When I woke up this morning, I was not feeling so great. I think I may be getting sick. We will see. I decided to lay in bed for a little while and then just come in for the afternoon since I'd be working late anyway. Gotta love Wednesdays.

On my way out of the driveway, I checked the mailbox and saw that the Charter cable bill had come. I was somewhat anticipating there to be a problem again with this month's bill since last month's had mysteriously had the Showtime package added to it (without my consent). I expected the bill I opened today to be around $120. Instead, it was like $12. I checked all of the numbers and either they made a mistake or they comp'ed me an entire month's bill, because the balance forward (which is supposed to be $0 if I have paid up to that point) was a negative amount (the exact negative amount that I paid for the last bill). I'd like to think it was for having to wait like 6+ hours for the technician to come out and set up the cable, but it's probably more likely just a mistake. So, I guess I'm going to have to call and find out about that. I suppose I could just pay what the bill says, but I don't really want to get charged twice as much next month or something like that.

I picked up lunch on my way in to the church and spent most of the day in my office, working. I did some research last night on dual-head video cards for a new computer that Eddie wants to put in Room 202. I made some recommendations of cards on NewEgg, and then Eddie picked one of those, and I bought it today. I selected overnight shipping so hopefully it will arrive at the church sometime on Friday so that we can install it before Sunday.

My brother Tim came to the church around 1:45pm. He wanted to borrow a wireless handheld microphone and some other stuff for some kind of event at Southside Christian School. I let him borrow the wireless handheld from Room 202 and a long VGA cable.

I helped him carry the stuff out to his car and then I walked over to the church "copy center" to check my mailbox. I go over there all of the time to check my mailbox and it is always empty. I found Jes and Lindsey in there working on some kind of booklet project. Jes was cutting envelopes with the cutter and Lindsey was taking the envelopes that Jes cut and then using an exactoknife to cut off the edges. Or something.

I stayed in there and talked to them for a while and then went back to my office. On my way back, Alysia, one of the Fellowship Kids (children's ministry), found me because we were supposed to meet and talk about a promo for Look Up Lodge for this Sunday. Last April (April 6, to be precise), we showed a promo for the summer camp at Look Up Lodge for our children's ministry based on some edited footage from an existing promo video for Look Up Lodge. I thought the actual promo video from Look Up Lodge was poorly made so when I made that promo last year, I cut out a lot of the footage and shortened it down to just a minute or so. Alysia and I looked at it again and decided to just re-use what we already had and update the voiceover at the end with the accurate event dates and registration details.

After we were done looking at that video, Alysia left and I decided to take a look at the Varilite mover light that I took down from the catwalk yesterday. It stopped working on Sunday so I wanted to try to figure out what was wrong with it. While it was on the catwalk, I couldn't see/reach the control panel, so I wasn't even sure if it was powering on at all. I decided to mount it to one of the short truss pieces that I had, and get it free-standing so that if I managed to get it to power on, it would have enough room to swivel around and move (it does that when it first turns on).

I mounted it to the truss which was kind of difficult considering the fixture weighs like 75 pounds. I realized once I mounted it to the truss that I needed to counterweight the truss to keep it from falling over. I managed to hang some bricks on the other side which helped some but not really. I ended up propping it up with a stool. In other words, I just wasted time with all of the mounting since I couldn't properly counterweight the thing.


I plugged it in and it did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I wasn't really surprised, since that's how it was behaving when it was mounted on the catwalk, but I was hoping it would be making a noise or something. Nope.

I took it back off of the truss and put it back on the floor of the office. Sometimes I wish I had a better workspace to look at/fix things than my office, but I'd rather work in my office where there are lights than work in the Worship Center where I'm not allowed to have the lights on.

I did a bit of audio editing today on a voice mail message that Matt got on Sunday. Several months ago (I'm not really sure when), Matt's wife, Whitney, was shopping at Wal-mart and struck up a conversation with a guy in the parking lot and ended up giving the guy a copy of Southside's "He Has Done It All" CD based on the Galatians series that we re-capped last April. Early Sunday morning, this guy (his name was Christian) called Matt's extension at the church and left a long voicemail about how this CD really encouraged him and God has really taught him a lot through listening to the songs and scriptures on the CD, even when he was ready to take his own life, the songs and words came back into his head. So, anyway, this guy left a long and touching message. Matt forwarded it to me and I recorded it onto the computer and we cut out some of the pauses and unncessary parts and shortened it down to play it tonight for the Worship team.

