This summer session has been a lot busier than i thought it was going to be.  Taking research and clinical 2 together was not a good idea.  The good news is that my last research class is this Thursday and my last presentation in clinicals was last week so things should slow down this weekend.  As luck (providence?) would have it this is just in time for me to split town with my wife for a romantic weekend at a friends wedding.

For those who want the quick update:

Zach has moved in and the adjustment is going well.  We still have a lot of things to iron out, but for the most part it is all good.

I’ve decided to slow down on my schooling just a little bit.  Internship plus three other classes was a bit much this past spring.  I’m cutting back to internship plus two other classes for the fall.  I’ll still graduate next spring, but I won’t get my counseling license until after next summer semester.  Two months of waiting for some extra sanity seems well worth it.

We still don’t have the Subaru back.  I didn’t really expect it back yet, but I miss my car.

The fourth of July was great.  I’ll have some pictures and a fun story posted next week.

That’s it for now.  Hopefully I’ll be back with more interesting stuff next week.

This is a week late, but my wonderful wife and in-laws treated me to what can only be described as an entire fathers-weekend, and I wanted to share.

It started Friday night when for the first Friday in forever I didn’t have to work! Jenny and I stayed in and watched the half-season finale of Battlestar Galactica together. I know I’ve said it before, but this is the best show on TV right now and this episode just proved it. There were three or four times in the course of the episode that I thought “why didn’t they just end the episode there and make that the cliffhanger?” And while they would have been good cliffhangers the final cliffhanger surpassed those other points so far that they seem like small plot points in comparison. It may have been on of the best single episodes of any TV show, ever.

My weekend continued on Saturday, when after spending most of the day at work Jenny took me out to dinner and the O’s game. She got us great seats behind the third base dugout, and it was the best game I’ve ever seen in person. It was really a special night: Great food, great seats, great game all with the best woman. I’m truly blessed.

As icing on the cake Jenny’s parents took the girls for the night, so we went home and had a night…and morning of uninterrupted sleep. We overslept and then proceeded with a lazy day around the house.

It was really a great weekend. I truly have the best wife and in-laws anyone could hope to have! Thanks Mom, Dad and especially Jenny!

A friend told me to spread the word, so here it is:

www.thingsididlastnight.com

Less than 24 hours after getting pummeled by hail my Subaru WRX reached the 100,000 mile…um…milestone!  The real amazing thing:  We bought this car brand new in November of 2002 and between then and now we have had no mechanical problems!  That’s right, zero, none, in 100,000 miles! In fact the only extended time the car has spent in the shop has been from an accident, an attempted break in and now the hail incident.  By comparison our Mazda, which has been a pretty reliable car, has had three minor mechanical breakdowns in 65k miles.  When we bought the Subaru I was able to talk Jenny into getting it because it had amazing reliability and safety reviews compared to the other cars we were looking at.  The fact that it is a cool car and fun to drive was just icing on the cake.  All this to say:  I love my car, and it’s been so good to us that I’m pretty sure our next car will be a Subaru too.

…but it hails.

About the same time Jenny was calling me last night to tell me the power was out at our home thanks to a storm that passed north of our house I was at school in Timonium watching tennis-ball sized hail rain down from the sky and wondering what my car was going to look like when I got out to it after class.  Fortunately the power came back on after an hour, but my car looks like it went through a tiny meteor shower.  The good part is no glass was broken and insurance will cover repairs.  The really frustrating thing is I never have class in Timonium, this is one of two classes I will take up there in the course of my grad school career.  All the other classes I have taken and will take are in Columbia, which got no hail.

After the computer screen breaking and now this I’m wondering what’s going to be next.  I’m starting to feel a bit like Adam has been.

Edit:  After getting onto the SunI feel fortunate for getting away with just a one hour power outage and a pox-marked car.  It could have been a lot worse.

No, the laptop isn’t dead.

Funny story:  I took the laptop to the computer repair store, and the screen worked fine.  I had been getting all these scrambled lines on the screen.  So I took it home, and you guessed it, it started acting up again.  It’s like when you take your car to the mechanic and tell them it’s making a noise, and they say “well, it’s not making it now.”  I hate that.  I’ve figured out that if I slap the back of the monitor just the right way when it’s all scrambled it fixes itself.  I remember my grandad doing that to his old TV set to fix a similar problem.  Isn’t it amazing how far technology has come!

I will be getting the laptop fixed sometime soon.  However, we ordered a new desktop last week, so I’ll probably wait till it comes in so that I have a computer at home.  We decided that with Zachary moving in soon we’d need a decent desktop for him to do his homework and stuff on.

So why no posts?  Life has just been that crazy.  Jenny’s finishing up school, and I have two papers and a midterm exam in the next two weeks.  I still have a lot I want to share, but it’s going to have to wait.

See you soon!

Blah, just when I was starting to get posting again at a decent clip my laptop screen has gone on the fritz.  I’ve got the Laptop hooked up to an old desktop monitor to write this post.  Anyway, I’m going to be taking the laptop over to the computer doctor this afternoon, so I’ll be w/out internet for a few days.

See you when I get the computer back.

I had a chance to see Prince Caspian this week, and I’ve got to say that if you haven’t seen the movie yet and you’re hoping for another movie that is a close adaptation of the book like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was, you’ll be a bit dissapointed.  The movie makers have taken significant liberties both with the story and with the characters.  From a movie perspective I can understand taking some liberties to make a better movie, however, I think they went too far. 

