Summer: The Best Yet To Come...

Those of you who know me know that I am a pessimist and know that I focus on the one or two bad things that happen instead of the many other good things. Thus, it was slightly depressing to look at my Rainlendar calendar to see that today is the last day of June and that my summer break is 1/2 gone. But I am reminded by Paul to be joyful always and so I cling to the hope that, in the remaining two months, the best is yet to come. I guess I can be thankful that we have a long weekend to kick off July.

Early on in my summer break (May 2, 2006 at 5:21pm to be exact) I posted up a summer goals "Top Ten" on a forum. Halftime is a great time to take a bathroom break, grab some more food/drink, check out the highlights from the first half and come up with a strategy on how to make the second even better...

1. Read 5 books. Yes, I know, some of you could probably read 5 books in a week but I hardly read at all so I figured I'd aim low.

I finished the Da Vinci Code back before the movie came out. That was a very quick read but not that satisfying due to the high expectations I had going into it. I thought the movie was very poorly done. I'm still trying to finish "Love Your God With All Your Mind" by JP Moreland. I had to restart the book since it was months since I read it and I had forgotten everything. It has been put on hold though. I should be done "Questioning Evangelism: Engaging People's Hearts the Way Jesus Did" by Randy Newman this weekend. A good friend of mine gave it to me and it has been an excellent read. I read a bunch of chapters right before God provided me with the opportunity to plant the seed for goal #8 below. The next book I'm going to read is called "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity". It was recommended to me by a religious studies professor who is teaching a course on modern Christianity in the 2007 Winter semester. Since I have not taken any religious studies courses and this is a 400 level course, I would need to read this book to provide a minimal background on what will be covered. The fifth book will hopefully be "The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard. I've already given it to a few friends so maybe I'll have to borrow their copies when they are finished with them. :D Still have a long ways to go to meet this goal.

2. Start up a semi-regular work-out routine. I think I'm going to try to get access to the weight room here in the health sciences building. I think it's a lot cheaper than the main campus and more convenient (much crappier though).

This one has been a failure. I've definitely gained a lot of "bad weight" over the last half a year of little to no physical exertion. The occasional floor hockey on Monday nights, some random football/soccer and badminton twice was all that I did in the last few months. I've started up a floor hockey team for July and August so that will provide 1 hr of fun every week. Still have much to improve here.

3. Learn a bunch of United songs off their United We Stand and Look To You albums with people at church.

My excuse for not making any progress here was that the high school kids have just finished school. So this was "made for the second half". I'm debating on what to work on...as I know that many people aren't huge fans of United's latest release. Maybe some Starfield perhaps? I really love their newest album and it is really making me regret not getting tickets to see them in Calgary in a couple weeks...

4. Research and purchase a distortion pedal.

This was done with my latest GAS attacks. Bought a ProCo RAT2 pedal off ebay. Great sound, great sustain, no tone lossage and no noise. The versatility I was looking for.

5. Write the OAT.

This is likely not going to happen. I've realized that my passion is not in optometry at this moment. More on this topic later...

6. Memorize all of Philippians.

Done! I may not be able to recite it all word for word now but i definitely remember all of the major themes. We are now moving through the book of Proverbs.

7. Go see Tomlin/Starfield/Third Day

Too expensive really. I think Tomlin is an awesome songwriter and would have loved to see/hear him live. I have also recently become a Starfield fan. But Third Day is the main feature and I'm not too crazy about them. I remember being a bit disappointed going to watch Delirious open for Michael W. Smith and I don't think i'm going to take a chance on that again. Still should be an awesome show.

8. Share the gospel with Jason (at work)

As I alluded to earlier, this has been done. We spent about 3 hrs after work on day talking about God, Christianity, heaven/hell, etc. It was good and he was really open about everything. He admitted he didn't know too much and I basically shared with him what I believed. That book really helped. With prayer and petition, who knows...maybe he'll change his views.

9. Spend more time with my brother

Not doing so well with this. Aside from some Xbox and trying to setup a LAN to play computer games, I haven't done much with him. He seems very bored now that he's done school so maybe there will be more opportunities for me to improve here.

10. Write a song.

Hehe, still waiting for that divine inspiration. Possible themes include discipleship and waiting/searching for that girl to marry...two recurrent themes in recent times. Probably write the words first and then stick a tune to it. Who knows. This is very low on my priority list and more of a general "life goal" that may be accomplished this summer.


So I've only done 3/10. Slow start to a strong finish perhaps?

Giguere, What Were You Thinking?!?

So as a long-time Avalanche fan, it was very sad to see Pierre Lacroix step down as the shrewd and masterful GM of Colorado. He said he would still monitor the activities of his apprentice, Francois Giguere, and remain in contact with the organization. Well, Giguere just made his first blunder of his career by trading away one of the most talented young left-wingers in the league for an offensive defenceman who can't score and a couple 2nd round draft picks. If this was soccer, Giguere's life would be in danger for giving up one of the team's best players. The fans would settle for nothing short of his head on a platter.

