Mark Lee: Guitar player for Third Day.

Ok, I'm 48 years old and I don't get all giddy about rock bands, or rock stars or movie stars... personally I would tend not to interrupt them if I saw them eating dinner or whatever. I figure their lives are pretty abnormal as it is and I don't need to be one more addition to it.

BUT

On twitter I follow a few people that are doing pretty well as musicians in the CCM genre of music. Brandon Heath who really does not post many tweets but I like one of his songs so I started following him on twitter.

Bart Millard of Mercy Me just because I've liked these guys for a long time and their cover tune grab bags are great and Bart will announce them being posted via twitter.

I also follow Brandon Todd Wright who is a real up an comer and will have a song on the next song discovery CD coming out from worship leader magazine..

Finally.. I follow Mark Lee..the guitar player for Third Day...

The great thing about following Mark and Bart is that the tweets they post really show that they deal with a lot of the same things the rest of us deal with. They are parts of bands that are huge in Christian music. I'm sure they do ok for themselves. Now Bart always posts via txt so there is no way he can interact with folks on twitter unless there is technology out there I don't understand..
But Mark Lee...he's on twitter just like the rest of us.. and he has quite a few people following him.. but then a couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail that he was following me (actually he is now following everyone that follows him on twitter)..that's pretty cool.

A few days ago a friend of mine posted a tweet about going to a metal concert in Denver and Mark Lee actually responded... hey wow..that's cool.

Today Mark posted info about a quiz you could take to see if you could determine if a phrase was scripture or Shakespeare.

I went there and scored a 70.. boo for me...

I asked Mark how he did...not really thinking that he would respond..(I am olderbutnotup by the way) ..now I thought that this was pretty cool..now for you naysayers out there...


Here is his twitter profile..

here is his blog link

read this it's pretty funny..

here is his band..



I'm still not all giddy or whatever but I think it's pretty cool how Mark is just a guy on twitter who happens to play for one of the biggest Christian Rock bands ever.. and I like them to boot.. fell in love with them when C. Caraway introduced them to me via the offerings CD. Just kind of a cool thing that happened today.

A comment about Wii Pray.

Cory posted this on his blog..take a look at it...









My comment was regarding what follow up gaming could come...










Next is Wii Worship..you work your way up from a background singer to the worship leader of the church..





Next is Wii Worship Leader..tour edition. Offers multi-player options such as drummer, lead guitarist and evangelist.





After that..Wii Worship…Megachurch edition: allows you to bring in tech personnel, support staff, and has a syms component along with Worship Leader tour version components.





Any other ideas?

____________________________________________________




Funny thing about this is.. I typed this up a couple of weeks ago and saved it as a draft.. then yesterday Todd sends this out on Twitter...

Sometimes I amaze myself..

Now..please tell me what you think about this..not my expertise in prophesy.. this game called Guitar Praise..

Commets for posts..

You know.. from time to time I believe my best thinking is done on OPB's.. that's other people's blogs.



I have no idea how many of you are out there in my segment of the blogosphere and I know many of you circle around the same set of blogs I do so this might become redundant for some of you at times but I am going to re-post some of my comments from other blogs on to my blog here at acts215.



Two reasons. 1. I know some people just hit my blog because they are my friends or co-workers and they don't normally read that many blogs.

2. If I have some really good thoughts.. or funny thoughts.. or just long thoughts that deserve the attention and adornments that only a blog post can bring like pictures....











then I'm going to turn my comments in to blog posts.. I will link back to the original blog but I will re post it here.. and you will know that it is a comment by the title..like my "a comment about Neapolitan ice cream"..it says it's a comment.. the next one you will likely see is .. a comment about "Wii Pray". I will link it back to Glover's blog and then I will share my profound comment along with some artwork/pics/adornments.



Have a great day!



This salutation is in no way intended to be an infringement or a re-representation of Chris' blog by a similar name "It is a great day". Although I do enjoy his blog the few times he posts I do not wish to confuse or confound the blog reading public by utilizing the "great day" phraseology. It is only being used here as an endearing phrase of departure and for no other reason.

A comment about Neapolitan Ice Cream..

