Drug-induced Relational-faithfulness

With two episodes left in the second season of Gilmore Girls, Katy and I decided to rank our top five characters. Now that we have watched the last two episodes and have shared our top five lists with others, our lists may have changed slightly. However, I will post what my top five list was when first created:

Top Five Gilmore Girls Characters (Tom):
5. Dean
4. Emily Gilmore
3. Luke Danes
2. Lorelai (sp?) Gilmore
1. Rory Gilmore

Top Five Gilmore Girls Charachters (Katy):
5. Jess
4. Emily
3. Lorelai
2. Luke
1. Rory

There has been much arguing about whether Dean or Jess is better. I argue that Dean, though very average and therefore boring, brings out the best in each of my other 4 characters. Katy argues that Jess is much more interesting and a better intellectual fit for Rory. We will let the critics decide. Oh wait, we are the critics.

P.S. Kevin and Abby, we will be returning from a week-long mission trip to Mexico with our church/youth and will NEED the third season the day we get back (Oct 22).

P.P.S. After watching City Slickers last night, I too tried to think of my best day ever and worst day ever. Because of my horrible lack of memory and my lack of every attempting this ranking before, I did not try it yet. However, I would be interested in anyone else's best and worst days if already determined.

A-Trophy Brain

We miss school. Not just school itself, but everything that comes with it. Like meaningful, intellectual conversation. We have very little in our world now that pushes us to think, especially to think about anything outside of ministry. When we have conversations with people, it's about 80% us complaining about the crappy things in our life and about 20% finding out about other people's lives. Very seldomly do we have discussions about issues, about philosophies, about something we had never thought about before. This means our conversations seem to be very repetetive. Likewise, we get bored with things that used to be fun because there is nothing new and stimulating about them. When we were at school (in the Good Ole Days where the grass is greener), either we were in contact with something stimulating in class, someone we talked to was in contact with something stimulating in class, or we were reading things that were stimulating and could relate to others on that level.

As a subpoint, I miss philosophy. I use the tools I gained by studying philosophy almost every day, but I rarely, if ever, get to deal through the philosophical arguments or schools that interested me so much through all of college. I find myself using my history degree much more often, since I focused on ancient history and Sunday School right now is on the history of the Judges. Biblical Greek I've used three or four times since graduation, but I feel that this is mmore representative of the needs in this specific ministry than it is in ministry as a whole.

As a result of the atrphying of my(our) brain(s), my blog has been like one of those magnified vanity mirrors; it only points out to me every time I want to blog that I have little interesting to talk about. This blog will now become my Medical Alert System ("I've fallen and I can't get up"). If I have nothing interesting to say for another month, please realize the severity of the situation, come and kick in our door, and start talking about Heraclitus or Roman conquest of North Africa or that Jesus "was resurrected" (passive) not "resurrected himself" (active).

I have even started losing interest in listening to our hip-hop cds and have fallen into the stupor of Christian acoustic rock. Maybe the situation is more grim than I had previously thought . . .

We're past the point of boredom . . .

Katy has been sick for about three weeks now. Last week she was diagnosed with Bronchitis, so we were not able to go visit my parents while my dad is still recovering from quintuple bypass surgery. I went out and got her two new fish (Bronch and Itis). They are Dwarf Gouramis just like the one our friends bought for us Labor Day weekend. Their plan was to buy us a fish and start a tradition of any friend staying with us feeling like they too should buy us a fish. The friend who came over the next weekend didn't seem to get it. Needless to say, Itis already seems to be dying, which is kind of foreboding since it was named after Katy's illness. I too have gotten sick; it is some virus going around. I have to take some nasty-tasting, codeine-laced robitussin that doesn't work nearly as well as Nyquil.

We've spent our days watching Gilmore Girls. We finished the first season of 21 episodes in 6 days (you do the math). We are about halfway through the second season after 4 days. We've slowed it down a little. We only watched one last night, and the night before we had the horrible idea of watching La Nina Santa (The Holy Girl) instead of Gilmore Girls. It was the first movie in a long time that we even thought of stopping halfway through because it was so incredibly boring. We've been incredibly stir crazy.

It's been almost a month and a half since Normal. We miss Normal. But by the time Normal shows his face again, we will be flung into the holiday season and won't see Normal again until the dreary part of the end of January. Always an optimist.

No Rest For The Wicked

It's been a month. Most recently, we had two friends stay for a weekend. We cut that short to visit my dad, who had quintuple bypass surgery (http://www.inessentials.com/blog/archive/2005/09/10/14_28_20.html). We drove straight back from Wisconsin to pick up a friend at the airport, who stayed with us for a weekend. That weekend was the fall kickoff at church, in which I led two different worship teams in the same service. We dropped our friend off at the airport and drove straight back to Wisconsin for a couple of days. We drove straight back from Wisconsin to lead youth group.

I'll write more once life gets back to normal stress levels.

I killed FDR

We finally got the new filter cartridges for the tanks that we've needed for awhile. But, the new cartridges don't have the bacteria buildup that the tank needs initially, so we had a huge ammonia spike, especially in the top tank. All of the fish on top were gasping, so I moved T and Spike into the bottom tank with Zebedee temporarily. After a day, the ammonia went away in the top tank, but Franklin was so affected by it, that he could barely swim and needed to be flushed. Since Zebedee and Spike did not always get along, I moved Spike back into the top tank. All seem happy now. Except for Franklin; he seems dead.

No Celebrities

Zerostars, my brother-in-law's band, has some updates online including mp3s.

Go see them at http://www.zerostars.com and http://myspace.com/heyzerostars

New Family Member

It's been awhile since I've been able to write, but there's big news. We have a new fish.

Our new fish has his own tank (he's in the new 10gallon). His name is Zebedee because he is a Zebra Angelfish. Well, he looks like a Zebra Angelfish and Gold Angelfish hybrid, but the Zebra is more noticable. He's incredibly shy and loses his coloration instantly when he gets scared. He's a little slow at swimming because he is pretty small so he doesn't swim in the current from the filter. This means out of every 5 pieces of food we feed him, he gets one because the others get swept into the current.

He is a beautiful fish with well-defined fins and great coloration. He's my new favorite.