Robert's Blog

the landscaping of my front yard has begun. i just finished spraying roundup on the lawn that we will place the flower beds on. in 24 hours all the grass in the area i have sprayed will be dead. there is no turning back now.

pam and i have decided to begin work on landscaping our front yard (the back will be later probably after the summer is over). we’ve been messing around with plans for 8 months or so but that’s about it. today everything got very serious because we reached the point of no return.

a few minutes ago i loaded some roundup into my trusty sprayer and went to kill some grass. sadly it was innocent grass. the patch of lawn i was going to kill had never really done anything seriously wrong. yes, every now and then it would grow faster than i wanted it to but i don’t know if that is really a reason worth killing it or not. no all this grass did was grow up in the wrong spot. poor grass. it never stood a chance. i’m sure the murdered patch of grass is outside right now grasping for breath and fighting to stay alive. you go little lawn … fight with all you have … you little fighter you. we’re all proud of you lawn.

anyhow, the lawn that i sprayed will be dead as a door nail tomorrow morning and thus we’ll have to start work on the flower beds. of course, we could just settle for being known as the house with the huge patch of dead grass.

i love reading youthblog by ian. awhile back ian detailed the building of his shed and i was surprised at how much i enjoyed reading about and following the progress of his shed. my fascination with the building of a simple shed is probably a rather sad statement on my life (and my extreme jealousy over him having a shed and me not having one is probably a very sad statement on my CHRISTianity).

through the whole thing i was inspired to likewise mark the progress of my own non-youth ministry related home improvement. pam and i recently finished the remodeling of our master bathroom and have now decided to move on to landscaping our front yard. this will be our project for the next three weeks. i could actually finish it in one week except for the fact that i will be leaving in the middle of the whole project on a mission trip with our youth ministry and will therefore be interrupted for a little over a week. anyway, we are starting on the project this weekend and will finish it whenever i get back. hopefully it will throw all of you into shock and awe regarding my masive green thumb.

the first step of this whole process is to determine what landscaping software is best to use for designing the whole project. the image above came from better homes and gardens’ free website landscape designing tool. obviously you get what you pay for. i’m probably going to purchase better homes and gardens’ landscape and deck designer because it seems to have the best reviews of any of the landscape designing software. if any of you guys & girls have any other suggestions on software i would be more than open to your suggestions.

i would also gladly take any suggestions you have on sources of top soil in the baton rouge area. i priced it today and found out it will take between $210 and $300 to purchase the top soil we need for the project. what is wrong with this world when DIRT costs this much? there has to be a better way to raise my flower beds.

a while back i made this flash animation to begin one of our worship services. if it works for any of y’all please feel free to use it. click here to view it.

i’ve been podcasting our youth oriented worship services for 6 months (and simply making them streamable for years before that). the podcasting has been pretty cool with probably 10 to 20 people downloading the podcasts each day (and then the very rare days where it raises to 100). personally i’ve ben pretty lease with an average of 15 people per day downloading messages and music and i thought our little ole youth ministry was doing pretty well to be in the podcasting world.

tuesday, june 28th apple relased it’s new version of itunes which has the ability to subscribe to podacasts. i was interested in the whole thing and immediately downloaded the new version (though i’ll probably stick with ipodder just because it’s i’m not the hugest fan of “the man” in any industry). still i didn’t really think that itunes would have much of effect on a little bitty site like our’s. as usual i was wrong. the people subscribed to feed from the site has doubled in the past two days and the total downloads (clickthroughs & subscriptions) have doubled also.

to quote from applpe’s own press release concerning hitting one million pdocast subscriptions:

“iTunes has done what possibly no one else could have accomplished, propelled Podcasting into the mainstream,” said Will Lewis, management consultant for KCRW. “Our servers have been swamped with a stratospheric increase in traffic. In fact, downloads have increased tenfold as a result of the iTunes 4.9 launch.”

who knew apple had such power? aren’t they supposed to be the “little guys” in the computer world? i wander what micro$oft will have to say about all this.

bride in canceled wedding throws party for homeless – how cool is this? what a great thing to do with a party that would have just been wasted otherwise.