I'm not saying Leopold sucks. Sure, he had a subpar season and definitely did not satisfy his role on the blueline. He's a scoring defenceman that was put to shame by the rookie Phaneuf. Even Robyn Regehr scored 3x as many goals as Leopold. But there are plenty of Leopolds out there. This regular season, Tanguay was the 11th top scoring LW and he missed 11 games due to injury. Tanguay is an All-Star - Leopold is not. I know the Avs needed the cap space and I know that the Avs were lacking in defense while the Flames were lacking in offense. But I think the Tanguay was definitely more critical to the Avs offense than Leopold was to the Flames defense.

I'm definitely upset about this trade. Calgary now possesses a player with the playmaking skills to give Iggy the Rocket Richard trophy next season. Tanguay will add to the Flames speedy forwards and should transform the mediocre Flames powerplay. If you don't believe me, just watch some of the great goals that Tanguay and scored and helped setup last season with the Avs.

Got GAS?

This most recent lapse in blogging has been both good and bad. The cynic that lives inside of me views blogging as an incredible waste of time. Especially when so much is happening in your life right now that it would take you hours everyday to blog it all with an above average typing speed. However, I guess it's basically my journal of sorts. It is definitely therapeutic to express my thoughts in writing and it's neat to be able to look back to see how I've changed over time.

This Sunday will be the last time that our worship team will be leading as a whole. The format of our Sunday morning corporate worship times will be changing as of next week for the duration of the summer. Due to facility limitations, the English side will be split up into 3 groups according to age: children (ECS-gr 6), youth (gr 7-12) and adults. One of our vocalists will be leaving to go to UBC in the fall and it is possible that the teams will get mixed up once September arrives. In the meantime, I hope to be able to organize a few jam sessions with the band once some of the younger team members are completely finished school and are on their summer vacation.

One of the big debates going through my mind for this month was whether or not to use an electric or acoustic. I've finally managed to organize my electric rig by getting all my pedals together on a pedalboard. I've been having massive GAS attacks over the past few months and have dropped a considerable amount of money on equipment. Although I have definitely wanted to play some Teles, ASATs, LPs and the likes, most of my GAS is in the form of effects.

When my Legacy and Classic 30 arrived, I only had a Boss CE-2 chorus pedal from my uncle and a cheap Zoom GFX-1 multi-fx unit. It didn't take me long to realize why the Zoom multi-fx was so cheap. When I plugged it into my amp there was a lot of humming and background noise. It also changed the tone significantly when I compared Legacy -> GFX-1 -> Classic 30 to just Legacy -> Classic 30 even when it was just being bypassed. At that point it was time to decide whether I wanted to go the digital multi-fx path or to go with single analog/digital pedals. One guy at my church has a Line 6 POD XT Live which is one of the top Multi-fx units out there. In hindsight, this would have been the most cost effective choice seeing as I've already spent more than the $400-500 price tag of a POD XTL on the individual pedals and my setup still isn't complete. I read a lot of guitar forums and spoke to a bunch of people who were all saying that pedals were so much better than getting a multi-fx unit (although the multi-fx is definitely nicer to haul around to gigs). Many of these people were the same ones who said that I should go with a tube rather than SS. Since I've been happy with my decision to go with tubes, I decided to begin the quest to create my own rig.

After a long string of GAS attacks, I now have a setup that looks like this:

[G&L Legacy] -> Boss Tu-2 -> Boss SD-1 -> ProCo RAT2 -> (Boss CE-2 -> Line 6 Echo Park) -> [Peavey Classic 30]

The chorus and delay are inside the amp's effects loop of the amp because I use a footswitch to toggle between the clean and dirty channels. It makes quite a bit of a difference when I'm using the amp's distortion to have the delay after the pre-amp tubes. Anyway, this GASing will subside for a while but I still would like to pick up a wah, noise suppressor (i think it would help with the single coils), and an EQ. I've been able to get some pretty cool U2-ish sounds with the Echo Park and now with the RAT, I can finally get that edgy distortion so I can play along with Sum41 and Metallica. The SD-1 acts as a nice boost for those bluesy tones and complements the RAT nicely. I've got a long ways to go before I'll be able to play like Satriani but it's a start. It's definitely a "poor mans" setup. I don't have any of those vintage, boutique, custom pedals. I think the only one with true bypass is my RAT2 but the tone colouration that comes from the others isn't bad. Then you have guys with the professional rack mounted effects. Overkill for my purposes. I don't even know how these guys figure out how to use all their effects.

Back to my dilemma...I wanted to do a cover of Tree63's version of Amazing Grace and in order to do that delay riff, I need to use an electric. However, I will be playing rhythm guitar for the rest of the songs and the electric just isn't as good for that as an acoustic. So I think what'll happen is I'll just get the lead to handle that part.