The following was actually my comment regarding Todd's blog post about Neapolitan Ice Cream...his post was in response to my request on his skribit widget.. After posting it I realized I should have blogged this topic myself.. so here it is.


OK, when I was a kid..we didn't buy real ice cream. We didn't make enough money to buy that stuff. We bought mellorine. From wikipedia... Mellorine is a lower cost alternative to ice cream, wherein other fats are used instead of butterfat. It can be made out of both animal fat and vegetable fat.

Mellorine is produced by freezing, while stirring a pasteurized mix of milk-derived nonfat solids and animal or vegetable fat (or both). Afterwards, it is sweetened with a carbohydrate sweetener and the addition of flavouring ingredients.

MMMmmmmm..... anyway.

Every once in a while we would get Neapolitan mellorine..that's a mouth full.. and I have to say, that because I didn't know any better, I enjoyed this frozen delight. (Mellorine that is) In a way I do not get real excited about Neapolitan because when I was young I didn't like anything but chocolate but it always seemed to me that the chocolate in the neapolitan was very intense. It seemed super chocolaty and super sweet..it was almost like special dark candy kind of chocolate...so with that I was excited when I saw it in the freezer...it was way better than the chocolate in the chocolate mellorine container.

Negative regarding this?.. Dad insisted that we eat all three flavors.. can't eat all the choc and leave the other two flavors. Must dip across the colors and keep it even.

So.. I would eat the strawberry first.. my least favorite.. then the vanilla.. then the awesome chocolaty feast of neapolitan mellorine chocolate.

Yeah baby!!

As for strawberry now?? I love Blue Bell strawberry for the same reason Todd does NOT like strawberry. I mean it's like they dump a tub of strawberries in there and mix em up. Love it.

I feel the same way Todd does about Blue Bell's "Great Divide" as I do enjoy a mix of vanilla and choc but then my wife does not have the same philosophy as to why the product was made. She feels it was created for options. I can have chocolate or I can have vanilla... NOOO it's for the purposeful combination of the two flavors ... and should be dipped across the flavors (a la my dad) and not dug out of one side...taking all the chocolate leaving some poor unexpecting fool with a pile of vanilla on one side of the bucket. You have to love family dynamics..

I think we have bought 3 containers of Neapolitan ice cream in the near 25 years we have been married. Not something we think about much but for some reason this thing popped in my head when the Skribit was up..kinda like the stay puft marshmallow man in Ghostbusters..

Friendship Wheel

I was looking around on Facebook this morning and I went to David Runnels space because I had sent him flair with a Chuck Taylor shoe on it and I wanted to see if he had it up...after all he is the "converse christian"

No flair.. none at all. And since he has none, my feelings are not hurt. Even though he has the iphone application he still chooses not to have flair. That's ok. I'm good with that. I don't get most of the stuff that goes on in the facebook community anyway...

But then I ran across this thing you see above. A frienship wheel. It's really pretty and is a neat idea.. It's also a little intimidating. You know..I'm 48..born 10 years before Mr. Runnels and so most of my friends from college and high school are not on this stuff... so for me to think about putting something like this up makes me a little anxious.. I don't have near as many friends on facebook. I begin to think about putting one of these things up and I wonder just how small would my wheel be?? I begin having wheel envy even before I contemplate how to put this thing on my facebook.

Then I start looking very closely to the wheel. I can't find my name. What is the deal here? I know I'm one of his facebook friends but I'm not on his friendship wheel? Did I do something wrong? I look around the wheel again and I still cannot find my name. I see so many people I know and love.. and then.. wait a minute.. Chris Huffty?? I know Chris through our CC(DOC) camps and he took my daughter to the prom this year.. he's kinda by himself over on the right..he's also my friend on facebook... maybe if I follow some lines from his name I'll find mine.

No go. What's the deal? What kind of mind boggling, ego destroying tool is this friendship wheel. I don't know how it works and so I don't want to jump to conclusions but I know I'm feeling a little shaky today...

