BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

Yesterday I met with Jeff and I talked a little about what churches we would probably go to on Sundays until we started our own service. So between that and thinking about what it is going to be like to move into an area that has a decent amount of churches, I figured I’d look up what there is available in the area. I found a website for the Minnesota Council of Churches which I thought was pretty cool. I figured they would have a group like that since I haven’t lived in a place yet where my Dad hasn’t been involved in an area church group with the other local pastors, but it was cool that they have this website. Also, the building that houses the administration for this organization is about two miles from the place I’m thinking about living, and they have pretty nice facilities that are available to rent, which I thought was cool. Also, from that site, I found out that there are 150 Lutheran churches within 15 miles of the zip code of the apartments we’re looking at.

I like these kinds of area church organizations, they do a really good job at getting churches to cooperate on common goals, and it is always a good idea to know who you are supposed to be working with in your area. I think maybe I’ll check and see when they have meetings for the local Minneapolis area pastors and either see if Jeff wants to go, or just go myself, because getting to know the people around you can be a great resource and it helps people to get to know you when your the new guy in town. Also this organization partners with separate organizations that target specific areas of need in the community. There is a great looking program called Minnesota Collaborative Anit-Racism Initiative which is something that a lot of us feel strongly about in the church plant team.

Also I found pages for the Minneapolis and St. Paul Area Council of Churches…which is basically the local version of the state wide deal. I liked their web pages a lot because it detailed out some plans for helping aid the community, and they had a cool tag line “uniting people of faith - serving people in need.” This could most likely be a good place to start looking for some outreach and servant type of work until we find our niche. Also, there aren’t any Vineyards on those two organizations “member churches” lists, probably because all the Vineyards are in the suburbs, but non-the-less it would be cool to be the first one on there.
Anyway, Mom has been giving me a lot of stuff to think about with churches working together for a common goal, and I think one of the visions I have for our church plant is to partner with the churches around us, not work against them, not trying to take members from their pews, but to reach people outside the church with them. Wesley said “If your heart is my heart, then take my hand” which means, if you have a heart for Jesus, then who cares about theological differences because we share the same goal. That is really how I feel about starting this church in Minneapolis, that and I really had a vision of building a larger church so that there can be a place where area Vineyards, or are churches depending on what we are doing, can come and do training or seminars. It’s funny, but I never did think of having a small church (which is OK BTW) in Minneapolis…ever since I went up there with Jeff, I always figured that it would be a decent sized church, especially after the church planting coordinator for the region said that there needs to be a large church in the area for training and teaching.

Anyway, that was my find of the day, so now I’m all out of stuff to write..later people.

Insomnia Sucks!

Why can’t I just fall asleep….I hate this feeling. I wish this over-active mind of mine could rest, but the thoughts swirling in my brain make me feel like my head is sprinting laps around a mental track of frustration. I asked God for peace so that I might rest…I’ve received none, I asked him to take a burden that I perceive in front of me because I don’t think it is mine to bare, but I still feel its weight. I came to a dead end in my mind time and time again. So, whats next….I guess I put my head on the pillow, and try hard to clear my head one more time, because I need some sleep now, or I’ll be getting it during a sermon no matter how bad I want to stay awake.

Sorry if this seems weird…I mean it is 6 am and I didn’t get enough sleep last night either, so if it wasn’t weird I would be pretty good at going without sleep….but I know I’m not, and this does sound weird when I re-read it.

Check this out if you are even remotely interested in Tech TV. I especially like the part where it says that Leo Laporte is going to bail on hosting the Screen Savers. I hate that guy, he always tells people stuff that isn’t completely true, pushes his lame Mac stuff, and says retarded crap. I made a game out of watching the show for the first six months to a year of having the channel by yelling at the TV every time he said something that was stupid, and pointing out regularly how he was wrong so that I could completely destroy any chance anyone had of learning something incorrect from him. It was great….then the game got boring…and he has been saying less about the technical side of things lately….doing more opinion based stuff, which is OK, because he has a pretty good take on the future of technology and politics revolving around tech stuff.

Also, if Comcast buys out Tech TV and does merge it with G4 that would be cool, cuz that G4 channel sucks. I watched it for a little while once…it was so boring…like a super dragged out version of X-Play on Tech TV, with worse reviews, and it is really boring watching LAN games of two competing teams playing Halo CTF. So maybe we could get a couple more video game shows on Tech TV and get rid of the constant battle bots during the day…mix it up a little bit…that would be nice.

Just thought I would pass on a juicy slashdot find for those of you who are interested.

So, last night I went to Legends…had a few mugs with the boys, haven’t done that since last summer…felt good to be out again. Good times. Hit Labambas on the way home….super nachos…mmmmm.

