Home is the place you are and I just wanna let you know

And I've done a few things I wasn't proud of,
I've said a few things that hurt you,
But you're still the only one who fills me up,
And every night spent alone, was worth it

You are my home, you are my everything, when I feel so alone,
You are my home, you are my shelter, when all my hope is gone

And I've seen many things, but they don't look like home,
They're just the bright lights from a city glowing all night long,
And I've seen many faces, but they all look the same,
Home is the place you are, and I just wanna let you know

That I've done a few things I wasn't proud of,
I've said a few things that hurt you
But you're still the only one who fills me up
And all the tears that we've shared were worth it

You are my home, you are my everything, when I feel so alone,
You are my home, you are my shelter, when all my hope is gone
You are my home, you are my everything, when I feel so alone,
You are my heart, you are the one, when it all comes undone
When it all comes undone, when it all comes undone

At times it's difficult to remember that we are supposed to be in the world but not of the world. My home, for eternity, is with Christ. Mandi, I hope the title made more sense to you this time around.

Long Time Gone

2007-09-25T13:19:00.000-04:00

It's once again been quite a while since I've done any type of update on here. It's been an interesting couple weeks. I had an interview last Monday for a job here in Knoxville. I feel like it went well, but it will be at least another week before they are able to officially hire anyone, due to restrictions and EEO requirements forcing them to leave job openings open for at least a week. So, if they decide to hire me, I won't know about it for at least another week, if not 2 weeks or so. In the meantime, I guess it's more applications and searching until I hear one way or the other.

I also got to spend the weekend playing some ultimate with most of the guys from Harding that I played with for a couple years. It was fun, tiring and hot, but all in all good times. It was great to see guys like Luke and Will Dockery, Rufio, Brett, Jordan, Whit and others that I hadn't seen since about the same time last year for the most part. We ended up getting 4th place in the tournament, which wasn't bad, although we did pretty much fall apart in the last game that we lost, going from leading 7-3 to losing 15-12 I believe. The only things missing were the Murphy boys and J. Bland. One of these days we'll have to try and put together a "Master's" team of some sort and get everyone together and play a tournament. I don't know if that would ever be possible, but it would certainly be fun. And I would be remiss if I didn't give mention to the Park Avenue CoC who allowed about 35 odd players to stay at their building and use their facilities, in addition to preparing all of us dinner on Saturday evening. Their kindness and hospitality were greatly appreciated.

My parents are leaving on Thursday morning for Japan. Dad will be gone for 3 weeks, and mom will come home a week and a half later. They will be touring through different parts of Japan, and then spending about a week at my Grandmom's place in Tokyo. It should be a good trip for them, and if you could pray for their safety it would be much appreciated. At the rate that they're going, next year they'll both be gone for a month, and then who knows how long after that. So I'll have the house to myself for 3 weeks and have to take care of everything around here. Should be fun stuff.

I've been trying to think of a favorite moment from this past weekend relating to the frisbee, and I'm having a hard time of it. Outside of playing again with guys like Luke, Will and Kevin Chastine, there isn't really any stand-out moment. I guess my best personal moment was after dropping a pass that led to a score for the other team, I came out the next point, caught 4 tough passes, and made the scoring touchdown pass all while completely owning my man on offense. I guess that running over the past few weeks paid off after all.

Play It Safe

2007-09-13T21:40:00.001-04:00

I have good news on the job hunt front. The other day, a church friend that works at UT sent me an email about a research group that works on things related to soil erosion with world-wide implementation of ideas that they have formulated. They're currently looking for someone, and so he gave them my name. I talked with a member of the group briefly today, and they are wanting to interview me on Monday. So...if everything goes well, I might have myself a job in the next few days. It looks like fairly interesting work, I'd be in a research group, and be doing something that's being used everywhere in the world. We'll just have to see how it goes, but it's looking promising at the moment. No sense getting ahead of ourselves though...

I feel I have been remiss, being an avid soccer fan, to have not made any mention of the FIFA Women's World Cup that is currently going on in China. The best women's teams from around the world are competing in their soccer championships. Action picks up again tomorrow morning. While we're on the soccer theme, this past week saw the return to action of the national teams as Euro 2008 qualifying began again in earnest. England impressed, posting back-to-back 3-0 wins to revive their chances for qualifying, while France was stunned by Scotland at home. Most of the other results went according to plan. In addition, the US played Brazil in a friendly, with the final score being 4-2 to Brazil, and starting next week, the UEFA Champions League picks back up for the 07/08 edition. All sorts of exciting stuff.

Seeing as how I've not really got anything else to say, I'll call it quits.

Things Better Left...Unseen?

2007-09-11T16:02:00.000-04:00

The other day, after dinner, dad said that he was going to the church to play some basketball. I had asked who all would be there, and he wasn't entirely sure but that a friend of ours had said he should come out and play for a while. Dad was a pretty good player back in the day, but it's been quite a while since I've seen him go play b-ball. Well, having not run yet yesterday, I figured I'd go along as well as it would be a good little bit of exercise. So I ended up going, and it turns out that they don't play full court. A league here in Oak Ridge plays a half-court 3-on-3 style game, where you play to a certain score, usually 25 or 30 or so. It turns out to be a good workout, but for the older guys, it's essentially 3-point shooting practice since the game-plan is to pass the ball around, and hit a 3 at the first opportunity. Maybe once every 10-15 possessions or so someone will drive the basket, but that's about it. I still got myself a good bit of high-intensity running in though, since I would just chase the ball around. At any rate, I talked with Mandi later in the evening, and mentioned that I'd attempted to play basketball, which anyone that knows me would know that it's a lost cause. But she said she couldn't even picture me trying to play. Which got me to thinking of other things that I didn't want to ever have to try and picture or see myself attempting...

1) Basketball
Reason that I shouldn't be pictured attempting this - I'm Asian. Enough said

2) Visual Art
Reason that I shouldn't be pictured attempting this - Have you seen anything I've attempted to draw? Be thankful if you haven't. I might be the worst pictionary player in the world, and if you can't even draw to get someone to guess what you're attempting in that game...well, you're bad.

3) Ballet/Gymnastics
Reason that I shouldn't be pictured attempting this - Does this really have to be spelled out?

4) Bodybuilder
Reason that I shouldn't be pictured attempting this - Well, besides the fact that it's disgusting, I sure can't think of why this would be your objective in life. And have you seen the female ones? If they need a commercial about what drugs can do to you...

That's about all I can come up with at the moment in between attempting to find jobs and such. If you've got suggestions, I'd like to hear them. Tonight, it's wings and a movie with the guys from church. 3:10 to Yuma is on the schedule, and Wild Wings Cafe is the dinner. Should be quite the evening.

Reaching Out...

2007-09-10T11:03:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, for our small group meeting, we went to a new group that was being started by some of the older members and more knowledgeable teachers that would focus on having an environment to allow people to bring friends or acquaintances to a non-threatening bible study. Our group went along just to help support the leaders and to have a few people there, since a number of our usual group were gone on either vacation or personal reasons. Essentially, the point of the group as defined by them is to have a place where people can bring questions or things that they want to study, and that will be the objective for the day. That way, if you meet someone who you don't feel would be comfortable in an intense study within a particular group, you can bring them there and allow them to dictate more of the direction if they should feel so inclined. I think it's a good idea, and it would do well for new Christians or people seeking to learn more. However, I don't know if that's how it will end up working in practice.

The main problem that I had with what was discussed last night dealt with the mind-set of the people that are going to be leading it. After a prayer and some of the usual chat when you've got people together, we got into some discussions. Well, the older people got in to some discussions while I sat back and listened. Now, I respect the older members of the church, as I feel like they have unique wisdom and insight, but I also feel like a lot of what they say is based on traditions, and that they go to Scripture in order to support their traditions. People were saying that if it's not expressed in the Bible, then they won't go along with it, but then they go on to make assumptions about things that are said in order for it to fit their view. Is that not contradictory? Maybe it's just me...

The main point of the evening was talking about unity. Do I think that unity is a good thing and that we should strive for it? Absolutely. But it comes to the point of what you define as unity. My impression was that unity, for the majority of older people was that everyone should become CoC. Stereotypical of Coc, but clearly evident here. They spent probably about half an hour talking about how some of them grew up in the Baptist church, and how they now felt that they had to go and show them how they were wrong and we were right. Are you kidding me? When I think of unity in regards to religion, I think of Christian unity. Not CoC, Baptist, Catholic, or any other type of unity. If you think that unity is making everyone believe what you believe so that there aren't differing ideas, that's not unity.

And then I got to thinking about how that type of discussion would have worked had there been someone there visiting or seeking to learn. What would their impression have been? Probably that we view ourselves as holier than thou and that it's either our way or no way, and if you can't accept that, then we will ostracize you and not give you the light of day until you come around to what we think. It seems to me like that is not a good way to go about reaching out to people who perhaps have never heard the Gospel.

What ever happened to things such as grace? Is it our right to take the place of God and decide who is right, who is wrong, who is saved, and who isn't? Yes, we need to stand firm in our faith, and we need to teach those around us that do not know Christ. But there needs to be love and understanding to go along with it. And you need scriptural back-up. Not tradition, with scripture turned in the direction you want it. I don't claim to be right, or to know everything. For all I can tell, I might be way off on my own island in the middle of nowhere. But at least for me, the idea of unity being everyone to CoC or in the wrong...that misses the point. And to me, it's concerning if that's the type of mindset that people leading this group are going to take.

It's Just An Illusion...

2007-09-06T23:54:00.001-04:00

I've always enjoyed magic. Way back in 1991 I saw my first magic show on TV. It was a David Copperfield special, that he used to run every year. Dad had watched them, and this was the first one that I was able to watch, or that I was interested in watching. A few years later he came through Knoxville, and my family went along to see the show. I don't remember a whole lot about that first show, except for his entrance and exit. The entrance was done in an empty box, along with a motorcycle. The finale was him riding that motorcycle onto a lift that took him up about 20 feet above the stage. The bottom fell out of it, and he reappeared about 3 rows behind us on the motorcycle. Needless to say, I was impressed.

I always looked forward to the specials, and for a while there were a number of magic shows on TV just at random. I even got myself a magic book that did some sleight of hand tips and tricks. About a year ago, Copperfield came back through Knoxville, so of course my family and I had to go. There were a bunch of new tricks, a number that we had seen in his last TV special. The most impressive of these dealt with audience members. In one, they take one audience member anywhere they want in the world. Whether they really do go to places like the Caribbean or Hawaii or not is up for debate, but it's sure believable and amazing. The other involves bringing 13 audience members up to the stage and making all of them disappear, and then reappear in the back of the auditorium almost instantly. If you get the chance to see him live, I would highly recommend it.

At any rate, all of that since I decided to put up one of his best illusions. It's portrayed as an escape, but it's really one of the best illusions that I've ever seen done. If you've not seen it before, you're in for a treat.

Blessed Are The Meek...

2007-09-05T22:09:00.000-04:00

An interesting thing happened this past week at church. Actually, at 2 churches. There's the one that I attend in Knoxville, and then there is Highland View in Oak Ridge where I grew up. Last week due to a number of circumstances, Mandi ended up going to church in Oak Ridge, while I went to Knoxville. The OR church had a guest speaker, their last in a summer series that they've been having for a number of years. I don't particularly remember what Mandi said the main message was about, but she mentioned that they talked a good deal about the passage dealing with turning the other cheek (Matt 5:39), and that the meek will inherit the earth (Matt 5:5).

As Mandi related this particular part of the lesson, and what it was that bothered her about it, I realized how much it bothered me as well. The speaker for the evening had talked about how difficult it would be for him to turn the other cheek if someone were to come up and threaten him and his family. He also talked about how it'd be better for someone that would break in to his home and attack his family to not be there when he got home, since he might be inclined to not show restraint. What?!? I wasn't there, but the way Mandi explained it made it seem as if the speaker would rather come home late after everything had happened, and give it a few days before doing anything about it. Luckily for him, apparently his wife wasn't in attendance.

She was also there for class on Sunday morning, where they were apparently following up on this subject, or at least it turned to it. The idea of meekness came up, and one of the ladies who teaches the younger children began saying how difficult it is for her to teach children the concept of turning the other cheek, and taking things without reacting. I don't know, but it just seems like the church wants a bunch of people that will just take anything regardless of who it might be harming.

It was quite the coincidence, however, when at church on Sunday in Knoxville, the exact same message was coming up, but with a completely different view. Our preacher addressed the idea of turning the other cheek in a way that I hadn't heard before. He stated that the idea of being struck on the cheek is like that of an insult, as a cultural type of insult. Therefore, turning the other cheek does not refer to allowing someone to just pummel you with punches, but that you do not react to someone that is hurling insults at you. You don't fight their insults with insults of your own, but rather you take them, and allow them to spew venom without reducing yourself to their type of mentality. I hadn't heard of it approached in that manner, but it appeals to me much more than the idea that everyone in the church should simply allow someone to run all over them and take advantage of them while we stand by and do nothing.

The other passage dealing with meekness required a definition of the word. What do you think of when you hear the word meek? I picture some pansy guy that can't do anything, and everyone is able to do whatever they want to him because, well, he won't do anything to defend himself. Here's the very first definition from Merriam-Webster. Meek: 1) enduring injury with patience and without resentment. I hadn't thought that someone described as meek could have a chance at having something good to describe them. But that's exactly what is being described in the passage. The meek will inherit the kingdom. This doesn't mean people that just roll over and give in to everything, and let everyone else run all over them. No! It means that people that can endure the hardship that will come, those that can handle the ridicule of claiming Christ, that can "turn the other cheek" at those that would mock, they will inherit the kingdom.

I found it incredibly refreshing to hear that message on Sunday, especially in contrast to the ones that Mandi heard. Why does everyone in the church feel like we should all just take everything, never defend ourselves, or each other for that matter, in times when anyone in their right mind would defend themselves? How can a speaker get up and say that if someone were to break in to his home and attack his wife that he had better be gone before he gets home since he might react badly? Jesus didn't come here and hope that he didn't offend anybody. He didn't just take things that were clearly wrong, and just allow it to continue out of "meekness". Is there a time to be humble? Of course. Does that mean that the church should be made of women, and as my preacher put it, effeminate men? I sure hope not.

Boomsday

2007-09-04T10:59:00.000-04:00

Every Labor Day weekend here in Knoxville, there is a festival known as Boomsday. I'm not entirely sure how it originated, but 20 years ago, the people of the city of Knoxville thought that it would be a good idea to hold a fireworks show down on the Tennessee River. It's actually quite the deal, if you're brave enough to deal with the excessive traffic. There are vendors and live music all down the river-front all day long, and from about 9:30-10:00, you are treated to the best fireworks display that I've ever seen. The fireworks are shot off from the Henley Street Bridge, which is closed for the entire day to allow for set-up, as well as from the adjacent Baptist hospital, and another bridge a short distance away. The show is set to music that is broadcast over the radio. This year, there were fireworks that exploded in the shapes of cubes, smiley-faces, and stars, they were lit and hanging from the bridge in a type of waterfall, they were shot down in to the river where they then exploded up out of it...basically it was an assault on the eyes and ears for 20 minutes. And it's spectacular. If you're ever in the area by chance during Labor Day weekend, set aside a few hours on Sunday evening, and come see it. Should you come, pick your seat wisely, as being too close to the river might not be all that great. Mandi and I were across the street from the river, and up the hill a little ways, and during the sequence where the fireworks were being shot in to the river, one of the flares that exploded up didn't go quite as high as it probably should have. This resulting in a flaming ball coming down right in the middle of all of the spectators on the street. This particular one happened to land about a foot in front of these two ladies, who managed to jump out of the way right at the last minute. They proceeded to continue backing up after they managed to calm themselves and get back on their feet.

I really wish that I had some funny story related to fireworks, but there's not all that much to draw from. I think I've got two of them, both from a while ago, and given how terrible my memory is, I could just be making it all up for all I know. The Boren's used to live right up the street from us, and we'd be over there frequently visiting, and playing with their kids. Well, at some point we thought it'd be fun to shoot off bottle rockets, so we got a whole bunch of them and some old glass coke bottles and went out to their front yard to fire them off. Well, we started off with them on the ground, but quickly decided that it'd be more fun to hold the bottle so we could aim where they went better. Let's just say that the idea sounded a lot better in principal than in practice, as I think we managed to shoot a number of bottle rockets directly in to their neighbors garage and in to pretty much every tree within 30 feet around their house. It was fun though.

The second one comes from high school, when a group of friends were out during the 4th. We had just grilled out and eaten, and decided that we should shoot fireworks. Now, the city of Oak Ridge has a ban on fireworks within city limits, but since they were out in the outskirts, we figured we may as well shoot them off anyway. So we went down the street a ways, and found a patch of (what we thought was) dirt. So we go and light the fuse on this big box of fireworks (not too much unlike what they've used at camp for the "big show"), and back up and wait for it. Well, they go off alright, but one of them doesn't do as well as it should, and ends up shooting up, spinning over, and going right in to the dry grass that's right next to where we set it up at. Well, there's still a good portion of the box to go, and for all intents and purposes, it looks like the grass is catching on fire. Luckily, it doesn't catch too much, and we put it out once the box emptied. We decided maybe we should hold off on the rest of them. We walk back, and pass a cop on the way. Either it was just sheer coincidence, or someone called us in.

At any rate, you can't ever go wrong with some fireworks entertainment. Just be careful of the neighbors house, or some flammable grass being nearby.

Minesweeper: The Movie

2007-09-03T18:15:00.001-04:00

I'm shamelessly stealing this from Taylor, but I thought that it was funny enough to merit it. This is for everyone that's spent a boring morning at work or school playing the classic game minesweeper. Posts of more substance later.

