Church:

Well, I officially feel flaky. Yesterday the news was announced that Christy and I are leaving our place in ministry at Christ-First Baptist Church in Covina to take a position at Midway Baptist Church in San Diego. This comes after only 11 months at CFBC. Christy and I criticized Aaron C. Turner for leaving Midway after 364 days (haha, one day short of a full year) but now we are in the same boat–leaving a church after we just got there–so I feel lame for making fun of ACT. Just had to get that off my chest…

We are not moving–our family is still taking up residence in Covina, I’ll be working full time at APU as the Associate Registrar, and Christy and I are both still in grad school. The job at Midway is only on the weekends. We’ll travel down on Saturday–I’ll work a few hours to prepare for the next day, I’ll lead worship in the morning services, and we’ll have the Midway Praise Choir and Orchestra practice from 230-430pm. Following that Christy will be a part of Kids Choir again, helping to teach the music or whatever (we’re working out the details) and Nathaniel will sing! Then we go home…with 20,000 other people trying to get back to LA. Yeah–there will be some bad traffic on the way home–but who cares.

We’re honestly SO excited to be back at Midway again! There’s just nothing like a music program that you’ve built from the ground up. Those people are like our family, and we have such great history with them. I love the musical experiences we’ve been having there during the week (and the occasional Sunday) so I’m looking forward to more of that! Christy and I are just so thankful to have the opportunity to do this again. I’m already making parts CDs tonight!!

So yes, I’m a flake, I guess…and it sure feels horrible to abandon our choir and band over at CFBC, but I think our time there was for a purpose. Quite possibly to model excellence and exuberance in music ministry, and to equip the people who are now stepping up to lead. I’m not sure–but I know it was for a reason. We have some great relationships we have made over there that we will carry with us in life regardless of where we work or worship.

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House Concert:

We saw one of my professors at a house concert on Saturday night in North Hills (North Hollywood area). It was a neat and unique experience. It was also a great pleasure to see my F-bomb dropping teacher (OK–she only dropped the F-bomb after the first song I wrote for her Commercial Songwriting class-and it was a good thing…) sing and perform. It was a fantastically Californian experience. I don’t know too many other places (and I could be naive and small-minded here) where you can sit around in a fancy back yard and listen to some folk music by some people that played with Elton John and were twice grammy-nominated (one of the band members wrote “Save the Best for Last” among other huge songs). I enjoyed it immensely, and I’m really looking forward to getting back to school.

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Disney:

Speaking of school–I got that Disney DVD gig from a class-mate at CSULA. I did some revisions yesterday on the project for the client and he was greatly pleased with the final product. I took and did three of the four songs in a higher key, and put some more life into them. It was grand. I hope to do more work for this guy–he was great to work with.

My boss is on vacation for the next two weeks.

So, just in case you were wondering, this is kind of how my promotion went. It’s like there was a hidden camera in the room…
 

I love my new job as Associate Registrar.

Remember that balance thing? Gone…for a day or two. I received a call on Tuesday night (about 10PM) from a classmate at CSULA that had some work to pass off to me. Evidently she has been working for a guy that writes for Disney–and has for twenty years. He needed demos of some potential songs for their upcoming Dalmations sequel (straight to DVD) with a male voice. So last night I sequenced and recorded my voice on 4 tunes that the producers and directors of this movie listened to today. It was great. Great working with this contact–great experience–great fun. I even recruited a friend over who had the appropriate equipment for recording my vocals.
The Disney guy has already talked to me about doing other work for him. He said that the producers will pick 2 or 3 of these songs to be in the movie and at that point he would be contracted to write the full arrangements. NICE.
I love it that I was able to do this all in one night and by the deadline that they imposed. That’s the only way to survive in this business! You must be able to make the deadline!
I hope to work for this person again…

Lots of stuff to talk about later when I have time…

I used to wonder why the person I just replaced would have approximately 150 unread emails in her inbox at any given time. Now I know.

