I had to look up instructions on how to embed YouTube videos for this post...I hope it works correctly...

I've really been slacking off on posting lately I guess...I didn't really mean to miss last night, somehow I just didn't end up posting. Saturday was a good day. I did some yard work, moved a piano to my house from my parents' house, went to Pat's birthday party (my sister's boyfriend), and went to a party for Daniel and Ellen. I am so happy that they are getting married, they make such a good couple. Needless to say, all that made me tired today, especially since I get up a little after 6.

Today wasn't too busy. I didn't have too much to do this morning at church. I ran Video Toaster and helped out with some other random stuff here and there. I kind of felt out of it most of the morning, I think just because I was tired.

After church we went to On The Border with Kristi's family. I have been trying to eat less, so I made a conscious effort to not pig out on chips the entire time. I think I ate less chips than usual, but man it was so stinkin hard. Salty things like chips and fries are my downfall, and it is almost impossible for me to avoid them. I am happy to say though that I think I've lost a little weight since starting to eat less. My pants are kind of loose, and shirts that had gotten too small for me are starting to fit again. Now I just need to start getting myself up early enough to run again. I really miss running, but I used to run late at night, which isn't going to work anymore. I have never been a good early riser. Supposedly it gets easier as you get older, but I don't think so. On one hand I have no issue getting up really early to fulfill responsibilities, but when it comes to voluntary things I just can't get myself out of my wonderful bed. When I used to run with Graham I got up because I had to meet him...maybe I just need him to drive up every morning from Charleston or something.

We got done with lunch and went to Wal-Mart to grocery shop on the way home. I have never considered myself a really healthy eater, but when I buy groceries at the Simpsonville Wal-Mart and see other people's carts, I feel alot better about my eating habits. Kristi's and my cart has some fruit, some diet drinks, and some other food items like chicken and bagels and frozen lunches for her. You should see some of these other carts. All these nasty frozen fried foods that don't even look good in the picture plus tons of snack foods and tons of high calorie drinks. I don't see how people survive. I feel like I'm being super judgemental, but seriously I cannot believe some of the carts I see going through the line. I enjoy my fried high calorie foods a good bit, but if I lived off of what people have in their carts I think my stomach would constatly be having issues.

We got home after shopping and I took Lucy for a walk. We hadn't been on our walk in about two days, so she was extra excited. I decided to lengthen it all the way to the other side of the neighborhood since she was so excited, and that was a big mistake. There were alot of kids outside playing together down on the other end, and we have already established that Lucy doesn't like kids, especially kids she doesn't know. A girl asked if she could pet her, and I said she wasn't very friendly while Lucy growled behind me...how embarrasing. But that's not the worst part. We started walking back and two kids started skateboarding towards us. If there's one thing Lucy hates more than kids, it's kids on skateboards. She completely freaked out, jumped around until she got out of her collar, and took off down another road in the neighborhood. The problem was she had to run through a group of kids to get there, which freaked her out even more because they all tried to stop her. I must have looked silly just walking slowly up the street, but I have learned that if Lucy has a nervous breakdown and I run after her she thinks I am chasing her, and then she'll never stop running. It was quite a production. Eventually I caught up to her once she had gotten away from all the commotion and slowed down. I put her collar back on and we walked back to the house where she decided she needed a nap. I wish I could fix her nervousness and distaste for strangers and kids, but I don't know what else to do. She's been exposed to plenty of them as a puppy, and she's never had a bad experience, so I don't know what her deal is. I guess it's just her genetics or something.

