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2009 turns into 2010, and I wonder… will ‘10 come in nearly as epic as ‘09 did? I’m not much for big “year in review” posts, and I’m even less for “resolutions that I’ll break before February” posts. But I think this year deserves something of a tip of the hat. Here are the highlights:

April – Disneyland trip. This was the first of our 2 vacations this year – included a quick stop in Vegas, a full-blown Disneyland experience, a little Route 66 driving, and a stop in Santa Fe, which is a new favorite destination for us.
July – PNW trip – almost 3 weeks on the road, including much needed rest at the beach in Bandon, and wonderful time reconnecting with family and friends.

Also during the year, my freelance business made some very significant strides. In fact, as this year wraps up, it is our sole source of income. I never thought I’d be able to grow it into a self-supporting venture, but it seems that has happened, and I’m very grateful. That it supports me and allowed almost 4 full weeks of vacation… unbelievable.

It seems like this was the year that Colorado really became our home. The trip to the PNW was significant because in many ways it felt like a watershed moment for us. Because of various factors, it would have been easy to go back to Vancouver, get all misty-eyed, and decide to move back. But this time, on our drive home, it felt like just that – home. When we arrived, it was good to settle back into life refreshed, and with a renewed vision for what our life here is, and what it will become.

Then to top it off, a little bit of extra work came in around Christmas time which allowed us to enjoy and experience the holidays without the added stress of wondering where our rent money would come from. What began as a year full of uncertainty and stress, still ended with uncertainty but with a level of peace about where we are that we haven’t experienced in a long time.

So what does that mean for 2010? (Two-thousand-ten? Twenty-ten?) First of all, it means that as we approach the three-year mark since we moved here, we’re ready to make some pretty significant decisions that will affect us for many years. Decisions about when/where/how to plant a church. Decisions about how to move forward in business. Decisions about how we approach the kids’ schooling. Things are not the same as when we moved here, and we are not the same. (I’d be disappointed, in fact, if we were the same as 3 years ago)

So with that, since I don’t make “resolutions”, I offer the following as a bit of a preview of what’s to come for us. I’ll be interested and entertained to read this one year from now and see how off-base I was.

In 2010, we will begin our church plant. Not just the “process”, but the community of people will begin to form and we will start journeying together as we discover who God is calling us to be as a church, and how we can together live on mission.

In 2010, my business will take another step forward, finally settling into a company that can provide a more predictable income stream. Health insurance coverage would be a dreamy addition.

In 2010, we will welcome into our family Nick’s new wife-to-be, her 7 year old daughter, and their baby that will come into the world this summer. I have been asked to officiate the ceremony, and for this I’m extremely honored and excited. These events also will bring a stream of family visiting town, and we’ll get to see everyone then.

See, nothing resolute, just a forecast of what’s on the horizon. Like I said, 2009 was epic in our family, bringing travels, changes, growth, refocusing. It’s my hope that 2010 is equally as moving. I’m sure it will be, in its own way. Regardless, we will remember 2009 fondly, and look to 2010 with anticipation.

We’re creeping ever closer to the end of this year… and what a year it has been. I know it’s a little early to do a “year in review” post, but mostly I’m just taking Thanksgiving to be glad for where we are, where we’ve been, and what we’ve been given. We went to Disneyland in the spring. We spent 2-1/2 weeks on the road to the PNW in late summer – that’s almost an entire month of vacation. I’m very thankful for that. Samuel Max (aka, our baby) turned 5 a few days ago… the picture is of me and Sam leaving the rec center on his birthday. I’ve had plenty of work to do, which hasn’t made us rich by any means, but week by week we get by and are consistently provided for. It’s hard not to be discontent with the fluid nature of not knowing how things will work out day by day, but it’s an experience that stretches our faith. And slowly, my businesses is establishing better means for keeping the bills paid, which in the end is really all I can ask for.