..and what's the deal with the colors??? what do those mean? Why is my DOC friend over on the right by himself and colored red?? Is there some implications as to if you're on the left vs the right side of the wheel? Do you move around the wheel if you get attached to a bunch of people pulling you around like some pull toy or if you make a bunch of friends across the wheel will you just have longer strings than everyone else?

I am bewildered.. I'm amazed.. I'm some other really big cool word that David would say.

Help me out here..

Twitter is for twits

I have friends who scoff at Twitter. They look at it and then send me text messages because they feel like participating in the process would lower them socially..

I have friends that have avoided it..well for no good reason.

Well my wife Donna.. who is the adult in our relationship.. she actually reads the paper and looks at news web sites while I'm editing video or updating my fantasy baseball team pitching rotation..found this site.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=770&tag=nl.e101

Seems twitter is a far more powerful tool than I ever imagined... either that or they're just a bunch of twits..

My Friday.. Re-Friday

Two loads of laundry done.. made a new graphic as to not tread on BTW's intellectual property..

Video Editing

OK, You don't have to watch this but I'm posting this to see how it works.. I just did some editing playing around with the two videos I already made the other night. It has an end slide that goes on far too long when played on windows media player but on here on the preview it looks ok so we'll see what happens when it publishes.. but hey.. this is way more than I could do two days ago!!! I'll have to do some more playing with it but it's looking pretty good.

Video

The first video is done at TV quality setting on my new camera. The second one is on the "320" setting.. I don't know what any of that means...

I do know this..

This Nikon Coolpix has over an hour of video capability at the lower resolution setting. Awesome!!

Get ready folks.. Some cool new stuff is on the way!!!.

Web Cam???

The other day I was showing my wife these video's off Todd's blog








I asked (since I am totally stupid when it comes to technology) do you have to have a special kind of camera to do this stuff because it seems he puts these videos up all the time with so little effort.

Donna say "It's just a web cam. I have one on my laptop and that's all he's doing is recording it on to his computer and uploading it. I'll be nice and let you use mine... or would you like one for Father's day?"

That would be cool!!!

Donuts..

I recently was looking around on the dashboard of my blog to see if there was anything else interesting I could figure out how to do. Todd explained something pretty cool that I have started using and it's awesome.. I can schedule blogs for later publishing. Big deal you might say but considering the life I live at FedEx there are times when it's nuts and I have no time to do anything. There are times when things are running so smooth I have little to worry about. There are times when things are running smooth but I still have 3-5 conference calls and a staff meeting to hold so I'm pretty much held hostage at the office with little to do but be on these calls. Now they cover important information and I do pay attention but I'm a person that can multi-task. Anyway.. I have some time to blog but I don't want it all to show up NOW.

Anyway.. back to what I started with. I was looking around on the dashboard and I saw "Blogs of note"? On there was the "NYC Donut Report!!"

I love New York, I really do! Believe it or not this country bumpkin redneck born in Texas City and raised in Galveston County in Alta Loma, TX (The area has incorporated and taken the name "Santa Fe" named after the railroad stop.. Brilliant!!.. and the school.. we were the Santa Fe Indians) Loves New York.. I hope to live there some day.. not my whole life but would love to live there a few years or so.

Donuts.. I love Donuts..you know I love donuts just looking at me. I immediately fell in love with this site.. It will be one of my new regular stops as I do my daily blog visits.... check it out


I may even try to figure out how to have it feed to my site.. that's the next trick I want to learn. Oh and if you can tell me how to put the most recent comments up on the side somewhere I'd love to learn how to do that too.

Later folks!

Tagged...

This came from here. Several.. well almost all my friends that I know blog have already been tagged but I'll do this anyway and I'll think of something.

WHAT WERE YOU DOING 5 YEARS AGO?

1. Managing FedEx Ground
2. Contemplating ministry
3. Leading worship every Sunday @ FUMC Lufkin
4. Helping raise 2 children
5. Enjoying Memorial day weekend?

5 THINGS ON YOUR TO DO LIST TODAY

1. Watch the new Indy Jones Movie
2. Play electronic Monopoly with Austin
3. Shave my head
4. Avoid any and all honey-do's
5. Do this blog

5 SNACKS YOU ENJOY

1. Cold Oreo cookies and ice cold milk
2. Fund raiser cookie dough straight out of the freezer.
3. Crispedos (yes this is gas station food) and chocolate milk
4. Cheetos and diet coke.
5. Freetoes and diet coke.

