This Boat Is Now Afloat

It's amazing what a clean environment will do for you. I haven't felt like doing anything in days, (of course, my first mistake was living off my feelings, right?) but about an hour ago I finally broke down, came into my room and took the time to pick everything up, organize, put my laundry away and generally just raise my standard of living from "pig pen" to "acceptable" again. And now, my whole attitude has changed. Really! I went from feeling like a loser with no life, to a man with stuff to do!

Heck, I felt energized enough to finally sit down and start a blog! Yes, I know, I used blogger. Don't kill me. It's quick, it's simple, I can export from it later. Right now, I'm just happy to see content -- and you should be too!

I'm not entirely sure what I'll be covering here, but it's going to me more of a personal blog with the occasional soul search, "deep" post, some smattering of my musical explorations and a touch of my apple enthusiast, web developer geek-i-ness peeking out. Oh, I'm sure there will be the random, stupid, goofy stuff on here too. Basically, it's the Jake A. Smith you know (and love?) on paper... err... pixels. Expect cheesiness.

Biblical things to come...
While I was cleaning up my room earlier, I stumbled across the book New Bible Dictionary -- it's one I bought and forgot about at college last year. It made me remember a long discussion I had with Katie a few nights ago about the Kingdom of Heaven (also, the Kingdom of God). We finished up the conversation with some answered questions, but this book seems to have a lot of information on the topic. I hope to write a post on it soon, so if you want something deeper, keep your eyes out for that

Oh, and if you don't see it in a week or so, you might mention it and give me some incentive to actually write the post!

Musical adventure...
Well, as some of you know, I've been working for the past few months with some of the guys from Velocity Youth (the youth group at my church, The Landing) trying to pull together a youth worship team. It's been quite an adventure with lots of inside jokes, flying drum sticks, screaming, too many bags of chips, bottles of (glowing?) Mountain Dew, chocolate, gatorade and.. oh yeah, some music in there too! We have one more practice on Thursday and then we're supposed to start playing on Wednesday nights!

I'm kind of scared. I'm pretty sure our first night is going to be pretty rough, but at the same time, it should give us the, ahem, "gentle nudge" we need to get into gear and progress to the next level. I'm not even sure what songs we're going to do yet, but I may add something to the sidebar or something with this week's song list just for fun.

Anyway, if you get a chance, say a quick prayer for us that the next practice will be productive and that we won't completely crash and burn on our first night!

Expensive interests...
Why is it that everything that interests me has a price tag well over my budget? I've been looking at stage lighting equipment the last few days and it looks like I'm going to need somewhere around $1000-$2000 just to get enough equipment to play with! I want to get a basic board to start out with (like maybe this Leviton NSI MC 7016 or the Elation DMX Operator Pro, which is what my church has), but I don't know a whole lot about them all yet. If you know anything or know someone who does, I'm definitely willing to listen to any advice!

The end of this maiden voyage...
Okay, I guess that about does it for this first expedition back into the blogging world. Questions, comments, critique you can direct at the comments. Complaints not accepted, I suggest writing hate mail to, well... someone who cares. Bon voyage!