Much of my blogging effort has been going into ProSportsColorado.com… it’s a sports writing site, that we’re trying to lean more towards journalism than blogging. It’s been fun, and I’ve managed to put together a great group of guys that write and share my passion for local sports. It’s beginning to take shape of something that could be more of a business model than I ever dreamed possible.

I have lots of other things to write about, but for today, I just want to enjoy being thankful . . . for my kids, my wife, the abundant food, the beautiful mountains I can see from our house. And perhaps I’ll blog again soon.

After a long three days on the road, here we are hanging in Bandon. We set out early Monday morning (which means we finally got the car packed and out the garage by 8am) heading north on I-25. We stopped in Laramie Wyoming at Coal Creek Coffee for a little pick-me-up. I had seen a couple of their baristas at the Mountain Regional Barista Competition, and they fared pretty well, so I was hoping for a fantastic coffee experience. What I got was an OK coffee experience, more like what I’d expect in Wyoming. I’m sure they have better work in them… but what I got was very average. Either way, we kept on driving, hoping to get to our campground by nightfall.

We drove across Wyoming. Then across Wyoming. Did I mention we were in Wyoming? It seems like forever when you’re driving across WYOMING. All. Freaking. Day. We ended up finding the campground, no thanks to GoogleMaps, which routed us to the wrong end of the lake putting us off course by 40+ miles. Once we got to the park, we pulled in, set up camp, enjoyed some New Belgium Sunshine Wheat (in a can!) while the kids enjoyed some A&W root beer, and watched the sun set over the Great Salt Lake. It was a very relaxing experience.

The next morning we got up and headed across western Utah and into Nevada. A quick early afternoon stop in Battle Mountain to see some of Priscilla’s old family friends and more driving, and we ended up in Reno just after dark. We checked into our room, and I wandered down to see if there was anything happening in the poker room. It was more of a poker “area”, with not a soul at the tables. Really, I just needed to sleep anyway, so we crashed for the night, then headed out first thing in the morning.

We drove across the Lassen National Forest in California, which took us along the edge of a pretty significant wildfire that had just been contained, then across CA-299, from Redding to the coast. That, my friends, is one windy highway. That’s windy, with a long “I”, as in ridiculous amounts of curves. Couple that with the constant construction stops, and the trip to the coast took all day. We stopped in Crescent City for pizza, then headed up 101 into Oregon, arriving in Bandon about 9:45pm.

It’s been since January of 2008 since I’ve been here… we were here over Christmas just 7 months after we moved. Priscilla was back the following June when Rena passed away, but that’s it. It’s not that I’m dying to move back – it’s just nice to be here after such a long absence. The air smells great, I can fill my lungs with rich, moist, oxygenated air again! So now we’re enjoying time with Priscilla’s family in Bandon, complete with tromping around on the beach. Monday we’ll head up to the Willamette Valley – a little time in Salem, poking around our old stomping grounds in Portland, and lots of visiting with friends and family in Vancouver. Then before you know it, it will be the 25th and we’ll be on our way back eastward to the other side of the Rockies. All in all, this is shaping up to be an amazing vacation. Disneyland was great – but not so relaxing. This will be some refreshing and recharging time – and will end up being the most vacation we’ve ever taken in one year before (25 days!).

Now to head off to Old Town Bandon where I will go in search of a proper bowl of clam chowder.

I’m the kind of blogger that blogs like someone who isn’t really comfortable in a manual transmission car. Lots of hurky-jerky, stop and start. Incidentally, I’m that kind of stick-shift driver as well. Little practice + haven’t actually sat behind the wheel of a stick shift in 15 years means I royally suck at it. But enough of me bringing down the manliness quotient of this blog. I feel a blog-splosion coming on… lots of topics on my mind and I think I need to get them out. We’ll start with a rapid-fire entry, much like the old “Notes from the Monster Files” feature I used to run in the LJ days.

