I got to work this morning right at 9AM. 9:02, to be precise. And you know I like to be precise. I actually felt excited to get to work that early in the morning. I guess the whole "not coming in at all on my day off" has its benefits.

I had a lot of email to go through. There were a 9 people that expressed an interest in serving on the tech crew. I spent about an hour looking at my tech matrix assignments, seeing where I thought these people would fit the best. My goal now is to contact them all and get to know them and start some training.

I went to the worship planning meeting at 10:30. It was a good time. We talked about the past Sunday and how it went and talked for a little bit about the upcoming Sunday. This Sunday, we have baptisms. I guess no one wanted to wait until the third service to be baptized, so we may just play back footage from the first and second services so that people in the third service can participate and hear their stories of grace too. I always thought it'd be cool to have a special baptism service where we spend a lot of time videotaping each person's story and turning it into a mini-documentary about how they came to know Jesus, but I guess that would take too much time. It'd be fun though and a really good resource for the church.

After the worship planning meeting, I went to Matt's office and we talked about stage setup. I asked a few other questions about Sunday, and then I went back to my office. I remembered that I told Jes that I'd get her a copy of last Sunday's sermon on CD, so I went over to get one out of the CD ministry room. On my way back, I saw Laurie and Ruthie talking so I interrupted and talked to them for a few minutes. I'm good at barging in on conversation like that. I like to think of it as ameliorating the conversation. You know, because, I'm such an interesting person, or, whatever. And now you're probably wondering why I have such an extensive vocabulary.

Jes wasn't in her office so I put the CD on her desk. James was out in the trailer rounding up everyone to go to lunch. Tommy was up for going but had to go talk to Dawn first, so James and I waited around for a while. Eventually we went over to Dawn's office and I "ameliorated" their conversation too. Yep. I'm pretty awesome. I'm not really sure how but somewhere along the way somebody mentioned "Blue" and I started singing "Blue Christmas" by Elvis Presley. It was a pretty amazing cover, I'm not going to lie.

Laurie Glass was in Dawn's office too and we recollected for everyone the time that she slapped me in the face in the parking lot for no reason. I think it was mostly an accident, but, for some reason I still stay an arm's length away for fear of it happening again. Emotional trauma, people.

Tommy, Nate, James, and I ended up going to Doc Chey's for lunch. It was pretty good. Tommy played around with my Canon Powershot SD1100 camera that I keep in my pocket all of the time. You never know when the opportunity to take a good photo will come up.



Lunch at Doc Chey's was good. All four of us got the "General Chey's" which was pretty spicy. I was sweating. We ate and got back to the church a little bit after 1:30pm. Nate and Tommy unloaded the "Rock Band" gear from my SUV and took it upstairs to set up.

I went to my office to work but Andrew had been doing some soldering in there, finishing up making some cables from last week. Something about the smell of old solder gives me terrible headaches. I had to stay out of my office for a while and also set a new rule--no soldering in the office anymore. Sorry, but I have a sensitive olfactory nerve, ok?

I went upstairs to help the Vapor crew set up the stage for tonight. Nate and I wired up some direct boxes for the simple acoustic guitar setup that Chris had for tonight. We set up some microphones and tested everything, and then moved on to setting up the Rock Band gear. We got out one of the flat screens from the side rooms and set that up as a main screen to play from. We also wired up a secondary monitor for the drummer, and I sent the feed into the main switcher at the back of the room so that all of the students could see what we saw on the screen. After hooking up the audio and doing a little calibration (it was off by 69ms), it was good to go. Of course, we did a couple of test songs to make sure. Haha.

I went back downstairs to work on a few more things. Andrew was working on fixing some of the AVIOM in-ear monitors that we use on-stage with the band. Those things are so fragile. I often wonder why they were designed the way that they are. Even the new versions of the product have the same essential design flaws.

Tyler Johnson stopped by my office and I pulled him into my "other office" (the tech closet) to talk about some things. We talked about his commitment to the lighting team on Sunday mornings as well as the possibility of leading a lighting setup team on occasion. We talked about some other things too for about an hour and then we both went back upstairs to make sure things were good to go for the Vapor setup.

Later on in the evening, I changed clothes from my jeans and sweater to my black dress pants and black shirt and black tie and black blazer. For the singing role. I take my roles seriously. I milled around the building for a while, helping the Vapor crew get things ready for tonight as well as helping some with the stage setup in the Worship Center.

We got everything set to open the night at 7:27pm with the song we picked, "The Middle", by Jimmy Eat World. It was a jam. Brian played the lead guitar, Dallas played the bass, Tommy plaed drums, and I sang. I used a real microphone so that they could put more of it in the monitors, but I really couldn't hear it at all. I just have to trust my instinct that I sounded amazing. And I'm sure it was great. I had a blast singing. I think most of the high school students were just wondering who I was. Either that or they're not fans of Jimmy Eat World. Not that I'm a huge fan either, I just knew the words to the song.





As soon as we were done singing, we packed up the xbox and Rock Band gear and got it out of the way so the stage would be open the rest of the night for everything else they had planned. I packed up the Xbox and Brian helped me carry it all downstairs and put it in my car for me while I helped Dan and Andrew untangle some cables on the stage in the Worship Center. I have some crazy good cable-untangling abilities.

I went back upstairs to get the rest of my rock band gear but it was on-stage and I couldn't get to it. I walked over to the Cafe area to wait and ended up talking to Tommy for a while about life and work and a lot of stuff. I think I talked and didn't make a lot of sense but was trying to be encouraging. I do that sometimes. Actually, all of the time. I try to be an encourager and usually share something that doesn't relate and then try to make it tie in by way of another analogy that doesn't relate. I'm good at ameliorating motivational conversation like that. Oh yeah, I brought the word out again.

I helped clean up and close up the Vapor time tonight. I like helping people. I put away plants, helped clean dishes, threw away trash, etc. Ruthie invited me to join everyone at Brixx Pizza, so I went. And it was great. As always.


I think I left a lot of detail out of this post. It feels short. I'm sure I could go back in and add more. I've got a lot on my mind as I write this. I had a neat idea to write something else on my way home tonight from Brixx. I may share it here. I'm not sure yet. My blog post-to-comments received ratio is still pretty low. And I know a lot of people read this blog. Sometimes I just debate in my head whether or not it's worth the time and energy to share and publish my creative ideas. Eh.

Later,

Joe