This new position is crazy and wonderful. I’m learning a lot, and I really feel like it suits my giftings well. It is also very busy–which I LOVE. I always love being busy (although, I have to be busy DOING something, not just busy doing nothing).

Nathaniel’s birthday is this weekend. We got him a bike (Shhh–don’t tell him). His other bike is tiny, and he has to pedal about a hundred times faster than one should ever have to pedal a bike in order to go anywhere. It’s hilarious. He’s always saying “My legs are SO tired…”
Well, this bike will be much better for that.

More later, I suppose. I have to go to bed and tomorrow I’ll make the famous Daniel cake for Nathaniel’s b-day party. Then my folks are coming for a short visit on Sunday to party hardy with us again. It should be a very fun weekend!

This week has flown by…no–the SUMMER has flown by. It’s almost August…

I have a few things to say–let’s do it in list form:

1) First (official) day as Associate Registrar was awesome. I like this job a lot.

2) I love Conan O’Brien. I haven’t watched him very much, but now with the magic of DVR, I can watch or delete him whenever I want. He’s so hilarious. I am so glad he’ll be taking over The Tonight Show in 2008 or 2009 (I forget which one).

3) Went to a John Williams concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday. It was a classic experience. This is why we live in LA–to be around and experience things like the most magnificent film composer of our time (or all time, perhaps) conducting the LA Philharmonic under the stars at one of the most famous and iconic venues in the world. It wasn’t mind-blowing, but it was great. 5 encores later, we finally went home…

4) There are some conversations that are never easy to have, no matter how many times you have them.

5) It feels amazing to be (and feel) valued for skills that you’ve worked on building all of your life.

6) Christmas is coming sooner than you know it! I’m already picking out Christmas concert repertoire.

7) I’m finding some balance in life right now by putting personal health–i.e. sleep, good eating habits, and exercise–above work. I’m also on a much better schedule for my personal devotions. I’ve lost over 10 lbs in the past month or so partly due to that competition I was in with my office-mates and partly due to the fact that it was time to take better care of myself. I don’t want to eat so much sugar that I develop adult-onset diabetes. So I’ve cut back, and I frankly feel way better. I don’t have sugar highs and lows–my energy level stays pretty constant throughout the day. I’m not feeling STUFFED full all the time, and I’m not sluggish. It’s nice. So cool.

8) 10-year high school reunion is coming up in about 6 weeks. That is going to be crazy. I’m so looking forward to it.

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for their prayers regarding my job promotion. I got it.

It’s official.

I am the new Associate Registrar.

Wahoo!

So, technically, I’m the Commander Riker of my office. Yeah.
“Make it so, Number One.” (said to me)

EDIT ADD:
Today.
Today is a GREAT day!
More later…

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Working at a university surrounded by faculty and staff that have Doctorates and Masters degrees really keeps you humble. I’m no theologian, I’m just a regular guy working on his commercial music masters degree. That said, I do learn from reading the Bible, and occasionally I like to share those revelations with all of you in cyberspace.

I read Psalm 67 the other day, and a couple of verses jumped out at me.

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 5 May the peoples praise you, O God;
       may all the peoples praise you.

 6 Then the land will yield its harvest,
       and God, our God, will bless us.

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Hmm. So praise precedes blessing. Interesting. Often times I think we gripe or whine to God when we want Him to bless us, but it seems that in this case David is saying that it is AFTER the people praise God that he will bless them. Blessing comes AFTER praise. Praise should not only follow blessing–at least in this Psalm.

That’s what I’m taking away, even though I’m no scholar.

EDIT ADD: My office-mate and I finally got our 19″ flat panel LCD displays at for our workstations. It is a phenomenal difference from the dinosaur CRT monitors we had before. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be working on this awesome display! Holy smokes!

