is this thing on?

this news is pretty upsetting.

i don’t want to talk about it right now.

so, i’ve decided that since i’m not very proficient at sticking to the “morning” part of this weekly installment, i’m just gonna drop the “morning” and now officially refer to this weekly entry into my blog as…

“the Monday Bump”

i know, not quite as nice of a ring, but still effective - i think.

so this week at Freedom, we kicked off a new series called “Face The Music”. Blake and the band played “Better Days” by the Goo Goo Dolls (love me some Goo Goo) and knocked it out of the park. JR’s message was slammin’ (download the podcast here), and they had me do the welcome instead of Todd. Dawn was out sick but our FreedomKidz volunteers picked up the slack magnificently. a lot of our normal people were out sick yesterday but we still had our highest number of people there since launch. exciting to say the least! we had some extra help from people who attended the newcomer’s lunch last week who wanted to get partnered up with us and help make Freedom Church happen. that’s exciting too!

i had a lot of ideas for this bumper but none of them were very feasible under the circumstances of having just a few short hours to work on it. so, i found a bunch of music videos that were on my external hard drive and just cut clips of the bands playing and threw some Radiohead behind it. logo at the end. fade out. done deal.

please note: at the end of this particular bumper, the words “Better Days” will appear (the title of the message for this week). next week the word “Apologize” will fade in at the end and then for week 3, “Crashed” will be in that spot. i’m probably not going to post the next two weeks’ bumpers because there’s really no need for that.

song: “Bodysnatchers” by Radiohead

Bumper made by Eric Crosby using Final Cut Express on his Apple MacBook. All Rights Reserved. You can check out more videos and bumpers from Freedom Church here.

on a completely unrelated and separate note, i was taking a look at my stats for this blog where i can see how many people visit and on what days and all that junk - pretty interesting stuff actually. especially when you can see how people find your blog. one person opened a search engine and searched for “sad daschund”. and then they clicked on my blog. that makes me laugh.

for the first time in 45 years, the ‘Canes defeated Duke last night 96-95! that makes this a little better. as a UNC basketball fan, along with this guy, i am obligated to hate all things Duke - not Duke players, coaches or fans, but everything else. those ugly black alternate jerseys, the team benches on the wrong side of the court to the television cameras, and the overall demon-mascot. (by the way, what is this?) and when did devils become blue? and why is he blue? because they lost back-to-back games to Wake Forest and Miami?? probably.

now, i don’t want to hear from Dawn, Justin and JR that “we’re glad Miami won. we’re Miami fans anyway.” nay, you’re Miami fans during football season. i’m a Miami fan during all-seasons.

i will cherish this win.

Go ‘Canes!

in response to this post, i’ve decided that i will share a bit of information with you, the faithful readers of this here blog.

this is my “perfect pen”.

it is quite amazing. this is the pen that i use to write our answers for trivia on Monday nights. i have one of these pens at work on my desk. i use that pen to write important words and things to remember on post-it notes (which deserve a stand-alone blog entry about the necessity and vast usefulness of post-its or “stickies” as they have been known to be called). i have one of these pens in my bag that i take everywhere along with a standard, yellow, lined legal pad (i do work at a law-firm after all). and i keep one in the car (this is the one that writes the trivia answers as well as anything someone else may need to write down for me while i am driving). i highly recommend these pens. they are fabulous.

do your hand a favor and buy some of these pens. go - right now. walgreens has them. look, i even told you where to go. now go.

wait, wait… come back. while i was perusing bicworld.com (how did i not find this site before today?), i noticed they have a “Pen Spinning Academy“. i have a feeling i’m going to be wasting a lot of time on this site.

i love lunch breaks.

i’m sorry everybody. i almost forgot about the MMB because i haven’t done one in about 3 weeks. so, this week was a great week at freedom, there were no major glitches and no hang-ups from a production standpoint. Blake was out of town this week so we had a guest worship leader, Stevie, who did a great job. he really worked well with the band and was in a good groove with what we had going on. pre-service stuff went great. we got to church at 6:30am instead of our usual 6:00am which meant that i slept in for a few extra minutes and boy, was it good.

we had our first newcomers lunch after the service on Sunday as well. our goal was 50 people and i think we had somewhere around 40. everybody that JR talked to said to expect 10 so this was a great start. i hope we’ll get some more partners of freedom out of these lunches.

next week we start a really great series: Face the Music. Blake and the band will do three songs over the course of the series and JR is going to take and bring the truths of these secular songs into light and make them a little clearer. originally, i was not going to spill the beans and tell you what songs the band is playing, but then i noticed a lot of the other freedom bloggers putting it on their blogs so i thought, “i might as well go ahead and put it on my blog.” but then i thought, “hey, instead of putting it on my blog, i’ll tell people to go read the other freedom bloggers’ blogs and get it from them”. so, you should probably go check out the other freedom bloggers’ blogs and get it from them. good deal. share the link love…

here’s the bump:

Bumper made by Eric Crosby using Final Cut Express on his Apple MacBook. All Rights Reserved. You can check out more videos and bumpers from Freedom Church here.