When You Are Near

2007-08-28T22:25:00.000-04:00

I kind of feel like I'm stealing from Philip a little when I mention the lunar eclipse that happened this morning, but I figure it's a rare enough event that I can do so without too much copyright infringement. I have always been interested in astronomy and the stars, planets, comets, black holes, galaxies...pretty much anything that has to do with space. Mandi mocks me for my lack of actual astronomical knowledge, but I generally just enjoy looking at the sky, and occasionally reading about interesting things that are being discovered about our universe. It really is amazing, seeing all that there is out there, and realizing how small a part of this entire creation we really are. Even with all of the knowledge that we've gained in the past 100 years or so, it's scarier still to realize how much of that we really don't understand, and how much more we don't even know about.

One of the things that's always impressed me since I became a Christian is how hard it is to look around you in everyday life and see everything that there is in our world, and be skeptical as to where it all came from and how it came to be. I guess, for me at least, while there are numerous theories on how everything works, and even more theories on how everything got started, it seems to me like it would be fairly obvious that everything had to have started with some type of creator. At least, that's how I think of it now.

I didn't become a Christian until I was 20, in 2003 (kinda hard to think that it's been 4 years already). One of my main problems was that I was simply too analytical. I needed to have concrete proof, something that I could put my hands on and say, for a fact, that it indeed was how people said it was. Wanting to follow a scientific route of study, I couldn't let myself simply take something on faith. You had to have proof, it's just how everything works. If you couldn't prove something beyond doubt with science and analytical thinking, then obviously there was something missing from you puzzle that you hadn't yet figured out. Thankfully, through friends, family and personal thought, I came to realize that I didn't have to have hands-on proof. I had to have faith. Faith in God and faith in His promises. For me, the realization that everything didn't require a data-set that showed everything to be true was a revelation, and allowed me to make my commitment to God. I think that one of the books that truly helped me out was one that we read in our sophomore year for our bible class entitled "The Case for Christ". Here was a man, who was also analytical in his thinking, and formerly an atheist, going around asking experts their opinions and reasonings for why Jesus was the Son of God. To see things laid out in such a concise, interview format was very insightful for me. After finishing that book, I later went back and read another one his books, "The Case for a Creator". It follows the same idea, with Strobel going around asking leading scientists in their field why there must be a creator to our universe. If you haven't read them, I would certainly recommend them to anyone, simply as another pathway to learn more.

I guess what I'm getting at here, is that during my first 20 years when I was looking for that concrete proof, for that beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt moment that would make it all clear, I was missing some of the biggest hints that could possibly have been given to me. Our creation, the world we live in, the universe we inhabit...all these things that show us the splendor of God, and the creativity that He possesses. People accredit many things to chance, to natural selection, to evolution, or to whatever it is that makes them feel the best in terms of a grander scheme, but they all have to start somewhere. There has to be a beginning, something that put it all in motion. If you read about the odds of things turning out as they have simply through chance, well...it's ridiculously low. And for people that are looking for the most plausible explanation, to choose some infinitely small number over the idea that there is a creator doesn't make it seem as if they're trying to pick the most likely option, at least to me anymore.

Seeing the eclipse this morning, and thinking of how God could have imagined such a thing, and to be able to witness it, was very awe-inspiring. And realizing that even with the grand scale of the universe, God still looks at each and every one of us individually is truly humbling. For me, something like the eclipse that is truly spectacular gives me a sense of the closeness of God. It lets me know when He is near.

We're So Far Away

2007-08-21T21:58:00.000-04:00

First off, my apologies to Paul for his hard work in looking for jobs for me. I did look in to them, this development with Mandi doing a Master's was quite a recent development. I think that from her thinking of it to being in the program, it was all of a week for the entire process. Probably the fastest application/acceptance/start of program sequence I can possibly think of.

Secondly, and speaking of Mandi's Master's program, if you could all pray for her, it would be much appreciated. I don't know how she's doing it, but she's working 10 hour days, driving back and forth from Nashville on weekends that she has class, reading about 300 pages in a book, writing a paper, and engaging in 2 hour debates online, all between yesterday and Thursday. So if you could keep her in prayer to just give her the energy and safety for travel and everything else, I'm sure it would be much appreciated.

Tomorrow, I get to go and pick up my diploma from UT that says I graduated from the program. Fairly exciting. In addition, I go back on Thursday to meet with some people that work there to discuss the possibilities of working with them. It's basically a meet and greet to be introduced to some people that have seen my resume, and to see if they might be interested in working with me, as well as whether I find what they do interesting myself. It's nice to have the help from a man at church that's getting me in contact with everyone. We'll have to see how it goes.

Something that we're discussing in church over the month of August has to do with outreach, and what ways one can go about reaching out to people in the community and those that we come in contact with. One thing that I've not really ever thought was that effective is the technique of door knocking. I don't know if that's just because I don't believe that would work for me to have random people coming to my door to talk to me without me wanting them to, or because I've heard that it's not that effective, but that was part of the talk this past Sunday. However, what they were door knocking for was presented as a survey for a school project, which then asked questions regarding religious beliefs. Some of the questions intrigued me, such as "What do you think the church needs to do better to meet the needs of the community?" and, "What would be a main reason to attend a church in your area?". The presenter didn't really have the time to give some of the responses to the questions that he asked (there was a total of about 18 questions), but I bet that there would be a number of answers that would be interesting to read in to. In general, it's just designed to highlight some of the reasons that people want to distance themselves from being part of a church, and what might be done on our part to help bridge that gap.

They are also going to be doing a spiritual gift assessment, which I think will be fairly cool. I've heard lots of talk about these kinds of things before, but I've never been able to do one myself. I'm looking forward to doing this, just to see what kinds of things it tells you. I hope that it's not simply one where it's comparing yourself to other possible likenesses, but that it's really a question-response based test that can be fairly streamlined based on the individual. I'll find out in a couple weeks, but I for one am looking forward to it.

Our preacher on Sunday mornings is also going to start talking about something that I find to be interesting, which is defining what is tradition in church versus what is actually biblically defined truth. There is some irony to me that a 60-70 year old man in a CoC is preaching about what is/isn't tradition, but I've always enjoyed listening to his lessons, and look forward to what things he brings forth in this debate. While I'm kind of hoping he might talk about things like instrumental music and women in the church, I doubt those will be the subject of our Sunday sermons. I guess I can always hope though. Who knows, maybe I'll be surprised.

Getting in shape update: Went swimming with Mandi on Sunday for about 30-40 minutes or so. I'm not the best of swimmers, but I was completely wore out over the course of that. And I won't lie, it wasn't continuous swimming either. But man, I bet that will get you in shape. I did manage running this morning as well, doing a 1 mile run, and then some sprints. Sadly, at the end of this, I was completely spent. Good thing I have a month to improve.

Kickin' It

2007-08-17T22:06:00.001-04:00

Soccer season is now officially back in season. The European leagues have already started, or will be starting within the next couple weeks. The English Premiership started last week, and already there have been a number of surprises (Man United held to two draws), and a couple of serious injuries (Wayne Rooney broke his foot after 40 mins). All in all, though, the sport that I find to be the most exciting will be back in full swing by the end of the month. I'm also playing in the fantasy soccer league on espn.com. Last year, Mandi showed me up over the first half of the season before she went to Guatemala. Hopefully I'll have a little better showing this coming season. If you'd want to sign up, you still can here. I'm currently playing against Mandi, Jeremy Stoneburner, and possibly Josh Murphy if he got around to signing up for it. You also don't have to really know anything about it, so if you're interested, run on over there.

In other soccer news, David Beckham made his first start for the LA Galaxy the other night in a 2-0 victory, scoring the first and assisting on the second. It finally looks like the ankle injury is healing up, and you should be hearing a lot more from him in the coming months. He's also been called in for the England national team friendly when they play Germany next week, so it seems as if his career is doing alright. For a look at his goal and assist, take a look here, and click on the "watch the goal" link. A patented Beckham free kick, and much more difficult than he makes it look.

Our church small group has a guys night on the second Tuesday of every month, which is essentially a night for the married guys to get out of the house and go out to eat and see a movie with a bunch of other guys. We went to Wild Wings, and then saw The Bourne Ultimatum. I have to say, I rather enjoyed the movie. It was, in my opinion, on the higher end of the spectrum compared with the other two. Looking back on it, I feel like there was hardly any dialogue, particularly from Matt Damon's character, but that might not actually be the case. I think it's just the fact that the action is so well done, and is always happening, that you kind of forget about the small moments when there are characters actually talking. You have car chases, foot chases, motorcycle pursuits, and some pretty incredible fight scenes. Of all the 3 movies that have come out this summer, this is by far the best one that I've seen. Catch it when you have the chance.

Job hunt update: Going OK. I'm getting massive amounts of help from people at church. Hopefully something will pan out soon that will allow me to stay here. Mandi is here in Knoxville for the next 2-3 years or so, and is now starting a Master's program at Lipscomb on the weekends (gasp!), and so I'm needing to find something around here.

Getting in shape update: So, now that I'm playing in the Club Sectionals tourney in Memphis in a months time, I've got to get running. First run? Tomorrow. Hopefully. Sometime...

Declaration

2007-08-06T11:15:00.000-04:00

A lot has been going on this past week. Many things good, bad, and sad have occurred. I'm now back at the parents place, and am in the process of job hunting, painting the house, and hanging out with Dustin until he goes back to school this coming weekend. One event that turned out to be quite fun was an XBOX night at a family's house from church. It was done for all the rising middle schoolers in the church so that they could start to get to know some of the kids in the youth group, but I think that all of us young adults that showed up to "help" had just as much, if not more, fun playing on linked xboxes all night. It made for a generally exhausting weekend, but it was all good.

I am completely finished with UT!! I turned in my paper last week, it was accepted and there will be no more revisions. About the only thing I expect from them in the next few weeks is my diploma. Woohoo!! It's nice to think that I'm done with school, although it will be kind of weird not having to worry about homework or assignments that are due in the coming weeks and days. I think that I could get used to it though. I guess there wasn't much to this post, except to state that I'M DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Hopefully, more pertinent and interesting posts will follow in the near future)

To Know My Self, Pt. 2

2007-07-28T00:37:00.000-04:00

Tonight is my last night in the apartment that I've called home for the past 2 years. I'm heading back to my parents place for a little while (hopefully), until I find myself a job. In a promising development, I had one of the companies that I sent a resume to send me back an email asking for some more information, and how and when to contact me. That's rather encouraging. We'll see what comes of it. For the mean-time, though, it's on to part two of the questions.

Question Five: What is your favorite TV game show?

Very interesting question...I think I would have to say that my favorite TV game show to watch would be MXC. Why, you ask? Because it's got a bunch of Asians on it, of course!! Just kidding. Sort of. But really, where else where you get witty commentary, slick pop-culture references, and some of the most bizarre games that you've ever seen played before? If you don't find watching a bunch of people trying to pole vault from a tall stand on to a small floating block of wood in a pool of septic sludge funny, I'd think there is something wrong with you. And besides, who doesn't like the repartee between Vic Romano and Kenny Blankenship? Right you are, Ken.

In a close second place finish, I would say Cash Cab on the Discovery Channel. The concept is brilliant, of having a cab ride in NYC that pays you to answer questions as you go to your location. However, get 3 questions wrong, and you'll get kicked out wherever you are on your trip. The host is pretty cool too. He's got some great facial expressions whenever people are struggling with a question. Catch it on Discovery at 6 PM ET if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Question Six: Name something about yourself that you should change.

That's easy. My inability to control my temper when I'm driving. I don't know what it is, but whenever I get behind the wheel, I suddenly become a very outspoken, critical person. I don't usually consider myself to be that way in general, but I am when I'm driving. I know I'm not the perfect driver, but I really do get on to people for doing idiotic things while they're driving. Now, I would think that most of my criticism is deserved. That doesn't mean I should get bent out of shape about it.

Question Seven: What are your favorite foods to eat, and what can you cook that anyone would like?

What kind of question is that? That's right, one to fill space. My favorite foods are pretty much anything that is Asian, and Italian. My favorite Japanese food is a particular style of food, more than an actual food piece. It's called Skiyaki, based on the sauce that everything is cooked in. You essentially get a huge wok, put in meats, vegetables, noodles, anything really, and you cook it in this sauce for a while. It gets the sauce flavor blended in with everything, and it's really quite amazing. If you ever happen to stop by my parents house, ask for that if there's a choice. My favorite dessert? Cheesecake, by far. And an outstanding dish that nobody but my mom can make correctly called 4-layer Delight. If you've had it, you know. If not...I'm sorry.

As for what I can cook, I think I do a fair job on the grill making chicken, burgers, and sausages. At least I do well when put in charge of that over at Mandi's place. I figure I can also cook a mean fish. Even though I'm not huge on them, they usually turn out pretty nice.

Question Eight: Why did you start writing this blog in the first place?

In all honesty, I really don't know the answer to this question. I remember thinking about 9 months ago, that I really enjoyed reading about the thoughts and adventures that friends were having. And I remembered also thinking that there were times that I was having thoughts that I just really couldn't talk with anyone here at UT about since, well, most of the time it wouldn't have interested them in any way. I've never been one to write in a journal or something, and I'd never really been one to write much at all period, but it seemed like a good idea one day after I'd been thinking about something for a particularly long time, to simply put it down somewhere. So this blog was then off and running. I guess is in the end, I wanted it to serve the same purpose that it served for me-that some friends of mine would be able to see a little in to what I was doing, and just let them know how things were going for me. I guess in the end that it's served that purpose, although for who it has served over the past 8 or 9 months, I can only guess. Hopefully, it's been somewhat entertaining for those that have suffered through it with me.

And so, here ends the Eight Question Meme. What the heck is a meme anyway? I guess I'll go Google it...

To Know My Self, Pt. 1

2007-07-25T22:33:00.000-04:00

Well, as the old adage goes, there is never a time when you stop revising a paper. Or is that even an adage? I don't know, but it's true. Exactly 2 weeks ago, I defended my thesis. For the past 2 hours tonight, I have been analyzing more data to add to it. It kinda seems like that's a little backwards. It's almost like a director going back, and after the movie has been released in theaters, shooting more footage and adding it to his own personal copy. Or an author writing a book, having it published, and then adding a whole extra chapter just for himself. Oh well. At some point, my supervisors say that this stuff will be published in some journal. Should be pretty cool once we get to that point. So, to take a break from the monotonous clicking that I've been going through, I will work on my Q & A that Luke asked me to do. Sorry if it seems disjointed, but I'll just be jumping back and forth as questions form in my head and my tolerance for my data analysis lessens.

Question One: What is your favorite verse from the bible, and why?

While at church tonight, our speaker was talking about tasting the word of God, or in other words, having a personal, intimate relationship with him that is not dependent on others spoon-feeding us, or with us expectantly waiting to be told everything we need to know about the bible. A question that he had on his handout was to discuss your favorite/most meaningful verse for us. For me, Jeremiah 29:11 has always been one of my personal favorites:

'11 For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you," declares the LORD...'

If that verse is not one that can give someone confidence in times of dire need, then I don't know what else I could say. Of course, it's not simply God that is doing something here, but it is also his people. God is saying that he will be there for us when we earnestly and whole-heartedly seek him. He won't be in hiding, He won't be holding back on us, He will be there. All we need to do is look to Him, and declare to Him that we are looking for Him with all of our hearts. What a promise.

Question Two: What possessed you to pursue a major in physics?

Sometimes, I found myself asking the exact same question. I would say, "Self, why are you doing this?" And from there, the answers would vary. My initial reasoning was my interest in astronomy (not astrology, there's a big difference). I'd always enjoyed learning about the universe, and I still do in fact. It's sad in some respects that my degree really has absolutely nothing to do with that, but at the same time, I'm thrilled to have what I do. At other times, however, I was not so thrilled. In fact, were it not for Dr. Murray at Harding, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near this far in terms of pursuing physics. My first semester of physics was really quite awful, and I had failed the first couple exams. He stepped in, tutored me, and got me back on the right track.

I guess my main reasoning for doing physics was that it was something that I was interested in, and when placed against all the other options those early years in college, seemed like the one that would offer the most challenge, and be the most rewarding in terms of learning. I'd considered chemistry, as I had enjoyed every chemistry class I'd ever taken, but didn't feel right doing it for a major. I could have slept through a music major with the piano, would have been bored out of my mind, and probably hated the piano by the time it was said and done. In the end, I wanted something that I would have to work for. After all, it's never any fun when something is just handed to you, is it?

Question Three: You seem to really enjoy music. Why is that, and what types particularly appeal to you?

It is true that I do enjoy music. I've attempted to add a little music to this actual page with the player at the side, although I don't exactly know how much of a success that has been (or whether it works on any other computer besides mine). I would not consider myself to be anywhere near the level of a musical expert. I have a fairly extensive catalogue, although in terms of recent stuff, it only reaches back to about 1998. And even then, it's limited to what I like. But I guess that's the case for everyone's music collection. My first album that I bought with my own money was Mad Season by Matchbox Twenty, and ever since they've been one of my favorite bands. (They have new stuff coming out in October after 5 years, amazingly enough). I also enjoy classical music, both from having played it, and the fact that it can be incredibly relaxing to have on. One of the first cd's that I would play on repeat was Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony. If you want to hear something that is truly spectacular, find a recording of that. It is indeed true art.

Why is it that I like music so much? I'm not entirely sure. It's just something that I grew up with. For as long as I can remember, I've listened to music or been playing music. There's something about it that can take you out of time and space, and just let you kind of be. That's especially true when I play the piano, as it just transports you out of where you are. I'm thinking that those particular sentiments are true of anyone that is engrossed in something creatively and actively.

Perhaps the main reason I enjoy music is that I just love a good melody. Mandi criticizes me sometimes for song selections because of what they are singing about within a song, or a message that may be taken from it. I guess, in my mind at least, I don't particularly pay attention to those lyrics. I'm engrossed in the melodies and the harmonies. I'm listening for how the voice goes with the music, or how the soloist interacts with the accompaniment. I love hearing how a composer can move idea throughout a piece, recalling themes at different points, and blending them all together. I'm partial to acoustic arrangements of popular songs. Not because I don't like hearing something heavier or anything, but because it generally breaks the song down to it's basics. All you have is a melody, harmony and some accompaniment. To me, that's what music is. It's not all about loud drumming, excessive electric guitar, and especially not simply screaming over some random chords. There's an art for creating a memorable melody and being artistically able to transport it from the page to the instrument.

