EDIT ADD: You can totally buy the Dwight Schrute bobble-head now…You know Mike’s gonna get one…maybe me too…

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I guess I rock at the American Idol game again because I
picked Kellie and the so-called smarty-pants winners like Christy and Mike
didn’t. Humph! I showed you. I TOLD you I was a week off in my picks (I have
been for over a month now…go back and look, you’ll see that I guess the correct
person exactly one week too early every time). Well this week I was smart, and
I guessed the same person as last week, Kellie. And I won. Ha. Next week Paris
is going home, mark my words…oh, and by the way, I didn’t even watch the show,
although I’m going to watch the part where Andrea Bocelli sings…all I had to do
to know who was going home was to talk to everyone about it the next morning.
Everyone was sick of Kellie, which tells me that the rest of America
probably is too…

 My class for tonight was cancelled—thank God. Not that I
don’t enjoy school, ‘cause I do—I love school. It’s just that I’ve been working
all day and all night, and I’m really tired. Between my assignments and
arranging to keep us afloat, there are some nights where I only get 2-4 hours
of sleep. Settle down, these times are rare, but last night I only got two hours of
sleep working on my homework assignment that was supposed to be turned in LAST
week (that I didn’t have ready and by default of running out of time was able
to not have to turn in until this week) and on an orchestration for Shack (for
the Citrus show). I have one little project to do for him on this show and then
I’ll be done for now. Oh well, I love arranging and orchestrating, I just am
tired today and there’s only so many Triple Caramel Macchiatos and Caramel
Frappuccinos Affagatto Style and Caramel Ice-Blendeds (oops-Coffee Bean!
What?!) and Vitamin Waters you can drink before you’re completely exhausted and
there’s nothing left to do but collapse. That day is probably today…so all that
to say, thank you that my class is cancelled and I have a night off, it is much
needed.

 
Family time is also all the more precious to me now. Since
my time is much more limited lately, I am more involved with the kids when I
get time to hang out with them. Not that I’m doing the “Quality Time vs.
Quantity Time” thing, because that doesn’t work. You can’t substitute what you
think is “Quality Time” for being there as a dad (or mom or husband,
etc..etc..etc..). It doesn’t work, for anybody, anytime, anywhere. So don’t be
confused, I’m not saying I’m spending more quality time since I’m not around as
much—instead I think I miss my kids more, and so I am simply more engaged when
we’re together, instead of taking the time for granted. There’s a FINE LINE
here, so be wary parents…don’t let the TV or your church or your Christian
School raise your kids—no matter what–BECAUSE THEY CAN’T SUBSTITUTE FOR YOU.
Be a parent, hang out with your kids. Show them you love them and care about
them. Teach them all kinds of stuff, DO LIFE together and show them that you
make mistakes too and that it’s OK to fail. BE THERE—otherwise you just suck.
Bad parents are yucky.

 
Side note: I’m not trying to say we’re great parents, ‘cause
we’re not. We fail, all the time. But hear this, my wife pours her every ounce
of energy into those babies, and we DO love them more than anything. I’m proud
of Christy for her time and love for our kids. She teaches me a lot of stuff,
and I would be a much worse parent without her.

EDIT:
Going Home: Kellie P
2nd lowest # of votes: Katherine McJanke
3rd lowest # of votes: Paris

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Someone in my office told me there was this cool snippet on
60 minutes about Starbucks with CEO and founder Howard Schultz, then she
brought me a VHS tape of it—sweet! That’s the way to operate…

 
So the guy I do arranging/orchestrating for has definitely been
helping us out lately. Not only is he providing a ton of work for me to do
(which = income) but he’s back to his old teaching self…and I love it. This is
why I loved college—people who are smart that aren’t afraid of teaching
you/telling you you’re wrong when you are. So I walk into his office on the day
of our big recording this past Saturday, and he’s looking on a chart I had
prepared for him, and he’s fixing stuff. Yikes. He says, “We need to talk…” and
of course, I already feel bad since he’s been paying me thirty bucks an hour to
do this stuff, and he has to fix it…he launched into a series of things that
I’m doing that could be done better/I’m doing wrong. Everything from score
style to wrong chords and stuff like that…I would complain about this, but he’s
right, and I deserved it. I wasn’t using my head and/or didn’t know. I really
felt bad…I was like “Do you want me to fix any of these now that I know…?” but
he had probably fixed most of them already…So I got Shacked. That’s what we
used to call it when he’d rip apart a composition/project to pieces in front of
the class (again, well deserved). We say “You got Shacked”.  I definitely was Shacked that morning…ugh.