• Work is good. As in, I have some. As it stands now, I could survive with the work I have booked all the way through June.
• The nice thing about freelancing, is that today I just stopped working to go outside and play in the snow with the kids. It was great… I’ll make up for it later.
• We have a big family-palooza coming up in April. I can’t really divulge details just yet… mostly because I’m not telling anyone in the family who is under 5′ tall what the plan is. So no guessing in the comment section!
• Last week, it was 75 degrees most of the week. Yesterday, we got 18 inches of snow over the course of about 30 hours. Now the sun is out again, and it’s melting fast… but a foot and a half of snow (in late March no less!) takes a LONG time to melt.
• Put 4 new tires on the minivan. It’s fun to spend 1/4 of the car’s worth on tires.
• I’m feeling like I want to move to NW Denver. Just move there and work there and be a part of the ‘hood there.
• The Broncos are making me want to throw up at the moment. Ditto for the Avalanche. On the bright side, the Nuggets might win a playoff series, and the Rockies are tied for first with everyone else, at least until the season actually starts.

That’s all I have for now.

So the only real meaning in this post title is that it’s from “Dust in the Wind”, and holy CRAP is it windy around here lately. The mountains have seen gusts of 100MPH! Down here in ol’ B-Field, it’s only been sustained winds around 20MPH, but gusts reaching upwards of 50-60mph. The house has been shaking.

So things have been busy enough to curb my already seldom blogging into almost a complete stop. I’ve been blogging now for almost 8 years – since August 22, 2001. So I’ve come to terms with my blogging frequency. It’s remained remarkably consistent. Consistently inconsistent though it may be. That being said, I’m happy that my blog stats continue to stay solid at roughly 125 page views/month. Keep visiting, keep reading, and for crying out loud comment once in a while, eh?

The last month was almost completely overwhelmed with work on a website gig. Between that and just regular life/church/holidays – everything secondary got pushed down the priority list. This site was quite the learning experience. I feel like I learned some harsh lessons in project management. But overall, with Dan’s help, we put together quite the product. It’s a dynamic registration-based site for a national modeling agency based here in Denver – Premier Image Agency. The front end isn’t too much to sneeze at (except the cool little flash flipbook on the media page that Ray did, but the backend is something to be reckoned with. Each model they represent can log on and create their own profile, upload their own photos, and then there’s the whole search and booking engine. It turned into a bit of a time suck – ended up underbidding by probably 40%. But for the first time doing something of that scale, we’re pretty pleased with the outcome.

Now that we’re pretty much done with that, I have a few projects that have gotten backed up on the schedule that I need to wrap up. All of them involve customizing Wordpress in one way or another. Which essentially means that even though I’d really like to finish the redesign and upgrade of this site’s WP install, it probably won’t happen anytime soon.

The holidays were good… very different for our family. It was our first Christmas away from the rest of the family (we travelled back last year – remember?). So we stayed home and had a very quiet, family Christmas. That in and of itself was nice, though we did miss everyone from the NW terribly.

We are really feeling the bug to move down closer to downtown. Pending a successful tax season (we’re still too poor to get hosed by taxes, although that’s getting better by the month), we’re looking seriously to get down there before summer – before spring if the right place at the right price comes our way. The whole church planting thing still feels like something of an enigma right now, but what we know is that we want to live in and be a part of that community – what God does in terms of a church plant, if any, will happen then. It sure isn’t going to happen as long as we’re hiding out in Broomfield. Which is too bad, because Broomfield has been good to us. It’s a nice place to hide out.

I came down to Forza to get a little work done because I was having trouble focusing in the home office. That’s a consistent issue for me. Not having a place to “go to work” is nice at times, but it’s a struggle in other ways. I’m discovering that it’s almost as difficult to focus here as it was there, but I’ve made some progress, thus the break to do a little bloggity-bloggity. Though some of the source files I need I left on my home PC, and didn’t put them anywhere accessible. So I can only do so much here anyway. But another couple hours and I should make enough progress to head home satisfied with my day’s work.

So I’ll be heading back to that. That’s the semi-brief update from Monster-Land.