FIVE THINGS YOU WOULD DO IF YOU WERE A BILLIONAIRE.

1. A million to each of my brothers.
2. Stop working at FedEx
3. Be a full time minister with no salary.
4. Take my wife wherever she wants to go.
5. Fund a lot of ministries.

FIVE OF YOUR BAD HABITS

1. Poor eating habits
2. Poor exercise habits
3. Impulse buyer
4. Procrastinator
5. Don't read my Bible like I should.

FIVE PLACES WHERE YOU'VE LIVED

1. Texas City, TX
2. Alta Loma, TX
3. College Station, TX
4. Austin, TX
5. Lewisville, TX (there's more)

FIVE JOBS YOU'VE HAD

1. Stock boy at Weiner's department store
2. Laborer on a construction crew
3. Resident adviser in Walton Hall @ Texas A&M
4. Food service at Sbisa Dining hall @ Texas A&M
5. Senior Manger @ FedEx Ground

FIVE TAGS (AND WHY)

1. Angela - Because I knew her when she was in Jr. High and she has grown to be such an awesome young lady with a great perspective.
2. Glover - Because Clay tagged him but he hasn't responded yet, and he's taking to0 long to come up with new content.
3. Sam- Ditto and because he got me in to this blogging thing to start with...even though he makes fun of twitter.
4. Shane-Because I've got him on my friends but he hasn't blogged in a long time.
5. Jimmy-He's my brother, he's a sports genius and is the only family member I know that has a blog.

the (re)blog

OK, I've already talked about my friend Cory and his (re)blog before. He's posted that he is thinking of "killing it before it dies". Responses have been minimal since he (re)surrected it.

He will challenge most of the folks in east Texas to think beyond the bible belt mentality we've grown up with while also being grounded in Christian theology that matches his liberal arguments. He's from here so he knows where most of you come from but he's also ventured to the northwest and has experienced and embraced a different "mindset".

Don't blow him off. Challenge him. Have conversation. He loves conversation. We all grow from conversation (see Proverbs 27:17) I need you to embrace his page... because I like reading it so much. I learn a lot from it. He may challenge you and question you but I assure you he has a big heart and does it all in love and for the expansion of God's kingdom. Check him out and give him some feedback.

and now what...

This is always what I have been anxious about. I know no one is really looking at this except maybe Sam because he put me on his friends list but now there is this looming expectation to produce... What is expected on something like this?

My friend Cory even invited me to mobblog his (re)blog. I hold my friend Cory in high esteem. He is a brilliant young man, has a great memory and has really helped me to stretch the boundaries of my theology and has encouraged me to continue down a path I felt I was going...he just made me run when I was wanting to crawl...

Anyway..Cory had this awesome blog when he moved to Lufkin, massive, great pics, super content, and he, I believe has a reputation based on that.

Now as I said before he invited me to be a participant on his blog (it's on my list..please check it out. You will be challenged!! Especially if you automatically write off people like Obama or Rev Wright.) Me? I seldom watch the news much less get in to such high level muckity muck. I'm a pretty basic guy and I really don't see my blogging exploits even entering the same stratosphere as Mr. Glover's. We have much in common but I look to Mr. Glover for insight, guidance, and comfort. He is my pastor.. No doubt, Mike is my pastor too, but when I was looking for a place to "be", to heal, he opened doors for me to serve but still just "be" and worship..not a lot of expended effort on my part to play 3 or 4 songs on a Sunday night. Great time for healing and I know he saw that... healing comes along and he moves me forward in my thought processes challenging my fundamentalist theology and beliefs... and remains my friend and confidant. I still remember him saying that I must think he's just a young kid that doesn't know anything but I hardly ever missed youth because I learned so much from him.

His (re)blog has been on hold for a while because he has been attending Bright Seminary at TCU but he completes that very soon so the (re)blog is getting resurrected.

I really don't know if my simple musings would fit in with Glover's... what do you think? Yes even you Cory if you happen to read this...