I decided to make some more bread today. I started it during lunch and I came home to fresh baked bread. I decided to make some cinnamon bread, didn’t have raisins to add. It was good stuff.

We had youth praise team tonight. Two of our members didn’t make it. I decided to cancel next weeks practice, give them a break, and then the week after Thanksgiving we’ll have a final practice before we lead that Wednesday. I think the group is really coming along. I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback from them, I hope they are enjoying it.

I didn’t do a whole lot tonight other than work on bills. I’ve got everything covered. I need to do some deposits and get some things off in the mail tomorrow. I’m actually still waiting for two bills to come yet.

Joel Egge loaned me the book that is now on my Planned Reading list, you can see this on the left. He recommended this some time ago, I believe it was after he read a post of mine that talked about my relationship issues. I’m kind of honored to know that he reads my blog now and then, actually I’m pretty honored that anyone reads my blog. I have a lot of respect for Joel. He has a great deal of wisdom and has a caring heart.

Well, I think I’m going to keep this pretty short tonight. On to some reading, then to bed for me. Ok, one final note. I think I’ve got a short in the brain somewhere. So I always close my posts with “chow” which is so rediculous. The correct word to be using is “ciao”, a kind soul pointed this out to me. When I realized this it had me totally laughing at myself. Now I think it’s great, I’m still going to use “chow”, it’s a lot more funny that way. LOL

Here I go, CHOW! LOL

Well, after work I had a little time before meeting Crowser at Pizza Ranch for supper. I got online and played a quick round of Sea3D, which is basically online Settler’s. When I got to Pizza Ranch I found that Andrew was sitting with Gene (and his wife, can’t remember her name, doah) & Todd. They both work with the youth group at Stavanger. I met them both when I had the game night at my house. It was fun to visit with them. I actually was commended for my desire to hang out with the youth outside youth group when I can. Gene jokingly asked what it would take for me to work with the Stavanger youth. No big head here, I’m a bit humbled really. In all honesty I think this is what working with youth really needs to be about.

After Pizza Ranch, Crowser and I headed over to John O’s for Settler’s. It was a good game but Crowser had only played once before. We kind of ganged up on him cause he decided it would be fun to place the robber on us. I got pretty close to winning again but John came out and won. I took Crowser to a friends house then went back to John’s to play a game of Carcassonne. After that I was off to home.

I pretty much got ready for bed but as you can see I didn’t make it to sleep. I got online quick then decided to check a couple things online. Already told her this, but I was kind of hoping to catch Sarah online. Yeah so I’m a dork. Well, she did pop on and we chatted a bit. Sounds like the performances have been going really good. The shows have been sold out, and they are doing and extra show tomorrow. I’m going to have to get tickets ordered tomorrow for Sunday or I won’t get in.

Well, that’s the short of it, or as short as I could get it, LOL. Chow!

So I did a little more IMing (is that even a word, probably will be) with, well, Sarah. It was all good, except for the part of it keeping me from my work. She had to go to work when we stopped anyways. Seems both of us can get talking away on MSN. Granted, I’m not a huge talker all they time. Although with as carried away as I get on here sometimes you’d think otherwise. Give me the right topic and good interaction and I can be quite the talker. I’m pretty much deciding I’m heading down to the play on Sunday. I guess I’m not expecting to be getting together with Sarah. For obvious reasons, one is her family is going down to see it and I’m sure she’ll be spending time with them, and I really don’t even know her (really), I’m kind of just sitting back and enjoying things as they come a long. We might get together for coffee or something if/when she’s in town. Anyways, I’m looking forward to seeing the play. It’s been ages since I’ve been to one. It’s something I’d really like to do more of, I should make time for that. I guess part of it is I don’t always have the money for that.

