what's up...

not all that much actually, just work and more work. sorry for the lack of posting.

Last monday the cycling season started with an absolutely gorgeous day. the president of the bike club exclaimed that even though dinner rides didn't start for another month, it was definitely too nice not to have a dinner ride. Angela and I rushed across town to get there in time and showed up what we thought was 15 minutes late. We went out for our own little ride and turned around because Ang was hungry. We got back to the park and saw people were showing up. Apparently we misread the e-mail and showed up an hour ahead of time. so, we got two rides in for probably around 26 miles for the dya.

Saturday was ride number two. The Saturday rides with the bike club tend to be a bit more hard core than other rides and so i knew that I'd be in for at least a little bit of pain. It turns out of course that I was in for much more pain than that. 'The Normals' aren't out yet, so it was all hardcore riders and we were starting out by climbing a couple mile stretch to a Fort Carson entrance. Did I mention 35mph windgusts and dust storms? i ate a lot of dust and was still hacking up things this morning.

Sunday was ride number three. Nothing too exciting, the clubs Sunday Social Ride is just that, a bunch of people gabbing while they pedal. my butt REALLY hurt when we started out. Thankfully things settled down. I got some sprinting practice in posting corners and a good time was generally had by all. heh.

anyway, the seasons started. There's a 5k on Saturday, but it's not in our budget and there will be time for races in the future. We sat down and actually wrote out a budget for the first time tonight. We've goofed around with it in the past, but we really want to get serious about paying debt off. I don't think we designed the perfect budget, but hopefully this will give us a leaping off point.

sorry for the quiet. hopefully it will end soon. i'll explain more about what's going on when I can, but let it be known that things are alright. There's still a chance things could dive into the beyond, but we're doing what we can to avoid that happening. next month i learn whether I can go straight from learning to walk where I'm at in the company I work for to learning to run. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that that transition to running is going to happen smoothly. Keep praying if you would though.

more later.
Brian

begets

1. To father; sire.
2. To cause to exist or occur; produce: Violence begets more violence

E.J., the pastor at the Refuse has been talking about beget quite a
bit lately... the cause and effects of situations. The type of thing
that, when you're in a reflective mood, makes you stop, pause, and
ponder. Sometimes the reflective mood in my head comes from
depression, though mostly that's just moroseness. Other times, the
triggers are smaller things. Tonight, Angela and I saw Elizabethtown
and it got me thinking about begetting.

I have a small list of movies, not even necessarily what I would call
my 'Favorite' movies, that make me want to make movies. They're not
necessarily great movies, they're just the ones that for whatever
reason poked me and told me to create, to cause to exist or occur, to
produce. There are maybe half a dozen to a dozen movies on the list.
It's rare when one comes around.

Tonight, the movie added to that list is Elizabethtown. A friend lent
me a pre-release copy because I hadn't had a chance to see it. Cameron
Crowe, like John Hughes in the early part of his career, tends to be
one of my button pushers and I'm not entirely sure why I never got
around to seeing it in the theaters. Actually, I do know why. It
appeared in the dollar theater for a week and left before Ang and I
could get there.

In any case, I've had this copy for a couple days and I've been vowing
to overdose on a whole series of Crowe films.

I don't want to turn this into any sort of a review. I just want to
say it inspired me to create. if only I could bottle the feeling up so
that I could use it at a time more practical than 1:10 AM on an early
Sunday morning.

We've hired a sales guy at the office. I don't know if it will help,
but it certainly can't hurt. On top of the fact that we hired a sales
guy, we hired a guy who has a long history of selling creative and
already has thoughts on places to hit. I hope it's the answer.

I turned down a job this week, partially because I wanted to fix this
existing problem, but also because it wasn't truly what I wanted to
do. Thankfully, my friend offering the job, told me to call back in
March when I might better know the situation.

I've been buried in work this week trying to finish a promotional
video for the music festival I work at every year. Thursday night was
an all-nighter and Friday could have been if we hadn't had a friend
coming over for dinner and a movie. Today was a full day and tomorrow
will be up until the Superbowl. It IS almost done though, and then
I'll post so you can see what's taken me away from blogging.