Now, in any regular situation, I’d be concerned that he
wouldn’t hire me anymore-but not this dude. We go way back, and my work is
still great, it just wasn’t excellent.
He said if I were in one of his classes, I’d get an A, but the stakes are
higher now since this is the real world…I agree, again, I am glad this
happened. The worst thing for ANYBODY is for someone to not have the guts to
tell them they are doing a bad job, because HEY, how else do we grow? How will
the end result happen? Someone else picks up the slack? That just leaves
everyone else frustrated…and now, I’ll do it right and he won’t have to worry
about it. And I love it, because that’s they way life should be. Tell people
when they’re doing a bad job, then teach them what and how to do better. It’s
really the best way to operate in any/every situation.

Anyway—so deadlines are approaching and I stayed up late
again last night orchestrating “You Raise Me Up” (which was fun) and got the
parts and score done…come this morning to find out that my score was not in
score order, which was stupid, because I KNOW score order…argh!! And he was
like, it’s ok, just for the future….i went and changed it during my lunch break
anyways, just for me if for anything…THEN he pointed out that I spelled Flugel
wrong (Flugelhorn…a mellow trumpet). I spelled it Flugal. He said, “the trumpet
players are going to make fun of you” and was making all these jokes about how
I was a music major, etc..etc..etc…which was hilarious. But I was just thinking
to myself DANIEL YOU IDIOT!!!! YOU CAN’T EVEN GET THAT RIGHT!!! ARGH!!!

And this has been another episode of God Keeping Daniel
Humble…tune in next time…

EDIT: Wow. God is amazing. Duh. We put all of our purchases in a prayer budget…a list basically saying “Ok, God, we don’t have this money so we’re just gonig to pray to provide”. And sure enough I found out yesterday that I was going to be making triple what I thought I might for an arranging job, which is going to totally meet all our needs. Thank you, Lord… Amazing. That doesn’t even count the stuff I”m doing for Shack. Wow…and I did another 5 hours of work last night after I got home from school and tucked the kids into bed…I love it. It’s hard, but God is totally providing this work right now, and everything is awesome…

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TreQ isn’t working. I really can’t do anything at work…so
here I am.

 
I sang at YLFC this weekend. It was super-duper fun! It was
a trial by fire, which was awesome, because frankly, (let’s park here for a
minute) I don’t need to be hand-held through a musical rehearsal, so don’t do
it—and they didn’t, and I loved it! OK—so I got the call on Wednesday afternoon
because a guy that had previously agreed to sing a solo this weekend had
something come up. I was like, “Sure, let me go check out the song first…”
and I did. It was John Mayer’s “Why Georgia” which is a cool song—I had never
heard it, well, maybe once or twice on the radio. I agreed to sing it, but wasn’t
going to be able to go to the rehearsal Thursday night because I have class on
Thursdays from 6-10PM. They were cool with that—which was really odd, since no
one had really heard me sing ever…

I emailed Brian and told him if he wasn’t comfortable with
me singing since I couldn’t go to the rehearsal that I was totally cool if he
wanted to find someone else…and I told him how when I was at Midway we hired
this piano player one Christmas from LA, and she got confused on the dress
rehearsal and didn’t come. She was like, “Oh, I’ll just come down for the
concert…” with no rehearsal ever! And I’d never heard her play! NO WAY!

But he was still cool with me singing, and in his email was
like “oh, but don’t suck, hahaha” –and I loved it!…that crazy guy…and then he
called the next day and asked if I wanted to sing for worship too…YES I DO…well
I prepared my butt off for the John Mayer song (literally working harder than I
ever had on any solo in my life) and got to the rehearsal and the solo was
great, then the worship practice started and I was the only tenor. I totally
thought there was going to be a bunch of us, but it was me and two other chicks
plus the worship leader. Woah! A tiny scary at first but I jumped in and sang,
sang, sang. And it was great! I loved it!

