Too Much Fun

I could not figure out what to title this post. The past two weekends have been quite “big” for me, and they followed just after the two-week recovery from Hurricane Ike. It has been an exhausting month, mostly fun, but definitely exhausting. I just had the premiere showing of my movie “Spirits Among Us.” It was my first feature-length film, and I just recently completed all the post-production, so the weeks leading up to the event were filled with preparation activity. In addition, on the prior weekend we had a guest, Rich Christiano, visit with us and show his movie “Time Changer” at our church. Getting his event prepared, promoting it, then helping run the event was great fun, but it consumed some energy. Of course, just two weeks prior, Hurricane Ike pummeled us. We had gotten our electricity back on just a few days prior to Rich’s arrival. I can’t say the Hurricane was fun, but some very good things came out of it. We thoroughly cleaned our refrigerators and freezes, the kids learned to do activities other than electronic games, we got to know our neighbors better, and we got to endure a little hardship together as a family-which is actually good for relationships in my opinion.

So, I’m exhausted and life is switching back to “normal” mode. After I get rested up I’m sure my brain will take off running again with new ideas for media projects. So I will probably switch back to “abnormal mode” in a few weeks, which for me is actually more “normal.”


The photos are of my car parked at our lake house with so many branches down that the driveway is blocked, a turtle that showed up in our yard after the storm, and a scene from the movie premiere. Visit my other blog SpiritsAmongUsMovie.blogspot.com to learn more about that.

Too Busy to Blog

What can I say? Visit my movie blog "Spirits Among Us" to find out what I'm up to. I'm sorry that I don't have time to write much more. It is a good, busy time.

The Edit's Done!

Post-production of my movie "Spirits Among Us" has absorbed much of my time and energy lately, but the editing portion is done. I still need to author the dvd, finish the dvd cover art and poster, and plan the premiere party, but having the edit done is a huge milestone.
You can read a bit more at my movie blog "spiritsamongusmovie.blogspot.com" if you like.
We also having been spending a lot of fun time out on our boat. That is great fun. I bought a kneeboard and the kids are loving that. I will bring the camera next time a grab a few photos.
I saw a hearse today. It had dual chromed exhaust pipes. I have never before seen a high performance hearse. I guess its for those who don't want to be late to their own funeral.
I was walking our dog today. While crossing at the crosswalk at a 4-way stop a man left the stop sign and started heading right for us. I jumped back and pulled Sandy (our dog) back with me, and the car stopped before getting too close. At first I was mad, but then I saw he was talking on his cell phone, and I realized he just had more important things to do. He was probably thinking "I'm on the phone, do you mind!"
I'm glad hurricane Gustav didn't wreak too much havoc. Praise the Lord for that.

Radio Silence

In my last post I mentioned that I was basically going brain dead between my periods of furious activity on my three projects. This weekend I got "away from it all" and spend a couple days doing maintenance on our lake house. A wind storm had blown down quite a few large branches that needed to be cut up and burned, and the lawn needed mowing. It is nice to take a break from mental work and constant communication and just have a time of silence and hard physical labor.

After a few hours of working my mind began to come alive again. Soon I was going over the remaining tasks on the project in Thailand and how to fold them all into the next couple months, and my mind began working on the Christian Media organization that has been brewing for almost a year now. But then something terrible happened. I had gotten the fire burning, which was no easy task since the wood was soaked from several days of rain. The fire was very smokey. The billows of smoke sometimes cast a shadow over the whole yard. As I piled branches onto the raging fire the smoke billowed even more. Then "it" happened. The phrase "old smokey" popped into my head, then the song "on top of old smokey" started playing in my head. It is bad enough when a song gets stuck in your head, and of course it is usually just one line of the song, and it just goes over and over. But what happened next is truly sickening, the words changed into the childish version of the song. The words of the song usually sung by very, very young children are as follows: "On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese, I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed." So, that infantile chorus kept running over and over in my head to the tune of "on top of old smokey," for about three hours. Three hours! I'm not exaggerating to make a point, I was actually tormented for that long. I could not get it to stop! Dave Barry wrote in one of his humorous books that the only way to get a stupid song out of your head was to sing it to someone else and infect them. The "song infection" will then jump out of your head and into theirs. I agree it is not the nicest thing to do, but hey, sometimes it is just survival of the fittest. In my situation I had no one around to infect. I was considering calling the guy in Thailand (the one who called me late Friday night) wake him up, sing the one line of the song, then hang up. I didn't do it but it crossed my mind. The song finally left me, but not without first bringing me to the brink of insanity.

I came home after the weekend of work and solitude. It was nice to see my family. Tonight my wife made dinner, we had spaghetti and meatballs. Can you believe it? I excercised enormous restraint. I could have infected the whole family with that stupid song at dinner time, it would have been great fun. My considerate side won out over my childish side, this time.

Blog Shortcut

It has been a busy time. I am working on two engineering projects and trying to wrap up post-production on my movie, "Spirits Among Us." It is a good kind of busy, but busy nonetheless.

What I am finding is that this current state is consuming 100% of my mental and creative energy. I have nothing left for insights, or interesting thoughts to post on the blog. I'm mental, that is certain, but just not very creative right now (outside my three projects). When I'm not working on the movie or one of the engineering projects I have noticed that I have no thoughts in my head. It is very quiet, just kind of a hollow sound. No self-talk, no debates, no observations epiphanes or insights, just an eerie silence.

So, I am taking a shortcut and giving you a link to my movie blog, here it is:



www.Spiritsamongusmovie.blogspot.com

Overdue Appreciation

I decided that this post was important enough to reference it in both my blogs. Please click the link below to go to my "Spirits Among Us" blog to read my post "Overdue Appreciation."

CLICK HERE PLEASE

Voyage

The title of my blog “Stumbling Toward God” isn’t just an attention-grabbing title, it is actually what I feel like I have been doing most of my life. I try to know God better, and serve Him better, but I seem to trip over many things and I often trip over myself.

I’m still learning that relationships hold a higher ranking than accomplishments. For some that comes easy. For me it does not. It is our voyage that is the goal, not the outcome of our efforts. It is a voyage largely into the unkown. I could be called the stumbling voyager.

Here is an excerpt from a recent devotional “My Utmost for His Highest” that articulates my thoughts well:

“We tend to think that if Jesus Christ compels us to do something and we are obedient to Him, He will lead us to great success. We should never have the thought that our dreams of success are God’s purpose for us. In fact, His purpose may be exactly the opposite. We have the idea that God is leading us toward a particular end or a desired goal, but He is not. The question of whether or not we arrive at a particular goal is of little importance, and reaching it becomes merely an episode along the way. What we see as only the process of reaching a particular end, God sees as the goal itself.

It is the process, not the outcome, that is glorifying to God.”


So, I’ve been trying to add “activities with other humans” to my daily “to do” list. If I don’t put it on the list, I won’t do it. Isn’t that “interesting.” An example of this is, last weekend I actually did very little “productive” activity. I spent a lot of time with family and friends, below are some photos to prove it. That was time well spent, even though I had to convince myself it was okay to not work for about 1 day. I’m learning.

The first photo is one of our new boat. If you look closely you can read the name of the boat "Voyager."