Photo by pseudoflake

Yesterday, I was given the opportunity to see the South Carolina United Methodist Conference Youth Choir, known to friends as the "Spirit Singers," known to better friends as "CYC," and known to best friends as, well, they haven't told me. This talented group of young people is composed of auditioned youth from across our state. As usual, they sounded great, especially considering they've seen the music for a total of 5 days now.

Two years ago was my first contact with the group, when I inexplicably passed the audition and joined the group at Spartanburg Methodist College for a grueling week of rehearsals. Honestly, I'm still amazed I was given such an opportunity. I had never considered myself to be the "choir type." The extent of my singing had been in the youth's praise band at church. My voice was quiet, hoarse, and flat. Even today, I still found myself in awe of the people singing on stage, despite the fact that I sang with that same group.

For that year-long period when I was in the Spirit Singers, traveling around the state and around the world, I was transformed into the "choir type" of person. I was granted abilities I never knew I had, courage I had only dreamed of, and a life-long group of memories and friends. The year was quite life-changing for me, as I was truly part of a group (a rare feat, as I tend to work best alone). I am so grateful for the opportunities I was given.

Mostly, I just want to thank Kathy-Jo for helping me to achieve things I had never considered for my life. Good luck to the whole choir on your 22nd year of touring.

Protip: Always have a plan to get to where you're going.

Protip 2: "We'll just drive around until we find it" is not a good plan.

This past Friday night, I treated my girlfriend to a lovely dinner at California Dreaming. We had been to the restaurant before, and I was reasonably confident I could find my way there. As it turns out, I was wrong. Thanks to the power of Google Maps, you can see just how wrong I was. The red line shows the 1.5 mile finale to the journey we should have taken. The blue lines (which cross the Ashley River bridge 4 times, by the way) show the additional 10 miles and 35 minutes we had to add to the trip, thanks to ill-preparation.

After nearly a half hour of driving in circles through the crowded streets of Charleston, I was forced to concede defeat and call Mom for directions. With just one road name, I realized that I was on the wrong side of the river. Within minutes we were in the restaurant's parking lot.

Photo by pseudoflake

There are, I believe, two morals to this tale. First, if you have a date with a beautiful lady, know how to get to the restaurant so as to avoid looking like an ignoramus.

Second, when you travel throughout the paths of life, knowing where you want to go is simply not enough. You have to make the necessary preparations to get there. Having a goal in mind for your life is a good first step, but if you don't work towards that goal, you'll be perpetually lost, metaphorically driving in circles on the wrong side of the river.

To all of my loyal readers: I apologize for the lack of updates recently. I am not, in fact, dead, but am working on the back end some more, trying in vain to squash new bugs which I have found.

In an effort to allow my pages to finally validate properly, I have set the character encoding to UTF8. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, I only barely do. The downside to this action is that many of the special characters I had used in posts on this blog and in my tweets now show up as complete garbage. I've been working to find a solution to this problem quickly, but the "quickly" part has not been going so well. Neither has the "finding a solution" part.

In addition to this programming nightmare, I have been working on developing a new About Me section, featuring more information, more ways to contact me, and on the whole, fewer placeholders. Unfortunately, progress on this update is, quite frankly, almost nonexistent. It'll be up soon. Ish. I hope.

In general, I thank you again for putting up with all of these delays, and I hope to resume a more regular posting schedule shortly. I hope that you are not upset, and if you are, here's a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head.