 
We banged out the three services on Sat & Sun and it was
totally fun. Yes! So fun! And I worked hard enough on my solo to not be
dependant on the screen or sheet music. I might have freaked out if the screen
NEVER came on, but it definitely was a breakthrough in that regard. I loved it.
LOVED IT!!!

 
Alright…Happy B-Day Mike! Great seeing you yesterday. It’s
time to move up here now…

 

EDIT: Church was great! We grabbed a bite aftwerwards with our new friend Nikki, who is super nice. We went to the Corner Bakery & Cafe–Yum! Came home and I went to bed early-like at about 9pm. Christy could not condone such an act however, and stayed up later preparing food and such for our trip to SD today (Noah has all special food he has to eat-no gluten or casein). 
San  Diego here we come!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIKE!!!!

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Busy day today…here’s the schedule:

1) 8:40AM–Drop off Daniel at APU
2) 9:00AM–Nathaniel Soccer practice
3) 10 AM — Daniel’s recording project at APU (Jazz Band recording songs I arranged)
4) 12:30 — pick up Daniel at APU and family drives to CSULA so Daniel can do homework in Lab for project due on Monday
5) 1 PM — Christy and kids play at CSULA waiting for Daniel…
6) 2 PM — Drive back to Yorba Linda
7) 3:30 PM — Rehearsal @ YLFC for evening service (Daniel singing a solo/worship team this weekend!!)
8) 6 PM – Service @ YLFC.

Pray for our day!

Noah is doing awesome. Evidently he drew some real actual things yesterday. Ears, hair..etc…which is pretty unheard of. We are getting ready to get into the thick of things, since our acceptance to Lovaas. You can read all about it at Christy’s blog…

Another prayer answered=my parents are getting a new van and giving us their old one next week. This will be great for Christy, she’s been stuck in this apartment for a while now…going a little crazy…

Ahhhh, I got the new EW Summer Movie Preview. This will guide my journey through the summer months of movie watching…I can’t wait to read it…

EDIT ADD: My profile pic rocks!

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AI picks:

 
Hmm…didn’t even watch the show. Too busy.
Writing/Arranging/homework/work etc…(and you know I love it) and I guess I just don’t care right now.
They’re going to vote off the good people anyways for the sake of the people
they “like”. It’s what starts to happen about now during this show, and I
usually get less interested in AI as that starts happening anyway.

 
Bottom Three:  Ace,
Kellie, Elliott

Going home: Kellie

EDIT: Heard all the songs I’ve been working my butt off to arrange today in the first rehearsal. It was awesome. It is so fulfilling to hear stuff I’ve written played by awesome musicians. These guys did great, and it was only their first read-through…but I was standing there hearing the music I’d written, in utter bliss, thinking to myself “THIS is why we moved back to LA.” Right here, right now. This is it. Waaaaaaaay cool.
The recording session is on Saturday.

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It’s very possible that this will only be funny to those of us nerds that work in the Registrar at APU…but I have to share this, it’s too funny not to share.

At APU, all of us folk in the registrar use this funky program called TreQ (pronounced like trek–like Star Trek, which automatically makes it cooler than it would be if called something else…). Well sometimes it can be finicky, and have weird errors, but we have been working with the manufacturers to fix some of the program errors. Yesterday, they told us to open up a test section of the program that wouldn’t affect actual students or classes, and to just start doing stuff to see if this one problem was fixed. So I just started creating nonsense classes in this “beta” section of TreQ. I was going as fast as I could…just making stuff up, and of course, amusing myself greatly. So I took screenshots and emailed them to some coworkers, who loved it and also started creating classes in the same section, and we all cracked ourselves up for a good thirty minutes until the software test was complete…
I included the screenshots below of the final classes that we created for you to tak e from American River College…I’m not sure what major this is for…you decide.

So you know how classes are sectioned off by discipline (MATH 110, SCI 220, ENGL 101, etc…). Our discipline was BURP. Yes–BURP.
You’re probably going to have to click on these pics to see them up close to appreciate them.
Have fun!!!

