Big News

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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).