Archive for July, 2007

OneSentence.org

July 19, 2007 at 9:35 am · Filed under web

Remember listening to someone tell a story for 10 minutes or read a book that could have been summed up in one page? Sometimes I do (depends on the person and the topic of the story, of course). GET TO THE POINT! Well, this is the site you should direct those people to. It’s called OneSentence.org. This is a blurb from their About page:

One Sentence is an experiment in brevity. Most of the best stories that we tell from our lives have one really, really good part that make the rest of the boring story worth it.

This is about that one line.

This is about telling the most interesting or poignant story possible in the least amount of words.

This is about small bite-sized pieces of extraordinary lives and ordinary lives alike… the happy, the sad, the funny, the depressing.

Here are some of mine from the recent past:

  • Six-year-old Gabe ran over his friend Annabelle with his Big Wheels and made her cry.
  • You’re the one who got me caught up in that crap in the first place and now you’re abandoning me to the hands of online junkies.
  • Everything in Knowledge of the Holy is underline-worthy.
  • MB blushed and embarrassed herself by talking with this guy she thought she knew.
  • Even Lance has a man-crush on him.

What are some of your quick points?

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team ninja wins the amazing race!

July 17, 2007 at 7:16 pm · Filed under life, travel ·Tagged , , , , ,

It’s official – My team totally won the Amazing Race this weekend!

Team Ninja started off in the middle of the pack, slipped to the bottom-middle, and then rose above the other 10 teams to each take home an iPod Shuffle – oh yes.

After completing multiple team-building activities on our church grounds, our first clue took us to the pedestrian bridge in Nashville. Sunset = amazing. On to Lebanon we went, only to look for a long time for pennies in the sand. Shoot me in the face right now. That was horrible, especially when everyone else was finding them left and right. We were the dead-last team to leave from there. Various smaller tasks and puzzles along the way kept us busy until we reached the booming metropolis known as Crossville, TN. If you are in Crossville on a Friday night around 10 pm, don’t go downtown unless you are joining in the “cruise the strip because it’s cool” parade. Total madness. We ended up spending the first night at the Crossville KOA campground, eventually falling asleep to the sound of “moooooo”. Living in luxury. I also just realized that Crossville is the golf capital of Tennessee. No wonder one team got lost when they asked someone, “Where’s the golf course?” HA!

Day 2 began with Team Ninja leaving in 9th place, 22 minutes behind team 1. First real stop: UT campus, Knoxville. Ninja Chris went to UT and knows the campus like the back of his hand, so he lead the scavenger hunt, which we finished first. This was one time in my life where I was thankful for UT.

While in the Smoky Mtns. leg of the journey, I slipped in a creek, therefore completely soaking my socks and shoes which I wore the rest of the day (Hey, you gotta sacrifice if you wanna win, right?), hiked up and ran down Clingman’s Dome (second highest point east of the Mississippi), and became excited that we had about a 10-minute lead on the team behind us.

Then on to Gatlinburg, Tacky Tourist Town USA. Now I understand some people enjoy Gatlinburg, but I don’t (can’t you tell?) and I don’t see why anyone really would. More on that later. Anyway, we had a huge scavenger hunt all over the whole town. By this time, I was tired of running. My legs hurt. I didn’t realize just how taxing it is on your body when you’re not used to running constantly outside in the TN humidity. We finally made our way to our final destination, the Greystone Lodge and were so excited to see that we were the first team to arrive! We couldn’t believe it. We had a goal to just have fun on the race and not really to win. Or maybe that was just David’s strategy so that we wouldn’t be disappointed if we lost. We really had a great team and meshed very well.

So that’s it. I think I’m done with the Amazing Race. Going out on top. I really don’t think I would last till the end on the real Amazing Race. If I could barely walk for the two days following the 2-day race, I think I’d have to amputate my legs if I attempted the 2 ½-month race. The weekend was a great time to take an adventurous road trip, experience God’s beautiful creation, and get to know some other Inversion peeps.

I’ll leave a comment on this post once I get the pictures and videos. The videos are sure to be quite entertaining.

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the true amazing race

July 10, 2007 at 10:55 pm · Filed under life, travel ·Tagged

amazing raceThere’s this TV show that I pretty much love. It’s called The Amazing Race. That’s RACE, not GRACE, for those of you who think I can’t pronouce it properly. I remember first watching this show in Indiana on vacation with my cousins Craig, Dee, and Rachel. Since then, I have been hooked.

It’s a show where teams of 2 (with the exception of one season where there were 11 teams of 4) race around the whole world by completing tasks – some fun, some where you’d rather jump off a cliff…wait, hasn’t that been one of the tasks?!) and praying for good luck for yourself and an random flat tire or missed flight for all other teams. a lot of it boils down to staying focused, working together with your teammate, and just having fun and not acting like an idiot if one thing screws up.

