...it's just that I've been a bit busy lately. So let me catch up!
Since my last post, my life has gone into warp speed, but it now stablizing. After exams and graduation, I dove into teaching two mini-session classes. Those are intense courses that are taught for three hours each day for three weeks. Teaching two of them meant I was teaching Monday through Friday, 9 AM-12 PM and 1 PM-4 PM. My weekends? Well, the first one I spend in Virginia doing a Jr. High Bash for the diocese of Arlington and visiting my aunt and uncle who live in that area (hello to all!), the second was memorial day weekend which I spend here celebrating my 6 yr. old's birthday with my father-in-law having a surprise visit (a great time), and then classes finished this week in time for the Young Adults Conference which I lead worship for, after practicing every night this week with the band (so this week was 9AM-12PM, 1PM-4PM, and 6PM-9PM band practice). Oh yeah, and my new CD came out last week, so I've had boxes around the house and been doing mailings in between classes and other family stuff.
I kind of feel like I checked out of my regular life for the past few weeks. I'm slowly getting back to emails- sorry to all I've been slow to connect with. Now that the first conference is under the belt and the mini-sessions are over, things won't be so hectic.
Hello to all who were at the young adults conference! That was a blast. The students in my band did awesome- I am very proud of them. I was expecting some first time out bumps, but really didn't hit any- we sounded tight and polished. Praise God! They are a great group to work with. They cover all my mistakes!
Young Adults Conference is one of my favorite conferences because it is small and there is a lot of time to interact with the participants. Friday night is cool because we end early just to hang out with everyone in the student center. I had some folks from Detroit say I looked like Joey Harrington when he has a beard. He used to be the QB for the Lions, but now he is in Miami. When I was younger, people used to say I looked like the guy from Psycho. I'd rather look like the QB.
In other news, I did find time to catch X-Men III: The Last Stand, though I had to see it late night and I probably shouldn't have with all the crazyness going on. My verdict? It was good, but not great. It was very un-imaginative, and the characters were flat. They also killed off some very major people with not much fan-fare, and made other characters look like wimps (like Rogue). And where was Nightcrawler? He was my favorite. They could have really used him to spice up the big final battle scene.
Which, by the way, was also fairly lame. I mean- the main good guy mutants were a young Colossus (who can turn into metal and hit people), Beast (who can jump around and hit people), and Wolverine (who has claws and can hit people). So you can imagine there was a lot of hitting people. The bad guy mutants were for the most part non-descript generics who looks like they benefited from a sale at the tattoo and piercing pagoda. I mean, couldn't they have had Rouge absorb some powers and make it interesting? Nightcrawler BAMPF around like he did at the beginning of X-men 2? They really missed a cool opportunity to make a killer battle.
The biggest problem is that the really cool director of the first two X-men wasn't doing it anymore (Bryan Singer), so they handed it over to the guy who did the Rush Hour movies. Singer chose instead do to Superman Returns- and I am getting pretty excited about that. For me, that's the movie I'm looking most forward to this summer.
The new bluegrass CD is selling great and I'm hearing lots of cool things. I'm also hearing from a few who think I've lost my mind. Well, I didn't expect everyone to like it :) But I'm happy for all those who are giving it a chance.
I'll have more regular updates each weekend after each conference. Thanks to all who signed up on the mailing list this weekend!
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