Last Time for A While...I Promise

I know I talk a lot about Butch Walker, but there's probably a reason for that. So he has a new album out (called "I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart") and as seems to be the usual way of things these days, there was a pre-order for the new album about 6 weeks before it came out. There were three different options, each including more stuff as you went up in price. The option I took got us the CD, a signed copy of the album on vinyl (which included a poster and a copy of the CD album on CD), a poster, and high-quality mp3 downloads of the album tracks.

The box came the other day and this is the picture I took:

I know most of you are probably rolling your eyes, but this was one of the most awesome things I've ever gotten in the mail.

So since I was able to download the album, and I ended up with two copies on CD, if anyone wants to see what all the fuss I make about this guy is about, drop me a comment and I'll get one of the CDs to you. The first CD even comes with a card that is redeem-able for a download of Butch's cover of "You Belong With Me".

Have a good weekend. The foot's still killing me, so I'll see you all on Monday.

--Paul

Surprise! (Again)

Get ready folks because it looks like the old way of life is coming back in style. That's right. Expect a few more blogs each week. The reason? Well, I'm glad you asked.

It was a week ago this past Tuesday. I woke up and started my day and as I was getting ready to get on the elliptical, I noticed that my foot was hurting pretty badly. I decided it was probably better to stay off the elliptical. So my foot continued to hurt throughout the week. It never got any worse, but I can't say that it's any better either. I looked around on the internet and decided that it sounded like I had a form of tendinitis. On Monday, I went to see a doctor about it. I figured it would probably be a good idea to go and have it x-rayed just to make sure I hadn't fractured or broken something. Turns out I was right about the tendinitis. The bad thing is that pretty much everything that they could give me would either interact with my blood thinner or make me more likely to have a bleeding ulcer, so basically I've got to just wait it out wearing tennis shoes and keeping off of it as much as I can.

So I'm supposed to stay off of it for at least two weeks after my symptoms go away. That means that I'm returning to my previous morning schedule and you'll now be seeing a daily blog. Have a good Thursday.

--Paul

Waiting To Hear

There are times when I don't really understand anything. Usually at about the point I'm ready to give up, God slaps me on the back of the head and straightens me out. This past Sunday, he made a preemptive strike when he gave Bro. Matt the sermon for Sunday morning. I don't have the sermon online yet, but I'm going to put it up this morning. Check here later this morning if you're interested in listening to it. For the rest of the blog I just want to quote a part of the passage Bro. Matt used Sunday morning:

Habakkuk 2:1:

I will stand my watch

And set myself on the rampart,

And watch to see what He will say to me,

And what I will answer when I am corrected.

--Paul

Look! A Blog!

That's right. Someone is on top of things this morning. Aren't you proud of me?

So the end of the week turned out pretty good. Wednesday night the church hosted Ugandan Thunder. They're a children's choir made up of orphans from Uganda and they were awesome. They were really a great blessing. It's always interesting to me to get a taste of how other people groups worship. It's always so different from what we as Americans think of as worship. These kids definitely weren't singing out of the Baptist Hymnal but they were praising God in a powerful way.

We've been on a bit of a movie tear here lately. For a while, we just couldn't find time to watch anything but the past two weeks have afforded us the chance to get the Netflix queue moving again. "(500) Days of Summer" was alright. It was a chick flick trying not to be a chick flick. "All About Steve" was just a chick flick being a chick flick. "Night at the Museum 2" was the standard sequel that's not as good as the first one. It was still fun and kids probably love it, but for adults that actually thought the first was great (like me), the second is a let down. Finally, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" was a cute animated movie with your standard life lessons hidden in the plot.

In addition to the rentals, DeAnne and I had a "date night" last night. We went over to Greenville, ate and then watched "Percy Jackson & the Olympians". Having read the book that the movie is based on, the movie was a pretty big disappointment. If you haven't read the book, then it's probably a fine movie but it diverged so much from the source material that we spent most of the time groaning about the changes the movie producers had made. Beyond the unnecessary changes, there were a couple of instances of unnecessary use of foul language that also took away from the movie. So if you haven't read the book, you'll probably enjoy the movie, but if you have read the book, don't be surprised by all the changes they made.

And that's about all I've got today. DeAnne's on her way to Ft. Walton with her mom, so it looks like I'm going to try and get a few things done around the house and hopefully I can get in some good game time this afternoon. See you Wednesday.

--Paul

I'm Starting to Think I'm Terrible At This

So once again, Saturday came and I failed to remember to blog. I had every intention of making it up on Monday but then Monday came and the computer was found to have contracted a virus. I spent the time I normally would use to blog removing said virus. It's gone, but there still seems to be one side-effect that I haven't been able to fix yet. It did something to my network settings and now the computer can't see my network drive that I store my iTunes library on. I haven't put a whole lot of time into fixing the problem. It's not an issue as long as I don't open iTunes and that usually doesn't happen much during the week.

Anyway, so of course the big story I had planned for Saturday was about the snow. We had a great time playing in it Friday. DeAnne was a little more enthusiastic about it than I was though. She couldn't get enough of it. I, however, had had plenty by the time late Friday afternoon rolled around. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it and it was amazing that it snowed that much here, but after we had made our snowman and thrown some snowballs and made a snow angel I was cold, wet and finished. DeAnne was just cold, wet and ready for more. It was nice for one day but it pretty much just confirmed for me that I have no interest in living anywhere where it snows more than one day a year.

