The brilliance of Sufjan Stevens

Enjoy!

thirtysomething

There was no way around it, no place to hide. 30 was coming and there was nothing I could do about it. Slowly it creped up on me over 12 months, and now it is here. I am 30 years old. I sure as heck didn't let it take me without a fight!

Wed night, Annie surprised me with a turtle pie during small group. She definately knows how to get straight to my heart. Thursday, I took the day off of work! I was able to catch up on some compilations I have been working on forever, wrote some music, drank several cups of coffee, went thrifting, watched Steve's keynote at Macworld, etc. Thursday night, Annie and I went to Pucket (awesome Thai place) followed by VIP seats at Monico. No one under the age of 21 was allowed in the theatre! Good times had by all.

Friday night, I had 12 guys over to play video games. We had 2 projectors (Wii, Gamecube), 2 TVs, a Genesis, an Atari, some Guitar Hero, a little Sam Adams, and some Chicken Mariachi from Denatos. I schooled Geoff in some NHL '94, while I simultaneously got schooled by Levi in Guitar Hero.



Saturday morning we went on a hike at Monte Sano with the Perigos. Levi got a little carried away on Stone Cutter. You can see the video.



On our drive back, I was thinking to myself how awesome of a birthday I have had. I was ready so sit back and relax the rest of the day until about 1 mile from our house, Annie's cell phone rings. It was Brinks security. Someone had set the alarm at our house off. The reason we got Brinks in the first place was due to a break in that we had in October of 06. I begin to freak out while Annie very calmly tells them that it is a false alarm and they don't need to send anyone. At this point, I am like, "What in the world are you doing?! Someone has broken into our house! Why would you call them off?" She calmly tells me everything is ok. I respond quite firmly with, "How do you know this? What is wrong with you?" She plays it off cool for a minute more, and then finally has to tell me that my family had come down to surprise me for my birthday and that they must have set the alarm off. I smile, we laugh, and then all sanity was restored. We spend the evening eating my sisters quite famous chili and watching a movie. They headed back to Indiana after church.



Many great memories from a wonderful couple of days. Turning 30 isn't so bad after all.

For the nerd in your life...

It's almost Christmas and you haven't gotten anything for the mac lover in your life. You cringe at the thought of heading out to your local mac retailer, feeling completely inadequate as they ask you questions about what version of OSX you have or if you are using a power pc or an intel based processor, etc, etc.

Well, here are a couple of low cost programs that you can download for your favorite mac geek without having to leave the comfort of your computer chair.


I have always enjoyed journaling on my computer, but I have never liked all the digital clutter of word or other word processing programs. Writeroom is a program that gives you a full screen writing environment, similar to a typewriter. The config is simple. You pick a background color, a page color, and a text color. Nothing else is on the screen. I use a black background, a grey page, and white text. It creates a peaceful writing experience, and it saves on battery life for your laptop.


If you are a very busy person, you couldn't make it without your calendar. Annie and I use the calendar in our kitchen religiously. It's how we keep our week somewhat manageable. The problem with the kitchen calendar is that if I am at work and I need to know what is going on tomorrow night, I have to wait till I get home to find out. Since we switched to mac, I have been trying to convince Annie that we need to go digital and move to iCal, but really that is still a calendar that is centralized in one place; at least that was the case until Spanning Sync. With Spanning Sync, we can view, add, or change our home calendar from anywhere that we have an internet connection. If I need to add an event from work, Annie can instantly see it at School or as home. I can't imagine how useful this would be if we had kids.

what happened

I made this video to show at Summit last week. While only 7 minutes, it gives you a very small taste of what we saw and did while in India. All of the people in this video affected our lived in some way. I have been trying to think of the right words to right on here to explain what the experience was like. It was nothing short of life changing. I think this video does better justice then my words ever could.

Turning 30

Daniel Cannon is now 30. I missed his birthday while in India. He is my friend. I like him. We have fun.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DC!!!!

Child's play

I got to spend some quality time with the kids in Java Thanda on Tuesday. We taught them how to play "Duck Duck Goose", "Simon Says", and they taught us an awesome game where you have to guess who the leader is in a mob of kids and if you get it wrong, you have to either sing or dance in front of everyone. The mob gets to pick whether you sing or dance. I have some video of that somewhere.

This video here is just everyone being silly in front of the camera. I had them follow whatever I was doing. Good times were had by all. :-)

back home

After 44 hours of travel, we are now back home. I look forward to posting more over the next couple of days. Thanks for all of your prayers. Many great things happened. We left our hearts with the people of India.