But the events leading up to this night out were what interests me particularly, and are the subjects of what I’ve been thinking about.
First off, how hard is it to do your own dishes when you use them. Why does Rob, Squirrel, and Suketu not do them when they are done with them. Seth, Dirk and I have been religiously doing our dishes for quite some time now, and we are getting really sick of doing entire sink fulls of dishes just to have room to fill up our water pitcher. That is just stupid. Also, why is that the stove becomes a storage place for dirty pans and cookie sheets. That is just silly and lazy. Finally, why do people have entire stacks of cups in their rooms….you know who you are.
So, after this annoyance was realized due to the severe lack of mugs…I only could find two and we used to have five…..I came up with a proposal to this whole thing to nip it in the bud. It will be further discussed at a house meeting when everyone returns, but for now I will detail it because this will give people time to think about it.
1. If you use a dish that is not yours, it must be washed before you can use another dish that is not yours, preferably you would wash the dish immediately after using it.
2. If you use a dish that is yours and don’t feel like washing it, it does not get stored in a common area of the house while dirty…..this goes especially for the cups/glasses all over the place and the frying pans and pots.
3. Failure to comply with 1 will result in your loss of ability to use other peoples dishes.
4. I don’t have a consequence to number 2 thought up, but it seems fair that if you don’t want to wash your dishes you shouldn’t have to, but you also shouldn’t take up shared space in the house to store your dirty dishes.
5. Shared space is not your closet….after a week your clothes need to be out of the common spaces….exceptions include coats and sweaters, because it gets absurd to be constantly dragging your winter coat into and out of your room when you are never going to put it on in there.
6. The Foreman grill gets cleaned every time it is used…right after the food comes of it…because it cleans better while still hot….if you don’t like that rule…don’t use the thing….except for Dirk, because it is his…but he hates when people don’t clean it, so I know he’ll clean it too.

People of the house are free to respond if they think this is a good set of rules…also we should figure out who is going to clean the kitchen next…because lets be serious…it is pretty obvious that Seth has done it more then the rest of us a by a good bit, and it is also obvious that Dirk and I have cleaned more then the rest of you. Also, people not from the house can suggest better ways to organize dish doing in a house with 5-7 people in it..especially people that may live with some of the house guys in the near future….because the people who are good about doing dishes are sick of this crap, and I can’t think of anything better than this.

Also, I drank some wine last night. It was a Shiraz-Cabernet Sauvignon, and I liked it a good bit, but still just a little to much tannin for me…I’m still getting used to that part. I liked the straight Shiraz a little better. Seth said that I lack complexity because of that…I told him that is OK, because I’m a complex guy in a lot of other ways….if I like a simple wine I can probably deal with that.

Dirk and I are going swimming later today. That should be hella cool. I love swimming, and it is a great workout, really cardiovascular, works more then just your legs, in fact usually my arms are more tired then my legs afterward. I also love diving, but given that I haven’t worked on my flexibility for a while, I doubt I can do everything I used to do. Also, I slipped once doing a gainer and almost hit my head on the board…and I slit my thumb open doing a laid out backflip because I came down too close to the board…so my nerves have been pretty shaky whenever I want to try to do one of those dives again. Diving can be somewhat of a workout…I usually feel like I got some good ab work done after a couple hours of just going off the board, but swimming laps is much better in terms of a cardio workout I think, and I don’t stay as long…maybe an hour or little less, so if I leave work at 4 I’ll be home by 6 after walking there and back.

So that is it for now…I had some other thoughts, but I think the beer and weird dreams ate them…maybe I’ll remember them later.

I was looking at snowboards and skiing areas the past couple of days. There is a place that is 5 miles away from the Mall of America. How sweet is that. That makes it 20 to 30 minutes tops from some of the places were are looking at living. Looking at equipment, I definitely am going to need some help picking my stuff. I know I need a fairly short board because I’m short, but it needs to be stiff to handle my weight. Also, I’m almost positive I am going to get strap in boots and bindings, not step in. Unless someone presents a good argument for step ins, I doubt it would be worth it to get those. The only advantage I’ve seen directly is the fact that you can get in and out of them faster. That is my main complaint about snowboarding, it takes too long to get on and off the lift. You have to sit down and get strapped back in while skiers are already heading down the hill….how crappy is that.

Just if you were wondering this is a link to the place close to Minneapolis. There are a couple of other places that look a little better, but they aren’t within a few minutes of where I want to live…I couldn’t go snowboarding after work at those places…and I could go for half days and not feel bad because I didn’t drive very far. Also, a season pass is $300, which isn’t terrible. The trail map looks a little lame, so I might still need to talk to people to see if it is worth it to get a pass there. But for as simple as the trails look it might be a good place to learn how to not suck at the snowboarding, and it does have a half pipe and terrain park, so it can’t be that boring. Alex, I need you to go to google and search for “Minneapolis skiing” (not in quotes tho) and see what comes up, and look at some of there maps and tell me which ones close to the city looks like they don’t suck.

