Wow..what a weekend..

well..it started with the fact that we now have one full time pastor on staff... then..
A long time member of our church had a heart attack and had surgery and got very sick.
Another long time member of our church passed away.
Another church family member was having surgery.

I talked the situation over with Kathy..our only full time pastor and we thought it might be a good idea for me to go to Dallas and pay a visit to our church family member that had the heart issues. Kathy was handling a funeral and going to visit our member having surgery.. First I was going to make a day of it..run up there and back...Since Donna was out of town and all I have is a hot, un-air conditioned pick-up truck I thought..hmm might be fun to go with my son and then we could take that new nissan cube.. with a/c. I also checked in with my daughter to see if she might like to have a lunch or brunch with me/us but she was busy going to Tyler and couldn't make it.. oh well..

Spoke to Austin but he had to work Saturday afternoon. I decided to get a hotel Friday night to make the trip less hard and we could bum around together a little along with making the visit to our church friend.

He made arrangements to get off work Saturday night and he thought he'd be through around 6:30 Friday and we could leave then.. sounds like a nice relaxing Saturday with my son..

A party shows up at the FUMC CLC that they thought had cancelled their party.. but I guess they didn't...so he had to stay late.. I went to FCC and moved some things around to make room for Jinx to play on Sunday morning.. I then went to FUMC to help my son move things around so he could leave..

and I didn't plan on this part...but that whole moving red padded chairs around in the gym became an amazing spiritual flashback moment for me that night... hundreds of times I moved those chairs around to set up for Upward Basketball on Saturday morning (we didn't have bleachers) and move them around again to set up for church (Center Court Service) in that same gym. A long time ago I said that gym smelled like Jesus...still does smell like Jesus to me!!

Anyway..the unplanned working late got us out of Lufkin around 9:30 and it was raining. Not fun to drive in. We stopped a couple of times to eat and to wake up etc.. of course I'm doing some twitter/fb posts along the way and my daughter calls me to see if we can have breakfast together Saturday morning since we're coming up Friday night. OK...

I finally get in bed around 2 a.m...

I'm up around 6:30 to try and find out if I had decent service at the Ex and to see if I need to be on a conf call.. and I'm groggy and not moving too fast but we finally get going and pick Hannah up around 10 and have a brunch..well really just an early lunch.. then we drop her off for a meeting she has to go to at 11 and we head back to Dallas...FYI.. DFW does not fully impart how far apart the D and the FW are.. especially in rain and slow traffic.

We go and have a great visit with our church family at Baylor... we then decide that we need to find puma shoes.. we drive around Dallas for a while and finally get to the Galleria... we eat there and the Genghis Grill and it was great. One bowl filled us up.. I know it's just a dollar more for the all you can eat but we had all we could eat.. we hang around go to a couple of stores and it looks like the puma shopping is going to be a zero.. I mean we were leaving the mall and I decided to google puma's and the finish line (which we had never heard of) has them.. we go find it and Austin gets these.

We finally head out of Dallas for L-town and drive in more rain. By the way the cube drives great..rides pretty nice and handled the crappy weather very well. We roll in to Lufkin about 9 and I find out our only full time pastor...Pastor Kathy...has the flu.. Sunday morning was not an issue..really except now I was going to have to get up earlier.. but I now had a funeral to do too. My first one ever..

Up early Sunday..wishing I was still in bed... church was great in both services. I went home and read over some notes.. put on my seldom worn suit and performed my first funeral.. it was a blessing to be there and I was glad I got to be a part of that family's celebration of life.

Then home..sat still for a few minutes then went and did music for the youth.. got done around 8:00 p.m....

and then...do you ever get so tiered and keyed up you can't go to sleep? I was up past midnight.

Ugh!!!! and when that alarm went off this morning I did NOT want to get out of bed...I drug my self out.. a little late and got to the Ex around 7.

I am looking so forward to a quiet restful evening tonight...maybe even a nap when I get home. It was a great weekend.. no doubt about it... but hope I don't have any more like it in a while. I do need a day off now and then.

More from Hannah and her trip to Italy-Venice!!

More pics from Hannah in Italy

Hannah at the church of St Francis of Assisi. The writer of my favorite hymn..



Hannah at Assisi with the Tuscan countryside behind her.



The Tuscan countryside..

A pic from Hannah

Hannah is traveling in Italy during spring break.. something I have not gotten to do.. She's loving it. Here is a pic she sent via text of the Vatican.

Random March 3rd stuff

Tuesday March 3rd Hannah and I went to TCU for another visit.. she wanted to visit with people from the environmental science department and I wanted to check on her scholarship situation..she also wanted to see one of the dorms she had not seen yet.. We ate at fuzzy's she fell in love with enviro science..(she wants to save the world).. we saw several friends of hers and even some of my friends..Then we went to U of Dallas to see her friend Allison Guse.. It was kind of a long day.. but fun to spend it with Hannah..this is just a short clip of the day..




