What happened today.

I woke up and the neighbors were taking off for the rocks. I said wait I'm coming. We then took an hour and a half drive to El Dorado Canyon just south of Boulder. WOW is this area gorgeous! Right after passing through the park gate you immediately past huge multi-pitch walls of rock with climbers scattered all over them left and right. I'm sure my jaw was hanging. So anyway, we had a great time. This area for the most part does not have bolts in the rock, so you have to trad climb the routes. I've never trad climbed, but the people I went with have experience and gear to do it. So I followed them on top-rope. I guess it was a good step for working towards placing trad gear, because I got to clean the route behind them and therefore learned a bit about good piece placement.

No particular subject - just stuff

Well there you go - nothing in particular. This week has been good. It's just tuesday, but I feel like good things are happening. Hopefully El and I will get jobs soon - we have a few leads. And I believe that we're going to start getting more involved with a church here that we like pretty well. We really like the preacher at this church - we've heard good things come from his mouth - things that challenge us, things that make sense for today, ways that we can think about and apply our Christianity in a real way.

Last Sunday he was listing a few characteristics of the first church and one of them was that it was a worshipping church. He was saying that the prime purpose for worship is to praise and exalt God. It may sound simple - it may sound like common sense. But (and this may be a particularly applicable subject to ponder if your church employs instruments in worship) isn't it true that sometimes while worshipping, we're not actually lifting God up - sometimes we think about US. About how WE look, about how WE sound. Maybe even about how dang well that lead guitarist is pickin' those tunes on his electric. Anyway - it surprised me how such a simple teaching made me scrutinize my actions/thoughts while singing worship songs.

I've been playing around with a free picture editor that I dowloaded a while back called The Gimp. And here's one item that i've produced with a few of the tools that I've learned so-far:

It's an excellent piece of software and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes picture editing and gets miffed at Paint for its lack of tools and options.

Have a great day!

~Josh

Hey. Well it's been a fairly eventful day.
I was happy to spot our friend Chris Quan log into gchat today. Haven't spoken with him in a while. Turns out he may be visiting Colorado soon - which is great because that means that he'd be visiting me.

Ellen and I rode our bikes to a restaurant close to CSU called The Wok. I had a delicious plate of pork curry and rice and she had sesame chicken and rice. So good. Then after dinner, we were unlocking our bikes outside the building while I was trying to unwrap my fortune cookie. Well I was messing with the lock and unwrapping (apparently i can't multi-task) and the next thing I knew, I was eating my delicious little stale cookie without the fortune in my hand. It'd been chewed into pulp with the rest of it and it was too late to retrieve it in one piece. Luckily there was a trashcan nearby for me to spit out my good fortune.

I did forget to mention that Ellen got bit by a black widow - much to our shock and surprize. It was at like 3:00 in the morning a couple of days ago. We went to bed late, scrammbled into bed after the lights were out and she said there might be a spider in the bed. I thought "yah right, it's probably just a crumb or a piece of fuzz (like it always is)." I turned the light on and there on the tip top of our comforter lay a shiny, garbonzo bean-sized pearly black spider. It was poised. I put it in the bathtub and smushed the living daylights outta that creep. We slept on the futon for a couple of nights. She IS doing much better by the way - the pain has mostly stopped in all areas of her body but directly behind the bite. Ladies and Gents, she will live.

Ever seen Hot Fuzz? Pretty crazy movie. We watched it the other night. Then it dawned on me - "Those to guys are the same actors as in 'Shaun of the Dead'!" That's a good one too. I recommend both. Just be warned of the violence and cursing. "Is it true that there's a point on a man's head where if you shoot it, it will blow up?" - Danny Butterman. Lol.

I finally had an interview today. I was SO nervous about it - even though I had plenty of reason to believe that I was a little overqualified and that the work wasn't quite up my alley. But the interviewer was very nice and very easy to talk to. She put me at ease after only a couple of words. And I ended up walking away feeling proud of myself - which doesn't happen very often. That interview turned out being the highlight of my day - despite the fact that I didn't get hired. ^.^

Gosh, I need to upload the pictures that I took from Bhutan. Soon. Very soon.

Goodnight!

~Josh

What is happening?

Good day. Well once again, I've come to my neglected blog to say that there is much to tell. Several things have happened over the past few months. So I'll see if I can sum it all up and then come back to share details over the next few days.

I've been meaning to post for weeks. I think about it every day. The problem is, I always think about it too much. I keep thinking about what I will say and how. I think I worry to much about content and formatting that I just miss the whole concept of bloggin - to keep a regular account of what's going on. That being said, I will again try to update regularly. 'Cause I know it's fun that way. It's fun recieving little bits of news and info every day about people you know and care about.

I am currently unemployed, so lately I've had quite a bit of time on my hands to search the internet for cool stuff. I think that Dustin has sort of inspired me in a way to explore new web content and internet tools more and more. I'm very impressed by his intarweb resourcefulness. The key to unlocking the jewels of the web is knowing how to search it. And I think that Dustin always finds what he's looking for. He's like the master of weblinks. Every time we chat, the first thing he sends me is a link - whether it's news, software, comics, or a funky cat macro, I'm always intrigued with his findings. Anyway, I think that my internet searching has been sharpened over the past month or so. It's probably due to all the job searching I've been doing!

I guess that's enough for now. I'm starting to wonder which is worse - keeping the job you hate, or searching for a new job after quitting the job you hated. Trying to stay content with my current state of existence... As you can see by the pic i just uploaded (And i mean JUST. When you don't have a job it's amazing some of the things you can do on the fly!), I need a break from the computer screen and the nebulous job searching.

~ Josh