So I had an echo-cardiogram today. That was pretty cool. It was almost just like and ultrasound, but for my heart instead of for a baby. The only part that sucked is that they couldn’t get a great picture of one side of my heart, so they had to give me an IV, but other then a small bruise it’s all good.

This afternoon, I messed with the grill. I cleaned it up some, took all the stuff out of the inside, disconnected the tank, and tipped it over to dump all the crap out. I checked all the hoses as best as I could, and it looked pretty good. So I flipped it back over, Dirk lit it up, and it fired right up, and it looked good. So I went out and bought a new lighter thing…one of those clicker deals with the long nose end, or whatever it is….I call it the “light the grill without singeing my eyebrows clicker thing”…I know it’s a long name, but I feel that a name should be descriptive…and I couldn’t come up with anything better on the fly. After I got home, I fired up the grill, cooked so much better then I’m used to that it burnt my steak, which is OK, because tomorrow it should work better since I know it is cooking hotter. Then Scott came home, he is working 12 hour days, on commission only, so today he didn’t make any money…which sucked. But he should make some soon. Then I hung out and talked with people as they came home. Tomorrow I go to work, do some homework, and chill, because I need lots of rest over break so I can feel good about going back to school…..ONE HALF OF A SEMESTER LEFT…..YEAH!!!!11111ONE11!!!!OMFGWTFBBQ!!!!!1111… &lt — that was a little love for you hoochi-momma Chang boy.

So, other then going home chilling, and eating deer steak, that is whats been up lately.
Also, Lauren is in Minneapolis, and saw a place in the neighborhood we are thinking of planting the church that she liked…and it had one bedrooms available, which should be all we need for a little while. The place had underground heated parking….a great find in Minneapolis (note to self…must find suitable block heater for the BMW for when it isn’t in underground heated parking) and the place had a pool, on-site laundry, and the price was nice which included heating. And it wasn’t internet wired, which some people would think sucks, but I’m kinda of the persuasion that if I pay for it from a company I’ll get more attention by calling the company, instead of messing with apartment people….I’m under this persuasion because I’ve had issues with it before, and so have other people I’ve known. Also, I’m gonna get cable anyway…most likely…so I might as well get the cable modem too, which is what they say is available around there. Next I’m going to check out where the skate parks are in Minneapolis…if that place is close to one, I might be in heaven….fun things to do in the summer and winter….does it get better then that.

So, that is my update…if anyone knows anything about where to live, or not to live, landlords that suck, skiing places, skate parks, or just have advice in general about Minnesota / the Twin Cities, drop me a line.

Well, here I am, sitting at a computer at the Electronics Shop (where I work) in Everitt Labs. I just printed a paper to turn in about half an hour, the paper sorta sucked, and it was supposed to be a rewrite, but it turned more into a small revision. I sorta realized I was pretty happy with the content, and the TA had said of the first draft, that I should go into more detail about Socrates arguments, and how he arrived at his conclusions, and that wasn’t the assignement…I was supposed to critically analyze the Symposium, not regurgitate it. So, I had Dirk read my first paper, and told him to tell me every place he couldn’t follow because I hadn’t talked enough about Socrates argument, and he said he followed the statements I made pretty easily, so I decided if a person who hasn’t read the Symposium could follow my arguments then why should I spew more crap into it that will just clog up the flow of the paper, and if a person were to read my paper, and couldn’t follow it…they could get the book and read the dialogue themselves.

Anyway, that is my little paper spiel, but on to more interesting things.
I had a fight with my Dad the other day, he is overworking himself again. Back on the job for two, maybe three weeks and it is already apparent that he forgot everything he learned about how to do nothing while he was recovering from surgery. I’m going home this weekend, and I wanted to take some friends home to have deer steak, and maybe shoot some guns (don’t laugh….shooting guns is a lot more fun then people think, don’t knock it before you’ve tried it….especially pistols…those are really fun) but Dad has to help with the make-up at a school play on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, and he has a leadership meeting Sunday night. So we can only have deer steak if he makes it Saturday afternoon and puts it in the fridge, and then cooks it on Sunday. (this is OK, because he fries the deer steak, and then cooks it in a sauce, so if he makes the whole thing…all we have to do is put the sauce pan in the oven sometime on Sunday and let it cook all day…and it would still taste great) But this upset me, because I don’t want him to have to do another thing this weekend….I don’t want him to have to cram something like this in with everything else. I want him to ask me, “hey, when are you coming home” and then plan around that. But he blamed me for not calling and telling him when I was gonna be home, and for how long…and I did tell Mom, weeks ago, and I swear I told him too, but I bet he just forgot because he was tired and didn’t write it down when I told him. Also, Lauren knew when I would be home when she was staying there while she was sick….he could have asked then when he was making all these plans.

