Digital Wilderness

Trying to keep my blogging momentum going… Today’s post is all about randomness.

There’s a fun and travel-intensive weekend ahead of me! Friday, Kristy and I are heading up to Indianapolis for my yearly fix of DCI. This year I’m going all out. Rather than heading to a local show, we’re going to the DCI World Championship semifinals! Let’s go Phantom Regiment! (Unfortunately, after winning it all last year, they find themselvs in 9th place at the end of the “regular season” this year… )

Saturday we’ll be heading to Western KY to spend some time with my family. Every year around this time, before school starts, my father’s side of the family converges on my grandparents’ farm, south of Henderson, KY. This year I’ll be bringing a special guest. Kristy will get to meet the entire paternal side of the family…all at once. She graciously accepted the invitation and seems to be up for the challenge of meeting everyone! Yep, she’s a keeper

There are rumors of a Quantum Leap Revival. Yes! That would totally make my day! Quantum Leap is one of my all time favorite shows.

I’ll follow that with an interesting report on a study that concluded Opposite financial habits attract.

Eli Finkel: We found that when looking at spending patterns, spendthrifts and tightwads tend to pair up.

Tess Vigeland : And though singles say they would rather marry someone with spending habits like their own, they often don’t. Finkel says it has a lot to do with trying to address the pain we each experience. Tightwads actually don’t like spending too little money and spenders don’t really like spending too much.

Finkel: On those rare cases where we have a trait about ourselves that we dislike, those might be the cases where we would seek somebody who’s the opposite of us. So, if I’m somebody who spends a great deal of money and experiences some pain about it, I’ll dislike it enough in myself that I may well seek the opposite in a partner.

Vigeland: Of course, if you disagree on finances, the research also shows you may experience “diminished marital well-being.”

The actual study can be found here: Fatal (Fiscal) Attraction: Spendthrifts and Tightwads in Marriage

Considering that the number one cause of problems in marriage is money, and 50% of marriages end in divorce, I’m not sure if this is a good thing…

Here’s an interesting website to which I wanted to bring attention: givinganon.org.
In a nutshell, the site let’s you give anonymously to others.

Giving Anonymously is a non-profit organization facilitating generosity between people. We are a volunteer organization; each of us donates our time without pay to keep Giving Anonymously running.

We began with a few goals in mind: We wanted to relationally connect people through giving, to make it fun, and in the process protect relationships from feelings of obligation. Giving to others in need can be full of mixed motivations and our hope is to facilitate Pure giving.

Anyone who enjoys putting cash under a friends door or in their mailbox will often times not know if their friend actually got the gift and they cannot hear what it meant to them. So, we came up with an idea to have a messaging line where recipients could call after receiving their gift. When a recipient doesn’t know who gave the gift to them they are even more free to express their gratitude and we capture this through voice files that we email to the donor.

And the last bit of randomness for today – I completely missed my 1 year anniversary at Medpace! I started July 28th, 2008 and the past year has been a good journey. I’m not doing much of what I was originally hired to do, having instead stepped into a more specialized role with a different system. I’m thankful for this opportunity and appreciate the challenge of establishing new processes and reworking old processes to streamline the flow of getting the system up and running. The company itself is great. They definitely have employee morale in mind by providing word day activities such as cornhole and pop-a-shot tournaments, ice cream socials and lunches, as well as outside work events such as the Christmas party, paintball, golf outings and more.
It has been a welcome change from my previous employers!

Hello readers. It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a meaningful blog post. Most of my entries lately have been links to videos, music, articles on other sites and the like. Last week, I even took a break from that and didn’t post anything. Honestly, the break felt good. As with many things in my life, I put too much pressure on myself to live up to certain self-expectations and as a result, the thing in question loses its fun and becomes a burden. Making the conscious decision to not blog last week lifted that burden off my shoulders, for at least that week, and restored at least some of the appeal to me again.

