Back to School

Note: I wrote this out by hand while I was sitting in my class. I’m just now posting it, several weeks after the fact (I have back-dated it the date I wrote it).

We’re back into the school year now, so life seems especially busy. (Though being busy isn’t exactly foreign to us!)

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but to bring you up to speed on another aspect of our lives, Tobin and I help out at a youth group, Illuminate. It is an extension of Neighborhood Life Center. Illuminate had a pretty amazing attendance rate over the summer (higher than I’ve seen in the past), so I don’t think we’vre really seen too much of an upswing in attendance now that we’re back into the school year. With that said, the quality of the youth group has been especially encouraging. The messages have been good – we’re recording them now and posting them on the website (which I recently rebuilt). Worship has been great – I play the paino, and we’re back to having a bass – which really adds depth. I take pictures every Tuesday, process them in Photoshop and upload them to the youth’s website – all by the time the kids are ready to go home.

So everything for youth group has been rolling right along. Unfortunately, I found out last Thursday that I did make it into the one class I could take this quarter toward my masters, and it’s on Tuesday nights! Bummer! This will pull me out of youth for the next 10 weeks. In fact as I’m writing this I’m in the second hour of my first week of class. The youth kids keep asking me what class I’m taking. It’s CS560 – Software Development – on the small chance you actually care. :-) Actually I think that it’s going to be a great quarter (at least I hope so!). The teacher seems like he knows what’s going on, and I’ve had several other classes with two of my classmates, so that’s nice.

What is going to happen at youth? Well Tobin will take two cameras (hopefully) and have kids take pictures. We’ve already had the kids taking photos, so we should be ok there. We just got a new hand-me-down computer that we installed a new EMU404 Sounds Card in, so we’ve got a bit of a learning curve there. So far I’m pretty impressed with the sound quality coming out of the card – it’s 100% better than the sound we got out of the laptop. Tonight is the first time we’ve actually recorded with the new sound cars, so we’ll see how that goes.

It’s Wednesday now as I’m writing this… The recording yesterday wasn’t all that great – we’ve got to figure out the quirks of that new sound card! Last night I swung by the tail-end of Illuminate after class. That was fun. It was better than missing all together. When I got home, I processed the pictures and got those up on the website. Then I checked my email. There was an email waiting for me from Dreamhost (that’s who I host this site through). Anyways, the first paragraph of that email told me that Dreamhost had bumped up hosting space on our accounts. Log in to your control panel and find out what your space is at now. Well I had 50 gigs (which I thought was great) – I paid about $400 for two years of hosting. When I logged in to my email, I had a (drumroll please) whopping 400 gigs of space. AWESOME! Ok, so I basically love Dreamhost now (as if I didn’t before). If you’re looking for some new/better hosting, I’d highly encourage you to go with Dreamhost (and use that link so I get some credit). lol

So I started off this post discussing our youth group, Illuminate, but never mentioned some things about our church itself. Two Sundays ago, we had an evening worship service at Safeco Field! How cool is that? There were serveral hundred people in attendance. It was so cool. Pastor Gary Vanderhoff said that the Lord has really been laying on his heart to have a worship service at Safeco – eventually packing the stadium out with worshippers. Well this year was a trial run for that – but I hope that the door is now open and the wheels rolling for this to be a massive, AWESOME event next year. (It was awesome this year, just a little smaller-scale.) :-) I took my camera and got a lot of pictures. Surprisingly a lot of them turned out. :-) I sped up my “film” to 1600 and lowered the exposure, then “push-processed” the pictures in Photoshop. Some of them even made it into the Sunday morning worship service – so I guess I’m following closely in my fathers footsteps. :-)