Question Four: Here's the usual question for guys about sports. What sports do you enjoy, which of those do you actually play, and what is your favorite memory from them?

Boy, self. Did you have to ask a sports question? Yes, I did. The list of sports that I enjoy is really quite small. First and foremost, I like soccer. I also like ultimate frisbee. I like rugby for the simple reason that it makes every player in the NFL look like a pansy with all their pads and helmets when the rugby players are getting hit just as hard with no protection. I don't really follow it though. Now, since ultimate is obviously not televised, the only sport that I will watch of my own accord with consistency is soccer. While I can respect the ability to hit a golf ball 350 yards down the fairway, or to hit a fastball with a wooden bat, or to repeatedly run in to 400 pound men, it doesn't mean that I won't be bored out of my mind watching them. And I am, so I don't.

I play both soccer and ultimate. In high school, I would have considered myself a good soccer player. Maybe good enough to play on a small college team. Certainly good enough to have played at Harding. Obviously, after 4 years of not playing soccer, my skills are seriously lacking, although having played in the Knoxville Adult League the past 2 years has shown me that I didn't lose everything. I'm by no means anywhere near my skill level as a senior in high school, but I'm not at at a complete loss out there either. As for ultimate, that was taken up once I got to college, and one Paul Murphy said that I should go play. I was horrible as I couldn't throw a frisbee, but I made up for it initially with an ability to read the disc and see where people were looking to throw. Hence, the 'Beast From The East' nickname was born. Or so I like to think it happened. Others might have a different story. At any rate, skill level increased, and I eventually came to think myself a fairly decent frisbee player. I think that skill level probably would have doubled if I could have ever learned how to dive correctly.

My favorite memory from each of these? Let's see. For frisbee, at least on the field, it was at College Regionals in 2005 when all the graduating seniors played once it got to game point in the final game for the other team. I think we ended up scoring about 3 times before they finally beat us. Playing with those guys for one last time, though, was amazing. In my years at UT, I've missed nothing more from Harding than Ultimate with all the guys. So that's why I kept going to wherever Harding was playing and playing with them anyway. So I guess I never really quit. Yet. As for soccer, it would either have to be making my first competitive team (when I still wasn't all that good, honestly), or when I got to play my senior year with my brother on the high school team. I ended up being injured fairly frequently that year, so I didn't play as much as I would have liked, but we did play our last game of the season together, and it was fun being on the same team as him for that year.

Alright, I've now given up on my data for the night. And given how long this post is, I'll continue with part 2, and the final 4 questions tomorrow.

Disarray

2007-07-23T21:48:00.000-04:00

Well, it has been quite a while since I had any meaningful post on here, so I figured I'd drop in and update. It's been a hectic couple of weeks. I'm in the process of going through the red tape to finalize everything on the Masters. There's the final final draft of the paper to be read for the UT Thesis Consultant to ensure that it follows the guidelines of UT for acceptance. There are the forms and papers to be filled in with all of the necessary signatures, and there are the usual trifles that need to be taken care of in terms of tying up all the loose ends with the physics department concerning official UT stuff (like keys to the buildings and such) that I'll have to probably let them have back. Unfortunate, at least in the sense that I won't have access to the telescopes should I have a need or desire to go up and use them again. But it's almost there.

Everything else is in a complete lack of order. I've been working today on job hunting, cleaning, and packing. Job hunting was not all that successful today, as there were problems at my apartment with the power supply (apparently someone doing construction nearby managed to cut right through the power lines) so everything was screwy most of the day. That reminds of the times when I would be going to Searcy and would be staying at the house of Justin Bland and I think that the for at least the first 2 times (maybe 3) I came out there on random weekends, some guy close by would cut through their water line and they would have no running water at the house. I thought I had gotten past that curse...apparently not. I guess in the future I'll just need to go and tell whoever it is that thinks that they can operate heavy machinery that they should re-think their strategy. There was also a water heater that broke right above me, leading to some weird colored liquid to drip through my ceiling, and subsequently having the water turned off throughout the building so they could get in there and get it fixed. So after a promising start this morning with a few applications sent in and mucho help from Mandi in terms of my resume and cover letter, it didn't end up going as well through the rest of the day.

I did, however, get a good deal done in the packing department, clearing off the bookshelves that I have and putting everything in to boxes. Now, I might have over-packed the boxes since they turned out to be extremely heavy, but I figure if there's 2 people carrying them, it shouldn't be that bad. As long as the box doesn't break...It was nice getting those things packed up and all. Tomorrow will be exclusively spent hunting more jobs.

It's really quite strange, how things kind of feel right now. It's hard for me to imagine that it's been 2 years since I started this graduate program here. It went by quite quickly in all honesty. There's been a lot that's gone on though, with numerous trips out to Harding through the first 1 and 1/2 years; frisbee tournaments at random times, new friends from church, trials, frustration, joy, excitement, and at the end of it all a graduate degree that will hopefully help me in some form or other. I guess it really is the end of an era of sorts. I'll be heading back home for, hopefully, not too long a time until I get myself a job and a source of income. Then it's on to the post-school time of life. It's hard to see what's coming, but I'm sure it'll be exciting, and probably move even quicker than the past 2 years. For now, though, a constant state of disarray is not all that bad. I'll just hope that it gets sorted out sooner rather than later.

IT'S OVER!!!!!!!

2007-07-11T23:23:00.000-04:00

So I noticed that it's been a while since I updated on here. Lots has been going on. My brother's home for a couple weeks until the fall semester starts up. He actually leaves for the Dominican Republic with my church's mission team for a week next Wednesday. The only problem is that he broke 2 fingers in his right hand. So hopefully tomorrow when he goes to the doctor, they'll say that everything has healed nicely and that it should be alright down there for a week without another appointment.

In other news, I'm FINISHED with my Master's. I defended this morning, through a 1 hour and 15 minute talk/Q&A, and came out with a sheet of paper saying that I had passed with all of the professors signing on it. In other words, besides a few extraneous pieces of paperwork, I'm for all intents and purposes and Master of Science. I think I'm going to go to sleep now. Rock on.

Vanity

2007-06-26T16:13:00.001-04:00

Something that I have a difficult time understanding are people that find it necessary to constantly show off. It doesn't really matter what it is that they are showing off about, whether it's musical, mental, physical, whatever. Just anything that they are obviously doing just to draw attention to themselves. Especially if they are doing it constantly. And even more so when they are clearly not all that good at whatever they are doing. Take, for instance, this guy that I didn't ever meet out at Harding. Now, for a while the cafeteria had a piano in it, for whatever reason. And everyday when I'd go to lunch or dinner, this guy would be sitting there, playing around on it, playing the same song or two over and over and over. Having played piano for a number of years, I would get quite annoyed listening to this guy showing off for anyone and everyone in the cafeteria, whether they wanted to hear it or not. Of course, there were always a couple girls that would go over and faun over him, which I'm sure was his main objective to begin with. In my mind, it doesn't make any sense why you would feel the need to just go over and start drawing attention to yourself about some ability that you really don't possess. Or even if you did, why you would want to just have people come over and start telling you how good you are.

Mandi has made the solid point to me that talents, such as playing the piano (or whatever the talent happens to be for whoever happens to possess it), is a God-given talent and that it shouldn't be kept from other people as it can bring joy to them. I understand her point, and realize that I do have a talent in terms of my piano-playing ability that God has given me, and that I should be willing to share that talent and ability with other people. But where do you draw the line between doing something for the glory of God and doing something to bring recognition to yourself? Or is there even a line there to be drawn? Is having a talent always going to bring personal recognition, and from that allow other people to recognize God through my ability?

It's something that I have a tremendous difficulty dealing with. I, for one, hate having people ask me to play the piano, especially in public places, because I do not want people coming up and telling me what they think of my playing, whether it be good or bad. I don't want to appear as conceited and vain like others that find it necessary to just go out and proclaim to the world how amazing they think they are at something (this applies to practically every young guitarist I've ever walked past). I don't want to make other people think like I do 99% o the time that I hear/see someone doing something to draw attention to themselves and get annoyed at them trying to get 15 minutes of fame whenever they can. I also realize, however, the my playing does make people happy and that some people enjoy listening to it, as it is a talent, and not something that everyone can do well. I would like to think that not everyone that plays does it simply to see how many girls (or guys) they can get to pay attention to them for a couple minutes. But how do you make the distinction between seeking recognition and giving glory? How can you keep it from being a matter of personal pride? How do you ensure that people see your action as one of praise to God, and not as a show of vanity?

South Carolina

2007-06-24T22:27:00.000-04:00

This past weekend was spent having quite the time, and ending up being extremely exhausted by the end of it. South Carolina was fun, as it always is, hanging out with the Murphy's, and various other friends that I've come to know over the past few years of heading down there and camp. All in all, good times. I did realize, however, that mixing nothing but sugar foods, little to no sleep, and headaches results in one not-happy camper. We'll have to change the diet next weekend.

I have to say that Mandi did exceptionally well today at her first soccer game in probably about 8 years. She ran hard, caused problems for their full-backs, and helped lead to 2 of our goals. I ended up having to play keeper, which was ridiculous in itself, but ended up pulling out the shut-out. Someone our captain figured that my frisbee skills would be useful in goal. How about that, huh? Luckily the other team didn't have too many shots, and a couple of the ones that I would have had problems with got blocked before they even got to me. Still though, not bad, although I wasn't able to help out Mandi on the field and kinda coach her along. She did well, though, so it didn't matter all that much.

Oh, and I heard the quote of the day today from my brother. Maybe even the week, month and year. I just called him up to see how things were going since he's coming home tomorrow, and I was telling him about the weekend. Here's about how it went.

Dustin: "You were in South Carolina for the weekend?"
Me: "Yeah, I went down for a wedding."
Dustin: "So, Paul got married??"
Me: "...stunned silence...HA!!!! No."

A new song's in the player. Enjoy it.

Frustrated Satisfaction

2007-06-19T14:44:00.000-04:00

Re-formatting your hard drive, while not the most enjoyable process to go through, can end up not being such a bad thing. I've just finished going through that process on my desktop computer. Programs were running extremely slow, cpu usage was almost always at 100%, and nothing seemed to work right. It all added up to needing to just wipe the slate clean and start all over. In the end, it's now 3:00 in the afternoon, and I have an empty hard drive, and a fast working computer again. Not a bad trade off. Good thing I backed up the hard drive just the other week.

The paper/powerpoint for the thesis is coming along nicely. Obviously, no work has been done today since it's taken me until about now to get my internet connection working again, which is necessary since in order to use the programs that my paper is on, I need to connect to ORNL's VPN network. There's about 3 weeks left now...the countdown is on. Things are looking good though, with the paper formatted and essentially finished except for maybe a few more minor cosmetic adjustments, and the powerpoint layed out in it's entirety. Now I've just got to add some graphics and such, and it will be ready for presenting. At least, that's the plan.

I just realized yesterday how incredibly terrible I now am at the game of ultimate frisbee. We played last night for a couple hours here in OR, and I got consistly owned by the other team, at least in terms of me making defensive plays. Even Mandi looked at me like, "What the heck are you doing???". It was really quite sad. I guess that comes with having not played a lot, and just being out of shape in general. On a positive note, though, my throwing is probably the best that it's ever been. Sam throwing a 40 yard flick for a score? Yeah, it's possible now on occasion. Who knows where that came from, but for me, not playing much apparently translates in to improved throwing ability. Hopefully by the end of the summer, things will be more back to normal.

And on a side note, somebody needed to talk to the people getting married in the coming weekends (Josh and Mark) about picking their times for weddings (11 AM and 8 PM respectively). Who has weddings at those times anyway? Just kidding guys. Enjoy the new tune.

Good Search

2007-06-14T19:40:00.000-04:00

This isn't really anything in particular, but Mandi was telling me the other day about a search engine that is able to donate money to charity for every search that you run using that program. It's called goodsearch, and if you go to that site, you are able to pick out a charity that you would like to donate money to. Now, it's only about 1 cent per search, but if you figure how many times you search for different things during the day, and if you can get a number of your friends to help out, and a number of your friend's friends...well, you get the picture. If you don't have one that you might like to sign up with, I'd suggest a company called International Justice Mission (IJM) based out of D.C. Not a bad way to donate a little money, all while you're just browsing around on the internet. Oh, and the song in the player has changed. Still can't get it to have a playlist though.

And on a completely random note, does anyone know what the T's in ITT Technical Institute stand for? I figure there's only so many times you can say Technical in a school title...

Now Comes The Night

2007-06-12T01:17:00.000-04:00

Well, I had been wanting to try and find a way to put up some of the music files for the songs that I reference as I go through this blogging thing. Today, since I was utterly bored at work for most of the morning, I went googling for help. I came across ways to do it, and lo and behold, I've got a way to play the songs that I've been talking about at random times throughout the past almost 9 months I guess. Maybe one of these days I can figure out how to get the playlist version to work, but for now I'll change out the song every couple of days. I'm kinda slow at this whole HTML coding thing. All the help places made it sound so easy...and yet, it's been difficult. Me and programming just don't go together to well.

It has been an incredibly busy 4, now 5 days. Friday was spent first of all trying to track down the ever-elusive Paul Murphy. We had rumor that he was in Nashville, perhaps staying with either Mandi's brother, or some other unknown entity. We also had a phone number that he had at one point called another friend with. The problem with this number is that when one tried to call it, the line went directly to voice mail. And not so that you could leave a voicemail, but needing a password to check your voice mail. Eventually, Mandi and I find out that he is actually staying with her brother, and so we pack up to head for Nashville. Luckily for us, there was frisbee to be played and we met up with some good friends in the Jordan brothers and Kevin Burr. Frisbee was played, and good times were had. We came back home late Friday night.

Saturday came early, and Mandi and I enlisted Paul to help us do some set-up work for our upcoming VBS. We drew quite an exceptional lion for our Daniel and the Lion's Den bible story for tomorrow night, and then proceeded to cut pictures for one of the largest mural's I've ever seen printed. Hopefully I can get a pic soon and throw it up here. We then went to SC to get Paul to camp for the week. I have to say, that after being out there for just a couple hours and seeing everyone, I was quite jealous, as was Mandi, that they were about to start camp and that we couldn't stick around and have some fun as well. Oh well...maybe next year?

Sunday began VBS, and so we've spent the past few days playing around with 2nd and 3rd graders and getting them back and forth between classes and crafts and games and such. It can certainly be trying at times, but it is fun, and for the most part our group has been incredibly well behaved. What more can you want from 2nd graders?

And just as an update regarding my thesis, the paper is moving along nicely. I'm in the early stages of my second revision, and will certainly have more to talk about the next couple days before all my mentors head out for Turkey. I'll be meeting with them for any last things that need to be discussed, and then it's essentially me working on the presentation aspect once I get the particulars of the paper fixed up. We're flying up on the end of all this school stuff. It's really pretty crazy thinking about how 2 years ago I had just finished at Harding, and was in the process of getting started here at UT, finding an apartment, getting ready to start off more on my own than I had at any other point. It seems like it wasn't all that long ago...At any rate, the night has come. Actually, it came long ago.

Already

2007-06-01T00:39:00.000-04:00

Well...how about a late-night post, huh. I've been hunting around on the net for some stuff that Mandi might be interested in doing after work that relates to service projects or just getting involved in some form or fashion with some people that would need it. Sadly, I haven't been able to really find any information at all on anything like that. I guess we'll just need to do some more digging.

Another thing that would be helpful, is if anyone has any ideas about how to spice up the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den, Mandi and I would be quite appreciative. We're teaching the class on that story during one night of our upcoming Vacation Bible School. The main emphasis is on prayer, obviously, and we're trying to come up with ways to emphasize that point, as well as to try and make it somewhat fun for the kids. Mandi's a huge fan of having me dress up as a lion and attack the kids at random and have them start praying and have that cause me to back away from them. I think she likes the idea mostly cause she thinks it would be amusing to see me running around in a lion's costume...Any help would be beneficial though, if there are any thoughts.

It's strange, how quickly time can pass. I don't really know where all that time went, thinking back to January when this past semester was just getting started, and thinking of all the time that I had to get things finished for the master's degree and everything. Now, it's already June 1st, and I've got about 5 weeks to finish my paper, create a powerpoint presentation, and take care of the business stuff that UT requires me to have completed. Things are moving along, although my first draft of my paper was decidedly a very, very rough draft. I've gotten most of the corrections taken care of, and now I'm waiting on the 3rd guy to go through all the data and see what he says about it. Last I checked, he didn't know what to do say about it, and if the guy that's been studying superconductivity for 30 years doesn't know what to say, I'm sure as heck not going to know what say about it. Unless I'm a genius...

Something that I've started doing in the past couple months of posting on here (and sporadically from the beginning) is to start using song titles as the title for my posts. They are usually just what I've been listening to either at the time of the post or that got me thinking about whatever random thoughts I put down for that day. Some of the time, the song content doesn't even relate to what I end up rambling about, and sometimes it coincides quite nicely. It's really interesting some of the inspiration you can get from a song title, regardless of the genre that the particular song comes from.

With that in mind, today's song title comes from a new band called Rush of Fools. I guess with looking at how quickly the past 5 months of this year have passed, it seemed fitting to use this particular word, especially given the constricted time frame I will soon be dealing with. The song deals with the idea that God has already taken care of anything and everything. There's nothing left for us to do but accept Him and do His will. He already loves us, He already has taken care of us, He already did everything that was necessary on His part to bring us to Him. For me, especially in a time when I'm feeling as if I have to work hard in order to have anything work out correctly, it's comforting to know that, for this aspect of my life, all the "work" has been done. All I've got to do is step up and accept what's on offer. Once I'm to that point, it shouldn't be all that hard to go out and do His will, should it? After all, the hard part has already been done.

