Romey’s Ramblings

Just a few random thoughts at the end of a long Thursday:

1. I ended up having to wait up for my sister tonight.  I’m kinda pissed at her too.  Last night we made plans for me to take her to dinner after I got off work today.  I felt bad because even though I’m technically responsible for her this week, I haven’t really spent as much time with her as I should be.  So I wanted to take her out.  So I come straight home after work today only to find that she wasn’t here.  I waited around all evening, but she never showed up.  She finally called me around 10pm, and came home around 11:30pm, but she totally forgot our dinner plans.  So I wasn’t very happy, especially with the fact that I came home and didn’t know where she was.

2.  I had another reason for going straight to Loveland after work rather than back to my place for a while - mowing the lawn.  Before my mom left for Orlando she asked me if I could have the lawn mowed by the time she’d get back.  Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal at all, except that the grass hasn’t been mowed for two weeks.  Typically our lawn needs to be mowed every three days, so you can imagine what two weeks of not mowing does to the lawn!  So it’s been a daunting task that I’ve been putting off all throughout this week.  But tonight was going to be different - I was going to go take my sister to dinner, come back and tackle the front yard and half of the back yard.  But as soon as I got home it began to rain here, and pretty heavy.  It ended up raining a good few hours here, so no way to mow the lawn tonight.

3.  So with no dinner plans and not being able to mow the lawn, I was relegated to seeing what was on Thursday Night TV.  I ended up watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals!  Talk about a low-scoring game!  I guess that’s what we should expect being that the #1 defense is playing the #2 defense, but would it kill someone on either team to light it up?  The game was decently exciting, but as a fan of high-scoring pizazz this left me pretty unsatisfied.  Also I hate to say it, but it looks like Detroit *choked*!  There I said it.  Geez, how the heck could they give up a 17-4 lead in the first quarter at one point fall 16 points behind San Antonio and ultimately lost 84-69.  Ugh! This series is going to be ugly!

I’m so glad tomorrow’s Friday.  I’m excited to wrap up an extra project I’m working on, then I’m headed to the drive-in

Today turned out to be a great day!

First off, as I am writing this I am sitting my parent’s living room waiting up for my sister.  This week I’ve been sleeping over at my parent’s in Loveland, while my mom is in Orlando taking a well-deserved vacation.  So to help the family out I am house-sitting here and taking care of my 16-year-old sister.  I’m still trying to keep her out of trouble  . In all seriousness she is really responsible.  Yes she’s been staying out late, but she’s always calling me letting me know where she’s at, who she’s with and when I can expect her home.  When I drop a curfew on her she’s been home at that time so as far as younger sisters go she’s being great!  Right now she is coming home from the Kenny Chesney concert, so I am being a good big brother and waiting up for her.

Work today turned out to be pretty hectic, but also pretty fun. It was hectic because I ended up spending over 7 hours on the phone and we ended up having to do a few installs with one of them failing.  We ended up going home for the day not knowing what exactly has caused our problem, or how we can fix it.  This does not bode well for our decision in choosing to adopt this upgrade into our current migration efforts.

It also turned out to be pretty good because I managed to cut through a lot of my tasks like a hot knife through butter and get everything done.  I’m at a poitn where I’m looking for work to do - it feels great!  It was also funny because as these installs were going on we ended up with a lot of down-time which gave me a chance to have some good conversations with my co-workers.  We talked about everything fromt pets to wines to retirement accounts and social security.  It was pretty interesting and turned out to be time well-spent.

I had a great dinner + dessert tonight.  I got to make dinner for a really amazing girl, and then we went up to Horsetooth to enjoy dessert while watching the sun set over the reservoir.  It turned out to be an awesome night, and I found out I’m not such a bad cook after all.

Interesting night tonight..  Not really quite sure just how I feel right now.

Tonight I had a Pastoral Council meeting at my church.  These are monthly meetings held on the 1st Monday, and it seems that whenever Pastoral Council Monday rolls around it really zaps the energy out of me.

First of all, I’m chairperson of the Pastoral Council, and while it sounds pretty cool and important, this is really something that I reluctantly accepted.  Believe it or not, I’m the only 3rd year member on there (Pastoral Council members are term-limited to 3 years at my church), and we had a chairperson throughout the first-half of the year but she had to resign because she was going back to school in Denver and her classes were taking up all of her time, so I as the Vice/Co-Chair reluctantly accepted the position.  I even tried to back-pedal out of it when they offered it to me, talking about how I’m not sure if a student should be chair of the Pastoral Council, how I don’t have a lot of time and so-forth, but it still got thrust upon me unfortunately.  So I’ve been trying to make an honest effort out of it, but truth be told I’m not really passionate about the inter-politics & (lack of good) decision making at my church that’s been going on for the last years.  And then when it’s time to get something done for the PC I’ve had the hard time making any time for it.  I feel bad because I’m not giving the group a real honest effort, but at the same time my heart’s not really into it…  It’s just one of those things.