Zoe was asked during her schooltime the other day to draw a picture depicting her Dad as “provider”. Even though it feels like the picture should be a blank piece of paper sometimes, I know that is just beating myself up for some very untrue reasons. And that is reinforced by Zoe’s drawing. That’s a picture of me, with my guitar, leading worship at church – it’s conveniently labelled for your benefit. What made me laugh was Dan, off to the left … mohawk and all. If you’ve ever met Dan, you’d find that highly entertaining.

Thank you Zoe for painting me in the light you see me. I hope I can be all that you expect. But with a less blue head.

I’m sure you really wanted to know the state of my sinuses, but rest assured, to me that’s an important tidbit of information. Above is a photo of me leading worship at Jacob’s Well Church last weekend. It’s been a good few weeks there, except for the cold-induced failure of my voice last night. But that’s secondary.

Went to our last Rockies game of the year Friday night… 250 photos to sort through, so I won’t be getting those up for a bit. Priscilla will probably have a gallery up shortly though. There was an epic fireworks show after the game, which was worth the price of admission. I’m not much for fireworks shows, but this was honestly the best I’ve seen. All in all, a good trip to the city. It’s good for these urban monster souls to get into the city every now and then. Hopefully more now than then.

After a few days of being sick and really unmotivated to do much of anything, ready to settle into a nice busy week filled with more work than I probably have time to do. That’s ok though, it beats the alternative.

Consider this the least informative update in a while. But hey… this also beats the alternative, which is no blogging at all.

Zoe is getting her hippie on here. She’s taking a guitar class at her homeschool connection this fall, and so I hit up craigslist, and craig came through by hooking me up with a dude in Boulder selling this little 3/4 classical guitar for cheap. Zoe and I went to pick it up, and she can’t play a lick yet, but just loves sitting for hours and strumming the strings, regardless of the dissonance. It’s fun to hear her ask to play her guitar. For a while, at least until lessons started, I tuned it to an open chord so the constant strumming at least sounded half-way intentional. Her first class was today.

You know, I never would have thought I would be taking on so many teaching projects. It’s odd that teaching web design in a formal setting is never something I considered doing, but seems to be about half of my income right now. Maybe I just didn’t have the chops until now, but there’s plenty of people looking to learn this skill. The beauty of it, is that just like any other discipline, you can’t take a 2-day class and come out the other side an expert. So oftentimes, I still get the design work once the student realizes that to do this right, and to do it well, isn’t as easy as throwing open dreamweaver and calling yourself a web designer. Anyone can write a book… not everyone can do it well enough to make a profession out of it. Although it does make me wonder how professional songwriters must view hacks like me who engage in the craft that they make a living out of, but can’t seem to do it well enough to really take it on as a profession.

Plenty of church planting thoughts in my head. Realizing that now is the time to go through an assessment, and fearing the fallout if we don’t come out of it with overwhelming positive results. I’ve set my eyes pretty firmly on planting a church, and I don’t feel I’ve been short-sighted about it. It would be a hard pill to swallow if it turns out we are still years (or more!) away from that ultimate goal. Not that an assessment is the voice of God… but still.

I’ve been chatting with a friend via email (you know who you are) more about the campus/multisite thing. I’ve kinda wearied of thinking about it, but I have to clarify my thoughts on it because outside of the assessment process that’s the next big question to answer. It’s good to bounce the questions off of someone who is bringing less baggage (or at least different baggage) to the conversation than I am. I like that we can ask the questions, with more regard for the process and less regard for the answer.

And to wrap up my bloggity-bloggarifficness for the day, I am playing a show next Friday at Forza Coffee in Westminster with my good buddy Dan. Dan and I have gotten to know each other playing in the band together at church, and so we thought it would be fun to go all co-op on a show and just work to build up our chops a little bit. So if you’re one my Denver area readers, feel free to come on by… the details are available at my Facebook (see link to the right), or Myspace (see link to the right).