Dance, Dance Christ Paffgen

2007-05-21T23:56:00.000-04:00

What a weekend. It turned out to be quite the time in terms of soccer for me this past weekend, with my middle school teams tournament going on, as well as the rec league team that I play for playing for the division championship for the spring season. We'll start with the middle school teams.

Saturday began bright and early at 7 am for the first B team game. Given that the schedule had put both of our teams playing at the exact same time for all 3 games in the group, we had to split up coaching duties, with two of us at the B team, and one at the A team. We would then rotate through the games in order to have each of us be at at least one of each teams games. Our B team played well, although they ended up losing 3-0 on 2 fluke goals. We also missed at least a half dozen chances to score ourselves. It really could have gone either way. During this game, the A team dismantled their opponent 4-0. Not a bad showing for a team that hadn't scored more than 2 goals in a game all year.

The afternoon game put me at the A team game. We were playing the winner of the morning game, so essentially this game was going to decide who would go to the championship game on Sunday afternoon. We were tied 0-0 after the first half. The other team had had a goal called back for a foul, which led to a quite humorous bit of yelling from the opposing team's coach. Now, anyone that knows soccer knows that when a foul is called by an assistant referee (linesman) , that the center official doesn't always see the call right away. This happened in the build up to the play, they scored, and then the ref saw the linesman with his flag off. He waved the goal off and gave us the free-kick. This led the over-weight "coach" of the other team to march out on to the field and start screaming at the referee that he had to play the advantage since they had scored a goal and that he couldn't go back and take the goal away. If the coach knew anything about soccer, he would know that there are goals called back all the time for offside, and that it is perfectly within the rules of the game to call a play back after the fact when he didn't see the flag right away. At any rate, the coach yelled for about 5 minutes ranting and raving...he just needs to read the rules. In the end, we won the game 2-1 on 2 excellent goals for my team and 1 spectacular shot from their team.

The third game Sunday turned out to be meaningless for both teams. The A team was already going to be in the championship game due to favorable results in the afternoon, while the B team was eliminated based on having lost their second game 3-1. The championship game was played well, and we ended up winning 1-0 on a great goal from one of our star mid-fielders. I have to say that it was quite exciting to be able to coach these kids and win a championship of sorts at the end of the season with them. They even decided to dump water and ice all over us after the game while we were celebrating. All in all, it had been a blast coaching the kids and just having some fun with the game of soccer.

As for my rec league team that I play on, we ended up winning the game 2-1 on a golden goal in overtime, although I wasn't able to play due to a freak neck-problem that kept me from hardly being able to walk most of Sunday. I still don't really know what was up with it, but it was like I had slept on it wrong, but about 20 times worse. I hadn't really ever felt anything like it. But that's how it goes sometimes I guess.

At any rate, I was a part of 2 championship teams this past weekend, which is really quite spectacular. I would have to say, however, that the one for the middle school team was the more satisfying of the two. And not just because I couldn't play in the game for my team, but just because it was great seeing the team work together and see how badly they all wanted to win. The happiness that they all had and just the fact that everyone came together over the weekend to play hard and work hard made it seem like the more special achievement of the two. Maybe this coaching thing wouldn't be so bad after all...

Leave Out All The Rest

2007-05-18T18:02:00.000-04:00

Ah, the weekly update. This week has been...busy. Mandi's been at a conference in Frederick, MD all week, so I've had ample time to work on my thesis paper. Which is a good thing. 2 months and counting. I am up to 45 pages now. Strange what a week's worth of work will do for you, huh? I even have references and stuff. It's crazy. Oh, alright, so I don't have anywhere near 45 pages of writing, but those graphs and charts and tables are necessary, and I certainly had to write them, so I'm counting them. And by the way, if anyone else that sees this is going to be writing a long paper that needs references, a table of contents and lists for figures and tables and stuff, try using LaTex. It just makes it all easier. You just label the figure, table, graph, whatever, and it tracks it, numbers it, and updates everything on it for you. Excellent.

This coming weekend is the end-of-year tournament for the middle school teams that I've been helping coach these past few months. We're kind of optimistic about how they'll do since they don't set up brackets specifically by the divisions you played in. Essentially what they did is they took the teams and broke down the records that they had, and placed the teams with similar looking stats in to the same brackets, I guess in a bid to try and even out the playing field. Our A-team has a pretty decent draw from the looks of it. Not so much for our B-team. But, as in any sport, you never really know how things will go until the game is played. Our only major concern is having everyone be on time. Our games on Saturday and Sunday morning are at 8, and since we can't hardly get a team to show up on time to a 6:30 PM game...we're a little worried. Hopefully it won't be an issue.

As I was sitting in church the other day, it was time for communion. So, naturally there is the "Communion Leader" who gets up and talks for a while. Now, I don't have a problem with this, and I generally think it's interesting hearing different men get up and give their perspectives on what they see as being important or what insight or personal experience they might have had in relation to this particular portion of the worship service. There are times, though, when I feel like it's too much about a particular person getting up and giving a 5 minute talk on communion and what they think is important. Almost like, since they're the designated "leader" for the week, that they feel they have to say a lot. I don't know if this stems from most people's generally inability to be comfortable in silence or what, but sometimes, I wish that it would be just a simple statement, and then everyone can have their own time to dwell on their personal relationship with God for a few moments. Communion is a time to remember Christ's death and, more importantly in my opinion, his resurrection. We take it as a remembrance until we can eat and drink with him again, which obviously would be impossible if he were not resurrected. I guess at times, less is more. Just leave out the rest.

Trust Me

2007-05-11T21:43:00.000-04:00

It's been a good week. I've noticed that it's once again been about a week since I last updated anything on here. There's been a lot going on the past week. Dustin came home last Sunday and so I went on home and stayed at the parents house. Dustin and I spent the days that I didn't go in to the lab lazing around the house, and the evenings doing various other things that mostly consisted of playing Winning Eleven on the computer, falling asleep in the basement and eating chips and dip in extremely large quantities. We also went to a "guys night" that some of the men at our church do among themselves. It's pretty cool stuff. We had a cheap (but not Murphy cheap) hibachi style dinner and then went and saw Spider-Man 3. I thought the movie was pretty good. It could've done without some stuff that wasn't really all that important, but I liked it overall. Of course, I'm no Spider-Man fan-boy, so I couldn't tell you anything about whether it's true to the comics or whatever, but I could personally care less about that kind of stuff. I thought it was a well done movie.

There are some things that I find extremely difficult. One of those is trusting, whether that is people, God, or anything else really. I have a hard time trusting many of the drivers around me since I think that most of them don't have a clue about what they're doing. I have a hard time believing people that I don't know or that have broken my trust in them before. I have a difficult time trusting in things that I can't find proof for myself. This trust factor was the main reason that I had such a hard time making any type of commitment to God and Christ. Sure, there is the Bible and the accounts that it gives. But there isn't any concrete, hands-on proof. It took me 21 years to be able to accept that I didn't have to have something in my hands in order to believe it.

Those of you that were in the Frisbee devo that we did will remember my character choice of Thomas. I feel like I relate to him because of his need for concrete evidence. Now, obviously I am not living in that time period and, unless things change rapidly, I won't be able to personally ask Christ to show me the scars as proof of what happened. I also don't think that Jesus made a mistake in picking Thomas as a disciple. Thomas always gets a bad rap for being the doubter, although I would have to submit that all of them doubted, Thomas was just the one who was vocal about it.

At the moment, my problem is trusting in the plan for my future. I'm looking at the calendar and seeing that I've got less than 2 months to finish writing a paper that I've barely started for my thesis. I've got to find a job somewhere, anywhere. I've got a lot of things to figure out. And it's not even that I don't believe things will happen, because for many of things things I know that they will work out, but I just can't see how they will happen. And for me, not knowing how is what makes things hard.

I was just thinking about this based on some stuff we talked about at church on Wednesday night. They were studying 2 Peter 1:19-21. Now, I didn't really get most of it since I had obviously not been there for the first 18 verses. Verse 20, however, struck me. It says, "Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. 21For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." Therefore, with an overall trust in God, it should reason to follow that whatever the scripture says should be easy to trust. I guess in the end, I just need to read one verse. John 14:1. "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me."

Waiting To Shine

2007-05-05T11:06:00.000-04:00

It's strange, when you look back at some of the great works that have been created, whether it be musical, visual, or written, how often the grand scale of the piece isn't understood until many generations later. I mention this oddity since Mandi and I went to see Georges Bizet's opera Carmen yesterday at the Tennessee Theater (which by the way is an amazing building once you get inside). The opera was debuted in 1875 to which is was roundly criticized and considered an utter failure. Bizet, after attending the debut and seeing the poor showing, became ill shortly after, and died within a few months of the opening. It was unfortunate that he would not see any of the success of this opera as it has now become one of the most popular operas of all time.

The story involves Carmen, a gypsy girl who seduces a corporal of the local army. The corporal deserts for the woman, and eventually is tossed aside for another man. In his jealous rage, he kills Carmen, and then himself. Of course, this all happens while another woman is pledged to be married to him. Basically, it's the essential set-up for most any opera story. At least, any of them that I've seen. The production that Mandi and I saw last night was very impressive and well done. In the liner notes of the program, the director noted that they had gone back to the original version of the opera. What this meant, was that later additions to the score and story by other composers were taken out, resulting in what Bizet had originally composed. Personally, I can't understand why there would have been additions to the opera in the first place that would be accepted as the true work of Bizet...but that's just me. All in all though, it was quite enjoyable. And speaking of operas, I guess I have the memory of the time when I went with Chris Morton and a few of his girl friends, Josh, and his "date" Paul. I think Paul probably wanted to kill himself for the majority of the 3 hours in the theater, and Josh's greatest moment of the night was getting photographed in front of Wang's. He's probably still got that picture laying around somewhere...

There aren't a lot of things that frustrate me more in sports than a team that doesn't show intensity or desire to perform well. That is my problem that I'm having right now with the middle school team, and I don't entirely know how to change their attitude. Both our A and B teams have not shown intensity or desire for the past few games, and it's really grating on my nerves. Essentially what happens is this. They show up late to the warm up for the game (which I know isn't entirely their fault), but then they kinda meander around instead of hustling to get in with the warm-up. They then proceed to do nothing besides talk, tell jokes, shove each other around and basically disrupt any semblance of getting ready for a game. Then the game starts, their heads aren't in the right place, and after about 10 minutes they concede a goal. After that, they just quit playing, and go on to lose 4, 5, 6 to nothing.

Now, in soccer you will get goals scored on you, just like in football you'll have touchdowns scored on you, or you'll get beaten on a lay-out for the frisbee, or you'll have someone out-sprint your throw to first base. OK, maybe that last one won't happen, but I think you've got the idea. You can just guarantee that those things will happen if you play the sport for more than 5 minutes. The big thing in sports is how do you bounce back from that? Do you simply throw in the towel, assume that each and every time that can happen you'll lose, and just walk off the field? Or do you pick your head up, and show them that you've got what it takes to get it back? Guys like Justin Bland and Paul always impressed me on the frisbee field because they gave everything all the time. It didn't matter if we were dominating or getting dominated. You're out there to prove to yourself that you've got what it takes to be the best that you have the potential to be. There's pride and desire to do well with the abilities and talents given to them. When you just give up and throw in the towel, where's the desire to do the best that you can and to show to nobody but yourself that you can do well? What are you waiting for?

I Walked On The Moon

2007-04-26T10:25:00.000-04:00

So I recently discovered an exceptional comedian. I guess it wasn't recently...I believe someone in the grad program told me about him and showed me part of a dvd of him early my first year here at UT. At the time, I guess I didn't think much of it or pay that much attention since I figured it'd be something that I wouldn't find funny or feel like watching. As it turns out though, someone from church earlier this year mentioned the name, and with my lack of memory I completely forgot that I'd heard of him before. I went and found his live cd online and had a listen. It is really incredibly funny and actually clean comedy. If you're looking for some laughs, I'd recommend giving this guy a chance. As a point of reference, here's his website which has a few clips on it.

The UEFA Champions League semi-finals took place Tuesday and Wednesday, and let me say that the game on Tuesday between Manchester United and AC Milan is one of the best that I have seen in recent times. The game was exciting, there were great goals, solid play all around, and basically an exhibition for why soccer is the sport of choice in so many areas of the world. So for you, Paul, I'll be sure to have the last half of the season of House and more than likely the 2 legs of the Manchester United/AC Milan games whenever you get back to the states.

Speaking of something related to the word house, my parents are currently remodeling a little of their house. They're replacing our front and back porches, as well as making a storage shed for lawnmowers and outdoor stuff. They're also putting a room so that they can put their hot-tub back inside and get it running and usable again. It should all turn out to be quite nice by the time they're finished, but it's going to be a while I think. Although, in my mom's mind, she thinks they'll be finished here in the next few weeks. We'll have to see how things go though.

Well, that's about it for today. Here's a little brain teaser to keep you occupied.
Water in the Cup:
A man in a restaurant asked a waiter for a juice glass, a dinner plate, water, a match, and a lemon wedge. The man poured enough water onto the plate to cover it.
"If you can get the water on the plate into this glass without touching or moving this plate, I will give you $100," the man said. "You can use the match and lemon to do this."
A few minutes later, the waiter walked away with $100 in his pocket. How did the waiter get the water into the glass?

Makes Me Wonder

2007-04-20T22:08:00.000-04:00

It's sad when there are so many bad things that happen that take up so much of the media time and public thought. Of course, all you have to see is Philip's post to see that there are just as many bad things that nobody cares about as much as who gets Anna Nicole Smith's baby. I mean, seriously people. But then I guess this is the point of our society today. How sad.

In addition to the events around the world, a man from our church passed away this past week due to cancer. He was probably one of the first "old" guys around the congregation that I got to know well. I worked out on his farm about 4 years ago for a summer helping him paint his farm-house, clearing out the woods that surrounded it, and generally keeping everything in order and clean around the place. It was a beautiful tract of land out in the country, and you could tell how much he loved being out there. He was always talking about it and riding around on his tractor out there. He was one of the kindest men that I knew at our church, and he will be missed.

In some happier news, my middle school B team one their first game yesterday. They fell behind to an early goal (inside the first 3 minutes), and then had a PK blocked in the last minute of the first half. This happened because the kid that I wanted to have take it apparently misunderstood my yelling, and told someone else to take it, who promptly shot it right at the goalie. At halftime we made some adjustments and got a goal within the first 5 minutes. Then we scored again just a few minutes later. The other team had this girl that was throwing elbows and fouling all over the place, so I got yelled at by the ref to keep it quiet since I was pretty furious that she injured one of our players and got nothing for it. They eventually scored a second, so we were tied 2-2 with about 5 minutes remaining. In what was essentially the last play of the game, we got a quick break, came down 4 on 3, got a good cross in to the box, and eventually one of our players got a foot on it and put it in to the goal. They were all pretty excited, and you could see it in their faces about how happy they were to have won a game. i have to say, I was pretty pumped myself.

This weekend is looking to be pretty good. Tomorrow Mandi and I are going to follow my parents to the place where they're having the Highland View Spring Retreat which is what we used to call the Family Retreat way back when. It's essentially a weekend at a state park where there's hiking, games, fun and fellowship. Mandi and I will go out there for the day and enjoy the outdoors and fun to be had hanging out with some of the members from Highland View. Sunday looks like a day for some disc golf since I don't have any soccer game that day, so we'll have to wait and see.

One of my poignant moments from tonight at the funeral? Seeing the family. They weren't bitter or angry. They weren't even sad. I guess I mean that they weren't the kind of sad that you have when you think you've lost something forever. The overwhelming feeling of the entire family was that they were happy for Harold. They were happy because they knew that he had gone on to be with God, and this was a testament to them and Harold and their belief in God. For us as Christians, funerals, while they are times of grief and mourning, are also in a way a time of celebration. We celebrate their being with God. We celebrate the fact that we know when Christ comes we will all be reunited. We know that it's not really goodbye. We will see them again.

Lost

2007-04-14T22:57:00.000-04:00

The past few days have been pretty action packed. The soccer teams that we coach both lost on Thursday. Our A team to a clearly superior team from Farragut, and our B team to a team that outplayed them. The A team lost 3-0, while the B team gave up two late goals to lose 2-1. Not bad showings, though, since they played hard. All in all a much improved performance from Monday, especially for the A team.

The highlight for the week is definately that Mandi's friends Emily and Rachel from Harding came in to town. We spent today touring around some things that I hadn't been to in quite a while that are in the area. The first stop in the morning was the Mayfield Dairy Farm. Now, this might not sound like much, but it was fairly interesting. You got to see the bottling plant where all the milk is processed, as well as how they make the jugs and get everything together. Mayfield is apparently the last dairy to use this machine that boils the milk in order to get the bad flavors out of it. I don't remember the name of the machine, but it was a pretty neat little contraption. The dissappointing thing was that we weren't able to see the ice cream plant since they are only operational during the week. We did, however, eat some ice cream, as they had a double scoop cone/cup available for $2. I had myself some strawberry cheesecake and chocolate cream pie ice cream. The chocolate cream pie is a new flavor that they're trying out, and I have to say that it was quite good.

Our second stop was at a place called the Lost Sea. It's the largest underground lake that is known about. You go in to the cave, and go down some 500 feet. They have a nice tour that walks you around the cave and points out the interesting features and everything, and then you go down to the lake, which they say is about 4.5 acres in size. You get in a boat, and they drive you out and around on it. The water was low today, as they say that it's down about 15 feet from the average. You could see the calcium line on the rock around the edge of the lake, and we were able to drive back farther on the lake then they normally do. In fact, part of where we were under is usually under water when the lake is at normal levels. They also have an all night tour where you essentially go caving and spend the night in one of the larger caverns that they have down there. Pretty cool stuff, and one of the cool things that you might not find out about in the area of East Tennessee.