There are a lot of things to say…

First off, YLFC is the bomb! Easter Sunday = awesome service and easy going experience. On the busiest church day of the year parking was great, childcare was easy and stress-free (like always) and we made it into the building before they closed the doors and directed everyone else to the overflow room. For a church that had about 8,000 people there this weekend, it sure didn’t seem like it from the way things were planned out and organized. I would never had been able to tell this was a busy day, all the volunteers around me were doing their job and doing it well–which as we know = good planning. It’s so great to be attending this church!

Also-the coolest start to the service EVER. The only way I can describe what was going on is to tell you that I felt like I was inside an iPod commercial. There was live music happening, and all the instrumentalists were also up on these big huge screens looking like the silhouettes from the iPod commercials. It was sooo cool. As soon as they make it available for download, I’ll let you know. It was sweet-and totally live. Oh yeah, and the messaage-series they are doing is called LOST. Yeah, and it’s based on the TV show. Awesome.

Starbucks Rules
Yes, we all know this. But here’s the thing-a while back, all the conservative types were up in arms about the “The Way I See It” blurbs on the backs of the coffee cups at Starbucks. Apparantly there was one about being gay and coming out with it sooner than later because, and I quote, “Life’s just too d— short.”
As you can see, offensive to some, and I suppose with some validity if you think about the arguement “I don’t want my kid to be reading this…” blah blah blah. OK. But let’s not be stupid, no boycott of yours is going to affect one of the top ten globally trusted brands, and the #1 coffee chain in the world. It just won’t. So we still buy our coffee…as do you. BUT, here’s what I got today on my cup:

Wow. Talk about equal representation. Thank you Starbucks, and thank you Rick Warren…
I was literally shocked and appalled when I saw this. So stop your whining about Starbucks pushing the gay agenda, which is just as ridiculous as saying they’re trying to promote Christianity. They’re not. It’s simply put, equality.

Oh yeah, and this is not a doctored picture or a fake. I have the cup in my office to prove it.

I got tagged a while ago, just didn’t do it ’til now. Here’s 6 things (not 5, Shantelle-but good try) that are weird about me. And listen up-it took me quite a while to think of these things. I didn’t just pump them out off the top of my head like my wife did. No, I had to think a long time about this, and frankly, I’m not sure why…

1) I cannot and will not touch the bottom of a swimming pool, lake, ocean, or any other body of water with my feet. I hate it. It freaks me out to not know what I’m stepping on (this is especially difficult in lakes where you can’t see the bottom).  This may come from an unlimited availability to swimming at my Grandma’s house growing up. There were always bugs and gross stuff on the bottom of the pool and it scared me as a child. One time there was a dead tarantula at the bottom. I think that’s when I stopped swimming for good…

2) I hate eating fatty foods (like, for main courses/appetizers, etc…). I don’t eat fried food, or creamy pasta, or any other high calorie main course dish (with the exception of an occasional piece of pizza at my favorite restaurant, or a cheeseburger at the best cheeseburger place ever–and these are very rare occasions). However, I intake all kinds of calories on dessert. I love cookies, candy, and ice cream (although, it must be light ice cream)–and I highly prefer fruity dessert to chocolate dessert.

3) I never drink soda. I have maybe one soda per year. I only drink water, Starbucks, and occasionally a Jamba Juice or Vitamin Water. The last time I drank soda on a regular basis was in 1995, as a sophomore in high school. I would go to my punk band practice (where I played bass) and drink like three or four Pepsis, and I loved it-until I realized it was horrible for me. That’s when I stopped.

4) I’m an avid collector. I have probably every Superman comic book published between 1993 and 1998–every issue. This means the embossed versions, the special new-stand only covers, the spin-offs and side stories…every one. Because when I collect something, I want to do a good job of it. I also have DVD’s that I’ve never watched, but because they were part of a series or trilogy, I have them. For example, I have 24 Season Three, although I’ve never seen it. I bought it because I had Seasons 1 and 2…and I later bought 4…Also on this track, if there are two versions of a product, I have to have the “Collector’s edition” instead of the regular one. Like the Seinfeld DVD’s, I spent the extra $$ for the box set with the puffy shirt, or the LOTR trilogy–every movie came out with the extended edition AND they had the extended edition in the collectors box with the extra DVD and the statue of something from the movie. Which one do you think I got? Yeah, the latter of the two…