This whole deal just makes me really mad, and I said some mean stuff while I was talking to him because I was mad….not really nice. Especially when he said “why is your small group more important then my church” and I replied “because my small group is growning”….that is a low blow….and he responded with “my church is growing” and it took a lot from me not to say “yeah, almost as fast as my small group”….but you get the point…I was out of line. But I’m really sick of competing with Dad’s job. He went on and on about how he was there for me growing up, and I wasn’t hurting for attention and stuff, and I was like yeah, I got attention, whenever someone’s long lost cousin who might have gone to our church once, and has distant relatives who tithed 10 years ago aren’t in the hospital. It just blows my mind that my parents would buy a video camera to tape David in high school sports after I graduated lettering in two sports for a total of 5 times, and I won a tournament in wrestling my senior year. They did help me go to Germany, which my brothers didn’t get to do, and that was cool. But I really felt like I came after the church. And now I have a mentally and emotionally beaten and bruised father who can’t quit to save his life….literally….and has to keep doing stuff at the high school even though he doesn’t have any children there anymore. He is going to coach track again this season. I’d be OK with that if he would cut down at the church to make up for it. It is bad enough that he goes there and spends anywhere from 50 to 70 hours a week doing just church stuff, but he now has a sewn together heart, and he is still doing stuff like school plays and high school track. I just wish he would retire, and move to the middle of nowhere, so he would have absolutely nothing to do except fish and hunt….but he would probably just get compulsive about that then. And the most annoying part is that when I say “why don’t you quit doing this crap, you don’t have any kids in school anymore” he says something about how getting in the community is a part of his ministry. Now, I wouldn’t have a problem with that if it weren’t really about him feeling accomplished in his JOB at the expense of time with his family. He was happier while he recovered from his surgery because we told people that no one could even come in the house because of the chance of him getting the flu, and he just spent time talking to me, Mom, Aaron, and David. I wish he could really separate ministry from his job, and then his family from all of that. I can’t tell you how many times growing up I had to hear about how I was hurting his ministry by doing negative things at the church….I was doing negative things…..but his ministry wasn’t my responsibility growing up. (to be fair, I was kicked out of confirmation and youth group…so I was causing a lot of problems….but that is not the point.)

I’m just super annoyed with this whole thing….it is so typical. Sometimes my family drives me nuts trying to squeeze the life out of every last minute….like the time they missed my introduction at senior night for wrestling because they were running early and decided to stop and get more film in case then needed more….that was stupid…if they would have just come to the school I wouldn’t have had to be introduced with my coach. But that is a small example of what a poorly managed schedule, with an obsession for doing more then is humanly possible can result in.

In other news…I am having small group…I need a key for Laurens apartment though, then I am going home….because I have a boat-load of doctors appointments….trying to get the stuff done while I’m still on the folks insurance, then I’m going to be here after Monday, working, studying for a test, and screwing around. So if your in town, stop on by this week.

One last thing….my friend Scott came to my place early this week, from Dekalb where he has been trapped in a lease and jobless for the last few months, and he found a job the second day he was here, so he is going to just double up on the rent, move in with us for a while, and see how that goes….pretty funny though…he filled out 80~somthing applications in Dekalb and got nothing…here he filled out five or six..the next day he had arranged for 4 interviews already, then he went to two, and got the job on the second one. He starts Monday at the Auto Mall as a car salesman. So cool for him.

Now I’m done.

I found an LJ community for Minneapolis, it is called twin_cities and I joined it so I can see what is going on up there. Also, I’m looking for more places to snowboard when I’m there. It looks like there are a few places with in an hour or so, and they have season passes for $300-400, which isn’t too bad.

I know some people think I’m crazy for saying I’m going to head up there, and that is cool. Some people might be mad at me for one reason or another…maybe you feel like we’re bailing on you, or maybe you feel like I’m giving into pressure from Jeff or Lauren or something like that. And I want to say that is cool…I’m OK with people feeling that way…especially the crazy part, because I expected that….but I do want you to say something to me….either in a comment or personally, but if you have very serious concerns call me or come visit (hows that for an excuse to drive down Dink) and I would love to hear them, and take them under consideration, but whatever you do, don’t just hold it in on me, don’t make comments that half say something…just say it…let me know what you think, because I want to know.

Anyway, I need to sleep…my little brother should be comming this weekend, and EOH is tomorrow…and I need mad sleep before then.