Anyways, Kristi and I went to small group and then came home right afterwards. I've been spending all night watching youtube videos of people playing drums and checking out some of my favorite music artists in live videos on youtube. I find it funny that really flashy people who aren't very good get tons of comments about how good they are, and then the solid people generally don't get much notice. For instance, I found this kid and he seems really solid to me, but no one really comments on his playing:

I also have a fascination with Jon Foreman, the lead singer of Switchfoot. I have liked them every since their first CD, and I really have alot of respect for him specifically. I think he is one of the more broadly talented musicians and songwriters out there and he seems to carry himself in a unique way that brings alot of respect. He just seems to have a ton of humilty and love for other people mainly I think. He's been doing alot of stuff with this girl named Molly Jenson lately, so I am thinking about buying her CD. There is alot of talking in this video, but when you finally get to the song it's pretty awesome:

I think the reason I love Jon Foreman's music so much is that I identify more with his songwriting than anyone else I've come across...not even just from a lyrical standpoint, but even from a melodic standpoint. One of my favorite songs he's written is called "On Fire" which has the lyrics:

"When everything inside me looks like everything I hate
You are the hope I have for change, You are the only chance I'll take"

Another newer song that I love off of his EP called "Your Love Is Strong" goes like this:

"I look out the window, the birds are composing
Not a note is out of tune or out of place
I walk to the meadow, and stare at the flowers
Better dressed than any girl on her wedding day
So why should I worry, why do I freak out?
God knows what I need
You know what I need
Your love is strong"

Seriously, can you think of many lyrics better than that? Anyways, I didn't really mean for this blog to turn into some huge plug for Jon Foreman, I guess I got a little carried away.

That was my day today. Tomorrow I guess I will go to school, and then maybe I can finish digging up the dead grass tomorrow afternoon. I was sad at first that it would dry out before I would finish, but then I thought...I have a hose, and I bet watering it down with that would be really similar to rain. I know, I'm a genius, you don't have to tell me. Monday night has become Little Caesar's night too, so I can always look forward to that!

I bet there aren't many cities that can do things as nice as Fall for Greenville...

Today was a pretty great day, although it got off to a rough start. I woke up while Kristi was getting ready because once again Lucy decided to get sick. I don't know what her deal is, it hasn't happened since I started feeding her late at night over a month ago, but I guess her stomach was too empty this morning for some reason. So that was alot of fun. I had to put some stuff in the wash and then get her to eat some food. After that she went back to sleep and I slept a little until 8:15.

I texted Joe to ask what time he was coming in. I figured if he wasn't going to be in until 10 or so, I would get some extra sleep...the week of school work wore me out quite a bit. He suggested that we go to breakfast, and I thought that sounded like a good time, so I met him at Perkins. I like hanging out and talking with friends, so getting to eat meals with Joe is always a good time for me.

Work was pretty uneventful today. We ran some cable up to the stage and I did a few random things like setting up an EasyWorship schedule and locating all the tv carts, but really it was pretty slow over all. I ended up leaving just a few minutes before 2:30.

Since it was so nice outside, I had already decided that I wanted to take Lucy to the dog park when I got home. Kristi said she didn't really want to go, so I didn't wait for her to get home. Lucy did a little better this time. She was still extremely nervous, but she interacted with the dogs a little more. You can tell that she really loves some of the dogs, because when certain ones come over to where she is to say hi her tail starts going and she acts like she wants to play. For some reason though she just isn't bold enough to go play with the big group. I think that she enjoys going though, and maybe eventually she'll be confident enough to play with all the dogs. We walked through Cleveland Park a little after the dog park, and then came back home.

On the way home I saw a blimp flying over Simpsonville, which seemed weird to me. I couldn't think of anything going on in Simpsonville that would warrant a blimp. I actually did a speech on blimps in college for my communications class, and there aren't a ton of them around. The speech was pretty amazing though, I drew a sweet diagram and everything. I actually did alot better on that speech than my serious ones, because my teacher never agreed with my point of view, so he was really picky. Whatev.

Kristi got home a little later and we took off for Fall for Greenville. We stopped at a carnival going on at her school first, but didn't stay too long. I wore the new class t-shirt, and I felt a little silly to be honest.

Fall for Greenville was a really good time. We got downtown and everyone was charging 5$ to park everywhere, so I figured we would see if the parking garage was free. It is usually free on the weekends, which I think is a great idea, but I wasn't sure about special events. We had to fight our way through a few parking lots and side streets because of streets being shut down to traffic, but eventually we got there and sure enough it was free. I had to laugh at the boy scouts across the street trying to wave the cars into their 5$ lot, and pretty much every car ignoring them and going into the free parking garage. Sorry kid, I don't know you, and I was never in boy scouts anyways.

