i feel for my buddy grant. tonight his rockies were swept by len’s bosox’s, and tomorrow my packers and kicking his broncos’ butts. poor buddy grant. it has to be a rough week.
halloween
the terrell family has just found it’s first thing within wisconsin (or at least within the village of plover if it’s not the whole state) that we think is dumb. it’s halloween. the “official” celebration of halloween within the village of plover was today (october 28th) from 3-6p.m. what do halloween and daylight have in common? i know some of you are not big fans of halloween. i’m fine with your convictions. my family and i on the other hand are fine with halloween and therefore we had to laugh out loud at the thought of kids trick or treating during the afternoon. it just didn’t feel the same.
SIDE NOTE – for those of you would know the baltodona’s i thought i would pass along claudia’s request that you pray for momma neubia. momma neubia has been sick for a few days and finally went to the doctor. the doctor checked her out and said that he thought she might have a tumor in her colon. they have no idea what that means yet and so they will be doing testing tomorrow. please keep the baltodona’s in your prayers.
curling
i joined a curling league today. thanks to the olympics it’s been my dream to curl for the past 12 years. now that dream is about to come true.
the morning after
ah life is back to normal in my small little world of a few visits a day. the air was thin up in the “marko effect” stratus. now life can go on as normal with me stealing other people’s ideas, posting meaningless rabble, and, of course, helping to produce a little marko. 🙂
now we will return to you regularly scheduled program.
the marko effect
i promise that i will soon begin to blog about something other than marko but i thought some of you would find the power of marko interesting. above is the google analytics graph for the traffic to my blog for the week before yesterday. as you can see i had my normal 40 people coming to view the blog (approximately 35 of which are my mom). things changed dramatically once marko posted the link to the top ten list. the traffic jumped up to 364.
to give you a comparison i’ll compare the traffic to my blog when it was put on the ys update (back in september). here’s the graph for that.
as you can see it wasn’t as big of a jump. marko is basically three times more influential than the ys update. he is a online youth ministry power and a force to be reckoned with.
all hail the power of marko’s name.
SIDE NOTE – after changing my design several times i finally built the desk for my study (now affectionately dubbed the “man cave” by pam). it’s basically a collapsible table so that the “man cave” can easily be turned into the “guest room” when the need arises. that’s right my space has to remain portable so that i can remove my stuff when we have company. oh yes, i am master of this domain.
the desk cost me a grand total of $16.24 after tax. now i’m getting an old computer from my dad (needs a power supple – $30) that i can run ubuntu on, and probably a widescreen monitor for movies.
the good and the bad
some things i miss about youth ministry
i am a reluctant church planter. i didn’t want to leave youth ministry – i think it’s the greatest thing going. in fact, GOD would have had a much harder time convincing me to be involved in a church plant if it had not been for finding a few models of church government that would allow me to be more directly involved within the youth ministry of the church than the traditional “senior pastor” model. my goal is once the church is started to be able to be as involved within the youth ministry as i was at the previous churches that i was a part of when i was their youth minister. i just think that youth ministry is the real deal and therefore the thought of giving it up is very difficult for me.
with the above said i do realize that i will not actively be involved within a youth ministry again for several years. the reason for this is pretty simple – we most likely won’t have any adolescents other than my own for several years. i’ll do youth ministry things with adam and noah, and love it, but that’s more about parenting than anything else.
so here are a few things that i will miss about youth ministry for the next several years:
- road trips – it doesn’t matter what the trip was for (a mission trip or a fun trip) getting to the destination and back was almost always one of the best parts of any event. incredibly significant things usually happen within a van (and vans are better than charter buses for this).
- middle school junk food – the middle school guys always had the best snacks and they were usually willing to share. everyone else may run from the middle school guys room but i love it because i know someone is always going to bring something i really like.
- random questions – there is no other situation within the world where the questions can range from the death of a loved one or friend to a scene in last week’s “simpson’s” episode (actually i’m showing my preference there because it would probably be a scene from last week’s “family guy” episode)
- random connections – i love the fact that it’s okay within youth ministry to combine the somberness of a prayer labyrinth with a water balloon launcher. nobody sees these as incompatible.
of course, there is much more that i will miss but that’s all i feel like writing about right now.
neighbors?
i found this yesterday in one of our trees. according to what i have read i need to wait till the first or second hard freeze before removing it. adam wants to take it in to his biology class, which is fine after a freeze kills everything. i would hate to give them a semi-live nest for their classroom. that would make for an interesting story but not one that i really want to personally experience.
pam – the uber woman
my wife finished and turned in her dissertation yesterday. in two weeks she will defend it and then she will be through. defending the dissertation is no easy thing, but when your main prof says “you have knowing to worry about because you’ve done a great study,” then you can breathe a little. i am amazed and incredibly proud of pam. i definitely married up.
free is good – maybe
i’m a vetran garbage digger. when i drive down the street and see a pile of someone else’s junk on the side of the road i am more than willing to stop and pick up something that i like. i’ve found several great things doing this. after all, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. last night i trash dove for the first time in wisconsin.
on the side of the road were two sets of waxless cross country skis. they are espoir titans (215 & 213 centimeters) and i know nothing about them (and i can’t seem to find anything on the net). all i know at this point is that they are at least better than what i had before – which was nothing. i’ll take them the hostel shoppe tomorrow. they will probably laugh at me but i’m okay with that because no matter how trashie the skis may be they are still free.
as a southern boy (born and rised in alabama) i have to add that finding skis in someone’s garbage was just odd and put a smile on my face. it’s probably normal for people native wisconsinites but it definitely wasn’t for me.