5) I don’t really look people in the eyes when I talk to them. I’m not really sure why on this one…

6) I couldn’t memorize lyrics to sing a solo if a gun were pointed to my head. The music? No problem, I can memorize a piano piece easy…If it’s a choir piece, or a group thing? No big deal. But as soon as it’s a solo or something, there’s just  no way on this earth that I can memorize it. I always get distracted and my mind goes blank. This is why it was so awesome at Midway to have the plasma screen on the sound booth. That thing enabled us all to make it through those solos…but just so you know–don’t ask me to sing a solo unless I can cheat. I really biffed it up big time on a duet with Christy the other night. I just suck at singing solo’s (unless the words are there…).

Wow. What a trip. I’m weird. I don’t think we’ve heard Mike’s yet, but he’s already been tagged.

EDIT ADD:

I had lunch today with Brian, the Worship & Creative
Arts Team Leader at my new, awesome church. It was great! He drove all the way
up from Yorba Linda
to APU to have lunch with me. That’s a good 45-50 min drive…and just think
about it—it’s the Thursday before Easter, which is any church’s biggest day of
the year. This is a HUGE church, and this super-busy guy took a good 3-4 hours
out of his day during the busiest season of the church-year, TWO DAYS before
Easter (they have services on Saturdays and Sundays),  to hang out with me. Incredible.

And beyond all the things I could talk about that are really
cool and interesting let me say this—it is hard to earn my respect—no, I take
that back, it’s easy to earn my respect—you just have to have the right qualities…integrity,
honesty, and sincerity (are among some of those that I look for). This guy has
totally earned it, and deserves it.

It is an honor to be singing and serving along people like
Brian and my mentor and friend, Al Clifft.  Following God is hard sometimes, but it is
also very awesome…

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I just want to say one thing:

I’m so proud of my Univeristy/workplace. I’m an alum of APU, and now also a staff member, and I couldn’t be more proud of being a part of this awesome place. If you haven’t read Mike’s blog yet about the Equality Ride folks that dropped by, go check it out. Thank you to the Lord for helping and guiding our leaders to make the right choices to bring Him glory, and to show the Equality Riders that not all Christians are idiots…

T-Shirts I would probably wear:

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AI picks:

B3: Bucky, Paris, Ace

Going Home: Ace

Btw-more cookies in the caf today!!! Yahoo!!!!

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So, for six weeks I went every Sunday to Starbucks to get the crossword puzzle that was an insert in the Starbucks editions of the New York Times. They were fun. The first two or three I finished myself (ok, Google helped me a little). After that, I’d spend a while doing absolutely as much as I could, then call my dad for help. It was great fun—every Sunday I’d call, and ask him “Ok, what about this one: 4 letters, the clue is (insert clue here) and I have blank, R, S, blank” and he’d pop out an answer. So much fun, and my dad was pretty fast.

Week six comes along and it’s the final puzzle…my folks were in Washington State with my Dad’s brother & family, and he is also quite the wit with crosswords. This time they actually went to Starbucks and got the puzzle, instead of the painful process we had to go through up to that point (thank you Seattle, for having 403 Starbucks locations inside the city limits…). They finished the final puzzle in a good half-hour, which was shockingly fast. THAT’s when the treasure hunt began…

In addition to the regular crossword puzzle, each puzzle had a trivia question hidden inside the crossword itself. Some were simple to find, others were as complicated as tearing the puzzle out at the perforations and rearranging the pieces to form a coffee cup AND THEN finding a question snake-ing through the finished design…these were all very well-thought out.

In addition to that, in the last week’s paper, there were 6 clues inside the New York Times that would help you find “the answer”. One of these clues was as simple as a picture telling you where to find letters from a previous puzzle that would spell a word, another clue was actual Morse code typed out in the paper that you had to translate (that one said to shade in all the E’s, F’s, and T’s, in puzzle #5—which ended up spelling CAN).  Also in that last paper, there was the actual crossword puzzle of the NYT that was titled “For Reasons of Comparison”, and looked exactly like the Starbucks-insert puzzle that week (same amount of squares, same location of black squares, etc…) but made no other mention of Starbucks or that it was involved with the treasure hunt-BUT THAT HAD A WHOLE NEW SET OF CLUES and WORDS. That alone is an amazing thing—to be able to make two exact (and large) crossword puzzles with all different words.

