Wordle Wallpapers

I know it's been a long time since I last posted, but this is the best way I can think of to get these out for everyone to see. All of these wallpapers are a 1024x768 resolution, but if you want one for your wallpaper, let me know and I can resize it for your resolution. To find out what your resolution is, right click on your desktop and click on "Properties". Then, click on the "Settings" tab and there should be a place where it says "number by number pixels". If you're interested, shoot me an email.


The Book of Luke


The Book of Luke


The Book of Luke


The Book of Luke



When Comes the Revolution?


When Comes the Revolution?


Conglomeration of J-T Songs (Vertical)


Conglomeration of J-T Songs


Conglomeration of J-T Songs

There ya go.

Since Graduation

It's been a long time since I last posted. My apologies. Before graduation, things got very busy and stressful. There are six of us from Minnesota on the CSI this summer. I kind of put myself in charge of buying the tickets for the megabus, which is a bus service that goes from Minneapolis to Milwaukee and Chicago. I reserved seats for us and accidentally reserved them for the day before we were supposed to leave. We didn't find out, however, until the bus driver said, "Oh, hold on now...this ticket ain't no good! This here says June 8th, today's June 9th! Call customer service." So we went through a long deal of talking to customer service, who said if it was ok with the driver, we could get on the bus anyway. In the end, the bus driver didn't trust us because "headquarters" had no record of us calling, so he drove away without us.

The day before we thought we would leave was Sunday, June 8th. This day was chock full of grad parties, including my own, which also included Nick Raway and Joe Bulger who were both coming with me on the CSI. Joe Bulger and I had come up with a plan the day before to get to every party but one. This meant going up to North Minneapolis, then down to Shakopee, Savage, Hastings, West St. Paul, then back to Burnsville. This is probably a little over 130 miles of driving. It would have been an incredible feat. However, our party ran a bit late and we spent too much time at the first couple of parties, so we missed about four parties. Oh well. It was a fun day. Micah Olson's party was last and he was coming on the CSI with us as well. Five of us, plus one friend of ours who wasn't coming, decided to stay the night at Micah's house.

We had a bonfire going after Micah's party with some of the seniors plus a junior or two until about two in the morning. After they left, all of us going on the CSI buzzed our hair. This is the shortest I've had my hair in about 7 years, if not longer. At one point, everyone but Micah and I fell asleep. Micah and I stayed up the whole night opening his cards and counting his money. That next morning, we went to the megabus station. Upon finding out that our tickets were bad, we changed them to the next morning and went back to Burnsville. Some of us wanted to do some kind of work, but most of us were too tired to. What we ended up doing was cleaning up Micah's party. After that, we slept a bit, and after that my dad came and took us all out to lunch. I was very grateful of this. After this, we went to a cigar shop, where Micah and I bought a couple of Cigars. Then we all went out to the Putziers' cabin and boated a bit. The next morning, we finally got onto the megabus and on our way to Chicago, where Kevin McShane and Justin Lokke picked us up and took us to South Bend. Ever since, we've been hearing many talks, trying to get used to 8 hour work days, and getting used to living in household.

This last weekend, we all went to Indy to help out there. It was great to see everyone there again, especially my brother John, who is taking two years off of school to be a missionary. Some people were assigned to demolition of parts of a house that was recently bought by the People of Praise. I was assigned to organizing all the tools and stuff in the basement of the main house that they live in. It is now all organized and looks much much better than before! Today we all got up, went to church, had brunch, and some of us went out to the Porters and swam and did some other things. Now most of us are back in South Bend, relaxing until another week of work begins tomorrow.

