Tag: random

  • Of BluRay and Websites

    It’s been a fun week.

    It’s been a crazy productive week. Not only in my work life, but also in some fun stuff at home.

    Our garden continues to bring us joy as well as an over-abundance of fresh produce. And the recent egg recall has only solidified our desire to get a few chickens and produce our own eggs. With almost a full season of success under our belts we are also looking for opportunities to expand the garden. I have two spots in mind, one in our yard that our landlord/neighbor had strawberries in, and our other neighbor has an abandoned lot with some old garden plots in it that we’d love to sharecrop with.

    We moved our CSA pick-up from the North Park farmers market to the Little Italy Mercato. No judgement on one farmers market over the other, I’m just excited that I get to go now since the pick-up is on Saturday.

    Yesterday, I pulled out our massive yellow tomato plants. They were producing 5-6 pounds of tomatoes per week and we just couldn’t keep up with them. So I’ve turned off that factory and we’re repairing that area of the garden for another summer planting of something less invasive. (It was nearly 20 feet tall!) I harvested one last batch of tomatoes and we have them laying in the sun today… sun dried yellow tomatoes!

    The kids have about 2 weeks left of summer break. We are slowly coming around to the idea that this means we need to start school shopping. The good news, it’s pretty easy at a school where everyone wears uniforms! But, every still needs new shorts, shirts, shoes, and backpacks.

    Kristen is officially in the second trimester with baby #3. She’s feeling a lot better as morning sickness subsides. We’re still in denial that we are going to need to buy all that baby stuff again. And my head kind of explodes when I realize that our Passat isn’t going to work with 3 kids. That said, we’re totally jazzed about this baby. Big surprise to us, but we’re going to enjoy it!

    Last weekend we upgraded our DVD player to a BluRay player. By upgraded I mean that our 1999 DVD player finally stopped working and we didn’t have a way to watch movies for a few months. We watched our first BluRay movie the other day… it’s amazing! Plus, it works seamlessly with Netflix online. (We already used the Wii for this)

    Since I’m being random, another early marriage purchase that just died is our toaster. Since we haven’t bought or looked at toasters since 1997… we both giggled that you can now get toasters that double as egg cookers. We might just have to do that. It’s a whole new world!

    In web news, I’ve been very productive. I re-skinned Kristen’s blog last week. And I also totally designed and launched a site last weekend that I’m very excited about. On top of that, we’ve reactivated Beyond the Zoo. It’s funny looking at the stats of BTZ. Even though we haven’t put much up on the site it still gets great traffic from Google. (50+ visitors per day, not bad!)

  • Summer update

    Summer officially began on Memorial Day, 5 weeks ago.

    A whole hodgepodge of things have happened.

    • Lisa has been here for just over a month. So far that has pretty well. She does fit into the flow of our house… so it really hasn’t been hard at all. Finding volunteer work for her for the first 6 weeks just didn’t pan out. She did a few things for a charter school that is opening in City Heights and she did a few things for a non-profit I’m exploring starting in City Heights. But most of our other leads never materialized. Several organizations were super interested, but when it came time to do something they bowed out. Who would have thought it’d be so hard to volunteer 6 weeks of labor? Not me. It’s been great to have her here for the convenience factor. Kristen and I have love being able to go for walks, go to the store, or whatever we want without necessarily having the kids in tow. That said, I think Lisa is a bit weirded out by how many people asked if she is my wife!
    • The kids get out of school this Thursday. We like the year-round school concept. But it does feel weird to tell them to get ready for school in July! It’s hard to believe that we’re just a week away from having a 4th grader and a 2nd grader. They’ve got an easy week ahead. There are parties every day and field day on Thursday. Both of them are something like 2 grade levels ahead academically… so moving up is a very good thing.
    • I connected with the YouthWorks San Diego team twice this week. (Gold star employee that I am) I went over and met them on Monday at their ministry location. And then when I realized it was just 10 minutes from my house, we invited them over for a BBQ last night. They are four very impressive college students running missions projects for 10 weeks with 50+ students per week from all over the U.S. and Canada. The guys inhaled all the protein, no surprise.
    • Kristen and I leave for Haiti in just 5 days. We are flying to Fort Lauderdale this coming Saturday night. We’ll have all day Sunday and Monday morning to just kind of relax and get used to the tropical humidity before flying over to Port-au-Prince Monday afternoon. (There may or may not be a beach and tropical beverage as part of this preparation.) We still have some pre-trip shopping to do. We need a tent, sleeping pads, and duffle bags. Outside of that we are set. I’ve got a lot of pre-trip thoughts for this trip. But I’ll save them for their own post.
    • Work stuff is going great. When I compare what we we felt like last year at this time to this year… man, we are in a much better space!
    • Speaking of work. I was afraid when the shake-up occurred that I’d somehow lose all of those friendships with now former co-workers. It’s been fun this summer to connect repeatedly with people who used to work for YS. Bit by bit everyone is landing on their feet. While I don’t see them nearly as often as I did when we worked together… it looks like those friendships are going to make the transition. And for that I’m stoked.
    • I’m evaluating a whole menu of personal projects. (Web design, app development, writing projects, stuff like that) It’s cool to have so many opportunities to evaluate. At the same time its a bit overwhelming.
    • It hardly feels like summer in San Diego. We’ve gotten a heavy dose of June Gloom that has carried over into July. This has been great for the garden, but not great for a nice warm summer. I’m thinking there will be a time later this summer when we’ll remember the coolness fondly. But for right now it’d be nice to get into the 70s.
    • The World Cup has been fun to watch. The games certainly were a fun part of our vacation! Yet I’m glad it’s only every four years because I don’t really like soccer that much to watch it all the time. When I watch sports that are a bit boring on TV I always come up with fun ways to make it more interesting. What do you think of this one? When a team scores a goal they have to chose a player to take out of the game. So if they go up by 2 goals they are 2 players down, etc. It seems like that would result in higher scores and make it more interesting. And they should get rid of the shoot out. Once they get to the 3rd overtime they just need to add a couple more balls. Split screen because there would be shots coming from everywhere!

