Whew! Since last week I’ve been going wide open everyday. I hit the ground running in the morning and don’t get finished with everything until late at night. Lately I’ve been doing lots of stuff for other people and its impacted my “ME” time. Part of that time is my blogging time.

TC asked what happened to the picture of me and my niece (thanks for askin BTW). My sis asked that I not post photos of Olivia on the web. She’s a fairly private person. My initial reaction was that I was irritated at the request, but then again in the scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. So, I simply said “ok” to her request and pulled it.

In other news, I’ve got a video from last Sunday of a song we did at church. I’m trying to find a better way to get it online as it’s 220+ megs in size. Not exactly web-friendly. It’s in high-def too and I haven’t successfully converted it into a more compact version for use online. Arlene was a trooper and downloaded it. If anyone else wants to check it out in its full HD glory, leave me a comment or send me an email and I’ll give you the link to it.

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Sitting here at the hospital with my sister, parents and brother in law just waiting on my niece to arrive. I’m excited.

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I guess it will be at least another day before I can get my “World’s Greatest Uncle” shirt out of the bag. Still nothing going on with my sis yet although that could change at any moment.

Today for lunch, a group of us tried the new mexican restaurant in town, Maria Bonita. They opened last Friday after almost 2 years of not opening their doors even though the place was ready. The restaurant is located in what used to be Court Street Cafe. Many years ago I used to go there and enjoy their chicken tenders. They’ve done a nice job with the interior - it feels much more upscale than most other places in town. It actually has the feel of a “big city” eatery rather than your run of the mill taco stand. I had the spaghetti for lunch. You heard right, spaghetti at a mexican place. It was decent. The marinara sauce had a distinct citrus flavor to it which I found unusual but pleasing. I did have to request some garlic toast as that’s what was missing from making it a complete dish for me. I hear the dinner menu is quite different. I’ll have to give that a try sometime soon.

I did get a chance to watch HEROS tonight. I think this episode had the most action in it so far. Plenty of things going on. Anyone else watch it?

LOST comes on tomorrow where they say they’ll “reveal 3 secrets of the island”. I can hardly wait.

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According to this article both companies have agreed to it. Now the regulatory peeps will have to scrutinize it. I have XM in my car is why it interests me. Any of you guys have satellite radio? If so, which one? Like it? Hate it?

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Sometime this week I expect to be an uncle. My sis’ due date is this Wednesday and if nothing’s going on by then, they’re going to go ahead and admit her and MAKE things happen. What does all that mean? To Kevin it means I may be “iffy” for band practice Thursday night. We’ll have to see how it all goes. To everyone else, it’s business as usual.

I spent tonight at church continuing working on our sound stuff. Why so much of this? Two main reasons: we’ve got new stuff (YAY!) and our room acoustics are challenging to say the least (BOO!). I noticed some boxes were there with our remote antenna mounting kits in them so I went ahead and installed those while I had the rack pulled out.

Oh… that reminds me. Today at lunch I was over at Westside Coffee Place - my buddy Mike owns the place. One of the girls was in the back asking him a question, but all you could hear was Mike’s side of the conversation: “go ahead and pull your rack out and I’ll come have a look at it…” My comment was “that’s quite the pickup line there Mike…”

Didn’t get to watch HEROS tonight since I was out. I’ll catch that episode online tomorrow though. That’s the plan at least. I have to get caught up on my TV watching before LOST on Wednesday night.

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I’ve had a non-stop weekend. Fortunately, I finally got over the headache that was killin me Friday. Saturday, Dave, Kevin and I headed north to Nashville with two goals: first, a trip to Guitar Center to get all the cables we needed for the new equipment we got and secondly, to visit a church up in Hendersonville (a few miles north of Nashville) that’s similar to ours to see how they use their meeting space. We have a few challenges with our place and it would help to see what worked in other places.  Lifechurch is located in a strip shopping center - a bit unusual but whatever works. They did a good job with the space although it still felt a bit cramped. They have several “big church” things going already such as their child care check in and check out systems. A parent has an ID card that they wave in front of a reader and a touch screen shows a list of their kids. They touch the names of the kids they have with them (if there are more than one) and a printer prints out adhesive name tags for the kids immediately. Stick em on the kid and off they go. That was cool.

Their band sounded good. I took a close look at how everything was set up in case we could get any good ideas we could take home and use. This whole visit was more to check out the logistics of things more than anything else although the lesson while we were there was pretty good.

While we were there, we did have to deal with some flurries. It never really got bad but it was nice to see something that resembled winter weather instead of it just being cold all the time lately. It did make for a longer drive home though. We did make time to stop for a late dinner at Macaroni Grill before finally getting home close to midnight.

