Today was a long day. I had some trouble falling asleep last night on the cold floor, even though I normally enjoy sleeping on the floor. This house creaks some too, so every time I moved around, I could hear Tim's bedroom door shaking, and, being the good brother that I am, I tried to not bother him as much as possible since I knew that Tim gets up a lot earlier each day than I do. Well, except for Sundays. I always beat him on Sundays.

I woke up this morning around 9AM and got to the church a little bit after 10. Andrew was already there working, but I didn't have much for him to do today. My primary focus was to work on the video announcements. In fact, I even skipped lunch to work on them.

Andrew worked on getting some lights set up to shine on the cross on the center of the stage while I was editing. I helped him test the placement of a few lights. Around 2:15pm, Mark Hudson, Lindsey's husband, stopped by to work on the light board with me. He is interested in volunteering with lights on Sunday mornings and we need more operators (need 2-3 more regular volunteers, really) with the light board so I was glad he came by.

Mark and I worked on the light cues for about an hour and 15 minutes or so. I gave him an overview of the console, its basic functions, how to write cues, some standard operating practices etc. and he picked it up really well. I think he is going to stop by again on Sunday morning for more training.

I finished up the video announcements during the afternoon, but I had to make a decision that I haven't made in a long time... to just re-use something I had already made and just "wrap it up". I hate doing that because I always feel like I'm not giving it my all or my best, but, on the other hand, spending 10-12 hours trying to come up with more creative titling and effects for a video that probably only 30% of the congregation will look at may not be the best use of my time. The one thing that really annoyed me with this week's video announcements was the audio... I had Matt wearing a lavelier microphone but it sounded awful. Nasally, really. And Matt wasn't sick or anything. It was probably my fault for the mic placement... but he was wearing a sweater vest. So, not much I could have done about it anyway. I did some EQ work and notched out around 1.4kHz which helped some but not a lot.

Sharon Thomas, one of the adult ministry assistants, stopped by my office to see if she had filled out a request to use the sound system out in the cafe for an event there tonight. I didn't recall seeing one but decided to just give her a quick overview of the system there anyway. I showed her how to turn the system on and how to use the microphone, and then went back to my office.

My mom called me this afternoon to say that she, my dad, and Tim had moved everything but the two couches to the apartment. They set up the washing machine and the dryer, and even set up my bed with fresh sheets. My mom is great. Back in December during Jingle Jazz week, when my life was really really stressful and I had been staying up all night working plus helping Tim with some medical issues, my mom came over to my apartment and washed my sheets and made up my bed for me twice in one week. It was so comforting to just come home to a fresh bed that one time when I had worked from Tuesday at 8AM (after only getting 3 hours of sleep) until Wednesday at 10AM and went home to sleep for a few hours before coming back to run the first night of Jingle Jazz. Thanks Mom.

Anyway. Back to today. Around 6pm, my friend Doug Whitley showed up along with his family and a few friends to do another character performance. You may recall one of the last times that I helped him with this. By the way, I totally love being able to link back to previous days in my life. Show me any other blogger who can do that. Doug was doing "Moses" tonight so that we could record it onto DVD for him to use as a resource for his ministry.

His two sons, Doug and Charles, worked as the camera operators. We got everything set up and ready to go. I put "Video Taping in Progress" signs up on all of the doors to the Worship Center just in case someone wanted to come walking in while we were taping. I sat in the control room the entire time that Doug presented.


We finished around 8:30pm and after taking a few character photos, the Whitley's invited me to their house for dinner. Before we ate dinner, I beat Doug III and Charles in Halo. Twice. I even let them team up against me. It was probably a little unfair because they rarely play, and I've been playing practically Halo every day for the last 5 years.

Dinner was great. We had steak and potatoes. You can't beat that. Doug told me all about his trip to Australia a few years ago and it was neat to hear about some of that culture and sights. They are always telling me of cool places I could go and visit. You know, if I ever took a vacation or anything.

After dinner, we all had some strawberry shortcake while Charles and I played "Nazi Zombies" on Call of Duty 5, which was a challenging game. I left around 12:15AM to go home. When I got back to the house, I found my room straightened with my bed set up and fresh sheets on it. Now I'll be able to sleep well, hopefully.

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. Even though I really don't have much to move, I'm hoping lots of people still show up for the party / "extravaganza". That reminds me. I should probably go buy the snacks and food at some point.

Later,

Joe