Once we parked we walked through the little courtyard and out to Main where Coffee hits. There was quite a crowd, so we got a map to scout out whether we wanted to get food from booths or eat at a restaurant. There were some pretty good options, so we decided to do the booth thing. We spent 20$ on tickets and got some really good food. There were so many choices that it was really hard to decide what to get, but I love variety so that was fine with me. I ended up getting some MiMi's Steakhouse shrimp and fried rice, some spicy shrimp rolls from Sushi Muriyaki, and a drink. Kristi got some MiMi's as well, some soup from Soby's, and a smoothie from Liquid Highway. We ended up having 4 tickets left over, and instead of finding something random that we wouldn't really enjoy we gave them to a family in line to buy tickets. They seemed like they appreciated it.

I hadn't been to Fall for Greenville for a few years, and I really enjoyed it. The food was good, and I saw a ton of people I knew too, including an old friend from Clemson, one of my swimmers from when I coached, and John from the worship team at Southside. It was a great time.

We came home and stopped at Bi-Lo on the way. I wanted to see what my options were for 1.00 DVD rentals from their machine. There were no good options, but there was a huge collection of Policemen and Firemen in the parking lot around this van in the back. They had yellow tape up and everything. I asked a guy what was happening, and he said he didn't know, but had heard they found a dead person in the van. I called my friend Nate from Greenville Tech. He is an EMT and I knew that if he was working he would know what was going on. Sure enough he said his friend Alex had made that call and that all they knew was that someone was dead. The coroner was on his way to check things out. I am looking forward to finding out more about that on Monday.

Since we didn't rent a movie, I put in Rudy when we got home. I hadn't seen it in forever, and I just bought it for 5$ from Target the other day. It is such a good movie, which I find slightly ironic as I don't really like Notre Dame. Really though when it comes to teams other than Clemson I usually like them or don't like them depending on their coach. I'm not a big Charlie Weiss fan, and I feel like Tyrone Willingham got shafted, so that's probably why. Oh, and I know some pretty obnoxious Notre Dame fans too. I really enjoyed watching the movie, and Kristi watched most of it with me. She doesn't really get into the whole football thing though, so alot of her watching involved sleeping. After the movie we both got into bed, and I figure I'll watch some Leno and Conan since I don't have to get up early tomorrow.

My plan is to dig out all the rest of the dead grass tomorrow and then go get some soil and compost to put down. I'm excited that it is raining outside because the ground will be soft. Although, I hope it stops by tomorrow so I can actually do the work....

I wonder if we'll be able to squeak another ACC win out against Duke?

Geez Louise...this has been a long week. You may have noticed that I have not posted for quite a while. I'd like to say that I was on a secret mission as a black op and just couldn't tell you where I was, but actually I was just so far behind on school work that I was up very late every night studying. I figured it would be nice to take a break from blogging since I would be fairly tired and busy until I was through my tests. I'm sure many of the three of you who read this blog were overtaken by the sadness of not being able to read my wonderful words each day.

The good news is I came through with flying colors. I wrote a pretty good paper for Psychology, made a 94 on my Micro test, and I'm pretty sure I nailed my Statistics test today. At first I was sad that my 94 wasn't a 102 like last test, but then I was like, it's a 94. I think my wife's overachieving spirit has started to rub off on me or something. Anyways, I do have two tests next week too, but they shouldn't require as much intense studying as the last two. That's what I get for not looking at my Statistics book since the test before.

I can't even remember all that happened since I last wrote. I remember I wanted to talk about running sound on Sunday. I thought it ended up sounding pretty decent. I really think that going through all the channels on Thursday helped a bunch. I have also found that I really enjoy running sound. It's something that I feel like I am fairly gifted in because of my ear and knowledge, and I also really enjoy making something good behind the scenes. I don't think most people really even think about it consciously, but I think that really good sound just helps the service flow and helps people get more engaged. I also know what it's like to be on the stage side and feel uncomfortable with the sound. I find alot of fulfillment feeling like I can recognize the full potential of the talent and hard work from the musicians and singers through the sound. I still do miss the creative musical aspect sometimes though.

