Let's see. Many exciting things have happened since I last wrote. Not really. I bet you'd be impressed to know though that I could sit here right now and write out what I did every single day since my last entry... but we all know you'd skim it anyway, so here are some of the highlights.

On Friday the 6th, I spent most of the evening with my friends the Morgans. Rex and Catie came down from Greensboro and whenever they come to visit his parents here in town, it pretty much means that I'll be hanging at the Morgan household too all weekend. When I went over to their house Friday night, Rex and Catie's dog, Sasha, was super excited to see me as always. And I was super excited to see Sasha, and also a new family pet, Rudy. Rex's parents recently got a little dachshund puppy and it is so cute.


And, of course, for whatever reason, all pets love Joe. Maybe I smell like bacon or something.


I also went to see the movie, "Watchmen" that Friday evening with Rex, his sister Sara, Sara's boyfriend Matt, and a couple of other people. I enjoyed some parts of the film but it was kind of long. I never read the graphic novel or anything so I was confused by a lot of it.

Saturday was fun. I didn't really have a lot to do. Rex and Catie came over to the house around lunchtime. I gave them a tour of the place and then we went to Oriental House for lunch. I think they're hooked on the goodness that is Oriental House. That place is so good. After lunch, the three of us went to the church and set up some computers in my office and played StarCraft. It was pretty much a "comp stomp" game (where we all gang up on the computers). We definitely won.

Let's see. Some other stuff. Sunday the 8th went well. I did not run the video switcher. Actually, I really didn't do much of anything except help direct some cameras. That was about it. It went well.


With the exception of Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, I managed to walk at least two miles every day this past week. Ok. If you didn't see right through that, it was really only Tuesday and Thursday that I walked. Happy? I just felt like walking both of those nights, so I did. It felt a little weird walking at night since I basically just walked from my house all the way into downtown Simpsonville and back, but hey. I had a flashlight. And an iPod. So it was cool. I kept looking behind me expecting to either get jumped or have a cop flagging me over so I could get arrested for walking at night or something. But, neither of those happened. I did step in a puddle one time and got my shoe all wet, but hey, these things happen.

I also played some Halo on Tuesday night and then, at 11pm, left my house, drove to Brixx, and hung out with my friend Tory there until 2AM in the morning. And then we stood out in the parking lot until like 3:30AM after Brixx closed, just talking about tech and geekery and cell phones and youtube. You know. Guy stuff. I can't say it was a blast getting home and going to bed before 5AM though and having to go to work later in the morning. Blah.

The nice thing though was that Mike Hawkins, one of the community pastors at Southside Fellowship, took me out to lunch for my birthday on Wednesday. It was a late birthday lunch, you could say. We went to Two Guys pizza in Simpsonville (which, ironically, is not run by two guys, but rather a husband/wife). I took Mike over to my new house after lunch and gave him a tour of the place. I think most people are disappointed when they come to my house and see that I don't have it like beautifully decorated and everything. I enjoy stuff like that, but I just don't have money to spend on stuff like that right now. Is that bad?

Thursday was a long day. I had some meetings. I don't know if I will ever be able to enjoy meetings. Something was ingrained in me at my past job about meetings and that mentality will probably stick forever. Meetings are not for accomplishing anything. You just talk about things you say you are going to do later. And then maybe you do them later, or you don't. That's it. That's all you accomplish in meetings. That's why I don't like them.

Andrew and I spent the entire afternoon on Thursday from 1 to 5pm setting up a green screen video shoot for a Habitat for Humanity promo. It took forever to setup but worked out very nicely.


The video turned out great though. I spent all day on Friday editing it, using some b-roll footage from the Habitat Promo DVD that we had looked at earlier (which was not all that great). I really liked the look of the foreground subject with the blurry background activities. It's subtle and really helped to enhance the video in a cool way. It makes me wish I could do more green-screen things.


I was going to go to an early St. Patrick's Day celebration on Friday night but I was feeling pretty tired from coming down with a cold. You know, the whole stuffy head feeling and whatnot, so I politely asked if I could back out of my commitment to the party. Sometimes I feel like when I ask people if I can back out, that they get the feeling that I'm just being unnecessarily polite. I guess I'm just different like that. I feel like if I've committed to something, that I am required to fulfill that commitment and go unless they say otherwise.

