I've been watching this piece for a couple weeks, and this Saturday I was finally able to make an uber-lowball offer on it that was immediately accepted... something about pulling a wad of cash out of your pocket must turn magical tricks around the eyes of flea market antique vendors.



I'm going to hang it in my living room.

Our stake here (The Apex North Carolina Stake) has an annual film festival, and apparently it's a pretty serious thing. All the wards have entries this year, and our ward did a film too. It was a mess of procrastination, but in the end I was asked to direct it (I was originally only planning on being the director of photography) with roughly a week to go before the deadline. We decided to scrap the script that had been written by a ward member and just do something much simpler, and in the end we had seven minutes of pretty good humor about two guys who get assigned to do a film for their stake film festival at the last minute and can't seem to get started with it... (Get it? It's an arc. Haha!) Christian and Jeremy acted in it and I did the filming and directing, then Christian and I edited it a couple days later.

Tonight they came over and we made the poster for the film, and since our film wasn't really about anything at all, we made a poster that's completely unrelated to the film. Here it is:

Is it possible that I just asked that? Have I really run out of things to say? I'm a talker and always will be, but I guess I've just become a bit more of a private person over the past few months. I don't think it's a permanent change or anything -- it's likely nothing more than the natural lull at the bottom of every sine wave.

I'm working a lot more, both at Red Hat and with several freelancing gigs on the side. I started a new position at work in which I'm helping the Order Entry and Subscription Management groups define and plan some much-needed improvements to their software systems.

I've been enjoying my travel -- down to the beach again, a couple trips down to South Carolina to see Mac and Mickelle, up to DC again to hang out with Allison and to go to Jeremy and Kayle's baby Kendall's blessing, and also to go to a Nationals/Cardinals baseball game -- and I have several trips coming up in the near future: Going to Provo over Labor Day weekend for a BYU game and to see good friends in Lindon, long weekend at Topsail Beach, NC in the middle of September, Frank's wedding in California in early October, plus a few other little trips.

I bought a GPS -- a Garmin Nuvi 660. I love it.

I'm enjoying my calling. I'm a home teaching district leader in the Elder's Quorom. After years of having callings that required me to be involved on a daily or weekly basis, it's been nice to have a small bit of a "break," even though it's only now hitting me how much work our ward has to do in the realm of home teaching quality. So the best I can hope for is that I can somehow motivate my six companionships to visit the people who need to be visited.

I recorded one of my old songs in Joel's mini-studio a few weeks ago. Really good experience. Let me know if you want the mp3.

One more thing: Kudos to RyRy on his new start at Texas Tech Law.