Great Weekend

I just had a mostly wonderful weekend and I decided to write about it. Yesterday, I was browsing the internet and came across this site: I Wish I Had Known. I mostly agreed with the writer about things he wish he knew when he was younger. It wasn’t a list of regrets, but a list of things that could have made starting a life a bit easier. One of the notes was to keep a journal. I am keeping a lifetime journal that I post an entry about once every 6 months, but that leaves out some details. This blog has quasi – sufficed for a journal, but I’m not writhing enough about the events, I am spending more time talking about my feelings. Feelings are good, but I want to make sure I keep track of things I can read in the future and remember from my life.

I just had a pretty sweet weekend. One of my closest college friends came over to my house accompanied by his 2 younger brothers, a brother in law, and another friend. I had hardly met any of these guys except for one brief time. Despite not really knowing each other, we got along almost immediately and had a splendid time.

The focus of our weekend was a ski trip. We were going to make a day trip to the Poconos, but were too tired and lazy to make the drive and went to Roundtop instead. It was actually my first trip to Roundtop, and I was mostly satisfied with the level of skiing following a couple inches of snow during the week. Bill prepared me for the weekend by telling me to “prepare for a lot of competition.” That got me jazzed because I typically crave competition. The weekend was entitled SSF08 (Snowboarding Sausage Fest). We started off the weekend with any kind of competition we could come up with. We established teams, and at the end of each competition, the winners got to shoot the losers with an airsoft gun in the back. The first event was Family Feud, followed by some Wii sports, and Dance Dance Revolution. These events were fun, but it was time to kick it up and notch. It was about 20 degrees outside, so we had to do some outside events. The first was a game standing in a circle outside tossing a football around, if you dropped it, you were out. This event was of course played without shirts. We weren’t outside long enough, and therefore invented Hypotherma-Bowling. This event is a relay race played on a field in the snow without shirts. The event included throwing a 6lb bowling ball as far as you could and sprinted to where it landed, picking it up, and throwing it again. You had to cross the field and come back, then hand off the bowling ball to your team mate. This was fantastic fun. At the end, we were all walking back to the house, still shirtless, and Liz saw us from the house, laughed and shut the door on us. We were getting pretty tired, so we ended the night with a solid game of poker which of course I won.

The Skiing was good. I’m not going to lie, I’m a pretty good skier. I use the ski blades which are kind of lame, but they are so easy to use, especially with my hockey background. Everyone else used snowboards, which left me as an outsider, but I didn’t care because they were falling a lot and I didn’t fall once. We got 3 hours of sleep the night before, and skied for 8 hours straight. We were exhausted by the end, but it was worth it. Then we went home, scarffed down some pizza, and called it a night. The next morning we had a breakfast meat feast. This included bacon, sausage, pork roll, ham, and scrapple. We through in some eggs and English muffins and ate until our arteries were clogged.

I noticed something by the end of the weekend that hit me like a slap in the face. I enjoyed these guys so much because they reminded me a lot of myself and my friends from high school and the way we spent our time throughout high school. We were doing stupid things, making everything a competition, constantly trash talking, and making homosexual humor. I was remembering the good ole days and thank all of those guys for giving me a trip to the past. All of this really hit me when I went to my hockey game on Sunday night. The guys on my team are nothing like these guys or my old friends. They are profane and only talk about alcohol and women in an incredibly disgusting disrespectful way. I was so revolted by the conversation in the locker room that I wanted to walk away and not be a part of the team any more. There is a person or two that I do respect, but that is it.

All of that to say; I miss my friends. I miss my friends now, and I miss my friends the way they used to be. We can occasionally get together and relive the old days, but it is clear to me that we have all changed over the past few years. The changes are mostly for the good, but some are for the bad. I don’t talk or see the guys very often any more which is to be expected with new relationships and busy lives, but when I do, things are still a bit different. School has put distance between us, love has taken us closer to others and further from each other, and turning 21 has stabbed a dagger between some of us.

Bottom line: I miss you guys. I doubt that any of us can ever have the kind of relationship we had in high school, but what is much sadder, I don’t see much hope of improvement over the relationship we have now. Maybe it is simply a part of life, but I don’t want it to be. I do wish all of you the best of luck. Even if I were to never talk to you again, I wish the best in your future endeavors.

Keith, I miss you most of all my friend. I know I have left some of the guys slip away without giving enough of a fight. This will not be true of you. I hope you are doing ok. I miss you buddy.

I love all you guys, and you know who you are. I hope to talk with you sometime soon.

A New Look

I figured it was time to change up the appearance of this site. The name and basic premise has not changed, but I felt the black background was a little bleak. I tried to change up the colors myself, but when it was finished, there were so many different colors running into each other that it made me a little sick to look at. Consequently, this is a simple template I found that I thought was pretty good. Any of you technical people out there, do you know how to make the body of the posts wider on the page? My long posts look ridiculously longer because the body of the text is so narrow. I would appreciate and feedback on that.

Moving on. I haven’t posted in a while which is mostly due to being pretty busy. Days have just been flying by recently, and I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write or do some other things that I would like to. However, I have been working out a little more regularly. I read an interesting article about variable exercising vs. endurance exercising and the way it affects your body. The article had a lot of good suggestions and tips. I thought the author made a really good point for doing sprints instead of running a few miles. His argument was simply to look at a long distance runner that looks physically beat, weak, and skinny, and then look at a sprinter who looks strong and fierce. I would personally rather look strong and fierce, so I decided to give variable exercising a try. Here is a link to the article if you are interested: http://www.gr8bucks.com/Training-Nutrition-Secrets.pdf

There are some other interesting things going on in my life. First of all, Liz and I are going to join the Carlisle Evangelical Free Church. We have been looking for a church for a while, and I think we can finally find a home at E Free. We have been going to a membership class, and I got to meet Pastor Shad for lunch one day to discuss our role in the church. I know I need to contribute more to the body beyond simply personal devotions. I think God has given me a spirit to lead, and therefore I hope to be leading a small group sometime in the next few months. It will either be for people my age, or for guys. I am partly leaning towards a guy’s group, because I think I am more suited for that, and I hope it will be easier to get deeper. I have also had a number of job interviews lately. One is showing a lot of promise because the called me back for a second interview that I think went really well. It is a really sweet and challenging position that could be great for my career.

I’ve spent a good deal of time recently thinking about what I should be doing with my life. I thought recreation management would be a lot of fun, and pursued that for a while, but had no luck since I have no experience. Since I was feeling a call from God to teach, I thought I should possibly pursue that as a career, but that would be a rash decision at this point in time. I think I am very gifted in business and finance and God wants me to be here for a while, and also get involved with a church to explore teaching and leadership. I have come to the conclusion that if God wants me to be a business man, then I should strive to be the best business man I can be. I was reflecting on the work of Daniel in the Old Testament where he was assigned a role as an administrator for the Babylonian kingdom. That is obviously not a direct role serving God’s church, but he knew God wanted him to be there, so he worked diligently to be the best at what he did, and in time worked up to a very high position. If this story applies to me, then it is time for me to step it up. I want to get into a position where I grow and work diligently. It is time for me to commit myself to the business world and be the best businessman I can be to the glory of God.

If you have a moment, I ask that you pray for my job search, that I will find a position that will be pleasing to the Lord, and that God will bestow the energy in me to work hard and be the best business man I can be.

Thank you for reading.