Well, once you finished that puzzle, and compared it with puzzle #6 and found what boxes contained the exact same letters between the two of them, it spelled “Starbucks Dot Com”. So, the clue had said “…and another clue that will let you know where to search for the answer”. Well, after four or five days of pulling our hair out, I decided to go to starbucks.com and type in the Search field nothing but “the answer” and hit search. When I did this, a new page came up that started off with “Congratulations, you made it this far…” and then gave us some instructions on when to come back to the site to enter some more info and then when to call in with our answer…the answer to the treasure hunt.

The time to call came, and I called, and called, and called. I made it through six minutes after the lines opened, and left my “answer” on the recording…it informed me that between such-and-such a time tomorrow, I would receive a call back if I had entered the right info, and would be given instructions on how to access the tie-breaker puzzle. You can imagine my anxiety the next day as I waited and waited for the call back…

So the next day we have community chapel at APU—one of the two chapels a year that everyone goes to–staff, faculty, and students. The time frame was between 8am-1pm, and chapel was from 9:30-10:45, so I course had my phone on vibrate, and was holding it in my hand to make sure I felt it, and was sitting right next to the exit so if it did ring, I could just pop out and take the call. It rang—but it turned out to just be my mom. Phew. Nobody else called during chapel.

We got back to the office, and got back to work. I actually had to put my phone on someone else’s desk because I got zero service in my office. So bam! At about 11:30 the phone rang, and I leapt across the office to get it. Here’s how the conversation went:

 
-“Hello.”

 
-“Hello, this is Shannon from Starbucks. I’ve called to tell you that you won free coffee  for life!” (by this time I had stepped out front of my all-windows-in-the-front office to get better reception on my phone).

 
-“I did? Really?” (confused) “There’s no tie-breaker puzzle or anything?”

 
-“…uh, no, not at this time”

 
And that’s when I turned around to see the entire office staff (a good 20 people) gathered by the front windows, staring at me…I was totally Punk’d!!! My office-pal totally set me up…she even called over to a friend at another department to get my cell #.

 
-(laughing) “…Hi Daniel, this is (name of office person in the back). (My office-pal) made me do it!”

 
We all laughed for a very long time about that one…

OK, but the call did come from Starbucks about an hour later, giving me the website where would be able to log on to at a specific time to get the tie-breaker puzzle. Also-she said that at that same time, the phone lines would be open to call in with the answer, and the first person who got it would win.

The time came, and I logged on to get the puzzle. At this point, my dad had come home from work early, and my Uncle was standing by at his job. Through the phone and emails we were going to be working together to complete the puzzle as fast as we possibly could. We all downloaded the puzzle and were not off to a great start. It was hard. I actually posted it a few posts back (take a look). Within the first five minutes my Dad and Uncle were saying, “There is something wrong with this puzzle…none of the answers fit…”

After an hour and a half of working, and only coming up with a good 3 or 4 words in the puzzle, we finally called in just to see if anyone had won yet, and of course they had.

After taking a look on a couple of other people’s blogs (who we had been checking throughout the whole process just for clues and stuff) it turns out that ALL OF THE DOWN WORDS WERE MISSING ONE LETTER, and that was the trick. Not only that, but the answer to the trivia question in that puzzle was “Starbuck”. Not Starbucks, cause it’s missing a letter, just like all the down clues…wow, I would’ve never figured that out!

I guess that someone called in with the answer in under ten minutes, ‘cause all you had to do was get a word or two from the trivia question (hidden inside the puzzle) and call in with the answer to win.

Honestly though, it was so much fun. I enjoy attainable challenges, and it was fun to work together with my Dad on something—hey, we even got Uncle Lee in on it!

It was good times. And that’s all to my story. I guess now I can say that I was one of only 750 people (at the most) in the world in the tie-breaker round of the Starbucks Crossword Challenge. But for free coffee for life, would you expect anything less from me??