Andrew F. had other plans already tonight, he forgot about them, so we didn’t get together for supper. Sounds like he’s game for heading down to the play with me. I had a pretty full evening as it was. When I got home from work I called up my cousin to help her get her printer working. In the end it turned out to be two issue. One was that there was a software configuration problem, it was easily fixed, the other thing was the printer had no ink. I kind of laughed about this to myself. I’m assuming she was able to get some ink and everything worked for her, I didn’t get a call back.

Tonight was our weekly game of Settlers. It was a pretty good game. I was very close to winning, but Dan snuck up and took the game. He has a habit of doing this. He’s actually won three weeks in a row now. I left as they were starting a game of Carcassone, they usually play I don’t. I’m trying to get to bed at a decent time so I know I need to be going by then. What’s funny is I’ll be back at it playing Settlers again tomorrow with John, Anders, and Crowser. It’ll be a bit earlier. Acutally got talking to Crowser on IM tonight and I’m going to meet him at Pizza Ranch tomorrow for supper. This will be good.

Well, on a final note this eHarmony thin has just got me going nuts. I’m getting like a match a day. This is way more than I ever expected. I’m not initiating anything, but seems like some of them are initiating with me. I guess this is perhaps the self-esteem boost I needed. Guess there really are women out there at least compatible by some standards. Well, that’ll be all for tonight. I think I may actually get to bed a t a decent time, yeah! Going, going, gone…

Today I was able to get up at like 5:30, and this gave me a good amount of time. I did some devotions but I really need to get up at like 5 to make the most of it. Got into work and started the day. Most everything was typical, some computer problems cropped up that I tried to resolve quickly so I could get back to the data entry work. I had a short time of talking with Todd. We’re suppose to have an actual meeting on Mondays but unless there is something in perticular we need to meet about it’s not really needed. I guess it’s a matter of us making it a priority. I did share with him about my feelings about the great ministry need with youth. I finally got my ShutterFly and Kodak iPhoto pictures. They actually came on Friday but after I left for the day. Basically the Kodak photos won, they were much more vivid. I think I might try the same 4 photos through SnapFish and Wal-Mart to get a good comparison of the services. I’m sure someone has already done this, but sometimes it’s good to see first hand. I really don’t know how much I’m going to be actually deveolping photos. I may do a photo Christmas card or something. My photos are up on my blog for all to see, so I see no sense in developing them. I usually have my iBook with me wherever I go so I can show people on there too. John O. stopped by my office and we got his PocketPC working on the secure wireless system. I was happy to see that our setup is versatile enough. After work I finally got my pickup load of leaves taken to the dump. I’m getting used to driving my truck again, which is good. Boy is it a difference to go from power-steering to no power-steering. After that I did some supper. Then came the catchup on entering my receipts and doing my bills. I really need to get back to entering my receipts into Quicken each day rather than waiting. I pretty much know what I have for money but I don’t want to miss something. After that I got an IM from someone unexpected. Actually it was someone that found my blog through Technorati. Right at that same time my friend John called. I’d been waiting for his call for a week or so. He had an idea for a garage sale website service. We walked about ecommerce and online businesses a bit and caught up a little. He told me that he and Melissa are expecting a baby! Wow, i wasn’t even sure if they were going to have kids. It’s awesome. i’m going to try to get together with him over Thanksgiving. After that I got back to the IM that I got. She did a search for eHarmony cause she’s a member also. She had let a comment and then IM’d me seeing that I was online via my blog status indicators. She was really just wondering where I got the IM status indicators but our conversation went on for awhile. I checked out her blog too. It’s kind of funny, looking through her blog, she’s seems like someone that has a lot of similar interests as me. She’s a Christian too. We determined that one reason we haven’t been matched up on eHarmony is cause I put no drinkers, and she does drink. That’s fine, I’m just looking for someone who also doesn’t care to drink. It was a good talk, I look forward to any future converstations. It got me think how Technorati is really bringing us back to how the Web was originally intended to be. It was all about information linking to other information, thus Web. Technorati does this and allows people to connect thie way also. It’s pretty sweet. Well then it was to the blog. Oh yeah, I also got the movie Hackers encoded to MP4/AAC to play on my Palm. It was actually the second time, the first time I tried H.264 encoding and it was totally choppy on the Palm.