Right Now

2007-04-09T11:35:00.000-04:00

So as I type, I sit here in the astronomy lab waiting on students to show up and finish their make-up labs that they've missed. The apathy on show is quite remarkable, as people that have 4 or 5 labs missing just won't show up to finish them. It's not like they're going to pass with a 60 or anything. They're going to get an incomplete and have to either take this class over or take another science credit since these always serve as electives. Oh well, it's not really my problem that people could care less about their education. They'll just regret it in a few weeks when end of term grades come out and they don't quite get to move forward like they thought they would.

Reading a post like Philip's where the weather reached 80 degrees, I wonder if they would enjoy a cold snap like we've had here. It's been in the 20's overnight, lots of wind, and little sun. Not exactly my idea of what spring should be. Then again, I guess there's always the "Blizzard of '93" that came even later in the year and had us out of school for a week with the huge snowfall amounts. All I've got to say is that if it's this cold for a week in the middle of April, at least send us some snow to have some fun in.

The week that should have been progress in the lab turned out to be quite anti-climactic. After fixing the problem with the machine, another problem with the computer came up in that I couldn't run the program that controls everything. So most of Friday was spent attempting to fix things in LabView only to be continually stifled in those attempts. I emailed my supervisor who is in China, and through the wonder of the internet and remote connecting, he was able to solve the problem and hopefully fix everything that I couldn't. If there's something that I hope doesn't happen this week, it's that something else doesn't break on me. If everything stays good, I should have some good data by the end of the week. Here's hoping.

Tonight my middle school team is back in action. The A-team won their game last Thursday 2-0. I think that we've kinda figured out a good formation for them to use that gets our good players in positions to make plays and puts our supporting players in places where they can excel. It's essentially a 3-4-1-2 (in soccer, you don't specify the keeper, and you start from the defenders and work forward) giving our better dribblers the middle of the field and putting some people in the middle of the park where a lot of teams are still prone to go. Tonight will be a good test of it as we'll be playing a team that's pretty good, so we'll get to see how well it works out in a little bit more strenuous environment. The B-team lost 3-0 but played well, showing hustle and winning balls in the air. I was quite impressed with their performance, except for the inability to do a throw in correctly. I think we had about 6 turn-overs on throw in mistakes. How sad is that? That has got to be corrected today.

The riddle of the day is Coenobita Confusion:

I love to climb up high in trees,
digging holes, and feeling the breeze.
I eat eggs, apples, carrots, meat,
even peanut butter, is a treat.
Around the world, my kin are found.
"Chirping" is our signature sound.

So, what am I?

Also, I don't know how many of you have seen any books on visual tricks, but they are generally quite impressive. Take a look, and see what you think of this picture. If you're confused, use your mouse to trace out one of the spirals. You may be surprised by what happens.

At any rate, I'm not in to my last 2 hours of teaching lab as a TA, so I should probably go help the student who just showed up. Oh, and props to Josh and Amber. Congrats guys.

Dismantle. Repair.

2007-04-04T22:43:00.000-04:00

So after the bad news of yesterday, today actually worked out alright. The lead guy in the group has been helping me out, and he spent some time yesterday getting the ice plug out of the machine. In order to do that, he placed a copper rod (which conducts heat) against the ice plug and let it slowly melt the ice. After a while, he could then break through it. Of course, this left ice in the machine, so all night he ran some dry air through the apparatus, hopefully getting rid of most of the moisture. We can't know for sure if it's all gone...but hopefully it is.

I came in this morning and got a sample run started, and the cooling process seemed to work fine, the needle valve didn't seem to get clogged, and everything seemed to be in order. The only way we'll see how things go is with time and just letting things run and seeing if anything else comes up that doesn't seem right. We'll know a lot more when I go back in the morning as to whether everything is working well depending on how the temperature control holds and keeping that vacuum chamber sealed. There was promise, however, and it certainly helped to make today a good day.

Tomorrow is the Cedar Bluff Middle School B team's first actual game, and I will be coaching them, with the other two coaches taking the A game that is running along-side it. I have a feeling it's going to be a problem getting them to understand positioning and not chasing the ball. In all honesty, a lot of it looks like some very young age AYSO soccer with the way everyone just clumps up around the ball and ball-watches. So getting them to play positions for 70 minutes will probably be quite difficult. We'll just have to wait and see. I haven't worked with the B team for the past week, so maybe they've gotten some things worked out in those couple practices. Here's hoping.

The Champions League tournament in Europe had some good games the past two days. It was leg one of the 2 leg home and away series that will be completed next Tuesday and Wednesday. Liverpool demolished PSV Eindhoven 3-0 away from home, virtually guaranteeing themselves a place in the semi-finals. The winner between those two teams will play the winner of the Chelsea-Valencia tie which has to be advantage Valencia after they managed a 1-1 draw away from home. In the other half of the bracket, AC Milan and Bayern Munich played an exhilarating 2-2 draw giving the advantage to Bayern as they were the away team. Bayern scored the tying goal with 10 seconds left in injury with virtually the last kick of the game. 10-man Manchester United lost 2-1 to AS Roma away from home, where the away goal could prove to be a vital lifeline. Next week will bring the conclusion of these ties, and move everyone one step closer to the final.

Today's riddle is named "Seven". Philip had the correct answer to yesterday's, although I'll leave it to you to decide whether it was coffee or cocaine which was the correct answer.

There are seven parts to this riddle,
Each is part of a greater whole.
You see most of these,
Everyday as you please:

First is what I did to a book yesterday,
Second mixes with apples.
Third is a shout, then "ouch" you say,
Fourth shares the sound of mean.
Fifth is what the wind had done,
The sixth is often skipped.
The last and final can be called by two names,
If roses are this, then which is the blue one?

Break Me

2007-04-03T22:32:00.000-04:00

Today was quite the disappointing day. You know, there are just some things that don't seem to work right when you need them to. I went to the lab today expecting to have about a 3 hour job of getting the machine set up and ready to go with some measurements. It turned out that I couldn't even get started. Something happened that is definitely not a good thing to have had happen. The inside of this machine works by having a pump that puts in a small amount of liquid nitrogen to the inner chamber where the sample is being held. What then happens is that the temp of the sample space heats up the liquid nitrogen, and so by a process of equilibrium you get everything to slowly cool down.

What appears to have happened, however, is that the vacuum chamber from which this liquid nitrogen is pumped had gotten some air in to it. Now, one might not think that this is such a bad thing, but the problem with air is that it will invariably have some moisture in it. Now, when you put 60 K liquid nitrogen in to air, you freeze the water that's inside of it. Now, this needle valve which shoots in the liquid nitrogen in to the sample space seems to have frozen over, along with some other areas within the chamber. So what's happening now is we're going to have to warm up everything, which will take a few days, and then pump helium through the space to try and clear everything out. It's going to take a while to see if anything works right or not...but we'll just have to wait and see.

I liked Paul's choices for the letter matches. I guess it does probably take about 90 minutes and then some to get anywhere in A.S. So I'll say that's a good answer, even if it's not the correct one, although if you can't get it after what Paul had... Today's question is called "Take A Break" in the theme of breaking things...sort of.

Discovered in Africa, I spread like a tide
To become a hot staple known the world wide.
A necessity to some, a treasure to many,
I'm best enjoyed among pleasant company.

Some like me hot and some like me cold.
Some prefer mild, others only bold.
Some take me straight, while some like to savor
My essence to which has been added a flavor.

So put down your cares and sit awhile with me;
I'll send you back refreshed and full of energy.

Star of the Show

2007-04-02T21:52:00.000-04:00

Props to Paul. He got to the answer quite quickly for yesterday's riddle. Well played. Today's is called "It Helps to Know You're Sport". Here it is.

90 M + I T and E T = G T in a S M

So we opened up our middle school soccer season today. I have to say that I'm quite proud of our team. They stepped up to play with more heart and hustle today than I think I've seen from them in the past 3 scrimmage games combined. They were winning balls in the air, they were going in hard in the challenge, they were hustling hard all over the field, and they gave their all for their teammates. It was really exciting watching them play that way when it's been so hard to get them to that point. I don't know what clicked today to turn the tide that way. Maybe it was that it was a 'real' game. Maybe it was the fact that they got their new jerseys today and were able to wear them. Maybe they've just not been playing as hard all along. I don't really know. I have to give them credit for today though.

The sad thing is, however, that the star of the show wasn't a player for our team that scored 2 goals, it wasn't a team that played their heart out, it wasn't even the other team which ended up winning the game on a well-taken free kick. It was, in fact, the referee (who had a daughter who was a friend of probably half the team that we played). So, as you can well imagine, all the calls went for the other team, our player got a yellow card when the other team player pushed him to the ground, and they scored the game winning goal on a foul called for grabbing when their team had been doing nothing but pushing, grabbing, and holding everyone all over the field. Myself and the other coach both got warned by the referee for our yelling, but when you're trying to defend your players from getting man-handled, I think that it's worth it. It's a good thing the game was almost over when he warned us, cause otherwise I think we'd both have been told to leave.

If there's one thing in the sport of soccer that I cannot stand more than anything else it's when there is a referee who feels like the game is for him. He's out there to do what he wants, and to make the decisions that he wants made so that he can be the focus of attention. He's not out there to let the kids play the game and to let them decide the outcome. What got us both the most was that he was clearly a friend of their whole team. How do you get a ref who is a part of the school that he's refereeing to be the decider in a game? There's a reason that in international tournaments they don't let any referee from a region where the teams are playing from be a ref in any form during that particular game. It would inevitably bring up the question of integrity for the refs should anything be construed to go in favor of the team that he hails from. It's no different here. I hope that ref never does another game for us. But if he ends up doing one for us, he'll not ever hear the end of our yelling to defend our players, and he can tell me to leave the field before I'll let my kids get run over and mauled by a team that he supports while I'm there.

Sugar, We're Going Down

2007-04-01T20:17:00.000-04:00

So this weekend was the big sailing adventure. It was quite an enjoyable couple of days spent hanging out with Josh, Amber, Tara and Matt, playing a little Wii Sports (that Wii is quite addictive...), hanging out on the sailboat, and even playing some throw-back old-school Mike Tyson's Punch Out for the NES. I was so horrible at that game way back in elementary school, so I had to prove to myself that I could get past the first couple guys in the game. I can. It's brilliant.

The sailboat was quite the ride. At least for the first hour or so. And then, my penchant for motion sickness started to kick in and I suddenly was enjoying it a lot less. Everything was kinda spinning, things looked not quite so inviting, and the general feeling was wanting to get the incessant rocking motion to stop. But, with Amber to the rescue, dramamine came in handy and a couple hours later I was good as new. One word of caution, however, is to try and avoid talk of spewing, losing the lunch, throwing up, or anything else while feeling sick. It generally doesn't help in keeping one from leaning over the edge.

That's actually Josh's second attempt at getting me to lose my lunch while on a trip or ride of some kind. The other was when he took some of us flying in their family's small plane while at Harding. Apparently I don't do well with heights or small aircraft or something, cause man...I was pretty out of it for that trip. He says that I wasn't really myself for a number of hours afterwards...I don't think I was myself for quite a while longer. I guess I need to just keep the dramamine close by whenever I'm going on an ocean vessel or a small plane. Although, I don't really think that I'll be on either of those types of vehicles in the near future.

Seriously, though, it was a fun weekend. The boat really was incredible, and having not been on a sailboat before, was quite the experience with putting the sails up, leaning all the way to one side to walk since the edge away from the wind was practically in the water, and basically just enjoying the peacefulness of being out on the water. The first time the wind caught the sail and the boat took off, I was kinda caught off guard when the whole ship tilted to one side. Then the boat kinda held it's position, and I thought that I'd be alright with it running along like that. Then, I noticed that the boat wasn't moving. Apparently we'd gotten stuck, but after some work with the motor and all of us standing on one side to lean the boat, we got unstuck and back on our way. Then I got the real feeling for how the boat runs in the water. I'd seen sailboats before, but I didn't realize that they ran so low in the water in the direction that the wind is going. I'd have to say, if there were some larger waves with the wind, I wouldn't be surprised for water to be coming up over the edge. But we didn't end up sinking, despite my early beliefs to the contrary. Overall though, I can see why they went touring around all summer in that thing just hanging out. Props to Josh for letting us get out on it and both he and Amber for entertaining us for the weekend.

For those of you that might not know, Mandi has gotten herself a job working for Bechtel as a Primary Contract Specialist. That's about all I can tell you about her job, because that's about all she can tell me about her job. The funny thing is, she is on her way to Nashville for a conference with the company execs without ever having worked yet. She gets back Tuesday night and will have her first day in the office actually learning the job on Wednesday. But mad props to her for owning the interview and getting hired the exact same day. Now it's my turn to have that kind of interview at some point.

I guess the riddle from two posts back about hunting has got people stuck, although some of the answers were quite humorous, and I would have thought they could work. If I actually made these up, I would select Philip's answer to be correct. The "official" answer however, is lice. Who would think of that? I don't know who did in the first place. But that's what they said. Amber, here's you're chance to be proven as a genius! Today's riddle is more of a logic puzzle called Anniversary Discount:

A fancy restaurant in New York was offering a promotional deal. A married couple could eat at the restaurant for half-price on their anniversary. To prevent scams, the couple would need proof of their wedding date.One Thursday evening, a couple claimed it was their anniversary, but didn't bring any proof. The restaurant manager was called to speak with the couple. When the manager asked to hear about the wedding day, the wife replied with the following: "Oh, it was a wonderful Sunday afternoon, birds were chirping, and flowers were in full bloom." After nearly 10 minutes of ranting, she comes to tell him that today was their 28th wedding anniversary."How lovely", the manager said, "However, you do not qualify for the discount. Today is not your anniversary, you are a liar". How did the manager know that it wasn't their anniversary?

The highlights for the coming week? Going crazy at ORNL with sample running in the machine for my thesis work, the start of the season for the soccer team that I'm coaching, the start of the MLS soccer season, the Champions League returns to action in the quarterfinal stage, and my lab section has their last day of lab, meaning my teaching is almost finished at UT. All brilliant stuff, and all to be looked forward to. For now, though, it's off to continue my reading of The Chronicles of Narnia. The current book is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and I'm glad that I've picked up reading them again after the long break since I quite (last summer, I think). I figure, though, that I'll have a lot of time to read in the coming weeks while I wait for those samples to cool and warm up, so they should be finished soon. I'll have to find another book after that though. If anyone has some suggestions of good books, I'd love to have them.

Exhibition

2007-03-28T21:19:00.000-04:00

It's been quite the week. Starting tomorrow I gain full control of the instrument used in the lab for taking measurements of superconductors. The next three weeks the room and machine is all mine to use to take as many measurements of samples that I possibly want to. It'll be nice, cause that way I'll be able to start writing my paper and moving towards getting everything finished up. Nice.

I'm surprised to say that none of the answers that were given for the last riddle are actually correct, although I did laugh quite hard at Philip's answer, cause I guess it could be right in some sense. But still no correct answer. I'll leave it alone for another few days. Another new one for today, quite interesting. It's a bit of reading, but a good one. A Poem of Biblical Proportions:

Adam, God made out of dust
But thought it best to make me first,
So I was made before man
To answer God's most Holy plan.
A living being I became
And Adam gave to me my name.
I from his presence then withdrew
And more of Adam never knew.
I did my Maker's law obey
Nor ever went from it astray.
Thousands of miles I go in fear
But seldom on earth appear.
For purpose wise God did see,
He put a living soul in me.
A soul from me God did claim
And took from me the soul again.
So when from me the soul had fled
I was the same as when first made.
And without hands, or feet, or soul,
I travel on from pole to pole.
I labor hard by day, by night
To fallen man I give great light.
Thousands of people, young and old
Will by my death great light behold.
No right or wrong can I conceive
The scripture I cannot believe.
Although my name therein is found
They are to me an empty sound.
No feat of death doth trouble me
Real happiness I'll never see.
To Heaven I shall never go
Or to Hell below.
Now when these lines you slowly read,
Go search your Bible with all speed
For that my name is written there
I do honestly to you declare.

We've also had a couple of scrimmages for the middle school team that I coach. We played on Monday against the Oak Ridge middle schools and their team, and kinda got owned. It was impressive, because in all my years playing in Oak Ridge, there was never a tall person on any of our teams. This middle school team had 5 or 6 players that were fairly close to my height. Kinda scary since they are only in 7th or 8th grade. Our team started brightly, and even scored the first goal, but then they just kinda gave up on stuff and got run over. The main problem is that they don't seem to get the idea of man marking. Myself and the other coaches spent the entire scrimmage yelling at people to mark up and they couldn't seem to get the idea of getting on a man and staying with them. I don't know how to impress that idea on them any better. We even pulled the entire defensive back four and told them that they needed to figure it out, sent them back in 10 mins later, and they still couldn't do it. Hopefully tomorrow's scrimmage will go better. We'll just have to wait and see.

I guess I don't particularly have any good stories at the moment. I should have some better ones after the weekend that will be spent in SC in Charleston. I'm looking forward to it. Speaking of which, I need to give Josh a call back...

Real Men Of Genius

2007-03-23T22:58:00.000-04:00

I recently discovered one of the catchiest tunes that I've heard in quite a while by the band Relient K. They've been around for a number of years, but I've never really listened to anything by them. They put out a new album this past week, so after reading a review of it, I decided to give it a listen on Rhapsody. The album as a whole is pretty good, but the one song which does happen to be their lead single is pretty infectious. The title is "Must Have Done Something Right", and it just kinda jumps in to your head and stays there. Head here to see the video and hear the song: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-297583-videos--Relient-K. After just now watching it, it even has soccer involved. What more could you ask for?