I spent most of Saturday just sitting around at home too, recovering and resting my voice so that I wouldn't have to talk much. I was worried that I'd cough a lot and end up getting laryngitis and lose my voice and not be able to direct the tech team on Sunday morning. It's happened before. We had to use flares and Morse code. It was not a smooth morning, let me tell you. I had lunch with Tim and my parents at this diner near my house, and that was really all that I did on Saturday, unless you count "catching up on laundry" and "watching Nacho Libre" as activities.

Sunday was such a long day. I really didn't sleep at all Saturday night even though I tried. I went to bed before 11pm and just kind of stared around at different places in my room trying to fall asleep. I tried watching boring tv programming to put me to sleep. No dice. I tossed and turned all night, drifting to sleep for a few minutes, waking back up, drifting back to sleep all night until 5:45AM when I decided to just get up and get going.

I've mentioned this several times before, but I cut my own hair. I've been doing it for a few years now but my mom still doesn't believe me. Other people don't really say anything, so either it's really obvious (in a bad way) that I cut my own hair, or people just don't care about that sort of thing. Anyway. I woke up Sunday morning and badly wanted to cut my hair. It was getting long in some places that I felt kind of self-conscious about it all of the time. So, in a rush on Sunday morning, I cut it. I cut a lot of it. Too much in some areas, not enough in others. It was a dumb decision. I left the house in a hurry to make it to church only to be self-conscious the entire morning of my uneven hair. I found out later that what I had accomplished was called "layering" when cutting hair. I guess I'm just more awesome than I think.

Sunday morning went great. I would even venture to say that it was awesome. I ran the switcher and directed 4 cameras for a fun prelude and a couple of other songs in each service. Everybody could hear me on the intercoms and things just went very smoothly, which again, I can only attribute to having an awesome team of volunteers, that, for some reason that I still can't figure out, love to serve on the tech team. Maybe it's because they envy my hair cutting skills and wish I could teach them.


Here's a video of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" that we did on Sunday morning as a prelude to each service. It was kickin'.



In the evening, I went to hang out with my community group at the Salamone's house. I was looking forward to it since we had not been together as a group in a long time. We had a lot of new people with our group tonight and in total, there were 16 of us there. We all had to wear nametags and introduce ourselves. When I realized we were going to be introducing ourselves, I decided to come up with a completely false backstory about where I was from and what I did before coming to Greenville and Southside Fellowship, only to find out we were just telling our names and that was it. It was kind of a shame really, because I had a good back story.

My back story was like this. I used to live in Massachusetts, where I worked as a wine-taster, specializing in red wines, merlot, mostly. I served local restaurants as a connoisseur and expert to give patrons accurate descriptions of taste, flavor, age, etc. On occasion, I'd freelance and write in local publications and give advice to wineries around the northeast on what to stock, etc. I quit that a few years ago and moved to the Upstate, South Carolina to pursue a career in photography and hand modeling and ended up at Southside. It's not a true story, but it sounds interesting, doesn't it?

Anyway. I didn't get to share my awesome made-up back story since we were just sharing names. Oh well. Maybe next time. I thought it was a pretty awesome story seeing as how I know absolutely nothing about wine (I've never even had wine before). I just thought it'd be funny to see how many people I could convince. Of course, half of the room already knew me very well so they would of course never fall for it.

We spent a long time discussing Sunday morning's message as a group. I think there were a few people at the group who had not heard Charlie's message from the morning. You'd think I would be able to speak knowledgeably, having been there for all three services, but nope. It's so hard for me to sit and listen as Charlie preaches on Sunday mornings. I'm so busy thinking camera angles, when to cut, listening for slide cues, talking about upcoming projects in the tech booth, and coordinating other things in the building on Sunday morning. It gets kind of crazy sometimes. I have to make an active effort to either listen to the podcast online or read the manuscript... which I actually prefer to do anyway.