There were a few other things of importance that happened. Kristi's class t-shirts came in, and they look pretty good, so good that I think I'm going to wear the one she got for me on a regular basis.

Today was a really long day in itself. I got up a little after 9, got ready, and then took Lucy for a walk. I wasn't going to let her get muddy, because I didn't want to give her a bath, but she slipped and fell in the mud a few times when running around in front of a house with drainage issues. Seriously, they just pressure washed the driveway, and since it rained it is completely covered in mud again. Sooo...I had to give Lucy a bath when we got back, which was no fun like usual.

After that I literally studied for 6-7 hours straight. I hadn't even opened my Statistics book since my last test, so I had to learn everything. I had gone through a few sections the last night when I got home, but left most of it for today. I left either ESPN or HGTV on in the background so I didn't go completely crazy. By the way, Charter now has HGTV in HD. I like to think that my phone call prompted them to move forward with that.

A little after 4:30 I had finished the two assignments I had to turn in when I took my test, and had finished studying so I left to take the test. The testing center closes at 7, and you have to get there by 6 to be allowed to start, so I was cutting it pretty close. The test seemed pretty easy. I would say that I made a 100, but I didn't know one of the fill in the blank questions. I love math, and it frustrates me that there is so much short answer and fill in the blank on these tests. Actually I think my favorite class at Clemson when I was a bio major was probably Calculus. I just like working with formulas and numbers. I definitely had some Performing Arts classes I liked more, but that was a completely different world than Biology.

Kristi got home a little after I did and we went to Moe's to dinner. I love Moe's, but their ice maker wasn't working tonight. That was pretty disappointing, because it you know me you know that chewing ice is pretty much my favorite part of drinking drinks. This is why I never use a sissy stick (or a straw for those of you unfamiliar with the term). The food was good though, and the Diet Coke was cold, so I survived.

After that we rushed home so I could watch the Clemson vs. Wake Forest game.

What can I even say about the game. I have become very hardened and apathetic to Clemson football the past few years, and usually I feel indifferently disappointed about the losses. This game for some reason was like old times. I don't know if it's that Wake Forest tried to hand it to us, or because I saw so many players on our team that should be going high in the draft with their talent level, or that we only scored 7 points, but I was just completely and utterly disgusted with the game. I think another thing that adds to it is the comments on ESPN. All day I heard about how people predicted Clemson to be an outside shot at the BCS title game this year, and about how much of a disappointment we are. During the game I heard about how bad the ACC was, and how disappointing we were. Then, and I kid you not, the announcers were making references to it being time for Tommy to go. It's just sad.

Anyways, I guess it's just football, as depressing as it is. Tomorrow I'm going to work, and then I don't know what is happening tomorrow night. I would like to see that new "Body of Lies" movie if it is clean enough. Maybe I'll see if Kristi wants to go see that. Then again, it would probably have to come out of my allowance...

Maybe I could at least drain the gas out of the weedeater to save a little money...

Somehow I always end up rushing to work on Friday. I always feel like I get up in plenty of time, but then I remember something I have to do, or Lucy won't do her business outside...there's always something. Today the rushing was mainly Lucy's fault. Although I did also start to fill out the voter's change of address form, but I needed a copy of my ID, so I gave up really quick. I think I have to have it post-marked by tomorrow or I can't vote. I really don't know that it matters that I don't vote, I don't really even feel gung-ho about either candidate, but I don't want to be unpatriotic or a bad steward or whatever.