The more time I spend on this blog, the more I itch to redesign it. Because, you know, I really need another non-paying project to dive into. But I did update my design portfolio! Check it out! I’ll leave you with that.

In other words, you can actually see his eyes without having to move his hair. Both Sam and Zoe have new haircuts… the cuteness in our house is pretty intense right now.

Welcome to my newfound commitment to blogging! I’m writing today from the brand spanking-new Compuskills facility in Lowry – a reclaimed Air Force base that is a cutting edge urban redevelopment project. So the buildings are old, but the facility is new. I’m teaching a Dreamweaver class… as I have mentioned in the past, I’m not the biggest DW fan, but the second day of the DW class is very fun, because I set the students loose on a project and we just go for it… so I don’t have to be up front ‘teaching’ all day… the students just ask questions, and I get to watch them be creative.

Yesterday was the first day off for me in quite some time- a quick look at the calendar shows 2 full weeks since a day off. I don’t remember what we did that Sunday, so maybe not even that. It was difficult to force the rest when there was much web-designey stuff I could have been doing, but the lazy day was much needed. Of course, then I couldn’t really fall asleep last night. So I pulled into the parking lot this morning, realized how early I was (traffic was minimal), so I tilted back the seat and promptly fell asleep. I awoke to the next hour’s weather report and a very creaky neck.

Played a bit of poker Saturday night after church… I’ve figured this group of guys out pretty well, but they aren’t helping me better my skills. I’ve taken home at least double what I started with each of the last two times I’ve played. (granted, we start with $5, so it’s micro-stakes) I did manage to get lucky on one hand with double me up to $10. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved winning a hand where my odds of winning the hand hovered around 10 or 15%. I’d like to play a game that takes on a slightly more serious tone… this game is a blast, but it is only for nickels and dimes, which makes the quality of the play suffer – mine included.

Very little else on the map for me today. One of these days, I’m going to leave the grid entirely for a day or two. I haven’t done that in a while. Until then, my dependence on the flow of digital information into our house continues (would that be called binary addiction?).

It’s been an interesting day of self-evaluation… not personally so much as on a larger, more family-oriented level. Specifically, trying to figure out what in our family dynamic has changed that has made our kids turn into little monsters (in the monstrous way, not the affectionate way). Trying to figure out what our church-planting journey looks like, fitting the pieces of that together with being at Jacob’s Well… or, more succinctly, knowing that we belong in both worlds, and what that fit looks like. Trying to figure out how on earth we can continue to push the budgetary limits to the very last penny and still come out with our heads above water. Right now we’re underwater, holding our breath and feeling the burn in the lungs. But we haven’t drowned yet, and we don’t expect to.

Taking the issues in order – with our kids, it feels like our free-wheeling lifestyle has let things slowly slip into a state of managed chaos. This is fun for a while, but doesn’t sustain in the long term. Not sure how we’ll tackle that one just yet.

The church-planting stuff is a much more abstract sort of quandary. At times I feel like we’ve lost focus on why we came here to begin with. All these different options that are close to what we’re after, but not quite there. Jacob’s Well has been great, and it continues to be great, and I have no reason to believe it will cease to be great… but along with it comes temptation to just move over to Thornton and live the suburban life. And to be fair, we could probably do just fine with that. We could live in community with people, loving and serving and letting our kids grow up in the town where I spent my childhood. But that’s not where we belong. We KNOW that. We didn’t come here to live the suburban life – heck, we could have done that just fine in Vancouver. We came here to be a part of seeing a community of faith sprout and grow in the urban core of Denver. So there’s that tightrope… that tension of being where we are, and dually focused on where we’re going. And the dual focus is tough to maintain for any period of time. The struggle is how to manage that in a way that honors Jacob’s Well and the relationship and commitments we’ve made, while simultaneously moving toward the task to which God has called us.

That’s been the day… mostly thinking and talking about that stuff. Introspection is fun. But now I need a break.