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I had my first interview today for a promotion in my office.
I feel like it went well, thank you for your prayers.
I’ll keep you posted…

Lots of business going on at my church as well. I’m excited about it.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

Ok, so I know it is the 7th today. In fact, today is 07-07-07 and there is quite the hooplah about it. I’m not sure why–we’ve had one of these every year since 2001…01-01-01, 02-02-02, 03-03-03…and so on. We’ll have a day like this until 2013, so big whoop.

Our July 4th was part cool, part awful. The cool part was hanging out with Mike, going to a neighborhood parade where the kids decorated their scooters and bikes and paraded around the block (and got an ice cream cone afterwards), seeing the other part of the family including newlyweds Jon & Erin, and the fireworks at night here in Covina where we bumped into Andy & Kayla Balch and ended up hanging out for a while with them. I also took some video of the motorcycle stunts (brother Dave! Are you paying attention?!?). The awful part was trying to go to the beach. I was stupid enough to want to go to the beach despite the fact that it is way too busy to find a parking spot. I drove around Newport for (literally) a good 2 hours–plus the time it took us to get there and back = a grand total of about 4 hours wasted. Yuck. I got sunburn on my arm and leg from the sun peeking in my driver’s side window. Here are some pics I uploaded to facebook. Jon Mann, why aren’t you my friend?

It gets better…
In Newport, on the way out of that traffic jam of a hell-hole, we decided to drive down the 1 hwy to see if we could find another place to park and get out. We drove North a tiny bit, and turned into a small road that went parallel to Hwy 1, but only for about a 1/2 mile, where it promptly dead-ended. It turns out it was this way both North and South of the intersection, and I wasn’t the only one that had decided to try this out. I got behind a stopped car about halfway down to the dead-end (where we were all going to eventually u-turn and get out of there). I was behind a line of cars that was basically stopped. It was a very poor decision. The good thing that happened because of this misfortune, was that Mike grabbed Nathaniel and Christy grabbed Noah and they all ran to the beach (a few feet away) for the 30 or 45 minutes I waited to in that line of cars to get out of that intersection. Well, I was quite bored, and during this time I had started noticing the myriad of cars with vanity plates–so I just started snapping pictures with my digital camera. Why? I don’t know…I didn’t have anything else to do. I was so worn-out and mentally exhausted after several hours of driving around…so I resorted to taking weird pictures that I knew I would eventually share with you. Take a look…

Who knows what this guy (or robot) does?

Something Limited?? What is that first part?

That isn’t even a real license plate, but I appreciate the marketing…

I have no clue…

Four Star Kidssssszzszsszz???

I like who this guy is voting for…

“Officer, the guy that rammed my car and got away was probably named Vinny…” (why Daniel doesn’t have a vanity plate)

Well, if I’m going to be bored, then so are you. So there.

On a brighter note, I hung out with my old friend DHawk today. It was fun. One thing I really appreciate about Dan is his ability to respectfully listen. Now, I’m not that girly about my friends, (or talking, geez) but I can remember a stark contrast between friends at APU that would interrupt you whenever you talked for more than 5 consecutive seconds about anything, and Dan. I can tend to be a little bit ADD when it comes to conversations myself, but I think listening to someone really shows them respect. I am really grateful for that in my friend Dan! Mike is the same way too. Yay for great friends!

Why is it so easy to plop down $225 bucks at Target? I mean, we were grocery shopping (’cause Target has some really kick-butt prices on food) for the month, and we did get a LOT of food–but I can’t ever get out of there without buying a ton of stuff. I guess that’s good for them…oooo, and I got some new French-Vanilla flavored coffee T-discs for my coffee-maker at work. I’m so much more excited for Monday to come.

Speaking of Monday–I have an interview for my promotion. Please be praying!

Tuesday marks the final rehearsal we’ll have with the Midway Praise Choir & Orchestra that I know of. We’ll be down to lead worship on July 15th and then probably not any more than that. It should be wonderfully fun!