Now let’s be honest here for a second:  Prince Caspian, as it is written by C.S. Lewis would not make the best movie when compared to others in the Narnia series.  There isn’t a ton of action, and the main characters are all rather one-dimensional.  That being said, Caspian is still a good story, and I think the movie makers could have stuck to the source material a bit more closely and still made a very good movie.  I don’t want to give away too much of the movie, so let me give you one example of how sticking to the source material was done well yet still changed things up to make a better movie, and another example of how a new scene was written that, I felt, took away from the movie.

First is the scene with the White Witch.  No, I won’t say more than that, except that all this scene does is take one chapter from the book and gives a sort of “what if” senario, that takes the chapter one step further.  The movie makers simply expand on something in the book.  They don’t write much new or change the characters.  I thought this scene was well done, and made for a better movie.

Second is a scene where Peter, Caspian and their troops storm the castle in order to take an early win in the battle for Narnia.  Check the book, this scene isn’t there.  I understand the need to make a bit more action for the movie, but this scene doesn’t just do that it changes the characters as well.  It makes Peter and Caspian to be young men out for glory and honor, rather than the noble and heroic figures they are in the book.  It’s a shame really, because if they wanted to add more action there is a skirmish between the men and the dwarves + Caspian that is referred to in the book they could have expanded on.  It may not have been as grand as this scene, but it would have stuck closer to the source material.

This scene, for as much as I didn’t like it, did make Peter and Caspian a bit more dynamic than they are portrayed in the book.  However, I felt there were some scenes from the book that were skipped in the movie that would have had a similar, if not as dramatic effect.  My favorite is the scene where Lucy sees Aslan for the second time (that part is in the movie in the form of a dream), and she then convinces her siblings to follow her, as she follows Aslan, even though they can’t see Aslan.  It’s a beautiful scene that portrays Lucy’s faith, and her siblings faith in her.  It also beautifully displays the conflict of faith and doubt that Peter, Susan and Edmund have as they wonder why they can not see Aslan, and one by one come to terms with their doubt and as a result can see Aslan themselves, the theme is still in the movie, but I don’t think the added scenes come close to capturing the simple power this scene had. 

Still, with all my frustrations about the movie, seeing Reepicheep with his little sword and feather on the big screen almost makes up for the liberties the movie makers took. 

In the end, it’s still a good movie, but not as good as TLTWATW.  Allow the movie makers to have their creative way with the story and you’ll enjoy it a lot more.

I only hope that they don’t mess with the next one as much, as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favorite book in the Narnia series.

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend.  We had a blast.  I’ll share more about it over the next couple days.

First, I wanted to share a little story about how the weekend began.  I work doing crisis response as part of my education on Friday nights.  I can’t normally talk about cases, but this one was all over the news.  If you are local maybe you heard about the big accident on 97Friday afternoon.  Well, we almost got called out to do the death notification to the family of the deceased.  I say almost, because we were about ready to go when we found out that by the time the police got the accident under control and got in touch with us the hospital had already notified the family.  I can’t say I was dissapointed.  The thought of having to tell family that their sister/daughter/mother and her unborn child were dead because some truck driver wasn’t paying attention to the road had me flipping out at the thought.  It seems like we hear about accidents a couple times a month, but when you get forced into the situation, or even almost forced into the situation it brings the whole thing to life.  The only thing I could think is God, where the heck were you on this one, followed by thank you for keeping my loved ones safe. 

I don’t know folks.  It’s easy to want to say that everything happens for a purpose.  Sometimes though you just wonder what the purpose of something like this, or the recent earthquake in China are. 

All I know is that night I went home from my shift and snuck into my kids room and gave them each a big hug and kiss.  Then I went to bed with my wife and held her as close as I could until I fell asleep.

If you think about it send up a prayer for the Sanchez family today.  While most of us were celebrating the long weekend they were mourning the loss of two loved ones.

Believe it or not I am now a little more than halfway through my Masters in Pastoral Counseling.  I have a hard time believing it, the past year and a half have really been a blur.  Over the next couple weeks I’m going to be posting about some of the things I have learned thus far about me, about ministry and about God.  First I thought I’d give a brief summary of my experience so far to give you some perspective on what’s been going on.

I started the program January of 2007, and was taking classes part time (3 classes per semester) and working part time, as well as watching my kids during the day while Jenny taught.  Crazyness.  Starting this past January I stopped working part time and have put my working energies into doing school full time (4 classes per semester) which includes doing a fifteen hour a week clinical experience doing Crisis counseling in Anne Arundle County.  I didn’t think it would be as crazy as working part time and doing an almost full-time load of classes, but I was wrong, it’s more crazy.  I will stay at this clinical placement until August, at which point I will have much needed couple weeks off and then move into my next placement doing drug and alcohol counseling.

The program at Loyola is very interesting, spiritually challenging, and intense.  We take classes in everything from Psychology to Theology, and my classmates are from a wide variety of faith and cultures such as other Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Koreans, Indians…I could just keep going. 

The best thing I can say about the program is that it has caused me to grow in ways I never imagined when I started.  I’m looking forward to sharing more about what I have learned over the next couple weeks.