I woke up at 5:45AM this morning after falling asleep sometime around 2AM. I really do stay up all night worrying about the dumbest things. When I woke up, it felt so good to just lay in bed. This is sort of a problem I have. I tend to fall back asleep. I woke up again at 6:17AM. I wanted to be at the church before 6:30AM this morning. I dressed in a hurry and rushed to the church. I met Brad Roberts, one of the sound team volunteers, who was waiting for me on the East side of the building since he didn't have a key to get in. I hated that he had to wait on me, but at least he was only waiting a couple of minutes.

I brought all of the equipment in the control room online and then worked on the light cues until about 7:40AM (after I tested all of the videos for the morning, of course). I should have just gone in last night and written all of the light cues but I didn't feel like it.

I stayed up last night worrying about who was going to be there to run things and really thought I'd be running the switcher and lights (nearly impossible), switcher and slides, or slides and lights (also nearly impossible). Like I said before, I worry about some of the dumbest things. I should have just trusted that God would provide. And He did. David, a new volunteer, came and ran slides this morning. Tyler showed up after being sick all week with bronchitis to run the lights. And Gewan ran the video switcher. That's right, after running the switcher for every single service for 17 weeks in a row (not including during Jingle Jazz, which I also ran it then), my reign was over.


Gewan said that if I was living to run the switcher every week in 2009, then my priorities were in the wrong place. That's probably true... but really the only reason I was in that position for that long is because I was investing my time in increasing the quality of a certain area (camera direction and switching).

Anyway. During each service today, I helped with video playback and really just observed everyone work. During the first service, we had an interesting issue with one of the "mover" lights. We have four Varlite VL1000TS lights that we can control from the light console, move them around like spotlights, etc. We use them all of the time for creative sets, gobos, etc. During the second song in the first service worship set, the 2nd light lost control and pointed up at the speakers. On a normal week, it probably wouldn't have been as big of a distraction, but with only having lights on the cross, this was pretty noticeable.

I walked out to the light console and watched as Tyler reconciled the problem by turning off the light. I hate being the guy who comes out and yells/takes over when a problem occurs, so I rarely take action unless it's a big priority and is disrupting a lot of people. Tyler turned off the light (the light intensity control is separate from the moving capabilities). He couldn't get the light to move, so I decided to go up to the catwalk and take a look at the light.

When I got up to the light on the catwalk (which wasn't the easiest feat with all of the lights off, but I managed to do it without tripping over anything), I realized it had no power. I pulled the power plug out and put it back in. No change. Normally when the light loses power and resets, it will calibrate itself and swing around in a full motion and return to its home position or the position the light console is telling it to go to. This light did nothing.

While Charlie was preaching during the first service, Tyler and I went around to every single electrical breaker panel in the building to see if any of them were tripped. We've never lost power to those outlets before on the catwalk (that are dedicated for the light electronics) so I wasn't even sure where the breaker for it was. After checking like 12 panels and not finding a single one tripped, we gave up and decided to just rewrite all of the cues for the morning to not use that light anymore and then take a look at it after church.

The second service went really well. I took some pictures of our setup with the cross which I thought looked really cool.


During the third service as I was playing back the video announcements, I re-situated myself in the chair and my elbow hit the spacebar on Video Toaster while the announcements were playing, which caused it to do a video transition. Normally this would not be a big deal because the default transition is a cross-fade, and a cross-fade between two identical sources is not visible. Today however, the selected transition was a big alien monster claw that grabbed the video, pulled it down, and threw up the second source. Yeah, that was kind of visible. I think it happened during a funny part so people probably thought it was intentional, but it definitely was not.

After church was over, I closed up a lot of the stuff in the control room and then Tyler and I went up to the catwalk to look at the light that was having problems.


We couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. We even tried using one of the other light's power cords and another outlet. The light is just dead. Now I have to do some research and find out if it's cost-effective to fix a light that is 7-8 years old or to buy a new one. Or not buy one or fix it at all, which would really be unfortunate because we use them a lot.

Tyler posed for a "sad-face" shot with the light, because this light has served us so well for the past few years.


I left the church around 1:15pm to go home. My mom had called me yesterday and told me that when she left the house party, she had gone to my apartment (after taking Tim's key) and cleaned the entire place. My mom is the greatest. I stopped to check out the cleanliness and noted a few areas that still needed to be cleaned. I wasn't really in the mood to clean them today so I took a few pictures and then headed to the house.

I took this picture on my way out... it symbolizes doors closing in our lives that lead to new phases of life... or something. Or, it might just be a picture of my old apartment door.


When I came home, I ate some lunch and laid down on the couch for a while. I was feeling pretty tired so around 3pm I went to my room to take a nap. I fell asleep around 4pm and woke up again at 6:30pm when my parents came over for dinner.

We all ate some pot-roast barbecue for dinner. My mom also brought over a birthday cake since my birthday is this Tuesday. My twin brother Tim's birthday is also on Tuesday, but it's hard to get excited about that. My mom's birthday is on Wednesday. Andrew, my assistant at the church, has a birthday on Thursday. It's a real birthday week, for sure.


My parents left around 8pm. I got out my Macbook Pro and did some writing. As I was sitting at the table in my living room, I got a video chat request from my friend Justin DeGarmo. We ended up doing a three-way video chat with me, Justin, and Jeff Looney, another friend from high school. Jeff just moved out to Colorado, so it was cool to catch up with him.

Video chats are cool.

So, tomorrow is my day off. I'm going to stay up late tonight (because I can) and then sleep in (again, because I can). I'm going to go to my apartment at some point and finish cleaning, and then turn in the keys. Sigh. I'm also going to Rodrigo's house later in the afternoon to help him with some more video stuff.

Later,

Joe