RockBand

I have a new found love for the game RockBand. I really enjoy playing the drums on it. A couple of my friends were playing in career mode; we started at song 3 and we finished all 58 songs. The whole time I was dying for a song to have a sweet drum solo, since pretty much every song has a guitar or bass solo in it, and then finally on the last song I got my wish. And I rocked the solo like a true rockstar. I even attempted to sing Flyleaf’s ‘I’m so sick’. After singing an entire song in extremely high falsetto my vocal cords were ready for a break, but I did hit 90% of the notes on the hard difficulty, so I was pretty satisfied with that.

The mission trip to Panama is also getting closer and I am starting to get more excited about that. Although I am slightly sad I am not going back to Ecuador this summer (I have been there the past 2 summers), I am really looking forward to going to a country I haven’t been to. I am also super excited to see the amazing things God will do. The past couple summers we have seen thousands of people give their life to Jesus, people healed, and all kinds of other miracles. Last summer I was praying with a lady whose husband was an alcoholic and she got baptized in the Holy Spirit and started praying in tongues. I was praying for her husband, but the Holy Spirit was so present that she was baptized without us even praying for it. It was so cool! So I am ready to see what God will do this year in Panama!!

Fitness walking is tough

Today my fitness walking class met for the last time this semester, which is great news. You would expect that fitness walking as a PE class in college would be pretty easy, almost a joke. Well, that’s what I thought, and unfortunately I was completely wrong. This class is actually tough, power walking is much more painful that just running. See, when you run you get to bend your legs a lot, so it keeps you nice and loose as you go, but power walking is different. When you are walking fast, you really don’t get to bend your legs a whole lot, so after the first ΒΌ of a mile all the muscles on your legs, and your ankles and shins and everything starts to get tight and you can’t really loosen up unless you stop and stretch or something. Either way, today we had to race-walk 2 miles, which, 1- took forever, and 2- was really painful. By the time I finished my shins were on fire, and I could barely pick my feet up once I stopped. I almost tripped because my feet were flopping around like I was wearing scuba fins. So maybe I’m a wuss, whatever. My other choices were step aerobics, water aerobics, or run conditioning. I still think I made the right choice with walking! Now that it’s over, though, I can focus on more enjoyable forms of physical fitness, like crowd surfing, stage diving, throwing guitars, jumping off speaker stacks, and of course exuberant praise dancing! Have a good one!

Oh, and if you forgot to play an April fools joke on any of your friends, go ahead and do it tomorrow, who cares if it’s a little late. I’m suuuure they will understand.

-Josh

Fright Factor & LOST

So I was watching some TV One Life the other day and saw the episode with “Fright Factor” which is sort of spoofing “Fear Factor”. Initially we had the idea to do “Jesus Factor” and see how adding Jesus into people’s lives would affect them, but decided it would be a difficult segment to shoot-you know, with the whole “people sinning or not sinning part”. So we decided to make it closer to the real show, and make the contestants eat disgusting food. I’m not sure who exactly was in charge of the menu, but I know I wouldn’t have gone near any of that stuff. I could almost taste it just from watching the show. Either way, I thought the spoof was really funny.

Something that is not funny, however, is the 4 week break that LOST is on right now. My roommates and I really enjoy the show (and have consequently gotten all of our other friends hooked also). We waited for almost a full year for this season to finally begin, and now it’s on break so they can catch up after all the writer’s strikes. However, don’t feel sorry for us! We are finding ways to stay sharp, even without new episodes. Mainly we have just completed the 4th and final LOST puzzle. I was never a big fan of puzzles (I don’t have the patience), but these are different somehow. It’s such a challenge to see partial images of tiny faces, or sets from the show, and try to guess exactly where they belong. A typical LOST puzzle session conversation could go something like this, “Hey I’ve got what looks like the top half of Jack’s dad’s left ear while he was sitting in the Italian restaurant in Sydney. Does anybody need that?” “No, but I have part of Sawyer’s flannel shirt that he was wearing in the beginning of season 2 when he met Jack’s dad. Maybe it’s the same scene?” Needless to say, putting together these four puzzles has certainly sharpened my recognition skills surrounding LOST characters. Now if only I can sharpen my recognition skills in my English class…

-Josh

Golfing

Earlier this week I went golfing for the first time in years. There is a par 3 course about 10 minutes away from my house. Because I had not golfed in years I went into this with no expectations at all except to do a lot of walking. Josh wanted to play from the amateur tees but Keith (the other guy we went with) and I told Josh to man up and play from the pro tees (it was a difference of about 20 yards on most holes- such a HUGE difference, haha). When he saw we weren’t kidding he finally gave in. But the tee placement was about the only thing professional about our games. I did have one tee shot that landed about a foot and a half away from the hole. I was super excited about that, but then I missed my birdie putt. So that pretty much ruined the amazing tee shot. And I did hit a crazy putt that started off the green for par on one hole. And that is basically all the highlights worth mentioning from my game. But even though my golf game is horrible it was one of the funnest things I have done in a while. We laughed so much that my abs hurt more than my legs when we finished. Josh, being super competitive, had to keep the score. Needless to say I lost (but not by that much) and he won. He must be impressed beating me, who hasn’t played in years, and Keith, who hasn’t played in 15 years (according to him). But as long as the weather is nice next week we plan to go out and play again. I am so excited it is almost spring and warm weather is coming back. I love being able to get out and play golf, or disc golf, or just lay in my hammock in my backyard. Being stuck in a house gets old fast, I love to be out doing stuff.