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Today is pretty much a day for us to catch up on rest, TV, and life. I’m hoping to catch the Indy Car race tonight, and that’s about it.

I love a good bargain.  Who doesn’t, right?  And I love ice cream  I scream for ice cream!   So when I saw this story on Yahoo! Shopping about the top taste-tested ice cream, of course I clicked on it.

The list included some usual makers including Ben & Jerry’s and  Häagen-Dazs. But the surprise on the list was Target’s Archer Farms ice cream.  Their Belgian Chocolate received rave reviews!

So the next time you’re looking for something decadently rich and creamy, look no further than your nearest Target store.

Yahoo! Shopping: The Creams of the Crop

It’s been a while since I blogged, and I experimented with some new Wordpress themes, so I thought I would throw up a post.  I like this theme because it reflects what I want my blog to become.  My blogging had fallen off into politics, economics, and all sorts of stuff that is not really about me or about God.  It was about the World, a World that seems to be flying off a cliff.

But life goes on.

Melisa and I have a busy weekend ahead, so we stayed home tonight and caught the “wedding” episode of  The Office that our DVR so conveniently recorded for us.  I got a little choked up at the end of the episode, because the two characters were so believable, all in a show that is so ridiculous that nothing seems believable.

Tomorrow we get started fairly early to get ready for a regional luncheon for Vineyard Worship Leaders.  It will be great to connect with people from the area that have the same passion for worship, for God, and for the Church.  We are praying that some great fellowship, friendships, and connections happen tomorrow.

Sunday we will be leading worship at Live Oak, and then busting down to play with a team for a young adults service down at VCC La Habra.  God is doing some cool stuff there, and we are excited to be lending a hand to what is happening there.

I will, in fact, relax a little bit this weekend.  Michigan has a big game against Iowa, and on a national stage. The Saturday Night game on ABC will feature the undefeated Hawkeyes vs. my underdog Michigan Wolverines.

Will the force be with Tate Forcier and the Maize and Blue?  I hope so.  They will need it against a tough Iowa team that dispensed with a powerful Penn State team.

I have to go pass out now, and dreams of  a Michigan victory dancing in my head.

Monday.  It gets a bad rap. It takes the brunt of our disappointment that the weekend is over, and introduces us to a whole new week of stresses, challenges, and labor.  But I have found that Monday evening is a good time for me to slow things down.  After the fun of the weekend, and the sometimes morning and evening services I lead or play at, Monday seems easy sometimes because we keep things simple and low key.

Tonight was one of those nights.  Melisa got home around 5, and I jetted past Guitar Center to pick up a few things, and came home to fire up the grill and make some BBQ chicken.  I love to grill.  The smells, the fire, the act of cooking in the elements, the whole experience is relaxing to me.   We currently live in an apartment, so I have to grill in this community “grilling area”, so It’s not ideal, but I still enjoy it.   Maybe it’s because when you cook on the grill, things slow down.  If you want things cooked right, you can’t rush the process.   This process gives me a chance to take a breath, to think, to pray, to ponder.

C.S. Lewis was known to be a pipe smoker.  I think that this habit, this passtime, gave him more opportunities to think, pray, and ponder.   In today’s world of insta-everything, we often leave little room in oiur lives for this kind of “slow” time.  I need, somehow, to find more of this time.

The Echoing Green blog had an interesting post today about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. Mackey has some interesting views on “conspicuous capitalism”.

According to Mackey, we need a new paradigm in business. His pick? Conscious capitalism, which seeks to expand and elevate the idea of the underlying purpose of business. As he put it, when someone asks why a business exists, the usual response is “to maximize profits.” However, if one were to ask that same question about a lawyer or doctor, there would be more to the answer: namely, fulfilling a social need.

Conscious Capitalism is the practice of running a business based on a deeper purpose. Mackey believes that, though capitalism beat out socialism in terms of implementation, it failed to capture the hearts and minds of the people; there’s still a deep divide between the idea of the greedy, exploitative capitalist corporation and the altruistic, martyr-like nonprofit organization. The process of bridging that gap is bringing us into a new era of business that manages to achieve success–both in financial and social return. – John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods

The millennial generation is going to do more business with companies in that “gap”. It’s obvious that this generation responds to “purpose” beyond the status quo of profit and monetary gain. (Either that, or they just enjoy shopping a supermarket that resembles a theme park!)