The meeting went pretty well, it flowed alright and I tried to keep people somewhat on topic, but again it’s hard hearing some of the things at those meetings.  It goes back to some of the struggles I blogged about back on May 12th - decisions about how they are (not) going to replace the Director of Campus Ministry position and all of that crap.  When it got rehashed again it really made me upset.

At the end of nights like these I ask myself "Why am I still going to these meetings?"  I’m really not getting anything out of it.  I don’t really I’m making any valuable contributions.  Do I really need to be here?  Then I am reminded of a column that I read back in 2003, from Ron Rolheiser, a very wise priest that was called "Pentecost Happened at a Meeting".  In his column, he reminds us:

"Pentecost happened at meeting and it happened to a community, to a church congregation assembled for prayer, to a family of faith gathered to wait for God’s guidance. Moreover it happened in a common room, a meeting room, in one of those humble, church- basement, type of rooms. It can be helpful to remember that."

He ends the column by saying that "When you don’t know what else to do, keep going to meetings."  So I will keep doing that.  I know that there’s a reason I should be at these meetings.  What it is, I have no idea, but I will still hold that faith…  But I still can’t help but wonder "Why me?"

I just wasted half a day here at work because of one stupid character.  We’re in the process of upgrading to a new platform and while I’ve been doing that I was updating my component of the application when I realized it wasn’t submitting.  It wasn’t returning any error messages at all - it just plain wasn’t working and reloading the form.  I went through and broke down the 80 different fields in the app and verified they were all doing the right thing.  Then I went through and debugged 1600 lines of code..  Only to find that one of the fields that I’m relying on was depending on my input to be 5 characters, when I was feeding it 6 characters!  Turns out it’s always been that way, but now the field isn’t as forgiving!

So I wasted four hours of my work day for a stupid character limit of 1!  How lame!!  More to come….

Well today ended up being a long, but great day!  In one day I got to be both a teacher and a student of sorts, and both experiences were rewarding.

So first my experience as a student… (and don’t laugh).  I learned how to drive a stick-shift today.  Yes I realize that I am 23 and am just learning how to drive one. You may laugh now, but NO MORE LAUGHING AFTER THIS!!!

I didn’t do as bad as I thought I would.  It took a little getting used to for the first few minutes, but I managed to get the knack and did some pretty good driving.  Driving a stick is really not that much different than playing drum set: both your feet are working separately, but also have to be in time with each other.  I drove down from Fort Collins to Loveland, then to south Loveland to get gas (where it’s $1.98 a gallon!!!) and then drove out to I-25 to trade cars with my sister.  A lot of stop & go traffic, I think I am ready to give up my Explorer in 10 days.

Now my experience as a teacher…  I ended up teaching a 4 year old about drumming!  Okay so I wasn’t really a teacher, more like a babysitter, but I did manage to teach her something…

After I finished cruising town in my sister’s Mazda I went back up to Fort Collins, got my drum set and went to church to play.  Usually our choir has anywhere from 5-7 people.  Well today we had 2…  Myself (the drummer) and Pete the guitar player/singer.  We also had a piano player on loan from one of the other choirs.  So needless to say we were in dire need of singers.  Luckily our on-loan piano player managed to call his sister who was happy to come and sing, along with her husband and her three kids.  Next thing we knew the choir platform turned into Romper Room.  It was chaotic, but at the same time it was pretty sweet.  Their 4-year-old daughter was so interested in the drum set that she parked up a chair right next to the drumset.  It was really sweet, but at the same time hilarious because all throughout Mass she kept asking me "What does that pedal do?" "What sound does that stick make?" "Why are you using those red brushes instead of the blue weird-looking sticks?"  "I bet I know what sound the tambourine makes"..  It was really funny.  I answered all of her questions and ended up giving a mini drum clinic right there.  It was cute, and I got really good at being able to play all my parts, (try to) sing, and entertain a 4 year-old at the same time.  Way to go for multi-tasking!

This was also a great affirmation that a LOOOOOOOOOONG ways away from having kids!