I was in church pretty much all day today. Regular stuff in the morning, then the afternoon making major upgrades to our PA system. Wires, connectors, racks, gear and screws were the order of the day. The efforts were worth it though. Thing were sounding good by the end of the day. A few more tweaks to get things “just right” but we’re already MUCH improved.

Anyhoo… after the cold weather - looks like we have a high close to 60 predicted for tomorrow. How’s that for a temperature swing?

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After band practice last night, I got a text message from Lesa to come out to Cafe 113 to hang out and have a drink. I finished up dinner with some of the band at Ruby Tuesday’s then made my way across town to 113. I had a really good time hanging out, but I also had a whole LOT of cigarette smoke to deal with. It’s been awhile since I’ve been around that much and I was paying for it today. My sinuses were givin’ me one heck of a headache - so much so that I came home after lunch and tried to sleep it off for a few hours. That seemed to have helped.

Yeesh.

Heading up to Nashville tomorrow to run some errands and to visit a church up there similar in size to ours. We’re trying to see how they get things done logistically and also what they use for their sound equipment. It never hurts to get input and ideas from others who have already “figured it out”. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Hope everyone has a stellar weekend!

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Man oh man… LOST was way out there tonight! Tonight’s episode was about Desmond. I think what we saw was a lot of insight into his background just like Juliet’s from last week. The major difference though was the time travel aspect. I’ll reserve commenting on that here till later this week so as not to spoil it for any Tivo people out there that visit here.

More cold today. It’s 25 out now on its way down to the teens later tonight. Kelsey is inside as she always is when the temps dip below freezing. She’s a good dog - comes inside and goes straight to my spare bathroom and lies down for the night. In the morning she heads straight for the door to the back yard. We’ve got a routine.  :cool:

On the church front, we’ve got lots going on from the technology side. For us in the band, we’ve jumped from a 16 channel mixer to a 32 channel unit. Now we can accommodate all the connections we have and still have extras. The biggest bonus though is we have another in-ear mix to send out! I’ve always had my own in-ear mix and transmitter - the extra-fly Shure PSM600. The other members of the band shared their own mix. The problem with sharing though is not everyone has the needs or tastes in what they hear when performing. Vocalists need more of their voices and the voices of other they need to harmonize with and instrumentalists have different need depending on what they’re doing. For example, as a drummer, I personally want to hear some of my drums, a good bit of the bass guitar (since we need to stay together most of the time) and some of the lead guitars and a good bit of Kevin’s vocals so I know where we are in the song or where we’re going if we’re drawing an ending out or something. Now there are more mixes to choose from to give more flexibility in tailoring the sound as needed.

Ok, I realize that not too many people will find the paragraph above very interesting. I was just all excited about it and wanted to share.

That’s it for now.

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Is there a good dry cleaner in my city?!?! When I used to work over in Madison, I used Gates Cleaners. They spoiled me there. When you start using them, they give you these nice nylon bags tagged with your name and your preferences for laundry or dry cleaning. They got my starch right, added the collar boards, didn’t mash up my collars by tying the hangars tightly together - overall just a great job. Oh, the women on staff were hot too. That was a nice bonus. This is in stark contrast with the cleaners I use now where I live. They do the starch okay, but mash the collars flat (defeating the purpose of the collar boards) and sometimes press the collars crooked. On pleated slacks, my pleats show up in different places. Not necessarily bad UNLESS YOU CAN SEE WHERE THEY WERE PLEATED BEFORE.

A friend of mine used to own a dry cleaning business. I was interested in the whole pressing process so I took one afternoon to go over there and see how all that worked on a commercial scale. I actually used the different machines - the one for pants and then the one for shirts. The shirt machine was pretty cool. you press the collar and cuffs first, then you stick the sleeves on this thing that inflates inside them and then they get sandwiched by the pressing surfaces and steam gets injected. Next, you wrap the body of the shirt around a form which also clips it on the top and bottom, inflates, then presses the front and back of the shirt in one step. It’s pretty straightforward and easy to do a good job. If you’re just rushing through it though, your pressing can come out looking like it was done by a drunk monkey.

I may have to go yell at someone about this.

Anyone have any dry cleaner horror stories?

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I’ll be an uncle. I’m very excited. You see, I never really cared for small kids much at all until just a few years ago when my friends Kevin & Stacey had their daughter Kailyn. She’s the first kid I’ve been around from the time she was born until now - and she’s four. What a cool kid. She changed my mind about kids for the most part.

Sometime in the next two weeks, my niece will come on the scene. I can hardly wait. I know my sis is ready - I can tell she’s a little tired of waddling around.

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