Edwin and I finished up playing the first "Army of Two" last night. I can't say that I would recommend it. The controls were fairly wonky at times and the storyline was pretty pitiful. It had a lot of good ideas for co-op game play but it just didn't seem like any of those ideas were executed in a good way. There's a sequel out but because of the bad taste this first game gave us, I don't think we'll ever try the second one.

So now it's on to other games. I've got a couple of games from Christmas that I still haven't played, so I'm going to be moving on to Red Faction: Guerrilla. I've got Dragon Age: Origins also, but it's such a long and involved game that I think I'm going to tackle it last.

Maybe this week will be the week that I remember to blog on Saturday. I did pretty good for a while there but here lately I've just been off my game. Anyway, see you then.

--Paul

More Apologies

I once again failed to blog on Saturday. I had every intention of
making up for it this morning but it would seem that our computer has
contracted a virus. So with malwarebytes currently scanning away, I'm
sending this in from my iPod. Hopefully by Wednesday things will be
back to normal and this week I can remember yo blog on Saturday.

--Paul

Hmm...

So not much has happened in two days.

We finally got around to watching the first episode of Lost. It was pretty awesome but I don't know that we really learned that much. The ads have been saying that the time for questions is over, but really, the first episode raised more questions than it answered, so I don't see where the Lost formula has really changed much. Who knows, they've got 16 hours to go counting the episode that aired last night (that we haven't watched yet), so maybe the real answers will start coming soon. I have my doubts though. I really think this show is going to end with a lot of stuff still hanging.

Rumors are going around that Dish Network is going to add 8 more HD channels today. I'm not sure what they're going to be or if I'll be getting all 8, but I'm always happy to see them add more. The list of channels that we watch that aren't in HD is getting pretty short. Hopefully that list will be even shorter after today. It's still going to be a while, but we're getting closer to the day when SD just goes away and HD is just the standard. It's strange to think that the next generation of kids won't know what SD is. I guess it's kind of like when I was growing up and color had completely taken over and black and white was just a faint memory and what you watched Andy Griffith in.

Anyway, see you on Saturday (I promise not to forget this week).

--Paul

Off The Grid

We had a fairly normal weekend. I'm not sure what happened Saturday, but blogging didn't even cross my mind. I realized yesterday afternoon that I hadn't blogged Saturday so I figured I would make it up to you by writing one today. I guess I'll get back to my routine tomorrow.

DeAnne's been reading the "Percy Jackson" series for a couple of weeks and with the first movie coming out Friday, I went ahead and picked up the first book and started on it over the weekend. So far it's been pretty good. There are a few themes that seem to be borrowed from "Harry Potter", but it's probably just unavoidable type comparisons rearing their head. I'm not sure what grade level the book is, but it's probably a year or two below the first "Harry Potter" book so it's a pretty easy read and I've been moving through it pretty quickly.

I know I talk a lot about Butch Walker, but I'm just trying to spread the love, so bear with me. His new album releases on vinyl this week so news and information have started hitting the internet at a steady pace. The biggest thing is that you can listen to the entire album streaming here. I listened to it Thursday and it's another great album. It has a much stronger country flavor to it than his previous albums. It seems that the older Butch gets, the more he mellows and moves away from his arena rock roots. That's not necessarily a bad thing as his trademark wit and humor are still the standout facets of his song writing. I don't know how he does it, but he just keeps turning out great song after great song.

So that's about it for now. I'll see you back here on Wednesday.

--Paul

Possibly the Coldest Day of My Life

Saturday was probably the first day that I really started to feel better. Since I was feeling better, I decided to go ahead and go to the Senior Bowl with Edwin. It was cold. Very cold. But we had a good time. It was interesting seeing so many fans from so many different schools and while there was some heckling, for the most part everyone was pretty pleasant. The two largest groups of fans were for Alabama, who had the most players on a team with six, and Florida. The Florida people were there to see Tebow one last time. It's too bad he stunk it up so bad. The South team just couldn't get anything going and they got beat by the North pretty badly. It was a fun game though. We made it through three quarters before we called it quits and when we got up to leave, I was worried that my legs weren't going to work. It was that cold.

T.V. shows continue to return with Lost starting its final season last night. I haven't watched the episode yet, but I can hardly wait to see how this show ends. I just hate that they moved it to Tuesday night. Our Tuesday night DVR schedule has gotten to be pretty crazy this year and it's mainly because they moved Lost. If they had left it on Wednesday night, it would have worked out a lot better for us.

One other T.V. note: Sunday night was the Grammy awards. I don't normally watch them, but I made one exception for this year. Butch Walker was asked to perform his version of Taylor Swift's song "You Belong With Me" with Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks. If you saw the show, he was the guy on the left side of the screen (Swift's right hand side) playing what looked like a sawed-off banjo (it was actually a "banjolin", a cross between a banjo and a mandolin). It was kind of surreal seeing him on stage on T.V. just two weeks after we sat 15 feet away from him in Atlanta.

Have a good rest of the week. See you on Saturday.

--Paul