Updates
getting adjusted
Apr 27th
everything is going great!
the past three weeks have been an adjustment for magan and i. going from a set work day/week to a schedule that ebbs and flows has probably been the biggest adjustment when it has come being on mission full-time with the church. we experienced this type of schedule when we worked at camp back during our college days, but it’s MUCH different in our current setting. i must say that my amazing wife has been a champ about the whole adjustment. i love her so freaking much and i’m so thankful for the blessings that she brings to my life. i also have a great group of guys on staff at the church that keep me accountable and not allow me to become a work-a-holic, throwing my priorities out of the window.
the rest of the adjustments have gone very smoothly as well. i’m transitioning from working on web sites for the majority of the day to a number of various tasks that pull me out from behind the computer. for example, we’re in the process of up-fitting our new space and we had to dig a trench the other day to bury pipes for future wiring purposes (shown left). i’ve learned very quickly that our volunteers are some of the best you could ever have on your team!
i’ve super blessed and am still in a state of shock that this is what i get to do on a daily basis.
more to come soon. i promise. i’m trying to get better about blogging. i know i have one person that always reads.
what's new?
Apr 12th
lots of stuff is new for me.
i have shared with a good number of people, but i thought i would use post to make the announcement to everyone on the inter-webs. no, magan is not pregnant, as several people have asked when telling them the news. you may have been able to deduce using some facebook/twitter reasoning as to my announcement. okay, enough on the suspense/unnecessary hype already.
i have accepted the call to get on mission full-time with journey church. starting today, i am the production and technical director for the church.
i am SUPAR hyped and still in somewhat a state of shock. the opportunity presented itself a little over a month ago. magan and i prayed about it and sought out counsel from family and our close friends and knew that this is what God has called me/us to for the here and now. i say us because there’s no way i could do this without the awesome support from my amazing wife!
my time with s&a cherokee was great. i don’t take any of it for granted. God had me there for a purpose. i’m thankful that they took a shot on a green/fresh web designer 2 1/2 years ago. i learned a great deal technically, but also picked up a lot of people skills along the way. i will miss the friends i made there.
i won’t get into the whole story in this post. i’d like to spread it out over a couple of posts as to keep myself from only being the occasional blogger (like smooth accused me of being).
november update
Nov 24th
5 blog posts since april. that’s pathetic. oh well, guess that’s why this blog is titled the occasional blogger. maybe if i were to make wordpress my homepage then it would prompt me to write a little more often. i think i’m a little too obsessed with igoogle to make that switch though.
on the busyness scale, november has been a ‘moderate’ month. magan and i have traveled less this month than october. we haven’t slowed down any though. i think busy has just become the norm. we did get to spend this past weekend in boone which was absolutely amazing! boone is a special place to both of us and it was great just to get away for the weekend and catch up on life with each other. could boone be a future home for us? we dunno. we love it. there’s just something about it.
magan and i feel that God is calling us to something larger than what we’re doing now. He has us in knightdale right now for a purpose, but the next page in our story is completely blank. we don’t know what’s next, but we know it’s something more than what we’re doing now. there’s more to life than what were doing now. we’re praying through it.
we got the chance to hang out with biscuit and kendall this month as well. they are traveling the southeast visiting friends and family raising support to move out to california to serve on staff at south bay church. we are super excited for them! it’s amazing to see the hand of God in our friends’ lives.
thanksgiving is coming. means tour de north carolina. we’ll stuff our faces with food and spend time with family. it’s always a good time to stop and reflect.
until next time, you can follow the tweets.
matt
hurry…the battery is dying!
Jan 22nd
hey everyone. i just ported over all of my blog posts from my old blogger blog to my new wordpress blog. i feel out of like with blogger quite some time ago. wordpress is just so much easier to use in my opinion. i guess it’s because it is my second most used blogging platform used a work. anyways, my laptop battery is dying and i don’t have much time to write. this is my first post since september 2007. SO much has happened since then! large happenings since then include getting a full-time job, getting married and moving to raleigh. magan and i are now looking to buy a house in the knightdale area sometime this spring. life is great! more to come…
for my sake
Nov 9th
well yet again, i have done what i always vow not to do, and that is to get behind on my blog. i have successfully gone almost four weeks without an update. at this point i would usually condense what i have to say into about three paragraphs, but i’ll try something different this time. i’m actually going to go back and write about each weekend. i know many may never read it, but for my sake, i will have a blog that i can read one day while sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair, with my Macintosh 2050 ultra portable laptop and remember the days when i was just a lad.