Reaching the end

As you no doubt have noticed, it's been difficult to keep up this blog in these last weeks of my high school career. There's a lot going on. We had a work day couple weekends ago, which was the first big thing we've done since the J-T Concert. It was the first time that Chamber Singers and Action have clashed for me. We had had two performances in the two weeks before that, then we had state performances the day of the Action workday. This was May 4th. Our choir had superior ratings (the highest you can get) as well as all the soloists and ensembles. However, this is nothing new. Chamber Singers gets superior ratings almost, if not every year. The way it works in Minnesota is that we don't compete against other choirs, we compete against a standard. This makes it so that it's not really a competition. You could have like 20 "winners" every year. All this really means is that they all got superior ratings from the judges. For the workday, everybody slept over in Dinkytown. We started with dinner, then heard a talk from Mike Wacker, and then we all split up into different groups doing different things, like learning how to read scripture, and learning some songs from the new songbook. In the morning, the Chamber Singers folks went straight to our thing, while everybody else split up into different groups doing work projects mostly in Burnsville. When we came back to Dinkytown, the guys took out the fence in the front of 1027 (the big house, while the girls painted a shoe shelf in the entrance of 1027. At about 5:30 we all assembled for Lord's Day, where the seniors were honored. Since that weekend, not much has been going on. The Senior Drama this quarter is Arsenic and Old Lace. It's a really fun play, and I have a smaller part. I'm in it this Saturday night, for those of you that would like to come. It's at 7:30. For now, that's all I've got...only 8 days of classes left. Then another two weeks before I actually graduate. I'm getting antsy.

April 12th EVENT!

April 12th

I can't remember if I've ever written on the J-T Kelly Concert/retreat type thing. If I haven't, here's the deal. Action is hosting J-T Kelly and a few of the Indy Missionaries this Saturday in our auditorium for a night of music by J-T Kelly, plus some talks and testimonies from the missionaries. I have been in charge of organizing and making happen a broadcast of the event, much like what happened over the summer. To watch it, I'll have the live feed embedded in a blog post that day. The event will be from 7pm CT to 10:30pm CT. That's all for now. God bless.

No end in sight

I think I would have to say that I'm in a good place right now. I've got my life figured out (for the most part) up until at least the beginning of next semester, things are going well in action, my men's group...things are just going fine and dandy. At this point, one of the bigger things on my mind is the J-T Kelly concert/retreat type thing on April 12th. We're planning on broadcasting it over the internet and I've enlisted the assistance of MIS. We've been working with them for a while trying to organize this thing, and it's really going well. We have no hit any big stumbling blocks thus far (although we may have come close once or twice. Or may we did hit some stumbling blocks and I just didn't really notice. The Lord has really helped me through it, giving me the grace to be calm and patient.

There seem to be a lot of miscellaneous things that I need to figure out before the end of the year, and it's like when I remember one thing I forget another. I know that a solution to this could be to write things down, and I've been doing that as much as I can. Unfortunately, most of the time I happen to remember something when I happen to be paper/pencil-less.

I've been able to get myself out of the mindset of life ending when I graduate. What I mean by this is that a lot of people, before their second semester of senior year still don't really have any idea what anything will look like for them after they graduate, and I've gotten myself out of that mindset. I now think of things in terms of what's going to happen in the next couple of years as I go to college for a two year Associate Degree, and probably transfer to the U of M. It's difficult, however, to think of what things will look like for me after college. Of course, I betcha not a ton of people think a lot about what after college will look like before they've graduated from high school. I dunno. Will I be a missionary? Will I get a full time job, get married? No idea. I think if I try and think about it too much, my brain will explode. No, I've decided to stick to a couple of months at a time. Hopefully this will work out for me.

P.S. - I'm curious to know who reads my blog, so if you could just leave a quick message (even if I might not know you), that would be awesome! God bless.

Indy

So last week was awesome. I spent the week in Indy with 8 of my senior classmates and Don Ferber. We arrived at about 5:30 pm on Monday Evening. One of the greatest things about the week was to spend the week with all the people there that I hadn't seen in a long time and to meet the one person there that I hadn't yet met, Mary Timler. I spent the week sleeping in 1819, which is a house they are renting right next door to the house that some of them live in on the South Side. It was really great. Every morning we got up to do PT (physical training), has personal prayer, breakfast, and then went to the north side to have morning prayer and start the work day. The evening talks were really great. The work was enjoyable. We put in a gravel walkway behind the duplex after destroying the cement stairs with a sledgehammer. That was pretty fun. The thing I enjoyed most though were the conversations I had with various people. First of all, they helped me with some problems I was struggling with, and second of all, they got me (if possible) even more excited for the CSI this summer. It's difficult to describe my feelings of last week. The Lord really moved in all of us. It's a good feeling when you know you're playing a big part in getting a lot of work done, which is what we did this last week.

There are 8 weeks left until the last day of school and 10 weeks left until I graduate. This last break was the last break of my high school career. This is the home stretch...here we go.