There is something the Church can learn from this, I think. I’m just not  how to exactly put it, other than this.  The millennial generation isn’t going to “do church for the sake of the church’s existence”.  Instead, they will “be the church for the sake of the lost”.

At least I think that’s one lesson we can learn from this.

What about you?  What can the church learn from Mr. Mackey?

Man, today started out great, and has been a mostly good day. I got up this morning and met a buddy of mine for breakfast at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles in Pasadena. If you’ve never had two giant waffles with a quarter of a fried chicken for breakfast, you haven’t lived.

After breakfast, I burned up about four hours doing some tracking for a demo of a song the Melisa and I wrote called “And We Sing”. We’ve been doing this song for about a month at Live Oak, and it has really been a song that has taken hold with our church. The demo tracks are coming together, and I hope to get this one done, and also finish off “Likeness of You”.

Stay tuned.

The only downer of the day: Michigan lost to Toledo. I blogged that on Scottie’s News & Views.

I had a rough week. It’s not that anything bad happened, I just had a rough week. Work wasn’t bad, I had the week off from worship leading, and had very little on my plate. I think I just needed to recover from a season of busy-ness.

Busy-ness: It’s all around us. It’s the American lifestyle in a nutshell. We leave the house in the morning to start the day snarled in the hustle and bustle of traffic goiing nowhere. And then we get to work, where Americans are finding that they are asked to be even more productive than they were last year. Many of us comb through dozens of emails every day that we write while we are on hold during phone calls. And then there is “texting” on our cell phones. We are in constant communication all day, but none of it is the kind of communication that “connects” us with people. After this is all over, we get back in our cars to “hurry” home at 10 mph on jam-packed roads.

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Ok, ok, so I’ve been slow at getting my pics from Hawaii uploaded on Flickr, but I’ve got a few up.

Check them out here. I’ve got about 300 more to post!

Highlights included:

• Sunrise walk on the beach on day 1 to view the sun come up over Diamondhead
• Pearl Harbor and the USS Missouri
• A point found on the north shore that juts out into the Pacific where we were surrounded by crashing waves and the bluest waters we have ever seen
• Giovanni’s shrimp truck where we at spicy shrimp so hot that we were hurting and our eyes were watering, but we signed the truck!
• Duke’s Restaurant on the beach
• A traditional Hawaiian luau
• The Hilton Hawaiian Village was amazing
• Good times with our friends from the OC, Kurt & Melanie

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This is mostly for my out-of-town readers.

The New York Times ran a story about the oldest freeway in the United States, the Pasadena Freeway (also known as the Arroyo Seco Parkway or “the 110″ to those of us in the San Gabriel Valley).

The Pasadena Freeway is narrow and curvy, but also a very pretty and interesting drive through South Pasadena, past Dodger Stadium, and then dropping into downtown LA. It’s about 10 miles from our neighborhood where the freeway terminates to downtown. However, the drive home can sometimes take 45 minutes, depending on traffic.

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So I’ve been walking around gingerly, and wincing whenever I have to pickup something heavy lately. See, I went out boating with some friends on Saturday, and I made my first attempt at wakeboarding. But the board they had was made for somebody about half of my weight, and I just couldn’t get out of the water. But I sure gave it all I had, and my shoulders and forearms were not happy with me and my attempt to hang on. My shoulders and my grip got a lot better today, but now my upper forearms aren’t happy. I supposed in another day I’ll be fine, but dang, a whole week to recover? It’s just a reminder that I’m not 20 any more.

There’s not a whole lot new going on. Melisa and I are getting excited about our vacation to Waikiki on two weeks! Five days in paradise! I’m already looking forward to the shrimp truck!

