Blog
Ransom Notes Keep Falling Out Your Mouth
Category: Random Updates
Oops, another 2 months without a post. Time to play catch up.
1 year anniversary was fantastic. I highly recommend Horshoe Bay for anyone looking for a nice vacation place near Austin. We went waverunning, spent time at the pool and psuedo-beach, had a few nice meals and some incredible desserts, and just had an all around great weekend. I very appropriate way to celebrate one full year of marriage.
Built my mom a website, working on one for Katie and one for Cameron. Also hoping to have a paying client soon, but waiting to hear back from them.
Teamworks is amazing. I absolutely love it. I know I already gushed about it in my last blog post from two months ago, but time has only made my heart grow fonder. God forbid, if anything ever happened to my current job, I'd be applying at IBM for a position as a Teamworks developer. :P It's fun, intuitive, and extremely useful. I get to work on a pretty time-intensive project in TW for the next couple of months, so that should keep me interested at work.
College football - less than 3 weeks away! Conference realignment stuff kinda fizzled, if you weren't keeping up. Colorado and Nebraska are leaving the Big 12 for the Pac 10, but Texas is staying put. Should be a fun season with Gilbert taking the reins of the offense and waiting to see if one or two running backs step up and become the primary RB. The defense should be stout, though. Any worries I have about the offense should be offset by how awesome the defense is going to be. OU and Nebraska worry me, but if we take one out of two of those games, we should get through the rest of our schedule without much trouble and still have a good shot at going to the conference championship game. (I really need to finish up my Garrett Gilbert website...)
Celebrate Recovery is going well. It's helping me put the focus in my life back where it needs to be - on God. Too often my spiritual life becomes a footnote or afterthought, instead of being the primary focus and everything else being in relation to it. It helps to have a bunch of guys who understand the kind of stuff I'm dealing with and are encourage me. If you don't know what CR is or have never been, check it out. There isn't a single person that couldn't benefit from going.
New house! We got all moved in a little over a week ago, and got the last necessary piece of furniture moved in last night (refrigerator). The house is really starting to take shape. If you haven't seen it yet, look out for pictures soon.
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
~Isaiah 58:8-9a
As To Win the Prize
Category: Running
I ran my first Half Marathon this past Sunday with a time of 1:37:00 (chip time was 1:36:47). I was about 10 seconds per mile slower than the Boston qualifying pace (for the full), but I was extremely happy with how I did. Within the first mile of the race, this guy (George) made a comment to the effect of "Now I don't have anyone to talk to." So I caught up with him and started chatting about the Austin Marathon and how he did in his Boston Marathon back in 2001. His goal for the race was to finish in under 1:40:00 (he did it in 1:38). I decided to try to stick with him throughout the race, which turned out to be a good idea. He kept me entertained through most of the race and helped me keep a faster pace than I would have if I had been running on my own. He was very friendly to the other runners and even to the people that were standing on the side of the road cheering people on. It was a great experience and reminded me of how much I love running in races. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next, but it will be soon.
We bought a new front-loading washer and dryer this week. It's kind of ridiculous how excited we are about it. It makes me feel old or uncool or something. :P But we are very excited about them. We chose to finance them so we wouldn't have to dip into savings, which I think will be a good thing in the long run. God bless Dave Ramsey, but in order to get a house, we're gonna need a mortgage, and in order to get a mortgage, we're going to need good credit. Hopefully this will help us out with that.
Foundations is going fantastically. ginni and I gave our Life Maps last time and we're looking forward to hearing the Calloways go this weekend. Since we started going, I've gone to a Stars game with Jonathan, had dinner and dessert with the Calloways, and had BWW with all the guys. It's nice to have a social life again, not to mention being surrounded by other young married couples that are trying to grow in their faith and marriage. I'm pretty stinkin' happy about how all of that has played out.
We've also been going to Celebrate Recovery for the past 3 weeks. I originally intended to go just to support gin, but before the first session was over I decided that God had some good work He could do in me there. At worst, it's another day during the week besides Sunday to remind me how important God needs to be in my life. At best, God is going to do some amazing things in my life. I'm leaning towards "at best."
Lots of fun web stuff going on with me right now. I'm learning Python - finally. I've been meaning to get into it for months now. I absolutely love Python and Django. It's really easy to use (especially the Django admin) and very structured. A nice change of scenery from the mess that is PHP. I'm currently redoing ginni's website in Python and am having a blast doing it. I also just found out that I may have another potential paying client. If I can determine that their web server supports Python/Django, I'm absolutely going to do it that way. If not, well, I just may have to convince them to change web hosts.
I can't make any promises that I'll post more often, but I can promise that I will try. (Note that that wasn't actually a promise...)