Around 4:45pm, Andrew called me to see if I wanted to meet him at Moe's for dinner. I jumped in the car and headed over. I called my mom on my way there and sang the last part of "Happy Birthday" when she answered, pretending that she had taken so long to answer that she missed the rest of the song.

I met Andrew at Moe's. There was practically nobody there, although it was before 5pm.


We ate dinner quickly and then we both went back to the church around 5:15pm. When we got back to the church, we had at least an hour before the worship team meeting, which started at 6:45pm. I went up to Room 202 and played around on the keyboard for a while. Actually, a long while. Around 6pm, I turned on the rest of the sound system and tested the CD of the voicemail message that I had edited earlier to make sure it was good to go.

Andrew came in and hung out in the tech booth in Room 202 with me for a while. I had to stay in the booth to run the audio while the team met tonight. That's usually what I have to do every Wednesday night, but I don't mind too much because it allows me to serve the entire team. Plus I get to avoid social interaction, so, what's not to like.

As we were closing up, Matt asked us all to break up into groups of 3 or 4 and pray for each other, which I always like doing. James, Andrew, and I all shared some things going on in our lives that we needed prayer for. I opened up by jokingly saying "I have this annoying assistant at the church that really tries my patience..." (Andrew).

When we were done, I went downstairs to get ready for sound check. I talked to Chad Boyd some (he plays electric guitar in the band). Chad is an avid reader of my blog and will probably be really disappointed if I decide to stop blogging at the end of February. I'd like to keep going, but I think I need a break. I'm not sure for how long. We will see.

After helping with soundcheck some, I decided to take apart the Varilite mover light I had worked on earlier to figure out why it didn't work. My first thought was that made a fuse had blown or something. I had never taken apart one of those movers before, so it took some time to figure out where everything was.

I finally found the fuse/power supply area.


It looked like the fuse was blown.


It took some work to get the grill/cover off of the power supply, and sure enough, the fuse was blown.


It was a 3.15 amp 250 volt quick burning fuse. I checked my supply of fuses and as luck would have it (whatever that means), I was out of 3.15a250v fuses. I had the empty case for them though.

I thought I'd look around and see if I had any other fuses of the same size. I remembered seeing one in a VCR that I took apart a couple of years ago (remember that photographic memory I have? see, it really works), so I went and got that VCR out of the storage room. I took the VCR apart (it was one of those DVD/VHS players) and pulled the DVD drive out of the way so that I could get to the fuse.


I put that fuse into the mover and plugged it in but it didn't work. I figured a lower-amp fuse would just blow quicker... but it didn't do anything.


I'm going to go to RadioShack sometime tomorrow and buy the correct replacement fuse and see if it works. If not, I guess we're not any worse off than before, but if it does work, then I just saved the church a lot of money, just by being resourceful and using some of my electronics skills. I really enjoy taking stuff like that apart and trying to fix them.

I remember as a kid, I used to take cheap electronics like radios, old computers, tv's, etc. apart and seeing what I could make work by putting it together just a little bit at a time. I built a robot out of vacuum and computer parts one time but it never really did work. It did get me a spot in the school yearbook though that year (I was in second grade).

A little bit after 9pm, I left to go home. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I decided to stick around at the church a little longer and see if anyone wanted to hang out. I parked on the East side of the building and went inside. I found Robby and Ruthie hanging out and talking but it looked like they wanted to be alone so I talked to them for a few minutes and then went back into the gym/worship center. I was really hoping that some people were going to hang out at Brixx or something but it didn't look like anyone was up for that, so, afer staying a few more minutes, I went home.

So, that was pretty much my day. Not super exciting or anything. Tomorrow will be a fun day. It's Andrew's birthday so we'll be going to Oriental House again for his birthday lunch. I'm also going to Rodrigo Rodriguez's house in the evening to help him with some more video stuff.

Later,

Joe