jasonackerman.com

i guess when you’ve been up all day, eaten like a pig, had a drink or two, it’s approaching 1am, and someone says to you and your brothers in the middle of a card game, “hey guys, all three of you show me blue steel, i’ve got a polaroid camera”, your ‘this is probably not a good idea’ alarm doesn’t go off, making you think that there’s no possible way that such a photo would ever end up on the internets.

matt (left), nick (center), me (right). we didn’t take a picture of magnum, because the camera couldn’t handle it.

if football and thanksgiving have become synonymous, than this toon pretty much sums up how the two converge in my mind.

i’ve been in support of jake plummer since the day he showed up, and last year he began to show that he could be elite, worthy of driving the broncos offense back to prominence. this year… holy crap. i’ve never seen a supposed ‘elite’ quarterback play like a college freshman for 10 games straight.

i’m kinda glad we won’t be able to pick up the denver game on tv tonight… might save us some pain.

of course, thanksgiving transcends football, and transcends even the third thursday in november.

i’m thankful for my wife, my amazing children, this place we are, which is so difficult yet so intensely rewarding.

yesterday was sam’s birthday, photos forthcoming.

well, another season of jasonackermanmusic is here.

just to let you all know, i’m playing at ice cream renaissance this saturday, from somewhere in the 7pm range to somewhere in the 10pm range. if you’re in vancouver, and feel the need to brave the weather, come on down and get some sort of ice cream dish – you won’t be disappointed, i’m serious, it’s the best ice cream you’ll find anywhere – and enjoy a few minutes of the rock and roll extravaganza that is jasonackermanmusic. i mean, i’m no tenacious d or anything, but i think you’ll enjoy your time nonetheless.

hope to see you THIS SATURDAY – i’ll be appearing again on december 8th, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. for now, we’ll concentrate on THIS SATURDAY, and not to sound beggarish, but if you can spare a little something for the tip jar, i would be forever in your debt.

peace out.

–jason.

i’ve mostly completed a design facelift on the blog. move on over to jasonackerman.com and check it out. not totally finished yet, but getting close.

i’m doing some serious design changes. please don’t puke, things look pretty nasty right now. i’ll hopefully be done with it by the end of the day.

peace out.

edit– major design work complete. only tweaks left.

this is a picture of me. it was taken in brigham city, utah, in august, about 2pm on a very sunny day. why am i so UNexcited, you might ask? well, because it’s 2pm, and we’d been driving since the previous day at 8pm, and been up since that same previous day at 7am… so a few short catnaps in the car is all i’m working on in over 30 hours.

but that’s not the point. the point, is look at the background. look where i am. it’s a lovely little drive-thru chain called SONIC. let me give you another (admittedly poor) photo to prove my point.

a chocolate cream pie shake from sonic is basically liquified heaven. you can even taste the CRUST. the PIE CRUST. in a shake.

are you hearing this? because if you aren’t salivating like a hounddog, then you really aren’t catching the importance of what i’m saying.

now for the kicker:

http://www.twcdrive-in.com/twc/

yes. a sonic, in the northwest. see, we’ve been tantalized with their television ads for months, maybe years now, but there is finally one that is less than 300 miles away.

my friends, this is bigger news than rumsfeld’s resignation. this is bigger than the detroit tigers rolling over like little kittens. then again, there are no sonics in michigan… while the state of missouri boasts 186 sonic restaurants. we may be on to something…

…anyhow. yeah. head on out to hillsboro (i know, hillsboro… but it’s on the way to the coast, or maybe if the flooding keeps up, before long hillsboro will be ON the coast…) and get a shake. i recommend the CHOCOLATE CREAM PIE shake.

cartoon from Stephen Breen/San Diego Union Tribune

so i guess today is as good as any to vent politically, which is something i rarely do on my blog(s), for various reasons.

i fully expect today to be a bloodbath for the GOP in congress. not that i think this is necessarily a good thing… but i don’t know that it’s all bad either.

a detailed explanation, and one that i’m not inviting an argument over, or even a discussion so much, as just venting, can be found after the cut.

Continue reading…

i realize that i failed to complete the series on denver trip reports. i’m sorry.

to experience our journey in photos, visit my wife’s photogallery of the trip: clicky clicky!

a couple weeks back, the entire staff at compass attended a four-day class taught by dr. don sunukjian (that’s him right above – [ edit - dude's picture was irritating me, so i took it down. google the guy, i promise i spelled his name right, and you can see what he looks like ]). the class was officially titled “transformed communication”, and was basically a compressed, break-neck speed version of a seminary course on expository preaching.

some of the basic principles i’ve already learned just in being coached through the few talks i’ve given at compass. this was a lot more detailed an in-depth. like any class teaching a skill, there was one particular method being taught, and everything was run through the filter of that method. and like any method teacher, don (i’ll call him don, he said it was ok) was fixed on the method so much, that anything that didn’t fit the method was “wrong”. to be fair, that’s his job, and his method is well developed and in practice is quite effective. what’s funny is that what i found as the most important principles were simply basic communication skills, both interpersonal and mass communication. the bible study component obviously won’t be found in a ‘communication’ course, but everything else was speech 101 and so forth.

overall, it was a pretty cool experience. i don’t get a ton of chances to put it into practice, but it was cool to get some good concrete methods down for communicating, because the loosey-goosey thing just doesn’t work real well. it takes an amazing natural communicator to make loosey-goosey work, and even then, it’s difficult to get a group to track with that.

something of a rant below the jump.

Continue reading…