Congrats to Lauren on correctly deducing the answer to yesterday's riddle. I wouldn't say correctly guessing, because since it's supposed to be a logical answer, there is no guessing involved. It's like those Sudoku puzzles that everyone works now. You can't guess on it, get it right, and claim to be good at them. Everything has a logical reasoning for why it works. Random ramblings. Today's brian teaser is a good one...or at least I think so. Here it is, entitled Hunting:

Everything that you catch, you throw away, but everything you don't catch, you keep. What are you hunting?

Do you remember the Bud Light commercials that ran some years ago highlighting those "true American geniuses"? They were 60 second spots essentially mocking some of cultures weirdest types of men, or "glorifying" jobs that many wouldn't think twice about. I had a friend of mine from church that played a few on a trip to his parents house, and it got me to thinking about how many I had heard, and that number turned out to be quite low. So I went hunting and found a whole slew of them...I hadn't realized that they'd made that many. Some of them are throw-a-ways, but there are a couple of them that are true gems. Of the many that I found, my favorites would have to be Mr. Used Car Lot Auto Salesman, Mr. 80 SPF Sunblock Wearer, Mr. Restroom Toilet Paper Refiller, Mr. Foot Long Hot Dog Maker, and Mr. Outside the Stadium Peanut Seller. I would put up a transcript of sorts to them...but I'd get in trouble. They are quite amusing though, with the awful background singing, and the pitch-perfect dead-pan delivery from the speaker. If you heard them, you'd remember.

I bring this up, because today I discovered that I might in fact be able to catch some Euro 2008 qualifying games live, on tv, for free. Quite the discovery. My brother alerted me to these programs called TVU player and TVAnt which are free programs that stream tv over the internet. And I happened across a site today that hosts different soccer games from around the world, including these qualifying games that are playing tomorrow. So perhaps, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to get it to work and maybe watch Germany vs. Czech Republic or England vs. Israel or something. It should be an exciting day. Real men of genius indeed.

Reset

2007-03-22T22:34:00.000-04:00

Contrary to the post that Paul put up, Mandi didn't try to hit me with a truck, and a girl didn't try and hit on me at T-Bell. I actually don't think that I've been to a T-Bell in about 6 months...Mandi is home, however, so I guess she would be able to hit me with a truck if she so desired. And even though she's home, she decided to leave me again, and went this weekend to Harding to see some of her friends. That got me to thinking about how many people I know that are still at Harding, and sadly the list is quickly shrinking. I couldn't hardly name anyone that I would actually want to see when I was out there outside of the remaning few that are still on Apocalypse for this semester. Oh well...it has been two years since I graduated, I guess it shouldn't be that surprising. Also, unfortunately the video from last time was taken down due to copy-right stuff, which is unfortunate, cause it was painfully funny to watch.

The soccer coaching front has actually been surprisingly fun. For the most part, the kids are all pretty cool. There are the usual couple that are problems, and there is one that just completely annoys the heck out of me. Everything that I or the other coaches say is met with a sarcastic comment, he does everything half-heartedly (if even that), and is generally disruptive and uninspired in terms of his work ethic. I really don't know what to do about it. It's not like every time we say something, that we can repeat it over and over again because he feels the need to open his mouth and make comments on everything, most of the time in a disrespective way. And it's not like we sit there and beat him down, we try to be encouraging, but when it detracts from everyone else's experience...I'm just not sure how to treat it sometimes. I don't quite know the home situation, but I don't gather that it's all that great, and from his lack of respect for pretty much any adult that I've seen, I don't think he's had a lot of discipline either.

I'll be heading out to SC this next weekend to hang out with Josh Murphy and co. on the boat that he purchased last year. It should be quite the exciting weekend, and it'll be nice to get away from here for a little bit so I think I've not really been anywhere outside of Knoxville since Mandi graduated. I also get to teach the last of my lab sessions in the next couple weeks which is spectacular.

On the master's front, I get the whole lab to myself starting next week for about 3 weeks. My supervisor is married to a woman from China, and they are going to visit her parents. So I've been frantically learning everything the machine that I didn't already know in order to operate it entirely on my own. It's kinda scary, cause other than my supervisor, nobody else in there really knows how to work the machine. So if I get stuck in the next few weeks...big trouble. But I've been starting, stopping, putting together, tearing apart, pretty much anything and everything related to this machine, so I know everything that I need to know. I'll just have to go over a few more things tomorrow and figure out exactly what I should be measuring in the coming weeks. And then it's time to start writing. A lot.

On the TV front, Luke Dockery, this is for you. There is some US Soccer this coming week on Sunday and Wednesday. Nothing really all that spectacular, but it's soccer. This week are international dates so that the European teams can have their qualifying round play for Euro 2008. I wish I could see some of those games...but since we're in the closed-off US, they won't show anything good like that. There's not enough time when there's so much basketball, football re-runs, and world's strongest man competition crap to show.

And of course, the riddle of the day (or in this case, week). This one is called Plain White.

I constantly collide into all the others,
The only one of 16 without colors.
Associated with English and banking and breaking,
The answer is right there for the taking.

MXC Painful Elimination

2007-03-10T01:06:00.001-05:00

Since it's been kind of a slow week, I've been able to catch quite a bit of MXC recently. This could quite possibly be one of the most painful eliminations I've seen. It definitely rivals some of those on the sinkers and floaters games. Prepare to feel pain.

Perspectives

2007-03-09T23:41:00.000-05:00

First of all, I would like to offer an apology. Mandi informed me of the wrong in my statement on Paul's blog regarding "that girl" from his freshman year. I was stretching for humor and an argument where I didn't have one. Mandi did point out that there were countless other arguments that I could have used (many of which were quite funny), but since I was unable to come up with those and instead attacked something of which this girl had no control, I unfortunately was found wanting. So, here is my apology for my poor judgment.

Second, I can't tell if anyone even tried guessing at the riddle I posed the last time I posted. I guess after going on about the clapping thing...at any rate, a hint is that you should be thinking of a word, and that the word is a number. It's quite clever in my opinion. Once you've gotten that one, you can move on to this one. It's entitled "Odd Two Out Too". I'll warn you, my guesses were not correct, so apparently my reasoning was off. Here we go:

You have to find the odd ones out in the groups of words. BUT WAIT! There's a catch. Each group of words has TWO words which do not belong. Can you find them both?

EXAMPLE: Lily - Jane - Tulip - Rose
Jane does not belong as it's the only one which is not a flower. Tulip also does not belong because it's the only one which is not a girl's name (although I guess someone could name their (poor) child Tulip...). You're on you own for the rest!

1. Dodge - Ford - Lincoln - Hoover
2. King - Earl - Knight - Bishop
3. Yellow - Green - Dead - Black

You know, it is funny how so many things can be viewed from the same place, and yet be seen so very differently. All you have to do is talk to a group of people who viewed any type of spectacular event, and you'll get just as many stories about what really happened. Being a soccer person, a sporting event that holds as a fair example is in regards to the 1966 World Cup Final. The final was contested between England and West Germany, and had gone in to extra time tied 2 to 2. The English went forward, and off of a corner kick, the player controls the ball, turns, and fires on goal. It bounces off the underside of the bar almost straight down towards the goal line, then back in to the field of play where it is cleared out of bounds. For those of you that don't know soccer, a goal is scored only when the entire ball crosses the entire line. The near-side linesman gave that it was in fact a goal, and the English went on to win 4-2 for their only World Cup triumph. If you watch the replay of that goal, it is hard to say whether the ball crossed the line. I've watched it a number of times throughout the past years, and even my vote goes back and forth. Sometimes it looks like it's over the line. Other times, it doesn't look like it crossed. People still debate whether a goal should have been given, and however many people that could fit in to that stadium all have their own opinion.

Opinion is always given based on perspective, at least as far as I can tell. Opinion isn't truth, it's simply what someone believes to be true based on their knowledge. If you continue with the above example, the opinion of someone sitting on the opposite side of the field shouldn't be given anywhere near as much weight as someone sitting right on the goal line. Why? The person on the goal-line obviously had a better perspective of what happened and would be a better judge to say what did or did not happen in relation to the rules. If you want to know people's opinions on how well a particular car drives, you don't go to a 4 year old and ask him which car he likes best. If you want to know what type of individual Jesus is, you don't go and ask your best friend and take only his/her story.

The gospels are our best information to what happened during the lifetime of Jesus. They are given to us from the 4 different perspectives of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They present a broad portrait of Jesus, what he did, and why he did it. They were given to us so that we might come to know him better. We can't take our parents/friends/preachers relationship with Christ and call it our own. It's got to be personal. It's got to be from our perspective.

Clap Your Hands

2007-03-07T23:16:00.000-05:00

You know, there are just some things about church that just boggle my mind. Take, for instance, what happened tonight, and has happened a few other times in the previous weeks. On Wednesday nights, before they dismiss the children for class, the song leader will pick a "kids" song, and have any of the kids (usually under the 2nd or 3rd grade) that want to come up to the front and "lead" the song. It really is a pretty cool thing, and it's always fun watching the kids sing, look clueless, or stand there staring at that interesting bright light coming from the projector. Now, as many of you know, a lot of children's songs involve clapping. Sadly, I cannot name one right at the moment. But, given the relatively conservative side that dominates most of the Knoxville area, I found it utterly amazing that a majority of the people, not just the kinds mind you, a majority of the people, clapped along with them. The song ends, the kids leave, and the next song on the list is a praise song that usually has clapping associated with it. A friend of mine clapped quietly to himself during this song, and was later told after church that this particular person (who had engaged in the clapping during the children's singing) didn't find it appropriate for someone to be clapping during service. So, it's OK to clap while there are kids in the room up front singing a children's song, but not alright when it's just adults? Does this mean that, to them, it's not really part of the worship when the kids are up front? I guess since it's not a 50 something man only up front, it must be something separate from the usual church service, and so therefore the "rules" don't really apply? I'm completely confused by this person's rationale.

If there is one thing about church the institution that I cannot stand it is this mindset that only what I think and believe is right, and everyone should conform to me. If I'm comfortable with it, then it's alright, but if anyone does something that makes me uncomfortable in the least, they are obviously in the wrong. I mean, I go by what my parents believed, so it's as good as the Bible, right? Give me a break. So many people are so caught up in their traditions, they don't even know why things are done. It's just the norm. It's what they've always done. It must be what should be done. I mean, Ephesians 7:3 says, "Thou shalt not clap your hands while in the church building"...doesn't it? A friend of mine made the point that if we're supposed to "Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord..." (Ephesians 5:19) then when we sing there actually shouldn't be sound coming out at all, because it should be in our heart only. He said it completely in jest, but the point is well taken. Those people that think they're the defenders of the Bible and that they know all usually know all that they want to know, and not what it really says. They take it to mean what they're predisposed to want it to mean. It's not that I'm not guilty of that, but I certainly hope that I don't take my incomplete knowledge and force it on someone else telling them it's the truth and that they're in the wrong for believing otherwise. Everyone's knowledge is incomplete, and it's our responsibility to study on our own and with others to gain a better understanding.

Granted, there are things that are right and wrong. If someone came up to me and said that Jesus is not in fact the Son of God, that he didn't die for our sins, and that he isn't resurrected and sitting at the right hand of God, I would have issue with that. That is a central belief of mine that all of those are in fact true, and the Bible says as much, taking 4 entire books (and of course many others) to explain who Jesus was in detail in his life. If you believe the Bible, you believe the Gospel's and what was said in them. You believe what you read in the Old Testament about God's love for his people, and his anger at their wrong-doings. You believe the miracles that occurred, the stories that are told, and the people that are described. Of course, the interpretation of how these events came about is what will differ from person to person, but the underlying stories are truth.

You can't simply believe the parts you want and exclude the parts that you don't think are possible. You can't believe David's story of killing Goliath, but assume that the flood and Noah is simply a myth illustrating a point when both are presented as actual events. I guess that you could, in theory, make a case that David's story is also simply a myth for a great leader that the people admired. You just can't pick and choose though. The Bible as a whole is God's word to us and how we are to know Him. If you say that parts of it are not true or that you won't believe them as truth, you discount the entire Bible, not just those areas. So when the Bible says, "instruments in worship will condemn you to eternal suffering" you should believe it. Oh wait, it doesn't say anything like that. Some people would have you believe it though. What about people picking and choosing what they want to accept as truth, but discounting those things that they don't think applies to their culture? I don't think God in his wisdom had the Bible written by so many different people so that we could come along thousands of years later and say, well, I like this section, but these few chapters don't sit right with me, so we'll skip those. This verse works well with me, but this next verse obviously cannot apply to me. We can't pick and choose. What it does say is that if something you are doing can cause someone else to stumble in their journey, then you should avoid that in order to help your brother. The church as an institution is about loving each other, helping each other, and bringing each individual closer in their relationship with God. It's not about fighting, bickering, and complaining about tradition that people think is as good as law. And the people that take things that way are missing out on what the church really should be about.

Congrats to those that correctly answered the riddle from yesterday. Given Philip's comments...I guess there could be more than one answer, although I hadn't exactly thought of it that way. Count on a Murphy for that thought pattern though. I'll admit, I laughed after I read his comment and re-read the riddle. Now I know where Paul got his sense of humor from. On to today's riddle, entitled Decapitation. I found this one to be quite clever. Good luck.

Decapitate me and all becomes equal. Then truncate me and I become second. Cut me front and back and I become two less than I started. What am I?

Winds of Change

2007-03-07T01:06:00.000-05:00

Well done to those that answered the riddle posed from yesterday. It is true that a year is in fact shorter than a day on Venus. So go for the year and make $2 million. If you're looking for a direct deposit on your prize money, just send me your bank account number and I'll deposit it for you.

Tonight's new riddle is called "The Pope Has It". Here it is: The Pope has it but he does not use it. Your father has it but your mother uses it. Nuns do not need it. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a big one, Michael J. Fox's is quite small. What is it?

One of the things that I enjoy doing from time to time is what I guess I'll term "Bible Hunting". Now, this isn't me going around trying to see where I can find bibles, but rather, taking something and seeing what I can find in the bible that relates to it. Being the fan of music that I am (I'm listening to some right at this moment as I type this), I like to take some of the Christian bands that I frequently listen to, take some of their lyrics, and see if I can find any of them within the bible. Some of them help me out and give the references for where they got the inspiration for certain songs. Others do not. Tonight I felt like doing some bible hunting.

I pulled a band that is extremely impressive in terms of taking something directly from the bible and incorporating it in to a song that they write. The song that they wrote they titled "Dive" and referenced Isaiah 40:31 which says, "but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint". If you look to the rest of that particular chapter, it is essentially God telling his people not to worry because He is there for them and looking out for them. It tells of how God is in control over everything, and that there is nothing that is able to overcome the Him. It really is powerful reassurance.

The song, for me, that came to mind when I read that verse, however, is a completely different one, which is where the title of this post comes from. The group is Kutless. Here are the lyrics:

Can you feel the pains in life?
Wrapped Around you like they're chains
Restricting all your dreams
Do you wonder if there is a way?
A way to set you free, set you free

Chorus:
So tell me all your dreams
Tell me all your fears and what you're longing for the most
It's not another way that'll end up the same
For it's under my control

Do you feel the winds of change?
Soon this weight will fall away
And take you to a place
Only found through these winds of change
A breeze that's new and free, new and free

I'll be the one who you can cry to
The one who will give you wings
I will give wings, someday we'll sail away
Mounted up on wings like eagles
We will run and will not fade away

Given my relatively young age, verses like the one preceding the one I quoted, which states that youths grow weary and young men stumble and fall, is a good reminder to me that, regardless of how I might feel on any particular day, I can not survive all of life's trials on my own. Everyone, at some point in their lives, will have times when they will need more than their own abilities and strengths to get by. And regardless of the situation that you encounter here on Earth, everyone can know that God is there for them. "He will not grow tired or weary...He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak" is what we're told in verses 28 and 29. And if one cannot take comfort knowing that God will empower us whenever we are weak or weary, then we are missing part of the nature of God, as well as misunderstanding the nature of being weak.

Physical weakness, while easily understood and recognized, does not (usually) bring one to the point of realizing that more than just the individual is needed to succeed. Spiritual brokenness brings true understanding of what God is seeking in us each and every day, and this is what will bring us into a better relationship with Him. If we can realize that we cannot succeed on our own and that we desperately need God to get us through, he will be there in an instant, since all we need to do is ask for help. God has the power to bring that second wind, to give that extra energy, to be the one urging us on. And no matter how much He has to help, and no matter how many times he has to help us pick ourselves up, He will never grow tired or weary. Once that recognition occurs, things can only get better. The winds will indeed change, and we will soar like eagles.

To Know My Enemy

2007-03-05T22:12:00.000-05:00

I should start this post with a belated happy b-day wish to Josh Murphy. Mandi reminded me that I needed to tell him this, and yet I completely forgot about it on the day. So here it is buddy. Happy B-day. The stories that I read about just a minute ago on Philip's blog were quite humorous to say the least.

I am quite impressed with how quickly the Murphy's (Paul in particular) could jump directly to the assumption that the man in the elevator is short. It seems kind of ironic to me...but maybe I'm the only one. The solution is indeed that the man is a dwarf. Here is the solution pulled from the website: The man is a midget. He can't reach the upper elevator buttons, but he can ask people to push them for him. He can also push them with his umbrella. Clever, no?

You know, without fail, it seems that lots of parents that really don't have a clue about a particular sport think that somehow they would make the best possible choice to be a coach. Take, for instance, this idiot of a parent (I'm assuming he's a parent at least) that today comes over to us while we're practicing, and tells us to quit playing "musical chairs" with the field and to pick a side. Our rebuttal? That the previous week they had complained we were on the wrong side of the field, and were told that we were supposed to be on the side we were using today. His response? To walk off without saying anything. He then comes back later on, and tells us that we shouldn't be running a drill for footwork on the touchline cause it will mess up the line. He then tells our kids to get off the line. Are you serious? Honestly, outside of his track suit looking thing that he was wearing to cover his beer belly, I doubt he knows the first thing about soccer. The only drills I've seen him making his kids run on their side of the field are the exact same things that we do. Their practice starts 30 minutes after ours, and he's usually there about when we get going. Seems kinda strange. Hopefully we won't have to put up with anymore crap from him.