  • Plethora

    Plethora is really the only word I have to describe my life right now.

    There are so many things going on, so many amazing opportunities, and so many more things I wish I had time to do. Here’s a glimpse into the madness…

    • NYWC has taken over my work life! Because of the changes we got a late start to planning this year’s convention… but we have a big deadline coming up and every intention of nailing it. So it’s crunch time for the website, the brochure, the video, and a whole lot more. I’m way more involved in all of that than I ever have been.  Which is fantastic and crazy to think about at the same time.
    • PlanetWisdom and the Canadian convention are also about to ramp up their stuff for next year. Yowsers! That’s a lot of websites.
    • I’ve got a couple McLane Creative projects right at the launching point. In the midst of that God is brining me a big vision to expand these side jobs from 1-2 projects per month to 5-6. I have to make a strategic decision about how to either grow or contract this part of my life soon. And that decision is stressing me out.
    • Next week I hit the road. It’s kind of related to NYWC but it’s really a trip where Shawn and I hope to meet-up with and encourage as many youth workers as we can. I’m not a natural detail person. So nailing down all of the meet-up locations, places to sleep, travel plans, and stuff like that has been a bit nutty! We still don’t have a place to sleep in Redding, CA. God… provide!
    • I’m in full-on recruiting mode for the Haiti trip this July. The team will be 20 people and we have 6 confirmed. There are a bunch of folks still praying about it, trying to move dates around, stuff like that. That’s a joy in my life… but there’s a lot of details, too. (We still have room if you are interested.)
    • Kristen and I just booked a beach house for June. Besides a weeks vacation by the ocean, we’ll be hosting a 13th wedding anniversary BBQ and a snarky renewal of vows. It feels good to have a signed contract and deposit in for that. But we still have a ton of planning to do.
    • I’ve got a series of articles to write about social media in ministry. I wish I could do more of this, but I’ve had to say no to some things recently because I’m over-committed.
    • I’m kicking around a book proposal. I’ve had an outline and some starter chapters for a while. I need to decide to go forward or to trash it soon.
    • Some people from our church (not our church, per se) are starting a charter high school in City Heights. I’m trying to gauge what my involvement with that will be. I have a passion for public school education so this something I care a ton about. And, of course, this would be the school Megan and Paul would eventually go to.
    • God’s moving some spiritual mountains in our midst within the high school group, I.O.B. and within our small group. I feel like I just get to witness that stuff and my heart longs to be more intimately involved.
    • In just a few week’s Lisa moves into our house for the summer. She’s graduating from college and.. well… the job prospects in California are actually much better than in Michigan. So, she’s coming to live with us, be our summer nanny, volunteer with some stuff, and hopefully get a clear vision for what the next step is in her life after college. Kristen and I take a long-range view of discipleship and this is definitely part of that. Can’t wait for her to get here.

    I wish that were it. But I know there are lots of other things going on which I just label, “the plethora.”