When I got to work the only things I really had to do were tasks I had been putting off because I didn't want to do them. I found a few other things to do first, like changing out mics and other things on stage, but eventually I had to do something from the list. I picked re-writing the instructions for the sound systems in the cafe. The other option was making an updated list of TV carts, but that sounded like less fun and I also want to have my laptop when I do that so that I can type everything out as I go from room to room. The instructions I wrote were incredible. I am pretty sure that someone from the 1800's could use the system with these instructions. Somewhere in there I took a break for my lunch, which was 2 slices of left over Little Caesar's. Eating is definitely one of my hobbies, and I have to say that packing a lunch or dinner is definitely a little dull for me. I did save money this week though, and I think I ate healthier, so I guess I will continue with the plan.

After I finished the instructions I was kind of out of things that I could do with the short time I had left. I decided to go through each channel on the console and check EQ, compressor, and pan settings. During rehearsal I had to do so much troubleshooting and so much gain correcting that I could never really get around to looking at much of that stuff. Since I have a good bit of knowledge about what settings I like, I decided to set channels up the way I would think I would want them, and then work from there on Sunday. The sweet thing about a digital console is that all my settings are saved, so no one can screw with them. I am also learning how to compensate for the room at Southside. I am not sure if it's the room or the system, but everything sounds really harsh. Even if you play an mp3 with no EQ or anything, it sounds like all treble and bass, no mids. I have learned that I am pretty much never going to do any boosting over 4-8k because it just makes the problem worse. I wasn't really happy with the way things sounded on Wednesday night, but hopefully with some of the changes I made I will find things more workable on Sunday.

When I was done Joe let me go since there was really nothing else I could do. It was only about 30 minutes early, but still it was nice to have the extra time. I stopped by the mower repair place and got my worthless weedeater, which I promptly threw in the trash when I got home. How can a company make an engine that isn't serviceable? Why did I buy a broken weedeater? Questions that get me frustrated these days...

Once I got home Lucy and I went for the usual walk. She was really hyper and it was one of those days where even after her walk she just barked at me nonstop. It is extremely frustrating when she is like that, but I guess that's what I get for getting a half jack russell. I got a few things done that I needed to as I waited for Kristi to get home. She got home a little earlier than usual so we could leave for the Southside staff outing.

The staff outing was tons of fun. First of all, the food was from Outback Steakhouse. How often do you get to eat as much grilled chicken, coconut shrimp, steak, wings, bloomin onion, and potato soup as you want? I really had to refrain from stuffing myself, because I didn't want to feel sick later. They catered it at The Channel, so Kristi and I walked to TJ Maxx after a little while to get a present we needed to get. From there we headed to the bowling alley.

I really love bowling. I guess I pretty much love any kind of physical competition, but bowling is an especially fun group activity. I didn't feel like I did my best, but I did pretty well. Kristi had 4 strikes in the second game, and scored 111. She doesn't really like competitions, and I thought that was pretty good for being nervous.

Now at this time you might think my night was over, but you would be wrong. My good friend Diego had called me and told me that a group of my friends was playing poker after 10. I haven't been able to see many of them or play poker in a long time, and Kristi was OK with me going, so I went. It was a really good time, I enjoyed seeing everyone, and I have always enjoyed poker, even though I didn't do too great tonight. We used to have a weekly game at Clemson House, where I lived in college. We called it "Clemson House Poker," and at one time we would have 10-20 people come from week to week. I don't think you realize how much time you have while you are in college. It's only once your out with responsibilities that you realize what your parents had been telling you all those years. We playing until about 1 and then I came home.

Tomorrow I will probably end up sleeping in a little since it is so late right now. I was going to do alot of yard work tomorrow, but I think some of the schoolwork I'm behind on is more important. We also are going to Diego and Melissa's engagement party tomorrow, and then to Kristi's parents' house for dinner. Originally it was going to be date night, but her aunt is in town. Really it's a good thing though, because I didn't realize the Clemson game was a night game, and I would like to watch it. Since we lost an easy home ACC game, I'm assuming we will win this tougher one away at Wake. I'm sure then we'll probably lose at home to Georgia Tech. Seriously, why does our coach have a contract through 2014? Oh well, at least I can usually count on beating the Gamecocks.