It also proves that if you are going to eat chocolate ice cream and wear white skinny pants..you will get some on your pants...

Hannah and her txting exploits v 2.0

Ok... we just went through the holidays... and when you look over to the right there at Hannah's texting performance, you have to be a little disappointed. You would think with all the extra time on her hands during the holidays she would text even more.


But no...


So why did the numbers drop???


Was it the number of minutes she was talking? Did she actually speak to people more and reduce her ability to text as much?? I did a brief analysis of her voice minutes....she was actually on the phone talking more in months previous than in this month of anemic texting performance..

I can only find one other good reason that she has deteriorated in her text performance.






His name is Ryan Stovall... He's pretty good guy.. plays sax in the AC jazz band and has a band of his own..he also plays guitar way better than I will ever hope to and he can play other instruments. I like Ryan.. but he sure is jackin' with our fun with Hannah's texting.

Hannah and her txting exploits..

Ok I lied.. I'm not too busy to blog until after Christmas.. or maybe I just find this topic way more important than the delivery of your boxes... not really just kidding. But..the phone bill came in today and I just though it would be really cool to let you see a glimps of a small part of my family life..that part involved in phone bills and texting..

I find texting to be a very strange phenomena in that people use telephones to NOT talk to others..just send them little messages like you might get from a western union office dozens of years ago..except faster and cheaper.. I actually like txting. I think it works for many in that you can manage the conversation among other things you are doing vs when you're talking you tend to have to get singularly focused. It has been funny when friends of mine have sent me replies to txts that they got from someone else... maby too many balls in ther air there???

Anyway..my daughter Hannah loves to txt... so I started a new feature over there to the right side of my blog...check it out..give me some feedback and I'll keep you posted each month on how she's doing. My daughter does make me cry sometimes...she also makes me mad... and she makes me laugh.. this is the funny part.. we have hundreds of roll over minutes every month we don't use but she will txt every waking minute she can if she's able. Why not just call em???

Catching you up...

I hope I don't make this too long but here's what's been up lately..

Friday Octoboer 17th.. drive to Conroe to do some work around my in-laws house.. almost hit a deer and scared the crap out of everyone.

Saturday October 18th.. Clean out my wife's aunt's house and get stuff for the 2nd "Send Hannah to Rome" garage sale (see pic of truck for our spoils).

Sunday October 19th.. Breif worship confessional..

Rain Down

To Every Nation

You Never Let Go

Communion-Come Ye Sinners

Went home, ate lunch, took a nap, drove to Fort Worth...Hannah did most of the driving on this trip..


, ate at Uncle Julio's with Donna, Hannah and Katie Anderson.. yeah. a table full of Andersons... but not all mine.

Monday October 20th.. Spent the morning hanging out with Katie on the TCU campus as she showed us around. Ate Lunch at Fuzzies and saw Nikolee Beyers (our super awesome student intern from last summer).

Saw Aaron Marez that morning too and he did our orientation meeting.. that was cool.

Hung out around the college of communications that afternoon and took a tour and saw Brittany Brookshire Adams.. she gave us all big hugs and we hugged her back and she introduced Hannah to her class.. that was cool. Also looked around the radio, TV, film department and that's where Hannah would like to study.. heck so would I.. looked pretty fun.

Drove back to Lufkin then drove (by myself) to Waco to do Fortune 100 transportation work.. hit a deer east of Marlin. No one hurt.. including the deer I think.. the PT Cruiser got a little damage though.

Tuesday Oct 21st.. Worked in Waco, age at Rudy's that night. Stopped at Sonic and got a sonic blast.. shot the last needed video I have to do to complete my half of the Todd and Artie eats video.. now if I could just get time to put it all on a CD and ship it to you.

Wednesday Oct 22nd.. worked in Waco that morning and drove back to rehearse for drug court entertainment.

Thursday Oct 23rd.. Worked that day then did entertainment for Judge White's drug court and drug court graduation at our Fellowship Hall. We did:

Unclouded Day

I'll Fly Away

Everything (Caraway, Anderson, et. al.)

The Road to Recovery (Muchow)

Friday Oct 24th Worked and went to the first half of the LP/University Park game (the half with no score).

Saturday Oct 25th Learned "Audience of One" by Big Daddy Weave and "Give me Your Eyes" by Brandon Heath. Cleaned House..moved all of Hannah's garage sale stuff out of the guest room in to the "media room" (that's a future name for what is now a junk room). Did laundry, practiced Audience of One with Shawn Reith. Hung out with Cory Glover and many of his friends who came in for his Ordination that occured Sunday night. Tell him he needs to blog. Went home early because I had to get up early for church..