The teams are generally pretty interesting to watch as they interact with the other teams and adapt to the different cultures and circumstances throughout their involvement on the race. I’m have been partial to Uchenna and Joyce, the Blondies, and the 4 siblings. These 3 teams in particular have all just had fun and not taken themselves too seriously.

I have always said I wanted to be on this show. But when I think about it even more, I don’t know if that is a good idea. I am afraid the final edits would make me out to look like a complete idiot and catch me saying all the things I wished had never come out of my mouth. Anyway, my closest encounter with this show came about a year ago when the big woman in charge of reality programming at CBS was sitting behind me in a staff meeting at work. Even though she said she had no real control over the people that were chosen, still, it was pretty cool.

But now my chance has come.

The 2nd Annual Inversion Amazing Race begins this Friday at 6:30 pm. I have a great team. For some reason, we have already been coined Team Ninja. Wha? Since we all went to Peru together recently, I am calling us the Peruvian Ninjas. I think that’s even more intimidating. We are going to have fun. I am pumped. Even though we won’t be traveling the world, it will still be very memorable and make for some entertaining TV (or at least home videos), so CBS, get ready!

Stay tuned for the recap and pictures coming to you next week.

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say hello to jonah!

July 6, 2007 at 11:18 am · Filed under the office

jonah 3I have been wanting to get a fish for a while. I finally said, “Enough procrastinating. I just need to go get one!”

Picking out a fish is a lot harder than it sounds. Most of the bettas I was looking at were very colorful, which is what I wanted. I couldn’t decide whether to get a blue or red one. So I got one that is blue AND red. Yeah, look out. Jonah’s a stud. Now I have “fish talk” with some friends around the office. Sounds like we have kids. Kinda ridiculous.

I really hope Jonah lives for a long time. I don’t think I can go through the trauma of having a beautiful fish die every month. The last fish I remember having were 3 goldfish in my cool aquariaum at home. Their names were Arial, Flounder, and Sebastian (from The Little Mermaid, of course). They took a journey to “the land beyond the flush down the toilet” sooner than expected. Poor things. But I am sure Jonah will live a long and happy life because I’m feeding him good food and he has a pretty home.

I was trying to decide what to name him. At first it was going to be Dori (from Finding Nemo), but then decided that would be too cruel because I couldn’t have a gay fish at my desk all day. Then Jonah just popped in my head. I can’t think of any famous Jonahs, except for the Jonah in the Bible. And even though Jonah is the one who gets swallowed by the fish, I decided to name the fish Jonah. Why? Because I can. He’s my fish.

So if you’re in the neighborhood, come say hi to the new kid on the block. He’s a cool one!

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these are a few of my favorite things

July 3, 2007 at 10:26 pm · Filed under life, web

For all of you “Sound of Music” fans, just sing the title of this post. I love that movie.

My friend Heather blogged about some of her favorite products and tagged me to do the same. It’s a good topic and worth some mention. I have a lot of favorite things – certain products, food, places, books, etc. So here are some products that come to my mind that I recommend:

  • Origins skin care products: smells good and relaxing and doesn’t clog your skin with tons of unnecessary gook. I’ve used this stuff for two years.
  • bareMinerals: I’m a convert who’s never going back. The tagline is “makeup so pure you can sleep in it.” It is free of preservatives, oil, fragrance, talc and other skin irritants, their site states. I love this stuff because I don’t have to carry makeup with me all day and it’s not all cakey.
  • Southwest Airlines: even though they don’t fly to millions of places yet, they do have affordable flights to Chicago, nyc, and random cities all over. Anyone up for a weekend trip to explore the place with the cheapest outbound flight?
  • Gap Long&Lean Jeans: I’m tall. I have always hated shopping for jeans. Once I found a style that actually fit right, the store would discontinue them. But then I found the L&L jeans. For me, they’re worth the money and last a long time.
  • Google stuff: Gmail, Google Reader, and iGoogle. The cityscape on igoogle is super cool. When it’s daytime in reality, it’s daytime on my cityscape. ☺
  • Shutterfly: I just moved my digital pics to this site (check ‘em out here). A friend of mine created an amazing photo book – high-quality and professionally done. I can’t wait to make one.
  • ESV Journaling Bible: Now I don’t have to keep up with tons of little message notes for each Sunday or carry around a note-taking book. I’m all about consolidation. My only complaint about this Bible is that it doesn’t have a concordance or study notes. But it’s a great size and has huge margins.

Here are some people I’m tagging:

Share some of your favorite products… word of mouth is a great thing. Stay tuned for more.

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