What is about kids that really have no skill having parents become complete jerks because they think their kid is the best thing to ever grace the earth? It doesn't really matter what it's in. It can be sports, academics, practically anything that has an ability that is capable of being shown to other people. I think back to this time with my brother's competitive soccer team. There was an overweight kid who could really only play goalie, except he was horrible, and therefore never really played. His dad, wondering why he wouldn't be put on in front of the athletic goalie who could kick, dive, punt, catch a ball, or move when a ball was kicked at him decided he would form his own team built around the athletic beast that was his son. He attempted to persuade some people on my brother's team to join, and all refused. He therefore went to the AYSO league, and got some of the players from there. They formed a team, and the father of this poor boy coached, of course so his son would play every game. The best part? My brother's team completely demolished that team every single time they played. I would guess the closest score in any game was maybe 4-0. I think the team broke up after about 2 years of getting owned repeatedly. I'm all for supporting your kids and encouraging them and everything, but by the time they are 14 and 15 and obviously are not meant to be playing said sport/participating in said event/whatever, I think the parents might want to consider more than their personal pride and find better ways of encouraging them then attempting to mold the world to them. I'm not of the belief that you should just serve up everything for your kids on a silver platter. But that's just me.

I don't really know what it's like, not being a parent myself, but I guess that some parents might be trying to make up for things that they weren't able to succeed in through their kids. Maybe that's why some kids are pushed so hard in things that they obviously don't want to do. Maybe that's why some parents go off the deep end when their children don't seem to quite make the cut at something. So what that they're not the star whatever that you wanted them to be. Think of all the other things that they are brilliant at and praise them and support them in those. Don't run them down in the things that they aren't as passionate about simply because you want to be that proud parents that can say, "My kid won ____ that I wasn't able to". If there's something that annoys me more than anything it's listening to people try and one-up each other using their kids. There were plenty of parents like that in my high school. Some parent chimes in with how great their child is doing in whatever. Another comes back and say that they're doing that, in addition to whatever else. And on and on and on. Please.

Wow. There's a rant for you, huh. I guess if I have to put up with this annoying coach, Monday and Thursday posts will be a little more venomous than before. So let's end it on some good notes. Mandi comes home in two weeks, which is exceptionally exciting. She's even told me that she is ready to come home, which is never something that I thought I would ever hear her say. Spring break is fast approaching, and my brother will be in town for the week, which will be quite cool. Should be some good volleyball and frisbee action going down if we can get some people together. The rec league soccer season begins this coming Sunday. I'm looking forward to it, as it will be nice to play against some people that are not 4 feet tall. Not that there's anything wrong with being 4 feet tall when you're in middle school or anything...

To keep things rolling, here's another riddle for you to have a crack at. Since I'm science minded, I found this one quite intriguing. You have to know a few things about Venus and such, which I did not remember at the initial reading of this riddle. It's a good one though.

Venus:
You awake inside a small transparent capsule sitting on the surface of Venus. From a small speaker you hear a voice that says, "We will leave you here either for a day or a year. If you choose to stay a day, we will give you $1 million. If you choose to stay a year, we will give you $2 million. Either way, you will have sufficient food and water. We will make sure the temperature is a constant 70 degrees Fahrenheit. We will also supply cable TV."What is your choice? (Don't let money decide your answer).

Game On

2007-03-04T22:07:00.000-05:00

It's just about here. Everyone's favorite time of year when they get to pick the brackets and see which of their favorite college teams make it to the final 4. I have to admit, my interest in basketball is small to say the least, but I do enjoy picking (randomly) the teams that will go on to the end. I have to say that Mandi bested me last year by quite a margin if I remember correctly, so I'll have to try and do better this year. On most of these sports things where you pick stuff to see who wins she seems to be much better at it than I am...

Something that is quite frustrating is to go and buy a product from the store, come home and set it up to be used, and to have it explode right there on your table after no more than 5 minutes. Then you have to deal with that awful stench of burnt metallic parts and everything, and at some point you have to find the time to go back to the store and return it for a new one. And of course, you inevitably have a pressing need to use this product, which is why you bought it in the first place. Not that I have any personal experience in that, I'm just saying, that's what always seems to happen.

If you check the comments page on the last post, you will see a couple of fun little riddles to be solved. I have indeed been remiss in posting any of these recently, mostly because I misplaced the sheets that I was pulling them from, and I had about exhausted the ones that I had answered myself. I guess I might have to go find them, and of course, there is the 365 day calendar with some random word games incorporated which I could pull from. Maybe a brainteaser would work as well. At least on those I could get a definitive answer on, and I have been reading some fairly intriguing ones recently...sounds like a plan, although that plan won't come in to effect until later.

The question of camp is a difficult one. They have been some of the best times that I've experienced in the past couple years. That week of hard work and hard play has been an immense highlight. There has been so much that has happened in those 2 weeks that I've been there thus far, it's hard to remember all that's gone on. I've referenced some before, with the miserably awful firework choice to light the pyre, Paul correctly answering a question in celebrity jeopardy: the bible edition, beating the campers in football 2-0 on a mark grayson safety, finding a camper in the staff cabin with his aunt after running a double c for a few minutes, watching xbox being played in the ark on the screen...tons of others, and that's just from two years of camp. I can't say what will happen this summer. There are a lot of things that will need to happen, and I'm not sure when I can squeeze everything in. There is the necessity of finding a job, which this past interview might have helped out considerably in and there is the need to finish my master's thesis, which is coming along slowly. My mom wants me to go to Japan along with the rest of our family to visit her mother, who is quite old. People from church would like it if Mandi and I were able to go with them to the Dominican Republic for the mission trip our church does yearly. I just don't know what time I will have. Knowing the importance of getting to Japan to see my grandmother, if there is 1 thing that I can do this summer and only one, it's going to be that. If at all possible, my knee-straps and I will be coming to camp. It's just to hard to tell at the moment. I'm hoping that somehow it works out that I can go.

For any of you soccer people out there, just a warning for this week's soccer action. ESPN 2 and ESPN Classic will be broadcasting the premier soccer tournament of Europe as the 2nd leg of the 1st knock-out stage is played this Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday's marquee matchup is Liverpool vs. Barcelona (last year's champions) with Liverpool holding a 2-1 advantage from the away leg. What this means, is that as long as Liverpool ties or wins, they will advance to the next round. If Barca wins 1-0, Liverpool still will advance on the away goals rule. If Barca wins 2-0, Barca will advance. If Barca wins 2-1, they will play extra time, and if Barca wins by 2 goals or more by any margin, Liverpool will be eliminated. It'll be an excellent game. Wednesday's highlight is the Bayern Munich vs. Real Madrid matchup, with Real holding a small 3-2 advantage from their home leg. It's essentially wide open, with Real needing to tie, or score more than 2 goals to advance. That game will be on Classic at 5/4 central. I don't know how many other soccer fanatics other than myself look at this...but if you're not too into soccer, I'd invite you to check out the Liverpool - Barcelona game. Granted it's at 2:30 in the afternoon...but maybe you might not be at work that day or something...not that I'd think about doing that...

Oh, what the heck, here is a neat little riddle for your enjoyment. There is one clear solution, once you know how to think about it. Here is "The Man in the Elevator" riddle:

A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator - or if it was raining that day - he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the seventh floor and walks up three flights of stairs to his apartment. Can you explain why?

The Prestige

2007-03-02T22:34:00.000-05:00

Today ended up being a good day. The interview went extremely well, I've been able to get some rest and relaxation, and I didn't have to drive 50 miles in and out of Oak Ridge. All excellent indications of a good day in my book.

On one of my usual thoughts about music, I've recently discovered a band called Anberlin who are really pretty good. They've been around for a number of years, but I didn't know much about them. They are Christians, but they're music is more pop/rock and not really so much what you would consider Christian music. In other words, they aren't like groups such as Casting Crowns, Kutless, or Skillet, but they have good music in the sense of the word without preaching to the choir as some would put it. They just released a new album called Cities which is excellent throughout, with my personal favorites being the tracks "The Unwinding Cable Car", "Alexithymia", and "Dismantle. Repair." Check them out if you've got the chance.

I've been a fan of magic for quite a long time. I can remember growing up watching the yearly David Copperfield TV special that would air, and the time period when magic shows were kind of a cultural phenomenon and they would have 2 hour specials at random times throughout the year. There is just something interesting about watching someone do something that just seems impossible to all of your senses, but they are right there in front of you doing it. Copperfield actually came here to Knoxville back last fall, and my parents and I went to the show. He's done some pretty impressive stuff, such as making a train car disappear in mid-air, flying, and walking through the Great Wall of China. My favorite trick when I saw him live was where he took 13 audience members, sat them down inside a box, closed it, made them all disappear and then re-appear in the back of the auditorium. Cool stuff. I wonder what it's like to be involved on stage with that. How does it feel? I think it'd be cool to find out at some point.

I got on to this magic thing because tonight I watched The Prestige, the story of two magicians that were once friends, but because of an event in their lives became enemies that spend their lives attempting out-do the other in the world of stage illusion. It's directed by Christoper Nolan, who recently did Batman Begins, and has also done the much talked about movie Memento, which I haven't seen. The Prestige is a really well-done movie, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The title stems from a description given at the start. It says that there are 3 parts/acts to a magic trick. The first is The Pledge, where something ordinary is taken and shown to be normal, at least from the audience point of view. The second part is The Turn, where the ordinary piece does something...extraordinary. At this point, you don't quite know what to make of what just happened, but you're waiting to see how everything turns out. The final part, is the Prestige. This is where the reveal occurs. The object is returned to normal, the thing that disappeared comes back in to view, what seemed wrong and impossible, is shown to somehow be possible.

I wonder if people around in Jesus' time might have felt like they were a part of something similar to this type of description. I wonder what would happen if we had our view of magic in their time what we would make of something like this. Obviously this is a poor comparison, but I do think that it holds on some levels. They were given the pledge, where Jesus came down from heaven and became a man, saying that anyone who followed him would have eternal life. To those on the earth, he was viewed as a prophet, and by some as the Christ. The turn comes, and suddenly the one we were calling the Christ is hanging from the cross dying. We don't know what to make of the situation, and what we viewed as our reality is falling apart. Finally, the prestige comes, and what a prestige it is. Not only is the tomb empty, but Jesus is alive, and he has ascended to the right hand of God to intercede for us. When everything seemed lost, and it didn't seem possible, it is shown to be a reality. The pledge really was true.

I guess that I like to think that God has a sense of humor, or at least a wit about him that enjoys seeing us go through our lives. I'd like to think that he laughs at our jokes, or cracks a smile when we do something silly or make complete fools of ourselves. Obviously sending his son was not an easy task, and he was incredibly pained at the separation he had to endure. But, like all great illusionists, he knew the true nature of the event. His sleight of hand fooled evil in to thinking that it had triumphed, when all along, God knew the secret. He knew...the prestige.

Rain

2007-03-01T21:57:00.000-05:00

What is it about rainy days and practices that makes it so much fun? I can't really put my finger on what makes rainy practice days fun, but they always seem to be that way. I think back to who knows when and playing competitive soccer. Some of my favorite practices were the ones done in complete downpours where the mud is so stained in to your clothes that they have that awesome new color of washed out brown that never goes away. You got to do the fun drills at practice like diving header practice, where you'd start from between the center circle and the 18 yard box and you'd sprint on to a ball being thrown in front of the goal to score that perfect goal (or more often than not just miss the ball).

As a defender I was always fond of the slide tackle practice session. What's more satisfying than seeing a forward running with the ball 15 yards to your side and getting up a head of steam, hitting the ground, and flying in from the side and taking the ball while knocking him over? Nothing much in the game of soccer. One of my favorite memories from high school soccer involved that very thing. We were playing in the tournament that Oak Ridge hosted annually and were playing in a heavy mist...just enough to get everything nice and wet, but not so much that you couldn't see anything. I was one of the last defenders, they're team went on a fast break, and I had to cover. A quick sprint, a lunging slide tackle, and the ball is running towards the out of bounds allowing my team to recover while the opposing team's forward goes flying over me as I stand up to go after ball. I can still remember the feeling of knowing that I just completely owned the other guy just like it happened yesterday. Anyone that plays sports I'm sure can relate to that.

Frisbee practice was much the same way in the rain. Given my inability/lack of wanting to dive, they were not generally as exciting to me. My overriding memory of rain practice involved diving practice where I ended up not being able to turn my head to the left for about 2 days because of landing awkwardly on my neck. To this day, I don't think that I've ever laid out for a frisbee. I'm sure there are those reading that will feel like berating me for such a blasphemous comment. And in response, all I can say is...you're right.

Why all this talk of practices in the rain? It's because tonight's middle school practice occured in the rain. And it was awesome. Now, we're not allowed to use the fields when it rains, so we couldn't do any type of diving/tackling practice, but we did play on the tennis courts and enjoyed some fine running. And by we, I mean myself included. I figure, at this age, it was always easier for me to run if our coach ran with us, so why not. It was a good work-out for me anyway. We played my soccer version of king of the hill, which is essentially a drill to get the team talking, working together, and understanding the importance of ball movement, while it gives people on defense the chance to completely own the offense and make them do push-ups/sit-ups/running/whatever punishment you can think of when the defense holds the ball for more than 5 seconds. It also teaches team defense, and that when you turn the ball over, your one goal should be to get it back as quickly as possible, which for this age group seems to not be something they're too concerned about.

All in all, it was good stuff. Makes me miss the days when all I had to worry about was soccer practice, my piano lesson and a little homework. I've got myself a job interview tomorrow, which should be interesting to say the least, since it's more geared toward engineers, which I'm certainly not. It should be good experience anyway. And I'm still waiting on that pros/cons view of soccer Luke.

Jump Start

2007-02-26T19:53:00.000-05:00

Since Paul has kick started me on this thing again, I figured that I should post something since it has once again been quite a while since I wrote anything. There were nights when I told myself that I should put up something since there have been some pretty good stories from the first few weeks of soccer practice at the middle school and such, but I never got around to it. So here they are.

I went skiing this weekend at Winterplace with some people from my church, which ended up being pretty interesting in itself. I did the usual skiing, another girl tried skiing for the first time, and the other 3 people all went for the snowboard. Needless to say, I had myself quite the time watching the first-time snow-boarders bite it hard when they were first trying to learn how to walk with the board, and then how to go down a hill. It's kinda like what Paul says about thing that are always funny, and certainly people falling down while attempting to ski/snowboard should be one of the things on that list. I think the best crash that I witnessed was this one girl, who clearly had no idea how to ski properly, starts down this diamond hill attempting to snow plow her way straight down. All you hear is her screaming, "LOOK OUT!!!! AHH!!!!!", and then you see some poor person in front of her skiing correctly, and she catches her skis on the front of that person's board. She looses both her skis and continues most of the way down the hill while he stays upright perfectly fine on his board and continues on down the hill. The last I saw as I went over the ridge on the lift was her attempting to walk back up the mountain and failing miserably. Myself and these two boys next to me from a random church group got a good laugh out of it.

Now for the soccer stories. Today's classic moment as I was breaking up half of the kids for our first large scrimmage on an actual field:
Me: "Alright guys, what positions to you play normally?"
Them: "Defense, midfield, forward, whatever."
Me to an extremely small (barely 4 foot) kid who hadn't said anything: "How about you man, where do you play?"
Him: "I've never played soccer before...what's a forward?"
Me: "...um...just...go up there..."

I've also ended up having to play on a team the past two practices either from odd numbers or from someone getting hurt. It's funny, cause I'll get on the field, and whoever's team it is will be all excited cause they get the "coach" on their team, and then get upset with me cause I won't just go score goals for them. I have to say, I'm having to kind of relearn the game myself, because things that have become intuitive to me (like positioning, simple passing/trapping, soccer-talk) are completely foreign to these boys. I've not had to yell this much this consistently since I quit having to play as a sweeper in my competitive days. But I have to be on their case pretty often, telling people where they should be making runs, when they can turn or have a man-on, all sorts of stuff. Some people are slowly starting to get the hang out of talking with their team, but it is really slow going. The thing that gets me the most is that there is no concept of team defense. Someone will turn the ball over, the person with the ball will be all of 5 feet in front of them, and they'll just stand there and not even go after the ball. It kills me. They'll pick it up quick here now that we've split up teams now though. At least, they better pick it up quick.

Kicking and Screaming

2007-02-15T18:50:00.000-05:00

So...it's been a while. Again. Oh well. It's been a busy week here, with coaching starting, astronomy observation sessions going on, and it being bitter cold. Especially while up on the roof until 10:30 at night. Even more so when you've forgotten a hat and gloves. Which I did each time. I'm a moron.

So, as some of you may know, the title of this post comes from the Will Ferrell movie kicking and screaming in which he becomes the coach of a team so that his son can play after Will Ferrell's dad (played by Robert Duvall) benches his grandson and doesn't let him play at all while his team goes on to win the championship. It's been a while since I saw it, but it did have its funny moments, and the usual Ferrell over-the-top antics and yelling, but it was funny at times. Of course, there are the usual stereotypes on the team - the son, who does something amazing to beat the team he used to be on; the short, dorky asian kid, complete with glasses; the giant kid who is 6 feet tall (or something ridiculous like that...), the star Italian soccer players who can't play because their uncle or someone wants them working in their families slaughter-house... - you get the point. And of course, they start off being the worst team ever, but after some yelling, practice, yelling, the team getting a surprise victory, yelling, the Italians making everyone look silly with their amazing skill, yelling, the son becoming angry at the dad, yelling, the Italians not being able to make a game, yelling, the team still pulling out a victory even with all the odds stacked against them, reconciliation, they are ultimately able to finally win the championship game against the "evil" team coached by the grandfather. Mike Ditka stops by for some pretty funny moments as well. Not bad if you've got an hour and a half to waste. Certainly not the pinnacle of entertainment though.

