It's Been a While...

Well it's been almost 3 months since I last blogged (most of November, December, and now most of January).  I'd been unsure about continuing because my life is very steady and repetitious.  But that's how it works when I'm putting in 40+ a week and filling my nights to the brim.  The final straw was a Sunday night when I was trying to stuff blogging in between volleyball, watching a show with Adela and going to sleep.  The balance wasn't working out right, so I held off, forgot and then chose to take a rest for a while.  Well tonight I have an extra half hour, so I'll try to churn out some quality information.

 

December was fun.  Denso has a bit of a Winter break and I spent it travelling up North for a wedding, hanging out with my visiting brother, freezing under several blankets during a 4(ish) day power outage and feeling sick in there as well. 

 

Casey, Bernadette, Myself, and Adela

January has been a whirlwind.  I've stayed in Battle Creek every weekend so far and enjoyed the time at home.  I'm loving the snow and I've been sledding several times.  Here is my schedule at a glance:

Monday:
5:00PM- Learn to Swim Class
7:30PM- Swimming workout (about 45 minutes)

Tuesday:
Ultimate Frisbee in Kalamazoo (1 hour starting at 7:30pm, 8:30pm, or 9:30pm)

Wednesday:
5:00PM- Learn to Swim Class
6:15PM- Clubhouse (games and Bible study with elementary ages)
7:30PM- Swimming workout

Thursday:
6:30PM- Youth Group (various activities from week to week)
8:30PM- New game/tv night with friends.

Friday:
No plans, and so far no travelling.

Saturday:
9:00AM through 12:15ish PM- Swim meets.  I try to organize the little ones so they don't miss events.

Sunday:
9:00ish AM through 12:00ish PM- Church
5:30PM- Volleyball

That's the rundown.  I fill extra time with Adela for the most part.  We have been watching the Shield and sometimes the Harry Potters (although she's ditched me on those).  I also have been playing video games over this stretch and trying to read a couple books. 

Here are some quick pictures from Youth Group where we did some melting crayon art:

To wrap up, I had a couple thoughts. 

1) Not sure how much I'll be interested in blogging.  Weekly worked much better when I was at camp and I had lots of different stuff going on, and usually some off time to write a little.  Even repeating the same schedule can be of utmost importance because it takes a lot of time to invest in relationships and community.  So maybe I'll get back on the weekly bandwagon, but most likely I'll try to find something a little more spread out.

2) Camp ministry is so much different than people ministry.  Instead of rocking peoples world for a weekend (or more likely doing dishes while OTHER people rock their world) I now am hip deep in Battle Creek.  Between work, sports, and church I'm interacting with lots of folks and enjoying the reconnection to Battle Creek.  This takes time and patience, both of which are difficult for me to manage at times.

3) A random thought as I travel around town and spend much more time in vehicles with radios in them: I hate the radio.  Christian radio has been generally awful around her for years.  I've found some new stations I like while I also mix in pop stations as well.  Today I realized that if I turn it off I can redeem some of my drive time.  I've realized this before, but habit takes over and I mindlessly scan.  Often times I'm trying to drown out my thoughts (frustration from sports or life, idle driving thoughts, or even generally happy thoughts about sports or life). 

My goal is to just leave it off for a while.  I listen to sermons here and there but otherwise I'll leave it off and force myself to address my own thoughts and maybe it'll be just the time I needed to sort things out and prepare myself for the coming tasks of the day.

Well that's it for now.  I think I'll try to take more pictures on a weekly basis and aim for Sundays again, but we'll see how it goes. 

Thanks for checking it out!