Amanda and I got very little sleep last night. I fell asleep on the couch, but I kept waking myself up. With my dry, sore throat I’d sometimes inhale and make a sort of rattling noise, which would wake me up. At about 2:00 Harvey started barking wildly, the way he does when someone or something is walking by the house. I glanced out the blinds and saw a small dog or a cat (or maybe some other animal) merrily trotting its way down the street. I hushed him up, closed the blinds then decided to head upstairs myself.
I tossed and turned a bunch. By 3:00 Amanda was up too. Due to some discomfort she wasn’t able to sleep either. I was up until at least 3:30 and she was too. When the alarm went off this morning she decided she wasn’t going to go to church.
I did though, and I’m glad of it. The first thing I did when getting there was to find Lauren Danaher, who helps coordinate Grow Zone, and tell her that Amanda wasn’t going to be in to help at the 10:30 service. I told her that I was sick but that I’d help out if I still could, but she told me to take the time off, that it would be better for both me and the kids I’d be watching.
From there I went to the auditorium and sat by myself. The music was great today. It included a rendition of the Ode to Joy and was capped off by Love Song, which is a favorite of a lot of people at PC3. After that, Mike Ashcraft talked about repentance, but he came at it not from a perspective of guilt, but in a way where one wants to align their heartset with God’s. It was a really, really good sermon, lesson, whatever you want to call it.
After the service I talked to Kyle and Lorin Van Zandt. Kyle mentioned that Lorin’s parents were taking them on a cruise as a Christmas gift, but apparently Lorin didn’t know they were going to the Bahamas because Kyle let that slip and she did a girly surprise scream.
I talked to Nick Warkentien, who was there to witness Kyle’s slip up, for a few minutes. Mike Paschal was around and we talked for a minute too. He said he’d call me and we’d do lunch sometime during the upcoming week. I haven’t been scheduled to volunteer with the production team in a long time, and he wants to talk about getting me back on doing something.
I can’t really blame his not scheduling me. He’s got people on three week rotations and I’m volunteering two weeks out of the month with Grow Zone. On top of that, he said, they’ve actually got an excess of production volunteers right now, which is an awesome problem to have.
I then talked to his wife, Kirsten Paschel, for a bit when Nick and Paschal headed to the back for a production meeting. She told me she’d seen the pictures I put up of me and Amanda on Facebook and thought they were really good, but I guess she hadn’t been Facebook stalking me enough because she didn’t know that we’re having a baby.
It’s really been a while since I’ve had much face time with either Paschal.
I headed on home after church and spent the day vegging out with Amanda. We watched a bit from the DVR, then we watched The Breakfast Club. I mentioned that any time we turn that on it’s on at about the same place, and it’s been so long since I’ve seen the very beginning of that movie that I don’t remember it at all any more.
After that The Perfect Storm came on. I’d only seen the first half of that before. It was one Thanksgiving when we went to Tom Lagrassa’s place at the lake. (We being my family; this was before I had even met Amanda.) We were all watching it as the evening was drawing to a close, but I had to get back to somewhere, so I left after Shooter McGavin said it was going to be “the perfect storm.” That, as Amanda pointed out today while we were watching the movie, was as good a place to end Part One of that movie as any. So I finally saw all of The Perfect Storm today.
After that I indulged Amanda and went with her to AC Moore so she could get something she needed for a gift. While I was holding our place in line a woman with two girls got in line behind us. Her older daughter went to go look at something but the younger one saw a calendar book with horses on the front. Apparently enamored of horses, the little girl started flipping through it. Each month had a picture in the top right corner, and she was dismayed to find out that her month had something else- cats I think, while her sister’s month had her beloved horse. She flipped to April, her mother’s birth month, and said to her mom, “You’re a beach, mom.”
“Sometimes,” her mother replied. The mom and I had a laugh about that. I also talked to the little girl, whose birthday was two days before mine, so we were both kittens or whatever.
After we got back Amanda and I cleaned up the DVR a little, watching two episodes each of The Soup and 30 Rock. She went to bed around 8:00 tonight, still tired from last night’s sleep deprivation I guess. I watched a little TV while catching up on my entries here. Right now I’m having an entertaining chat with Nick via Facebook.
Zach Dotsey