So yesterday stared pretty funny. I woke up at like 6:59 am. The thing of it was, when I woke up (before the alarm went off) I thought it was 6:59 pm. I freaked out thinking I had slept through the whole day, missing church & playing on the praise team & Jeanette’s birthday party. Well, after running downstairs I found it was only the AM and still had an hour to sleep. So I went back to bed for a little while. I got up, had breakfast, got ready for church, and head out. I got there right at the end of the first service. Once the people cleared out I got my guitar plugged in and tuned. The practice/warmup time went pretty smooth and quick. This time I felt pretty comfortable with how I was playing. After the service I tried to find Andrew F., I thought we were going to go for lunch, but he was no where to be found. It was ok cause that game me my afternoon and saved some cash. I worked on the World Missions CDs and pretty much got that done, I did have to work on them a little more that night. It was a little different process to get the video encoded as I wasn’t going from an iMovie project but straight from a DVD. I finally went with MPEG-4 for the encoding. I think they turned out pretty well. Got over to Applebee’s at about 6:00 pm for the party. It was good, I was able to catch up with Carrie & Henrick who I hadn’t seen for a long time. they are expecting another baby. Henrick is looking to got for his Masters in the Twin Cities, so if he gets in they will probably be moving. After the supper at Applebee’s we all headed over to Kari’s for dessert and games. The dessert was pretty much all chocolate so I decided to pass. I pretty much just stayed for awhile and talked. I left before they started playing games as it was already 9:00 pm and I need to get to bed at a decent time if I was going to be able to try and get up at 5:00 am.

Ok, I think I’ll talk about Saturday & Friday briefly as I see this post is getting pretty long. I’m sure I’ve lost most people by now. I should try writing a book, LOL.

So Saturday I had the small group leaders meeting for youth group. It was ok but the stuff we went over was something we went over when I first started. It wasn’t really anything new, but it was good to talk about some of the experiences we’ve had in small groups. After that I went out to lunch with Alex. It was a good time to catch up. We talked a bunch about his blog. I’m better understanding how he’s been approaching his blog and where some of the stuff is coming from. I can kind of identify with some of what he was talking about. I can be easier sometimes to talk more about the things we are questioning and have a hard time with then the good things. After lunch I rushed him home for a family issue. Alex and his family need a lot of pray these days. Later that afternoon I decided to finish working on cleaning up the leaves. I got pretty much everything cleaned up. I decided to leave some leaves spread out and cut them up with the mower. I’ll probably need to take another small load of leave to the dump. I didn’t do much that night, other than do a lot of communicating on eHarmony. A match that was found on Friday responded back on the first step. We got all the way through to the last step in the closed communication on Saturday. On Sunday, we actually had the first email type of communication. I’m not sure where this might go. Like I’ve already said, time will tell. (no more communication as of Monday)

Friday was a good day at work but kind of crazy. I had to change gears a lot and ended up working right through lunch, which I haven’t done in awhile. I took off at like 3:30 since I didn’t have a lunch. This gave me a good amount of time to get ready for people coming over that night. The guys (youth and leaders) were invited to come over at 6:00 pm for games and snacks. Not that many guys came but ben brought a friend, he brought Star Wars Risk which we decided to play. I had actually never even played Risk. It took some learning but it was good overall. I’d enjoy playing again sometime. After that everyone but John O. had left. He and I played a game of Carcassonne before he headed out, I won (yeah!).

Well, it was a long one. I didn’t get back to more of last week but oh well. Hopefully I can keep up on things a little now. This week should be a relatively easygoing week. I’m thinking that I’d rather not take on any future side jobs. I’m kind of feeling that the whole relationship building adventure is way better than being alone and working all the time. Well, it’s later than I’d hoped it would be. I’m heading to bed. Chow for now!