Go rent Elizabeth town when it comes out on Tuesday and pay close
attention to the last twenty minutes. Those were the magic minutes,
the film-making and creating moments. Those are the ones I'll rewatch
and try and inspire myself from. Those are the minutes from which I'll
take the music that carries me there when I need to create.

more later.

a thought for the evening...

I've never actually gotten up out of bed to blog about something that
was racing through my head. But I was thinking about something my
friend and pastor E.J. said at church tonight. We've been working our
way through the day of pentecost, but at the end of the sermon, E.J.
went off on a tangent about the way we mistranslate the word amen. (we
had been talking about the imperfect and perfect in Greek and how this
particular piece of scripture was meant to imply that instead of it
being something they had done, it was something they were continually
doing... that it was the imperfect tense, indicating that it was
ongoing.

Anyway...

When we say amen, we generally ascertain that it means "So Be It".
It's an ending. The Amen rings and people are done with whatever it is
they're doing. The proper translation though is much more of an
action... "I'm going to do everything on my part to make it happen".
Strong's concordance says this "a primary root; to build up or
support; to foster as a parent or nurse; to trust or believe, to be
true or certain..." I didn't think it affected me as much as it did
until I was lying in bed rolling it around in my mind.

I put my final save the company plan into effect today and it's
already bearing some flowers. I'm not going to say fruit yet, but I
think it could help. If not, I turned in the resume my friend had
requested and I should hear about the other job relatively soon.

and as I continue to pray about the company and job switches, I say "Amen".

ok. Back to bed.

an update

hey everybody,

sorry for the lack of posts since the nebulous post. I had a second job interview the other day for a job I really don't want but feel like I might need to take and I spent the weekend really up in the air about what I want to do. My heart is really with the company I'm currently with, but if the work isn't there, the job isn't there. I've been hesitant to talk about it because things are still relatively up in the air. I'm not sure what to do. Do I take the job (which would actually be a raise) even though I don't really have any passion for it, or do I continue to do everything I can do here to try and get things to work and then take my chances on not having a job March 31. It's been a pretty confusing couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I've been busy the last couple days on a promotional project for the Cornerstone Festival, the festival I spend the week shooting website photos for every summer. It's been kind of nice immersing myself in the video tapes I've been editing. Seeing the grounds makes me a little homesick for that dusty, humid, hot slice of Western Illinois farmland. I'll post a link to the finished video when it's ready for distribution. Y'all can hear my professional broadcaster voice doing the narration.

I guess if I have any prayer request, it's that we'd put enough business together that I could keep my job... and if you have a need for any quality professional design or video work, visit my agency's sitehttp://www.redpenguinent.com or e-mail me and I'll send you a demo reel and portfolio on DVD. Quality work, cheap prices... and you'd get to work hands on with me (which I would hopefully think is a good thing. :-D)

Sorry about the lack of blogging...

it's been an interesting couple of weeks. There's not a lot I can go
into, but there's been some major things going on at work that to say
they're good would be a major misnomer. In any case, it's fairly
depressing stuff and I've been a bit of a zombie since the beginning
of the year.

I've been hitting the weights pretty hard this month. One of the
things I've been happy about the YMCA having is an assissted pull up
machine. I've never had the upper body strenght to match my lower body
strength. I haven't been able to do a pull up EVER, so to have a
machine that can offset some of that weight so that I can work up to
doing them without weight assistance has been great.

I'm also happy that I'm pressing over 500 lbs on an incline leg press
now. The thing that sucks about it is that it's plate loaded so it
takes a while to haul the 45lb plates to get up to that weight. I'm
interested to see how that will translate to the cycling season. I
haven't been losing weight this month, but I can see that there's been
a dent in my love handles.

Anyway, if you're the praying sort, now would be the time to pray.
I'll say more when I feel i can, but I hate watching things collapse
in on themselves.