At any rate, the current middle school team that I am coaching doesn't quite compare to this movie. Not only do we not have any Italians, Asians, or really any other ethnicity, but we do have a few players that actually surprised me with their skill. Of course, there are plenty that surprise me with their lack of skill. We're trying to get up to 30 players so that we don't have to cut anyone...cause that would be plain awful if we ended up needing to cut players. We had 25 tonight, with the promise of a few more, so I think we'll be alright.

The first two practices have been ok. We've done the usual stuff just to see how they are with a ball. We'll do the usual toe-tapping on top of the ball, and boxing the ball back and forth between the feet, and then move on to a drill that I did for the last 5 years of my competitive soccer career which involved dribbling the ball in a 10 X 10 square with everyone else and having to keep control and do moves while dribbling, all while touching the ball with every step. It works well to improve your ball control and dribbling ability, if you do it right, since it's definately hard to keep solid control when you're in a small box with 20 other people.

We've also done 3 vs. 3 small-sided games, and a 4 vs. 4 keep-away game to see how they work together, how their sense of positioning is, and how well they can control and pass a ball in tight situations. Needless to say, there is a lot of work that needs to be done in that respect with all but a small number of them. It seems as if many of them don't play any type of competitive club soccer, and that a majority of them haven't really played all that seriously yet. Hopefully we'll be able to help them improve their skills...but there's really only so much we can do in 3 hours a week. We're planning on having a scrimmage in the next couple weeks just to get them in a game and see how they do. It's been fun so far though. Except for how much they talk and joke and don't listen...but I guess that's to be expected from 6-8 graders.

Only time will tell how this team will do together. I guess I figure if we can get the solid players to work together we can work in the people with lesser skill and in the process improve them as well. I'm glad I'm doing this, as I think it will be good experience, and maybe I'll be able to coach more in the future. We'll see how it goes though.

Oil and Water

2007-02-06T19:33:00.000-05:00

Soccer is back. Wednesday night at 9 PM eastern on ESPN 2 the USMNT plays Mexico out in Arizona in probably one of the most heated national sports rivalries. The U.S. has recently been dominating Mexico, going 7-2-1 against Mexico since 2000. Both losses have been at away games, notably in the intimidating Mexico City stadium where few teams ever beat them. At home, the Americans are 6-0-1 with an 11-0 goal differential. Of course, some can wonder why, having only played 9 times in 6 years, there can be any type of rivalry. North American sports has saturated the idea since most "major" sports end up playing their rival at least once a year, if not more. There is so much more to a rivalry than simply playing each other every few weeks and having some people from each team trash talking. In the case of the US and Mexico, there is national pride, and regional dominance of the soccer world. The Mexican country expects their team to beat the US. They see themselves as superior to us in all things related to soccer. It's an embarassment to them to lose to us, and they have been embarassed a number of times, most memorably the 2002 World Cup Round of 16 where the US beat them 2-0 and knocked them out of the tournament. They still seek revenge for that game every time they meet. World Cup qualifying begins in a year, and usually the team of the two that comes out on top during the qualifying session has a chance at being put in the pot as one of the top seeded teams, meaning they have a better chance to avoid big names in the tournament. Mexico was given the last top seed at the '06 WC, and received a relatively easy group compared to the US.

At any rate, tomorrow's game does not necessarily carry the burden of qualifying for the World Cup. It does, however, mark the debut for the new Mexican National Team coach, and the 2nd game in charge for the interim US coach. A win for either will boost their standing considerably, while a loss will be devastating to the morale and future of both coaches. In addition, both teams are fielding relatively young teams. The new WC cycle brings about a necessity to have new faces fill the voids. The US team for sure has voids to fill with Brian McBride, Claudio Reyna and Eddie Pope all retiring from national team duties. That trio has essentially formed the spine of the national team for the past decade, from forward to defense respectively, and finding people to fill their shoes is of the utmost priority. It won't be an easy task, and although there are people that are promising in those positions, the reason they were around for so long is that nobody in the past decade was able to challenge them for their positions.

If you don't normally watch soccer because you find it boring, I think that this might be the best chance to "entertain" you. For sure when there is world cup qualification on the line, there isn't a whole lot better in our neck of the woods than US vs. Mexico. The teams despise each other and bragging rights go to the winner...at least for another 6 months or so. What more could you want in a game? If you have a minute, tune in and watch, cause I know I will be.

Snow?

2007-02-01T09:58:00.000-05:00

Well, it's now the 1st of February, and there has been snowfall in the East Tennessee area. Maybe a quarter inch at the most. It was amusing watching the news last night how everyone was completely freaked out, the stores had been rushed, the shelves were empty, schools even cancelled the night before just on the threat of snow. Nobody here can handle anything with even the slightest bit of snow on the ground. I'm sure our counterparts in the north mock us mercilessly whenever they happen to hear about schools in the southern states getting closed for a "snow day". It's alright though, cause I took the fact that Knox County schools were closed as a reason to not drive to Oak Ridge and therefore stay at home and work when I feel like it.

In other news, I will be coaching a middle school soccer team this spring. Mandi had told me at the end of the summer that I should coach a team, but it didn't look like it would happen since the coordinator that I knew for the coaching positions in AYSO moved away shortly after. I got a call late last week from a parent at church that helps run our small group that her son's school needed a coach and asked whether I'd be interested. So I said yes. I don't know the full details and we're having a meeting on Saturday to discuss how to get things going, but I'll be coaching a Varsity and JV soccer team at Cedar Bluff Middle School (I think) from later this month through the middle of May. I think it'll be pretty cool. Now I'll get to see if all those years spent complaining about coaches not knowing what they were doing when I was watching other teams play comes back to bite me.

Hugh Laurie - Mystery

2007-01-28T22:06:00.001-05:00

For those of you fans of the show House M.D., here is the lead actor Hugh Laurie performing a song on the Inside The Actors Studio show. He's actually quite talented, and as you can tell, quite British. At any rate, enjoy the humorous song, mystery, and see the return of House on Tuesday at 9/8 C on Fox.

It's All Set Out Before Me...

2007-01-17T21:13:00.000-05:00

Tonight was a little different. I went to another local church other than that one that I normally go to as there was a guest speaker by the name of Patrick Mead that had been giving a series of lessons over the course of the week. I had heard from others that he was quite an exceptional speaker, and figured it would be a good opportunity to hear someone that I hadn't heard speak before. I looked online, and the lesson title for the evening was "Forgiven Much, Forgiven Little", which, as many of you reading this might guess, dealt with the "sinful" woman who came in while Jesus was with Simon the Pharisee. She wept on his feet, dried them with her hair, and poured perfume on them. Simon was shocked by this action, and questioned Jesus in his mind why he would allow a woman such as this to touch him, for if he was truly a prophet, than he would know and would have been appaled as well, because, well, that's how you should be when "sinful" people come up against "good" people. Rather than agreeing with the usual thought pattern of the learned teachers of the day, Jesus tells the story of the man who cancelled the debts of two men, who owed 500 and 50 denarii respectively. When he asked Simon who would love his master more, he correctly replied the one with the larger debt. Jesus makes the telling statement in Luke 7:47 - "Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven - for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little." An excellent story to remind us that we all should love much, for we have been forgiven much. Nobody in the eyes of God is righteous in and of himself. The blood of Christ makes us that way. And without a humble spirit to recognize that we are not any better than anyone else should lead us to a life where loving others, and loving God, is of the utmost importance.

However, that wasn't exactly what caught my attention, as I have heard that story and that lesson preached a hundred times. What got me interested was a little Q&A session, that maybe lasted 10 minutes, that happened right at the start of the service. Of the 3 questions he took, there was women in the church (where he referred us to his online sermons which he said were prepared after 3 years of study with the elders of his church and scholars of language and religion), something regarding the role of elders and deacons (I wasn't really paying attention to that one as it was the last question), and that of the meaning of predestination mentioned in Ephesians 1. And in the space of the 3 minutes that he talked about, he probably made it clearer in my head than anyone else had before. Here's the general idea:

Ephesians 1:4,5 says, "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will." Now, some people will take this to mean that God has already chosen who will be saved and who will not be saved. I cannot agree with this in the least, for one, it takes away free will, which we all have. Secondly, it would negate the many, many, many times that Jesus specifically says "Whoever believes in me..." and then fill in the rest. If only some of us were to be saved from the beginning, He would have said something like, "Well, for the four or five of you, but not for anyone else, that will believe in me...".

Looking back at the verse, we see that Paul wasn't talking about our spiritual journey being predestined, but that in fact, God had predestined the journey of Christ as our intercessor. It says we were predestined "to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ." God wasn't taking away our ability to make decisions. He was in fact giving us another decision to make...whether or not we would become an adopted son of his by coming to Him through Christ.

I guess when I've heard it discussed, so many people get to the word predestined, and then something blows up in the thought process and the rest of the verse, chapter, Bible, gets tossed out. Suddenly, our thoughts are controlled, our futures are set in stone, and there's not a thing that anyone can do about it. To me, what he said, and how he said it (to which I've tried to reproduce here) made perfect sense in terms of being consistent with other statements in the Bible, and the fact that God has given us free-will to make decisions, whether they be good or bad for us. The thing that we didn't have control of was whether God would offer us a way back to him since we are all sinners. But from the beginning of time, He had a plan that would bring us back to him. In that sense, I guess it was all laid out before us and set in place before we had a chance to have a say. And for me, that's not such a bad thing.

1 Week Down

2007-01-16T20:23:00.000-05:00

To say that this has been one of the slowest weeks I've experienced would probably be an understatement. School's started, but since I'm not taking any classes, I don't have to do anything. So essentially all I should be doing is working on my thesis, but until today we weren't able to get everyone involved in the group that I'm with together, so I haven't really done anything with that either. All in all, pretty boring. Wow, what a first paragraph.

So here is a Google Earth picture of the city Mandi is in. I haven't got any clue where she is within the city, but it's pretty large, and this was about as far away as you could get before all the detail was lost. I'm guessing the only big patch of green is the field where she went to the soccer game that she talked about in her blog. Maybe when she checks she might be able to point out more where she is exactly. Or maybe you can't see it, I don't really know.

The word games of the day:

31) 101 D

32) 7 D S

33) 17 is a P N

34) 4 S of the Y

35) 2 H of a C

Bend It Like Beckham

2007-01-16T03:16:00.001-05:00

As anyone in the states might know, Beckham is coming to the US to play for MLS in the coming year. Now, he is past his prime, but I think that he still has more to offer the game of soccer than just marketing. At any rate, here is one of the most clutch goals that I've seen. A 93rd minute free kick to send England to the 2002 World Cup Finals. If he didn't score, they were staying home.

Ninja Warrior

2007-01-14T20:20:00.000-05:00

So I had the tv on today while I was doing some work, and would you believe that I ran across a program on G4 called Ninja Warrior. Now, the premise is simple. Take 100 men, put up 4 separate obstacle courses that challenge strength and agility, have a really excitable Japanese commentator, and let the games begin. I have to say, this is the first time that I've ever seen it, but it seemed pretty humorous. Kind of a less campy version of MXC, which is one of the classic game-shows, but probably just as amusing. Basically what they try and do is get through a series of traps and physical agility programs in order to become the next Ninja Warrior. The commentator at the start said that only 1 person had ever made it through all the traps.

As an example, the first series of traps for everyone to attempt involved: 1) running across diagonally spaced tilted blocks, 2) running up an inclined narrow log, 3) jumping to a ring that is hung across a sliding metal bar and hanging on and swinging to the next safe point, 4) running across a series of planks set diagonally opposite each other on a narrow pivot point, 5) jumping off a trampoline onto a rope net and climbing across without touching the pool of water underneath, 6) running up a ramp that comes over the top of itself, kind of like a C with a hook across the top of the C, and finally 7) climbing a rope on a wall that is approximately 20 feet high. And that's just the part to weed out the weaklings. According to the website, of the 1400 people to have attempted, only 200 have made it to the second stage. Tuesday's at Midnight on G4 tv. If you're a fan of MXC, I can pretty much guarantee you'll like this one. I guess I found it interesting because I am a ninja at heart (most people just don't know that about me though), and it's always funny to listen to overly-excited Japanese comm1.6entator people screaming things such as "Go Curry-Man! We like our curry anyway you serve it!" (said to a contestant that is a chef for his real job). At least, it was something like that, and certainly funnier when you hear it while watching some guy in a chef's apron running through all the obstacles. I guess my relatives over there in Japan really are quite funny a lot of the time.

On to the game of the day. Here they are:

26) 1.6 K in a M
27) 4 W of a C
28) 191 U N M S
29) 2 D in a W
30) 168 H in a W

The Hunt Is On

2007-01-13T21:56:00.000-05:00

So today began the job hunt. I ended up applying to 3 jobs today, 2 in SC and one in NC. I'm not entirely sure how qualified I am for them. I guess I wonder how much of the qualifications list they really mean, and how much lee-way they will give to someone that doesn't meet each one of them to the letter. I guess that when they look for a few years experience, and I instead have graduate school, I would figure that those would be interchangeable. At any rate, apparently most of the jobs for physics and math majors, or at least that look for a physics and math degree are situated in California. That is a problem, since I have no desire to move to California, or anywhere that far west for that matter. Who knows. I'll just have to pray that something will come along, and I'm confident that God will provide options for me.

Outside of that, it's been a slow day at the apartment. My roommate is out of town on a trip he went on with his on-campus church group, and outside it's been gloomy. At least it's been fairly quiet, since there is a holiday here on Monday, I guess a lot of people might have gone places for the long weekend.

The word games for the day:

21) 1000 Y in a M
22) 15 M on a D M C
23) 208 to 214 B in a H B
24) 5 to 7 C of the W
25) 6 S of a C

Wondering

2007-01-12T19:42:00.000-05:00

Do you ever have those days when you just have all the time in the world to think (whether you really have that time or not)? Today has been one of those for me. I don't even really know what about half the time. They are just scattered fragments of thoughts that come in and go right out without really making a mark. Just one of those days I guess.

For Christmas, I got one of those 1-a-day calendars, and there was a little puzzle a few days ago that had me stumped for a little while. Maybe you'll get it without any difficulty. For me, the directions were what screwed me up, cause I was thinking the completely wrong thing. Here we go:

WORDEZOID: Start at any letter, then spell a common 8-letter word by moving along the lines from letter to letter. Example: You can spell ONION but not UNION. You are not allowed to use a letter twice in a row. Clue: Not income.

G---O---I
/ / /
U---T---N

The horizontal lines are correct. The vertical lines are supposed to connect between the U and G, the T and O, and the N and I. There are also lines connecting the U to the O, and the T to the I, but given my inability to draw satisfactory lines for the easy ones even, I'll just describe it. Can you believe that had me stuck for about 5 hours? It's not like I sat there constantly staring at it for 5 hours...but I felt like an idiot when I re-read the directions for about the millionth time and the answer hit me. I highly doubt it would take anyone else that long. Wow.

As a little plug, anyone who wants some new desktop pictures or likes to have a picture slideshow scrolling as a screensaver, check out Digital Blasphemy. Now, there is a members section where you have to pay, but there are also about 20 free pictures. Not bad for someone with a computer and a pretty good ability at art.

In conclusion of today rather's slow post, here are the usual 5 word associations. We're almost through Part 1 of 3. At least, part 1 of 3 of the ones that I have gotten.

16) 365 D in a Y (a gimme, for Friday)
17) 52 W in a Y
18) 9 L of a C
19) 60 M in an H
20) 64 S on a C B

A New Beginning

2007-01-09T22:59:00.000-05:00

So I've noticed that it's been a while since I last entered something in this blog thing. Between now and a month ago, many things have happened. We've had Christmas holiday, another New Year has come, time has been spent with friends, family, and loved ones, and now it's back to work, school, or whatever else it is that time is spent doing. It's crazy how quickly another year has come and gone, and how many things have happened over the course of it. I can't even hardly remember everything that I've been a part of or done this past year. There are some stand-out highlights however. In no particular order:

1) Having read Philip's blog, I was reminded of the amazing little show that the people at camp put on regarding bringing fire down from heaven, and lighting an altar that would show people the true God. In our rendition, however, God actually didn't show himself, because the fire only managed to light a small patch of grass about 15 feet from the altar. Read here, and look at the comments to get more of a view in to the show of power that never was.

2) Playing again with the guys from Harding at the frisbee tournament in Memphis at the start of the semester was probably one of the most fun activities that I was able to do. Having not played in a tournament for over a year at the time of that one, it was actually a lot of fun, and I still had a little bit of frisbee skill left in the tank. One of the best groups of guys that one could expect or hope to play and hang out with.

3) I took up playing soccer again this past year. Strange, since this was the first time in over 5 years that I played soccer. However, after the first few weeks of trying to get back in to playing and controlling a soccer ball, it got to be fun again. I even scored a few goals during the past year...

4) I completed my first year of graduate study. As of now, there's only about 6 months of graduate work left. That means I have to get my tail in gear and work hard on my thesis, and get in to the job market searching. Yay for growing up.

5) Thanks to Mandi, I attended a US Soccer game in the build-up to the ultimately dissapointing US campaign. I've always wanted to go to a game, and thanks to that gift I was able to go. Maybe one of these days when I manage to travel to Europe, I'll be able to attend a Champions League or European league game. All in all, however, a great experience.

Those are just a few of the stand-outs. There's so many other intangibles and small moments that I am no doubt forgetting. All-in-all, though, 2006 was a good year. Now to look forward to 2007.

In addition, if you guys could pray for Mandi, it would be much appreciated by her, myself, and her family I am sure. She left for Guatemala today, and will be down there for 10 weeks until March 20th. She is studying to improve her Spanish speaking ability, and will be working with some of the missionaries and other events and people down there.

I almost forgot...the word games return:

11) 100 C in a D
12) 12 M in a Y
13) 29 D in F in a L Y
14) 27 B in the N T
15) 13 L in a B D