Sunday Oct 26th.. video worship confessional and more..

Yes.. our wallpaper is coming off the wall in our bedroom... we'll be fixing that some day soon.

And that's a PBJ..yes I ate it right after shooting that vid.

Oh and by the way. We had myself on Acoustic Guitar and Amanda Hutchinson on bass..that was our whole band.. We had several singers and thank you Scott Skelton, Tara Watson, Bill Malnar and Tina Peavey for being there along with Amanda..

You can see the video of Cory's ordination here.

Monday Oct 27th..worked that day and vegged that night..watched some dvr'd shows and ate and skipped bible study.. I was too worn out. Forgive me.

Tuesday Oct 28th..worked at you know where that day and that night planned, scanned and e-mailed music for the next couple of weeks. I have even updated my sidebar here on my blog with the music that is planned for the next few weeks. I also went to the Goodiers to get more garage sale stuff for Hannah. I plan to head to the Tyson's Thursday and get their offerings to the Rome trip.

OK, my hands are cramping.. I think that's enough.

My Friday

Hi gang.. continuing on with the "My Friday" movement started by BTW.. My alarm went off at 5:30 this morning... I hit snooze until about 6:10 and finally drug myself out of bed.. took care of some unmentionables and headed for work. Had a 7:00 a.m. meeting with our business partners at FedEx Ground and then did some reports, visited with my people and the worked on a reward and recognition program spreadsheet that needed to be updated because of new company procedures, guidelines and measurement tools. I had been putting it off for weeks but it only took about an hour. Just not "fun" stuff. Had to be on a 10:00 a.m. conference call then worked some more on the spreadsheet and information I wanted to cover for my noon staff meeting.

Ah..my staff meetings...most employees hate going to staff meetings and dread being there. I don't think it's that way where I work..I'm the boss but I not a real hard liner...unless I have to be but I love having fun where I work. Heck, I spend too much time there not too. And I have a great set of people to work with that usually end up making me laugh to the point of a headache at every staff meeting..some are easily distracted, some are conversation hijackers, all are good hard working folks for the most part and are great to be around.

Finished with the staff meeting at 1:3o and then did some filing and read some blogs and handled some calls and then departed work a little early because I was helping with Celebrate Recover tonight.

I first wanted to go by the house because we are having a Garage Sale of Mammoth proportions. This is a little fund raiser to help get money for Hannah to pay for her trip to Rome next spring break.. I wanted to help get some larger items outside and others could get the smaller stuff down while I was away.

Got the big stuff outside and then went to Celebrate Recovery. Jim Riggs who usually leads the service is out of town doing some grandfather stuff and I was just stepping in to help tonight. I used to lead music at this ministry on a weekly basis.. with work 60 hours a week at FedEx
Ground, leading worship Sunday morning (that's 0700 at the church on Sunday usually) Leading worship for the youth Sunday nights I was getting frazzled.. Lamoine Williams has stepped on to the scene to help with the worship and tonight was the first time I've been there since he began leading the music. The Holy Spirit was certainly present tonight. It was an awesome eventing of worship and our small groups were very open and encouraging. It was a great night...then we had cheese cake and coffee..then it was clean up time and off to the house to haul out all the rest of the stuff for the "Send Hannah to Rome" garage sale.. family has come over from Conroe to help with the pricing, laying out, hauling out and of course the sale tomorrow. We have had so many friends that have donated items for the garage sale. How wonderful and kind they have been. Frankly I hate garage sales. I don't mind the sale itself ..it's the getting all the crap out and organized. Donna handles the organize and pricing because I would blow my brains out.. I just do the heavy lifting. Here are some pics of the layout in the driveway tonight. I'll be putting black plastic around it all later which seems to work as some sort of anti crime device because no one has ever come and stolen our stuff before when we do this. Much cheaper than security systems or guards for that matter.

.. maybe I'll see you there tomorrow.

CYLS Region Rep Installation

Friday night Hannah was installed as a region rep for the Southwest Region of Christian Youth Leadership Council in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).. I like typing all of that.

Anyway.. it's an awesome honor to be called to such a leadership role.. servant leadership role.

This has been a huge..magnificent week spiritually and this really capped it off. Wonderful. Video isn't the greatest but it's all I had..

Hannah gets a ticket..

A few weeks ago Hannah got pulled over because she had an expired inspection sticker on her car. When the officer asked for insurance, she couldn't provide proof of any (there is an insurance card in her glove compartment but she says she can't open it).. Anyway, that all leads up to our visit to Municipal court on Wednesday morning..

When we got there we found out it was pastors kids day at municipal court as there was the offspring of another pastor in town that will remain nameless. That person was right in front of us in line.

Anyway.. watch the video and enjoy...