Genius In Progress

The Michigan music scene is losing a great musician this month. Dawn played her “Farewell to Michigan” show a couple of days ago in Canton, MI. Soon, it will require a trip to Chicago to hear her excellent music… all in all not a horrible thing, as Chicago is a great town and her music is worth the drive, but still a little bit less convenient than wandering over to Chelsea, Canton or Ann Arbor for a show.

At the farewell show, Dawn and I passed the time before she began her act by creating
The Top 10 Sci-Fi Dating Faux Pas, a collection of rules proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were geeks involved in the making of the list. Ah, way too much fun.

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
when sorrows like sea billows roll;
whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
let this blest assurance control,
that Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
and hath shed his own blood for my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

And, Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
the clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
even so, it is well with my soul.

Eugene Harlan Stauffer (1926 - 2006)
We’ll miss you, Grandpa.

For those of you who have not yet gathered (hey, humour me… I can pretend that at least one of the tiny smattering of people who may possibly read this doesn’t know me), I am a big fan of Christmas music. In the same pre-Advent Christmas excitement mood as the previous post, as it currently stands I will be helping to record at least two Christmas CDs this year. Hooray for adding more versions of time-honored (or possibly obnoxious) holiday music, and hopefully even a few new additions to the wonderful world of Christmas music.

Yeah… so it’s been over a month and a half since I last posted on this here blog thingy… this whole technology thing is so confusing. Anyway, in summary: job offer out of the blue… huge decision to make… Johannes gone to Ireland… awesome Nickel Creek concert… talking with Sara Watkins afterwards… crazy party at my house…. dancing and costumes… new job… yeah, that about covers the main points. Ah, I love how relaxing fall is. Oh, and did I mention? HOLY HAND GRENADES, IT’S NOVEMBER ALREADY! On that note, I’m off… with only a minimum of elipses in this post… ok maybe minimum isn’t the right word.

All I can say is thank you God for this verse: “and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” Yeah, yeah, it’s only the night of the fifth / the morning of sixth right now, but it’s still the weekend, and after the amount of sleep I’ve gotten recently, I am certainly going to rest (ie pass out) for the next 12 - 14 hours. Maybe some time after that I’ll even post again. For now, goodnight.

So apparently it’s a small world. I just got a call from a friend who I work with. He’s getting married in August (congrats to him), and apparently was meeting with a family friend, or friend of a friend, or something of the sort, because she does slide shows or something of the sort, related to weddings. Anyhow, she showed them some examples, and he recognized one of the people from the pictures as the person I dated for quite a while. He had met her once up north, and though he recognized her in the pictures, so he called to ask me what her last name is / who she married. It turns out her husband knows the lady doing the slide show presentation fairly well, or at least his parents do, or something of the sort.

So, the moral of the story is, slow and steady wins… um, wait, I mean, it’s a small world. Crazy stuff.

Posting in a somewhat out-of-order fashion, as I normally do when I actually post, last night was a pretty cool night. Ann Arbor Assemblies of God hosted a concert as a fundraiser for their youth group. 4 bands played, including Dawn and Christopher Adam, who were both awesome, as they are every time I see them play. There were not a huge amount of people there, but the concert was still quite awesome. Some of us stuck around talking and various people jammed on some of the instruments. I got to talk to Dawn, which is always a pleasure, and I had to help my brilliant brother jump start his car… silly boy… someday he’ll learn to turn the lights off. Hehe, hooray for relaxing evenings.

True to the last sentence of my previous post, here it is almost 2 months later and I am finally posting. As I have many other things to do, this will be short, but I figured since I spend the time to fend off the vicious comment spam mongers every day, I might as well actually post. Life has been somewhat busy for the last couple of months. Between work, other work, church stuff, moving things into my house, fixing things around my house, and all those other exciting things, I certainly could use a vacation.

At least, unlike last time I wrote, I now have a comfy bed in the bedroom. This is somewhat problematic actually, as it’s comfortable enough to make waking up for work in the morning just that much harder. However, it certainly does beat sleeping on a sleeping bag and ground pad every night.

Aside from that, the whole house thing has gone pretty well. The basement is going to rock some collective socks as it gains more and more instruments, microphones, guitars, amps, and all sorts of other useful things. The main thing we need now is a grill and some deck / patio furniture for if the weather ever happens to shape up and actually get nice again.

Well that’s all for now folks. Perhaps we’ll do this again in a couple of months.

And now, we are ALMOST to the present. Upon returning home from Florida, I picked up the keys to my new house and headed straight there. Kelly met me there a little later, and after heading to Meijer to pick up a shower curtain and some other things so that I could spend the night, we plunked down on bean bags (the only furniture in the house at the time) to watch Keeping the Faith on my laptop. I got visits from John, and Johannes and Abbie to check out the house during the process of the movie, and Kelly and I eventually gave up on trying to finish it because we were both falling asleep.

I then proceeded to spend my first night in my new home on a groundpad in a sleeping bag (which I continue to sleep on, until my bed arrives on Saturday). The house is continuing to get more and more furnished, and is getting lots of visitors (yay, keep them coming), and I am sure getting it up to fully livable status will be quite an adventure, but for now, I am having lots of fun!

That’s all for now. I am sure I will update more in a month or two.

After all the stress of purchasing the house (thank you God for making the house possible, and thank you all for your prayers as well), as timing would have it, I left for Florida. Less than 11 hours after signing the final document to purchase my house I was in a car heading to the airport, having not slept at all in the time in between (I left at about 4:15 in the morning). Kevin and Mike and I met up and drove to the airport, and headed down to Orlando.

Once there, after finding out my luggage was still in Detroit because a baggage handler had had a concussion or something else of the sort, I waited in line for about 45 minutes to give them the address of the hotel to ship it to when it did eventually arrive on a later flight. We then proceeded to rent a car, head to this gigantic hotel/resort, and get ready to spend a perfect day outside. My lack of a suitcase was a little problematic as it was 82 and sunny outside and I was wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt, but it all worked out.

After unpacking a bit at the hotel, we headed to this golf course, designed by Jack Nicklaus. Mike and Kevin golfed, and I manned the golf cart and the peanut gallery. Basically we spent the whole afternoon relaxing on the golf course in the glorious weather.

The next 4 days were spent in Microsoft lectures / classes learning about new features of the upcoming development tools. There was some informative stuff and a lot of repetitive information, but overall it was useful. On the last day we relaxed again. We got to check out the ginormous swimming pool facilities of the resort (huge, huge pools intertwining through caves and stuff) and just relaxed before heading home. We did have one other intriguing incident on the trip involving attempts to leverage the power of rear wheel drive on a Dodge Magnum, and a gas pedal becomming detached from the floor, but that’s a story to be told in person. On Thursday afternoon, we headed home.