So let’s recap a little. Wednesday youth group was good. Joel & Liz Christensen gave a talk about their work in China. It was a little different than what they talked about on Sunday wo that was good. With the craziness of the week I didn’t do music, which worked out just fine. Afterwards, like I said, I went over to John & Charisty’s. We did some popcorn and had a campfire. It was nice. It got surprisingly late however. Oh yeah, that day at work I moved into my new office. You can see the pictures I posted from that.

Thursday, ok day, did a little more organizing. Talked with Todd about the blog stuff. We decided it would be good to go ahead and setup a sub-account on the web host for the blogs. I didn’t do much for desktop/network work as I was expecting to do some of that on Friday after work. I worked on the upcoming F&FP bookstore website. I can wait to get this launched, I’m way over due on this. That night I helped Jim Saul clean out a rental property of his. That was a gross job. I don’t think I ever want to be a landlord.

Friday, pretty normal data entry day. However, I was actually able to get up at about 5:15 that morning. I had breakfast, did some morning devotions (didn’t get to blogging about this, sry. I was reading out of the A Passionate Life.), and got to work at 7:00 am. I had a great morning and left at like 4:00 pm. I was back at the office somewhere between 5:30-6:00, to do the server move. It of course took awhile to get things situated the best way and work on keeping all of the cords organized for future maintenance. The worst of it was I had a problem with one of the servers not coming back online. I figured it was partly due to a lack of free space on the system partition. I noticed the warning before I shut it down. I ended up being up till like 11:30 that night working this out. I finally just left it trying to start up. I planned on going back in the next morning. So that was a long day.

Well Saturday came too soon. Partly because my boss, Todd, was bringing his dog over at 7:30 am for my to dogsit for the coming week. So I finally got going into work at about 11:00 am that morning. To my happiness the server was back online and everything seemed to be back up and running smooth again. I worked on freeing up more space on the server. I still really only got around 500MB total free on the boot drive. Doesn’t seem like much else to do. The rest of the day, which was starting around 1:00 pm, I worked on cleaning the house before my family arrived. I got most everything done except for getting all the dishes done. This was a huge deal, it’s not like my family doesn’t have some dishes needing to be done when I go there. I had plenty of clean dishes to use, and they weren’t going to be here that long. They didn’t get here until like 7:30 pm I think. This was after I drove to Alex to meet them for supper at Culver’s. I was pretty tired. I think this could have been partly due to some allergies, dust from cleaning. We headed to bed after not doing much of anything.

I got up at like 6:30 am this morning to get ready for church. Had breakfast again. I guess I kind of decided that if I eat breakfast perhaps this might keep me from being hungry at night, and help me to not need a lot for lunch either. I ran projection for both church services. Sometime between services I got a major headache. It may have been because of coffee withdrawel, I don’t know. I did have a cup before second service. My family took me out to eat at Big Harvest Buffet. It was good food as usual. When I got home I took some excederin. It took awhile for it to kick in. During lunch I got a call from John about playing Settlers at 5:00 pm. I thought I might be up for that. My family would be gone by then anyways. They did leave at like around 3:00 pm. They braught in the blue chair you see in the photo. Something my Mom picked up at a garage sale to replace the worn out green chair I had. Also for my B-Day, which is tomorrow, they got me the couch cover. Something I’ve been lokking at for awhile. I’d really like to get ones for the chairs that match, we’ll see if I can find some sometime. I took it easy and rested before Settler’s time came. I had another cup of coffee besides. When 5 o’clock hit I was good to go. It was a good time. Only thing that stunk was me. I did horrible at the game, by the end I really didn’t care what moves I made and basically just gave stuff away cause there was no chance for me to do much. I need to think about my strategu a little more, I think it’s a little off.

Well, that’s most of it in a nut-shell. One thing that kind of came across my mind tonight is that I am kind of an odd one. I feel like a very strange combination of geek and normal person. So anyways, off to bed I have to go. Here’s shooting for 5 again, we’ll see. Chow all!