Though I did spend some quality time with the couch and ice cream (topped with Magic Shell and rainbow sprinkles FTW!) over the last couple weeks, down time which I’ve needed, it wasn’t all laziness. So here goes an “in review” post covering the last week or so, from what I’ve been doing to things that have been on my mind.

Camping
Two weekends ago, I headed down to Red River Gorge with 3 other guys from my Tuesday night small group for a night of camping and a day of hiking. A few days before we left, the weather forecast called for sunny skies and great temps. However, the day of the trip saw nothing but rain, rain and more rain, with some thunder and lightning thrown in for good measure. There were even thunderstorm and flood watches and warnings issued for the counties surrounding the gorge. Thankfully, it let up just enough that we were able to get a tarp and the tent up without too much difficulty, though the tarp did take some work. The next day, after a breakfast of bacon and pancakes, the skies finally cleared and it ended up being a great day for hiking. We did a 5 mile loop trail – Auxier Ridge to Courthouse Rock to Double Arch Trail, one of my faves in the gorge. While there, I logged three more geocaches, these of the Earth Cache variety (Haystack Rock, Courthouse Rock and Double Arch), bringing my total up to 108 found caches. Pictures from the trip are in the gallery.

NEXT Small Groups Conference
This past Saturday, a group of us from First Church of Christ went to the NEXT 2009 Saddleback Small Groups Conference. The conference consisted of three session centering around Saddleback’s (Rick Warren’s church) small group model. Specifically, the sessions were about Authenticity and Character, both led by Steven Gladden, and Core, a session led by small group master Lyman Coleman. Core was by far my favorite session. Lyman led us through parts of his 32-page “cook book” of exercises, drills and skill-building concerned with taking a small group to the next level. I was a little disappointed with the conference as a whole, but still came away with several good ideas and things to implement.

Church
Sunday night was a great cookout with people from church. Can’t go wrong with grilled meat, cornhole and good friends!

Health
As for my health…You may remember my twitter/Facebook status from a few weeks again. I had mentioned consistently waking up in the middle of the night, being very thirsty (drinking about twice as much water as normal), among other things. There was a discussion on Facebook about this and several people mentioned it could be diabetes. With that concern in mind, and getting fed up with not sleeping well, I finally called and booked a doctor’s appointment. The appointment is scheduled for June 11th, when I’ll get my first physical in years, as well as have blood work done for the first time. Thankfully, over the past few days, I’ve slept a little better and haven’t been quite as dehydrated as in previous weeks, so things are looking up.

Mat Kearney
The much anticipated new album from one of my top 3 favorite musical artists was released this past Tuesday – City of Black and White by Mat Kearney. It’s been three years since his last album and I’ve absolutely worn it out. Well, as much as you can wear out mp3s at least. The new album is really good. Maybe not as good as his first one and a half albums, but still really good. Expect to see some of his new songs on future Music Monday posts. Next anticipated album release: Needtobreathe, another top 3 fave, due out in August.

Books
I have a TON of books in the queue, some I’m very anxious to read. Two of those books are Faith and Doubt by John Ortberg and How Long O Lord by D.A. Carson. I’m currently reading Boundaries (something I very much need to put into practice to avoid a repeat of the past few months). Unfortunately, my exhaustion and other factors have really slowed up my reading output. I’ve only been able to get to a few pages before falling asleep. Normally I could get chapters under my belt before drifting off. Those aforementioned books are incredibly relevant to where I am right now, so I want to devote special time to not just reading them, but taking notes and truly learning and growing from the knowledge that lies within.

Processing and Resolving
I have two weeks before my summer class starts and I really need to make this time productive and meaningful. Much is on my mind, many things which I have avoided thinking about but need to be processed and resolved before I can finish healing and moving forward. Though it’s something I hate, I need to sit in silence, process and work through these before I end up getting busy and overwhelmed again.

Well, that’s about all I have at this point. Hope each of you are enjoying the days of spring/summer weather!