After we were done meeting, a few people left and the rest of us hung out at the Salamone's house for a bit and then some of us went to Perkin's for a late night dinner. "Talkative and probably annoying" Joe continued his presence (he was there all night at community group) at the restaurant and was probably annoying the other restaurant patrons. I'll have to get on his case about that. Is it weird that I talk about parts of my personality in the third person? They really only surface every now and then... mostly depending on the amounts of sugar I've had and new people I am around where I feel like I have to impress them with how funny I can be. It's really a weakness of mine and is probably more of a method of hiding my true self to avoid being real with people. Kind of like that awesome back story. Look, I'm just being honest.

Monday was a nice relaxing day. I was so tired Sunday night that even though I wanted to stay up late and eat pop-tarts and watch tv, I fell asleep after midnight. And I slept until like 10:30AM. It was fantastic. I met my brother Tim and Russ Bryan, the operations/IT director at Southside Christian School, for lunch at Oriental House. Look, they picked it. I just recommended it. That's all. I specifically wanted to talk with Russ about letting me come and speak/lecture to the media arts class. I've wanted to do it all year and after passively saying to others, "I wish they'd let me come teach something", I decided to be more proactive about it. Just one of the few things I've been doing now that my daily energy isn't targeted towards blogging.

Russ and I talked in detail about the class structure and what they have been learning and some other things that I could possibly teach to them. I had a few ideas of my own and we talked about possible schedules where I could come and teach. The downside of course is that it would be hard to do anything in the short amount of time I am given, not to mention the wide range of age/class level in the group of 14 students. We're going to work something out soon though for me to come and present some things that I've done for Southside Fellowship and maybe show a few advanced techniques like green-screen keying, syncing external audio to a camera, etc.

After lunch, I went to my friend Ben Cornwell's house to help him fix a tv. He bought an older projection-model tv from somebody for $50, but it was broken. There was something wrong with the convergence signal. Like any geek, I decided it'd be fun to take it apart and see what we could do.

We took it apart and then did some research on the internet about parts. I took a few pictures of the problem and we went to a local electronics store (apparently, the only place in Greenville that services Toshiba televisions). I told a guy there about our problem and tried to get him to tell me how to fix it, without letting on that I intended to fix it. I could tell he wanted me to just bring it in and let him fix it... for $270. I did my best to sound somewhat knowledgeable yet ignorant until he told me the part number I'd need to use to fix it. When I told the guy that I had taken the lens off of the green lamp, he gave me this look like I was retarded and then said, "WHAT'D YOU DO THAT FOR??" and my response was hilarious yet poignant.... "So I could look inside? And show you this photo?" I think he was underestimating my electronics skills to take things apart and not break them.


Then we went back to Ben's house, looked up the part online for $12, and bought it. It'll be in on Saturday. We're going to try to fix it ourselves, and save basically $240. I'm awesome like that. It's just a basic integrated circuit soldered to a board anyway... how hard can that be. Famous last words, I suppose.

So, that was pretty much my Monday. I went to Rodrigo's house again in the evening and helped him with some more video stuff and hung out there for a while. I'm pretty good friends with them now and Mary said Rodrigo would even play in my wedding. Now I just have to get a girlfriend, I suppose. I figure though that'd be a good dealbreaker, you know? "Hey, if we ever want to get married, I've already got an internationally-known classical guitarist who will come play at our wedding..." Maybe, maybe not.

Today was a good day. I came in just in time for the worship planning meeting in the morning. I went to Applebees for lunch with James, Matt, and Jackson, and then spent the afternoon setting up and shooting a video to create a ministry highlight for the new "Fellowship Connector" website thing that we launched recently at the church. I tried to use my camera dolly that Rex and I made a few years ago, but after setting it all up, I decided I didn't even like the shot idea, and basically ended up not using it. I do that sometimes... I change my mind once we get on the set. Art didn't seem to mind.


I worked on a few other projects today, cleaned up my email inbox from the last few days, helped with stage setup, etc. Tim and I ate at Chipotle for dinner and it was great. That's right, South Carolina has a Chipotle now and the only one is on Woodruff Road. It was great. Oh, and with today being St. Patrick's day, I managed to avoid getting pinched all day long even though I wasn't wearing anything green. Look, I just don't own anything green. It doesn't look good on me. It's a choice. Don't judge me.

So, that's been the last week and a half or so of my life. What's new in your life?

Later,

Joe