In the mean time, we have been staying busy with a lot of work stuff. I’ve been kind of in a summer funk when it comes to blogging and writing much. Melisa, on the other hand, has been working on a new song here and there, and we also have to finish up her demo of “Likeness of You”. Hopefully some of her creative fire will spark me a little bit.

But actually, I’ve been following the Olympics a lot lately. The USA is having a pretty good games so far. I haven’t seen this morning’s match between Nigeria and the USA in soccer, so please, no spoilers. Michael Phelps is just a machine, and I’m sure he is a mutant or something. But he is a Michigan Wolverine, so he’s ok with me.

David and I were talking the out the other night while Melisa was helping his wife, Maria, get their new baby boy, Isaiah to fall asleep. Melisa is known as the baby-whisperer, but anyway. But David and I were chatting about theology, the Lakeland Revival and all of it’s ramifications, and other pastoral/leadership stuff. But while we were talking, the Olympics were on the TV in the corner. NBC was showing mens synchronized diving. And David and I agreed that it’s kind of a strange sport. It’s definitely not as “manly” as the shot-put or weight lifting, that’s for sure.

Well I just experienced my first California earthquake of any significance. I went through a small one in Washington, but today was the largest quake I’ve ever experienced.

First, everyone is ok. Melisa is working at our apartment today, and she said that a lot of stuff fell off shelves, and her glass of water was thrown off the dining room table. Sawyer (our cat) apparently was totally going crazy, but he’s ok.

Anyway, thank God that reports seem to indicate only minor damage. Everyone at work is fine at both of our LA-area factories.

Note: This was downgraded to 5.4 by some people at Cal Tech at 12:29 pm.

From KFI 640 AM:

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake rumbled the Los Angeles area at 11:42 am local time, Tuesday, July 29, 2008. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake was centered about 2 miles from Chino Hills, and 29 miles from the Los Angeles Civic Center. The center of the quake occurred approximately 7.6 miles underground. There are no initial reports of major damage. Keep it tuned to KFI AM 640 for the latest.

My father-in-law is a rock-drumming legend. You might know him as Billy-boom-boom, or as the drummer for the legendary Christian-rock band, “One Truth”. If you want to share in the fandom of Bill, David Carr has created a Facebook fan club titled, “Bill Dragoo Is A Rock Star”.

Join here (Facebook account required)

Nice one, DC.

So my wife has been researching “white tattoos” for a while now, and drawing up ideas for something that is meaningful. She also researched “white ink tattoos” and decided that she liked that idea.

She drew up this idea of a cross with a ‘fleur de lis’ inside of it. She wanted something on the inside of her wrist the reminded her of God, and I think it turned out pretty good. Maybe I’ll post some pictures once it heals up completely and looks nice. I love the design that the artist drew up based on her concept.

Everyone is asking if I want one now, and I emphatically do NOT. Why would I pay money for someone to stick me with a need a thousand times?

I found this story to be quite interesting. Below are the list of the most popular baby names from the 1950’s versus the most popular from 2007.

Most popular boy/girl baby names in 1950:

1. James / Linda
2. Robert / Mary
3. John / Patricia
4. Michael / Barbara
5. David / Susan
6. William / Nancy
7. Richard / Deborah
8. Thomas / Sandra
9. Charles / Carol
10. Gary / Kathleen

Here’s the list from last year:

1. Jacob / Emily
2. Michael / Isabella
3. Ethan / Emma
4. Joshua / Ava
5. Daniel / Madison
6. Christopher / Sophia
7. Anthony / Olivia
8. William / Abigail
9. Matthew / Hannah
10. Andrew / Elizabeth

On the guy’s side for 2007, Ethan stands out to me as one I wouldn’t expect. On the girl’s side, Madison is a little surprising.

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My sister just bought a Nintendo Wii, according to her Twitter feed:

shericarr so J & I splurged on a late-night trip to Walmart and bought a Wii!!! can’t wait to play with it. we’ve wanted one since Christmas! about 2 hours ago from web

Maybe this *is* a sign that I need to get a Playstation 3!

I can hear Melisa grumbling even when I just think about it.