a bittersweet farewell

they had a nice breakfast farewell party for me this morning and the people in my department said all these nice things about my personality and optimism. it's hard enough to leave without all that! i think i've said it before, but one of the hardest parts of the decision to leave was the loyalty i felt to both the plans we had for the rest of the year and the people i work with and for. however, in the end, we felt it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up.

we're looking forward to a long weekend in nashville and then i start the new job and classes on tuesday. happy labor day weekend!

weekend

on saturday we had our work fantasy football draft at my house. what's the worst thing i could do on friday night before the draft (well, related to the draft itself)? yes, lose the one magazine i had bought to create my cheat sheet. luckily, after a couple of hours, i found it had fallen under our bed. the draft was a blast! lindsay and jake went to the mall and to run errands and 8 of the 10 team owners came over to draft in person and eat pizza. i like my team and i'm looking forward to the football season though my heart isn't really invested in any one team - indy colts (for peyton), tn titans (for nashville), wash redskins (for dc), and (minimally) the cinci bengals (for around here).

after church on sunday, we went to the mall and got me a new personal cell phone since i just have the one for work and i'll be giving that back this week. i was debating between a motorola slvr and a treo 650 and i finally gave up trying to convince myself that i might use all the pda features of the treo and i went with the slvr. if nothing else, it has itunes on it and is working as a temp replacement for my busted ipod. i gotta contact apple about that...

if you need the cell number just e.mail me. if you need my e.mail, leave a comment.

so, umm... i quit my job

yeah, big news. i got a job offer from lexmark and it was too good to pass up (even considering the tuition remission from working at asbury). the job came up out of the blue... twice. i responded to a random careerbuilder e.mail before july 4th week, had a phone interview on july 5th from a panera while on vacation, and had an in-person interview the next week. i didn't really hear anything for a while so i thought it was a dead issue. then, they called me last week out of the blue and basically offered me the job.

it makes me sad because we had a lot of big things going on before the end of 2006 that i helped create and design and now i won't see them implemented. however, the pay and experience was too good to pass up. this was the type of job i was looking for right out of college - low level programming. the drive will be longer, but they're really flexible with me for classes and i'll still be able to finish my m.div. degree in 2-3 more part time years. the end is near.

my last day here is thursday, august 31st; i'll have a 4-day labor day weekend; and then i'll start the new job on tuesday, september 5th. classes start that evening as well.

circus

on saturday, we took jake to the circus for the first time ever. he sat and watched all the sights in amazement; much as he does when watching certain programs on sprout. we went with other friends and overall it was a great weekend. sickly lindsay got to rest some and hopefully she will be able to continue to do so.

to update, lindsay thought she had gotten strep throat for like the third time in 9 months, but it turned out to be mono. she never stops working much and her body continued to get rundown and she developed a minor case of pneumonia in her left lung. we went to an ent dr. last week and she is scheduled to get her tonsils out at the end of september when she's hopefully back to normal from the mono et al.

i read a good passage in the imitation of christ today about how we go through trials (aka lots of work and school for me) for a period of time for a better time later. i'll have to bookmark that one for when the semester is about 2/3rds done and i'm trying to press on :-)

the imitation of christ

so i was looking at the ol' bookshelf the other day and the imitation of christ by thomas a kempis jumped out at me. i started reading this book when i was alone in arlington, va for 6 months before me and lindsay got hitched. the book is broken into 4 parts with numerous chapters of about 2 pages each. i would read it each morning with some breakfast or something and the whole experience really transformed (or spiritually formed?) me into a little bit more of a quiet, contemplative soul. i only got to about the middle of the 3rd part before putting it aside because the 4th part is about christ in the sacrament and i simply wasn't ready to read about that yet. i am now though and i'm excited to finish this spiritual classic (written around 1425).

fall classes

i've had a couple of questions about this recently and i'm looking ahead to it these days so here's the skinny on my fall classes:

classes start right after labor day: i have a tuesday night class (church planting - 3hrs), a wednesday afternoon class (speech - 2hrs), and an online 'class' - mentored ministry for 2hrs. really though, i mainly do something with my church for 8 hrs a week and then the 'class' portion is reviewing case studies or something. i hear the online version is a lot easier than the on-campus version so i was really excited when i found out over the weekend that i got into the online section. plus, now i only have one class during the day like i'm supposed to.

that gives me 7 hours, but i'm really interested in the church planting class and there's not a ton of work for it besides a big semester project that i'm going to enjoy. in some of the speech classes, you only have to come on the days you give your speech, but i hope mine isn't a joke like that. it's been a while
since i've preached and i'm hoping to get some good stuff from this class (official title: communication as christian rhetoric). and for the mentored ministry class, i'm going to be hosting a small group that i'm really looking forward to and keeping up with the other small groups in our church. i'll have more info on the small group when i finalize some things. i expect we'll have our first meeting on the sunday evening following labor day weekend (sept. 10th) at, say, 6pm. if you're reading this, you're invited to join us.

normalcy

i meant to post on friday that everything had simply been kinda normal for the past couple of weeks and i simply didn't think of anything to write. lindsay has been under the weather a bit and is going to see an e-n-t doctor this week about possibly getting her tonsils out soon (2 cases of strep throag and 1 case of tonsilitis all in about the past 9 months).

breaking out of that normalcy, we went with my dad and some of his friends to six flags - kentucky kingdom on saturday. the tickets were free through one of the friends and we had a really fun day. jake enjoyed all the excitement and had fun on some rides. i'll see if we got any good pics...

on a sad note, my ipod is messed up and i'm not sure what to do. i can't even force it to go to 'disk mode' so that i can totally restore it or anything. ::sigh:: help!