october 16th – october 22nd
this week was great because it was a short work week. being a freelance designer has its perks and one of them is taking vacation whenever i want to. magan had fall break starting on wednesday afternoon which meant i was calling it a week and heading to kannapolis on thursday. on thursday we got to see magan’s brother lucas play football. he is already a hoss in 8th grade and i’m sure he’s going to be force to be reckoned with when he gets to high school. they won the game soundly, and wrapped up their season, finishing in 2nd place. during this trip to kannapolis, i had my first experience in retail. that’s right, retail at american eagle. magan worked at american eagle in high school and occasionally works there during the holidays, especially for floor sets. well we decided it would be cool to work a floor set together. the only thing was that floor sets occurred from 9:00pm to 6:00am, not the normal operating hours for this kid. i found out that retail is a lot tougher than i thought. they didn’t let me fold a lot of stuff, but i could build a wall and hang some clothes in no time flat. it is an understatement to say that we were tired after working two nights, but i have since recovered from the sleep deprivation and may even participate in an overnight floor set again someday. it is definitely worth the employee discount that i got. i also will never fold a pair of jeans the same way again. anyways, when we weren’t working or sleeping, magan and i were hanging out around the house or in town. we went shopping and i got me some cool new clothes. we also had a little date night in charlotte that was a lot of fun. all in all, it was a tiring weekend, but i had a lot of fun and made a lot of memories.
october 23rd – october 29th
this week i was back to my normal schedule. i had finished up my latest round of freelance work and i was looking for some work. my buddy mike over at amazing video creations called me up and said he had some stuff that i could work on. he was working on a video for a local church and was needing some help filming. i jumped on the opportunity. i always love learning new things, especially technology stuff. mike is very good at what he does and was gracious enough to show me how he approaches video work. a learned a lot of useful facts that hopefully i will be able to put into practice in the future. this weekend was black saturday. i had no clue what black saturday was until i met magan. it is by far the biggest game in the asu football season. this is the game where they play their rivals, furman. the festivities were not quite as numerous as they were for asu homecoming, but it was still a big deal. we kicked off the day by tailgating with campus crusade before heading into the stadium. i must add that the temperature was probably 30 degrees cooler than my previous game and the wind was blowing about 20mph. therefore, i was wrapped in as many as three layers with my ski jacket and beanie to top things off. by the end of the game we even got some of those little heat warmer things to put in our gloves, very nice. anyways, the game was great. asu didn’t come out firing, but after they got warmed up, they were pretty much on a roll. the only thing that was more interesting than the game was the people we dealt with. magan and i were lucky to get some front row seats, but we were next to aisle. that meant that people came and stood at the end of the aisle and they didn’t seem to have an awareness to personal space. before long, we had people standing all over us and things got a little tense. we were both just glad to get out of the stadium without any bumps or bruises. we spent the rest of the weekend just hanging out. magan had a teacher workday, so i hung around until monday so i could spend some more time with my best bud.
october 30th – november 5th
this week was a week of change. i still didn’t have much work coming in and even had my first job interview. i met with a guy who was interested in starting up his own web design and hosting company. he was needing some web designers to get him started by doing some freelance work. i still haven’t contacted him. i’m waiting to see how things work out. i finally got my application to the BGEA for a creative director position. i heard back later, and i was not considered for for further review. its okay though, that just means that it wasn’t God’s will for me. magan spent half of the week in nashville, tn at the national middle school teachers conference. it was a God thing that she got to go and she had a blast. you can read more about it in her blog. as for the weekend, i headed down to caswell for the 2nd fall retreat. i drove down because dave had come down with strep throat and of course didn’t feel like driving. it was good to get back to the place where i have made so many memories over the past few years. i was back at the helm controlling all the media stuff in the booth and even got to do a little acting with the drama team. the wayne kerr band was awesome and chad hambrick did a great job bringing the word. it was great to see friends and spend some time with my big brother dave. i’m looking forward to going down to caswell one more time this fall and spending more time with friends.
november 6th – today
as for this week, its going great. i’ve had some more jobs come in and i’m not quite as bored. God just keeps providing as He works out what He has in store for me. i did apply for another job this week. magan told me about a ministry that was building a new facility near charlotte, nc so i went online to see what i could find out about it. i found that it was the inspiration network that is building the new facility. i checked out their website and they had some job openings. one of which is a web content manager position for their steelroots.com website. it is a student-based website that connects students with God through alternative “extreme” sports such as surfing, snowboarding, and skating. the job sounded right down my alley, so i sent in my resume. now i just have to wait and pray and see if this is where God wants me. this weekend magan will be headed here to fuquay to hang out. i haven’t seen her in two weeks, so it will be good just to hang out and have some fun here in fuquay with my family.
now that i have officially written my longest blog post ever, i will get out of here. its been fun. hopefully what i’ve written will help jog my memory when i’m old and gray about the days of my youth. later…
